The Sunday Intertitle: Three to Get Ready

So, didn’t make it in for STEAMBOAT BILL, JR but rocked up in time for Frank Lloyd’s OLIVER TWIST, with Neil Brand on piano — great stuff, actually a revelation on the big screen and with proper accompaniment. Our second remember of the Standing theatrical family appeared, Joan Standing, a Standing by marriage (Herbert Standing was in JUST AROUND THE CORNER way back on Friday was it?). John Standing, perhaps the last of the line, is still with us. I said this to friends and Mark immediately volunteered “I’m Still Standing” while Steph offered “Last Man Standing.”

My programme notes for this one are here.

Next up was OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS, a glossy MGM se-and-morality fable. You get not only Joan Crawford but also Anita Page and Nils Aster and Johnny Mack Brown and Dorothy Sebastian and Edward Nugent — all very sleek and elegant. Much as I enjoyed the funhouse visage of Ernest Torrence in MANTRAP, his facial contours a slalom for the eyeballs, there was much to be said for this panoply of male and female loveliness, surrounded by Cedric Gibbons’ moderne sets and aglow with studio moonlight. Maude Nelissen wrenched such heartache from the piano it had to get an emergency retuning in the interval.

Final film would have been THE ORGANIST OF ST VITUS (Martin Fric) but if I’d stayed for that one I wouldn’t have made it home, so the actual last film was THE RACKET, my man Lewis Milestone, and livelier than I’d remembered it, aided by more thugs with ugly mugs than you could shake Percy Marmont at — Louis Wolheim leading the mob with his impacted fender of a fizzog, and George “the Runt” E. Stone playing his equally lovely son. It’s a Howard Hughes production so some of the subsidiary goons may have been picked up from the real rackers, as was purportedly done on SCARFACE. Marie Prevost was ace, and director Milestone himself cameo’d as a speakeasy doorman (“Swordfish!”) ~

“Skeets” Gallagher played a drunken journo with a marked air of Frank McHugh avant la lettre. I googled the play to see whether McHugh had perchance originated the role and sleepy-eyed Gallagher mimicked his perf, but no. (But my research reminded me that John Cromwell starred in the play, and got to direct the remake.) Perhaps McHugh patterned his schtick on Gallagher, or perhaps the McHugh archetype was haunting the Jungian unconch for some time before manifesting — for Milestone! — in THE FRONT PAGE a few scant years later? (There are a few earlier McHugh appearances, but his role in TFP — as “McCue” — seems to set the seal on his persona.)

Mike Nolan (piano) and Frank Bockius (percussion) enhanced this one considerable. I had a ringside seat for the drum kit — RACKET is right! — no sleeping through that one. A riotous jazz-age end to the evening.

More tomorrow!

First Blush

The third in an informal trilogy (and really, everyone should make informal trilogies — they’re the best kind), following OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS and OUR MODERN MAIDENS, OUR BLUSHING BRIDES (1930) is the first full talkie in the sequence, and the earliest talkie I’d seen Joan Crawford in. (I’m now excited to see UNTAMED — as who wouldn’t be, with that title? — her very first speechifying role.)

Shaking up the familiar format of leggy girls and lush deco sets, the movie casts Joan and regular co-star/sacrificial lamb Anita Page as shopgirls, with Dorothy Sebastian completing the traditional trio. DS is really good in this, and it’s a shame she’s the one who slid into extra roles. The department store they work in (Crawford is a mannequin, her friends and flatmates sell perfumes and blankets respectively) is a relatively restrained, realist construction, so that we have to wait until the fashion show at the millionaire’s country retreat before we get any Cedric Gibbons elegance, but it’s worth the wait ~

Uncredited director Harry Beaumont directs fluidly — there are some long “photographs of people talking” scenes, but also some propulsive tracking shots with overlapping crowd dialogue and a dynamic mix of synch and post-synch sound: an early lingerie pageant has a Greek chorus of female customers babbling over it, perhaps to fix the scene as a fashion show rather than a skin show in the censor’s mind. Whatever, it’s a pleasingly weird effect.

Sociopolitically, we’re still in flux: the working girl stuff is quite Warner Bros, with sympathy for the gold-digging impulse (it’s what our current Glorious Leaders would call Social Mobility), but Joan is portrayed as the wisest of the three little pigs, the one who doesn’t trust men and won’t accept the advances of tiny-child-in-a-tux Robert Montgomery until he’s proved his intentions are honourable. Whereas Page and Sebastian both get royally taken by the predatory males they’re foolish enough to believe. This means we get to see Page’s shagging palace (above), a spectacular streamlined suite with leather-bound volumes just for show (“David says women shouldn’t ruin their minds with thinking,” gurgles Page), but the biggest treat is Montgomery’s tree-house —

Yes. This is a tree-house. By Cedric Gibbons. What, no swimming pool?

You can buy the first two films in the series —

Our Dancing Daughters
Our Modern Maidens

Moderne Maidens

OUR MODERN MAIDENS is the follow-up to OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS — it also stars Joan Crawford and Anita Page, just like its predecessor, and deals with the emotional travails of poor little rich girl jazz baby flappers — the problematic working class character has been eliminated so we can all relax and enjoy the minor emotional problems of the fabulously well-to-do with a clean conscience.

Like its predecessor, this is a soundie — recorded music and a few sound effects including applause, laughter and even the odd bit of offscreen dialogue. It’s a strange audio world where radios can talk but human beings have to use intertitles.

Joan is at her sexiest — still vaguely terrifying but her rangy physique, carnivorous grin, mad staring eyes and unfettered bosom do exert an allure. Anita of course is full of gooey, doughy, woman-behind-the-radiator perkiness, as ever.

The party! Cedric Gibbons gets a bigger budget to make his Grauman’s theater/cathedral mash-ups bigger and better — a zoom lens, of all the cockamamie things, has been procured from somewhere, to create a weird shrinking box effect around Joan and Doug Fairbanks Jnr. Either they borrowed the Paramount lens, or MGM got the use of Joseph Walker’s experimental zoom, which I have never otherwise seen used, though it’s been written about.

And then Doug Jnr does some impressions — really good ones. Alright, John Barrymore’s Mr Hyde is a fairly standard item in the caricaturist’s repertoire of the period, and I daresay it’s easy if you happen to have the right facial muscles to do it at all, but John Gilbert is someone I’ve never seen mimicked, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that he was colourful enough to caricature. Fairbanks nails him. And then of course he does his dad…

OUR MODERN MAIDENS was followed by OUR BLUSHING BRIDES — will definitely be checking that one out. It’s 1930 so I presume it’s a full talkie — one of Joan’s earliest. Perhaps, at last, Cedric will get to make a church look like an art deco palace rather than the other way around.