Pre-Code Capsules 3: THE SECRET 6; SMART WOMAN, TARZAN, BLONDE CRAZY, THE MATCH KING

It was kind of disconcerting to hear Alec Baldwin and David Letterman this week discussing their love of old films, with Dave adding they start getting good only from after 1934. Say whaaa? Dude, Acidemic readers know the best cinematic times are the eras Letterman doesn't like, the post-silent/pre-code era of 1929-1934, before the code crushed womankind and made her wear ridiculous aprons and act wholesome, in ways bourgeois woman's groups felt would be better for the 'masses.' Here's some 90 proof good stuff, before they gummed the works:

THE SECRET 6

1931 - ***

 Wallace Beery gets top billing in this protean MGM gangster drama set in gritty downtown Chicago (there's some chilling stockyard tracking shots). Hard to believe Beery was once a huge box office draw, playing burly ruffians opposite Jackie Cooper or Marie Dressler; he had a certain gruff charm sure, but when he left, he took the hopes of big ugly lugs to make A-list money with him. Here he plays a ruffian stockyard worker nicknamed "Slaughterhouse" who leaves off hog killing to become a gangster (prohibition made it a sound career move), eventually running for mayor on the "pig-sticker" ticket, with the stockyards howling and mooing away behind his podium.

Andre Bazin would approve of this film since it operates on a loose semi-documentary style: lots of interiors packed with extras and activity and a sense of real time via long uninterrupted takes in medium frame. Everyone speaks slowly and carefully for the early sound equipment.  If nothing else it makes for an invaluable record of Chicago in the actual prohibition era: press rooms, stockyards, nightclubs, bottling plants, breweries, various ways to stash and distribute (putting bottles inside other things for delivery, etc.) money changing hands, receipt tallying, shakedowns, political rallies, checks being written, highjacking, and blackmail. Lewis Stone is his bitter Irish rival, Jean Harlow a sexy nightclub hatcheck girl whose real job is to hook reporters so they glorify the gangsters in the press, and Clark Gable a two-timing no good rat finkwhyIoughtta.... who tips off her latest patsy.

SMART WOMAN

1931 - ** 1/2

Thanks to the light touch of director Gregory La Cava this soggy farce is pretty light on its feet, even with excessive early sound hiss and TCM's print all but faded to light uniform grey. Mary Astor plays a martyrishly modern upscale wife who comes home from a trip abroad--faithful to her husband Don (Robert Ames) all the while--only to find he's taken up with a blonde gold digger (Noel Francis), and her claw-hooked mother (Gladys Gale). Once again the gender neutral fuddy-duddy-isms of Edward Everett Horton attempt to liven the stiltedness. He comes to pick Mary Astor up from the docks in a huge crowd scene; there's a brief, horrifying minute when I thought he was the husband Astor's been boasting of to her would-be lover Sir Guy Harrington (John Halliday) during the voyage. Phew! Were we meant to think that? Tricky, tricky Gregory! Things get better when the blonde gold digger hits it off with Sir Guy during a strangely sexy bicycle ride. Dewy, wild-eyed and seductive, trying to hide her panting and light sweat sheen, she really wakes up the film, ash if the exercise re-activates the bootleg backstage hooch in her system, but the zzz's are never far behind, struggling to catch up like Edward Everett Horton on a girl's bike.

TARZAN, THE APE MAN 

1932 - ***1/2

There's been so many kid-friendly TARZAN films--from the silent era up through Disney's animated version--that it's easy to forget the first two films with Weissmuller were adult, intense, and uber-lurid. TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) has a nude swimming scene (restored!), wild-ass battles and Maureen O'Sullivan in the hottest loincloth of any Jane ever. This one is pretty wild too. The big climax-- a tribe of pygmies throwing Jane and her father into a pit with a flesh-rending ape monster--is unparalleled in sheer lurid extremity. A more terrifying version of the Lollipop Guild, the studio used real African American and African dwarfs in the scene, and to see them all decked-out in exotic furs and fangs swarming around the pit, yelling and screaming for blood, man oh man.... it's so splendidly disturbing, and racist and wrong, you may never want to watch it again, after just twenty more times...

BLONDE CRAZY

1931 - ***

A Warner Brothers Cagney film with lots of good-natured slapping, BLONDE CRAZY's got a little something for everyone... to be offended by... sooner or later... like seeing James Cagney--wearing lots of white make-up and eye shadow--getting taken for a sucker by Louis Calhern during a trip to the big city.  Wait... what? Louis Calhern? Senior Trentino of Sylvania? Mrs. Teasdale, I'm afraid this has forced our countries into war!

Noel Francis

Cagney starts out a movie usher, then a hotel lobby boy before hooking up with Joan Blondell to implement his scrapbook full of scams. She's the cheese, he's the mousetrap, get me? Guy Kibbee's the first sucker they trim; his roll gets them to 'a big city' and all is well... at first. Cagney in these scenes is already super-modern and hip and making fun of the measured early sound way other actors talked in the early days of sound cinema. But... again, I just can't stand seeing him get took by the dude who'd later lose a war to Groucho Marx. Am I right, bud? Would you want to see John Wayne get his ass kicked by Franklin Pangborn? And speak of the devil, Noel Francis (left) is as dewy and weird-eyed in her few scenes as she was in SMART WOMAN. More please!

There's also an impossibly young Ray Milland as a Wall Street swine who sends Blondell tomes of love poetry (Cagney reads some of the Browning in amusing style) and look fast for a 'good luck' swastika key chain.

THE MATCH KING

1932 - ***

Thanks to TCM we've had the chance to discover a lot of pre-code stars that fell by the wayside over the years. Perhaps it's because being in the shadows helped stave off the draining of endless imitation, but seeing these guys in action at last over so many films it's like finding a holy grail that might lift current cinematic masculinity of its wussy gutter. Warren William is one such fella, here as droll and pleasingly devilish as a no-good embezzler can be in a loosely biographical portrait of Ivar Kreuger, the guy who cornered the market on matches in the 20s, turning his uncle's floundering Swedish match factory into a giant conglomerate because everyone uses matches, "even the rich" and anyone even the bum on the street "will give you a match." Along his way up to the top we learn all sorts of quick scam tricks, including using an array of well-kept courtesans to get insider trading tips from dignitaries, and inventing the idea of 'three on a match' to help sell more boxes, and bailing pre-war European countries out of economic collapse in exchange for match monopolies. Lili Damita gets a few meandering scenes as the main love interest; she and Warren share a long walk and got caught in the rain and then fall in love or something, then she's gone and he's back to work, thank god. No one gives a shit. We'd rather chill with Glenda Farrell who has an earlier bit as a confederate who gets the jilt stateside; Harold Huber is a Portuguese counterfeiter meanwhile, making Ivar some counterfeit bonds which eventually prove his undoing; before then though Ivar has plenty of time to espouse and practice his philosophy: "Don't worry until something happens." 

I would sure like to be able to operate that loose and gutsy but hey - it's too nerve wracking as we consider our national debt ever spiraling out into the double digit trillions. "It's all right," notes Ivar of his house of matchsticks strategy, "as long as I keep going... as long as I don't ever stop." In other words in order to not have to pay back his loans he has to keep procuring more and more debts through more and bigger investments. That's sure the way my boss Michel used to operate so I can vouch for its correctness as far as big business... Incidentally, David Letterman mentioned this movie in a discussion with Alec Baldwin this week on the joy of TCM! Baldwin hadn't heard of it. Baldwin, you'd do well to absorb a little Warren in your already scintillating rogue repertoire! He's just your type.