Cuckoo Croak

THE CUCKOO MURDER CASE: an Ub Iwerks short starring Flip the Frog. Great spooky house atmos and I love the picture of the dopey cat on the wall. Lots of cute anthropomorphic gags. EVERYTHING is alive here: the murder victim is the cuckoo from a cuckoo clock, who gets perforated by a gunshot. The entry and exit wounds are circular holes running right through the bird, making him seem wooden, which he is. But still alive, and then dead.

He has a washing line and a plant pot on the side of his clock.

The clock has a literal face which reacts to events. The hands prod the cuckoo to make him perform (before he’s shot) and then call the cops using a phone which is also alive and sentient.

The clock “dials” 2479 by peeling the numbers off his face and dropping them into the receiver. I wonder when the emergency number in the US changed to 911? 2479 is a terrible choice.

Interestingly, the clock can’t speak, but makes various clock noises while moving his lips.

Flip is another vaguely minstrel-like character with black head and white mouth area — but these features, common to Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Rabbit, Bimbo the Dog, are arguably just a way to make a figure read well in simple b&w drawn form. Only Bosko was openly intended as a racial caricature.

Flip is a detective in this one. His cop car lives in a kennel and its bark is a car horn honk. It’s not exactly logical, but once it’s established, Iwerks can carry on just as if it were. When he stretches the car/dog’s tongue out and twists it, using it as a crank to start the motor, that’s kind of strange. But we are riffing on connections between canine and auto anatomy, so it holds up, just about. Though I don’t think it’s an accepted way of starting your dog.

By some similar reasoning, the squad car’s siren is a cat, activated by turning its tail like a handle to make it caterwaul. When the car passes through a puddle, the cat becomes clogged, so the tail now becomes a pump which can blast the water out of its mouth. It would be handy if we could do that to Momo when he wants to throw up, so we could make it happen in the right place. He always goes looking for the most expensive and soilable item in the floordrobe to spill his catguts into.

Iwerks is having so much fun with the notion of characters motoring through a storm that he pretty much forgets about his plot. The journey is a good place for repeating action on loops, a favourite technique of the 30s (see also Fleischer toons) because it allows for recycling of cels. Plus a lot of the comedy comes from creating a musical tempo, plus you can build laughter by doing the same gag a few times. If it’s funny once, maybe it’ll be funny again.

When the rain gets too heavy, Flip detaches the mouse figurine hood ornament, which didn’t exist in any previous shot, and attaches it to his windscreen. Since the mouse is an actual live mouse, it now works as a windshield wiper. Actually, I’m kind of embarrassed about the amount of work the word “since” is doing in that sentence. In an Iwerks cartoon, there isn’t really any since.

Even the house is alive, flashing its windows at Flip like the Palmer house at the end of Twin Peaks season 3. The illuminated eyes and mouth scare Flip away — the hero’s quest refused — but the wind keeps blowing him back.

Like Gary Oldman’s shadow in BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, or Peter Pan’s, Flip’s shadow starts getting ahead of him — and there’s that dopey cat again. Or maybe an ancestor of the previous dopey cat. When the cuckoo clock’s pendulum strikes him (why? the clock invited him here) like the hazardous wall clock in Chaplin’s ONE A.M., Flip trashes a suit of armour in retaliation and reveals a third, identical portrait. This is like Corman’s HOUSE OF USHER.

Not unlike other spooky house thrillers of the time, e.g. Benjamin Christensen’s amazing, hallucinatory SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN, the exploration of the haunted house is just one damn thing after another: rather than building up a coherent mystery with puzzles to solve, suspects advancing and retreating, it’s just a whole morass of crazy occurrences. In the BC film — and in Gance’s amazing AU SECOURS! with Max Linder, and probably in Benjamin Christensen’s other spooky house films, now lost save for their Vitaphone soundtracks — we just accumulate madness until a single global explanation accounts for all of it in one swell foop.

The title suggests the Philo Vance films William Powell was doing at the time, but the sensation-film angle is much closer to Leni-Christensen.

With the eerie hooded figure, seen from behind, this may have been inspired by another of those old shockers, Roy Del Ruth’s THE TERROR, now missing presumed lost. In which case, this is the closest thing to seeing it, apart from the few stills in circulation and the contemporary reviews, which suggest it was really something.

Even by cartoon standards, the ending of this one is unsatisfactory. But interesting. Flip flees the hooded killer, who is apparently Death Himself — shades of Argento’s INFERNO — running down a corridor with the camera rushing after him, and dives into a dark void — and that’s it. As if we ran out of background and foreground at the same time.

Philo Facts

Warren William only made two Philo Vance movies, and he made them six years apart, which is not as surprising as the fact that there are so damn many PV movies. He’s a pretty tedious character — Sherlock Holmes without the interesting qualities, and without a Watson to place his inhuman intellect in relief. Also he, in the words of Ogden Nash, “…needs a kick in the pance.”

But the WW duo are of some interest. Partnering him with Gracie Allen is certainly an unusual idea: S.S. Van Dyne was a fan of the comic, and wrote her into a book, and she then consented to play herself. WW’s reactions to Allen’s “pretzel logic” are marvelous. He doesn’t do a full double-take, just a sort of irritated hesitation of bafflement. He knows he’s Philo Vance. He knows this is a Philo Vance movie. So what is this idiot woman doing making absurd statements and calling him “Fido”? He’s finally found a mystery he can’t solve.

The earlier film, THE DRAGON MURDER CASE amused me because the story of a guy who dives into a swimming pool but doesn’t come back out is a good sort of inversion of a locked room mystery, and because the suggestion that a dragon might be responsible is a pretty delightful red herring to throw in Fido’s path.

The natural pool is called “the dragon pool” after a Native American tradition, and one character has a bunch of books and articles about sea monsters, including “Nessie” — now, KING KONG had just been released and interest in the Loch Ness monster flared up at this time — cynics might say Willis O’Brien’s man-eating lake dinosaur was more of an influence on the reported sighting than any actual Scottish plesiosaurus.

Of course the dragon footprints found in the mud when they drain the pool are in fact — SPOILER ALERT —

— something else entirely.

Which led me to an odd connection. Yves Le Prieur was a prolific French inventor — among other things, he was the first person to take off in a glider from Japanese soil (a fairly niche record to hold) and he invented a plane-mounted rocket launcher for taking down German observation balloons in WWII. Remarkable guy.

Two of his big deals were scuba diving — he’s the one who got the idea to connect the re-breather mask to oxygen tanks worn on the back, rather than to a surface air pump — and the translux screen, which greatly improved the brightness of image possible in rear projection. He gave that invention to the world for free.

In the early thirties he accompanied producer Bernard Natan on his tour of American film production centres, and around this time rear projection became much more common. So maybe his trip made KING KONG possible.

And so THE DRAGON MURDER CASE could be said to be inspired by KING KONG which is inspired by Yves Le Prieur’s working holiday. If the “dragon” were actually a scuba diver, the poetic connection would be really satisfying, but sadly this is not the case. He wears a “shallow-water diving suit–the kind largely used in pearl fishing” says the source novel. This is regrettable, but it leads to a lovely image when the suit is discovered hidden in the family crypt ~

Is the lovely image worth the loss of the lovely scuba-Kong connection? Oh, I suppose maybe it is.

The other point I’d make is that Vance is so boring, the decision to turn the Perry Mason adaptations into WACKY COMEDIES, playing to WW’s sense of fun, is probably a direct result of DRAGON. And, more regrettably, the egregious SATAN MET A LADY is also a consequence.

 

The Sunday Intertitle: Hazard Lights

Youtube. I was looking for one thing and found another. You know how it is.

Having enjoyed a stimulating Warren William Weekened double feature with the Starving Lion as Philo Vance in THE DRAGON MURDER CASE and THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE (no, really) I was searching for glimpses of either of WW’s silent movie appearances, in which he played as Warren Krech, an impossible name for a leading man, you would have thought.

It turned out that the second of these, PLUNDER (1923) was Pearl White’s last adventure serial. I did manage to track down an extract, but White was such an independent heroine that long stretches are Krechless.

That led me on to my longstanding search for THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE, which appears in Dennis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies and therefore must be viewed. I found a few clips but not what I was looking for. But then ~

At 6.30 we can see something often described as a myth: a serious melodrama featuring a woman tied up on a railway track. Since the earlier myth was that silent films were full of such contrived scenarios, it was a relief to be able to say that the only actual example was Gloria Swanson and the Sennett team spoofing the practice in TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE.

But then, what were they spoofing? It didn’t seem an obvious activity to have presented on the stage. You could tie someone to some fake tracks, but the impossibility of a locomotive actual trundling onstage to kill the captive would surely diminish the suspense.

Helen Holmes, railway adventure-girl, in THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, seems to provide the spark, though it’s notable that she’s tied up on the tracks rather than tied TO the tracks as later cliché would have it, and she rescues herself. The world’s collective faulty memory portrays the serial heroines as in constant need of salvation by brawny he-man types, and so we get the Penelope Pittstop of cartoon infamy, but in fact the followers of Pearl White were as self-sufficient as any Flash Rogers or Buck Gordon.

As for my original Starving Lion hunt, the only image I turned up of a silent WW is a poster for THE TOWN THAT FORGOT GOD, a William Fox production in which the young Krech can be seen on the upper left, a ghastly apparition, with his hair mussed in a way which vividly recalls his appearance in, of all things, THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE (Gracie has just thrown a handbag at his head).