If TCM and YouTube had been around when I was growing up, I'd have left the house even less than I already did. And I still would have ignored the classics in favor of cinema's red-headed stepchildren. Enough with the classics! Up with the arcane, the outré, and the uncouth! Just don't ask for your money back, bub.
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR OLD? (1911): On the day an old carpenter learns that his wife is gravely ill, he loses his job to a younger worker. As his money runs out, the carpenter is arrested for stealing groceries. The judge, having seen similar situations, bails him out and gives him money for his wife's medical care. When the carpenter arrives home with a doctor, the wife is already dead.
Try running that synopsis past a studio, see how far it gets you. But being the star director at Biograph, D.W. Griffith had free reign to make any kind of movie he liked. And what he liked were social dramas exposing the lives of the dispossessed and those who profit from them. And just to show you how serious he was about it (and movies in general), What Shall We Do with Our Old? was just one of 75 movies Griffith made in 1911! But that's when movies like this ran 15 minutes or less.
You can't expect much in the way of subtlety in most movie acting of the time. Nobody shakes their head in sorrow when pounding a fist on their chest will do. Yet there is something undeniably moving about the story and its characters. W. Chrystie Miller makes the carpenter (as the song goes) a man of constant sorrow. Who among us in his position -- a dying wife, loss of income, imprisonment -- would look or behave any differently in real life?
When watching a movie like What Shall We Do with Our Old?, a modern audience needs to prepare for simple sets, long takes, a static camera, and occasional histrionics -- it is, after all, 112 years old. And while movie-making has come a long way since then, what hasn't changed is the question that the title poses.
BONUS POINTS: While the actress playing the old wife, Claire McDowell, is obviously much younger under her make-up, W. Chrystie Miller was 68 at the time. To put that in perspective, he was born when John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States.
LUCKY BOY (1928): A young man from the Lower East Side turns his back on the family business in favor of vaudeville. As his fortunes rise, he falls in love with a shiksa, questions his values, and returns home to tend to a sick parent, where he at last gains familial blessings for his career choice. In other words, the silent/sound hybrid Lucky Boy steals from The Jazz Singer lox, shlock, and barrel of schmaltz. There's even a "Mammy"-style song, "My Mother's Eyes", performed not once, twice, but FOUR times in 77 minutes.Credit -- make that discredit -- lies with scriptwriter/ star George Jessel, one of the most inexplicable celebrities of the 20th century. If Lucky Boy is any indication, the 1928 version of Jessel was little different from the tedious talk-show nudge of four decades later, viz: A personality similar to a dead flounder; an endless supply of hackneyed jokes and mawkish songs delivered in a mumbling, nasal voice bordering on the near-incomprehensible; forever confusing sentiment with sentimentality; and sporting a hairpiece that wouldn't fool a blindfolded mite.
Originally titled The Ghetto until a last-minute change, Lucky Boy features its star playing someone named Georgie Jessel. And if that first name sounds adolescent, it's no accident. In the movie's early scenes, Jessel plays the teenage version of himself swearing to run away from home -- when the actor himself was 30! Poverty row studio Tiffany-Stahl promoted George Jessel as "The Original Jazz Singer". It was a reminder that he had been the star of the Broadway play of the same name, only to lose the movie version (and his place in film history) to his frenemy Al Jolson in a salary dispute with Warner Brothers. Whether called The Ghetto or Lucky Boy, the title of the short story on which this cinematic consolation prize was based is probably more appropriate: "The Schlemiel".
BONUS POINTS: The only legitimate laughs are provided when Jessel makes a few pointed jokes regarding Henry Ford's antisemitism.
WIR SCHALTEN UM AUF HOLLYWOOD! (1931): Viennese-born actor Paul Morgan arrives from Germany to report via shortwave radio on his experiences in Hollywood. After a German expatriate shows him around the city, Morgan literally parachutes into the MGM studio, where he meets Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Adolphe Menjou, and Leo the Lion. In the evening, he attends a movie premiere where even more Metro actors appear.Yeesh, that's it? Now picture the whole thing in German without subtitles, and in a washed-out print. That's Wir Schalten Um Auf Hollywood! (in English, We're Switching to Hollywood!), made for release exclusively in Germany, one of Hollywood's biggest foreign markets. And brother, they can have it.
Strictly for obscurity fanatics, Wir Schalten... features production numbers from the never-released 1930 Metro musical revue The March of Time. Two of the numbers are obviously cut from what seems to be the sole surviving print of Wir Schalten..., although we're blessed to see a recreation of a turn-of-the-century vaudeville routine featuring people tapdancing in horse costumes. The picture also gives us the opportunity to hear Joan Crawford awkwardly attempting to speak German. Adolphe Menjou, though, is utterly fluent in a weird movie-within-a-movie where he's eventually shot by Paul Morgan, climbs a ladder to Heaven, then enters a cinema where he orders the film rewound so that he lives.
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BONUS POINTS: Sergei Eisenstein can be seen at the climactic movie premiere. Russian filmmaker at a Hollywood premiere in a German movie -- gee, it looks like we can all get along!
STREET OF
CHANCE (1942): Before griping about your day, consider the plight
of Frank Thompson. After getting conked on the head by a piece of falling
debris, Frank gradually learns he had been living as someone named Danny
Nearing for the last year. As Nearing, he was having an affair with a dame
named Ruth Dillon despite him being happily married to another woman. Confused
yet? So is he -- especially when a silent, tough guy gets on his trail. Oh, and
I almost forgot: Frank is wanted for a murder he can't remember!
And the only witness who can clear him is a bedridden old crone who can't
speak. Like I said, no complaints about your day.Based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, Street of Chance's main characters all reflect Frank Thompson, in that none of them are who they appear to be. Ruth Dillon is just a housekeeper -- until she isn't. Frank's hulking nemesis Joe Marruci appears to be out to kill him -- except he doesn't. The two survivors of the murder victim are the obvious suspects -- up to a point.
While Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor are fine as Frank and Ruth, it's Sheldon Leonard, as usual, who steals the show as Joe Marruci. Scarier here than he typically is in dramas, Leonard was born to dominate whatever project he appeared in, whether movies, radio or TV. I love this guy.Director Jack Hively seems to have wanted to jazz up what would have been an ordinary B-mystery. His use of lighting (and darkness) is effective, as are the impressive crane shots that literally elevate the movie's look. Still, there's never a minute during Street of Chance when you aren't cognizant that the movie makes absolutely no sense, is overflowing with handy coincidences, and sports more loose ends than a welcome mat that's been caught in a tornado. Maybe that's why it's so entertaining.
BONUS POINTS: The grandly-named Adeline DeWalt Reynolds, who plays the elderly mute, entered the movie business at age 78, two years before Street of Chance's production, and continued until her death in 1960. See all you aspiring actors, there's hope for you yet!
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1 comment:
I never realized early Hollywood was quiet so bizarre.....
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