THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 67

 As we wait to hear the conspiracy theories involving the latest attempt on Donald Trump's life, here are four movies to take your mind off of the madhouse we call "life itself".

APPLAUSE (1929): Had I been running a movie studio in 1929, I'd have ordered my directors to watch Applause multiple times. Then I would have barked, "That's how you make a talkie!" And all thanks go to director Rouben Mamoulian. From its opening moments with the camera following a theater poster floating in the breeze to its climax tracking close to another poster featuring the story's lead character, Applause is the first sound movie to really move.

Sure, its story of over-the-hill burlesque queen Kitty Darling trying to keep her virginal teenage daughter April from following in her footsteps seems hackneyed today. But it's what Mamoulian does with the camera and editing that brings it fully to life for its 80 minutes. The techniques we take for granted now -- overhead shots, lightning-quick edits, motion -- seem to have made their sound debut here. The Russian cinema-inspired montages of the creepy audience members and washed-up burlesque dancers stun even now, while Kitty's p.o.v. shot of her low-rent colleagues looking down at her and her newborn baby is more horror movie than happy.

Broadway legend Helen Morgan, only 29, looks the part of the middle-aged floozie Kitty Darling, forever a slave to her unfaithful live-in boyfriend/manager Hitch Nelson (played by the actor with the unforgettable name Fuller Mellish, Jr.). Sleazy with a capital S, Hitch puts the moves on the 17-year-old April with the line, "Charity begins at home!", a moment both hilarious and disgusting. As for pre-code language, there are two "damns" and a character named Tony who dislikes his name because it "sounds like a wop bootblack".

For those unfamiliar with the star of Applause -- long before Judy Garland took her first upper, Helen Morgan was the original "tragic" female entertainer: torch singer, alcoholic, four-times married, psychologically and emotionally troubled, dead at 41 of cirrhosis. And it's all there onscreen in Applause, perhaps the first great American talkie. Recommended viewing; an excellent print is free on YouTube. 

BONUS POINTS: Applause features some great location footage of the old Penn Station, Brooklyn Bridge, and atop a Wall Street skyscraper. 

GIRL OF THE PORT (1930): Few movies are ahead of their time while being incredibly dated as Girl of the Port. Josie (Sally O'Neil), a washed-up showgirl, is herself washed up on a South Seas island to tend bar at the local dive. There she meets McEwen (Mitchell Lewis), a horny, racist landowner, and Jim (Reginald Sharland), a drunken, shellshocked, pyrophobic World War I vet. Deciding Jim is the only decent guy on the island, Sally moves him into her hut for a few months to sober him up. McEwen eventually kidnaps Jim, gets him drunk, and takes him to another island to scare him to death at the natives' firewalking routine -- only to discover it has the opposite of the desired effect. 

There are plenty of interesting bits in Girl of the Port, none including the title character. The prologue is a terrifying war scene where Jim and his fellow British soldiers are beat back or burned up by Germans with flamethrowers, an event that would shellshock anyone. Later at the bar, Mitchell Lewis stuns when his character McEwen buys a round for the boys and toasts, "To white supremacy!", before calling one of the natives a "black baboon". His pride vanishes when Jim announces that McEwen is actually a "half-caste". As his white "friends" move away, McEwen realizes he's buying a round for the smirking "half-castes" who silently welcome him as one of their own. It's an unexpected, well directed moment.

So: self-loathing racism. Untreated PTSD. Alcoholism. A couple shacking up. All in all, plenty of pre-code situations to revel in. Too bad the wisecracking Sally O'Neil and the overwrought Reginald Sharland dampen the potential with dialogue and direction aimed at the cheap seats. Had Girl of the Port come along two years later (although released in 1930, it was filmed in 1929), it could have been a better-made, more sophisticated take on the issues it deals with. Still worth its 68-minute watch to see the horrors of World War I unflinchingly portrayed, and an openly racist character get his comeuppance -- although he had to be only half white to do so.

BONUS POINTS: If Mitchell Lewis looks and sounds vaguely familiar, it's because he's the captain of the guards in The Wizard of Oz who says of the Wicked Witch, "She's dead. Dorothy killed her!" The alleged "black baboon" was in reality the Hawaiian surfing champ and five-time Olympic medal winner Duke Kahanamoku, who appeared as himself in the silly semi-documentary Around the World in 80 Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks. 

THE ROAD IS OPEN AGAIN (1933): No other president had Hollywood around his finger like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the Republican studio heads felt obliged to jump on the New Deal bandwagon, featuring references and even entire shorts devoted FDR's good works. 

Warner Brothers did its part by releasing the half-reeler The Road is Open Again. Dick Powell is sitting at the piano trying to knock out a new patriotic song. Upon closing his eyes for a moment, he's visited by the ghosts of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson. Rather than running out of the room screaming in terror, Powell listens to the trio explain how wonderful Roosevelt is, confident that the newly-elected commander-in-chief will right the ship of state. All that is required from the country is faith in their leader, and to buck up, because the road to prosperity is open again.

Huzzah! Dick Powell has the hook for his song. And as the ghosts disappear, Powell sings -- off the top of his head! -- "The Road is Open Again" as newsreels of people going to work and pro-New Deal headlines fill the screen.  And before you can say "massive national debt", the merry propaganda picture is over.

No doubt The Road is Open Again is charming while, according to some economists, completely wrongheaded about the New Deal in general. Yet it reminds us of a time when a president with a good heart and sound mind was able to bring a country together when rabblerousers on both ends of the political spectrum were dividing Americans, unemployment and inflation were on the rise, and dictators were starting to run riot over Europe. So glad things have gotten better!

BONUS POINTS: The lyrics to "The Road is Open Again" appear onscreen so the audience can join in. But just try to sing louder than Dick Powell.

HALLELUJAH, I'M A BUM! (1933): In an unusually witty performance, Al Jolson is Bumper, who lives the happy-go-lucky homeless life with his pals in Central Park. Bumper switches gears when rescuing June Marcher, who tried to end it all by jumping off a bridge into a park lake. June, having lost her memory, falls in love with Bumper. Going gaga himself, Bumper asks his pal John Hastings -- the goodtime Mayor of New York -- to arrange for a job so he can eventually marry June... not realizing she's the Mayor's ex-girlfriend. 

One of the year's biggest financial flops, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! has so many things going for it. Offbeat direction by Lewis Milestone; a sophisticated screenplay by S.N. Behrman; an incredibly clever score and "rhythmic dialogue" by Rodgers & Hart; and a great supporting cast. Harry Langdon is a riot as Egghead, the Communist trash collector who condemns both the "plutocrats" who run the city and "parasites" like Bumper and his pals who sponge off the workers. The never-disappointing Frank Morgan plays Mayor Hastings with equal parts sophistication and human qualities. There's some racy pre-code dialogue, too, with Madge Evans (as June) involving a pun on "laying a cornerstone", while a gay-coded maid wearing a monocle makes an appearance.

So why did it bomb so badly? Its production history involving three directors, a sneak preview debacle requiring an entire re-shoot with a new script, score, and at least one actor re-casted, along with Jolson's dimming popularity and the unusually sophisticated score all likely contributed. While the pace starts to flag during its final third, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! (available for free at Internet Archive in an excellent print) is now considered by many contemporary movie critics to be not only Al Jolson's best movie but the pre-code musical most deserving of a revival. I could have told them that upon my first viewing on a UHF channel in 1970, but it's nice being proven right again. (The print I saw back then was the original British release, with the word "Tramp" replacing "Bum" in the title and songs, the offending word having a much different meaning there.)

BONUS POINTS: Richard Rodgers cameos as an assistant photographer, while Lorenz Hart can be seen as a harried bank teller. And six years before co-starring in The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan says, "There's no place like home." 

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "SAY IT WITH SONGS" (1929)

Al Jolson's stunning late-in-life comeback helped people forget that it was movies like Say it with Songs that drove him out of the public consciousness to begin with. 

So bad is Say it with Songs -- a musical about an emotionally-manipulative singer with a gambling problem who's imprisoned for manslaughter (sounds fun!) -- that it seems like a personal vendetta by scenarist Darryl F. Zanuck. Even the ridiculous call letters of the radio station where Jolson's character Joe Powers sings, QRSA, sound like some kind of a private joke. 

Zanuck couldn't even be bothered giving Powers' five year-old son a name, being referred to only as "the little kid," "junior" and, of course, "little pal" -- the name of the movie's breakout hit. I thought you needed to name your child before bringing him home from the hospital.

Jolson tries not to strangle his little pal.

Joe's imprisonment, by the way, was due to fatally beating up the radio station manager, Arthur, for trying to blackmail Joe's wife Kitty. (He would renew Joe's contract only if Kitty was "nice" to him.) In an outrageous abuse of jurisprudence, the judge presiding over his trial questioned Little Pal regarding his dad's state of mind before the killing. The bigmouth brat's helpful testimony: "He said he was going to kill him dead!" Thanks, kid. Now go play in traffic. 

Killers love nothing more than
being forced to listen to maudlin
pop songs.

Unlike most fresh meat in prison, Joe doesn't get on with the others by providing drugs, but, rather, singing them a chin-up number, "Birdies Sing in Cages, Why Can't You?" Yeah, that's what the boys in gray would want to hear in real life, a third-rate TED Talk set to music. No way would they hold his face down in an unwashed toilet while taking turns being "nice" to him.

Once he's out of the slammer, Joe tracks Little Pal down to the boarding school Kitty has enrolled him in while she works for Robert Merrill (a surgeon, not the opera singer who was always on The Ed Sullivan Show.) After a brief reunion, Joe leaves, not noticing that Little Pal is following him through the busy city streets, where he gets mowed down by a jalopy. Considering that he was the ultimate cause of Joe's prison term, this would seem like just desserts.

"Who's that old guy putting the moves
on you all the time?"

While in the hospital, the kid is diagnosed with damage to his spine, nerves and vocal chords. You'd leave your kid in the hospital for a spell, right? Not Joe Powers. He carries Little Pal to Dr. Merrill, who has loved Kitty since he was "a young intern." Judging by his age, that would have made Kitty about six months old at the time.

Merrill offers to perform life-saving surgery for free if Joe gives up kid to Kitty. Otherwise, it'll cost $5,000. That must have been part of the 1929 version of the Hippocratic oath. (Little Pal's private school doesn't even notice that he's missing until Merrill calls them the following day. What the hell kind of medical and educational standards does this city have anyway?)

Taken aback by Merrill's questionable ethics, Joe swears to "rob every house in town" in order to pay another surgeon instead, which makes no sense whatsoever. But he soon has a change of heart, returning the kid to Merrill and his dangerous-looking X-ray machine. (It appears to have the ability to give cancer to people three floors below.) Little Pal can walk once more, but regains his power of speech only when hearing Joe singing "Little Pal" on a record, leading to a happy ending for the audience, who no longer has to watch the movie.

No microphone was needed for Jolson
to be heard over the airwaves.

It's been said that to truly appreciate Al Jolson, you had to have seen him live in concert. And during his upbeat numbers, that legendary to-the-rafters style is infectious, being the only times Jolson performs naturally. But no dramatic actor was he, especially during emotional scenes when his vocal chords quiver as if caught in a wind tunnel. Didn't anyone at Warners remember that Jolson was a star of Broadway musical comedies?

There are times, too, when he appears to be ad-libbing his lines, and not in a good way. When accused by Dr. Merrill of kidnapping Little Pal from school, Jolson replies, "Say, what's the idea? I came in to see about saving my boy's life, and you start beating around the bush!" Umm, yes, alright, have a seat...

Director Lloyd Bacon instructs Jolson
to believably sit still for two minutes.

Say it with Songs has an undeniably cheap look to it as well, with an outrageously phony painting of the Brooklyn Bridge standing in for the real thing being the worst of it. It was a strange way to treat Jolson, who saved the studio's bacon when bankruptcy loomed. After all, The Jazz Singer made movie history in 1927 as the first feature with singing and talking sequences. The following year, The Singing Fool, another part-talkie, immediately became the highest-grossing movie ever made (surpassed by Gone with the Wind 11 years later). 

"Alright, Jolie, enough
already!"

Say it with Songs tried to replicate The Singing Fool's success by bringing back Jolson's co-star, Davey Lee, as his son. The latter movie made "Sonny Boy" the biggest-selling record of the year, so, true to formula, Jolson warbles "Little Pal" over and over and over here. One wonders what this barely-out-of-diapers kid thought of a bombastic entertainer singing in his face like a cyclone all the time. 

Maybe Warner Bros. cynically thought that anything with Jolson's name on it would sell tickets. If so, they were wrong. Say it with Songs premiered at Warners' flagship theatre in Times Square, but was pulled after two days of negative reviews and bad business. While Jolson continued to flourish onstage, movie audiences didn't care much to hear him say it with songs or anything else for that matter.

Parental cruelty alert: Davey Lee retired from movies at his mother's request in 1930 in order for him to have a normal childhood, forcing him to give up a weekly salary of $30,000 (or about $428,000 in today's money). I got Davey's autograph at an Al Jolson centennial convention in in 1985. What was astonishing then was just meeting someone who had starred in movies with Al Jolson in the 1920s. Now, it's knowing that he was only three years older than I am now.  

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If you care, here's Al Jolson in Say it with Songs singing the romantically-titled "Used to You."

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 KILOBYTES

Before my daughter posts anything on Facebook, my wife repeats her favorite maxim about never writing anything you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of the New York Times. She never warned me, however, that anything I’d written would eventually appear on an anti-Semitic website without my knowing it.

While putting together an online résumé, I needed to find the links of some newspaper pieces I’d written. During a Google search, I was shocked to find my name on an unfamiliar site with the foreboding name of Jew Watch. Knowing full well the rabbit warren of craziness that the internet can be, I nevertheless couldn’t resist clicking the link to find out how I wound up at a place whose tolerance level puts the "mini" in "miniscule."

It took only a second – just long enough to notice the hammer and sickle in place of the “c” in the Jew Watch banner – to confirm my all too-obvious hunch. This discovery, however, lead to further questions. The page I was directed to was devoted to a lengthy biography of Al Jolson -- real name, we’re warned, Asa Yoelson, just so we don’t forget who we’re dealing with. What was a biography of a Jewish entertainer doing on an anti-Semitic site, and what did it have to do with me?

It was only when I scrolled down the page I realized the biography excerpted a couple of sentences from a 2008 magazine piece I’d written on celebrity endorsements in politics. Jolson, I had mentioned, appeared to be the first 20^th-century show business figure to actively campaign for a presidential candidate – in this case, Warren Harding. While factually accurate, the entire article was clearly written tongue-in-cheek, something you wouldn’t have realized from the way it was selectively quoted here. I doubt anyone was really “enthralled” by a song called “Harding, You’re the Man for Us” – outside of the candidate’s mistress, that is.

More disturbing, of course, was my name appearing anywhere near a site that claimed to be a “Scholarly Library of Facts about Domestic & Worldwide Zionist Criminality” – the capitalization of adjectives and nouns being the province of scholars, apparently. In addition to its predictable theories regarding 9/11, Hollywood, “banksters,” etc., there was a photo section called “Jewish Faces.” Debra Winger receives something of a pass here, with a caption under her photo informing us that she “looks like a mix, but we have no source.” Let’s be grateful they’re not passing along uncorroborated information!

Still, the comprehensive work put in by someone who asks “Where have all the Aryans gone?” was almost impressive. The cognitive dissonance necessary to write objective biographies of people you loathe – presumably in the spirit of “Know Your Enemy” -- while remaining true to your beliefs must be pretty agonizing.

Well, maybe not so much. It soon became clear that most of the biographies were copied word for word from Wikipedia, footnotes and all, without attribution. The rest were simply linked to their source –- again, Wikipedia. What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust a paranoid anti-Semite for original reporting?

Returning to Google, I discovered Wikipedia’s Jolson article, including my name in the footnotes, had been republished on several other sites unknown to me, including Radio Swiss Jazz, The Super Click, Darwin Central and something called My Greasy. Remind me to update my Linked In account.

It's a strange thing to find your name on sites you’ve never heard of. Stranger still when it's attached to one controlled by a fellow who, in another lifetime, would have been happy to use my relatives for target practice at Auschwitz. If there’s any consolation to be had, it’s that he has, last I checked, only 92 Facebook friends from a possible worldwide audience of 1.1 billion users. Justin Bieber, he isn’t.

As for the chance of my being quoted in some more outré sites in the future… well, as Al Jolson might have told me, “You ain't seen nothin' yet.” I just hope people Googling my name – if there are any – don’t come to some spurious conclusions by the company I appear to keep online. Like they say, you can’t choose your family or your cyberlinks.

Oh, and if Jew Watch’s creator is reading this – my father was Jewish but my mother was Catholic. Technically, this should be put me in the clear. I’d hate to see my photo on your “Jewish Faces” page unnecessarily. 

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