Hopalonging

“If you pandered to the public you’d still be living in the horse age.”

“You think we’re not? Look at Hopalong Cassidy.”

“YOU look at him.”

You probably know this one, if I know you. SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. Joel McCrea (centre) is arguing with his bosses about the new picture he wants to make, O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? He has the first line and last line quoted, and Porter Hall (right) has the middle one.

The OTHER producer (left) is Robert Warwick, pictured below IN a Hopalong Cassidy picture. Sturges was hving a laugh, as was not unusual for him.

Ad you may have noticed, I’ve been watching a lot of trailers lately, otherwise I might never have discovered this in-jokery. I’ve never seen a Hopalong cassidy film (though I’ve seen a couple starring William Boyd, who played him). My dad, as an excited schoolboy, got to MEET Hopalong.

Warwick had an interesting life. Apart from being in the first HOPALONG CASSIDY, he had been a silent film star and for-real ran his own distribution company. As a jobbing actor in talkies, he would do literal walk-ons for Sturges as well as playing more substantial roles. In NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS he plays Neptune in a toga and we discover that, My God, Robert Warwick is Really Buff.

Aunt Julia Vs the Scriptwriter

In MURDER BY THE CLOCK, Aunt Julia (Blanche Friderici) is a nasty old woman with a morbid fear of premature burial. Taking a leaf from Poe, she’s installed the family crypt with a kind of horror horn, which she can sound off should she awaken unexpectedly entombed. Meanwhile she’s changed her will, various grasping relatives are plotting her assassination, and her “idiot” son Philip (Irving Pichel) has an unhealthy obsession with murder: when she asks him what he’d like to do in life, he replies “Kill!”

I was seeing this movie as part of my ongoing odyssey to view every movie depicted within the quaint and curious A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford, and it just happened to tie into Poe Week, via the premature burial theme, so it serves as a suitable aftershock of that festivity. It’s not great, but it’s from 1931 so it’s a fascinating historical artifact, showing how the fear film hadn’t yet gotten to grips with the supernatural can of worms opened by DRACULA. Here we’re in CAT AND THE CANARY terrain, with every creepy event solidly rooted in the criminal psychology of melodrama.

Apart from Mr. Pichel (above, right), who would go on to direct SHE and co-direct THE HOUNDS OF ZAROFF, we have clown-faced Regis Toomey, stalwart William “Stage” Boyd, and sultry Lilyan Tashman (above, left), who seduces three men into killing for her. Her husband is particularly unfortunate: strangled by Tashman’s lover, he’s revived by an adrenalin shot to the heart, Uma Thurman-style, then nearly stabbed to death by the lover, and finally scared to death by the spectre of his resuscitated aunt, before he can name the man who originally throttled him. Unlucky stiff.

With its witless comedy and on-the-nose dialogue, this creaker is no classic — it makes James Whale’s often rigid FRANKENSTEIN look fluent and pacy, and lacks that movie’s moments of the sublime. But it is extremely handsome, photographed by Karl Struss in the Paramount soft-focus style, which makes for an unusual-looking horror film. Director Edward Sloman sure lives up to his surname, but obtains good perfs, especially from the sly Tashman and amiable maniac Pichel.

Seeing as how most talkies by 1931 had shed the stumbles, cracklings pauses and enunciation of the early sound misfires, I guess it was deliberate policy to play horror movies slower, for creepy atmos and suspense. Makes sense. But when it doesn’t quite work, it feels like the movie’s slipped back to 1929…