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 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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MOVIES OF THE DAY: "CONQUEST OF THE AIR" (1936/1940) AND "VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER" (1943)

There was something in the air in the early 1940s -- Messerschmidts, primarily -- that must have caused studios on two different continents to release documentaries involving the history of flight in peace and war. From Britain came Conquest of the Air. Hollywood's contribution was Victory Through Air Power, a Walt Disney movie whose lasting fame is right up there with his other productions like Moon Pilot, Savage Sam and Nikki, Wild Dog of the North.

It's no secret that for many years -- oh let's just come out and say it: decades -- the UK film industry was far behind Hollywood's both technically and creatively. So Conquest of the Air -- originally released in 1936 but re-released in an expanded version four years later to cover the war with Germany -- doesn't differ much from something you'd have slept through in history class. Flat black & white cinematography, crude historical recreations, monotonous narration and hollow audio dubbed-in after the fact take up much of its 70-minute running time. (That some scenes are slightly better than others testifies to five directors being involved.) 

Oh yeah, that'll work.

The most fascinating fact Conquest of the Air presents is that there were a lot of idiots back in the pre-Renaissance day who thought that if they strapped on 50 pounds worth of phony wings and jumped off a tall building, they could fly. I mean a lot of idiots. Like generations worth. The only one who begged to differ was a budding Superman who thought a cape would do the trick. I think they're still scraping pieces of him off a piazza somewhere.

One odd directorial choice is keeping the face of the actor playing Leonardo DaVinci away from the camera at all times. Was the budget too low to afford a phony beard?

"Get-a your tootsi-frutsi ice cream!"

Then there's Laurence Olivier playing foppish hot-air balloonist Vincent Lunardi with the zaniest Italian accent this side of Henry Armetta. Olivier might have killed onstage in his salad days, but he ignored the "less is more" flag waving on the movie set. I mean, he makes Lionel Barrymore look like Warren Oates. On the other hand, with his two-minute cameo he's the only memorable actor in Conquest of the Air, so maybe he knew what he was doing. Attention must be paid and all that. 

"We should begin our descent
in approximately 144 hours."

Where Conquest of the Air really shines is the documentary footage of early flying machines. A weird contraption -- it looks like a Volkswagen Beetle -- spins over what appears to be Central Park, just waiting to be declared illegal by Mayor Bloomberg 75 years later. Interesting facts abound -- the narrator is astonished, for instance, that it was possible to fly from London to South Africa within a week. Today, it takes that long just to get through Security.

The footage of the Hindenburg explosion nicely illustrates, I'd say, the pros and cons of using hydrogen for fuel. (Although I think it was a conspiracy involving the Illuminati, the World Bank and the Fox Movietone Newsreel wanting an awesome exclusive.) British war planes are shown getting ready for battle while the narrator sadly warns us that peaceful usage for flying will be on the shelf for the duration. Winston Churchill reminds his fellow Brits that their war with Germany was going to be won by air power.  

Nobody had to tell that to Col. Billy Mitchell, who, in the 1920s, urged the U.S. Army to focus on air power in future combat and was court-martialed for his trouble. Russian-born-turned-naturalized-American Major Alexander DeSeversky was so impressed by Mitchell's arguments that he published Victory Through Air Power not long after our involvement in the War. Walt Disney, in turn, was so impressed by the book that he decided to make a feature-length adaptation. Today, the jokers who run the studio would ask, "Where are the vampires?"

As with Conquest of the Air, Victory Through Air Power opens with a history of Man's attempt to fly. Unfortunately, its silly animation appears to be aimed at your average mentally-challenged two year-old chihuahua. Stung by the failure of Fantasia three years earlier, Disney was now moving into the middle-of-the-road crap that had already neutered the once-anarchic Mickey Mouse.

So what follows couldn't be more of a contrast -- a live-action lecture by DeSeversky interspersed with chilling animation that brings to life the perils of underestimating the Axis' strength. As with Billy Mitchell, DeSeversky seemed to have been in possession of a crystal ball few took seriously. Among the very first words he speaks:

As soon as the airplanes that are already on the

drafting boards of all the warring nations take to the air, there will not

be a single space on the face of the earth immune to attack. [...]

The distinctions between soldiers and civilians will be erased. And I believe

that it is only a matter of time before we here in America will suffer

our share of civilian casualties.

Major DeSeversky explains it to you
with a really big globe.

Give that guy a Purple Heart for Prognostication. 9/11, drones, Syria, Chechnya -- it's all there in Technicolor. As obvious as it seems now, this was heady stuff in 1943. It makes you wonder who the Pentagon is ignoring today.

DeSeversky was blessed with the gift of taking rather complex military theories and presenting them in such a way that the average idiot (e.g., me) could understand. His soft Russian accent has just enough of a lulling effect to draw you into what he's saying without putting you to sleep -- except to audiences in 1943, but more on that later. 

Uh oh.

The animated sequences that accompany the lecture aptly bring to life the need for air power over the more conventional ground combat. Whether talking about Germany or Japan (Italy gets short shrift here, apparently being the kid who goes along with whatever his big brothers suggest), DeSeversky explains clearly how our goals will be reached with current warfare techniques vs new thinking. 

I prefer my Japanese octopus with
sticky rice.

The war with Japan, for example, would last until 1948 by merely hopscotching from base to base until finally reaching Tokyo. Or we could shorten the war via "long range air power" -- bigger planes with more fuel. The ultimate solution, he believed, would be building airbases in Alaska from which our bombers could take off. Brilliant thinker that he was, DeSeversky never considered a weapon like, oh, the atomic bomb to get the job done. 

Disney explains what an airplane is to
Major DeSeversky.

Typical for World War II animation, the bad guys are thoroughly raked over the coals in a way that would make today's p.c. crowd weep. There's something refreshing, even liberating, to see evil portrayed as evil. Now if someone would only do the same thing with Jeff Zucker, we'd be making progress.



Disney thought he was doing his patriotic bit by producing Victory Through Air Power. At the same time, he was first and foremost a businessman, which explains why he was hedging his bets when it came to promoting it. Posters, like the one a few paragraphs up, played up the war angle (albeit with the slogan, "There's a Thrill in The Air!", which would fit quite well with a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald operetta). 

If Louella says it's so, it's so.

Critics, recognizing something special, got behind Victory Through Air Power in a big way. Newspapers and magazines provided free promotion. Everything was in place for audiences to sit enraptured. Everything, that is, but the audiences.  Ultimately, all that Walt Disney had to show for his efforts were an Academy Award for Special Achievement and $400,000 in red ink. Coming on top of the almost $2,000,000 loss Fantasia suffered, Disney would later call Victory Through Air Power "a stupid thing to do."

It doesn't seem that way now. Victory Through Air Power is probably the most fascinating movie Disney ever made, a fine example of what live action and animation were capable of. It probably plays better on home video than it did on a big screen in the middle of the War when escapism, not a lecture on technological warfare, was the entertainment choice of the day. As with his other cinematic experiments, Disney put monetary considerations on the back burner, certain that audiences would appreciate what he was doing -- no matter how often he was proven wrong. 

The current Disney regime has certainly learned, though. Upcoming releases include Jungle Cruise (based on the Disneyland ride), Monsters University (a prequel to Monsters, Inc.) and National Treasure 3 (no explanation needed). Unseen and forgotten since its original 1943 release, Victory Through Air Power made its DVD debut in 2004 in a limited edition of 250,000 copies. Nine years later, unopened copies can still be found on Amazon. We're not going to be seeing Victory Through Air Power: The Drone Years any time soon.

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "FRIENDS AND LOVERS" (1931)

Friends and Lovers asks the question, "Can two men remain friends when they both love the same woman?" We all know the answer to that one, but the movie spends 68 minutes teasing us with the possibilities -- kind of the way the woman in question does.

Captain Geoffrey Roberts and Lieutenant Ned Nichols (not to be confused with bandleader Red Nichols) are stationed in India when they discover they've both had affairs with a married woman, Alva Sangrito. Roberts tries to settle matters by sending Nichols on a fatal mission, only to wuss out and rescue him at the last minute. Having decided to put Alva behind them, the two men unexpectedly meet her (and her new fiance) in London at the kind of weekend sleepover rich people indulge in.  Realizing that Alva and Roberts are still in love, Nichols takes a wild shot at him, only to miss. Alva, finally realizing she's caused enough trouble for these idiots, leaves the party. Roberts, at Nichols' urging, successfully wins her back.

"Yes, it's true, I'm
devilishly handsome."

Director Victor Schertzinger must have thought Friends and Lovers a work of art, his name appearing as an ostentatious signature on the credits. But it's the actors who make it worth a look. For Friends and Lovers marks the American movie debut of Laurence Olivier, whom RKO Radio Pictures anticipated would be the new Ronald Colman. Unfortunately for both the studio and Olivier, Colman wasn't going anywhere. Within a year or so, Olivier was back on the British stage where he belonged. (You can take that last remark any way you'd like.)

"Don't let the door
hit you on the way out, Larry!"

As Nichols, Olivier is outclassed by Adolphe Menjou's Rogers in more than just military ranking. There's a 17-year difference in their real-life ages, giving Menjou a leg up not only in the art of movie acting but in life itself. Opposite a foxy film veteran like Menjou, 24 year-old Olivier is alternately juvenile (which may be the point) and playing to the balcony of the Old Vic (which definitely isn't). If you weren't aware that he would some day be considered one of the the great actors of his time, his impact on you would range somewhere between zero and so what.

"Love to hate...
or hate to love?"

Viennese-born Erich von Stroheim as Alva's husband, Victor, is the cyanide-laced frosting on the cake. Promoted early in his career as "The Man You Love To Hate" (an honorific now owned by Ashton Kutcher), von Stroheim is terrific as the guy who's been forcing his wife to engage in extramarital affairs just so he can blackmail her lovers for money. The way he bemusedly catches Rogers and Alva in a lie that he's set up is wonderfully funny in an icky way. And when demanding £5,000 to keep the couple's fling quiet, Victor informs Rogers that he's already gone to the trouble of finding out where he banks.

"Thanks for lending me
your wife, buddy!"

The equally-bemused look on Menjou's face signals that we're in the company of two old pros -- both the characters and the actors themselves -- who appreciate each other's jaded world-weariness. (Von Stroheim's innocent defense, "Blackmail is such an ugly word," instantly created a cliche that would launch a thousand comedy sketches.)

This is similar to the
way my wife & I hang out
at home.

Victor, by the way, needs the money in order to indulge in his hobby, collecting porcelain -- the most fragile piece being his own wife, who can't even fight back when he whips her with a riding crop, leading their butler to fatally shoot him. I wish he'd accidentally shot the wife, because von Stroheim's icy presence is missed for the remainder of the movie. A truly underrated actor, von Stroheim was appreciated far more in Europe, to Hollywood's lasting shame.

You may remember the actress who plays Alva, Lily Damita, from a previous piece about the 1932 sex farce This is the Night. Damita's sex-kitten persona in that movie is all but negated here, as she apparently confuses languor for heartache. She must have been mighty hot in real life, because I still can't figure out why Errol Flynn married her, let alone why she's the object of desire by four sapheads in this movie, two of whom were willing to kill each other over her. I guess men weren't as choosy during the Depression.

The only actor to have
starred alongside
Laurence Olivier and
Wheeler & Woolsey.

A couple of supporting actors are worth mentioning, not so much for their talent as for just being in the movie. Hugh Herbert plays McNellis, Rogers' valet, with a singularly unconvincing Scottish accent. Herbert, best known as the rubber-faced character actor from a hundred or so Warner Brothers' comedies, seems weirdly out of place when sharing scenes with Laurence Olivier. Your brain reacts to it as it would to, say, Shemp Howard playing opposite Max von Sydow: This makes no sense whatsoever.

"I was born in 1858.
Have some respect, sir!"

As the host of the sleepover, Frederic Kerr trots out his old codger routine seen in Frankenstein the same year. All's that missing is the fez. I bring him up only because he was 72 at the time -- and how often do you see actors who were born 155 years ago?

"Are you convinced I'm wonderful?"     

Watching a somewhat-better-than-average melodrama like Friends and Lovers convinced me that you can pull any Adolphe Menjou role off the shelf and never find a bad performance. His style might not have differed much from role to role -- Menjou doesn't even attempt a British accent in Friends and Lovers, his crisp diction being enough -- but no matter the genre, he was consistently good, occasionally great, always convincing.

"Oui! I am, how you say,
un grand hambone!"

In movies, Laurence Olivier, was inconsistently great, often histrionic, not always convincing. (He couldn't have bettered the job done by Menjou as the despicable martinet in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.) Check out The 49th Parallel some time, where his French-Canadian trapper (left) could be substituted for Swift's Premium Ham in your grocery's meat section. For every movie like The Entertainer -- brilliant, a role in which Olivier really loses himself -- there's The Boys from Brazil, The Betsy, The Jazz Singer ("I haff no son!"), Inchon... And, of course, the legendary Polaroid commercials for which he was paid the princely sum of one million dollars. Having coveted the dough more than his reputation, it was one of his more credible jobs.
 
But none of that matters in a piece of sophisticated fluff like Friends and Lovers. Because in real life, Roberts wouldn't have saved Nichols back in India, and Nichols would've shot Roberts through the head at the sleepover. Alva, in turn, would've stayed with her fiance, just to make the survivor that much more miserable. And no amount of great acting would change that.

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