THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 57

Three movies made during the changeover from silent to sound, and one from a decade later featuring what was briefly Paramount's B-movie stock company.

THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK (1928): There's nothing about The Docks of New York promising greatness. A ship's stoker saves a hooker who tried to drown herself in the East River. They go to a dive bar, get married, spend the night the together before he ships off the following day. He has a change of heart and swims back to land, where he learns she's in night court for a crime he committed. He confesses, gets sentenced to 60 days. The hooker promises to wait for him.  

Would you watch such a movie? Well, maybe you should, just to see how important a great director can be. For Josef von Sternberg elevates a cliched tale into something both human and humane. The first reel or two feature situations and characters you've seen in countless old movies, particularly silents like this. Yet von Sternberg molds it all into something that you gradually come to understand and care about. Sure, George Bancroft (the stoker) is rough around the edges -- drinking beer straight out of a keg -- and Betty Compson (the hooker) has been beat around by life pretty badly. Yet each brings out something positive in the other. For Bancroft, it means a real love he's never felt for any woman. For Compson, it's a belief that it's possible to find a man who cares about her.

Von Sternberg transforms these battered people into a couple you root for even in their tawdry surroundings; it's a master class for anyone who wants to learn what an "actor's director" is. Watch the dozens of extras in the bar -- each one appears to have gotten personal instruction from von Sternberg; their action never looks forced or phony. (One funny moment comes when Bickford and Compson converse in a corner, completely ignoring a rowdy fight going on in a mirror's reflection above them.) 

There's more, much more, in The Docks of New York than is covered here, from the genuine filth covering the stokers, to how Betty Compson begins rock hard and slowly softens into the kind of woman her character probably dreamed of becoming when growing up. If von Sternberg's first movie, Salvation Hunters, was the work of a self-styled artiste trying too hard to say something important, The Docks of New York is a masterpiece of an unexpectedly mature drama from a bold, thoughtful director. Spoiler alert: the happy ending feels neither forced nor tacked on. 

BONUS POINTS: Gustav von Seyffertitz (born in 1862!) steals his five-minute scene as "Hymn-Book Harry", the priest who reluctantly marries the wayward couple in the dive bar. With a mere look in his eyes, von Seyffertitz reminds all the barflies (and us) of the solemnity of the moment. Brilliant stuff.

INTERFERENCE (1928): As you could guess from the advert on the right, Paramount's first talking feature Interference has nothing to do with football. It is, rather, a melodrama of the British upper-class involving hidden identity, divorce, blackmail, and murder. Kind of like the royal family if you dig hard enough. 

While Interference possesses many of the drawbacks prevalent during the early days of sound, its story is actually quite involving. Phillip Voaze has a chance meeting with first wife Deborah Kane a decade after his disappearance in World War I. In need of a few shillings, Deborah hatches a blackmailing scheme involving letters written to Voaze years earlier from his former sidepiece Faith. Without knowing what the others are doing, Voaze, Faith, and Faith's current husband Sir John Marlay each visit Deborah. One of them would like to kill her, another really does, while the third is arrested for it. All this hubbub for a few old "Oh baby, what you do to me" mash notes! People sure were touchy in 1928.

There are coincidences galore throughout Interference, like Voaze just happening to choose Marlay as a doctor, but that's to be expected in any movie of this type. Evelyn Brent and Doris Kenyon (as Deborah and Faith respectively) get the lion's share of histrionics. Clive Brook, the kind of distinguished Brit that talkies were created for, is agreeably lowkey as the stiff upper-lipped Sir John, the doctor whose prescription for blackmail is a dose of lethal threats. 

But it's William Powell, as the sickly Voaze, who steals Interference. His clipped, eloquent delivery, heard onscreen for the first time, must have convinced the boys at Paramount's front office that he was far more suited to leading roles than his often-villainous supporting parts in silents. No surprise that his next movie, a silent titled The Canary Murder Case, was immediately reshot with sound. Now that kind of studio interference makes sense.

BONUS POINTS: One credit reads "Dialogue Arranged by Ernest Pascal", as if the guy cut up the script, tossed the shreds up in the air, and glued them together at random like William Burroughs. Another credit, "Based on a Lothar Mendes Production", refers to Mendes' direction of the silent version of Interference, which Roy J. Pomeroy followed for his direction of the talkie version, which was shot simultaneously. As with The Canary Murder Case, those were the days when studios could pay actors once for making a movie twice.

THE SQUALL (1929): The funniest feature of 1929 must have been The Squall. And making it even more of a hoot is that it's a drama. Ergo, if you ever want to convince your friends that early talkies get a bad rap, this is not the movie to show them. 

In a small Hungarian village, middle-aged couple hire a young Gypsy woman named Nubi as their housekeeper. She shows her gratitude by seducing every male in the household and turning all the women against one another. Money goes missing, the maid and gardener quit, Paul breaks up with his fiancée Irma, fights break out -- and Nubi the housekeeper doesn't even sweep the floor! 

Absolutely nothing else happens in The Squall, other than the audience wondering why Nubi wasn't fired after her first day on the job. As for the acting -- hoo boy. Myrna Loy -- still stuck in "exotic" roles -- is Nubi. She's supposed to be sexy but appears to be a thousand kernels short of a cob. Too, Nubi (or, rather, Loy) is stuck with 90 minutes' worth of dialogue along the lines of "Nubi not happy!" or "Nubi like diamonds!" Loretta Young, as Irma, sounds exactly what she was in 1929: a 16 year-old girl badly reciting lines for the first time. Yet nobody beats Caroll Nye as Peter, emoting his already purple dialogue to the point where his mouth probably tasted like grapes. As for the direction, Alexander Korda makes sure to keep The Squall at a dead snail's pace. 

Somehow, Loy, Young, and Korda eventually proved to be far better than The Squall would have you believe. In later years they all probably shook their heads just hearing the word "squall" in weather forecasts. As for the rest of us... the forecast for watching The Squall is a 100% chance of disbelief mixed with unceasing laughter.

BONUS POINTS: The miniature horse & wagons standing in for the travelling Gypsy camp manage to be laughable and utterly charming all at once. In fact, they give a better performance than any human in the picture.

KING OF CHINATOWN (1939): 

Paramount must have been pretty pleased with the previous year's Dangerous to Know, because a year later they rounded up much of the same cast for this well-made crime caper. Give the studio credit, too, for trying to revive Anna May Wong's sputtering career even in B-pictures like these. 

If there's a problem for fans of top-billed Wong, it's that her character, surgeon Dr. Mary Ling, is often overshadowed by Frank Baturin, the white leader of a Chinatown protection racket, who was shot by his underling Mike Gordon on orders of the gang's accountant (nicknamed The Professor). After performing life-saving surgery on Baturin, Dr. Ling becomes his temporary live-in caregiver. As Gordon and The Professor take over the racket, Baturin decides to break up his criminal band, furthering the accountant's desire to get him out of the way once and for all. Moral: always be good to your money manager.

King of Chinatown is unique in that the sex and race of Wong's character are never a subject for conversation or contention -- she is simply a brilliant surgeon, period. But unwilling to leave well enough alone, Paramount cast white actor Sidney Toler as her Chinese father because... well, he was currently playing Charlie Chan over at Fox! And why is Armenian-American Akim Tamiroff using an Italian accent when playing a character with the Ukrainian name of Maturin? Oh heck, let's continue with busy second-rate dialect actor J. Carroll Naish using an Irish accent as The Professor for no reason other than Chinese and Italian were already taken. Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, as the red-blooded American gunsel Gordon, already lost his accent, so he gets a pass.

All this confusion helps to make King of Chinatown an even more fun 56 minutes than it already it is. And despite the odd casting (and accent) choices throughout, Anna May Wong was probably grateful for the chance to prove she could do something other than the usual Dragon Lady routine. But I still wonder how she felt about a white guy playing her Chinese father. 

BONUS POINTS: Super-annoying actor Roscoe Karns disappears from King of Chinatown before the end of the second reel, as if director Nick Grinde realized they didn't need an ambulance driver character ripped-off from MGM's Dr. Kildare movies.

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