CAPTAIN SWAGGER. Pathé Exchange, 1928. Rod La Rocque, Sue Carol, Richard Tucker, Victor Potel, Ulrich Haupt, Maurice Black, Ray Cooke. Directed by Edward H. Griffith.

   This silent comedy opens in France in 1917, where gallant American pilot Rod La Rocque as just returned from Paris, “an hour and three quarts away…” still on the windward side of soused, but ready to volunteer to dare the skies against Baron Von Stahl (Ulrich Haupt), due to make his daily bombing run.

   Sure enough our hero is true to his word and shoots Von Stahl down over his own lines, but when he fails to see the gallant enemy pilot emerge from his burning plane he lands and rescues him. The grateful German recognizes a fellow knight of the sky and presents him with his own engraved Luger, then helps him to escape the German troops who spotted his plane come down.

   A decade later back in good old New York, our hero, who has earned the nickname “Captain Swagger” from his numerous bill collectors is on his last dime, a playboy who has run out of funds and friends, so taking the engraved Luger he decides to do what any self respecting Twenties gentleman would do: turn elegant bandit (top hat, white tie, formal coat, and white silk scarf).

As luck would have it, all he succeeds in doing is rescuing beautiful Sue Arnold (Sue Carol) from a wolf with a convertible. A bust at banditry, Captain Swagger returns to his soon to be former residence with the girl, and resolves he will have to try a more honest form of survival.

   With the girl, he manages to form a dancing act at one of the more upscale clubs and they are an instant hit. Sue is ready to breathe a sigh of relief: he has finally given up the gentleman bandit game when the club his held up, and one of the hold-up men is Baron Von Stahl.

   Will Captain Swagger stay on the straight and narrow for the sake of true love, or will he fall under the sway of his old enemy and comrade of the skies?

   And why, should you care?

   There is a reason, the reason I have been so careful not to reveal the true name of Rod La Rocque’s Captain Swagger, you see his real name is one you will almost certainly know:

   It’s Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond.

   Brought to the American screen for the first time, H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s two-fisted, beer-guzzling, jovial and homicidal hero not only becomes an American, he loses his entire reason for being, looking for adventure in boring old peacetime, misplaces Carl and Irma Peterson, leaves the trenches for the skies, and ends up dancing at a night club.

   What would Algy Longworth say? What would Dick Hannay say? What would they say at his club? What would Phyllis say?

   He can hardly show his face at those old Etonian dinners again, one would think. At least Raffles had the good taste to get shot in the Boer War. Even the Saint might think twice about rubbing shoulders with half of a cabaret act.

   La Rocque isn’t bad in the lead. You can imagine him as Drummond, and fortunately a year later Samuel Goldwyn had the good taste to stick much closer to the book and play with an all talking film, cast Joan Bennett as the soon to be Mrs. Drummond, Montagu Love as dear old Carl, and Ronald Colman as Hugh, an especially good idea as Colman managed to get nominated for the first Best Actor Oscar for playing Drummond (he lost out to Warner Baxter’s the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona the last time two series characters or films would be nominated).

   But such is Bulldog Drummond’s first sojourn onto American screens, and I suppose we should be grateful the Brits didn’t retaliate by casting Jack Buchanan as a singing and dancing Philo Vance. There’s no telling where this kind of thing might lead. Can you imagine Mr. Moto, Burlesque comic; or Charle Chan with simple songs and snappy patter; Ellery Queen and his amazing Poodles; or, Fred and Ginger as Nick and Nora?

   The blood curdleth.

DUDE RANCH. Paramount, 1931. Jack Oakie, Stu Erwin, Eugene Pallette, Mitzi Green, June Collyer. Written by Milton Krims, Percy Heath and Joseph L. & Herman J. Mankiewicz. Directed by Frank Tuttle.

   The first of the films I brought home from Cinevent, and what a treat!

   Stu Erwin plays the owner of a Dude Ranch where things are so dull the tour guide falls asleep in mid-sentence. As one departing guest observes, “Wild West? The wildest thing I saw out here was a wildflower — and it was a pansy!”

   As the guests prepare to depart en masse, a down-at-the-heels-and-soles troupe of traveling players (Oakie and Pallette, marvelously hammy, abetted by Mitzi Green as a professional orphan and Ms Cecil Weston as her chronically long-lost mother) stumble onto the scene, and quickly conspire with Stu to liven things up with a bit of full-blooded melodrama.

   Thus Jack Oakie becomes Vance Kilroy, hero of the plains; Eugene Pallette morphs into Black Jed, wife-beater, child-starver, and all-purpose blackguard, menacing Mitzi and Ms Weston as mother-and-daughter recently escaped from Injuns. A bit of drama, some fisticuffs, and the guests (except for the lovely Ms Collyer) eat it up with a ladle.

   This is the meat of the film: Jack Oakie, preening and posing as only he could, Eugene Pallette huffing, puffing, and stuffing his mouth, and little Mitzi wrenching tears of sympathy from all & sundry. The written word doesn’t do her justice. You just have to watch the scene where a kindly old lady asks her what tribe captured her, and she rolls her eyes heavenward and sighs, “They was Cleveland Indians, Ma’am!”

   As an aside, I really think Jack Oakie developed the Bob Hope Persona before Hope himself did: Soft of heart and head, cowardly, vainglorious, yet somehow likeable—and most important, Fun-nee!

   But to get back to the story: More plot quickly ensues as a quartet of genuine tough guys arrive, intending to use the dude ranch as a base of operations for a bank job—a plot that gets no more attention from director Frank Tuttle than it merits, as we race through the usual complications, enlivened with some funny pratfalls and cutting wordplay, then up to the Big Chase Finale, with thespians, guests, Stu Erwin and the law in pell-mell pursuit of the baddies and a captured heroine.

   And I have to say that this chase seems to have been the inspiration for much of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as Jack Oakie’s stunt double leaps from car to truck, swings off the roof and into the cab, kicking the driver out, and gets into a wild donnybrook with the baddies while the truck is stalled on a railroad track with the Superchief bearing down on them. Tuttle gears this bit for thrills, and produces a breathtaking and suspenseful few minutes that left me marveling in its wake.

    Dude Ranch didn’t win any awards, and it’s completely forgotten these days, but the talents involved put a lot into it, and it paid off handsomely for any viewer who chances to discover this gem.

GILDERSLEEVE’S GHOST. RKO, 1944. Harold Peary, Marion Martin, Richard LeGrand, Frank Reicher, Amelita Ward, Freddie Mercer, Margie Stewart, Emory Parnell, Jack Norton as the Drunk and Charles Gemora as the Gorilla. Screenwriter: Robert E. Kent, based on characters appearing on the long-running radio program, The Great Gildersleeve (1941-1958). Director: Gordon Douglas.

   Some folks think it kinky of me, others merely shrug and roll their eyes, and a few have damned me from the pulpit for it, but I always thought Harold Peary was funny. Just something about that chuckle of his and the trademark hem-and-hawing, always gets a laugh out of me.

   So I’m tempted to give Gildersleeve’s Ghost much more praise than it deserves from a discerning critic like myself. I can’t honestly recommend it to any serious movie buff either. But damitall, this movie has everything: ghosts, an old dark house, a mad doctor with a sinister assistant, an invisible woman, insulting comic relief, and an escaped gorilla. Who — I ask you WHO? — could ask for anything more?

   Peary skips through it with his usual aplomb, and Gordon Douglas, whose career included Rio Conchos, Tony Rome, and Sincerely Yours, directs with the flippancy it deserves. I should also mention writer Robert Kent, who went on to a long and bizarre career with Sam Katzman, writing things like Hootenanny Hoot and The Fastest Guitar Alive.

   As for Gildersleeve’s Ghost, it’s fast, light, and outrageous enough to keep you saying “Whuzza?” even if you don’t find it funny. Catch it if you can.

MAKE A MILLION. Monogram, 1935. Charles Starrett (Professor Reginald Q. Jones), Pauline Brooks, George E. Stone, James Burke, Guy Usher, Norman Houston. Director: Lewis D. Collins.

   As far as I have been able to discern from Charles Starrett’s credits on IMDb, this was the next to the last film he had the romantic lead in before he became a full-time cowboy star. A movie entitled Along Came Love, made in 1936, was perhaps the last. It was probably a good thing that he could ride a horse, because on the basis of this one, his career in movies would have disappeared under his feet, with no one today knowing he ever existed.

   While made as a comedy, Make a Million also attempts to address the economic issues that were plaguing the nation in 1935. Not very deeply, mind you, but just enough to draw audiences in and maybe have them laughing a little about the problems they were having paying their bills and keeping their families fed.

   As Professor Reginald Q. Jones, Starrett plays one of those naive and out of touch left wing radical professors who think the little men in the country are paying all too much toward the wealth of the upper class, and when he fails one of his students, the daughter of a banker, for disagreeing with his theories of economics, he is summarily fired.

   But with one proviso: If he can use his theories to earn a million dollars within a fixed amount of time, he will be reinstated. Which, without wanted to reveal too much detail in how he goes about it, with the assistance of a band of hoboes, he does. Along the way, the daughter of the banker gets to see how shady a businessmen her father is — and am I telling you too much? — decides to switch sides, but almost too late.

   Nobody today, I grant you, would watch this movie other than a relic of the past. It is fun, though, to see Charles Starrett in a suit and tie and at six foot two, towering over everyone else in the movie, especially during a meeting between a band of avaricious bankers and the band of the brotherhood as they are busily discussing financial matters of the day. “What do you think of copper [as an investment]?” “Coppers? I can do without them.”

TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME. 20th Century Fox, 1941. Cesar Romero, Virginia Gilmore, Milton Berle, Charlotte Greenwood, Sheldon Leonard, Stanley Clements, Frank Jenks. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone.

   Even though this film is heavily populated by hoodlums and hardened criminals of all kinds, starting from Cesar Romero on down, what it really is is a comedy romance, as I’ve already categorized it. Not a single dark and gritty scene to be seen.

   There is a bit of a mystery at the beginning, though. Why does Milton Berle, Romero’s number one henchman, put the former’s trademark cigars in the mouths of three bodies discovered at a mom and pop store shootout? Answer: to implicate his boss, but why?

   Shift of scene to a department store where Romero spots a good-looking girl (Virginia Gilmore) who’s in charge of the section where mothers drop off their children to play while they go on to do their shopping. A conversation between the two is struck up, and before he knows it, Romero has hired Gilmore as a nanny for his children.

   The problem is, you guessed it, he doesn’t have any children, and he has to go find one, a very truculent Stanley Clements. The romance goes on its semi-rocky way from there, while at the same time, Romero has to deal with a gangster from the other side of town (Sheldon Leonard) who’s trying his best to crowd in on the former’s territory.

   The result is only mild fun, nothing more, even at the time. What is fun now, some 75 years later, is watching a nicely assembled gang of professional actors go through their paces.

Note:   Go here for Walter Albert’s comments on this very same film, posted over six years ago on this blog.

WILD MONEY. Paramount, 1937. Edward Everett Horton, Louise Campbell, Lynne Overman, Lucien Littlefield, Esther Dale, Porter Hall, Benny Baker. Based on a story by Paul Gallico. Director: Louis King. Shown at Cinevent 26, Columbus OH, May 1994.

   The surprise “B” hit of the convention was Wild Money. Edward Everett Horton, on of my all-time favorite character actors, was the star. He played a stuffy accountant for a big-city newspaper, who, while vacationing with his cousin (Esther Dale) and her husband (Lucien Littlefield), is charged with reporting on the “breaking story” of the kidnapping of one of America’s wealthiest men.

   Horton, Dale and Littlefield make a delightful team, and there’s not a wasted frame in this comic crime film. Horton even gets the girl (Louise Campbell) and kisses her in the final shot.

   What films such as this demonstrate is that a well-crafted small movie is a safer bet than a larger-budgeted film with pretensions beyond its capabilities. But that’s another fatality of the demise of the studio system where the “A” crew could be used on the “B” film, giving it a professional sturdiness that has disappeared in the era of out-of-sight budgets.

BONUS:  Wild Money‘s Lucien Littlefield, a supporting actor whose career began in silent films, was even more delightful in the Joe E. Brown comedy, The Gladiator (credits below). Here he plays mild-mannered Professor Donner who’s discovered a formula that increases strength in animals and, as he discovers when Brown is unexpectedly administered a dose, humans as well.

   Brown was both touching and funny in the title role and although the film rushed through the final sequences to a pre-ordained conclusion, it was most enjoyable.

THE GLADIATOR. Columbia Pictures, 1938. Joe E. Brown , June Travis, Man Mountain Dean, Dickie Moore, Lucien Littlefield. Based on the novel by Philip Wylie. Director: Edward Sedgwick.

THE ADVENTURES OF JANE. Eros Films, UK, 1949. Christobel Leighton-Porter, Michael Hogsworth, Peter Butterworth, Sonya O’Shea, Ian Colin, Stanelli, Sebastian Cabot. Screenplay by Alf Goulding, E. J. Whiting and Con West, based on the comic strip “Jane” created by Norman Pett. Directed by E. J. Whiting and (uncredited) by Alfred Goulding and Norman Pett. TV series: BBC, UK, 1982-84 (reviewed by Michael Shonk here ).

   Jane, that grown up Little Orphan Annie in and out of lingerie, wasn’t the first glamor girl to strip down in the comic strips on either side of the Atlantic, but her predecessors like Fritzi Ritz, Dixie Dugan, Blondie (before marrying Dagwood), and Frank Godwin’s Connie were modest in comparison to the British Gypsy Rose Lee of the news kiosk.

   Jane lost more clothes, showed more skin, and outlasted the best of them. She has hardly been out of the papers since her creation and even managed two movie outings over forty years apart.

   That’s not bad for a lass and her pet dachshund Fritz, especially since Jane’s chief talent was a gift for getting caught out after spectacular costume failures.

   Jane put the strip in comic strip.

   She was created by artist Norman Pett as a morale booster, a bit along the lines of Milton Caniff’s “Male Call,” but Jane ran in the daily papers and fairly soon, unsatisfied with simply finding ways for Jane to lose her clothes, Pett decided there should be a bit of plot to go with all that skin, so Jane got involved with smugglers, spies, saboteurs (certainly a fifth column was involved in sabotaging her costumes), and kidnappers. Across her career she would veer into a soap opera for a while and even acquire a daughter just as prone to losing her clothes as Maman.

   There is a whole school of British comic strip inspired by Jane and Pett, including Romeo Brown by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdway, who soon got more serious with Modesty Blaise.

   Here we have the original Jane, Christobel Leighton-Parker, in the flesh, the model whose photos often accompanied Pett’s annuals and collections of Jane’s adventures, cast as Jane, a show girl who gets involved with smugglers when a seeming nice old man, Sneyd (the name should have been a clue) gives her a fake diamond bracelet.

   It’s all part of a dastardly plot to get past British customs with the stolen Bulawayo Diamond by the handsome criminal Cap, but bound to be foiled by Fritz and Jane’s less than bright policeman boyfriend Tom, and Jane herself, because Jane is never just a victim to be rescued by a man.

   That’s it folks. There is a swimsuit contest Jane judges, Jane shuts doors, and other things, on her clothes and loses her skirt while only wearing scanties, Jane changes her clothes, Jayne wears lingerie, a comic drunk climbs in bed with Fritz in her room, Jane goes to sea, gets wet and changes out of her wet clothes… It pretty much is the same formula as the comic strip in action.

   A young Sebastian Cabot even shows up in a comic bit about a Frenchman going through British customs.

   If you haven’t guessed how The End flashes on screen you aren’t trying.

   But it is fun in the same way as the strip was, plus under the titles we get to see Pett drawing his most famous Jane picture as Leighton-Porter and Fritz pose. You can catch it in two parts on YouTube if you want, and it is currently on Amazon Prime.

   It’s all fun and tease, and Jane, for all her innocence of her various states of undress, is a surprisingly smart and capable heroine who as often as not rescues herself. It’s no wonder she has survived the ravages of time and changes of custom.

   Jane is a force to reckon with.

   A naked force at that.

   

LOVE ME TONIGHT. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith, Elizabeth Patterson. Music by Rodgers & Hart. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the best romantic comedy musicals of all time. The plot is simple. A tailor in Paris (Maurice Chevalier) goes to a castle in the country to be paid for some work he’s done, gets mistaken for a baron, and falls in love with a princess (Jeanette MacDonald).

   Love Me Tonight was one of the first musicals in which the songs are an integral part of the story, in fact moving the plot itself along on more than one occasion. A fact worthy of note, but the cinematography? Perhaps even more astounding. Under Mamoulian’s direction, the camera never stops moving, zooming in and out at will, and using split screens as well as fast and slow motion to both great dramatic and comedic effect. It is difficult to believe that this movie was made in 1932.

   Two long scenes need pointing out in particular: The opening of the movie takes place on a quiet Parisian street at dawn. Then a worker comes out with a hammer to work on the pavement, then a woman comes out of her house to sweep the sidewalk, two other women open their windows to flap rugs against the railings, two shoemakers begin hammering nails into boots in a syncopated counterpoint harmony, and soon there’s a entire cacophony of sounds (and music) showing off life in a big city.

   Later on, the song “Isn’t It Romantic?” begins by being sung by Maurice Chevalier in his tailor’s shop, is picked by a man taking a cab to the train station; on the train a band of soldiers overhear it, and continue to sing it while marching through a forest, where a gypsy hears it and takes it back to his camp, from which the sound is heard by the princess in a balcony of her palace. Wonderful!

   Other songs you may have heard of are “Mimi,” “Love Me Tonight” and “The Son of a Gun Is Nothing But a Tailor.” Of the players, both Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald were made to play their respective roles, while Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, and C. Aubrey Smith, all resident members of the nobility, are in fine comedic form. There is but one regret in this film. One can only wish that Myrna Loy were on the screen more. Unfortunately several of her pre-Code scenes were deemed too risque when the movie was re-released in the late 1940s, and the shorter version from that date is the only one that still exists.

MY FRIEND IRMA GOES WEST. Paramount Pictures, 1950. John Lund, Marie Wilson, Diana Lynn, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Corinne Calvet, Lloyd Corrigan, Don Porter, Harold Huber, Kenneth Tobey. Screenplay: Cy Howard & Parke Levy. Director: Hal Walker.

   Marie Wilson, who made a career of playing ditsy blondes, will be remembered best for her portrayal of Irma Peterson, the impossibly vacuous New York City secretary with a mind the size of a paper clip. This was the second film to feature Irma, who began her career on radio in 1947, but as usually the case, of all the people who were in the cast on the radio program, only Marie Wilson managed to make the transition into the movies.

   And even though creator Cy Howard was also involved in the movie production, much of the magic her character created in her original form is gone. In fact, Irma is on the screen far less than the up-and-coming comedy team of Martin and Lewis. Incidentally, they also appeared in the first Irma picture as well — their screen debut, no less.

   The plot is simple enough — Dean Martin, who plays the boy friend of Irma’s friend Jane, gets a shot at Hollywood, or so he thinks, and the whole gang goes along. It;s to bad that, unknown to them, the boys in the white suits come along afterward to pick up the “producer” who hired him. (But what about the French actress with eyes for Dean?)

   Irma continued on the radio for four more years, until 1954, but there weren’t any more movies. It’s no wonder why. When writers lose the roots of their own creations, chances of a successful transplant are next to none.

YOU NEVER CAN TELL. Universal, 1951. Dick Powell, Peggy Dow, Joyce Holden, Charles Drake, Frank Nelson and Flame (the dog.) Written and directed by Lou Breslow.

   This movie-fantasy is dumb as a box of puppies, but I liked it anyway. Maybe it’s the loopy concept and the way it plays on movie conventions. After all, Dick Powell had been playing hard-boiled PIs and tough guys for so long his mere presence promised a certain hard-chiseled persona — and here he is as Private Eye Rex Shepherd, a reincarnated dog set to sniff out the guy who poisoned him (shades of D.O.A.) and romancing heiress Peggy Dow in the best Philip Marlowe tradition.

   The story takes way too long to get going, and the humor is on the level of Francis the Talking Mule (also from Universal), but the players take the stale jokes and cliché situations in easy stride, turn on their relaxed charm and rise above it — no, elevate it — to a surprising level. I particularly liked Joyce Holden as Powell’s secretary (formerly a race horse) and Frank Nelson offering one of his patented smug-polite perfs as a police detective dealing with Powell’s PI in a neat turn on the sort of thing Philip Marlowe used to go through.

   Don’t come to You Never Can Tell expecting a lot of laughs, but if you’re looking for an off-beat thing with a certain charm, this is it.