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!

Old Rope

Alas! The first George Pearson film I looked at — I vaguely recall being disappointed by MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S on Talking Pictures TV, but remember nothing else about it — MURDER BY ROPE (1936) — is, well, ropey.

It begins quite well. The “Laughing Strangler” is on trial, Montage of news-vendor;s sign. Another headline goes by on a bus — and reveals the Old Bailey. Then the camera tilts down and it becomes clear that we’re way above street level. That bus must’ve been on a monorail. (In fact, the passing of the bus was a separate shot, linked to the Old Bailey tilt by a hidden wipe appended to its back.) That’s unusual enough to make me think Pearson has his thinking cap on.

We then get a long scene of the jury deliberating, which starts off as TWELVE ANGRY MEN only the solitary hold-out, who thinks the Laughing Strangler is insane (a reasonably hypothesis) is a woman. But she gets worn down, so the scene turns out to be unnecessary and we never see any of these people again.

The plot summary has made MURDER FOR ROPE sound a bit like a Karloff mad scientist revenge movie, or a PHIBES film. And indeed, various parties involved in the trial start receiving threatening letters. From the synopsis I’d expected a bunch of them to be mysteriously summoned to a country house and then picked off one by one. In fact, only three people from the trial attend the gathering, which is just a regular gathering but with a jewel robbery thrown in. There isn’t even a murder until very late in the second act, and the dialogue until then is pure padding. Precious little laughing OR strangling: what there is of the former is done by the cast, and the latter seems to have been delegated to the audience.

You can catch people early in their careers, on the way up, in quota quickies, or late in their careers, on the way down (kind of like AIP’s drive-in extravaganzas later in the US). Pearson is on his way down, but look, here’s Wilfred Hyde-White, on his way up, or anyhow sideways.

WHW is a generally reliable presence. He’s not up to his usual standard here, but clearly the script and schedule aren’t helping him, and at least he’s interesting to watch. And casting him as a hero-figure (though the script can’t make up its mind who the main character is) is unusual.

I can sympathise with Pearson not bothering much with this material — it’s a terrible script, which manages to be both flat and lumpy at the same time. But a director is an entertainer, surely — if the material is lousy, dance about it in an amusing fashion (which is sort of what Sidney J. Furie thought he was doing in THE IPCRESS FILE, though his material was much better than he knew). The sad thing is that the stuff Pearson directed that survives seems to be like this, while the films he actually strove on, when he was inspired, is lost to history.

The cheapest-looking thing here is the way Pearson reuses shots. The hallway is viewed so many times from the same angle it occurred to me to cut all its appearances together. The result is that the Blake Edwards mystery farce element is augmented, and it becomes funnier than anything that’s actually in the film.

I’ve thrown in the Old Bailey as bookends.

I’m reminded of AIP again. Roger Corman or somebody on THE TERROR apparently decided to save time by not bothering with clapperboards (let the editor struggle to sync the footage, his time is cheaper than the crew’s). The result, when the rushes were screened, nearly caused Jack Nicholson to expire with laughter — long shots of corridors, the same people wandering up and down them in impossible cycles, vanishing at the far end and reappearing at the near one. I might try recreating that effect someday.

BONUS: two of my old pieces have reappeared at The Chiseler. Here (Chester Morris — I’d entirely forgotten this one — it looks pretty good!) and Here (Frank McHugh).

McHugh Two

Over at The Chiseler, an old piece on character actor Frank McHugh (lovingly illustrated by Tony Millionaire) has been promoted to the front page, so to celebrate I wrote another, inspired by a recent re-viewing of the Reinhardt-Dieterle MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.

I’m always excited by quixotic attempts to reinvent the science of acting, which everyone in that film is involved in, but even more exciting is that McHugh invents a method of his own, distinct from the rest…

Here.