Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
--
Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue

Old Dark Capsules IV: NIGHT OF TERROR, THE CROOKED CIRCLE, THE UNHOLY NIGHT, THE 13TH CHAIR, A STUDY IN SCARLET

Black and white old dark house films are the perfect balm for miserable rainy days like this, or the advent of spring (pollen/allergies) contesting grey winter's turgid encore as the sky clears. Cobwebs, shadows, candelabras, sudden black-outs, howling winds, shifty-eyed conspirators, pouring rain, sheet metal thunder, suits of armor that fall at odd times, cats, clocks striking midnight, readings of the will punctuated by lightning strikes, daggers in backs, spooky seances, fog-enshrouded stalking, spying through keyholes, secret passages, hidden laboratories, gorilla suits, disembodied death masks floating in the darkness - it's all manna. If you grew up at all in the 60s-70s then you remember too the ghosting of the UHF antenna signal (highly susceptible to cloud cover) when these movies showed on local TV Saturday afternoons; how a spooky old film was almost always, somewhere to be found out in the white noise wilderness, deep in those films that were deep in the white noise wilderness, Bela Lugosi waited like a UHF Kurtz, hamming it up in whatever role he got, be it a brooding vampire or just another enigmatic butler.

Back in the 70s, before the advent of VCR, one's ability to see old movies was tied to the whims of TV programmers and the the cloud systems of a fickle God. With only a circular antennae and rabbit ears to move around in vain, atop the set, every second of one of these films that was visible became a sacred text written on the snapchat wind. At any moment a cloud might pass and wipe out the signal, which had bounced in off a storm cloud from Wilmington Philadelphia, and leave you stranded, never knowing what it was called, or how it ended. Thus you basked in the hoary atmosphere while you could, read your Famous Monsters of Filmland like a holy writ, imagining that, one day, you'd be able to watch the movies those photos were from right there on the page of the magazine, as if a screen could one day be as flat and light and book-sized.

You know the rest --that dark birthday wish come true ( I spent a recent jury duty in the waiting room watching Invisible Ghost, The Ghoul and The Black Raven on my Kindle thinking damn, my wish came true, then again, they all have, eventually) and when it's too pollen-saturated or soaking wet and freezing to go outside without sneezing like a machine gun, what can you do now but watch thy old dark house collection from the sanctity of your germ-free bubble, and remember how precious every signal-reception moment used to feel when it was all so ephemeral. The narcotizing effect of these old gems transcends mere pre-sci-fi nostalgia. If you've ever stayed over in a huge dark mansion and tried to find the bathroom in the dead of night, no sound but the rats in the walls and the tick of the grandfather clock and.... what's that creaking?... then you know how great it is to live in a small NYC apartment on a high floor with three padlocks on the one door. Nothing makes you feel dryer than a raging storm onscreen. And if you're a Lugosi fan, then you know.

NIGHT OF TERROR 

(1933)

*** / Amaon Prime Image - B-

A long-unavailable old dark house swirl of a thriller melding in some pre-slasher movie signatures, the Bela Lugosi-starring NIGHT OF TERROR is violent pre-code melodrama that more than lives up to its lively reputation. Highlighted by an unusually lurid string of murders by a knife-wielding madman, who grins impishly from the bushes in and around a rolling, fog-enshrouded estate, then creeps in on his unsuspecting victims, stabbing them, then leaving his calling card - a headline of one of his killings - pinned to the back of each new body. From the opening scene of him crawling into a lover's lane convertible to stab a pair of necking lovers (top) it's clear this ain't your average 30s old dark house film, more like a 70s-80s slasher movie. Inside, a dotty scientist (George Meeker) plans to test his new 'suspended animation' death-duplicating drug by burying himself alive for two days--mixing Houdini and medical science together under the watchful eye of an eminently murderable board of directors. His fiancee (Sally Blaine) is too 'animus-dominated' to argue with her gullible dad (Tully Marshall) who encourages the marriage and bankrolls the experiments. She's so passive about it, she even tolerates social climbing reporter Wallace Ford's pushy come-ons. She'd probably get into a car with the killer too, if he had a bag of candy. She might even vote Republican.

The dad is, thankfully, murdered. Heirs gather for the reading of the will; the killer offs them by the dozen; Ford and the cops need to figure out if he's working for one of them (the will's split between heirs, so the fewer the inheritors the more $$) or if it's just a mad killer 'coincidence.' A no-good brother and his cash-hungry wife arrive out of nowhere and try to push everyone else out. The mysterious Hindu servant Degar (Lugosi) and his spirit medium-housekeeper wife (Mary Frey) are also in for a share, though the scheming brother and wife don't think belong in the will and plan to contest it - better hurry up, schemers!

Playing the very first of his long line of red herring butlers, Lugosi's role is pretty central to the action (he's more than just a comic relief macabre sidebar) and--considering what a lean year 1933 was for him (in the doghouse at Universal for refusing to do Frankenstein)--he seems glad to be working and manages some real malevolent around-the-corner stares through doorway cracks. Meanwhile the mad killer's body count rises and the black chauffeur (Oscar Smith) alone is smart enough to want to skedaddle. Naturally there's a mysterious climactic seance (always turn out all the lights in a big first floor open window and ajar door-filled room when a maniac who's already killed four people that night is still at large in the house) and a final act escape down a secret panel to a scary basement.

This rare Columbia B-movie gem was one I'd been looking for since forever - so when it recently surfaced online (I think it's on youtube) and on Prime after never being on VHS, DVD or shown on TV. That I'm actually not disappointed after all that expectation (35+ years of waiting) says a lot. What sets this apart from so many other old dark houses is the wild pace and the abundance of little macabre touches. Man, that lunatic really racks 'em up. I think he even makes it to double digits. I love the blackly comic way no one seems able to alter their schedules, beef up security, turn on some lights, or lock their doors even knowing the killer is right in the same block radius - it's the sort of suicidal eloi passivity--that immunity bubble--that causes so many car fatalities due to people's inability to stop texting.

In a very strange cool ending the killer threatens the audience with death upon divulging the trick ending. It's weird how often that must have happened at the time - because we see that same thing at the end of The Bat Whispers, and so many others. SPOILERS - believe it or not, underneath that weird make-up, the killer is gravel-voiced Edwin Maxwell (Dr. Emile Egelhoffer in His Girl Friday). 

--

20. A STUDY IN SCARLET

(1933) Dir. Edward Marin

*** / Amazon Image: D

My favorite early 30s Sherlock Holmes (pre-Rathbone) film, this has Anna May Wong and plenty of Limehouse fog and that's all I need. Some purists decry Reginald Owen's Holmes as too bulky and slow (he played Watson opposite Collin Clive the year before) but--though he's probably my least favorite Scrooge (in the 1938 version)--I like him. More forceful and less dotty than, say, Arthur Wotner, he's also less keyed-up and fey than Rathbone. The Watson dynamic is inversed too: Nigel Bruce's Watson tended to lag along behind Rathbone's gamboling Holmes like a shopping bag-encumbered mom after her sugar-addled five year-old, is replaced by Warburton Gamble, bouncing off the terrarium walls while Holmes sits motionless like a gecko perched above a watchful cricket, and then--- zap! the cricket has disappeared in a slight blur of pink tongue. Cool rather than fey, assertive rather than snide, Owen's Holmes has more than just a keen mind, he has gravitas. And Watson has more than just bumbling devotion, he has our respect.

When, for example, his close study of a crime scene leads him from the murdered man's desk out to the front yard, we see Watson and Lestrade (Alan Mowbray) just standing off to the side, resignedly watching him nose around the desk's minutiae. Neither is doing the usual dimwitted jumping to conclusions Bruce and Hohl do in the Universal films, as if feeling the need to spell out every misconception for the slow-witted audience members. Owen's Holmes doesn't spell out all his 'elementary' observations either. When Watson points out the resemblance of Thaddeus Merrydew's shoe size and cigar brand to those of the murderer they're hunting, Holmes just looks at him like a patient teacher guiding a student towards an already established insight: "Is that all you observed?" Holmes points out there were a hundred more details Watson missed, but then he doesn't go into them! Still waters run deep with this Holmes and we come to appreciate the carefulness with which Owen keeps the water clear enough to see all the way into his character's purple depths. These long pauses give those sudden whiplash gecko tongue movements extra snap, like when he counters Merrydew's feigning of ignorance over a widow's trust with a simple "it won't do" that chills the blood.

Another highlight is a local tavern out in the country wherein a nice old Col. Blimp-style officer strolls in, buys a bottle, and beguiles the local carriage driver with tons of whiskey before hiring him for a trip out to a for-sale mansion. Owen is so thoroughly buried in his role that we're not quite sure which of the two men is Holmes, if any; we just enjoy the idea of being kind of hard up for another drink, being low on funds, and having a friendly stranger come into the pub and bring over a whole bottle on a foggy moorish morning. We watch in awe as Holmes deftly avoids drinking his share while plying the driver, and how expertly he soon starts searching all over the mansion, locating secret panels, and sending the maid out of the room after feigning a heart attack. 

As in all the best Rathbone Holmes' (The Scarlet Claw in particular) it's the rich foggy night atmosphere that sells the mystery, especially in and outside the gang's Limehouse hideout, where many a chase, sudden shot and skulking suspicious walk occurs. Wong plays one of the inheritors of the bloody tontine (based on some sequestered jointly stolen jewels), alongside the innocent June Clyde and saucy scoundrel J.M. Kerrigan (the guy toasting "King Jippo" in The Informant). She doesn't have much to do but she still generates plenty of intrigue and suspicion with some hooded glances. An invigorating climax finds Holmes, Lestrade and a gang of detectives show up at the county pub for a quick one to bolster the blood before trundling off through the moors for the big climax. Hail Britannia! We wouldn't see a 'quick stop at the local before the showdown' scene again until Straw Dogs! 

 Clearly a labor of love for Owen (he produced and co-wrote the script with Robert Florey), it doesn't have anything to do with original Conan Doyle novel of the same name (Owen had optioned the title only, not the actual story) but they did a bang-up job whipping something together that feels proper and correct, with British atmosphere is so thick you may be forgiven for presuming it came from Gaumont rather than long-lost LA poverty row outfit Tiffany.

THE CROOKED CIRCLE

(1932) Dir. H. Bruce Humberstone 

*** / Alpha Image - **

This 'campy mystery' was the first film ever broadcast over TV airwaves, back in 1933! - and what better choice? Old dark house films thrive with a fuzzy picture. Combined with the inherent staginess and strange rhythm you may get the delicious impression you're somehow not meant to see it, that you're stumbling onto a secret broadcast meant for other eyes. We open on a circle consisting of several men and one woman in black hoods, sitting a skull on round table deep in some basement. They close their clandestine meeting with the chant: "the fight to the knife and the knife to the hilt!"  The way the circle draws cards to see who does each murder "in a manner already prescribed" evokes Robert Louis Stevenson's "Suicide Club." H. Bruce Humberstone, the man behind most of the Fox Charlie Chan movies, directed it, which may explain why it hums and pops.

The suspects all gather around 'Melody Manner', an abandoned, creepy split-level haunted-ish mansion that's just been rented out by the leader of the Sphinx Club, a group of amateur sleuths. Soon the one long night is populated with a rogues gallery of kooks ("before you got here, a queer-acting hunchback brought over a basket of tomatoes"), mysterious violin sounds ("didn't I say death would come with a string?"); killers pop in and out of attics, grandfather clocksl; backyard graveyards have tomb-top chutes down to basement trap doors. There are some genius touches of the sort I haven't seen until the more recent Good Time (like a burglar (Robert Frazer) forcing the homeowner he's holding at gunpoint to change clothes with him, before the cops arrive) and never a dull moment cross-cutting in an all-in-a-single-night small time frame (the mark of a good old dark house movie; daytime shots are a bore).

Irene Purcell--her alabaster Norma Shearer-esque arms as lovely as ever--is the heroine. The eminently forgettable Ben Lyon is her nominal fiancee. Stealing the movie with some elegant 'against-type' aplomb is C. Henry Gordon in a rare good guy turn, sporting a turban as the enigmatic foreign detective Yoganda; fellow Sphynx Clubber Roscoe Karns nibbles on whatever comedy relief isn't chewed down to the nub by mugging Zasu Pitts' terrified housekeeper and James Gleeson's rattled traffic cop ("oh, a wise guy, eh?"); Robert Frazer, Christian Rub, and Spencer Charters are various spooky eccentrics flittering in and out out frame. Before you know it, the Crooked Circle are being unmasked and it all ends too soon but do what I do and just press 'play from beginning' at the first sign of credits, because I guarantee you won't remember a goddamned wonderful word of it even if you watch it twice, back-to-back, in the same evening. It's just that good because--in the words of Zasu Pitts, repeating the warning given her by the toothless violinist early on-- "something always happens to somebody." She ain't kiddin'.

THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR

(1929) Dir. Todd Browning

**1/2/ (TCM image - ***)

Often remade (to no real effect) this is one of those 'have your cake and denounce it too' seance exposé old house hybrids so popular in the days before DRACULA made the legit supernatural cool. Initially a barnstorming stage melodrama, no one has been able to make a good movie out of what is essentially a single room-set play. Margaret Wycherly stars as Madame LaGrange, a soft-spoken medium hired for a party of British diplomats and swanky ex-pats in India. Demonstrating the mechanisms behind spirit raps and table raising, LaGrange seems intent on demystifying mysticism and bumming everyone out, all in the service of finding out who killed a friend at a party the previous year. Summoned to perform on the anniversary of their collective friend's death, Wycherly makes a half-hearted attempt to access real magic for the climax (her familiar is "Laughing Eyes" an old Native American shaman) and in the process shames hardened carnies like director Todd Browning, whose eagerness to expose the seamy underbelly of the seance racket seems mean-spirited (maybe he did it to impress Houdini -dead only three years at the time - or was he?).

Until Dracula two years later proved the public was ready for fantasy, Browning shied away from the straight-up supernatural, thinking the public preferred Chaney's endless stream of 'deformed sideshow contortionist loves circus waif' masochism vehicles. So in this case, the old dark moody billing is a cheat as the medium's calling on her fake familiar for real help seems quite absurd and eventually her dated sentimental schtick plus the elaborate disclaimers combine to kind of swamp the picture.

Ah well, you can always fall in love with Leila Hyams in her seductively diaphanous art nouveau Adrian gown, as I did. The jagged ruffles of her flapper-y skirt alone are as unforgettable as the window treatments in Deep Red. You don't blame mopey Conrad Nagel for mooning over her (though eventually you will want to slap him, too). The Calcutta setting lets art director Cedric Gibbons indulge in the most luxuriant exotica, and Bela Lugosi is great as the local Indian police inspector, masterfully using his aristocratic bearing to boss around the snotty British and the big surprise climax is not without its spooky charm.

Nonetheless... as with other mysteries from the period (like Secret of the Blue Room) it gets too hung up on its final act twist, becoming almost too contrived to be believed. And oh man does Wycherly's schtick stick in the craw. It's clear Browning is as taken with her as Hitchcock was with Lila Kedrove in Torn Curtain, or Anderson with Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run. Browning should have known by then that you can't let elderly characters actors run away with a scene, because they will take twice as long to walk half as far. And then they will be all we remember, and we'll never want see it again, anymore than we want to go to the old lady's home and visit granny. She's a swell old girl, but... just the thought of that place kind of gives us a claustrophobic, buried-alive feeling. Hyam's diaphanous art nouveau gown and Lugosi's imperiousness can compensate for only so much.

On the other hand, twenty years later Wycherly would turn her saintly homespun mom schtick on its head as Cagney's terrifying mother in White Heat, and don't say 1929 mysteries don't age well, because there's one old dark house movie from 1929 with the same basic seance murder mystery structure, and it rocks, and it's up next on the hit parade:

THE UNHOLY NIGHT 

(1929) Dir. Lionel Barrymore

**** / unavailable 

This MGM old dark house thriller gets a bad rap for being--like most early sound films--awash in crackles, hisses, stiff acting, and literal and figurative static. That's all actually plusses for an old dark house fan, for it gives the impression the air of the early sound era was something we could hear and see, like a special alternate form of liquid perfect for late night/early morning dipping. And The Unholy Night may offer the coziest example: everything seems to be taking place underwater seen through some magical submarine window as, under the protective anonymity of London fog, a killer is strangling unwary ex-British military officers. They're dropping like flies in a wild opening montage. Lord Montague (Roland Young) is nearly strangled too, but he manages to get rescued and at Scotland Yard proceeds to start pouring the brandy and sodas to steady his nerves, and he doesn't stop 'til the whole mystery's wrapped up (announcing each new glass is "my first, today"). Turns out he and the dead men all served together at Gallipoli in the Great War in the same regiment so Scotland Yard suggests they round them up at Montague's mansion for a an impromptu reunion and their own safety and thus protect them with some plain clothes guards and get to the bottom of things. What with all the drinking and WWI existentialist undercurrents you can bet it was written by Ben Hecht, and there are so many creepy seances, ghosts, mass murder tableaux, walking corpses, and British army buddies singing drinking songs that it becomes the perfect film to watch as the sun comes up after a wild night of revels.

The cast is rich with strange faces: Montague's sister (Natalie Moorhead) goes in for seances in a big way, and seems a harmless enough pastime to her doctor fiancee (Ernest Torrance) but is it? Hardworking character actor George Cooper is Montague's loyal servant from the war - he's sure happy to see the regiment back together for a weekend, happier than he can say, and knows just what kind of drinks to serve and when to bring another round (which is immediately); Boris Karloff is a foreign lawyer with shady motives and a strange will; Polly Moran is kept on a short leash as the maid (she can really ham it up... if... if encouraged); the disfigured Major Mallory from their old regiment dies in the other room while the gang are mixing up "a bowl of wine" - a concoction of everything but wine, let aflame and carried around while singing "drink it down / drink it down."

Things really shift into high gear with the dramatic arrival of the Turkish-British Lady Efra (Dorothy Sebastian -above, center), the daughter of an officer who was drummed out of the regiment for cheating at chards and who vowed revenge and is now dead.... maybe. She might be in town because she knows about father's will, a tontine, i.e. where the fortune is divided up equally amongst "surviving" members of the regiment, set up as some vengeance-minded rich folks as part of a byzantine revenge plot (i.e. encouraging so-called loyal friends to kill each other). Lady Efra has her own plot in mind probably via 'tricks of the ancient orient' - like hypnosis, sex and suggestion (ala Thirteen Women, another Erich favorite). Naturally the news of the tontine leads to some hammy moments of alibi-challenging, confessions of being broke or in debt, and going "crazy" from the strain (it sure doesn't take long!). Naturally though, this being England rather than some godforsaken corner of the heathen orient, brotherhood prevails and some pretty rounds of "Auld Lange Syne" put it al perspective, eventually. That night the doctor boyfriend slips the nervous Efra some tranquilizers upstairs and asks if she can identify the voice she heard conspiring with Karloff the night before, and the brother officers all mill around outside her door cockblocking one another and thinking of lame excuses to knock.

Yeah, I love this movie to death. I've only seen it a few dozen times, usually late at night, drunk, or sick, all the better to not remember it for the next time. (It is key, really, to enjoying these old murder mysteries over and over again- make sure your short term memory is off, so you forget who the killer is as soon as it's over). I do recall that, considering her possible yen for killing them, the men milling around her boudoir don't seem at all wise. And I remember  Karloff's weird mix of abashed lovelorn discomfort and silken sinister motives during his scenes, but not exactly where he fits in to anything (he's not even in the credits). I remember a great grisly morning tracking shot past numerous strangled victims, lots of hamming. My favorite moments--the one I remember most--occur earlier, a rattled Lord Montague in Scotland Yard after almost being strangled in the London fog, shrugging off his fear with a succession of brandy and soda (his first today!), and when Lord Montague, leading Scotland Yard into his mansion, opens the parlor door to investigate a scream, and finds the lights out and his sister and a gang of folks mid-seance, spooking maid Moran. It's total darkness while the disembodied head of Sôjin Kamiyama whirls around the room, chanting in a hideous deep voice! Oops! Oh well, nothing to worry about. As a viewer it's such a great WTF moment it stays in the unconscious like an eclipse stays on the retina. Well, gentlemen, let's to the study and have another round. Another regimental drinking song if you please and another brace of brandy and sodas. Our first today! Well, you know what I mean. When it comes to how drinking is done by gentlemen, Ben Hecht never forgets!

PS - Good luck finding it - it's not on any DVD or VHS.  TCM occasionally shows it - usually very late at night. Could you please demand they make a DVD, maybe part of a pre-code old dark house five movie DVR set? Suggest they add Murder by the Clock, Night of Terror, Supernatural, and a decent print of Crooked Circle! I'd appreciate it.

See also:
Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Old Dark Capsules II: PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, THE BLACK CAT (1941), HORROR ISLAND, ROGUE'S TAVERN, ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT

Old Dark Capsules III: THE GORILLA, WHITE COCKATOO, WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT, BULLDOG JACK, SHADOW OF DOUBT

Grave Diggers of 1933: THE INTRUDER, SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM, BEFORE DAWN, TOMORROW AT SEVEN, SUPERNATURAL

NOTES:
1. Adapted in 1936 (see: Russian Orthodox Roulette: Lindsay Lohan, THE DEER HUNTER, TROUBLE FOR TWO)

Lee Tracy! STRANGE LOVE OF MOLLY LOUVAIN, HALF-NAKED TRUTH, BLESSED EVENT, DINNER AT EIGHT, DR. X

Alongside Warren William, Lee Tracy is one of those guys who is largely forgotten by mainstream film lovers but revered by those in the pre-code know. Unlike Williams, the Big Bad Wolf of sneaky industry captains and unscrupulous womanizers, Tracy's doesn't ooze authority and charm, but he gives great amphetamine crackle to a coterie of wiry Hollywood press agents and snoopy reporters, gossip columnists, and crime beat morgue haunters. He takes some getting used to, even by seasoned campaigners, perhaps because the Lee Tracy 'type' led to several imitators, none of whom matched his mix of spooked nerve, rattled newsprint panache, and speed patter. So don't let the imitations turn you off --Tracy's the craziest, sharpest, most cynical actor of the code's all-too-brief era. Now he's on TCM - don't miss these!

THE STRANGE LOVE OF MOLLY LOUVAIN

1932 - ***1/2

Tracy's frequent Warner's co-star Ann Dvorak is one of those girls doomed to give up her sweet blonde child while tumbling down the social ladder, lower and lower, with the bad luck to be dating a two bit hood who shoots a cop while she's in his stolen car with a naive bellboy she wrangled. The crook is shot, Molly hides out in an apartment that shares a phone with Tracy as a fast-talking journalist. Soon he's stealing her from the kid, making plans and meanwhile trying to get Molly to come into the cops by playing up the sob sister angle, broadcasting her child is sick and needs her. It all ends with a dizzyingly amphetamine-fast police station-press room race around which makes the one in His Girl Friday seem like a Rohypnols commercial. Has Tracy ever been faster, better, sleeker, continually winding and unwinding? His 'knowing about women' spiels around his neck and heart and others until a final confessional monologue leaves us whirling, and other films paling.

THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH 

1932 - **1/2

Here's Lee Tracy doing what he does best: motormouth speed-talking through long scenes of unscrupulous flim-flam: first he's a carny barker hawking Lupe Velez's uninhibited fan dancer; second, hawking a blonde hotel maid who partners with Eugene Palette as wild, untamed nudists. Or is it reverse? I fell asleep, but TCM's print was too washed out, or was that me? Palette as an ersatz wildman is enough of a consolation that this wasn't written was by Ben Hecht, but on the other hand it probably it lacks gallows wit, and what's Tracy without it? There's also Frank Morgan as a Broadway impresario who eventually winds up in bed with Velez, thus opening himself to Tracy's blackmail, I think.  Some rare moments of real connection exist, though, like the reunion of Pallette, Tracy, and a handful of sawdust which Tracy pours through his fingers asking "can you imagine this stuff running though your veins?" Tracy's own painful awareness of the cliches by which he's bound make me think he was far more than just an amphetamine-tongued con artist. He was also a drunk, and therefore a poet.

LOVE IS A RACKET

1932 - ***1/2

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars in this one as a columnist who tangles over Francis Dee with generic gangster Lyle Talbot; fellow scribes Tracy and Dvorak are hep enough to know their boy's getting taken to the cleaners by slumming Dee, but they keep their yaps shut like true pals. Dialogue is pitched at such a darkly cynical height that censors ears clearly weren't fast enough to catch it: "Looks like you been up at Sing Sing looking at a burning!" is a typically grim remark, and sex is everywhere, as when Tracy and Dvorak are out at a nightclub eating dinner and she says "if you loved me half as much as you love that steak I'd break down out of self-pity" (meaning throw him a sympathy fuck, yo!) Fairbanks describes Dee--to her face!--as having "a beautiful can." and that she's "as pretty as a little red wagon." Lots of phone calls are made and received. The TCM print looks real nice. There's nothing quite like this film's unambiguously cynical ending, the sort of loose-ended defiance of the crime-must-pay adage only possible in pre-code conditions. William Wellman directed it... like a punch to the gut.

BOMBSHELL

1933 - ****

Playing a loose conglomerate of Clara Bow, Thelma Todd, and herself, Jean Harlow comes through in metatextual spades here as an overworked MGM starlet, earning her place at the top of the spitfire heap with rapid fire slang-filled dialogue pouring in satin torrents from her tongue as she goes zipping, 8 1/2-style, through a carnival of blustery studio heads, make-up artists, insurance fraud grifters, drunken joneser fathers (Frank Morgan), an accented gigolo lover, an infatuated director (Pat O'Brien), and Lee Tracy as, what else?, an unscrupulous publicity agent.

BLESSED EVENT

1932 - ***1/2

If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. Here he's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with an adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. Highlight: Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via a monologue about an electric chair execution he witnessed that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places, such as his imitation of the wobbly walk to the chamber, his voice cracking with hysteria, body spazzing sharp and jerky like a Zulawski gangster as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of a reprieve, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated.

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down. Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham all come over to the table, adding plenty of moxy. Add un-PC dialogue ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" - "Oh, dozens!") and a wild-eyed girl 'in trouble' played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (above), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end. PS - You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

DINNER AT EIGHT
1933 - ****

I watched this film a lot when I was really, really, really beginning to descend into the round-the-clock drinking abyss, and I'm glad it was there to sink into the mire with me. If you drink along with the Depression era-sorrow and small triumphs and wallow in your own self-pity like the swine you are the film glows like a lamp in a flop house doorway, especially if the girl you're pining for happens to be named Paula and look a lot like Madge Evans (above), who plays a Paula pining for John Barrymore, near end... a swell funhouse mirror reversal! I watched this every night, drinking and retching along in sympathy as Barrymore's shakes continually threaten to rear up and destroy him... until finally he beats them to the punch.

First though, you can nod out during the long, drawn-out conversations with an ill shipping magnate Lionel Barrymore asking former siren of the stage Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler) to not sell her stocks to a corporate raider (bullish Wallace Beery). The raider's wife meanwhile is a hot-to-trot bimbo (Jean Harlow in some truly shiny sleepwear), with a yen for her doctor (Edmund Lowe), who'd rather not but likes the promptness of payment. And, oblivious to all the suffering and real time issues going on around her, Lionel's chirpy wife Billie Burke freaks out because she "got the Ferncliffs" and the aspic isn't just right and all the other stuff that bourgeois pretension-suffering dinner guest scribes like Herman J. Mankiewicz and Frances Marion wrote for her to say until you just want to punch her and shout "your shrill pettiness is killing your husband and your daughter Paula's chasing after a drunk former rock star named Erich, I mean John, I mean, Larry Renault!!" By then of course, there will be one less at the table.

DR. X

1933 - ***1/2

Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to the early 2-strip Technicolor hues of DR. X. What used to look blurry and muddy and depressing now glitters with glowing emeralds, murky pinks and streaks of deep red that make it like a candy fountain of shadowy death. Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his atmospherically-lighted collection of scientific colleagues: Dr. Welles has made a 'study' of cannibalism and keeps a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines on the other hand was shipwrecked for years on a desert island and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays' effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are 'normal' people." Mmm...hm.

And dig the post-modern self-reflexivity of the the climax, with the doctors all chained to their chairs, their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester when they're aroused by the murder tableaux staged before them, just like you in the audience! Scream ladies and gentlemen! The Tingler is in this theater! In the subtext, the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its antithesis: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means the opposite, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it, as expected by the morgue attendants and security guards he bribes to look the other way. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements include: "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore (see BLESSED EVENT) maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained for your own amusement, indeed.

CLEAR ALL WIRES
1933 - ***

Tracy's a journalist! The magic year of 1933! He's the kind of dirt digger who travels the world worming his way into the dens of the most dangerous men and angering the snobby New York Times journalist who's always too late for the big story because he's too busy trying to arrange Tracy's downfall. It's kind of silly but there are typically big-budget MGM scenes as Tracy and entourage head to Russia to report on the 15th Anniversary of the Communist Revolution. Una Merkel as a flighty baby-talking mistress who follows Tracy around at hotels across the street is very reminiscent of both Susan Alexander Kane and Marcello's mistress in 8 1/2. Benita Hume is a fellow reporter who had an off-on affair with Tracy. After awhile you'll wonder how he ever survived so long by making so many self-defeating choices, i.e. when in a dangerous country, don't antagonize a fellow reporter just for fun, especially if he's aces manipulating governments into throwing you into jail, and if you must cart around a baby-talking Merkel, make sure she's not your boss's. 

TCM Diary: LURED, THE MALE ANIMAL, THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT, NOTHING SACRED

LURED

(1947) Dir. Douglas Sirk

***1/2

For some of us, the name Lucille Ball produces shudders. Her long-running TV show was in constant late night reruns, and when nothing else was on TV we'd watch it, and so began to associate it in our minds with a feeling of trapped isolation. That's what's kept me away from LURED (1947), all the while, which is too damned bad, for it's a grand tale of Sherlock Holmes x The Lodger atmosphere and foggy mystery, gamely directed by Douglas Sirk, with Ball as a tough, sassy distinct individual far more resonant than the the proto-Cathy "waaaa" housewife married to some slow burn Cuban bandleader she'd later become. Laden with Hitchcockian drollery and pluck, it's stocked with some of my favorite supporting and leading actors: George Sanders is a semi-cavalier playboy who gets all schoolboy-ish over Ball's moxy and red hair; Boris Karloff mugs deliciously as deranged red herring fashion designer stuck in the 19th century (the DVD cover can make you think the whole film is set in the 19th century but it's just because they use an image from one of Karloff's scenes); Alan Mowbray and Joseph Calea are coded white slavers (the fate of the abducted girls is disguised for the censors ala the "classy dips and burglars" in SHE DONE HIM WRONG). Charles Coburn (Piggy himself) is the head of Scotland Yard who recruits Ball as a deputy to go undercover as a taxi dancer; George Zucco is Ball's cop shadow. His sussing out crossword clues from random things Ball says is the dumbest thing about the film, but it's great to see him playing an easy-going cop under a watchful -list eye like Sirk's, instead of another PRC heavy, not that there's anything wrong with that, either.

As fast moving and fun as a London fog murder movie can get, there's great termite bits like Karloff spying the camera in the mirror and breaking the fourth wall to tell us in the audience "I'll be with you in a moment!" in that full creepy/wink voice of his. Ball's natural gift for working girl 'take no shit' toughness and fearless snooping makes it also very feminist; the way she seems wowed by Mowbray's offer of a trip to South America only to trick him into giving her the name of the boat, or the way she intentionally fools us as well as the suspects into thinking she's dumb, then springing the trap, or growling at Sanders like a hungry dog, ruff!

 Things get suspenseful, and then they get looser in that vein similar to Hitchcock's, where suspense doesn't slacken even as the wit and winks fly. Sanders' presence even makes it connected to REBECCA in its tale of an ordinary girl destined for ritzier things due to her surplus of character, figure and intellect, but best of all she starts out way tougher and more self-confident than Joan Fontaine. Ball can be charming as needed, well who can't? But she can also relax, like a real woman, right there onscreen, smoking and knocking back cakes with her big feet up on her day off. It's such a rare thing to see, a warts-and-all portrayal of a real live woman, unafraid to let it all hang out, that it's priceless to see. Like a whole new version of striptease, Ball's character can shed her fake personae as easily as a nightgown. Yeah, but anyone can take off their clothes! Who can take off their mask all the way, to the hairy human animal beneath, with a whole film crew and blazing hot lights breathing down your neck yet--and still be a knock-out?

I know of a few (Stanwyck, Davis) but never thought Lucy was one, til now...

THE MALE ANIMAL

(1942) Dir. Elliot Nugent
***1/2

With deep shadows from a roaring bonfire, the camera low, his shadow large and Wellesian sinister, crypto-fascist Eugene Pallette shouts "Fight! Fight!" while humanities prof Henry Fonda and his acolyte look through round Leninish spectacles, aghast at the horror of mob mentality in action. No, it's not TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, it's homecoming week at Beardsley College! The always durable and ready Jack Carson is the All-American football hero who dated English professor Fonda's wife before Fonda, and if you, as a cinema blog-reading smartypants, ever sneered at the sporting events of your college, city, or state, you'll enjoy THE MALE ANIMAL. It has a kind of Capra-ish ending with Fonda reading a letter from anarchist Vinzetti against massive public outcry, but it's hard to take such clear-cut fascism seriously when it comes from Eugene Pallette, the wondrous bullfrog who played Fonda's dad in THE LADY EVE. Here it's dopey Fonda who's the smart one, but Palette get's the film's last and best line as they march in a parade in honor of Fonda and Pallette notices a troublemaking student isn't cheering, "What's the matter with you?" he barks. "You a fascist or something?"

THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT

1957 - **1/2

Jean Simmons is a virgin secretary-teacher who helps kids cheat at geometry and sexy bespectacled dancer (Neile Adams) cheat at baking contests. So she must be okay. Wait, what? Well, the nightclub environment they work in is cozy and cute, with everyone more or less nice to each other, a rarity for these types of things, and occasionally the club floor is lit in an almost Sternbergianly chthonic nest of curvy shadows. Tony Franciosa is at his sweaty, grinning best as a taut nightclub manager struggling to stay free in the face of marriage's inescapable vortex (to Simmons). The other reason to see this Nellie Adams, a scrappy brunette-bobbed bombshell who comes across like a curvier, smarter, black-haired Shirley MacLaine, with cute glasses and, shortly after this film was released, the power to lure Steve McQueen into marriage. Hubba Hubba! Alas, she didn't do much other than some TV shows after this, having two kids to keep her busy. Steve McQueen, you dick! You stole a gal who could have won the heart of a heartless, cynical world.

NOTHING SACRED

1937 -Dir. William Wellman ****

If you're a screwball fan, or Ben Hecht fan, or both, you probably saw NOTHING SACRED first as a crummy public domain dupe, with its primitive three-strip color washed near to mud. It's still hard to see a good copy today, for this and other reasons. On TCM it looks okay, but the colors still make everything seem kind of muddy/ Plus, I don't think Frederic March is ideal for Ben Hecht's dialogue; he just tosses it off when it could use some John Barrymore-style ballyhoo. All that said, this film only improves on repeat viewings, with great bit players like Max Rosenbloom as a slugger from circulation ("It's me, Moe! Yer brudda!"), Sig Rumann as Dr. Emil Egglehoffer; John Qualen as a Swedish fire chief ("Yumpin' Yimminy..."); the music of Raymond Scott's bouncy quintet; Owlin Howlin (baggage), Margaret Hamilton (matron), and Troy Brown Sr. as a rotund phony maharaja.

Credit William Wellman with his keen eye for earthy detail and Hecht for his flash-frozen cynicism, which stains even the most seemingly mundane of dialogue a frosty black, and Carole Lombard as Hazel Flagg, paraded around the city like a Joan of Arc on slow-glam burn, and the way Frederic March falls in love with the sound of his own sorrow. As a kid who often faked illnesses to avoid sports and school, I can relate with the horrible guilt Flagg experiences, writhing in her first class suite as maids fret over her (including Hattie McDaniel, uncredited). Good old Hecht, you come away basking in the warmth of the evening star, the spectre of death--momentary or eventual--still hanging over everything, the lure of fascism, sentimentality, phony morals, sensationalism, and tawdry exploitation dangling like a anglerfish's lantern luring, luring us all into our cold Stygian comfort zone.