THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 62

Forty-six years separate the oldest and newest movies here, bookended by a silent version of a classic stage play and a semi-update of a classic novel. The fans of the play and the book would object to them. Too damn bad.

GHOSTS (1915): It helps to have a rough idea of what Hendrik Ibsen's groundbreaking play Ghosts is about. Otherwise, you'd think the "Inherited Trait" mentioned in one of the intertitles was insanity brought about by too much partying rather than syphilis. 

Capt. Alving's marriage to the wealthy Helen Arling doesn't prevent him from continuing his roue ways, even at his wedding reception. As time passes, his behavior worsens, even urging his eight-year-old son Oswald to knock back a shot of whiskey. Helen ships Oswald to boarding school, where he becomes a renowned artist... who keeps rubbing the back of his neck because that's apparently an effect of the "Inherited Trait". It also drives him to go off his nut, burn down a church and eventually take poison. Well, that's what syphilis a sore neck will do to you.

Wisecracks more or less aside, Ghosts at least tries to get across the idea of an STD, while definitely keeping the incest subplot of the story, as Oswald falls in love (and almost marrying) the woman he doesn't realize is his half-sister. His real father, of course, sired her out of wedlock -- which comes as a surprise to the guy who thought he was her father. Just why the family doctor knew all this but never told anybody until it was almost too late proves he should have lost his license to practice medicine. Or he just wanted to give Ghosts an excuse to run more than three reels.

Controversial dramas made in 1915 aren't known for subtlety, but Henry B. Walthall (Beggars in Ermine) is quite good as Alving father and son; his climactic nervous/psychological breakdown is remarkably effective and kind of scary. If you cut Ghosts some slack, it's not difficult to understand why it was considered a powerful, adult movie in its day, even if it cuts corners. Watch for Erich von Stroheim in a bit part in the boarding school, too.

BONUS POINTS: Following the opening credits, somebody named Karl Fromes poses as Hendrik Ibsen rather stiffly. Maybe he had a sore neck.

JULIUS SIZZER (1931): Do you remember a comedian named Benny Rubin? He was the go-to actor if you needed an old guy, maybe running a pawn shop or complaining about kids these days. Rarely explicitly Jewish, his character came close enough to give you the general idea.

Not so in the early days of sound, when Rubin's "gift" for Yiddish accents, slangs, and malapropisms came to the fore in many low-budget two-reelers for the smaller studios like RKO Pathe, which released the gangster parody Julius Sizzer. Here, Rubin plays crime boss Liddle Sizzer (you get the joke, right?) and his younger brother, the goodhearted Julius. The "plot", if you can call it that, involves Liddle trying to find the guy who took a shot at him, while he tries to keep Julius, just off the boat from Russia, away from the underworld.

There's very liddle -- excuse me, little -- in Julius Sizzer that would rouse even a smile today. Not that the Yiddish stuff is offensive. In fact, that's the only thing that makes it, and Rubin's other pre-code shorts, almost interesting. No, it's the constant use of the Yiddish accent attempting to make mediocre jokes and puns that's offensive, even if it is fascinating to view a kind of humor that feels as ancient as the Torah. (Liddle Sizzer's weapon of choice is little scissors. Oy vey!). Strictly for undemanding fans of early talkie comedies and historians looking for grant money in order to write seriously about this kind of stuff. 

BONUS POINTS: As often with movies like these, the fascination with Julius Sizzer comes when it inadvertently calls attention to itself as a movie, such as the ambient sound of an airplane flying overhead, a couple of brief moments when it goes out of focus, and the microphone being a little too far from the actors during wide shots.

YOU AND ME (1938): Give credit to director Fritz Lang for putting every genre except Westerns into You and Me: romcom, drama, gangster, comedy, German Expressionism, a touch of leftist polemics -- even Kurt Weill gets into the mix with a couple of songs. Its poor box office made sure there'll never be another movie quite like it again. But it was fun while it lasted (for 85 minutes)!

Five years after their pre-code Pick Up, Sylvia Sidney and George Raft were reteamed, this time as Helen Roberts and Joe Dennis, employees at a department store. Joe, like many of the workers, is an ex-con given a second chance by his boss. Helen is aware of Joe's past but still wants to marry him. But she's hiding a secret from her past, one that derails their marriage, and drives Joe back into a life of crime. 

You and Me's multi-genre hopscotch is dizzying. It begins with an anti-capitalist number, before calming down into your average love story, before whiplashing into laughs, punches, guns, threats, a gauzy recreation of the song a nightclub chanteuse warbles, a bizarre prison fantasy/flashback recounted in rhythm and rhyme by the store's ex-cons... It's all very strange (and strangely entertaining), with camera angles and lighting in the manner of Lang's 1920s German productions. Ergo, it shouldn't have been a surprise that Depression-era moviegoers wanted something a little more accessible to drop their nickels on. 

Sylvia Sidney is nothing less than wonderful as the lovestruck Helen -- she can go from thrilled to despondent without breaking a sweat -- while George Raft is his usual cigar-store Indian self, made even more wooden in comparison by a lively supporting cast, including 28-year-old Robert Cummings, playing ex-cons. I think Raft's most interesting moment was likely off-screen, as he pretended to understand what the heck kind of movie You and Me was.

BONUS POINTS: It's also the only film where a group of criminals are literally taught a lesson (in math).

CASH ON DEMAND (1961): The next time your relatives drop by uninvited for Yuletide cheer,
tell them they're going to watch an update of A Christmas Carol. Then run Cash on Demand. It won't be what they were expecting, but it'll be a nice change from the hundredth screening of the real thing. That is, if they take their holiday fun with nerve wracking suspense and threats of violence. 

Peter Cushing, Hammer Studios' legendary horror mainstay, is the mousy yet Scrooge-like bank manager Harry Fordyce. Two days before Christmas, his ice-cold demeanor is shattered when forced to help rob his bank by a charming criminal posing as an insurance representative. If they don't pull off the heist within the allotted time of 45 minutes, Harry's wife will be zapped by two electrodes attached to her skull. And a happy new year!

When I call Cash on Demand nerve wracking, I'm not kidding, bub. The movie, playing out in real times, continually racks up tension until, as with Double Door, you feel like screaming at your TV. Cushing, detestable for the first several minutes, gradually becomes unexpectedly sympathetic, thanks to Andre Morell's eerily charming role as the robber. His psychological needling of Fordyce brings out, perhaps for the first time ever, the bank manager's humanity. To describe more would be unfair to first-time viewers; catch it next December, as it seems to be one of TCM's holiday favorites. Just be sure to have a glass of strong eggnog on hand to steady yourself.

BONUS POINTS: Fordyce's put-upon assistant is played by Richard Vernon, the disgruntled train passenger who shuts off Ringo's transistor radio in A Hard Day's Night.

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THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 37

 

Two weeks of the bachelor life while the wife was away in Vancouver and a retreat (from me?) offered lots of opportunities to catch up on Blu-Rays ordered but not yet seen and movies on YouTube I'd either never watched or heard of. Just the thing to distract from a New York heatwave.

THE TELLTALE HEART (1928): 

OK, you know the story, right? A whacked-out guy who's killed and buried an old man under the floorboards of the house? Manages to fool a couple of investigators only to give the game away by "hearing" the heartbeat of the dead man beneath his feet? And, like everything Poe wrote, is almost impossible to believe was published in the 1840s?

There have been over a dozen film adaptations of The Telltale Heart, ranging from eight minutes to feature-length. And while the 1941 short directed by Jules Dassin is still startling -- especially for an MGM picture -- this silent two-reeler was the earliest and most unusual for its time. Directors Charles Klein and Leon Shamroy must have viewed every available German Expressionist film before embarking on this project. Tilted walls and doors, oddly-shaped furniture, the word KILL projected in squiggly lines over the lead character, the investigators speaking moving their mouths identically and simultaneously, this Telltale Heart was likely meant for the art-houses and film clubs attended strictly by the aficionados de film who wouldn't have known a Laurel from a Hardy.

The acting from Otto Matieson (as the killer) and William Heford and Hans Feurberg is, to be expected, highly-stylized, further creating a sense of dread and madness. Other than being a really interesting production, The Telltale Heart is one of the rare examples of silent American movies that, instead of pandering to audiences, actually brought them to a different level. It wouldn't have hurt to run it at the local Bijou before the latest Tom Mix western. Might have even been a good thing for the popcorn-munching kiddies.

BONUS POINTS: Otto Matieson played Dr. Joel Cairo in the original 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon. Co-director Leon Shamroy would go on to be the cinematographer (and later, director of cinematography) for over 100 movies, including Cleopatra, The Agony and the Ecstasy, South Pacific, and Snow White and The Three Stooges.

THE BIG TRAIL (1930): For "The Most Important Picture Ever Produced", The Big
Trail doesn't offer much difference from other major Westerns of the day as far as story is concerned -- it's your typical go-west drama featuring deserts, snowstorms, and murder. What definitely separates it from any movie of its day was being shot in the new 70mm Grandeur film process with hundreds of actors, extras, horses, cows, covered wagons... and, oh yes, 23 year-old John Wayne in his first starring role.

Even for a movie nut like me, a two-hour movie from 1930 almost promises to be something of a slog -- it takes a very full half-hour for the wagons to get moving, as characters are introduced, re-introduced, and re-re-introduced. The dialog tends get barked more often than spoken, with pauses adding to the film's length. But boy, does it look beautiful; aside from the occasional thin vertical scratches, the restoration job done on The Big Trail is pretty much perfect, giving a great idea of how it looked in the two theaters able to run it in 70mm at the time. (Each scene was also shot in 35mm, as were -- get this -- the four foreign language versions with different lead actors, all over the course of only four months. The budget was $1.25-million, or roughly $21-million in 2024 -- and still cheap at that.)

Watching a genuine, nearly century-old widescreen production, filmed entirely on location in six states, is remarkable and damn near uncanny. What's also uncanny is how annoying Fox Film's resident Swedish dialect comedian El Brendle can be as "comedy relief". The Big Trail could have been 20 minutes shorter without his endless "yackass" and "yumpin' yimminy" routines. 

But what of the barely out of his teens John Wayne? If you like him already, you'll like him here. If you never liked him, you'll at least be stunned by his movie-star handsome looks, decades before trucks of Chesterfields and barrels of Old Crow ravaged him. His delivery is exactly what you expect, only younger. What you don't expect is how is character, trapper Breck Coleman, is a friend to "the Injuns", preferring their company to that of whites. No matter what you think of John Wayne or Westerns in general, The Big Trail is one of those groundbreaking movies that you should see once, if only because, well, there was a time when a movie looked kind of like what you see now, and John Wayne hung out with Injuns.

BONUS POINTS: The Big Trail's original exit music remains on Blu-Ray and its occasional TCM broadcast.

HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950): A-list director Fritz Lang decamped to low-brow Republic Studios for a drama that mixes the worst sides of writers and family. After turn-of-the-20th-century author Stephen Byrne accidentally(?) kills his maid, he guilt-trips his gimpy older brother John into dumping the body into a river. As news of the maid's "disappearance" makes the news, Stephen is delighted to see the sales of his latest book rise, inspiring him to write a new novel about the real crime. Even better, once the body turns up, the locals believe big brother John is the murderer, giving Stephen the idea of arranging the guy's "suicide" to "prove" his guilt. And as long as he's at it, Stephen might as well strangle his own wife to death, too, because it would make a terrific climax to his book. But not even the cleverest writer can always make that kind of thing work.

From House by the River's opening moments, you know Louis Hayward's characterization of Stephen Byrne is going to be a quietly nasty one, gradually growing during its 90 minutes until all you want is for him to disappear from this earth, the more painful the better. I'm not quite familiar with Hayward's oeuvre, but this one performance alone is impressive enough to keep in one's memory. Just how much of it is strictly his own talent or brought out by Fritz Lang is not for me to say. All I know is, well, this is a Fritz Lang movie to the core. And with not necessarily well-remembered co-stars Lee Bowman (John Byrne) and Jane Wyatt (Stephen's wife Marjorie) doing first-rate work -- hell, even Dorothy Gaunt as the short-lived maid Emily has real presence -- makes me believe Lang knew exactly how to get the best out of actors. 

Lang was also smart enough to cast plenty of interesting, often familiar character actors in supporting roles, including Peter Brocco as the one-eyed coroner; Jody Gilbert as John's love-starved, frog-faced housekeeper; and Katheen Freeman as a giddy family friend. House by the River is not the easiest place to visit but is nevertheless worth dropping by just to see how easily a sociopath can manipulate neighbors and so-called loved ones alike. The only distraction is how the South African-born Louis Hayward resembles Desi Arnaz at certain angles. Babaloo!

BONUS POINTS: Paul Brocco's eyeglasses have one dark lens, evoking Fritz Lang, who wore a patch over one eye and a monocle over the other. 

THE ENFORCER (1951): The boys in the Warner Bros. publicity department must have been
aware that their studio's number one star was aging fast. Although Humphrey Bogart had entered the bowtie stage of his career, the posters for The Enforcer didn't just picture him with his '40s neckwear, his face was airbrushed to within an inch of Casablanca. 

And while Bogie is his usual tough guy persona, as D.A. Martin Ferguson he's definitely on the side of the righteous as he tries to bring down a ring of hitmen-for-hire.  If you didn't see the original trailer, you wouldn't even know who the enforcer is supposed to be -- the D.A. or the killers' ringleader.

The hitmen surrounding Bogart in The Enforcer are some of the most striking-looking character actors of the day, including the least-expected hitman ever, Zero Mostel, looking well over a decade than his 36 years. If you're used to Mostel as a comedian-par-excellence, his performance as Big Babe Lazick is a real stunner. More of a wannabe murderer than the real thing, Lazick is just a petty criminal trying to earn an extra buck for his wife and son. Others in this real rat pack are guys you've seen somewhere even if you're not sure where, like Ted de Corsia and Michael Tolan, the only one who doesn't look like he would kill your baby for crying. 

But the real scene-stealer is the most low-key, the great Everett Sloane as the ringleader who dreamt up the brilliant idea of hiring killers who have absolutely no connection to the victims in order to throw the police off their trail. The Enforcer has so many memorable actors that at times Bogart seems to be a supporting player in his own movie. Yet his final decade of movies gave Bogart a different, often deeper side; too, if you watch them in order there's a genuine poignancy as he seems to be gradually dying before your eyes -- which, frankly, he is -- but always putting up a fight. Even if he doesn't exactly run the board in The Enforcer, Bogart is, as always, a real screen presence.

BONUS POINTS: The only movie where a potential victim is warned off the streets by Humphrey Bogart speaking over a record store loudspeaker. I don't care how serious it's supposed to be, it's mirth-provoking as heck.

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