THE FIRE BRIGADE. MGM, 1926. May McAvoy, Charles Ray, Holmes Herbert, Tom O”Brien, Eugenie Besserer, Warner P. Richmond, Bert Woodruff. Director: William Nigh. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    I don’t know what the cast of FX’s Rescue Me would think of this fire-fighter drama, but I liked it just fine.

    Terry O’Neill (Charles Ray) is the youngest of three brothers in a family whose profession as firefighters goes back several generations. When one of Tom’s older brothers is killed in a fire that got out of control because of shoddy construction, the stage is set for a drama in which corrupt politicians and builders think nothing of constructing an orphanage that’s a potential firetrap.

    Mix in Terry’s developing relationship with Helen Corwin (Mac McAvoy), daughter of James Corwin, the crooked builder (Holmes Herbert), and you have all the ingredients for an edge-of-your-seat, burning building conclusion.

    And I want to add that the scene in which the young hero races the horse-drawn firewagon to the burning building caught my imagination in a way that the high powered technical marvels available to the contemporary firefighter never quite do.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS. 1954. Originally released as Abismos de pasión. Irasema Dilián, Jorge Mistral, Lilia Prado, Ernesto Alonso, Francisco Reiguera, Hortensia Santoveña, Jaime González Quiñones, Luis Aceves Castañeda. Based on the novel by Emily Brontë. Director: Luis Buñuel.

   I’ve seen three films of Wuthering Heights and they all cut out the last hundred pages of the book

   Q: The last hundred pages? How big a book is it?

   A: Oh, about 250 pages.

   Q: And they cut out the last hundred?

   A: Right.

   Q: Damn!

   A: Damn indeed, as you so aptly put it.

   Luis Buñuel’s 1954 film goes them one better by also cutting out the first thirty pages. Assuming one has maybe a passing acquaintance with the classics, he kicks things off with Heathcliff’s return and his pursuit of the married Cathy — or failing that, her sister-in-law — to work his nasty love/revenge, all this set in contemporary Mexico.

   On the surface that might seem a brutal travesty of Emily Brontë’s novel, but Buñuel gives it a sensitivity and passion wholly suited to the subject. His Heathcliff bristles with Byronic angst, played effectively against a compulsively-impulsive Catherine whose fiery Latin temperament suits the character perfectly, and the Mexican landscape somehow evokes the spirit of the lonely moors… perhaps something to do with the Moorish architecture, but I may have my moors mixed.

   Whatever the case, Buñuel conjures up Brontë’s characters and atmosphere perfectly, and when he tacks on his own original ending, it seems perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the thing … and memorably creepy in its own way.

   Anyway, watching this led me to pick up the book again for the first time since high school (I remember thinking there weren’t enough explosions in it.) and, though Emily hardly needs endorsement from the likes of me, I found it an incredibly good bit of writing.

   The main characters are all surly, short-sighted and self-absorbed, but somehow they gain our sympathy and never lose our interest. And those last hundred pages…

   I can only say that the ending of this book, while hardly cinematic, is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

A GENTLEMAN OF PARIS. Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., 1927. Adolphe Menjou, Shirley O’Hara, Arlette Marchal, Ivy Harris, Nicholas Soussanin. Screenplay by Chandler Sprague from the story “Bellamy the Magnificent” by Roy Horniman; titles by Herman Mankiewicz; photography by Hal Rosson. Director: Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   The cinematography by the noted Hal Rosson was compromised by the dark print that made some of the intertitles difficult to read.

   This was also to be a problem with at least two other films, one of which was so severely damaged that the last reel was almost unwatchable. (More on this later.)

   Adolphe Menjou is the dapper Marquis de Marignan whose complicated love life is managed with great skill by the apparently unflappable Joseph Talineau (Nicholas Soussanin), his butler and general manager of his household.

   The arrival of the Marquis’ fiancee, Yvonne Dufour, taxes even Joseph’s talents, but all seems to be under control until Joseph learns that his wife (their marriage seems to be one largely of convenience from her point of view) is one of his employer’s conquests.

   Stunned by the discovery, Joseph decides to destroy the Marquis by engineering a card game that appears to demonstrate that the Marquis is a cheat, a crime worse, in the eyes of society, than cheating with a friend’s wife. What begins as a frothy comedy of manners turns so dark that the only recourse for a gentleman is to take his own life.

   The sudden reversal that undermines Joseph’s plan and restores comedic balance may satisfy some conventional sense of wanting a restoration of the “natural” order but it throws the film off balance.

   Tragedy threatens and the momentary crossing of the boundary that separates comedy and tragedy in classical French theater may prove disconcerting to more than one spectator, especially since the resolution seems so hollow.

   The director had worked with Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in which Menjou plays a similar role as a gentleman about town, his stock in trade as an actor in the silent era, and this film, even viewed in a dark print, is an effective exercise in style.

   D’Abbadie d’Arast’s Hollywood career was apparently damaged by his reputation for being difficult and going over budget (reminding one of von Stroheim). He ended his career in 1933 with the direction of Topaze, which boasts fine performances by a cast headed by John Barrymore and Myrna Loy, closing his career with a film that played to his strengths as a director.

STRANGE INTERLUDE. MGM, 1932. Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Alexander Kirkland, Ralph Morgan, Robert Young, May Robson, Maureen O’Sullivan. Based on the play by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard (uncredited).

   On stage, Strange Interlude was a long experimental play (four and a half hours with a dinner break) that won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for drama. While the film was cut down to a manageable 110 minutes or so, the experiment of stopping the action and allowing the actors to voice what they were really thinking was carried over to the movie.

   It didn’t work then, and it works even less (to a modern audience) now. Using voiceovers while the action stops and the actors try to match facial expressions to what the audience is hearing takes a LOT of getting used to. In these awkward moments, only Clark Gable seems able to deliver his lines in a natural and unforced manner, and that may be in part because he has fewer of them than any of the others.

   While certainly abbreviated from the stage version, and abundantly censored in the process, there still remains much in this movie that wouldn’t have passed the provisions of the Hollywood Code that came along a couple of years later. In order to maintain her husband’s sanity (Alexander Kirkland), a woman (Norma Shearer) has an affair (and a child) with another man (Clark Gable) while still in love with a man who died in combat. To complete this five-sided romantic quadrilateral, a fusty old friend of her father’s (Ralph Morgan) is also in love with her but due to his strong ties to his mother, he is unable to tell her.

   Her husband assumes the child (later to become Robert Young) to be his, but the strain of keeping the secret from him over the years wears and tears at the relationship between all of them, including the child himself, who for reasons he himself cannot easily explain, hates his “Uncle Ned.”

   Mildly fascinating, overall, and as entertaining as a slow motion disaster set in motion by characters who are too weak to prevent it, but at least I now know which play it was that Groucho Marx was parodying in Animal Crackers (1930).

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE. United Artists, 1941. Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Victor Mature, Ona Munson, Phyllis Brooks, Albert Bassermann, Maria Ouspenskaya, Eric Blore, Marcel Dalia. Screenplay (by von Sternberg and three other writers) from a play of the same name by John Colton (produced in New York in 1926). Cinematography by Paul Ivana. Mural in Mother Gin Sling’s apartment by Keye Luke. Director: Josef von Sternberg. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   If Dante’s Inferno [reviewed here ] literally takes the viewer into the various levels of Hell where damned souls writhe in eternal agony, von Sternberg’s mesmerizing drama set in a gambling casino in Shanghai’s Red Light district takes a metaphorical spin on the nether region that is infinitely more terrifying than the silent film’s version.

   Colton, author of the play on which the film was based, was also the author of Miss Sadie Thompson, which first made it to the screen in 1928 as Rain.

   If the earlier play posed problems for the Hollywood censors in the pre-code era, The Shanghai Gesture was even more problematic, with a central character (Mother Goddam) the proprietor of a notorious establishment, who introduces her daughter (Poppy) to drugs and prostitution as revenge on her English father.

   The result was considered unfilmable in a more lenient Hollywood, and only made it to the screen with a much watered down but still pungent screenplay years after the installation of the restrictive Production Code.

   Ona Munson, who memorably played Belle Watley, an Atlanta madam, in Gone with the Wind, was persuaded with great difficulty by the director to take on a part that, even with the prostitution element eliminated, could not help but remind audiences of her celebrated role.

   Von Sternberg surrounded the newly christened Mother Gin Sling with a first-rate cast, with her daughter played by the young, promising Gene Tierney, her ex-husband by the notable Walter Huston, and a supporting cast of seasoned character actors, some playing against type (as in the case of Eric Blore), others (like Victor Mature, early in his career) etching indelible portraits of the employees and habitues of the gambling house.

   The movie has languished in obscurity in recent years, but with a fair amount of notoriety connected to it. The overhead shots of the gambling den that spirals down like steps toward Hell are brilliantly realized, while the great scene at Mother Gin Sling’s climactic dinner party beginning as an elegantly orchestrated party of revenge, quickly unravels as the revelation of old truths, long buried, leads to the violent, tragic conclusion of this disturbing film.

         

DANTE’S INFERNO. Fox Film Corporation Production, 1924. Lawson Butt, Howard Gaye, Ralph Lewis, Pauline Starke, Josef Swickard, Gloria Grey. Written by Edmund Goulding and Cyrus Wood; cinematography by Joseph August. Director: Henry Otto. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   This is one of those moral dramas that were so popular in the silent film era, which seemed to take special delight in appealing to audiences’ interest in the artistically tasteful depiction of sexual excess, this time portrayed in a tour through Dante’s Inferno with the poet guided by his Roman predecessor, Virgil.

   The really interesting part of the film, the guided tour that shows the horrified Dante the sufferings of the damned (with a great deal of what appears to be actual or very well simulated nudity), is embedded in a modern morality play, whose simple treatment of good and evil needn’t detain us here.

   As for the programmers at Cinevent, I suspect they scheduled the film rather less for its artistic merit than as a lead-in to Josef van Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, a modern take on the eternal question of good and evil that may be less classically graphic but is a much more powerful treatment of the subject.

Editorial Comments: Be watching for Walter’s review of The Shanghai Gesture. It’ll show up here soon.

   And while it isn’t certain that the photo below is from the 1924 silent version of Dante’s Inferno, there is a long sequence in the 1935 film with Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor which used stock footage from the earlier one. Since that may be where this rather horrific scene came from, I’ll include it on a provisional basis, and delete it later if it shouldn’t be here at all:

            

I’LL NEVER FORGET YOU. 20th Century-Fox, 1951; aka The House in the Square (British title). Tyrone Power, Ann Blyth, Michael Rennie, Dennis Price, Beatrice Campbell, Raymond Huntley. Screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on the play Berkeley Square by John Balderston. Director: Roy Ward Baker.

   This is an old favorite of mine that is available for the first time on DVD. It’s based on the hit play Berkeley Square which was filmed earlier with Leslie Howard, and once I start to discuss it, the plot will seem familiar. It has been used countless times, but this is based on one of the original sources.

    In this version, Power is Peter Standish, a nuclear physicist in England working on a secret project. His work and the birth of the atomic age have left him a lonely man, and one rather fed up with this world and this time. When he meets Roger Forsyth (Michael Rennie), they hit it off, and he learns that Forsyth’s old family home was destroyed in the Blitz but some of it still stands. He agrees to meet Forsyth to see the old place that stood in fashionable Berkeley Square.

   Arriving before Forsyth, but after dark, he feels a strange tie to this place. A sense of déjà vu as if he had been here before. Wandering through the ruins he spots a surviving portrait still hanging over the remains of a hearth.

    The painting is of a beautiful woman and mesmerizes him. But when he moves on, he upsets some of the rubble and is knocked unconscious.

   And when he wakes up, he is in England of the 18th Century, the age of the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern scientific age. And by the way the film is suddenly in brilliant technicolor instead of the drab black and white of the introduction. Cinematic shorthand for how Power views his own world and time and the past as he sees it.

   Nothing new, the technique was used most famously in The Wizard of Oz and both Portrait of Jennie and Hitchcock’s Spellbound used color briefly for it’s visual qualities.

   He meets Forsyth’s ancestor and the girl in the portrait, Ann Blyth, with whom he is already half in love, the wife of wastrel Tom Pettigew (Dennis Price).

   Passing himself off as a Colonist to explain his accent, he puts his talents as a scientist to work to become something of a sensation with his wonders, but he draws too much attention, is accused of witchcraft, and is nearly killed.

   When he comes to he is again in postwar drab black-and-white England, having been found by Forsyth and his sister — Martha (Ann Blyth). The look between the two is enough to tell you that love has survived across time and they will finally be joined together.

   Music rises, fade out …

   This sort of romantic nonsense has been knocking around for quite a while. It’s pretty much the theme of George DuMaurier’s Peter Ibbetson, is touched on by some of Marie Corelli’s novels, is part of the fascination of Rider Haggard’s She, and shows up in novels like Edwin Lester Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician. John Dickson Carr used it in one of his best historical mysteries Fire Burns and to some extent in The Burning Court.

   For that matter it is pretty much how Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter gets to Mars — a combination of wish fulfillment Madame Blatavasky, Theosophy, reincarnation, and the whole fascination with the occult that played such a role at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century. Love conquers all and survives even death.

   As late as Richard Matheison’s Somewhere in Time it still enthralled audiences as Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour struggled with love across time and past lives.

   I’ve never seen Berkeley Square (1933), so I can’t say if this is as good a telling of the tale as the Leslie Howard film. It’s simply one I’ve seen perhaps a dozen times since I was a child, and it has always touched some chord with me.

   It may seem at best a rather tired fantasy to you, and that’s fine. But if you let it, the film has a charm all its own. Similar films include Enchantment with David Niven and even the Archers’ Stairway to Heaven, and the musicals Brigadoon and to a lesser extent Finian’s Rainbow.

   I confess I’m a sucker for them all. Probably my Highlander ancestors. All that Scotch and fog — you tended to see things. Cynical realists are warned to stay away.

   But if you ever one day dreamed of a another time or wanted to escape into a more romantic and less mundane world this is a good vehicle for it. It’s a bit like Shangri La, Brigadoon, or even forgotten Kor, it’s there to be found if only in your heart.

   I make no excuse for it as film art. It is quite simply a movie I love, whatever its flaws or failures, and there are few enough of those for any film lover.

Note: The 1933 version was directed by Frank Lloyd with Leslie Howard, Heather Angel, and Samuel S. Hinds. And anyone familiar with their Noel Coward will know the pronunciation is Barkley as in his popular song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” that became a sort of anthem for WW II England.

THE GOOD BAD GIRL. Columbia, 1931. Mae Clarke, James Hall, Robert Ellis, Marie Prevost, Nance O’Neil, Edmund Breese, Paul Porcasi. Director: Roy William Neill.

   It’s purely a wild conjecture on my part, but was Mae Clarke’s role in The Public Enemy, in which she had her most famous scene in a long career in the movies – you know, the one with the grapefruit? – came out in April 1931. Was it only coincidence that here she is now in the lead role in The Good Bad Girl, which was released in May of the same year?

   I’ll concede that the time frame is way too tight for there to be a real connection, but it’s a nice thought. One thing that I never realized, though, is that Mae Clarke didn’t have a screen credit in The Public Enemy, but her scene in it is a bit of screen business that if you’ve ever seen it, you’ll never forget it.

   Except for Mae Clarke, all of the people involved in the making of The Good Bad Girl had long careers in the silents. She started in 1929, though, and ended up lasting the longest of all her co-players: her last movie was Godfrey Cambridge’s Watermelon Man in 1970.

   Among director Roy William Neill’s final films were the 1940s Sherlock Holmes movies and Black Angel (1946), based on the Cornell Woolrich novel.

   Normally I’d be mentioning the last couple of items to help substantiate a case for this movie to be covered here in a blog devoted to mystery fiction in all its various forms, but in this case it’s not needed, as the part that Mae Clarke plays is that of a hoodlum’s moll who wants to leave him and the rackets he’s in.

   She has a new lover, you see, the son of wealthy parents who doesn’t know who she is, not even her name. When Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis) commits a murder and expects her to stand by him and provide an alibi he desperately needs, she refuses and leaves him up the creek (and in the Big House).

   You might call the story line as a very close kin to a month’s worth of early soap opera, or maybe it’s just plain melodrama. Either way, I emphasized the silent era background of all the players for a reason, that being that movies in 1931 often displayed an unsureness in how acting should be done, now that actors could talk, and how scenes should be played – both often very slowly and stiffly, not knowing how easily audiences were going to follow and respond.

   That’s the main downfall of The Good Bad Girl, it’s often too slow and stationary. Nor do the weepy parts connect very well with someone watching it today, not that I think the movie made much of a mark in 1931 either.

   You should not get me wrong. Even though Mae Clarke seems swallowed up in a role that’s several sizes too large for her, the movie’s watchable, and there are parts — such as the continual comical byplay between Marie Prevost and Paul Porcasi, the latter as a night club owner who’s Prevost’s very close friend, about the diet she’s determined to keep him on – that are relaxed, natural and highly enjoyable.

BABY FACE. Warner Brothers, 1933. Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   Barbara Stanwyck is the star of Baby Face, the sordid tale of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who rises to kept affluence in a series of bedroom maneuvers that redefine the term “permissible risque.”

   There’s a redemptive finale (which Stanwyck plays with a notable lack of conviction), but her hard-boiled, terse acting in this seventy minute film is riveting.

   There is a bit by John Wayne as one of the “Johns” she loves and dumps, while the other men in her life include Douglass Dumbrille, Donald Cook, and George Brent. Puzzle of the week: Who plays the man she finally really falls for and for whom she turns “good”?

   (This is like figuring out the murderer on the Angela Lansbury Murder, She Wrote series. Out of all the has-beens and never-were’s drafted for roles, who is the most unlikely and therefore most likely suspect?)

   Her role is tightly circumscribed, but within the assigned limits Stanwyck is superb. The more I see of her early work (and the American Movie Classics cable channel has shown several of her lesser thirties films), the more I am impressed by her.

   And then there is her unforgettable acting in Double Indemnity to crown a career that in recent years has shown all of the professionalism of this fine actress but with little of the distinctive beauty and intelligence of her early work.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.]   Discovered in 2005 at the Library of Congress was a racier pre-release version of Baby Face that’s five minutes longer than the one seen by movie-going audiences in the 1930s. The unedited version is currently available on DVD.