THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 74

 Anti-communism! Pro-New Deal! Capitalism! Civil Rights! The entirety of the 20th century in three movies and one TV show. 

FORGOTTEN COMMANDMENTS (1932): The amount of hypocrisy that went into the making of Forgotten Commandments is equal only to its mediocrity. The work of two directors (each probably had to poke the other to stay awake), Paramount's low-budget, anti-Commie screed is further cheapened by two reels of... well, let the opening credits explain: Glorified by Spectacular Episodes from CECIL B. DE MILLE's Epic "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS". By the way, that's the 1923 silent version. Without it, this thing would run crawl only 40 minutes.

Newlyweds Paul and Marya move to Moscow to attend med school. Being married, they're allowed less expensive lodgings: a dorm-like facility, where each side-by-side "apartment" is one room minus a ceiling. Prof. Marinoff takes a liking to Paul, as does his sweetie Anya. Not to worry -- Marinoff considers monogamy to be anti-revolutionary... until Anya seduces Paul, which drives Marya to divorce, and Marinoff himself to murder. Moral: When the boot's on the other foot, Reds turn green with jealousy. (As for DeMille's Ten Commandments footage, it brings to life the story of the Exodus told by an old Orthodox priest to a group of children, which lands him in front of a firing squad. He should have stuck with "Hansel and Gretel".)

Subtle as a Russian farm tractor, Forgotten Commandments' script ("Don't keep calling me 'darling'. It's bourgeoise!") is Reefer Madness without the reefer. It also shares the same non-qualities -- simple set-ups, the look of filmed rehearsals -- as similar quickies of the time. Nobody, other than John Carradine as a rabblerousing Marxist, puts any effort into their performance -- it's astonishing this dreck was produced by one of the major studios. But what really bugs me is that the sexual shenanigans frowned upon here were rampant in Hollywood as they are now. Worse, it would take another seven years for a major studio to make an anti-Nazi movie, having spent most of the decade running scripts past the German embassy for approval. The real forgotten commandment in 1930s Hollywood was Thou Shalt Cower Before Fascists.

BONUS POINTS: Marguerite Clark (Marya) and Irving Pichel (Marinoff) starred in Dracula's Daughter four years later. Gene Raymond (Paul) starred in the manic marionette melodrama I Am Suzanne! Edward van Sloane (as a surgeon) was Hollywood's go-to actor as medicos, while Harry Cording (as a cop) was the junkie doctor in Narcotic. That's my idea of an all-star cast. 

MOTHER'S HELPER (1933): People who think certain Hollywood folks kowtow to Donald Trump have never watched the studio-produced, pro-NRA shorts. These didn't just explain what Pres. Roosevelt was trying to accomplish, they lauded him as the second coming of Abe Lincoln while actively pushing his agenda to audiences who just wanted to escape real life for a couple of hours.

Unlike The Road is Open Again, there's no finger-snapping song to warble in Mother's Helper. This is just a three-minute sitcom featuring a husband explaining to his wife that he's home early because his boss has signed the NRA pledge. The husband's workhours have been split with new employees in order to provide more jobs to the Depression-hit unemployed. At least that's what I think he said. When you've got Fox Film's resident Swedish dialect comedian El Brendel doing the talking, you're lucky to figure out (or care about) half of what he's saying.

Professional flibbertigibbet Zasu Pitts is the housewife who tries just as hard as us to understand what this NRA business is all about, fluttering her fingers as if shaking with the D.T.'s. Or maybe, as a hardcore anti-FDR Republican in real life, being forced to recite dialogue like "Anything the president does is OK with me" made her shake with rage. A genuinely funny appearance by starlet Esther Muir as Brendel's new part-time wife -- his own idea of NRA -- wraps things up with an unexpected laugh. An interesting example of how show business worked with the government in order to push a president's agenda, Mother's Helper offers all kinds of possibilities for a contemporary, ICE-inspired short starring Dean Cain and Roseanne Barr.

BONUS POINTS: Esther Muir would gain lasting fame as Groucho Marx's would-be paramour in A Day at the Races. 

TAKE IT FROM HERE (1954): When a movie has only one showing, it's either a real
stinkeroo, something completely oddball (like It Never Happened ) or a promotional short made for a convention. Take it From Here falls in the last two categories, but people with a less worldly view of entertainment than me would drop it in the first as well. It's lonely being open to the strange and different.

Made for the 1954 Texaco gas station owners convention -- did you know such a thing existed? -- Take it From Here is a two-reel musical advising them how to promote their businesses. Such a premise sounds pretty D-U-L-L, which is why the Texaco folks jazzed things up with over a half-dozen dames with fishnet- stockinged gams. Set in the "Texa-Courtroom", Judge Harry Von Zell provides over (make that leers over) a "trial" where the women -- each representing a different mode of advertising -- musically "testify" how they help the gas stations keep the pumps pumping. I guess that still sounds pretty dull if you're not looking at the aforementioned fishnet-stockinged gams.

This is where Jimmy Durante and Donald O'Connor come in. Clad in their finest Texaco pump jockey uniforms, the two sing and clown their way through a pep talk aimed at the "jury" (i.e. conventioneers). Their message is essentially, Texaco dropped a fortune on a national advertising blitz, now hand out Texaco hats to your customers. Unlike similar ephemeral shorts, Take it From Here is in wonderful condition, looking as good as it did the day it was run for a room of drunken conventioneers who wanted more of the girls and less of the stars. 

BONUS POINTS: The classy unnamed singer representing radio --the only woman here in a fancy dress -- is a reminder of the weekly Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast sponsored by Texaco from 1940 to 2003. The conventioneers did not give crap one about her. 

HOLLYWOOD ROUNDTABLE (August 28, 1963): Following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
March on Washington, seven of its participants gathered in a TV studio to discuss the civil rights movement. Moderated by journalist David Schoenbrun, the roundtable consisted of Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Marlon Brando, and James Baldwin. 

That's one heck of a discussion group, and startling in so many ways -- not the least of which is Heston and Brando being on the same side of a liberal cause. Unlike similar broadcasts today where the idea is scoring points with meme-ready wisecracks, these folks are lowkey and thoughtful; Heston freely admits that his involvement in the civil rights movement was for too long merely cocktail party chatter. Such a thing would get you condemned today for being late to the game rather than being literally welcomed to the table.

The white guys have their own way of speaking. Heston tends to be brief, occasionally quoting the founding fathers. Mankiewicz is passionate, verging on angry, at how "the Negroes" have been treated. Brando is Brando, talking as if being paid by the word, wanting to be taken seriously as anything but an actor. If Schoenbrun hadn't interrupted him, Brando would have kept yakking all night.

Belafonte, Poitier, and Baldwin of course are the only ones who speak from
experience in regard to civil rights or lack thereof. They are serious; while likely appreciative of the white celebrities' support, the three appear to be thinking Why should I care what they have to say? They also make you sit up and listen; Baldwin's closing remarks would be considered shocking today. 

Hollywood Roundtable, filmed by the U.S. Information Agency (oh, how times have changed!) makes one yearn for the time when news and public affairs programs were civilized and made you think. Too bad a discussion about civil rights doesn't include any women, though.

BONUS POINTS: It's weirdly nostalgic seeing people on TV enveloped in cigarette and pipe smoke. 

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "HOLLYWOOD PARTY" (1934)

 No other movie represents the occasional downside of the old "assembly line" style of moviemaking and M-G-M's utter ineptitude in making zany comedies like Hollywood Party. What was planned as a straightforward all-star musical revue became, over the course of a year's creation, a ludicrous 68-minute musical comedy so disjointed that a new ending was tacked on explaining it was only a nightmare. Which most people considered it to be.

They look good even after their showers.

But you know what? I like Hollywood Party. In parts, anyway. By and large, it looks great, from James Wong Howe's classy cinematography to the massive art deco set where most of the movie takes place. One of the extravagant numbers features women taking showers, which seemed to be a legal requirement in those pre-code days. 

But then there's the story -- or, rather, idea for a story. Jimmy Durante has carved out a movie career as jungle hero Schnarzan. Having heard that audiences are tired of him fighting stuffed lions in his films, Durante throws a party in honor of the untrustworthy Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl, in his final movie, thank God), who claims to have captured a half-dozen real lions. Competing with Durante for the lions is another jungle movie hero, Liondora. 

This leaves only 63 more minutes to kill before the movie ends, so it's up to the comedians to save whatever is left. And by comedians, I'm not talking about the inexplicably popular Charles Butterworth and Eddie Quillan, two of the most one-note actors in movie history, who get way too much screentime. 

What's sad is that he's in better shape than me.

Outside of the unfortunate talkies he made with the alcoholic Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante is always welcome. The Schnarzan trailer we see in a theater scene (following another Metro picture, Queen Christina) is not only stupidly funny in a good way but shows why they're called trailers -- they used to trail the feature rather than appearing before them. Props, too, for looking like a real Metro trailer, too. 

The Stooges enjoy their last big budget movie.

If Durante isn't up your alley, wait roughly 35 minutes for a brief appearance by Ted Healey & The Three Stooges as, respectively, a photographer and autograph hounds. "The boys" aren't mentioned in the opening credits, so either M-G-M thought so little of them (the Stooges decamped to Columbia later that year) or their scene was hastily filmed after the credits were created. No need to describe what they do here -- you can probably figure it out yourself and still laugh when you see it.

Mickey's pissed that Disney loaned him out to
 be in this mess.

Mickey Mouse drops by to introduce a weird Technicolor Disney cartoon short about a war between chocolate soldiers and gingerbread men, all of whom are eventually crippled, blown to bits, or melt in the sun. No wonder Disney parceled this thing out to M-G-M. Even by my standards, it's a disturbing seven minutes.

Stan reminds Ollie to get this scene done in one 
take so they can get back to the Hal Roach 
studio, pronto.

Only one -- make that two -- comedians rivaled Mickey Mouse in popularity at the time, so top-billed Laurel & Hardy stroll in 10 minutes before the end of Hollywood Party to show us what comedies are supposed to be. Their tit-for-tat egg-smashing bit with Lupe Velez was probably dreamed up by Stan Laurel a half hour before filming, but is nevertheless the undisputed highlight of the movie, and further proof that he and Hardy were geniuses at turning the simplest bits into hilarious set pieces. Watch Ollie's face in close-up as one icky broken egg slides down the front of his pants and a second down the back, as he silently registers shock, disgust and, finally, relief, in just a matter of seconds. Brilliant. 

Nobody in this scene listed Hollywood Party 
on their resumes. 

For a musical with three songwriting teams, Hollywood Party doesn't have much in the way of good songs. One number, "Hello", is clearly "influenced" by Animal Crackers'  "Hooray for Captain Spaulding", while "I've Had my Moments", rips off the melody from "Dinner at Eight". You know Rodgers & Hart didn't knock themselves out writing the title theme, although the proto-rap song they gave Durante, "Reincarnation", is just bizarre enough to be amusing. Or vice-versa.

As for Hollywood Party's other creators, only two of its screenwriters are listed in the credits, which features none of the eight directors (nine, if you include Walt Disney) who cycled through it. You can tell what the studio itself thought of the movie by holding the world premiere over 2,000 miles away in Atlanta. 

While Hollywood Party isn't the utter disaster history has made it out to be, it makes sense that the biggest names in the movie, Mickey Mouse and Laurel & Hardy, had to be loaned to M-G-M for their appearances. Otherwise, there really wouldn't have been much of a party at all. 

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 A year before Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante, Jack Pearl, and Ted Healy & The Three Stooges appeared in another misguided M-G-M comedy, Meet the Baron, which you can read about here.

TV SHOW OF THE DAY: "THE SUNDAY SPECTACULAR: INSIDE BEVERLY HILLS" (1956)

Celebrities! They can laugh at themselves! They've got kids! They go to church! They're just like you! 

That seems to be the message of Inside Beverly Hills, a 1956 "spectacular" combining a testimonial dinner, live comedy sketches, musical numbers, and filmed interviews with celebrities outside their palatial homes. Originally airing in color, it exists now only in a faded black & white kinescope, the better to make the long-gone stars even more ghostly than they already are. (You want old? One of the dinner guests is Burton Green, who, in 1900, bought the land that became Beverly Hills after failing to find oil there.)

"Are you asleep yet, folks?"

Inside Beverly Hills is really a 90-minute effort in self-congratulation masked in phony humility. Human blank slate Art Linkletter is your unctuous host, both commending and joshing the citizens of Beverly Hills with not-bad jokes that would be funnier if delivered by Bob Hope, who made himself scarce for this broadcast. 

"I think we're missing somebody."

The occasional flashes of wit found throughout Inside Beverly Hills can be partly attributed to co-writer John Guedel, the creator and director of Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. Top-billed Groucho himself appears in a few segments, cracking wise about Beverly Hills and the cheap set standing in for it. Chico Marx turns up from time to time (once briefly with Groucho), while Harpo is "interviewed" on his lawn with his wife Susan and three of his kids. In typical Hollywood thinking, the producers had the freakin' Marx Brothers on their show in color and put only two of them on screen simultaneously. 

Peter Lawford has a premonition of what life
will be like after Sinatra throws him overboard.

Two sketches come off pretty well. Pre-Rat Packer Peter Lawford does an amusing bit of self-parody, sleeping with sunglasses, letting his wife run off with the gardener (Chico again), telephoning Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper with the same "exclusive" piece of gossip ("I awoke this afternoon at 3:15!"), and shooting a movie scene without getting out of bed. Later on, the great character actor Sheldon Leonard plays his typical shady character reminiscing about an ultimately futile experience trying to become a Beverly Hills resident, before moving to Pasadena, "where I belong." (I bet Pasadenans thought that was hilarious.)

The dancers earn their $50 the hard way.

Singers Tony Martin and Helen O'Connell handle the "special material" in typical 1950s
middle of the road style that was fast becoming a thing of the past. The most interesting musical number is a dance piece filmed on location on Wilshire Boulevard. Edited in such a way that it appears to be one long take, it must have been filmed very early on a Sunday, before the streets were filled with tourists, shoppers, and pickpockets. With only a handful of rubbernecking pedestrians and streets blocked to traffic, it almost seems to be the inspiration for the opening scene of LaLaLand, albeit on a much smaller scale.

James Stewart counts the days before the kids go
back to school and he can have fun again.

But people don't just break out in dance in Beverly Hills. They live real lives! And so Inside Beverly Hills takes time out to chat with the locals on their well-manicured lawns. The celebrities would be unknown to anyone born after 1960 -- Jimmy Durante, Sam Goldwyn, Harold Lloyd, dancer-turned-Sunday school teacher Eleanor Powell (spreading the Gospel to a bunch of very bored-looking children). Bob Cummings and James Stewart proudly show off their home-on-vacation military school sons, which allowed the actors to continue their extramarital philandering with fewer kids around. And if you're wondering where the ubiquitous George Jessel is, he's quite appropriately in a commercial for the nausea-treatment Tums.

And he still doesn't have a living wage.

For all its humor, Inside Beverly Hills's self-deprecation has the depth of a typical actor's intellect. The tuxedo-clad garbage man who opens and closes the show probably provided chuckles, yet rubbed into viewers' faces that they will never come close to attaining the wealth and status show business professionals enjoy. 

If you can afford it.

When Peter Lawford describes his nightmare ("I dreamt I was an ordinary person, making $20,000 a year, living in an ordinary house with perhaps 8, 10, 15 rooms"), it was at a time when the average annual income was $3,600, and kids had to double or triple up in their bedrooms. I know that's the joke, but for some of the savvier folks at home, the laughter must have featured a bitter aftertaste. 

Certainly, few of them enjoyed Inside Beverly Hills in its intended glory; the price of a color TV in 1956 ranged anywhere from $495 to $1,300. With only 150,000 of them in use that year (in a population of roughly 165-million), a good many of them could be found only -- where else? -- in Beverly Hills.

                                                                     ***************

THE EARLY SHOW

Good morning, good morning, good
morning, ugh.

 Thanks to my odd sleep cycle, lately I've been waking up as early as 4:30 a.m. Instead of wasting the pre-dawn hours on silly stuff like meditation or exercise, it's given me the chance to do something far more important: watch obscure movies and old TV shows.

Not just any obscure movies and TV shows, but those that nobody in their right mind (like my wife) would watch at any hour. That's the rebel in me. 

None of these are worth an individual write-up, but all deserve a mention, although not necessarily for good reasons. In alphabetical order:

BABO 73 (1964): Before Robert Downey, Jr., there was Robert Downey, Sr. Unlike his celebrated son, Downey pere was the writer/director of underground movies, a phrase that's just asking for trouble. His first, Babo 73, features all the traits of that genre: post-synched sound, non-linear storyline, sloppy camerawork, and alleged subversive humor, like an angry priest sexually assaulting a hitchhiker -- fortunately, offscreen.

Taylor Mead, not yet the Grady Sutton of Andy Warhol movies, plays President Sandy Studsbury. There's also a character named Chester Kittylitter. It's never a good sign when goofy names substitute for real jokes.

The "plot" appears to be about all the president's men creating a political doctrine for their boss. Much of the action takes place on a beach. Someone gets thrown in the water, but I forget who or why. 

That's all I can tell you; although Babo 73 is only an hour long, I pulled the plug after 30 minutes. Maybe you can tell me how it ends.

BONUS POINTS: Proving that just because it's on TCM doesn't mean it's worth watching.

BIG HOUSE, U.S.A. (1955): Ahh, this is more like it! Sociopath Ralph Meeker kidnaps a lost boy and holds him for ransom. When the kid accidentally dies, Meeker dumps the body down a canyon. Well, that wasn't part of the plan.

The police can't pin the kidnapping on him, so they throw him in the slammer for extortion. The leader of the big house's biggest gang hatches a big breakout, forcing Meeker to join them in recovering the hidden ransom money. Which is big.

You can smell the Dragnet influence throughout Big House, U.S.A., with an FBI agent's flat narration and location photography (Colorado instead of California). Ralph Meeker was an inspired choice to play the kidnapper, since his initially friendly good looks soon give way to his dead-behind-the-eyes life choices.

But the real stars are (left to right) Charles Bronson, William Talman, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Broderick Crawford -- without doubt the four ugliest actors ever to appear together in one movie.

It's awe-inspiring how there was a time Hollywood actually wanted guys with muggs like these to step in front of a camera; they're like Halloween masks come to life. Bronson, the youngest of the four and the only one in good physical shape, is shirtless 90% of the time. Women who were dragged to Big House, U.S.A. by their husbands or boyfriends needed something to look at. 

BONUS POINTS: An unexpectedly gruesome moment involving a blowtorch and a dead body. 

BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD (1933): No cliche goes untouched in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's obscure drama of three generations of a family vaudeville act. Jealousy, booze, success, failures, all ending with the grandson filming a dance number on a soundstage while grandpa dies on the sidelines. If only showbiz were really this exciting.

Extant prints of Broadway to Hollywood don't accurately represent its original release, which featured at least one Technicolor production number from the studio's unfinished 1929 musical-comedy revue The March of Time. The sequences remain, but in black and white. (M-G-M used its releases, mainly shorts, as dumping grounds for The March of Time outtakes for years.) 

Broadway to Hollywood is a wanna-be epic that crams in as many Metro contract players like young Mickey Rooney as possible for a scene or two before disappearing. (Jimmy Durante is onscreen for all of one minute!) As if the studio demanded they earn their salary that day, Moe and Curly of the Three Stooges briefly appear as clowns. 

Fully made-up and speaking in high voices with German accents, the Brothers Howard are initially difficult to tell apart. In fact, if you weren't already aware they were in it, you likely wouldn't even know it was them. They probably shot their scene in about an hour before returning to the loving slaps of Ted Healy. The ghost of Louis B. Mayer would be appalled that it's now Broadway to Hollywood's most -- make that only -- interesting scene.

BONUS POINTS: Unintended laughs when actors are filmed tapdancing in such a way that you know their feet belong to somebody else.

CELL 2455, DEATH ROW (1955): The best movie of the bunch, Cell 2455, Death Row is based on the autobiography of career criminal Caryl Chessman. Surprisingly lowkey, the movie begins with Chessman (renamed for reasons unknown as Whit Whittier) looking back on his life from prison as he awaits execution. 

His perfect childhood is ruined by a car accident that leaves his mother a cripple, gradually sending him on a criminal trajectory. In and out of prison, his crimes escalate until arrested for sexual assault and kidnapping -- a capital crime in California -- despite his victims not being able to agree on a description of their abductor. Chessman (or Whittier) uses his time on death row to study law, and winds up postponing his execution several times. 

The most impressive thing about Cell 2455, Death Row is its lack of grimy exploitation. While the movie never absolves Chessman of his crimes, it shows how literally a wrong turn can lead a good kid to a bad life. Willam Campbell gives Chessman just enough depth to make you understand why he became the cause du jour for many celebrities, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Steve Allen (shows you what being a good writer will do for a criminal). In real life, Chessman's luck ran out in 1960 when he finally kept his date with the hot squat. 

BONUS POINTS: A pre-Ben Casey Vince Edwards shows up in the final third as Chessman's wingman -- the only actor who looks familiar. That is, if you're my age. 

THE COMEDY HOUR (1951): Better known as The Colgate Comedy Hour, this early TV series reverted to a more generic title every fourth week when saddled with another sponsor. This particular episode, subtitled "Michael Todd's Revue", is hosted by Broadway legend Bobby Clark.

"Legend", that is, if you're over 100 years old. Otherwise, his surviving movie and TV appearances will either baffle or bug you, Clark being one of those stage actors who didn't translate to the screen very well.

Puffing a cigar, wearing his trademark painted-on glasses, outsized overcoat, and porkpie hat, Bobby Clark is a comedic creature from a different age. His motto seems to be, If it was funny once, it's funny forever. He was wrong.

Between Clark's wheezy jokes and the show's hoary musical numbers, this Comedy Hour doesn't seem like it will live up to its title -- except for two sets of guests. 

Australian siblings The Maxwells are a bizarre sloth-like duo wearing too-small suits and the expressions of clinical morons, whose act initially seems to consist solely of moving a pile of crates around as if drugged. The routine, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, starts to pay off when it turns into an unexpected acrobatic bit, which, thanks to them appearing under the influence of fentanyl, makes it look even more dangerous than it already is. Genuinely entertaining stuff.

The Comedy Hour's other comedy act is Willie, West and McGinty, whose career, going back to -- get this -- 1900, consisted of one, count 'em, one routine: three idiots trying to build a house. 

While certain details were added and subtracted over the years, the bit is essentially unchanged from the one audiences saw a half-century earlier. Slips, pratfalls, and Rube Goldberg-style gags are performed with atomic-clock perfection, with dialogue consisting of little more than the occasional "Hey!" Having done absolutely nothing else over the decades, they probably could have performed it blindfolded in a dark room. I think they're hilarious.

And if you're wondering how these guys were still able to pull it off when they started this act in the 19th century, that's easily explained. As each of them retired or died, they were replaced -- two of them by their sons. Over time, they went through seven members. So, the Willie, West & McGinty we see here aren't the same ones their original audiences saw, or who appeared in their only starring movie short, Plastered, in 1930. It's like how Saturday Night Live replaces its cast from time to time, until it's completely different. Just not as funny as these guys, who finally rang down the curtain around 1960. 

BONUS POINTS: Knowing that with some people, if it's funny once, it really is funny forever.

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Moe and Curly's scene from Broadway to Hollywood:

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT" (1932)

Depending on your view of the current White House resident, your first response to the title The Phantom President might be "If only!" You may even assume it's a horror movie. 

The Phantom President, instead, is a rather sophisticated musical that, 85 years after its original release, offers 21st-century viewers proof that corrupt, contemptuous politics is nothing new. A group of bureaucratic hacks, lead by Prof. Aikenhead, believes that the super-rich Theodore K. Blair would make a splendid president, despite him being a businessman with zero political experience and possessing the charm of lumpy mattress. Impossible!

On the verge of giving up, Aikenhead and his colleagues stumble upon Doc Varney, a charming, smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who is Blair's exact double. Varney is immediately enlisted into taking Blair's place on the campaign trail, with the understanding that he will disappear once Blair is elected. But fate -- and the scriptwriters -- have other plans in store for all involved.

Blair and his doppelganger -- or vice-versa.

The big attraction of The Phantom President in 1932 was its star, the legendary George M. Cohan. At age 54, Cohan was perhaps a decade past his prime as an entertainer -- yet anyone familiar with his biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy, will immediately recognize where James Cagney got his dance moves. 

He's not a bad actor, either, playing Blair and Varney with two distinct personalities, right down to the way they talk and move. It's rather confounding that Broadway's most famous song-and-dance man made three silent movies but just two talkies -- only one of which was a musical. (Remember, this is an industry that put Enrico Caruso in five silent movies.)

Especially after she finds out he's a conman. 

A strikingly cynical vibe runs throughout The Phantom President. When Blair doubts the validity of running an entertainer in place of the real thing, Aikenhead assures him, "Voters want a musical-comedy campaign." A shot of a horse's ass dissolves to a close-up of a platitudinous senator speaking at the convention. Felicia Hammond (Claudette Colbert), the woman Blair is in love with, prefers the fast-talking Varney, even after she finds out he's a conman.

Despite George M. Cohan having written some of the most popular stage musicals of his time, there's no way he could have come up with anything as sophisticated as The Phantom President's score, written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart during their brief spell in Hollywood before returning to the more worldly Broadway.

"And I'll build a wall around Manhattan!"

While Cohan was best known for flagwavers, Rodgers & Hart's centerpiece number here, "Blair for President," performed at the presidential convention, is a hilarious expose of American politics' art of being everything to everybody. Varney's sidekick Curly (Jimmy Durante) addresses New Englanders in a Down East accent, gives polygamy a thumbs-up to Utah's Mormons, and informs Harlem's delegates that Lennox Avenue will be the new U.S. capital under a Blair administration. (Six decades later, then-Governor Bill Clinton's promised a group of rabbis that he'd keep a glatt kosher White House if elected president in 1992. Nothing changes.)

You want modern? There's even a Times Square
Jumbotron 60 years before it really happened.

Rodgers & Hart's takedown of patriotism doesn't end there. Blair's number, "Someone Ought to Wave the Flag," is really about getting suckers to fork over money for his phony patent medicine. (Analogy alert!) Even the one "straight" romantic song, the treacly "Give Her a Kiss," is obviously a parody of love songs, to the point of birds and frogs singing the lyrics. (Typical of Paramount Pictures' comedies of the time, there are more surreal touches in The Phantom President than 500 M-G-M movies combined.)

And as for the climax... well, if America and its politics were anything like it's portrayed here, it's astonishing that anyone was elected president in 1932. 

All things considered then, The Phantom President would make a fine half of a double-bill with another 1932 release, the acerbic Washington Merry-Go-Round. But they'd probably be too sharp for today's audiences. For them, Alec Baldwin wearing a blonde wig is the height of cutting satire.

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MOVIES OF THE DAY: "WHAT! NO BEER?" (1933) AND "A SOLDIER'S PLAYTHING" (1930)

If anyone wants to see the outcome of genius denied, the notorious What! No Beer! provides the perfect tutorial. One of the top-drawer comedic actors in movies, Buster Keaton had forsaken independent production in 1928 to sign with MGM, believing that he would continue to make movies the way he always he had. Instead, he quickly found himself just another cog in a studio factory that had no understanding or appreciation of his style. Faster than you can say "Ars Gratia Artis," Keaton sank into morass of depression, divorce and drinking. And any Keaton fan watching his MGM features will ultimately do likewise. 

Having immersed myself in Keaton's silent movies in the early '70s, I was struck not only by his breathtaking physical comedy -- he once broke his neck without realizing it -- but his strangely-modern deadpan countenance. While optimistic contemporaries like Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were always ready with a smile, Keaton looked defeated even when triumphant. Watching his movies at a time when America was still reeling from Watergate and the Vietnam War, Keaton appeared to tap into a zeitgeist about 75 years before anyone knew what the hell that word meant.

Durante does MGM's bidding by finishing off
Keaton once and for all.

Once talkies arrived, MGM decided the best way to present Keaton was to put him into dialogue-heavy comedies. Make that "bad dialogue-heavy comedies." Because who would want to watch somebody just do stuff when they could hear him talk? Ultimately some studio genius got the bright idea of pairing him with MGM's other new hire, Jimmy Durante, for three movies, each worse than the one before it. Their final picture, What? No Beer?, was the bottle, as it were, that broke Keaton's back.


There's no point in recounting What! No Beer?'s story. Keaton and Durante play a couple of nitwits who become bootleggers during Prohibition's dying days -- that's all you need to know. What's sadly fascinating is how MGM deliberately placed Keaton in a situation that called for little of his comedic gifts, forcing him to simply feed lines to the bigmouthed Durante. Even worse, he plays straight to a trio of hobos-turned-brewers who play their scenes like a flashmob in a cemetery. (I wonder if their roles were originally intended for the Three Stooges, who were signed to MGM at the time.) It's like watching Edward Hopper having to paint generic billboards for Wonder Bread. It's nice he's getting a steady paycheck and all, but goddamn-mighty-damn it's a tragedy to watch.

While always a Durante fan, I nonetheless watched him more stonefaced than Keaton himself ever was. 

Run away, Buster, as fast as you can.

Playing against Keaton, he's the cinematic version of the schoolyard bully, completely overwhelming his helpless partner not with physical but verbal abuse. Only 37 but looking 50, the once-great Keaton is drunk -- I mean really drunk, not acting -- throughout What! No Beer?, slurring his words and and barely focusing his dark, haunted eyes. He gets a couple of chances at his physical comedy -- nobody can slide down a beer-slicked stairway like him -- but those moments only illuminate the sickening dismay that both we and Keaton find ourselves experiencing. It's the original version of Night of the Living Dead.

Gagman Keaton compares notes with the Marx
Brothers on how MGM destroyed their
careers.

To Keaton's horror, the worse his MGM movies got, the more money they made -- more, perhaps, than his good movies in the '20s. (Sometimes it isn't always a good thing to give the people what they want.) Shortly after What! No Beer?'s release, he was fired by MGM for insubordination, sending him spiraling into years of severe alcohol abuse. Ever wake up in Mexico with a woman you had no memory of marrying the previous day? Just another day in the life of Buster Keaton. In a typically vindictive move, MGM would later rehire him as an uncredited gagman at $100 a week. And while he lived another 33 years, What! No Beer? would be his final lead role in an American movie. Hooray for Hollywood, hunh?

A few years earlier, fellow movie comedian Harry Langdon found himself in a similar situation. Having come to movies from vaudeville far later than his contemporaries, he was soon compared favorably to Charles Chaplin. But after firing his writer/director Frank Capra -- a move which Capra never stopped bitching about until, and probably after, he died -- Langdon started to focus more on the dark, bizarre humor that fascinated him. (In Long Pants, Langdon, having fallen for a sexy temptress, spends the rest of the movie plotting to murder his fiance. It's a comedy.) By the end of 1928, he was for all intents and purposes washed-up. Langdon had been in movies for all of four years.

But in 1930, Warner Bros. cast him in a strong supporting role in the World War I comedy, A Soldier's Plaything. Nothing more than a loosely-connected series of comedic vignettes, the 59-minute feature is by no means a classic. A laid-back fan of early talkies might consider it "OK, nothing special" and leave it at that. However, compared to What! No Beer? (how sick are you of reading that title?), it's another Duck Soup. And it's due only to second-billed Harry Langdon.


Although their approach to comedy was different, Langdon and Keaton were similar in two key ways. Unlike the universally-beloved Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Langdon and Keaton even at their best -- especially at their best -- were acquired tastes. Too, their onscreen characters never seemed quite of this world; while Keaton was an unemotional cynic, Langdon was more like a confused seven year-old boy trapped in a grown-man's body. It's no surprise that Langdon and Keaton play better to contemporary audiences than they did to those in the 1920s.

Ben Lyon warns Harry Langdon
to stop stealing the movie from
underneath him.

A Soldier's Plaything allows Langdon to display both the childlike and bizarre sides of his personality. Unfortunately, so dependent is Langdon on his subtle reactions that describing his best scenes really doesn't do him justice. You need to see him mindlessly following orders as he marches through a window, into the general's office and smack into a wall. It's not enough to tell you that he tries wooing a beautiful French woman, only to discover that she's deaf. It's his impossible-to-describe stunned, babbling reaction, climaxed by hitting himself on the head with a bottle, that makes it laugh out loud hilarious and proof that he could have easily reignited his career in A's if given the right material, a sympathetic director and the chance to contribute to his role. 

Alas, like Keaton, Langdon was at the mercy of an industry that just didn't get him. Apart from the occasional supporting role in A-movies, he was relegated to low-budget B's and shorts, a far cry from the days when he was mentioned in the same breath as Chaplin and carried thousand-dollar bills in his wallet for spending money. And again like Keaton, Langdon made it through the lean years as a gagman, working with Laurel & Hardy at the Hal Roach Studios. While Langdon died in 1944, Keaton lived long enough to experience a late-in-life career resurgence thanks to TV and movie producers who let him do what he wanted, which was all he ever asked for.

Louis B. Mayer would be baffled that Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon silents continue to run at museums and film festivals. But they're strange. And they aren't classy like Metro pictures! So the next time you see a preview for a comedy that makes you wonder Who the hell thought this was a good idea and why did they pay this guy $20-million to make it?, say a prayer for the two otherworldly talents cut off at the knees in their prime by studios run by men whose allegiance to the bottom line was equaled only by their fear of genius.  Ars Gratia Quaestus.

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