THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 61

 Two features and one short from the early 1930s, and one game show from the 1950s. You've never heard of these, and will likely never see them. That's what I'm here for.

THE HOT HEIRESS (1931): Just another of those pictures where a construction worker accidentally lets a hot
rivet go flying through a rich woman's bedroom window, setting a fire... in their hearts! Can they overlook their class differences in order to build a path to the altar? Or will the girder of love collapse under the strain of disapproving friends and family? 

It took three days to make it through this 79-minute musical comedy, and even then, it was strictly for historical reasons. The Hot Heiress was the first movie with a score by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart and a script by their longtime Broadway collaborator Herbert Fields. And while they were played up in the big time in the original trailer, the result is Blah City. There isn't one genuinely funny piece of dialogue to be found here, and as for the score, the most memorable song is titled "Nobody Loves a Riveter but His Mother". This, from the duo who wrote "My Funny Valentine", "Isn't it Romantic?" and "Where or When." As with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Once in a Blue Moon, there's something about the movie industry that can bring out the worst in the most talented people. (Rodgers & Hart would redeem themselves two years later with their score for the brilliant Paramount musical Love Me Tonight.)

Another bit of interest is The Hot Heiress was made at a time when audiences were sick of musicals that opened on an almost weekly basis since 1929. Many of them wound up being released after the numbers were left on the cutting room floor. The literally spotty condition of two of The Hot Heiress's three songs suggest the same thing happened here and were only put back when it was eventually sold to television in the 1950s. The one number that appeared to make it to its original release? That ridiculous riveter/mother song. If you're interested, you can catch it here following the credits. Don't be surprised if you find yourself humming it to yourself for the next day or two, whether you want to or not.

BONUS POINTS: Ben Lyons, the leading man, was briefly a studio exec at 20th Century-Fox in the 1940s, when he discovered Norma Jean Mortenson and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

GUILTY HANDS (1931): If you watch just one great Lionel Barrymore movie (trust me, I know what you're thinking), Guilty Hands
can't be beat. A decade away from his wheelchair-bound, thunder-and-lightning, batten-down-the-hatches delivery, he proves himself to be the equal of his brother John, and superior to most other movie actors of his time. In a mere 69 minutes, Lionel runs the gamut of emotions, from cynical, loving, philosophical, and murderous, never once making the wrong move. 

The set-up of Guilty Hands is ripe for drama. Former D.A.-turned-defense attorney Richard Grant is appalled that his daughter is going to marry his client, the debauched Gordon Rich. Fully aware of Rich's sordid love life -- including a 16-year-old girl who jumped out of his 24th-floor apartment -- Grant promises that he will commit the perfect murder in order to prevent the wedding. Grant, in turn, swears to return from the dead to exact revenge. Both men succeed, without the help of anything other than a clever idea and simple science respectively.

There's a solid supporting cast to be found in Guilty Hands, including Alan Mowbray as the foul Gordon Rich who gets what's coming to him; Kay Francis as the sidepiece who sticks with him during his constant philandering; and Madge Evans as Grant's young, innocent daughter Barbara, who's dazzled by her libertine fiancé. (Her playful relationship with her dad gives one pause today, as it occasionally appears to border on incestuous.)  With plenty of pre-code situations and dialogue (one wonders what Grant has in mind when warning Barbara that her wedding night to Rich will be "a horror" she'll never be able to shake), and, of course, Lionel Barrymore's surprisingly natural performance, Guilty Hands is one more obscure early talkie that needs to be rediscovered.

BONUS POINTS: In no other film does Lionel look exactly like John from scene to scene.

BOO (1932): Following 

a disgusting dinner of lobster and a glass of milk, a dope falls asleep reading Dracula, leading to nightmares accompanied by a "funny" narrator. When things wrap 10 minutes later, you could swear you just had a nightmarish experience. 

Universal Studios' Boo

anticipates the 1963 TV series Fractured Flickers by using clips from other movies while dubbing in silly narration ("He better keep away from the casket, or he'll be coughin'" is just one of a dozen or so puns we're forced to listen to.) It's kind of surprising that Universal allowed Frankenstein to be openly mocked here, an act that strikes me as sacrilegious. Oddly, instead of clips from Bela Lugosi's Dracula, Boo features Nosferatu, the 1922 German version of the story, which few Americans had seen up to that time. 

What gives Boo interest today is that it features two minutes from the long-lost 1930 horror movie The Cat Creeps. (Last month, seven more minutes were discovered.) Of course, its dialog here is obliterated by the irritating narrator, making it an even more frustrating watch. To those of us who went to college in the '70s, Boo dredges up memories of "midnight shows" of wacky shorts and TV clips made hilarious under influences legal and otherwise, but tedious when older and sober.

BONUS POINTS: In its defense, Boo seems like a parody of the similar MGM shorts produced and narrated by Pete Smith. If you don't know who he is, consider yourself lucky.

LAUGH LINE (4/16/1959): 

The obscure game show Laugh Line's concept is pretty simple. Viewers at home sent in descriptions of New Yorker-style cartoons which were re-created by actors.  A panel of comedians then re-arranged the actors and provided a new caption. Get ready to laugh, America!

A show like this depends on quick wits and a lot of luck to put it over. Laugh Line's merry-makers are Orson Bean, Dorothy Loudon, and Mike Nichols & Elaine May, all of whom are enveloped in a near-constant cloud of cigarette smoke. While talk-show stalwarts Bean and Loudon are at home in this setting, Nichols & May seem like, well, sophisticated comedians stuck on a game show featuring commercials for aspirin and ingrown toenail medicine -- the kind of thing they parodied in their nightclub act. While Laugh Line puts their improv experience to good use -- Nichols comes up with a funny idea for one of the "cartoons" immediately -- I couldn't help but think he and May were doing this strictly for the money. And who could blame them? 

Presiding over the hoped-for shenanigans is Dick Van Dyke, in one of the many, many pre-sitcom TV series he hosted in the 1950s, and that few people are alive to remember (other than Elaine May and Van Dyke himself). As he was on Mother's Day, Van Dyke is silly and non-threatening, as is Laugh Line itself. There are some funny moments -- it gets better as it goes along -- but not enough for it to have lasted more than two months. The commercials are fun, however. 

BONUS POINTS: Within a year of Laugh Line, Dick Van Dyke and Nichols & May would become Broadway stars in Bye Bye Birdie and An Evening with... respectively.  A year later, Orson Bean starred in the stage musical Subways are for Sleeping. A year after that, Nichols would direct Dorothy Loudon in the off-Broadway show The World of Jules Feiffer. They don't make game show panelists like that anymore.

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THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 50

 

BROKEN LULLABY (1932): Paul Renard, a French veteran of World War I, is haunted by killing German soldier Walter Holderlin during combat. In an attempt to ease his guilt, Renard he visits the victim's bereaved family -- and Walter's former fiancée Elsa -- intending to admit he was responsible. Unable to bring himself to tell the truth, Paul tells them instead that he and Walter were friends in pre-war Paris. Herr Holderlin's hatred toward France gradually melts, while his wife finally finds joy in life once and more. And as Paul is accepted as part of the family -- and falls in love with Elsa -- he finds himself more tortured than ever by withholding his secret.

A 180-degree change from the usual frothy comedies directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby is an anti-war drama forcing the audience to understand the pain suffered by both sides of war. (One shot of a veteran's parade has the camera placed under the amputated leg of a soldier -- one of the most startling moments in a 1930s picture.) And as Herr Holderin (Lionel Barrymore in a sterling performance) gradually recognizes his generation's responsibility for sending its sons to their deaths, his own guilt-ridden outburst to his French-hating friends could have been written today. No doubt Broken Lullaby was one of the more mature, insightful dramas of 1932, with a message that still resonates over time.

Unfortunately, the movie is nearly derailed by Phillips Holmes as the tortured Paul Renard. Haunted -- perhaps going mad -- by killing the German soldier, Holmes' performance is out of a 1910 silent melodrama, when over-emoting was considered high drama. Contemporary audiences who might otherwise take to Broken Lullaby's message likely will find Holmes off-putting at best, laughable at worst. Why Ernst Lubitsch -- an expert at subtlety and sophistication -- encouraged Holmes' scenery-chewing is a mystery. Nevertheless, just for its unusual story (and poignant finale), Broken Lullaby is deserving of one go-round. Just try not to be distracted by Phillips Holmes' histrionics -- or occasional resemblance to Timothee Chalamet.

BONUS POINTS: The flashback to the scene in a foxhole where Renard finishes signing Walter's final letter home by holding the dead soldier's bloody hand. Unforgettable, tragic, and gruesome all at once.

THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE (1933): Otto Kruger does his best Warren
William/Ricardo Cortez mash-up as the brilliant, womanizing, day-drinking lawyer Kent Berringer, who's never seen a criminal he didn't defend or a dame he couldn't deflower. His debauchery hits a wall when pure-at-heart Doris Worthing tries hiring him to defend her father for murdering her stepmother -- who happens to be Kent's ex-wife. The shock sends him on an alcoholic spree leading to his disbarment. Kent makes it his mission to find Tony Perez, the malefactor he believes really offed his ex.

The Women in His Life has everything one wants in a pre-code picture: a fast-pace; racy dialogue; pre-marital sex; and a general disdain for morality. There's also plenty for the eye, like beautiful art deco sets, and Kruger's fabulous tailored suits, provided by MGM's wardrobe department. I've seen plenty of these lush early '30s movies, and nobody looks as good as Kruger does here. I would kill for this stuff. And he'd defend me in court!

But Kruger is just one actor that makes The Women in His Life so entertaining for early talkie fanatics. From the very beginning, when the camera tracks down a row of busy telephone operators to the usual friends, lovers and suspects, there are faces more welcome than those of your own family. You know instantly upon seeing their names in the credits the characters they're going to play and how they're going to do it. In addition to Otto Kruger (far left), there's Roscoe Karnes as Kent's wisecracking assistant Lester (far right), C. Henry Gordon as oily criminal Tony Perez (in the chair), and Una Merkel as Kent's smartass secretary Simmy Simmons (not seen in the still). In a world spinning out of control, The Women in His Life makes for a comforting respite.

BONUS POINTS: In what appears to be a real copy of Variety, the front-page headline reads NUDIES EYE STAGE COIN. This could mean strippers wanting better pay, or low-budget, adult-only independent movies hoping to charge Broadway ticket prices. Feel free to come up with your own translation.

PILGRIMAGE (1933): Or, A Mother's Love Gone Off the Rails. In 1917, small-town widow Hannah Jessop prevents her son Jimmy from marrying his knocked-up girlfriend by arranging for her son to be drafted in hopes of him being killed in World War I. And she succeeds!  A decade later, Hannah reluctantly joins other gold star mothers to attend a memorial ceremony in Paris, where she meets a young man in the same position as Jimmy was. Finally realizing what a bitch she's been, Hannah urges the young man's mother to allow him to marry his sweetheart. Hannah returns to the farm a changed person, begging forgiveness from Mary. As if that's going to bring back the old crone's son.

I give credit to director John Ford for making Hannah thoroughly detestable for most of Pilgrimage. She admits to Jimmy that she'd rather see him dead than wed Mary (or any woman), barely sheds a tear when getting word of his death, and refuses to acknowledge her bastard grandson. Actress Henrietta Crosman (born in 1861!) overshadows the other actors in the picture to the point where there's no need to mention them, yet she's never for a moment hammy. You just hate her, and continue doing so until the last reel when she finally admits to herself -- and eventually Mary -- what a terrible person she's been all these years. Frankly, I wouldn't have forgiven her, but I hold a grudge like you wouldn't believe.

There's some humor in the Paris scenes, such as Hannah and another farmer/mother successfully taking aim at every target in a shooting gallery. But that's enough fun and games; after the ceremony, she tells the other mothers that unlike their sons, hers was "no good" -- meaning he wanted to leave the farm and get married. There are precious few moments where Hannah's haranguing isn't heard, making Pilgrimage difficult but definitely fascinating to watch. I just kind of wish she fell off the ship returning home.

BONUS POINTS: During the scene when the grandson is teased by his classmates for being illegitimate, I recognized Marilyn Harris, best known as the little girl tossed in the pond in Frankenstein. Norman Foster, who played Jimmy, later became a director; his output includes a bunch of Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan pictures, the Orson Welles-produced Journey into Fear, and the noir classic Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. Glad he wasn't really sent to his death by his mother.

IF YOU COULD ONLY COOK (1935): Gentle, post-Code screwball comedy? A merry mix-up based on deception? Another one of those Depression era millionaire-goes-slumming farces? Sorta, kinda, and for sure. 

Auto magnate Jim Buchanan, unhappily engaged to a woman he doesn't love and fed up with his board of directors, walks out of his job and into Central Park, where he makes friends with the unemployed Joan Hawthorne. Mistaking Jim for one of her own kind, she finds them positions as cook and butler for former bootlegger Mike Rossini. Over the course of a week, Jim and Mike fall for Joan; Joan gets arrested for robbery for showing Jim's sketches for a new car to one of his business rivals; Jim is talked into returning to work and his fiancée; and Mike rounds up his hoodlum pals to eventually set things right for everybody. And if any of this comes as a surprise, you haven't seen a movie made before 1960.

If You Could Only Cook was Columbia's rare attempts at sophisticated comedy. The classy Brit Herbert Marshall (The Letter) is nicely self-effacing as Jim, who willingly loses a few stripes off his captain of industry position. It's easy to understand why he goes for Joan (Jean Arthur, who always sounded like a pack-a-day-smoking Minnie Mouse). She's a jumble of contradictions: smart yet naive, sexy but innocent, cynical but romantic. In other words, they're the kind of people ticket-buyers meet only in the movies.

And so are Marshall and Arthur's costars. Leo Carillo gives Mike Rossini the kind of Italian accent you'd hear in comedies like this. Another familiar voice belongs to the sandpaper-throated Lionel Stander (Soak the Rich) as Mike's sidekick Flash, who's suspicious of the new help from the get-go. Many cineastes tend to describe If You Could Only Cook as "unfairly underrated". To me, it's cute and charming but becomes laugh out loud funny only in its zany final 15 minutes, which is what you remember best after the closing credits.

BONUS POINTS: In the UK, Columbia Pictures falsely promoted If You Could Only Cook as a Frank Capra production. By way of apology, Columbia boss Harry Cohn gave Capra a cut of movie's profits. 

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DR. KILDARE'S STRANGE CASE" (1940)

If you find yourself in need of medical attention the next time you're in New York, you can't do any better than Blair General Hospital. That is, if you like soap opera shenanigans, gossipy switchboard operators, violent ambulance drivers, smokers outside the operating rooms, and ethically-dubious procedures.

Dr. Kildare's Strange Case, starring B-movie leading man Lew Ayres, was the fourth entry in M-G-M's popular series about the dreamy diagnostician learning his craft at the side of the crotchety cripple, Dr. Gillespie (the crotchety cripple Lionel Barrymore). By now, enthralled audiences were getting to know these people better than their own families. Kildare's growing love for nurse Mary LaMonte; Gillespie's life-threatening melanoma; Kildare's parents dispensing wisdom the way pharmacists do Valium; and all the other supporting characters who seem to be paid to stand around and yak all day instead of doing their jobs. If all hospitals were this much fun, I'd go to med school right now.

Joe Wayman looks forward to physically
abusing Sally after work.

But not all is well at the House of Blair. Molly Byrd, the Superintendent of Nurses, is giving Gillespie a hard time. ("If I don't drink one glass of milk a day," he grouses to Kildare, "she hides my cigarettes.") Ambulance driver Joe Wayman is known to smash the skulls of alleged miscreants with an industrial-sized monkeywrench. And Dr. Gregory Lane, a supposedly brilliant brain surgeon, has been on something of a cold streak lately, his nickname around the hospital being "The undertaker's best friend." (Wouldn't you like to work in a warm, supporting atmosphere like that?) Lane himself bitterly comments after his latest botched surgery, "The operation was a success, but the patient died!" Good to keep a sense of humor at times like this. 

Lane redeems himself by saving the life of an unidentified hit-and-run victim. Unfortunately, the surgery appears to have left the guy a babbling idiot, yelling "Friday!" incessantly. Kildare decides to save Lane's career by proving that the patient was a babbling idiot before the surgery as well.

You'd be pissed-off like Nurse LaMonte
if you were stuck between a chain-smoking,
wheelchair-bound grouch and the dreamboat
who won't give you a tumble.

It wouldn't be a Kildare movie without enough subplots to fill a cemetery, and this Strange Case is no exception. Gillespie diagnoses a woman's rash as a reaction from the lacquer on her mah-jongg tiles. Joe the ambulance driver gets Sally the switchboard operator drunk at the local hash-house.


And this being only the fourth movie in the series, Kildare, still an intern, hasn't made a major move on Mary LaMonte yet, thanks to his meager $20-a-month salary. (And you wonder why your medical bills are so expensive!) Yet, he turns down a chance to work at the prestigious Messinger Institute at $6,000 per annum, just so he can continue stick around with Gillespie, and to watch Dr. Lane date the horny Nurse LaMonte. Audiences in 1940 were supposed to approve Kildare's decision, but looking at things from a 21st-century perspective, all we can think now is, What a 24-karat sap!

But whence the strange case we've been promised? Well, remember the hit-and-run patient? Kildare has a theory that the guy is suffering from schizophrenia -- or, as he pronounces it, "SKEEZ-o-frenn-ya," like the punchline of a joke about a crazy Irishman. Going behind Gillespie's back, Kildare consults with his own father, a small-town doctor, about the possibility of curing the patient via insulin shock therapy. Kildare père has seen the effects of the procedure first-hand: "One of the most terrifying things I've ever seen in my life!" Insulin shock therapy, he explains in an off-handed way typical for the Kildare pictures, "causes patients to go backwards through evolution -- ape, bird, lizard, and so forth." What. The. Fuck.

Even for a Kildare movie, this is some weird medical shit. So of course Kildare fils is eager to jump into it. Moving the patient to a private room without permission, Kildare convinces Mary LaMonte to help him perform a procedure better suited to Island of Lost Souls. Mary, being the only sane person at the hospital, demands an explanation. "Buried deep in the brain," Kildare says gravely, "is the brain of our human ancestors." Also the brain of anyone who thinks this is a good idea. 

"Man, I love torturing people for my own
professional edification!"

What follows the insulin overdose is the strangest sequence in the entire Kildare series. Filmed partly in silhouette, the patient indeed goes back in time to his Alley Oop origins and beyond, twisting, shuddering and squirming in agony, his eyes popping out as if being pushed from the inside, like something out of a Universal horror movie. 

There's no accompanying music, just Kildare doing a quiet play-by-play for the terrified LaMonte. "The hands are beginning their first primitive movements... The body is trying desperately to obey the impossible demands of the brain..." That sounds like me every morning. Audiences probably thought this bizarre scheme was S.O.P. in hospitals at the time -- they trusted doctors to pull off stunts that would get their licenses revoked today. But guess what. It works!

Kildare performs an emergency
appendectomy on Gillespie while
Nurse LaMonte applies
 anesthesia

To recap: This is a hospital where the chief diagnostician is a heavy smoker; the ambulance driver is a sociopath; the chief brain surgeon keeps his job despite killing patients; and an intern seriously ignores protocol and performs a procedure out of Dr. Mengele's notebook.  

And people loved it! So much so that five more Kildare movies with Lew Ayres followed, before Lionel Barrymore's Gillespie continued on his own for another five. In 1949, they re-teamed for a radio series, The Story of Dr. Kildare. I shudder to think of the misguided men and women who were inspired to enter medical school by these quacks.

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Two Dr. Gillespie movies are discussed here and here.

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DUEL IN THE SUN" (1946)

Oh my God. Has there ever been a more oversexed, overheated, overproduced, overacted movie than Duel in the Sun? With phantasmagorical three-strip Technicolor and shouting-to-the- rafters dialogue making it look every inch the fever dream of amphetamine-addicted producer David O. Selznick, Duel in the Sun was intended to top his previous epic Gone with the Wind. 

Instead, the huge, grossly-expensive (almost $100-million when adjusted for inflation), two year-long production is still considered one of the most harebrained movies from Hollywood's "golden age." Director King Vidor handles Selznick's risible script with the same anvil-like touch that he would bring to The Fountainhead three years later. Vidor, by the way, was one of six directors who helmed Duel in the Sun during its lengthy inception -- or is it ejection? -- including Selznick, who, in a rare moment of lucidity, fired himself. As for the acting, there's so much ham on display that it's probably banned in Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods.

The tale of a young, half-breed trollop who causes havoc between two brothers and their racist father, Duel in the Sun intends to be spicy but winds up being tasteless. It would have fared better as a low-budget RKO black & white programmer as originally intended, but once Selznick got his Oscar-winning paws on the project, all bets were off. 

Warning: staring at this sun on a high-def
TV for 10 straight minutes can cause
permanent eye damage.

The movie announces its intentions to epicdom (a word I just made up) with a 10-minute instrumental prelude by Dimitri Tiomkin, which never manages to string together more than three interesting notes at a time. 

The difference between "prelude"
and "overture" is 7 minutes.

Just as it comes to a thudding end, and you're settling in for, you know, a movie, the voice of character actor Reed Hadley announces, "Ladies and gentleman, the overture to Duel in the Sun!" -- followed by three more unmemorable minutes of the Selznick Studio orchestra sawing away while Hadley describes the movie you're about to see. Show, don't tell! 

Then that's followed by the credits, and that's followed by a magniloquent prologue spoken by Orson Welles (presumably to make it sound classy) before the movie finally kicks in. I guess Selznick had to do something to make it seem as long as Gone with the Wind. (Without the music folderol, Duel in the Sun runs only a little over two hours.)

Now we know where Elvis Presley got his sneer.

If Duel in the Sun was Selznick's attempt to turn his then-mistress, Jennifer Jones, into another Vivian Leigh, he should have spent more time on his shrink's couch and less time popping bennies. Wearing dark "Injun" make-up, Jones instead resembles a drunken Emirates Airline stewardess. And rather than being sexy, as was Selznick's intentions, she often appears to be having a seizure. But as she admits, "I'm trash like my maw!" A moment later, upon reflection, she writhes on her bed shouting, "Trash, trash, trash, trash, trash!" Yeah, like the script, script, script, script, script!

"After we do the nasty, I'm going out to kill
a mockingbird."

Anyone familiar with the stolid Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mockingbird will be shocked by the horny, violent sociopath presented here. Unlike, say, Alfred Hitchcock's multidimensional bad guys, Peck's Lewt McCanles is a rotter through-and-through, licking his chops like a hungry wolf eyeing a defenseless lamb -- in this case, Jennifer Jones' Pearl Chavez. As for Pearl, it winds up being one of those I-hate-you-so-much-I-love-you relationships that always work out real well in the end. (Note: that was delivered with a heavy dose of irony.) If nothing else, Peck has the time of his life playing a heel for a change, far looser in Duel in the Sun than anything else he ever made, even if he is more cartoon than human. 

Joseph Cotten is amused by Jennifer Jones'
attempt at catching flies with her mouth.

Jessie McCanles, Lewt's younger brother, hasn't got a chance with Pearl. While having pledged her love to Jessie, she's far more attracted to bad boy Lewt. Just to show you how low Pearl is, she  allows Jessie to enter her room just as Lewt is in there lighting up a post-coital smoke. (What's Apache for "bitch"?) Cotten is saddled with pity-me dialogue, but so underplays his part that he comes off better than most of his co-stars. (The only other actor in Duel in the Sun who avoids histrionics is Herbert Marshall as Pearl's father, and that's because he's killed off after ten minutes.)

The good preacher takes a personal interest in
Pearl's salvation.

Yet despite Jones' and Peck's grandstanding, it's up to the old-timers to really pull out the stops. Walter Huston's brief appearance as a shady preacher proves that the actor knew kitsch when he saw it, and, as with his role as Doc Holliday in The Outlaw, plays it with outsized tongue in cheek. King Vidor probably didn't get the joke.

"I look like Hillary who?"

Nor did Vidor do poor Lillian Gish any favors as Lewt and Jessie's mother Laura Belle McCanles. Perhaps not having seen any Gish performance since The Birth of a Nation, Vidor appeared to have instructed her to telegraph her emotions by opening her eyes like manholes, dropping her jaw to the floor, and placing her hands on her cheeks whenever possible. Her final scene -- crawling from her bed to console her grumpy husband before dropping dead at his feet -- is perhaps the cruelest, most unfortunately-hilarious thing a legend like Gish ever had to suffer. Other than the rest of her scenes in Duel with the Sun.

Lillian Gish wipes away the
spittle from Barrymore's
line-readings.

But nobody -- no body -- overdoes it like Lionel Barrymore as Sen. Jackson McCanles, the family patriarch. Once a wonderfully subtle actor, Barrymore had by now settled comfortably into the wheelchair-bound lovable crank character that defined the latter part of his career. Under Vidor's direction, however, Barrymore crosses the divide between crank and bull undergoing a wide-awake vasectomy. Bellowing, bawling and roaring his dialogue like a one-man zoo, he officially becomes a self-parody in Duel in the Sun the way his brother John did in Playmates. But at least the latter was supposed to be a comedy.

At least you can see the (over)budget on the screen.
An impressive sequence featuring hundreds of cowboys charging down a steep hill and across the plains is still exciting (and today would be recreated with CGI). The psilocybin-like Technicolor is wildly vivid, with fiery red sunsets and gorgeous blue skies popping out of the screen, while Tiomkin's score never, and I mean never, stops. As Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review, "Oh, brother—if only the dramatics were up to the technical style!"

D.W. Griffith visits Huston and Barrymore
on the set of Duel in the Sun, and decides he got
out of pictures at the right time.

Thanks to the lurid promise of SEX SEX SEX, Duel in the Sun actually turned a financial, if not artistic, profit, becoming the second highest-grossing movie of the year. It would go down in history as being the first movie little Martin Scorsese ever saw -- such are legends made.

Love means never having to say you're
sorry after shooting each other to death.

Today, Duel in the Sun divides viewers. Scorsese, still a fan, believes it was ahead of its time. Everybody else thinks it's the work of a madman. But the best part -- the absolute icing on the cake -- follows the climax. Pearl and Lewt shoot each other a dozen or so times before dying lustily in each other's arms in the hot desert sun. Pull back, fade out... to five minutes of Exit music. 

Two hours and 20 minutes of non-stop music -- and I still can't remember a frigging note.

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To read about John Barrymore's swansong, Playmates, go here.
To read about King Vidor's The Fountainhead, go here.

 

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DARK DELUSION" (1947)

It's always fun to watch old medical-based movies. Procedures taken for granted by naive audiences then would be grounds for malpractice today. It's a real hoot, too, when watching these melodramas since my wife's a nurse. They make her gasp, "Oh my God!" more than the investors in Malaysian Airways.  

Dark Delusion ups the entertainment value by exploring the world of mental illness, presumably a ripe topic after the success of Hitchcock's Spellbound two years earlier. But while the latter strove to be a serious, mature take on one man's psychological breakdown, Dark Delusion is Freud by way of M-G-M's Department of Romantic Melodrama.

"She may be crazy, but she's my  kind
of crazy!"

Dr. Tommy Coalt is a headstrong sawbones who's been quite successful at alienating patients and hospital management alike. Sent to the fictional New York suburb of Bayhurst to temporarily replace the town's only doctor, he immediately becomes entangled in the case of Cynthia Grace. 

Cynthia has a psychological condition that makes her appear to be photographed in semi-shadow even when in direct sunlight, and her every move accompanied by a woozy organ, glockenspiel, and off-key violins. But speaking professionally, she's all kinds of maniac -- depressive, klepto, and pyro topping the list. While her father wants her admitted to the local laughing academy, Coalt ultimately proves that she's no crazier than anyone else in town. That, of course, isn't saying much.

"I now pronounce you man and lung."

Tommy's a nice guy once you get to know him. He even plays cupid when he's not alienating people. One young woman hospitalized for polio wants to break off her engagement, until Tommy convinces her that her fiance has absolutely no problem being married to someone who's living in an iron lung. And thus we are allowed to witness the most bizarre wedding scene in movie history before Chained for Life, starring real-life Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton.

But Tommy is fully aware of his professional standards. When talking to a newly-adoptive mother, Tommy notices she has baggy eyes, so he prescribes her sleeping pills. When Cynthia shows up unexpectedly at his office, he slips tranquilizers in her water. Keeping up with his madcap drug dispensing, Tommy gets to the root of Cynthia's problems via narcosynthesis. Shooting her up with an unidentified drug for about 10 seconds -- "This is an awfully long injection," my wife rightly noted -- Tommy gets her to talk about the root of her problem. It seems Cynthia banged her head after falling off a horse. 

With absolutely nothing else to go on, Tommy immediately diagnoses her with having a blood clot on the brain, and arranges for surgery the following day. It took my doctors six weeks to diagnose me with renal cancer, followed by seven weeks of waiting before the surgery. Medicine obviously has gone backwards since 1947.

"Hey, I know that person!" alert. That adoptive mother I mentioned is played by a pre-game show Jayne Meadows. Her onscreen husband is cured of his fear of heart trouble when his doctor deliberately picks a fistfight with him -- a treatment no longer covered by Cigna. That MDF (Doctor of Fisticuffs) is played by the great Keye Luke, formerly Charlie Chan's #1 son. Confucius say, When co-pay not paid, broken jaw suitable substitute. 

Barrymore is disgusted by playing
third banana to a wanna-be Gable
and a crazy lady.

Dark Delusion, oddly, was the final entry in M-G-M's Kildare/Gillespie series, starring the cantankerous Lionel Barrymore. You wouldn't know it by any of the posters, since Dark Delusion was sold, quite falsely, as a romantic mystery. (The tagline -- "How Much Can A Guilty Girl Hide?" -- seems to have been created to further throw the audience off the scent.) 

It almost seems like the Gillespie scenes were an afterthought in order to pad the movie's running time to an A-length 90 minutes. Barrymore is off-screen for the bulk of the movie, which is a shame since his playing-to-the-rafters style is sorely missed. There are times, however, when he seems to be channeling his fellow character actor Edward Arnold -- but you'd recognize that, wouldn't you?

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give
a damn that I'm aping a better
actor."

And speaking of channeling, James Craig, as Dr. Coalt, struck me as doing a Clark Gable impersonation for much of the movie. That was no surprise, since he was Gable's replacement at Metro when the latter went off to war. Once Clark returned, Craig had no place else to go except, well, Dark Delusion. He, like his ilk of washed-up actors, retreated to the far more lucrative refuge of real estate. I could name a dozen actors today who should make that career change, but I'd only be wallowing in my own dark delusion.

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "CALLING DR. GILLESPIE" (1942)

Attention, ladies! If your boyfriend registers displeasure by bashing in a puppy's skull with a rock, do you:
A) Call a cop?
B) Run like hell in the opposite direction?
C) Stick by his side until he murders three people and tries for a fourth?

While Marcia looks forward to
marriage, Tod has his eyes on a
cocker spaniel.

If your answer is (C), then you're ready to check into Blair General Hospital, where the crustier-than-stale-farm bread Dr. Leonard Gillespie runs the show from his wheelchair with an iron fist and a hot temper. With the help of  Dr. John Hunter Gernide, the old bird decides that Roy Todwell, fiance of Marcia Bradburn, needs help. Or, as Gillespie sympathetically tells Todwell's parents,"I'm sorry to say, but your son is a mental case." 

Look at him -- I told you the maniac's doctor 
was a know-it-all.

Not to worry, though -- a psychological trigger, he assures them, can turn anyone into "a homicidal maniac." (My former boss would probably agree.) Roy's parents are in denial -- perhaps they have friends who smash puppy's skulls in on a regular basis -- as is their know-it-all family doctor. 

Even after Roy inexplicably smashes a storefront window, hops around like an epileptic Mexican jumping bean and swears to kill Gillespie, all that's prescribed is a good nap. Son of Sam wishes he had such understanding people around him. 

"Darling, where'd you learn to handle
 the scalpel so well?"

But thanks to the ol' palming-the-sleeping-tablet routine, Todwell makes his escape, first to Boston, then to Detroit, all the while dropping Gillespie the occasional threatening postcard. (Weather beautiful. Toured the Chevy factory. I'm going to slash your throat.) 

 

After knocking off a couple of car dealership employees -- and is that really a crime? -- Todwell returns to Blair General where he kills a visiting doctor and assumes his identity. 

This being called Calling Dr. Gillespie and not Calling Precinct 14, the cops guarding the hospital are of no use. It's Gernide who hatches a scheme to lure Todwell into being captured, and Gillespie's bodyguard who nails him on the head with a well-aimed monkey-wrench. Blair General can resume its usual routine of receptionists cracking wise, interns tripping over their shoelaces and nurses flirting with wealthy cardiac patients.

Calling Dr. Gillespie was to have been the ninth in MGM's enormously popular Dr. Kildare movie series, which began in 1938. These are the kind of movies where deafness is cured with a vitamin B shot and schizophrenia by putting the patient into insulin shock. In Calling Dr. Gillespie, Dr. Gernide figures out that the sound of train whistles set off Todwell's murderous rages. (Times were much simpler then.) And unlike many other movie series of the time, the Kildare films had continuing storylines so that audiences felt involved in the characters' lives. Think of them as a B-movie Berlin Alexanderplatz. Go ahead, I dare you.



Phillip Dorn:
"I'll make you forget your
draft-dodging Kildare!"

Barrymore demands that Ayres get out of
his camera range.

Lew Ayres, the title star, upset the Kildare cart by declaring himself a conscientious objector after our involvement in World War II. Even Ayres joining the Medical Corps and serving on the frontlines -- unarmed -- didn't sit well with the public. 

Having already filmed the movie as Born to be Bad, MGM reshot Ayres' scenes wth Dutch actor Phillip Dorn (who looks like a cross between Fred Allen and Frank Sinatra) as Dr. Gernide. This allowed Lionel Barrymore, as Kildare's mentor Gillespie, to chew the scenery even more than usual, enough to wear down his molars. 

This is not a slam against Barrymore -- I find him to be extremely entertaining, often more than his brother John. I mean, if I'm watching an actor, I want to see him act! And boy does he ever -- shouting, snarling, snorting, chuckling, squinting and whatever other gerund you can think of. 

(While we're on the subject, my daughter noticed the similarities between Barrymore's Gillespie and Hugh Laurie's Dr. Gregory House. Both are cranks; have problems getting around; play piano; are the Sherlock Holmes of the sawbones set; and have utterly ridiculous medical theories which inevitably prove correct.)

Calling Dr. Gillespie goes into territory previously unexplored in the Kildare series; e.g., homicidal mania. Harold S. Bucquet, the series' regular director, must have enjoyed the change of pace, as he shoots some scenes bordering on film noir. Running close to an hour and a half, Calling Dr. Gillespie is about 15 minutes longer than the previous Kildare movies as well, as if the studio decided to go the extra mile to make up for the loss of Lew Ayres. 

Irony alert: Dr. Gillespie on
a cigarette trading card.

Just in case any fans wondered if the series would continue without Kildare, an onscreen announcement following the closing credits assures them them the next chapter in the series would be Dr. Gillespie's New Assistant. It was pretty obvious by then that the real star of the series, the one that audiences were paying to see, was Lionel Barrymore. People loved the gruff-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside guy who put the "Unc" into avuncular. 

That wheelchair wasn't a prop, either, Barrymore having both arthritis and a fractured hip keeping him off his feet. At the time, it was a well-kept secret that his pain was alleviated by daily cocaine injections. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was thoughtful enough to supply the coke himself, although deducted the cost from Barrymore's weekly salary and, presumably, declared it a tax write-off. (By the way, Dr. Gregory House is a Vicodin addict.)

Don't be fooled by
that boyish smile.

But there's one actor -- the only one I've seen in any of the Kildare/Gillespie movies -- that really interested me other than Barrymore. And in Calling Dr. Gillespie it's Phil Brown. In his first moments as Roy Todwell, Brown appears to be your typical B-movie leading man: young, charming, bland.  

 But the moment he kills the puppy, Brown becomes the creepiest guy in town, even when putting on the nice-guy act. With eyes half-shut and a smile that says Oh boy, I can't wait to kill again, Brown takes charge of all his scenes, elevating the movie from its B-movie settings. To me, his performance is the blueprint for all the movie stalkers that were to come in later years. I kept asking myself, Who is this actor and why haven't I seen him anywhere else?



It's a long way from Blair General
Hospital to Tatooine.

Well, it didn't help that Phil Brown was one of the many victims of the HUAC investigations of the '50s. (Destroying as many non-Communists as not, HUAC was Congress' very own assault rifle.) Brown continued his career in the UK. Further research showed  that I had indeed seen him at least one other time. Thirty-five years after Calling Dr. Gillespie, he had the small but pivotal role as Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen in the original Star Wars. From then until his death in 2006, Brown was a welcome presence at sci-fi conventions and autograph shows everywhere.




Calling Dr. Gillespie is my favorite kind of old movie, one that delivers far more than expected. Had I seen Calling Dr. Gillespie in my younger years, I'd have gotten my hands on a poster featuring Phil Brown's creepy image and attended one of his conventions. As I slipped it in front of him, I'd sigh, "You were one of my favorite mental cases ever!" I'd like to think he'd have appreciated it.


           

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