pre-code capsules 5: WHITE WOMAN, RED DUST, GIRLS ABOUT TOWN, THE PURCHASE PRICE, MANDALAY

WHITE WOMAN

(1933) - ****

Fans of KONGO, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and/or Charles Laughton: Alert! Here is a film you should see. Lurid and steamy and darkly funny, there's really not much in the way of miscegenation but Charles Laughton as a psychopathic but otherwise borderline lovable rogue who operates a rubber plantation far deep in the tropics more than makes up for it. Employing escaped convicts and wanted men so they don't dare ever leave him, he bribes the natives to kill anyone who does, if the crocs don't get them first.

A truly marvelous scene occurs early wherein Laughton seduces Lombard while he's out in Saigon or wherever getting supplies. Coming off all down to earth and humbled by the loss of his wife, he's  truly touching. She's being booted out of port almost as soon as she arrives thanks to snooty governors' wives, so needs a place to crash -- and Laughton doesn't mind a shady past, in fact he depends on it. Then, as soon as they're married and he has her deep in the bush, he becomes a bully in high MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY / BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET style. However, I think he's better and more sympathetic here than in either of those films, especially in his bemused rivalry with fellow jungle rat Charles Bickford, who shows up out of the soggy swamps looking for a job (as "overseer") and making no bones about his intentions to steal her out from under his portly employer. But Charles would much rather have an honest-about-his-shady-intentions rogue as his rival than the mealy-mouthed 'moral' pretty boy who does steal Lombard's heart (Kent Taylor).

Laughton is always hilarious and you feel the hurt over his new wife's revulsion towards him and his futile jealousy over the young Kent underneath his bravado and smirking. You hate him for shooting the porter's monkey but you'll cheer his poker-faced Englishness during the big native attack finale. Can you believe Laughton made ISLAND OF THE LOST SOULS the same year? Talk about a roll!

RED DUST

1932 - ****

More remote rubber plantation action with Clark Gable in the Laughton role, so he does much better with the ladies, particularly Mary Astor (wed to a naive white fever victim) and traveling 'salesgirl' Jean Harlow (she takes her famous rain barrel bath). The plot is the usual W. Somerset Maugham-style steamy love triangle, in the jungle where white Christian decency melts in the tropical heat and monsoons. MGM keeps the lurid indecency on a tight chain but they keep it hungry too -that one rainstorm kiss between a soaking wet Astor and Gable is hotter than hell, and no one who sees this film, even once, has ever forgotten it.

I like what Rupert has to say about it on Classic Movies Digest:

As Barbara, Mary Astor is even more unwillingly libertine in her adulterous lust for Gable's Denny when one knows the background of the actress' torrid and infamous real life amours. The fireworks are in their scenes together as well. Early on when Astor slaps Gable hard for a verbal offense, he enjoys it, grinning that Gable grin from ear to ear. Then she can barely conceal her growing desire for him as she watches the strong, dark and commanding Denny hold her fair and weak husband, nursing him back to health from the fever. The comparison of the two is indeed notable to the tingly Astor. Then in the scene immediately following, Vantine happily and boldly watches Denny undress for bed, only to be told to go to her own, which she does in disappointment. These two ladies have it bad. 

GIRLS ABOUT TOWN

1931 - ***1/2

I saw this at the Film Forum about ten years ago during their first pre-code festival, with a packed, delighted audience, and it was a hoot and a holler and a half. Seeing it at home is still good, though it helps to have seen a lot of other pre-codes first so you understand the haphazard amorality brought on by the Great Depression, when so many women were broke and on the streets and hustling in a kind of gold-digger limbo between outright streetwalking and showgirl social climbing. Like Liz Taylor in BUTTERFIELD 8, the GIRLS also have a phone service to get their dates, and while one or two of them get happily reformed by the end the final shot is of our fearlessly amoral survivor calling that number for yet another victim. Kay Francis and Lillian Tashman are the girls. Joel McRae is the reformer, Eugene Pallette is the A-list sucker, Lucille Gleason his hard-luck wife. George Cukor directed with his champagne touch already in evidence. Similar in a lot of ways to BED OF ROSES and dozens of other features of the early sound era, the story is predictable but pre-code to the core. Sure Francis reformed at the end but Tashman gets to keep her diamonds and booze, thus pleasing everyone long time. 

THE PURCHASE PRICE

1932 - ***

Barbara Stanwyck has probably never looked sexier than trying to seduce dumbass sodbuster George Brent in this weird pre-code crowd-pleaser. Tired of life as a New York City singing slickster, Babs runs away from her clingy gangster lover Lyle Talbot by switching places with a Montreal hotel maid who was supposed to marry Brent via long distance matchmaking newspaper ads.

It's not quite fair the way Brent gradually changes from sullen hick to merely a college grad who's designed his own new kind of wheat germ but needs a bunch of money to pay the mortgage. Paramount's resident pre-code sleazebag David Landau (he was the villain in the Marx Brothers' HORSEFEATHERS - "Here's to dear old Darwin!" the same year) wants ti step in, buy the mortgage and get Babs as his, um, 'cook,' in the process (things aren't going great in the Babs-Brent marriage - she fends off his one lamely busted move and he sulks ever after).


The story's strictly from hicksville and Brent's too much a mealy-mouthed pretty boy to convince as either a hick or a horticulturist, but Wellman gives us, as is his wont lots of great pre-code nitty city and farm town grit, including: one pretty good barroom fight; a vividly etched and very drunken shivaree; burning cornfields, terrible wallpaper; and lots of leering through open doorways. No grit in the world is so nitty it can best Stanwyck in a negligee and thigh high stockings, though. Seldom before has adult sexuality seemed so tangible, vulnerable or rock-hard tough, via a young, rail thin and undressed woman who's still wearing all the pants in sight.

MANDALAY

1934 - ***1/2

If you're suspected of killing the guy who ran out on you, and get exonerated, and then the guy shows up alive, are you allowed to kill him? That is the question asked of many a pre-code heroine but few have handled it as coolly as Kay Francis in MANDALAY.  Ricardo Cortez is the charming gunrunner fiancee who leaves her behind in a Burma nightclub to pay his debt to shady club promoter Warner Oland. At first she refuses to stay, but then gets a hang of the game, changes her name to 'Spot White' and is soon so deep in the bedrooms and pockets of the rich and famous that the wives move to ship her farther up river (the way they do Lombard in WHITE WOMAN). But on the riverboat to Mandalay who should show back up? Old Ricardo... and right when she's trying to make it with one of the ubiquitous archetypes of these jungle expeditions, the drug-addicted (or here, drunk) but good-hearted doctor (Lyle Talbot) heading up river to work on yellow fever victims, which--as we learned from W. Somerset Maugham's PAINTED VEIL--is a great way to pay off your malodorous malpractice or adulterous guilt.

The code came in around halfway through 1934, so the whole RAIN / PAINTED VEIL-ripped subgenre of commonwealth sin would soon be extinct in place of frilly frocks, domestic breakfasts, nannies, priests, and angelic children, but here in MANDALAY things are still allowed to be rife with all the lurid trimmings: drugs, booze, depravity, prostitution, gun-running, miscegenation, and murder. Michael Curtiz directed so you know there's nary a dull moment, even when nothing happens, and Kay's seldom looked lovelier. Dig that slinky Orry-Kelly gown above! Oh you kid! Awooga!

Pre-Code Capsules IV: PRESTIGE, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN, BLONDE VENUS, OUR BETTERS, BEAST OF THE CITY

PRESTIGE

1931-***

Melvyn Douglas dissolves before our eyes as a French officer put in charge of French Vietnam's most sweltering prison camp. Adolphe Menjou is the scheming major with designs on Douglas' new wife, Ann Harding; he probably sent Douglas off to the camp in the first place, hoping she'd stay behind so he can get his dirty little hobbit hands on her, as he's fond of doing in these sorts of FAREWELL TO ARMS-ish variations, but who can prove it? Harding's dad says she shouldn't follow Douglas into this jungle hell, but if she does she already has the only thing that can save her there: the 'prestige' of being white. She must never slacken her grip or lose her superior breeding! Never! The natives are a mix of African-American extras, genuine Asians, and ugly white dudes in a lot of make-up, all depicted as little more than untamed animals in comparison with the staunch white man and his wife. As with all the Commonwealth-set pre-codes, the specter of miscegenation hangs throughout!

A product of the relatively rough-edged RKO-Pathe studio, PRESTIGE has strong expressionist touches and excellent tracking shots: fire dances, cockfights, guillotines, whips, chains, and general white-on-black brutality, it's like John Ford on bad acid and malaria. Simultaneously racist and anti-colonialist, PRESTIGE should be shown in every college class about Vietnam, as an illustration of the colonialist root chord underwriting the rise of Ho Chi Minh. As the screwed-over 'hero,' Douglas starts out wanting to be nice, but gets a fever, sweats, collapses, shakes, and turns sadistic: chaining up prisoners, guillotining rebel leaders, and generally devolving into a hate-filled drunk. Harding is her usual lovely, wistful self. Her soft voice ever-crackling with dignity and bruised emotion. As befits her 'white prestige,' she does what she can, but they won't even let her hang curtains! And the ending is intense, lurid, and nihilistic. Hurrah! Only in the pre-code, and even then... only abroad.

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN

1932- Dir. William Cameron Menzies, Marcel Varnel
***1/2

Edmund Lowe takes things a little lighter than PRESTIGE's Melvyn Douglas for this more kid-friendly but still decidedly racist and colonially smug pre-code film.  Chandu (Lowe) is a lordly traveler who's learned the mystic secrets of the Yogis so now can do wilder rope tricks while saving the world from non-white power mongers like Roxor (Bela Lugosi). Chandu's scientist brother-in-law (Henry B. Walthall) is abducted by Roxer's dacoits, forced to work on a death ray that can destroy zee vorld!

Though one must put up with a shitload of tired comic relief from a drunken limey who bugs his eyes out over Chandu's magic tricks, it's worth watching for the constant bizarre touches and gorgeous art direction (William Cameron Menzies at his best) and one of the sexiest, wildest performances from Bela Lugosi. Lean, dashing, dressed in black like a cool pre-beatnik, he's at the height of his insane scenery-chewing, alive with gleeful menace. Speaking of fiery death rays, check out June Lang (below) in her sheer white gown being auctioned at a slave mart filled with lusty sheiks! Like PRESTIGE (above), CHANDU considers it a betrayal of white breeding to be so much as pawed by non-white hands, which of course made such pawing a popular threat in pre-code exotica. 

All in all, with its narrow escapes, cliffhanger derring do, visible nips, and Lugosi firing on all engines, Chandu is a great undiscovered (for most of us) treat. Playing like an excellent big-budgeted condensed serial, layered with fun, menace, and intrigue, great sets and wild rides, aside fro the racism, what's not to love? Some people have a problem with Edmund Lowe. Not me, I think he's great. He's no Gable or Grant, but he's cooler than Ronald Coleman.  Irene Ware is his love interest, the glamorous Princess Nadjii (it was OK for white men to marry foreign gals as long as they were royalty - a popular loophole to let America's horrific miscegenation hysteria go unchallenged even while living the fantasy.

BLONDE VENUS

1932 - ***

The first and (wisely) last time Paramount ever gave Marlene Dietrich a kid and husband, Von Sternberg here seems to be lampooning typical pre-code women's pictures, showing the divine Dietrich as a good mom scrubbing her son up German-style in the bath, and enduring her near-squalor apartment while hubby Herbert Marshall diddles in labs to no great effect except to give himself radium poisoning; she must go back to her old habits of vamping to pay for an expensive European treatment. When he finds out what she's been up to, he taciturnly snaps about his cuckolding benefactor: "I don't know whether to thank him or shoot him... dead!" When you're Herbert Marshall and the guy is Cary Grant, you're better off just thanking him, but Marshall instead labels Marlene an unfit mother. Much taking it on the lam with the kid ensues. 

 As a swinger in retirement, nothing gets me down like watching a layabout like Herbert Marshall use a kid to keep his hotter younger wife imprisoned in his stifling patriarchal caress du condescension. First, we're 'treated' to the early days of how Marshall and Dietrich met--he and his student pals stumble on her and some friends skinny-dipping in a sparkly stream, and they proceed to leer to their heart's content, which right there seems shitty and frat boyish. Next we see the product of their union, with her sleeves rolled up, bathing little Johnny while Marshall looks on, and, yeesh, you can't wait for her to bail on them both and get back into a smooth nightclub with some folks her own age. So much as I admire it, BLONDE VENUS is my least favorite of Dietrich's films with Von Sternberg. Even the esteemed "Hot Voodoo" sequence loses its edge once she puts on that hideous disco 'fro wig (above). Still, there are more great moments scattered around it than a dozen ordinary films: take for example the innuendo-driven shot of a fat diner owner puffing his cigar in anticipation of how the now broke Dietrich is going to pay for the meal she just fed to her little Johnny. Du hast mich betrogen, Johnny, in der ersten Stundt, indeed!

OUR BETTERS

1933 - ****

One of my favorite recent TCM discoveries, this has great saucy dialogue and sophisticated ideas on lover-swapping, especially as concerns two ladies of title, the American-born heiress Lady Grayston (Constance Bennett) and her voracious Duchess pal Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) and her constant gigolo, Pepi (Gilbert Roland). A weekend in the country is called for, REGLE DU JEU-style, wherein Grayston hopes to get it on in the poolside bath house with Pepi and placate Minnie with the guest of honor, a fey dance instructor named Earnest, the hardest to get houseguest in the whole of upper crust London. Meanwhile Anita Louise, Alan Mowbray, and others look on, askance.

George Cukor--as few have before or since--really shows how the right gay male at the right time makes any party ten times better and Earnest's last act entry really kicks home the idea of a weekend party's hungover Sunday. Maybe you know the feeling: you've had a great drunken time but now its Sunday and you can barely remember how and when you may have made a fool of yourself the night before. You're anxious to leave before brunch so you can get home to your private bar and video collection, but are stopped on the way out by the late arrival of the very person you'd been hoping would come the night before. This late arrival's lack of connection with last night's damage makes him like an embodiment of fresh starts and forgiveness as he just starts rearranging everyone's mood even as the butler's taking your bag out to the car. So who laughs last? Call Earnest a stereotype, but he's delightful and even gets the priceless closing line: "There's no finer sight in the world than.. two women of title, kissing each other!"

BEAST OF THE CITY 

1932 - ***

"Instead of the glorification of the gangster, we need the glorification of the policeman," explains the scroll from Herbert Hoover that opens BEAST OF THE CITY. Indirectly justifying the existence of police brutality, Hoover's letter finds its poster child in Captain 'Fightin'" Fitzgerald (Walter Huston), the Irish-Catholic representative of pre-Dirty Harry vigilante-mindedness, struggling to keep the streets of his nameless city clean while gangster-glorifying reporters gum up the works. Yes, it's MGM doing what Warners did best, a nose-to-the-pavement gangster picture, and trying to do what no other studio was dumb enough to try (except maybe Columbia), take Hoover seriously and apply bourgeois downward flowing morals to a lowbrow genre. Nothing is more anathema to genuine art than the lionization of working class 'values.' The only person who could ever make working class sentimentality seem genuine--since he damn well drunkenly believed in it--was John Ford. And BEAST director Charles Brabin is no John Ford.

All early gangster pictures were forced by citizen's groups to insert scenes of 'ordinary citizens' protesting newspapers' glorification of the gangster--these scenes were hep people's cues to go the rest room or refill their popcorn-- but in BEAST the citizen's groups have a point about who the real enemy is--the press! The cops endure a regular drubbing from the reporters who in turn influence the politicians, who need the favor of those reporters for campaign PR. Thus, the public's morbid interest in hoodlums itself indirectly breeds corruption in local government! Ladies and gentlemen, writs of habeas corpus are the tool of the mobster even more than tommy guns! Huston could slap the truth out of 'em in five minutes, but the politicians have taken away his most important tool, his fists!  

Of course one thing that made the gangster film so alluring was its wrongness, and since MGM's idea of glorifying cops is to make them into brutish, cabbage-fed simpletons (scenes include Huston reading the funnies to son Mickey Rooney over pancakes before church), you no longer get that giddy feeling of wrongness that comes from the best WB pictures, especially since the police brutality isn't directly shown. 

There are perks though: Wallace Ford is good as Figthing Fitz's brother, a cop who doesn't mind taking a drink once in awhile, especially if it's with Jean Harlow (as an unreformed moll in reformed moll clothing who sends Ford down a slippery path), and there's complex pre-code politics involving citizen's groups dictating the concessions corrupt politicians must make towards law and order, something that results in Huston being elected police chief. After his men applaud his first speech, Huston barks: "Never mind those open hands, ball em into fists and use 'em!"

But this approach also illuminates how prohibition creates contempt for the law: when you prosecute victimless crimes (no one is really glad when Fightin' Fitz closes all the bars) the more violent elements of gangland eagerly step in to fill the need, the ones not cowed by jail and cop beatings. So while Ford gets corrupted by Harlow's smooching and bootleg booze maybe Fighting Fitz is indirectly the one to blame. Meanwhile, there's lots of heroin references, as when Fitz barks: "Take away your guns and your hops and you're yellow crawling maggots."  The liberal media may have enlightened us all to the dehumanizing racism in films like BLONDE VENUS, PRESTIGE, and CHANDU, but when it comes dehumanizing opiate addicts. well, some things just never go out of style.

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.

Pre-Code Capsules 2: CITY STREETS, BOMBSHELL, THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH, THEY CALL IT SIN, SAFE IN HELL, HOLD YOUR MAN

CITY STREETS

1931 - Dir Robert Mamoulian

****

It seems dimwitted to call this film CITY STREETS--it's the kind of title that wouldn't pass muster in a college lit class, too vague and generalized. One imagines treacly Chaplin Americana with the Dead End Kids. Also, its central plot device: an alcohol kingpin (Paul Lukas) risks his whole operation in a play for underling Gary Cooper's girlfriend, seems kind of ridiculous, like no one would ever rise to power in the underworld if he went in for prima nocta. (the Mafia--as we learn from Joe Pesci's fate in CASINO--understood how bad it was for business). But such things aside, STREETS is actually very beautiful, sleazy, unrepentant, and expressionistic as all art deco hell. Full of all the weird termite tricks that made Mamoulian a kind of early sound forerunner of the New Wave, here murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very dirty fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibbee (as you've never seen him before, needless to say).

Dashiell Hammett's grit-filled eye of detail fills the sails with snappy patter (including hilariously curt rapport between Kibee and daughter Sydney) and keeps the Mamoulian coffers rich in minute detail that feels observed rather than imagined, thanks especially TCM'-restored Lee Garmes' visceral expressionist photography. That title and the inevitable (for the time) romantic triangle plot are rote, but the rest is stunningly free of any remote chance of gangster cliche. It's like a molten crucible of gangster film-ism, without a shape or form, yet mythic enough to re-do over and over in generations and remakes to come.

That said, convict Sylvia Sidney's jailhouse pleas to her pinball wizard romeo Kid (Cooper) not to go fight or whatever drag on and on: "Kid, don't go! Oh no Kid! No, Kid, please don'tgoifyouloveme, kid oh kid oh kid, if you love me kid please don't go." Sylvia, you were ten times cooler before you went to prison. Now you've gone soft and the rackets got no place for soft. Still there's a super sexy scene of passion with Cooper across a wire screen in the ladies' prison visiting room, and she has the coolest vanity mirror ever (a giant vulture/eagle over it, with wings outspread) and Cooper is at his most youthfully ravishing. Look fast for Paulette Goddard at a nightclub!

BOMBSHELL

(1933) Dir Victor Fleming

****

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, partying like it's 1899!), an accented gigolo lover, an infatuated director (Pat O'Brien), and Lee Tracy, as usual, an unscrupulous publicity agent.


There's something inherently unlikable (to me) about Tracy, but he sure can talk fast and believably think on his feet.  Even when he apologetically comes to tell Harlow he's been fired on account of her complaints you don't notice his emotions, you just stare at the ferocious meta-amphetamine insect anger in his sharply slicked-back hair. It forms--in the excellent TCM transfer--a weird bi-level triple side wave-part. Too much information!

In order to appease Harlow and get his job back, Tracy must pledge to cease sleazing her up in the tabloids and instead put her onto the 'Home and Garden' page, dressing her up in frilly aprons, with forked potato in hand, longing wistfully for the patter of little feet. In a hilarious interview with a matronly journalist, Harlow holds her hands clasped together and gazes into the heavens, imagining the baby to come, then sets off to adopt one, ala Angelina Jolie, picking them out by the bushel like puppies. Mythical Monkey writes:

 "The movie skewers every Hollywood type—the hangers-on, the rapacious press, the stalkers, the slicky boys, the fraudsters, the petty tyrants—and does so with a manic quality that would characterize the screwball comedies allegedly invented by Howard Hawks and Frank Capra in 1934, but which, as I mentioned in my review of Design For Living, seems to have developed full-blown sometime earlier. Fleming spared no one, including himself—he's caricatured as director Jim Brogan (Pat O'Brien), alternately described in the movie as a "piano mover" and "a smooth-tongued bluebeard." (here)

Irregardless of any future screwballing, the damage has been done and the post-1934 serious code enforcement look for women has already been dreamt up, right here in front of the matron and Ladies Home photographer, in an act of parody. As Harlow assumes this pose of born again maternal sanctity, we briefly--or did I hallucinate--see her smile to herself--a subliminal wink to the audience--as she gets all pious and starry-eyed at the thought of a woman's 'ultimate duty to the continuance of the species.'

Phony or not, she never lets up in it - she either decides this sugary drivel is the only way to beat the system at its own game of hypocritical posturing or she genuinely believes such a dull code of ethics barefoot/pregnant line. That we'll never know if she was just bullshitting or not is what the code is all about: for every 'you know I'm just kidding' there shalt be an accompanying teardrop of sincerity, sayeth the Breen.

THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH

(1932) - **1/2

Secretary: "Imagine anyone daring to question your veracity."
Tracy: "Such language!"

More Lee Tracy doing what he does best, motormouth speed-talking as an unscrupulous press agent: first as a carny barker hawking Lupe Velez's uninhibited fan dancer from the tropics to the Ziegfield-ish Frank Morgan as an exotic princess rescued from a Turkish harm (this would make a hilarious second feature to The Great Ziegfeld in which Morgan plays the friend/rival/backer). After that scheme winds down, he starts a new bent hawking a blonde hotel maid who partners with Tracy's right hand man Eugene Palette as the leaders of a cult of wild, untamed nudists. Naturally he splashes a few front pages ("what the public wants is good, clean entertainment," he counsels Morgan after Velez leaves him, "they're all washed up on these hooch dancers"). Naturally, it all caves back down to where they started, in the carnival midway gutter, where they all started out (the scene where the noises of the city and the office start resembling the sound of the carnival calliope luring him back is a highlight).

Tracy's got Cagney's gift for speedy patter, but he lacks Jimmy Cagney's agility, and humility -- a scene where he smacks up Morgan with enlarged blackmail photos is just irritating. Some rare moments of real connection exist, though, like at the end, like the cool bro-to-bro 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?" He finally seems to have run out of hot air, and as the sand falls to the ground, we kind of love the poor sap at last, his own painful awareness of the cliches by which he's bound  make him human; then the sound of Lupe Velez singing her bawdy hot jazz "Carpenter" song comes down the midway and suddenly what was once kind of shrill warms the heart like a shot of good whiskey. Gentle Ben tells us in real life he was fired and sued by the studio for always being late and often drunk to set. That's why, perhaps, Cagney is immortal and Tracy just a curious footnote. Both played incorrigible scammers, but Cagney was just playing. Tracy was playing for keeps. Now that we're being honest, I think I like Tracy better, even with that adenoidal crackle in his voice and those long arms always moving like a dozen spider legs in all directions.

THEY CALL IT SIN

1932 - **1/2

Hot as she was, by 1932 Loretta Young's persona was that of a nobly young woman who looks around at the newfangled crazes --divorce, premarital sex, drugs, prohibition liquor-- and bristles up her moral feathers, does three hail Marys and calls her priest. The devoutly Catholic Young often used her acetylene hotness like an Olympic torch of morality in any dark, dank pre-code films she found herself in, such as this one. Always first in line to confess to a crime or sacrifice her happiness to save someone else, anyone else, her characters are martyrs like only a self-righteous hottie can play them. Here her sleazy ex-boss is accidentally killed and she races like a Chariots of Fire sprinter to be the first person to confess and save her true lovezzzz... Before that she's dicked around by David Manners, rescued by George Brent, and ripped-off by Louis Calhern (the guy who would go on to hire Chicolini and Harpo in DUCK SOUP the following year). His excellency's car! At any rate, she gets some good digs in at a speakeasy when she runs into Brent, and Manners' double standard (he's getting married but still expects her to keep a holding pattern) is depicted as rather vile, although at least he admits it. Both agree working for Calhern is not the thing for her, but "she does what she pleases when she pleases." Finally! At any rate, Una Merkel is a champ as Loretta's hoofer pal who puts her wise, and there's the usual top notch trimmings all First National-Vitaphone pics had in the glorious year of 1932, so don't waste your time not seeing it next time it cartwheels its way onto TCM!

SAFE IN HELL

1931 - Dir William Wellman

***

One of many pre-code films made about women of ill repute lamming out to the tropics or the Orient after skipping bail or being wanted for murder: Joan Crawford did it in RAIN the following year (32); Marlene Dietrich in SHANGHAI EXPRESS the following year, and Kay Francis did in MANDALAY the year after that 1934, then came the code. They stopped doing it. But back in 1931 it was anybody's game and SAFE IN HELL happens to be one of the  more lurid exhibits of the pre-code era: Gilda (Dorothy Mackaill) is a dissolute prostitute who winds up accidentally burning down a building with a drunk john in it. Her innocent sailor fella (Donald Cook, unbearable) returns home and-- hey! He's earned a first mate stripe so now they can finally get married. Oh, Donald! He gives her a ship in a bottle and a fan from Japan as presents from abroad - but she lets him know the score and before you can say "Jake" he's smuggling her off to a remote island with no extradition laws and a cadre of debauched expats waiting to slaver, dark-eyed, over their gin-fizzes, at her hotel room door.

Clarence Muse (THE INVISIBLE GHOST) as the bellhop brings as much dignity as ten ordinary men into the role; at the front desk and tending bar is Nina Mae McKinny (THE GREEN PASTURES) who sings "When It's Sleepy time Down South" right in time for Gilda to drop the airs and come down and make nice with the seven dwarfy sleazes. Director William Wellman (as usual) packs the film with earthy detail and weird characterizations: Charles B. Middleton,  Gustav Von Seffeyrtitz, and Morgan Wallace are three of the leering fellow outlaw guests. Noble Johnson (the zombie in GHOST BREAKERS) is a guard.

With her droopy skin and lumpy posture, Mackail is not your ordinary heroine but she's perfect as a Depression-era fallen woman who's genuinely no good, not just a Loretta Young-style good girl fallen low through circumstance and cheating gigolos. No, she's an authentic lowlife, a cranky snob for whom the woman's picture conceit of romantic self-sacrifice is less a noble deed than a kind of Antigone-style fuck you to the world of sin (unlike so many heroines who fall just to rise, she starts out fallen, and rises and falls again erratically throughout the film). When she finally gives up her sainthood and starts drinking with the riffraff you get a real sense that she's smoked and drank before, and often. You don't ever get that with Loretta Young.

HOLD YOUR MAN

1933 - Dir Sam Wood

***1/2

Jean Harlow gets pregnant via hood Clark Gable, but she's in jail and a martyr so doesn't tell him. Stu Erwin wants to marry her and move her to some bo-hunk town when she gets out of stir but no way. See, there's only one guy for her - and he can't visit her in the clink as he's wanted himself, see, for a crime he did commit! See? George Reed (THE GREEN PASTURES) is the black preacher father of fellow inmate Theresa Harris (Alma in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) who sings "Saint Louis Blues" while the girls relax after a hard day steam-pressing shirts.

HOLD YOUR MAN gets me deep in the gut because everyone is redeemed at the end--even the romantic rivals and prison warden--and not in a humorlessness Loretta Young kind of way, but in a genuine caring, cliche-defying way.  When Gable cries to Reed in the chapel, I feel redeemed --every time - and mister, I'm a hell of a sinner. That HOLD YOUR MAN was written by a girl (Anita Loos) doesn't fully explain the incredible compassion this film offers, but it's a part of it. How often do you come away from a tough pre-code women's prison picture feeling optimistic about humanity? Just this once, baby.