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!

The Monday Intertitle: Keep It Under Your Hat

A cynical intertitle from a cynical journalist in Howard Hughes’ cynical production THE RACKET, directed by Lewis Milestone.

Milestone regular Louis Wolheim, he of the imploded bulldog face, is Nick Scarsi, top mobster locked in a deadly battle with honest cop Thomas Meighan. Hardboiled night club entertainer Marie Prevost is a pawn in the game. The source is a play, and the bulk of the action unfolds in a nightclub and a police station, with some token opening-out. But Milestone’s versatile coverage removes any hint of the stagebound.

The women’s cell — a beautiful composition made mainly of legs.

Milestone, while not yet up to the visual pyrotechnics of his early talkies (he doesn’t even move the camera for the first half hour, though he pans dynamically and the editing is fast and expressive) does try some interesting stuff. At a rival gang leader’s funeral, Wolheim glances around and his knowledge of the set-up imparts x-ray vision — the rows of derbies held in the laps of his hired goons seem to melt, wither and resolve into a dew, revealing the clenched shooters beneath.

Politically, the film is incoherent in a very Hollywood way — the good cop gets so hacked off at the corruption around him that he tears up a writ of habeas corpus and has the lawyer who brought it arrested on false charges. Surprisingly fascistic for Milestone, but not for Hughes. What’s startling is that the corrupt political system, exposed and explored in the film’s narrative, gets threatened with destruction but the system takes steps, the threat is neutralized, and the city is just as rotten at the end of the movie as it was at the start. A bad guy gets his just desserts, but the game goes on. Milestone the social critic and Hughes the outsider could agree on the probability of that.

Hughes remade the movie in 1951, by which time he needed five directors to get a result that satisfied him. I don’t know if the ending of that one packs a similar sting.

The Monday Intertitle: No Atheists in the Foxholes

I was wondering, looking at early Lewis Milestone talkies, what made him so kinetic and exciting? The charging camera of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, surging headlong across the battlefields, is the best-known example of this, but the kinetic, fluid and nimble movements of RAIN are extraordinary, and in THE FRONT PAGE he seems to be pushing for the steadicam thrillrides of vintage Scorsese before the technology existed to allow it. In the less celebrated NEW YORK NIGHTS he goes so far as to stick his camera in a dumb-waiter and ride it up to the second floor. Yet my impression was that in silents, Milestone had not distinguished himself with the dynamism of his camerawork. Why did he becomes so willfully fleet-footed at exactly the moment sound technology made the roving eye of something like WINGS almost impossible to achieve?

(The other guy with itchy tracks was Tay Garnett, whose restless visuals in BAD COMPANY paved the way for SCARFACE, no question, and who combined tracking and panning with the Paramount zoom lens on PRESTIGE, with results that seem to echo Visconti or Fulci for ADHD antsiness.)

So seeing TWO ARABIAN NIGHTS, a big-budget WWI romp (a far cry from the anti-war sentiments of ALL QUIET) from 1927, is instructive. It’s true, there are few impressive camera movements, but nor are we stiff or static. Designer William Cameron Menzies is much in evidence, a man who liked to design not just sets but SHOTS, reducing the director to mere drama coach for the cast (here, a pre-Hopalong Cassidy William Boyd and thuggish Louis Wolheim, paired as an imitation of Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglan in the previous year’s Raoul Walsh smash WHAT PRICE GLORY?). Early on, the two frenemies are fighting in a crater, unmindful of the encroaching Germans. When they realize they’re surrounded, we get two shots which flamboyantly make this apparent, one a low-angle POV, in which the shallow ditch they’re in is suddenly fifty feet deep to afford the best view, and a God Shot looking down like Busby Berkeley in which the bomb-site is a fairly shallow depression, but much wider. The lesson comes from German expressionism, of which Menzies was a student — a different set for each angle gives you the strongest possible graphic impact, which is fine if what graphic impact is what you want.

At any rate, the central mystery remains, and will do until I’ve seen more silent Milestone, preferably with the distinctive influence of Menzies removed from the equation. Unfortunately, I’ve only got THE RACKET to watch, plus FINE MANNERS and THE KID BROTHER, each of which Milestone directed parts of — and we don’t know which parts.

How about a Lewis Milestone Week, everybody?