KONGO. MGM, 1932. Walter Huston, Lupe Velez, Conrad Nagel, Virginia Bruce, C. Henry Gordon. Director: William J. Cowen.

WHITE WOMAN. Paramount, 1933. Carole Lombard, Charles Laughton, Charles Bickford, Kent Taylor, Percy Kilbride. Director: Stuart Walker.

   Caught a couple of of lush tropical melodrama-cum-horror flcks a few weeks back; both are based on stage plays and both quite fun.

   Kongo is a sweaty, steamy, depraved-looking thing, with Walter Huston… well, I almost said he was in excellent form, but here he plays a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair and determined to wreak baroque vengeance on the man who put him there (a role he played on Broadway before Lon Chaney took it up in the film west of Zanzibar).

   To this end, he has set up a trading post in the African jungle, where he cows the natives with stage magic, helped along by Lupe Velez, who radiates her own steam, thank you very much.

   Houston wriggles about the place like a grimy spider, moving his victims about like game-pieces, marking the days till he springs his trap on a calendar scrawled iver with the words “HE SNEERED!”

   This could be corny stuff, all right, but everyone plays it to the edge without tripping over. Director William Cowen (who he?) keeps things moving right along and handles the crucial scene — a satisfying and improbable twist that reverses everything we thought was happening — without blinking at the old-fashioned melodrama, and Harold Rosson photographs with what looks like s sheen of sweat over it all.

   Even normally uninspired actors like Conrad Nagel and Virginia Bruce put it across quite well. In all, a movie to set aside your critical faculties and simply enjoy.

   White Woman tiptoes through similar tropical tulips, and does it quite neatly, thanks mostly to a script by Frank Butler that keeps things edgy and unpredictable, pacey direction from Bluert (Werewolf of London) Walker, and the usual Paramount patina of soft-focus splendor.

   There’s moody acting from Carole Lombard as the eponymous “entertainer” who winds up in a remote rubber plantation, Charles Bickford, Kent Taylor, and Charles Middleton, as lost souls slaving away in the heat, but the film belongs to Charles Laughton, who plays the jungle tyrant, and plays it for laughs — which makes a nasty part somehow more disturbing.

   Made up with frizzy hair and a silly moustache, Laughton gads about in a stripes, plaids and polka-dots, inflicting one deliberately sick joke after another on his unwilling workers, oblivious to the mounting tension until he sets off a tribal uprising (in hilarious fashion) and tries to deal with the bloody outcome.

   Where Kongo seems deliberately theatrical, Woman keeps undercutting the melodrama with surprising bits of business from characters who stubbornly refuse to play by the rules of the genre: Laughton in particular is constantly faced with dramatic outbursts, only to respond as if he wasn’t even in the same movie, kidding around with an unnerving humor about as funny as Richard Widmsrk’s laugh.

   The result is that rarity, an old-fashioned tale that keeps one wondering what’s coming next.

7th HEAVEN. Fox, 1927. Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Ben Bard, David Butler, Marie Mosquini, Albert Gran, Gladys Brockwell, Emile Chautard, George Stone. Scenario by Benjamin Glazer, based on the novel by Austin Strong. Cinematography by Ernest Palmer. Director: Frank Borzage. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   After thirty years of film festivals, there are undoubtedly notable films that have eluded me, but I have finally seen the film that established Gaynor and Farrell as major stars and led to a partnership that lasted for twelve films.

   Still, this is not a partnership that has endured in the experience of current film fans as have the Eddy/McDonald films of the mid-1930s, although for a roomful of viewers at Cinevent I venture to say that the magic of the two distant stars flamed again in their glory, albeit briefly.

   The film follows the fortunes of Diane, a waif rescued from the streets by Chico, a sewer worker who’s just been promoted to his long dreamed-of job as a street cleaner. But, of course, he’s no ordinary blue-collar worker but a dreamer and a poet whose act of rescuing the disreputable waif leads to an undying love that flourishes in a garret apartment where they transform the humble room through the miracle of love into a privileged place where their lives flourish and expand.

   Then, the reality of war intrudes, separating them for years during which their devotion unites them daily in a ritual of remembrance. Finally, a tragic event seems to part them forever, unless a miracle can work its magic.

   Gaynor is the miracle that infuses this film with a life that can touch a contemporary audience. Farrell is an appealing partner, somewhat gauche in his romantic ardor, and certainly lacking the transfiguring grace of Gaynor’s smile (so memorable also in Murnau’s Sunrise) or the gamin-like reticence of her mime.

   The two may have starred in better films, but I suspect that they never appeared together in a more appealing one.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Fox Film Corporation, 1917. William Farnum, Jewel Carmen, Charles Clary, Herschel Mayan, Rosita Marstini, and many others. Scenario by Frank Lloyd. Director: Frank Lloyd. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   This is a lavish, entertaining version of the Dickens novel, adapted and directed by Frank Lloyd (later director of the 1924 version of The Sea Hawk), which undoubtedly takes many liberties with the original to fit into a seventy-minute running time.

   The most startling departure is the murder of Mme De Farge (certainly well-deserved but not canonical) but otherwise the story sticks to the familiar central plot of wrongs righted with new wrongs committed in the name of “justice,” and Sydney Carton delivering, as expected and anticipated, his famous curtain speech in intertitles.

   The key roles of Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are both played by William Farnum, and played superbly, and the supporting cast is uniformly excellent The 1935 version will probably always be considered the definitive screen adaptation for its typically lavish MGM production and casting, but this silent film seems somehow closer in spirit and style to the historical period.

MARIA, A HUNGARIAN LEGEND. Hunnia Filmstúdió (Hungary), 1932. First shown in the US: 1935. Also released as Spring Shower; original title: Tavaszi zápor. Annabella, Ilona Dajbukát, Erzsi Bársony, Steven Geray, Karola Zala, Margit Ladomerszky. Director: Pál Fejös. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   One of the most anticipated films [of this convention] was Paul Fejos’ Maria, a Hungarian Legend (1932), starring Anabella (later to have something of a Hollywood career and marry Tyrone Power) as a servant who is sent packing when she becomes visibly pregnant and begins wanderings that include a brief period of peace at a brothel where she scrubs floors until she gives birth to her daughter.

   The film was presented without subtitles, but this is a sound film where the story is carried by the visuals. Only a brief scrolled prologue (in Italian) and the reading of an official document depriving her of her daughter (in Hungarian) provoked some momentary nervousness in the otherwise linguistically unchallenged audience.

   A lovely film that in other hands could have been a mawkish disaster. The final sequence when Maria reaches down from heaven to prevent her daughter from making the same mistake she had made glows with a serene beauty that is extraordinarily moving.

CAUGHT. MGM, 1949. James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan. Very loosely based on the novel Wild Calendar by Libbie Block. Director: Max Ophüls.

   Speaking of endings, as I was when discussed Kiss Me Deadly a short while ago, something similar happened six years earlier — intentionally, this time — with the ending of the MGM film Caught, where we see one ending, a richly satisfying one in which (WARNING!) Barbara Bel Geddes murders her abusive husband Robert Ryan, but we hear — in a jarring, dubbed-over tone — another one in which the characters talk about how she saved his life at the last minute. (END OF WARNING.)

   Obviously there was some last-minute fudging by the studio heads at MGM, to appease the censors and give audiences a happy ending, even if it meant throwing out the whole point of the story. Yet in spite of what we hear the characters say, the evidence of our eyes remains.

   I guess actions — even images of actions — speak louder than words.

Editorial Comment: Based on Mike Grost’s review of the film, which you can find here, I’ve changed the category in which I placed the movie from “Crime Film” to “Romantic Drama,” in spite of the fact that other experts often consider Caught to be film noir.

FOUR HOURS TO KILL. Paramount, 1935. Richard Barthelmess, Gertrude Michael, Ray Milland, Helen Mack, Dorothy Tree, Henry Travers, Roscoe Karns. Director: Mitchell Leisen. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   A sort of Grand Hotel that’s set in a theater, and with a good cast rather than the constellation of stars in the MGM film. Leisen, one of the interesting stylists of the period, concentrates on keeping the interlocking plot lines moving smoothly, which he does more than capably.

   Barthelmess (one of the most popular of silent film stars, here in the twilight of his career) is attending a play handcuffed to a cop who’s killing time waiting for the next train to take Barthelmess back to the prison he’s escaped from.

   Roscoe Karns, usually the quintessential wisecracking reporter, plays an expectant father who keeps making phone calls to the hospital where his wife is in labor. (It’s not clear why he’s at the theater rather than the hospital, but given his manic behavior, somebody probably didn’t want him around to upset his wife.)

   Ray Milland, in an early role, is a smooth gigolo rendezvousing with his elegant girl friend (Gertrude Michael), stepping out on her rich husband, and willing to save his hide by letting an usher be arrested for a theft for which Michael is unwilling to press charges. The pot is already boiling when Barthelmess escapes but hangs around waiting for the arrival of the man he broke out of prison to kill.

   All this, and no commercial breaks.

MISS FANE’S BABY IS STOLEN. Paramount, 1934. Dorothea Wieck, Alice Brady, Baby Leroy, Burton Churchill, William Frawley, Alan Hale, Spanky McFarland, Dorothy Burgess. Based on the story “Kidnapt” by Rupert Hughes, Cosmopolitan, 10 November 1933. Director: Alexander Hall. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   German actress Wieck plays a film star whose infant son stolen by surly Hale, nervous LaRue and bored Burgess. Brady plays the spunky farm wife who retrieves the child and escapes the band of inept crooks in as improbable a car chase as you will ever see this side of the Keystone Kops. A minor diversion that was the initial screening of the convention.

BRIDE OF VENGEANCE. Paramount, 1949. Paulette Goddard, John Lund, Macdonald Carey, Albert Dekker, John Sutton, Raymond Burr. Director: Mitchell Leisen.

   BRIDE OF VENGEANCE sounds like one of those syrupy, echt-Hollywood projects: an economy-minded trip to Renaissance Italy via the studio backlot, peopled with American actors like Paulette Goddard and Macdonald Carey as the Borgia siblings, wrapped around a simplified “historical” story that serves mainly as an excuse for lavish costumes and sets — done in black-and-white as if to signify that Paramount had little interest in the project to start with — how surprising, then, that this emerges as an intelligent, even beautiful bit of work.

   Some of the credit has to go to writers Michael Hogan (who adapted REBECCA to the screen as faithfully as possible) and Clemence Dane (author of A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT) and to cinematographer Daniel Fapp (he went on to WEST SIDE STORY) who provides baroque deep-focus imagery reminiscent of Olivier’s HAMLET. There are also some evocative (if cheap) sets offered up by Paramount’s art department. But the true beauty of this film seems to come from director Mitchell Leisen.

   Mitchell Leisen was never a major auteur of The Cinemah, but he maintained a highly satisfying output over the years, with favorites like HOLD BACK THE DAWN, GOLDEN EARRINGS and especially the morbidly balletic DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY. All of them are done with an almost painterly eye for composition and mise-en-scene, like a classical landscape from the Pre-Raphaelites.

   For BRIDE he provides an intriguing visual style that seems to define the characters; most of them (including John Lund as an Italian prince!) sport a colorful renaissance look, bright, vivid andperhaps a bit effeminate. In contrast, the Borgias and their entourage all have a vaguely medieval look: throw-backs to a more primitive time, capable of all sorts of nastiness, mostly done for them by Raymond Burr, typecast as usual in those days as a heavy in every sense of the word. The scene where he consoles Lucretia on the death of her latest husband (engineered by himself) without a trace of irony is one of the high points of his career in villainy.

   But getting back to director Leisen, he infuses each scene with a clear-eyed romanticism that simply dazzles the eye and moves the plot (such as it is) along quite nicely. There’s a wonderful bit about Prince Lund dabbling in the arts, trying to cast a statue of Jupiter, followed by a baroque tracking shot down into the stygian bowels of his foundry where we discover what “Jupiter” really is as the music pounds to a crescendo worthy of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

   There are other moments too. Moments that lift the tawdry story and suffuse it with a lovingly artistic moodiness. Enough of them to make BRIDE OF VENGEANCE something memorable. And definitely worth seeing.

FOOL’S PARADISE. Famous Players / Lasky Super Production for Paramount release, 1922. Dorothy Dalton, Conrad Nagel, Mildred Harris, Theodore Kosloff, Clarence Burton, John Davidson, Julia Faye. Photography by Alvin Wyckoff and Karl Strus. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   This was a repeat performance for me but I find it hard to resist early DeMille silents. Arthur Phelps (Conrad Nagel), an unsuccessful poet, is also unsuccessful in his pursuit of noted dancer Rosa Duchene. When he is blinded by a cruel joke engineered by Poli Patchouli (Dorothy Dalton), a dancehall girl who’s in love with him, she assumes the identity of Rosa, marries the besmitten and unsuspecting Arthur, and the two live in deceptive bliss until Poli, repenting of her joke that blinded Arthur, arranges for an operation that may restore his sight.

   Only a DeMille could make this concoction work, but against all odds, and with the help of his appealing cast and some flamboyant camerawork, he does. There’s an episode late in the film that cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed. Arthur, a millionaire after oil!

HI-LIFE. 1998. Campbell Scott, Moira Kelly, Michelle Durning, Eric Stoltz, Peter Rieger, Charles Durning, Katrin Cartlidge, Daryl Hannah. Screenwriter/director: Roger Hedden.

   As we approach the Holidays, I want to recommend a Christmas Movie unlike any other: Hi-Life may not seem overtly Capra-esque, but it offers the kind of sardonic/goofy/cynical romanticism that Frank Capra put out for depression-era audiences of the 1930s — minus the tendency toward Capra-corn that marred his best-known films.

   Campbell Scott stars as a bartender whose sister (a precise, knowing and humorous performance from Moira Kelley) asks him to raise money — quickly — so she can have an abortion. But—

   She’s not really pregnant; her boyfriend (Eric Stoltz) needs the money to pay a gambling debt to his bookie (Charles Durning) But—

   She doesn’t know this because Eric told her he needs the money so his sister (Daryl Hannah) can get an abortion. But—

   It seems Hannah is an ex-girlfriend who dumped Scott several months ago.

   All unaware, Scott wanders Manhattan in one long night a week before Christmas, scouting out old friends who owe him money. He’s followed by Katrin Cartlidge (a fine actress now sadly deceased) as a cute alcoholic who knows his friends will stiff him, but she figures they’ll feel guilty and buy him drinks and if she’s with him she’ll get some.

   Meanwhile, Peter Riegert, one of Durning’s (remember him?) hangers-on, has been ordered to stick with Eric Stoltz till he comes back with the money. But—

   Seeing a chance for easy profit, Riegert has arranged for the teen-age son of his live-in girlfriend to “mug” them once they get the cash.

   Also in the mix are two sub-normal paramedics posing as actors, and the scene where they try to sell the plot of Schindler’s List 2 to Moira Kelley recalls the best of 30s screwball comedy. As does a street fight with an errant boyfriend hiding out disguised as Santa. And the climax, which sees a desperate Eric Stoltz facing his sister and his girlfriend at the same time and trying to convince each that the other one is pregnant. Followed by a sweet ending which sees love and the Christmas Spirit conquer all. With excellent ensemble acting, sharp script and fast direction, Hi-Life may be just the thing to ease those Holiday blues.