WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM – Nightmare Alley. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1946. Triangle Books, hardcover, Photoplay edition, 1948. Signet #738, paperback, 1949. Popular Library, paperback, 1976. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1986. New York Review of Books, softcover, 2010. Included in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s, Library of America, hardcover, 1997.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Taylor Holmes, Mike Mazurki, Ian Keith. Based on the novel by William Lindsay Graham. Director: Edmund Goulding.

   The very words “nightmare alley” with their fusion of dreams and squalor, phantasm and filth, promise a lot when you put them on a book. Or a movie. Nowadays it’s possible to read a book and watch the film made from it in close proximity, and a while back I had a bit of ghoulish fun with the exercise.

   Nightmare Alley was William Lindsay Gresham’s first novel, and though there’s a bit of fat in the book, it’s still a powerful and often unsettling tale of Stan Carlisle, a smooth carnival huckster who promotes himself to spiritualist and then religious con-man, rising in society only to find that the seeds of his own undoing were always within him and “what we saw and he didn’t” have grown to hideous (nightmarish?) proportions.

   This was the work that brought the term geek to the public, and Gresham’s description of just what a geek was in those days, and how one was made, is still chilling today. It ain’t for every taste, but fans of Jim Thompson and David Goodis will find it a rare and — in its own way — unforgettable treat.

   (PARENTHETICAL NOTE: William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962) was, from all accounts, an alcoholic who abused his wife and children and ended up a suicide. His treatment of his wife and kids was bad enough that his spouse took the children and fled to England — where she met, fell in love with, and married C. S. Lewis. Their story can be seen in the film Shadowlands.)

   The movie Nightmare Alley that came out in 1947 is something of a surprise from a major studio like Fox, a “class” director like Edmund (Grand Hotel) Goulding, and producer George Jessell (!) but it’s slick, savage, seedy and immensely satisfying.

   Tyrone Power — a smooth leading man with an odd flair for self-destructive roles — puts bitter bite into his performance as Carlisle, ably supported by a spirited cast of capable players, including Joan Blondell, Ian Keith, Mike Mazurki, and chilling Helen Walker as a lethal psychologist; the scene where she destroys Power’s psyche is worthy of Lady MacBeth.

   Lee Garmes’ evocative, sleazy-splendid photography helps out too, but best of all is Jules Furthman’s cunning screenplay. Undulating past the censors, he takes the masochism explicit in the book and makes it implicit in the character, and even hints at a darker ending than the one we see on screen.

   Furthman always was a good hand at adapting the works of others (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, etc.) with a slick trick of slicing just enough out of a book to get past the censors, while still preserving the tone of the piece, and his work here is simply splendid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idlYaKQ1yjw

CHARTER PILOT. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Lloyd Nolan, Lynn Bari, Arleen Whelan, George Montgomery, Hobart Cavanaugh, Henry Victor, Etta McDaniel. Director: Eugene Forde.

   In spite of the fact that a couple of my favorite B-movie stars are in this one, I found myself disappointed for most of the movie’s running time.

   The opening scene showed some promise. Lynn Bari is the scriptwriter for a radio show based on the fictional exploits of air ace King Morgan, played by Lloyd Nolan. In reality, and far from fiction, Morgan is indeed a pilot, but for a commercial airline whose more prosaic tasks include bringing a load of soft-shelled crabs up from Galveston to LA.

   OK. So far, so good, but it turns out that there are romantic complications between the two, and for maybe next 50 minutes or so the movie turns into a comedy of most mundane proportions. He proposes, she refuses until he gives up flying, he gives up flying and goes to work behind a desk, which doesn’t work, in great detail which I shan’t bore you with, but if you were expecting a comedy, you might find this portion of the film amusing, if not out and out funny.

   It also turns out, though, eventually, that there is a bad guy in the background, and the next to final scene, with King Morgan and aforesaid bad guy kicking, wrestling and fist-fighting in the cramped space of a cockpit of a small airplane over the jungles of Honduras, with Lynn Bari screaming behind the controls while live on the air – well, at last the film was worth the money I paid to see it. On a homemade DVD, of course, as almost goes without saying.

   Lynn Bari, of course, is as beautiful as ever, and Lloyd Nolan, while far from beautiful, is, as usual, one of the finer actors ever to be a B-movie star. Watching him rehearse his prepared proposal speech, while working out a whole gamut of ways to present his lines, is like attending a master class in acting, and he does it with ease.

NO MAN OF HER OWN. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Paul Ellis. Director: Wesley Ruggles.

   One big reason this pre-Code movie is worthy of note is that this was the first and only onscreen pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, later one of the most famous of married couples in Hollywood. A good second reason, though — if that’s possible — is that No Man of Her Own a pre-Code movie; in fact, it may have been one of the tipping points that caused the Code to go into effect.

   Clark Gable, sans mustache, plays a card shark and con man who fairly obviously makes a good living at it. But when the heat is on, he heads out of Manhattan in a hurry. Picking a destination at random, he ends up in the small upstate town of Glendale, NY. Being the ladies’ man that he is, and is he ever, Babe Stewart’s eyes falls almost immediately upon Connie Randall, Carol Lombard’s character, one of the town’s librarians.

   It is lust at first sight. Connie is about to burst from boredom. Glendale is far too small for her. But she knows better than to be too easy, although Babe is awfully hard to resist.

The scene that takes place in the stacks in the back of the library is one of the more famous ones in early cinematic history.

   But a later scene that takes place in a cabin up at the lake, in which Connie is seen clad only in bra and panties, is also well worth a second look. Add in a couple of shower scenes, albeit separately, and (in another vein) the scene following the one which ends with Babe saying, “See you in church,” and you have the beginning of a humdoozer of a movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J733OtRwgw

   Alas and alack, once the two are married, all there’s left to do is for Babe to reform, if Connie can accomplish it, and the last third of the movie limps to one dull thud of an ending. “Is that all there is?” you may ask yourself. But it’s the getting there that’s the attraction, and it’s why this movie is lot less likely to be forgotten than most of the others made in 1932.

IT HAPPENED IN FLATBUSH. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Lloyd Nolan, Carole Landis, Sara Allgood, William Frawley, Robert Armstrong, Jane Darwell, George Holmes, Scotty Beckett, with Vivian Blaine in her uncredited debut. Director: Ray McCarey.

   From Wikipedia: “Flatbush Avenue is the main thoroughfare through the Borough of Brooklyn.” And if you’re of a certain age, what do you think of first when someone mentions Brooklyn? Baseball, of course, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

   They apparently didn’t get the rights to use the team’s name in this movie, since the team that Lloyd Nolan’s character is the manager of is called only the “Brooklyn team,” or simply “Brooklyn” for short, but the team is the Dodgers, all right, no doubt about it. Nolan plays Frank “Butterfingers” Maguire to perfection. He fits the uniform as if he born to do so.

   But how did he get the nickname Butterfingers? It turns out he was run out of town as a shortstop several years ago, having committed an crucial error in the field that cost the team the pennant. Against all the advice she’s been given, including that of the general manager (played by William Frawley, who looks exactly the same here as he did in the 1950s playing Lucy’s landlord and neighbor, Fred Mertz), the elderly lady owner (Sara Allgood) brings him back to manage the team.

   Upon which point the lady owner ups and dies, leaving the ownership of the team in the hands of relatives, including society dish Kathryn Baker, played of course by pretty dark-haired Carole Landis. None of the new owners know anything about baseball, nor do they care to know, so it’s up to Nolan not only to guide the team, but to persuade Kate to spring real money for some real players.

   Persuasion turns to romance, and new players mean a run for the pennant. Can Nolan escape his history of buckling under pressure to be successful at doing both? Well, if Real Life baseball manager Leo Durocher could marry movie star Laraine Day, also back in the 1940s, anything’s possible in Category 1, and as for Category 2, nothing that happens in a sports-oriented comedy could be more surprising than what happens in Real Life.

   A fun if slightly fanciful movie, and of course I could watch the always charming Carole Landis in anything, even as the owner of a baseball team who ends up watching the final game of the season in the dugout.

Note: Two more short clips from this movie can be found here.

BOLERO. Paramount Pictures, 1934. George Raft, Carole Lombard, Sally Rand, Frances Drake, William Frawley, Ray Milland. Screenplay: Horace Jackson, based on a story by Carey Wilson & Kubec Glasmon. Director: Wesley Ruggles (and Mitchell Leisen, uncredited).

   Cornell Woolrich once claimed the plot of this film was stolen from an unpublished manuscript of his. Could be, but I doubt it.

   There are a couple of very Woolrichian concepts here (the hero makes a point of maintaining chaste relations with his dancing partners, and — WARNING!!! — at the Climax, he does his big Production Number and collapses dead on the floor… though this idea, which Woolrich used more than once, owes more to “Le Sacre du Printemps” than anything else) but by and large its pretty much the standard rags-to-riches thing beloved of 30s movie-makers, if not -goers.

   Watching it, you can see why, graceful as he was, George Raft never became a big Dancing Star; Raft’s forte as an actor was always Playing it Cool and Impassive, and though this works quite well in the fatalistic Last Ballet, the strained smile on his face is a definite handicap in the earlier “light-hearted” routines.

MOCKERY. MGM, 1927. Lon Chaney, Ricardo Cortez, Barbara Bedford, Mack Swain, Emily Fitzroy, Charles Puffy, Kai Schmidt, Johnny Mack Brown. Scenario by Benjamin Christensen based on a story by Stig Esbern. Cinematography by Merritt B. Gerstad; edited by John W. English. Director: Benjamin Christensen. Shown at Cinevent 35, Columbus OH, May 2003.

   After a notable career as a director and actor in his native Denmark that included the controversial Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, Christiansen was brought to America in 1926 by MGM, where after completing two films, The Devil’s Circus and Mockery, and working on The Mysterious Island (begun by Maurice Tourneur and completed by Lucian Hubbard), he moved to First National.

   There he completed (among other films) a version of A. Merritt’s Seven Footprints to Satan that’s not a lost film but one that’s in restoration limbo. (It was announced for a showing on Turner several years ago that was cancelled with the explanation, as I recall, that the soundtrack was not up to standard. An odd explanation for a silent film’s cancellation. A good friend, Charlie Shibuk, who saw the film some 25 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art with Czech intertitles, points out that the original titles were written by Cornell Woolrich as William Irish.)

   Chaney plays Sergei, a brutish peasant who rescues the Countess Tatiana (Barbara Bedford) from revolutionaries, helping her to escape to Novokutsk to deliver a message to the Czarist forces. Sergei falls in love with Tatiana and she, in turn, falls in love with a Czarist officer (Ricardo Cortez) who arrives in time to save her from the Bolsheviks.

   Chaney learns to hate the aristocrats but can’t overcome his love for Tatiana and sacrifices his life for her. Chaney, almost unrecognizable in his effective makeup, gives a nuanced performance, one of his strongest in a non-genre film that I’ve seen.

   I didn’t detect any of the stylistic flourishes for which Christiansen’s horror films are known, but his sensitive handling of the fine cast is, perhaps, a testament to his own acting skill.

   I wondered if the editor is the same John English who co-directed, with William Witney, some of Republic Studio’s finest serials in the late 1930s. IMDB says yes.

SPOILERS OF THE NORTH. Universal Pictures, 1947. Paul Kelly, Adrian Booth (Lorna Gray), Evelyn Ankers, James A. Millican, Roy Barcroft, Louis Jean Heydt. Screenplay: Milton Raison. Director: Richard Sale.

   There are two good reasons for watching this movie, and neither are the two male stars. Adrian Booth is one of them. Earlier on in her career she was the actress Lorna Gray who played Vultura in the Republic serial Perils of Nyoka. The other is the slim, blonde and beautiful Evelyn Ankers, who might be recognized most by many as appearing in a couple of the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies.

   There were other substantial highlights in each of their respective careers, and respectable ones at that, but I don’t believe that either actress would have placed this film very high in their résumés. Padded with scenes of the Alaskan salmon industry, including the complete cycle of spawning, catching and the packing of the fish into small cans, without the presence of the two lovely ladies, there would be little left but the barest scraps of meat on a lot of bleached-out bones.

   Paul Kelly is the nominal star of the movie, playing the kind of guy who has a girl in every port, and does. Evelyn Ankers is the one in Seattle, who comes up to help Kelly when he falls behind on the quota he’s promised his buyer. Faking an injury, Kelly needs her on hand to help persuade his brother (hunky James Millican) to not let him down and abandon ship (literally and figuratively) when the spawning season is over.

   And Adrian Booth is the half-breed girl up in Alaska whom Kelly has persuaded to help keep the local Native Americans working for him – by special dispensation, they are allowed to fish salmon all year round. It’s a crooked scheme, but Kelly is up to it. Even so, not only does he have to keep the U.S. Fisheries patrol from catching on, there are the two women who can’t be allowed to discover that he’s promised to marry each of them.

   And then, of course, there’s the brother, the honest one, who can’t but admire his brother’s taste in women. If you couldn’t make a small story out of these several small threads of plot, perhaps you’re not quite trying. There is one scene, though, I have to admit, that took me by surprise, and if you were ever to watch this film, it might you also.

PostScript.   Yes, in case you were wondering, director Richard Sale is the same Richard Sale that started out writing tons of stories for the pulp magazines, long before he found his small niche in Hollywood as a producer, director and screenwriter (most famously for Gentlemen Marry Brunettes). The movie itself is available for watching or downloading at www.archive.org.

       Photos:

Poster, upper right. Paul Kelly and Adrian Booth.

DVD, on left: Paul Kelly and Evelyn Ankers.

Black and white scene, lower right: James Millican and Evelyn Ankers.

Lobby card, above: Paul Kelly and Adrian Booth.

THE PIED PIPER. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Monty Woolley, Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, J. Carrol Naish, Peggy Ann Garner, Marcel Dalio, Marcelle Corday, Odette Myrtil, Helmut Dantine. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson from a novel by Nevil Shute. Director: Irving Pichel. Shown at Cinevent 35, Columbus OH, May 2003.

   There was a time when I objected to the addition of films from the 1940s to the programs at Cinevent, but the quality of productions like this one I has pretty much taken care of my objections.

   Woolley is an Englishman vacationing in France in the spring of 1940 as the Germans have swept across France and are beginning to think of conquering England. As Woolley attempts to return to England in advance of the German army, he acquires — against his curmudgeonly objections — a group of English and French children he attempts to shepherd to safety.

   Their escape — with the help of sympathetic French patriots — seems assured until they fall into the hands of a German company headed by Major Diessen, played by Otto Preminger.

   Garner and MacDowall are both superb and there’s not a typical Hollywood child actor in the small group recruited for the film. I’ve listed some of the French actors in the film. Although their roles are small, they are distinguished film performers. (Dalio starred in Jean Renoir’s masterly The Rules of the Game.) I found this to be a moving film, and with not a false step by the numerous fine actors.

YouTube Notes: The confrontation scene between Preminger and Woolley can be seen here. A longer ten-minute clip can be found here. This one’s from earlier in the movie, as Monte Woolley begins to discover what fate has in store for him.

   The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: for Best Picture, losing to Mrs. Miniver; Best Actor, with Wooley losing to James Cagney for Yankee Doodle Dandy; and Best Cinematography.

   I recently watched a series of films in a free association mode, beginning with Iphigenia (1977). The movie was adapted from Euripides by the writer/director whose name is usually anglicized as Michael Cacoyannis, and if you’re not familiar with the play, it deals with the agonies of Agamemnon, whose Troy-bound armies get bottled up in Greece when the winds refuse to blow.

   As the troops grow restive and mutinous, an oracle tells Agamemnon he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia if he wants to appease the gods and get moving. How Agamemnon deals with the conflict, and at what personal expense, forms a telling drama.

   Most of the actors’ names would mean little to you, but there’s a vulnerable and heart-breaking heroine, a convincingly conflicted Agamemnon, and Irene Papas as Clytemnestra (Agamemnon’s wife and Iphigenia’s mother) brings new dimensions to outrage and bitterness.

   So after this I had to watch Helen of Troy (1956), producer/director Robert Wise’s super-spectacle on the Trojan War, and a hard film to beat if you like simple-minded action, lavish production, and lots of skin.

   Faced with a script that allowed little or no character development; Wise compensate by creative casting: Robert Douglas, the villain of a dozen swashbucklers, plays a crafty Agamemnon, and as soon as he comes on screen, you know all you need to know about the character.

   Likewise Stanley Baker’s tough-guy Achilles, Harry Andrews’ lantern-jawed Hector, Sir Cedric Hardwicke as stately Priam and Torin Thatcher as a scheming Ulysses. One actor puzzled me though: Ronald Lewis playing Aeneas seemed terribly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen him. A bit of research revealed why he seemed so familiar; yet unrecognized – he was Mr. Sardonicus.

   And after that, of course, I had to finish Agamemnon’s saga with Electra (1962), Cacoyannis again adapting Euripides, this time the story of Agamemnon’s return home, his murder by Clytemnestra, and the vengeance of his daughter Electra — played with steely resolve by Irene Papas, who played Clytemnestra fifteen years later in Iphigenia.

   Where Helen was sheer spectacle, painted with a wide-and-brightly-colored palette, Electra and Iphigenia are pure Drama, done mostly outdoors without sets, and they achieve a simple intensity that struck me as remarkable.

   If (like me) you languished in the doldrums of Greek Drama in school, you might do well to take a look at these. They are, in every sense, an awakening.

   So after that, of course, I had to watch Mourning Becomes Electra, Dudley Nichols 1947 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s take on the play. In his time, Nichols authored some memorable screenplays (including Stagecoach) but what he was doing here quite escapes me. Admittedly O’Neill can be heavy going, but I can’t think why Nichols apparently told his cast to emote like a troupe of performing seals.

   No one who has seen Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday would even recognize her lip-writhing, eye-rolling histrionics here. Or if they did, perhaps they’d just politely look away.

IPHIGENIA. Greek Film Center, 1977. Original title: Ifigeneia. Irene Papas (as Eirini Papa), Kostas Kazakos, Kostas Karras, Tatiana Papamoschou, Christos Tsagas, Panos Mihalopoulos. Director: Michael Cacoyannis (as Mihalis Kakogiannis).

HELEN OF TROY. Warner Brothers, 1956. Rossana Podestà, Jacques Sernas, Cedric Hardwicke, Stanley Baker, Niall MacGinnis, Nora Swinburne, Robert Douglas, Torin Thatcher, Harry Andrews. Director: Robert Wise.

ELECTRA. Finos Film, 1962. Original title: Ilektra. Irene Papas, Giannis Fertis, Aleka Katselli, Manos Katrakis, Notis Peryalis, Theodoros Dimitriou. Director: Michael Cacoyannis (as Mihalis Kakogiannis).

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Raymond Massey, Katina Paxinou, Leo Genn, Kirk Douglas, Nancy Coleman, Henry Hull, Sara Allgood, Thurston Hall. Based on the play by Eugene O’Neill. Screenwriter/director: Dudley Nichols.

THE BIG KNIFE. United Artists, 1955. Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Ilka Chase, Everett Sloane, Miss Shelley Winters. Based on a play by Clifford Odets. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   [This review follows that of director Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset, which you may find here.]   Too bad Aldrich couldn’t have worked similar magic with The Big Knife because he had all the elements: a corrosive play by Clifford Odets, edgy camerawork, and an off-beat cast: Rod Steiger; Ida Lupino, Wendell Core, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane and Jean Hagen, all headed up by Jack Palance as Charley Castle, a talented actor (something of a stretch) who wants out of his contract and on to better roles.

   To be fair, The Big Knife has some nice stuff in it. There’s a neat dichotomy in Castle’s character: pampered and polished on the outside but inwardly rotting away.

   Rod Steiger is engagingly hammy, played off against the effortless ease of Sloane and Corey, but someone let the women go w-a-y over the top, and three really talented actresses come off as little more than caricatures.

   And then there’s the pace — or rather there isn’t. Knife is the kind of classic tragedy that needs fatalistic momentum; we should see Charley Castle’s destiny come careening at him in the course of a single day, like Oedipus.

   Instead, director Aldrich and adapter James Poe open Odets’ play out and let it meander around, a fatal mistake with material like this. It weakens the concentration a drama needs with characters like these, and we come away wondering who to really care about.

   Oddly, the one memorable characterization in the whole thing is Wendell Corey — never the most electrifying of actors — as lethal press agent “Smiley” Coy. When Smiley pours himself a drink and talks casually of killing off Shelley Winters you get a real chill. Which may be part of the problem: any movie where Wendell Corey is scarier than Jack Palance has its priorities twisted.