The Manipulator

A really good double feature — THE MIND READER and THE DARK HORSE.

The former has Warren William as mentalist, starting as a failed sideshow hustler and discovering the psychic gag as a way to hustle at a higher level. Very snazzy direction from Roy Del Ruth with a lot of Dutch tilts and some sweeping crane shots. William as maybe the worst scoundrel of his professional career, since his act actually ruins lives and kills people, and he reforms once then shamelessly backslides. Put it this way, he’s so bad, the movie can’t exonerate him at the end, and he has to go to prison.

Allen Jenkins’ last line is wonderfully bathetic: “Gee, boss, it seems a shame you’re going away just when beer’s coming back.”

Good little role for Clarence Muse: as always, he deserves more. Unrewarding sappy gf part for Constance Cummings, a brief sighting of the bewitching Ruthelma Stevens, wheeled on to glower accusingly before the elevator shaft beckons.

THE DARK HORSE (dir: Alfred E Green) is a key work in the Warner precode mission to FULLY DOCUMENT AMERICA: it’s about the biggest racket of them all, politics, and shows how a brainless candidate (Guy Kibbee in his apotheosis, above) gets more or less accidentally nominated and how the machine gets behind him to transform a rustic chump into something the electorate can be fooled into voting for. In charge of that transformation: Warren William, of course.

Arguably there’s too much about WW’s love life, which is of course amusing but not 100% central to the political issues. Actually, issues are not discussed (the candidate has no platform), but the one big issue — the failure of American politics to produce worthy politicians, the packaging, instead, of chumps — kind of fades in the second half. Bette Davis is the romantic interest but she must have had an envious eye on the bad girl part, which Vivienne Osborne triumphs in. I don’t know why she wasn’t bigger.

No Jenkins in this one, but it has Frank McHugh so that’s fine: the schmoe quotient is filled.

Asides from WW, the hidden connection seems to be screenwriter Wilson Mizner, who was working himself to death at Warners from 32-33. His name is wonderfully seedy: I somehow picture him typing in fingerless gloves and a raincoat.

Warren William Weekends

Fiona and I have been having Friday evening watch parties with friends… for some reason we’ve settled on Warren William as the centre of the cinematic universe. We started with the Lone Wolf series, to which we may return like a lone wolf to its vomit, but we moved on to GOLD-DIGGERS OF 1933 where he gets to play a fatuous character instead of just playing a regular character in a fatuous manner (I LOVE WW’s fatuousness) and thence on to his Perry Mason films, which are of a slightly higher standard than the Lone Wolves — less generic, more eccentric. Since Mason doesn’t have a regular comedy sidekick or any regular co-stars, he gets to more comedy himself and this is no bad thing. Though of course Eric Blore would always be welcome.

Speaking of casting irregularities, we wound up watching THE CASE OF THE BLACK CAT which does NOT have WW in it. Riccardo Cortez who, like WW, had unsuccessfully played lead in a version of THE MALTESE FALCON, unsuccessfully plays lead here. He’d soon start directing films for Fox, not one of which is available even as an illegal download. That’s how good he was.

But the first film in our double-feature, THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE features a really ebullient turn by WW with professional sidekick Allen Jenkins backing him up, and strong support from character wizards like Olin Howland, Warren Hymer and Maya Methot. Michael Curtiz directs with a rocket up his arse and somebody’s just handed editor Terry Morse a shiny new optical printer so every scene ends with a zoom-in and blur effect FOR NO REASON. Morse later got the job of shoving another Perry Mason, Raymond Burr, into GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS. Stick with me, kids, it’s not much fun but it’s educational.

GOLD-DIGGERS OF 1933 stars Michael Lanyard; Lady Fingers; Hattie ‘Mom’ Frink; Peggy Sawyer; Philip Marlowe; Scattergood Baines; Caterpillar; Kitty Foyle; Screwball; Sir Alfred MacGlennon Keith; Chico; Sgt. Dickens; Max Jacobs; Montague L. ‘Monty’ Brewster; Sermon; Helen St. James; and the voice of Winnie the Pooh.

THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE stars Philo Vance; Doris Kane (Leo); Perry Mason; Vivian Rich; Jonathan G. ‘Goldie’ Locke; Steve Wilson; Lt. of Detectives Dundy; Inez Cardoza; Angelface; Mr. Davis – Schoolteacher (twice); Judge Thatcher; Uranium Prospector (uncredited); Peter Blood; Zedorah Chapman; Aramis.

THE CASE OF THE BLACK CAT stars Sam Spade; Tommy Thomas; Marie Donati; ‘Snoop’ Davis; Player Eating Bonnie’s Chicken (uncredited); Wild Bill Hickok; Colonel Skeffington; Sheriff Prettywillie; Mr. Waterbury; and Wax Figure (uncredited). Let’s face it, this wasn’t a stellar cast.

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor

There’s a new article at The Notebook by Daniel Riccuito and me.

Here.

We’ve evolved a strange method of collaboration. Daniel pesters me on Facebook, asking for paragraphs, or thoughts or examples of cinematic phenomena he’s exploring. I’ll churn out a hundred words or so on the topic at hand, and he’ll simply drop the passages into his works in progress, occasionally, I presume, massaging the surrounding text to make it seamless, or seamless-seeming. Not easy, I suspect, for anyone to identify who wrote what.

Illustration: Allen Jenkins by Tony Millionaire