CHINATOWN NIGHTS. Paramount, 1929; William Wellman, director; Wallace Beery, Florence Vidor, Warner Oland, Jack Oakie, Jack McHugh, Testsu, Komai, Peter Morrison. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   I may have a very soft spot for the resourceful Mary Miles Minters and Mary Pickfords of the film world, but let it not be thought that I subsist only on sweets. I’m also partial to Warner Oland, both for his masterful incarnation of Charlie Chan and for his earlier screen career as an Oriental villain, a role he once again assumes in this flavorful treat.

   Chinatown is ruled by two gang lords, Chuck Riley, the Caucasian tong leader played by Wallace Beery, and Boston Charley, the Chinese tong leader, played by Warner Oland. (It’s of interest that this screening was preceded by the showing of a trailer for one of the early, lost Chan films starring Oland.)

   Florence Vidor is the society woman who tours Chinatown and stays, infatuated with Riley, whose familiarity with Shakespeare and some signs of tenderness captivate her. The most striking scene takes place at the performance of a Chinese opera, attended by both Riley and Charley, that explodes in a shoot-out that shatters the always fragile quiet of Chinatown.

   The soundtrack is somewhat rough, but Beery is a commanding presence, with the dark, dangerous streets, punctuated by gunfire, creating an ominous background to the troubled (and troubling) relationship of Beery and Vidor.

   Oland’s role is, unfortunately, not large, but he doesn’t get lost in the crowd.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT]   Walter doesn’t mention it, but this movie is regarded as Florence Vidor’s first and last sound film. Her voice was dubbed by another actress, the story goes, and after a long career in the silent era (and once married to director King Vidor), she decided to quit the movie-making business, having married again, this time to violinist Jascha Heifetz in 1928.

   I’ve tried, but so far I’ve come up empty in finding a photo of Warner Oland in this movie. Sorry, Walter!    — Steve

BEFORE DAWN. RKO Radio, 1933. Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Wilson, Warner Oland, Dudley Digges, Gertrude Hoffman, Jane Darwell. Based on a story by Edgar Wallace; director: Irving Pichel.

   As far as I’ve been able to determine, Edgar Wallace wrote this story in Hollywood especially for this film, and it was never published separately. I’m far from being an expert on Wallace, so I can easily stand to be corrected.

   Assuming that you don’t expect to see a detective story when you watch this movie, I think you’ll enjoy it immensely. (I did.) Warner Oland is the villain in this one, playing an Austrian psychoanalyst who listens intently to a dying man’s last words as he confesses to a crime that he committed 15 years earlier.

   Not only that, he reveals where a million dollars in stolen gold is hidden, somewhere in back in the US, which turns out to be in one of those spooky old dark houses that were so popular in criminous 1930s cinema.

   Slow-speaking and soft-spoken Stu Erwin plays an undercover cop who nabs Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson) and her father (Dudley Digges) as a pair of phony mediums – only to discover there’s nothing phony about her at all. And off they go to the house where the suspicious death of the owner, Mrs. Marble (Jane Darwell) has occurred – the very same house where Dr. Cornelius is snooping around.

   If mediums able to speak to the dead actually exist, I’d like to think that they would be intelligent, beautiful and petite young brunettes like Dorothy Wilson, whose career in Hollywood (1932-1937) was not nearly long enough.

   She married scriptwriter Lewis R. Foster (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) in 1936, and that was it as far as her career was concerned; she raised a family and stayed married until his death in 1974. She herself died in 1998.

   There is plenty to see in this sixty minute movie: secret doors and rooms, deadly cisterns in the basement, candles blowing out, no telephones, cops that go tearing off in the wrong direction at precisely the wrong moment, and the evil deeds of Dr. Cornelius.

   You can’t go wrong!

TO DIE FOR. Columbia, 1995. Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas, Alison Folland, Dan Hedaya, Wayne Knight. Based on the novel by Joyce Maynard; screenwriter: Buck Henry. Director: Gus Van Sant.

   There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. In the course of talking about this movie, I’m going to have to reveal more about the story line than I’d really like to.

   I know what I’m talking about. I was watching the movie, which I’d just taped off HBO, when I needed to take a short break, and while I was up and about, I decided to check out who an actor was on IMDB. The first thing I saw was the key plot line that was coming up next but which I hadn’t yet gotten to.

   So just in case you haven’t seen the movie yet: POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT.

   The movie does begin, in grand pseudo-documentary fashion, with the death of Suzanne Stone’s husband. Apparently she’s been accused of being involved in his death, but how and why, we (the viewer) do not know.

   Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne Stone in one of most convincing performances I’ve ever seen. Ms. Stone (she does not use her married name, Maretto, for professional reasons), has talked her way into becoming the weather person for the local cable outlet, a small two-man operation that Stone is convinced is going to help her find her way to the top.

   Of the TV profession, that is. She is obsessed with television and the fame that comes to those who are on the screen; she will do anything, and work for the longest hours, to become a success.

   What she does not realize is how lacking she is, both in awareness of the world and opportunity. I’m not convinced that she has the ability, either, but that has never stopped others, and it probably wouldn’t stop her either, given the chance. Of course (as it happens) her husband of one year (Matt Dillon) does not share her dreams; he is content to help run his father’s low scale restaurant for the rest of his life.

   Deciding to do a documentary on local high school students, Suzanne Stone finds three slackers and unfortunates who are willing to help: Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, and Alison Folland, who find their own lives briefly brightened by her interest in them.

   They also become part of the plan Suzanne Stone is hatching. Her husband is becoming part of the ball and chain that is holding her back.

   I suppose that most mystery fans will put the pieces together well enough from here. Some of Suzanne Stone’s most convincing arguments take place in bed (a dim-witted but very virile Joaquin Phoenix) or making promises of taking Alison Folland, overweight and with no friends, along with her to Hollywood.

   As characters, two more pathetic creatures can hardly be imagined; as actor and actress respectively, both Phoenix and Folland are to be congratulated as highly as they can be.

   All of the performances are ‘A Prime,’ in fact, including especially Illeana Douglas, who as the dead man’s sister, can see right through her new sister-in-law’s facade in an instant. The latter’s a four-letter word that starts with C, she says. Cold.

   But Nicole Kidman’s performance is more than that. I may be the only person in the world who thinks so, but she makes Suzanne Stone also so vulnerable that I could only find pity for her, in spite of the deeds she does, especially in the end, when her fate finally catches up with her.

   It is very difficult to tell someone that their dreams are very likely not going to be realized, and that is the saddest part of this movie, I found, by far.

AFTER THE DANCE. Columbia, 1935. Nancy Carroll, George Murphy, Thelma Todd. Director: Leo Bulgakov.

   As you will have noted, Thelma Todd is in both this movie and the one I previously reviewed on this blog, Lightning Strikes Twice. This may not strike you as remarkable as it does me, so allow me to explain further. I recorded both movies back-to-back on the same home-made VHS tape back in 1991, but Lightning was shown on American Movie Classics, and a day or so later, After the Dance was on The Movie Channel.

   You might guess that there was some sort of anniversary of Thelma Todd’s suspicious death around that particular time, but she died in December 1935, and the movies were shown in August. I’m going to assume that it was just chance, until or unless you can persuade me otherwise.

   As for After the Dance, to get right to it, it’s – well – not very good. One reviewer on Amazon has called it a “proto-noir,” but while I concede the point, it isn’t one that would have occurred to me.

   It is a crime movie in part — in fact, for the most part — with only a semi-happy ending – which was, I admit, very uncommon in 1935 – but the story is sappy, and George Murphy’s character Jerry Davis, aka Jerry Blair, a nightclub entertainer who’s railroaded off to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit, simply accepts the bad fate that’s thrust upon him with far too little emotion for the person watching to care very much either.

   Thelma Todd, as Mabel Kane, might have saved him, since she was in the room when the death occurred (which was before the movie started), but she clams up – she’s the villainess in this one – and off to the lime pits he goes. Only to escape, accidentally – Jerry Davis doesn’t seem to do anything on his own initiative – and to be found by Anne Taylor (Nancy Carroll), a vivacious nightclub singer and dancer (and a sheer joy to watch) who puts Davis, now Blair, into her act.

   Where he becomes the star attraction, and whereby the movie changes coats like a chameleon and becomes a song-and-dance musical, and not a crime film at all. But of course fate (Thelma Todd) intervenes once again.

   I liked the part of the film that was a song-and-dance musical. Some of the other Amazon reviewers suggest that parts of the rest of the film are missing, especially a big chunk at the end. It could be; it’s a better theory than mine that the criminous portions of the proceedings were made up as they went along.

   Nancy Carroll was an awfully cute actress, though.

IT CAN’T LAST FOREVER.

Columbia, 1937; Hamilton McFadden, director; Ralph Bellamy, Betty Furness, Robert Armstrong, Raymond Walburn, Thurston Hall.

Specialty acts include The Dandridge Sisters, with a 13-year-old Dorothy performing as the middle sister, and a brief, unbilled appearance by Donald O’Conner in a tap sequence, his first role in the movies. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This film’s strong suit is the polished performances by the cast. Raymond Walburn takes top honors as a bogus mind reader who’s promoted by struggling theatrical agents Bellamy and Armstrong who conceive the ill-fated idea of staging a robbery to showcase their client’s talent.

   Unfortunately, Walburn’s role is too quickly reduced and Bellamy replaces him as the mind reader on a spectacularly successful radio show. The film moves quickly at 67 minutes and is one of those pleasant musical oddities that Cinecon and Cinevent are particularly adept at recovering.

    [EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The crime content of this film, I suspect, is minimal, but from Walter’s description, I’m going to say that it’s there. If I’m wrong, the error is mine, not Walter’s!       — Steve

HIDEAWAY. RKO-Radio, 1937; Richard Rosson, director; Fred Stone, Emma Dunn, Marjorie Lord, J. Carroll Naish, William Corson, Tommy Bond. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   A rural comedy-drama, with Fred Stone, a major stage performer who created the role of the Scarecrow in the original production of The Wizard of Oz (1903), heading the cast.

   Fred is a lazy farmer who takes in as boarders a crew of urban gangsters, led by J. Caroll Naish, in search of a cache of money from a bank robbery, believed to be hidden somewhere on the property formerly occupied by a confederate of the Naish gang. The film is populated by country boobs, with Stone’s family (Dunn, Lord, and Tommy Bond of “Our Gang” fame, who died recently), a relative island of sanity in the surrounding inanity.

   The film was chosen to introduce guest Marjorie Lord, who had a minor film career and is best known for her TV role as Danny Thomas’ wife in Make Room for Daddy.

   J. Carroll Naish walked off with the film, which depressed me for its misuse of Stone and its cheapening of the once-popular rural melodrama. A more charitable view is that it’s a routine, bottom-of-the-bill quickie, with some good performers doing their best to make a weak script palatable.

   In my review of Sarah Stewart Taylor’s book Judgment of the Grave, in the post just preceding this one, I referred to it as noirish, but truth be told, the word surprised me when I wrote it. It came out naturally, but believe it or not, calling the book “noir” hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment.

   It’s really a detective story with darker than usual overtones, and it’s very possible that Ms. Taylor had nothing more than that on her mind when she wrote it. So I’ve been puzzling it over. Why did my subconscious take over like that?

   Is the book noir? Probably not, but I said in my original comments, with a slight but deliberate change of focus and intent, it could have been. (The marketing efforts were probably along the lines of it being an academic cosy.)

   But continuing in the direction I was thinking, since I mentioned a black-and-white film version, I’ve come up with a possible cast, if the movie were to have been made back in the 1950s:

      Sweeney St. George – Ruth Roman

      Tim Quinn – Dane Clark

      Ian (Sweeney’s friend in England) – Zachary Scott

      Beverly Churchill (the missing man’s wife) – Beverly Garland

      Cecily Whiting (mother of the boy with leukemia) – Mercedes McCambridge

      Bruce Whiting (divorced from Cecily) – Robert Ryan

      Lauren Whiting (Bruce’s new wife) – Gloria Grahame

      George Whiting (Bruce’s father) – James Whitmore

      Will Baker (local innkeeper) – Raymond Burr

   With a cast like that, there’d be no doubt. Not so?

HERE’S FLASH CASEY. Grand National Pictures, 1938. Eric Linden, Boots Mallory, Cully Richards, Holmes Herbert, Joseph Crehan, Howard Lang. Based on the story “Return Engagement,” by George Harmon Coxe (Black Mask, March 1934). Director: Lynn Shores.

   A copy of Black Mask from 1934 with “Return Engagement” in it is going to be hard to find, if you don’t already own one, but you can also find it in a much more recent book about the leading character: Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer: From the Pulps to Radio and Beyond, by J. Randolph Cox and David S. Siegel.

   I wish I had my copy at hand, because any resemblance of the Flash Casey in this movie and the Casey I remember reading other stories about is — to put it bluntly — none at all. Someone else is going to have to read it, the original story, that is, and be willing to tell us about it.

   I’ve also been hard-pressed to come up with posters or stills from the film. I have one of Eric Linden, who plays Casey, and some kind of trading card of Boots Mallory, who plays Casey’s girl friend of sorts, Kay Lanning, the society page editor of the newspaper where Casey, fresh out of college, lands his first paying job. (And at $18 a week, it is not much of a job. It is a wonder what Kay sees in him.)

   What you can do, however, is watch the entire movie online. Go to www.archive.org, click on the right spot, and there it is. Marvelous!

   In a matter of speaking, of course. I’m talking about Internet technology, not the quality of the film. Eric Linden, whose career lasted about ten years through the 1930s, plays Casey as a naive college kid for all it’s worth, which is maybe the dime it would cost you to see it back in 1938. And if I haven’t happened to have mentioned it before, this is a comedy film all the way, so it’s not Linden who’s responsible for his actions.

   What might possibly qualify this as a crime film? Almost nothing, as long as you’ve asked, but Casey does take some candid photos at a society affair that an unscrupulous gang of blackmailers alters and tries to make a bundle on. Bungling that, they kidnap Kay, and Flash comes to the rescue by commandeering an ambulance…

   Besides being an actress for a short while, Patricia “Boots” Mallory was also a good-looking dancer and an actress. Her film career ended in 1938, but she had married film producer William Cagney, brother of actor James Cagney, back in 1932, well before then. She later married actor Herbert Marshall, to whom she was still wed when she died in 1958.

   So, as you can see, here’s my review. Two paragraphs about the movie itself, surrounded by a lot of fluff. Go watch the movie itself and see if it deserves more.

JAMES M. CAIN – Double Indemnity.

Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #16; paperback original, 1943. First published in Liberty magazine in 1936 as the eight-part serial “Three of a Kind.” First hardcover edition: included in Three of a Kind (Knopf, 1944) with “Career in C Major” and “The Embezzler.” Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and paperback, including Avon #60, 1945 (shown).

Film: 1944, with Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray; adapted for the screen by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder.

   James M. Cain wrote of “the wish that comes true … I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this rather than violence, sex or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation that gives them the drive so often noted.”

   Double Indemnity employs this same technique, already displayed in The Postman Always Rings Twice, with dazzling ease. Cain, making a quick buck writing a magazine serial in 1936, did not realize it at the time, but he was at the top of his form. Employing skillful, scalpel-like first-person narration, Cain tells his tale of love and murder from the point of view of a lover and murderer.

   Insurance man Walter Huff becomes embroiled in a plot to kill a beautiful woman’s husband. In addition to the sexual and financial incentives, Phyllis Nirdlinger manages to play upon Huff’s boredom and his pride – he knows the insurance game inside and out, and figures with his expertise he can beat it.

   The husband is murdered, according to Huff’s plan, without a hitch. But Huff is dogged by Keyes, a claims agent who also knows the insurance game inside and out. Huff begins to realize Phyllis is untrustworthy and just possibly insane, and falls in love with Lola, the daughter of the murdered man by a previous wife, who had very probably been yet another murder victim of Phyllis’s.

   Double Indemnity is a murder mystery turned inside out: We are forced inside the murderer’s skin, only to find it uncomfortably easy to identify with him, and then share his paranoia as the world crumbles piece by piece around him.

   Huff is a white-collar worker and he’s smart – smart enough to sense early on just how major a mistake he’s made. His sense of his own frailty and wrongdoing makes him a truly tragic protagonist, as does his sense of loss: “I knew I couldn’t have her and never could have her. I couldn’t kiss the girl whose father I killed.”

   Cain liked to explore the workings of businesses, and he never did it better than in Double Indemnity, through the characters of Huff and Keyes. But he also gave the pair an understated shared understanding of humanity (an aspect broadened in the widely respected Billy Wilder-directed, Raymond Chandler-scripted film version of 1944).

   In their final confrontation, Keyes says to Huff (renamed Neff in the film), “This is an awful thing you’ve done, Neff,” and Huff/Neff only says, “I know it.” And when Keyes says, “I kind of liked you, Neff,” Huff/Neff says, “I know. Same here.”

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

THE LONG WAIT. United Artists, 1954. Anthony Quinn, Peggie Castle, Gene Evans, Mary Ellen Kay, Shawn Smith, Dolores Donlon, Charles Coburn. Based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Director: Victor Saville.

   In a comment that he left following my review of the movie The Guilty, based on the novelette “He Looked Like Murder,” Walker Martin commended me on comparing and contrasting the film version with Cornell Woolrich’s original story.

   I wish I could always do it, but usually it doesn’t work out that way. If I’ve just seen the movie, the book is nowhere to be found. If I’ve just read the book, finding a copy of the film is another question altogether.

   Case in point, and another small confession. If I’ve ever read The Long Wait as a novel, it was so long ago (50 years maybe) that if I did, I’ve forgotten it. And if I did read it, the other voice in my head says, how could I have possibly forgotten it?

   This last statement was prompted by the post that appeared just before this one. If I ever read a book anything like the one Bill Crider talks about, I think it would have stuck in my memory forever.

   Not being able to find my own copy of The Long Wait, I thought that Bill’s review would serve the purpose almost as well. Probably better, but I won’t tell him that.

   But before I being telling you about the movie, you might want to take a look at a short clip of the movie I found on YouTube. It’s the opening few minutes, in which you see Anthony Quinn being picked up as a hitchhiker, the fiery accident that follows, and a brief glimpse of the next scene, with Quinn in a hospital with his hands completely bandaged.

   He also has amnesia and no idea of who he is, where he was going, and more importantly, where he was coming from. A prankster, though, with hardly the best intentions in mind, sends him back to Lyncastle, where he’s known as Johnny McBride – and where also a wanted poster proclaims him wanted for murder.

   If you read Bill’s review again, you’ll get the idea that the book runs generally along the same lines. I don’t see Anthony Quinn as a “Johnny McBride,” however. His face and that name simply don’t match. I don’t say that he’s miscast, exactly, but I also don’t see him as the girl magnet he becomes as soon as he returns back to Lyncastle. (The police, by the way, have a problem matching him up with their fingerprint evidence. Due to the accident he was in, he no longer has fingerprints.)

   In any case, from here on in, I’ll be reviewing the movie, not the book. There is more actual violence in this film than in most noirs – with one early scene standing out in particular, when McBride is trussed up and about to be thrown into a 200-foot-deep quarry, and ends up alive – and the three hoodlums all dead.

   And another one later which has to be seen to be believed – and I’ll get back to that later. There is also an elaborate detective story going on as well, or actually a pair of them. First of all, the question is, who’s the real killer? But the second, and the more interesting, is who of the four woman who McBride becomes involved with is his old girl friend, Vera West?

   McBride’s memory is gone, of course, and since Vera’s had plastic surgery done before she came back, no one else knows who she is either. Well, one man knows, but he’s killed, shot to death early on. Working against McBride all the way is Servo (Gene Evans), the gangster who practically owns the town. (Evans was last seen by me as the leader of the pack of thieves doggedly hounding the trail of Clint Walker and Roger Moore in Gold of the Seven Saints, reviewed here back in July.)

   You do have allow some license to the screenwriter in working all of this into a sensible plot, let alone go down smoothly. (My copy of the film is unfortunately one that originally had color commercials for a California used car dealer in it, and whoever cut them out did not do a very good job of it. Some transitions are jarring, and I am slightly suspicious of them, thinking that maybe some small bits and pieces have been removed.)

   There is one long scene in this movie that makes definitely worth watching, even if all you can find is a crummy copy. That’s the one that comes toward the end, with Quinn as McBride tied in a chair in the middle of an empty warehouse, and Peggy Castle as Venus (one of the possible Vera’s) with her feet bound and her hands tied in front of her as she works herself slowly across the floor to him on her elbows, with Servo laughing and deriding her efforts the entire way.

   Beautifully photographed in glorious black-and-white, with lots of deep shadows and contrasting areas of light, this is a scene that will stick in your mind for a long time. The movie’s hard to find copies of, but it does exist. It has some flaws, but I hope I’ve made you want to see it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

PostScript: I sent an advance copy of this review to the previously mentioned Mr. Crider, hoping to come full circle, if possible, and let him compare the film (unseen by him) with the book. His reply, short but succinct:  “The quarry scene’s in the novel, and the scene you mention at the end is (probably) much more violent in the novel, a real torture scene.”

   I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to have to find a copy of the book, and soon.