THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 26

 As time passes, I've come to realize that it's a good thing 75% of movies made before 1950 are lost. This makes it so much easier to watch what already exists, whether they're worth it or not. Fortunately, three out of the following four certainly are. I'll leave it to you decide which category each falls under.

CONDEMNED TO LIVE (1935): The geniuses at the ignoble Invincible Pictures must have
decided a semi-remake of the previously discussed The Vampire Bat was necessary, even if only a year had passed. In an unnamed European village where everybody has a torch ready to fire up and nobody uses contractions when they speak, a series of strange murders are occurring. The much-respected Prof. Kristan pooh-poohs the idea of a giant bat or vampire being the culprit -- and for good reason! Without giving too much away, let's just say the first time you see the good professor rubbing his forehead in pain, it's time to get out the stake and silver bullet.

Condemned to Live is a great title for an otherwise borderline C-movie -- this budget must have gone mostly to the furniture (which is no compliment to the furniture). You'd never know it was made the same year as Top Hat or Mutiny on the Bounty, unless you were aware that Invincible Pictures and its equally cheesy releasing studio Chesterfield Motion Pictures Corp. peddled their wares strictly to the very small town theaters that couldn't afford the good stuff. It opens interestingly enough, with a prologue showing how Kristan's mother was bitten by a vampire bat when she was giving birth to the professor-to-be (M is for the mutant that she made me...) before jumping ahead a few decades -- which isn't made clear until roughly 20 minutes before the end. I guess they couldn't afford a slide that said 30 YEARS LATER.

While Ralph Morgan likely didn't appreciate M-G-M loaning him out for Condemned to Live, he's a better actor than Maxine Doyle as his fiancée  Marguerite, who speaks her first-draft dialogue like a 12 year-old in a school play. And while Pedro de Cordoba's fine diction adds some class as Kristan's best friend, the actor we really came to see is Mischa Auer as the professor's gimpy hunchback assistant with the cool name of Zan. As with Dwight Frye in Vampire Bat, Auer is the villager's prime suspect as the killer. Zan, in fact, knows his boss is behind the murders, but volunteers to take the blame for him -- the kind of employee every boss would love to have around the office. 

While not entirely terrible, Condemned to Live is interesting more as a sample of low-budget horror of the '30s rather than just as a movie, period. A restored DVD currently available probably makes for better viewing than the worn-out print I watched on YouTube, but wouldn't necessarily make it good.

BONUS POINTS: Due to the unimaginative cinematography, editing, and lighting, it's easy to pretend you're on the set during filming. But you'll ask yourself what the hell you're doing there.

Q PLANES (1939): British military planes are going missing throughout Europe
and the U.S. west coast. Major Charles Hammond of British Intelligence disagrees with the belief that it's a coincidence and, with the help of test pilot Tony McVane, discovers that all roads lead to Nazi Germany.

You wouldn't know it from that brief outline, but the British-made Q Planes is as much comedy as it is spy drama; the title itself sounds like a parody of the genre. (If there was an explanation of why they're called Q planes, I didn't catch it.) Witty dialogue comes as fast and furious, forcing you to sit up and pay attention. And this being British, the dialogue is spoken impeccably well, making everybody sound like, duh, stage trained British actors.

Ralph Richardson has the time of his life as the witty, pipe-puffing Hammond, battling his superiors in order to prove his theory correct, while engaging in a running gag of cancelling dates with his girlfriend in order to solve the mystery. Laurence Olivier plays straightman as McVane; he, too, is convinced that someone is sabotaging the planes at the airplane factory where he works. And being the most handsome, sexy pilot in the UK, he's given a romantic interest in Hammond's sister Kay (Valerie Hobson), a reporter who's working undercover herself at the factory commissary. Retitled Clouds over Europe in its American release, Q Planes is a splendid way to spend 82 minutes in the company of some classy British actors having fun in the months before the war in Europe changed everything forever. 

BONUS POINTS: A brief scene in a theater's dressing room with American actresses -- or British actresses playing Americans -- makes Richardson, et al sound even classier than they do already.

SYLVIE ET LE FANTOME (1946): Baron Eduard sells a portrait of his mother's long-ago lover, Alain, that has become the romantic fixation of his 16 year-old daughter Sylvie. Alain's ghost and that of his dog, both invisible to humans, escape the painting as it's being moved, and start to explore the castle where the family lives -- and as he does, falls in love with Sylvie. Eduard has hired an actor named Anicet to play Alain's ghost at Sylvie's birthday party, when two young men sneak into the castle: the love-sick Fredrick, and Ramure, a thief, both of whom have already met her. Eduard mistakes them for Anicet's colleagues, and asks all three men to take turns playing Alain's ghost. As the evening progresses, the disguised young men learn that Sylvie is in love with one of them, while Alain realizes he's no longer the objection of her affection.

The charming, genuinely romantic Sylvie et le Fantome (no translation necessary) eschews the usual heavy handed ghost shtick that its American counterparts would have featured. Being French, it takes the heroine's love for Alain's portrait seriously; at no time does the actress, Odette Joyeux, ever play it for laughs. (You remember what love was like when you were 16, right?) This makes the comedy provided by the hammy Anicet even funnier, even if his costume resembles something you'd see at a Klan meeting. And either the director wanted to make the set look like a damp castle or they filmed it in the real thing, because you can see the actors' breath every time they talk.

Of all the movie's stars, the only one who might seem familiar today is Jacques Tati as Alain's ghost. While primarily a stage actor at this time, he must have been famous enough to have his name in large letters, separate from the rest of the cast, in the opening credits. And it must be his name alone that was the selling point; he has no dialogue and is given very little in the way of physical comedy that any actor wouldn't have been capable of. Tati polished those same traits in later years when creating the character of Monsieur Hulot in a series of brilliant comedies. Kind of a fairytale for grown-ups, Sylvie et le Fantome is never for a moment manipulative, and will leave you wondering why they don't make French movies like this anymore.

BONUS POINTS: Jacques Tati's scenes used a 19th-century theatrical technique called Pepper's Ghost, making them more realistic than the usual double exposure we're used to. That is, if you find ghosts realistic.

EAT THE DOCUMENT (1967): The creators of the short-lived anthology series ABC Stage 67 requested a documentary of Bob Dylan's 1966 concert tour of the UK. Directed and edited by Dylan himself, the 50-minute Eat the Document takes the form of cinema verité -- French for "out of focus, choppy, and difficult to understand". No song or conversation is heard in its entirety. Clueless journalists ask stupid questions. Dylan watches a bagpipe parade. Fans complain about him abandoning folk for rock & roll. An anonymous woman walks her basset hound across a busy street... Dylan seems to be daring us to turn off the TV, as I almost did more than once. 

To its credit, Eat the Document isn't flattering to Dylan, as when he impassively watches a bandmate trying to buy a young man's girlfriend, who becomes less and less amused during the (flippant?) bartering session. Near the tour's end, Dylan appears physically and psychologically drained in the back seat of a cab with John Lennon, who advises him, in so many words, to suck it up. (His friend Johnny Cash gets more screentime than Lennon's 10-seconds.) By then, I figured this ramshackle jumble of images and audio resembled what the tour probably felt like to Dylan himself, making Eat the Document a far more authentic piece of work than a "professional" movie might have been. 

No surprise the folks at ABC Stage 67 rejected Dylan's cinematic reverie. Until the age of YouTube, only the most rabid Dylan fans ever had a chance to see it in midnight screenings and bootleg videos. While Eat the Document's third-generation condition doesn't make for easy viewing, it oddly helps you live what he was experiencing. We can only hope that, at 82, Bob Dylan is more comfortable in his current self-described "never ending tour."

BONUS POINTS: Dylan's touring musicians, the Hawks, would never look this young again when, two years later, they renamed themselves The Band.

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