THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 18

Sex! Loansharking! Magical murder! A singer making a fool of himself for the sake of a TV show! It must be another Early Show.

SEX (1920): Now there's a 

 straightforward title for a straightforward movie
about a straightforward woman whose life eventually goes sideways. Sneering showgirl Adrienne Renault is enjoying an affair with Philip Overman -- until his wife divorces him. The thrill of the relationship now gone, Adrienne dumps Philip in favor of Dick Wallace, with whom she unexpectedly falls in love. Two years after they marry, Dick begins an affair with Daisy Henderson, a once-innocent dancer whom Adrienne had taken under her protective wing. Her marriage, heart, and spirit now broken, Adrienne sails to Europe on an ocean liner, where her previous lover Philip Overman has reconciled with his wife. How you like now, Little Miss Sex Queen?

As with similar dramas of its time, Sex wanted to titillate its audience with, um, sex, while making them feel guilty about it by the sixth reel (a trick Cecil B. DeMille successfully put to use in his career). Adrienne's cynicism is upfront, advising virginal newcomer Daisy to take what she can get without feeling sorry for anybody but herself. As for the millionaire businessmen, we never learn exactly what they do to make themselves wealthy -- they seem to spend all their time at their girlfriends' apartments, attending Broadway shows, and ducking their wives. 

By 1920, histrionics were becoming a thing of the past in movies, so Sex's actors keep the emotions on a low boil. Louise Glaum is excellent as Adrienne, pulling off two scenes that mirror each other -- first as the mistress and later the spurned wife -- quite well. Credit director Fred Niblo, too, for tackling a potentially melodramatic subject without going overboard. As movie historians like to say, Sex is ripe for reappraisal -- if only somebody could do a restoration of the current washed out print that often make the intertitles difficult to read. But who needs words with a movie called Sex?

BONUS POINTS: Wondering how audiences reacted to a movie titled Sex that never features anything stronger than a kiss.

I DEMAND PAYMENT (1938): Forced into joining a loansharking outfit run by Joe Travis, Toby

Locke marries his girlfriend Judith Avery solely to prevent her from testifying against him in court. When she learns the truth, Judith takes the easy way out by driving her car in front of a speeding train (wouldn't an annulment worked just as well?), but survives just so her surgeon, Dr. Craig Mitchell, can fall in love with her. Meanwhile, Toby kills one of Travis's enforcers, Louie Badolio, in order to get his hands on the ten grand he's carrying, before convincing Judith to run away to Mexico with him. Louie's brother, oddly named Smiles, and another enforcer, oddly named Happy, follow with murder in mind. Just as Smiles is ready to pull a gat on Toby, Dr. Mitchell shows up to try to win back Judith. Can't a couple honeymoon in peace?

And is it too much to ask for a movie titled I Demand Payment to live up to its promise of being strictly a low-budget indie crime movie? Apparently so, since the subplot involving Judith and Dr. Mitchell takes up too much cutesy time. I was really hoping the underrated Jack LaRue (the poor man's Bogart) would have more screentime than he does as Smiles, but what we see of him will have to do. (Unless I'm mistaken, LaRue starts out with an Italian accent before giving up midway through.) 

As dimwitted gunman Happy Crofton, Guinn (Big Boy) Williams, on loan from Warner Brothers, gives his usual better-than-expected performance -- the part seems like it was written specifically for him -- especially in the final scene, where all the actors finally have something interesting to chew on. LaRue and Williams do the heavy lifting for nominal "stars" Betty Burgess, Matty Kemp, and Lloyd Hughes. As loanshark ringleader leader Joe Travis, Bryant Washburn deserves a shoutout for a cleft chin deeper than the Erie Canal. The only movie I can find released by the who-the-heck-are-they Imperial Pictures, I Demand Payment will have you demanding why I wrote about it. (Because of the title, Jack LaRue, and its 58-minute runtime, OK?)

BONUS POINTS: Betty Burgess looks better after smashing into a train than most women do after a trip to the beauty parlor. 

THE STRANGE MR. GREGORY (1945): A magician known as Gregory the Great, having fallen in love with Ellen Randall, frames her husband John for two murders, including that of... Gregory the Great! Impossible you say? Not at all -- Gregory has mastered the mysterious "death trance", right down to losing a pulse. (I'm not giving anything away -- you'd have to be in a death trance not to have figured it out.) Gregory reappears as his twin brother, Lane, to resume his pursuit of Ellen. Ellen's friend Sheila smells a magic rat, and before you can say "hocus pocus", she and the D.A. are out to prove that Lane is really Gregory by visiting his tomb -- where the magician appears to be still dead. What gives? And how long do you think it will take before Gregory turns up again to put his final moves on the unwilling Ellen?

For a movie that runs 63 minutes, it took a lot of condensing to cram the general idea of The Strange Mr. Gregory into one paragraph. That's why today's screenwriters could learn from the guys who churned out movies for studios like Monogram: add a different plot point every three minutes, the better to keep the audience from realizing that what they're watching is a lot of hooey, and still wrap up the show at the end of lunch hour.

Like many former A-listers who found themselves freelancing on Poverty Row in later years, Edmund Lowe never phones it in as Gregory, even though he probably laughed all the way through the first table read (as if Monogram ever had table reads). Whether sporting a thoroughly unconvincing toupee and goatee as Gregory or his authentic thin moustache as Lane, Lowe likely reminded 1945 audiences that he still had what it took to be a star, doing his pitch-perfect best to pretend that The Strange Mr. Gregory isn't as silly as it seems. You won't miss anything special if you don't see it, but it's not an hour wasted, either.

BONUS POINTS: Jean Rogers, who plays Ellen, was the sexy Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon serials a decade earlier. If her voice is any indication, she was either stage-trained or smoked three packs of Old Golds a day.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO MEL (1955): Imagine an SCTV sketch directed by Ed Wood, and you have Everything Happens to Mel, an astonishingly amateurish unaired sitcom pilot starring crooner Mel Torme playing crooner Mel Turner. (Already you know the kind of deep thought that went into this.) After being mauled by a strange Southern hick named Millie, Mel brings her to his nightclub instead of the nearest police station because she's a good singer. Just as he's ready to become her manager, Millie's hillbilly father shows up to bring her home. And that's all she wrote. 

Well, maybe not she wrote. It could have been a he, or even an A.I. prototype -- it's impossible to know. While the cast is listed in the credits, none of the behind-the-camera "talent" takes the blame for creating the celluloid miasma known as Everything Happens to Mel. And my Ed Wood reference isn't necessarily a joke. While anybody can be a lousy writer/director, Wood leaves his uniquely inept stamp on his projects like a stray dog with an intestinal virus; this show has it all in spades. Yet nowhere in Wood's oeuvre does Everything Happens to Mel appear. It doesn't even come up on Torme's imdb resume. It's as if we're watching a bad Kodacolor dream brought on by an overdose of Robitussin. 

And perhaps that's how Torme would have wanted it. As good a singer he is, his songs here range from forgettable to abhorrent; only his ace drum solo makes a positive impression. Torme proved himself a fine dramatic actor three years later in The Fearmakers, but what happens to Mel here is an embarrassing attempt at spreading his wings before falling flat on his face. 

BONUS POINTS: The only thing that could make this thing worse is if former vaudeville comic/Abbott & Costello foil/short-lived Stooge Joe Besser (as the nightclub owner) reacted to Torme's sudden turn of bad luck by turning to the camera and bawling, "Everything happens to Mel!" So he does. Thanks, Joe!

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