THE EARLY SHOW. PT. 19

 No major studios here. Just the almost-finest that Tiffany-Stahl, Reliable Pictures, PRC, and Screen Guild Productions have to offer. 

THE LOST ZEPPELIN (1929):  Commander Donald Hall is leading an exploration to the South Pole when his Navy airship is caught in a storm and crashes without any means of communication with the outside world. One by one the crew dies until the only survivors are Hall and his second-in-command Tom Armstrong. Just as it looks like the two are becoming human Klondike Bars, a rescue plane lands... with room for only one of them. Oh, I forgot to mention: Commander Hall caught his wife in a clinch with Armstrong the night before the expedition started! Who's going back to the little lady now?

If newspaper ads of the time are to be believed, The Lost Zeppelin broke box office records (at one theater, anyway), likely more for the spectacle in the sky than the melodrama on land. The zeppelin-related special effects are what you'd expect from almost a century ago -- primitive by 21st-century eyes, yet charming in their own 1929 way. It's only when the action moves to the South Pole that the movie resembles a George Melies short from a decade earlier, with slide whistles standing in for the sound of wind. Another problem with studios like Tiffany-Stahl is the occasional dubbed dialogue that neither matches the actors' lips nor sounds like it's coming from the set. Despite those faults, The Lost Zeppelin could be mistaken for an early, not-bad RKO production.

While the performances of Conway Tearle and Virginia Valli (as Commander Hall and his wife Miriam) often feel like the already-vanishing silent days, Ricardo Cortez (Tom Armstrong) paves the way for a more naturalistic style of acting that sound required. He's no Brando but is still one of those actors whose movies I catch when they turn up. Outside of the zeppelin itself, he's the one thing worth watching here. If you're a Ricardo Cortez fan like me, I mean. Otherwise, you probably won't particularly enjoy anything about it. 

BONUS POINTS: Just to make sure audiences at the time got an extra thrill from sound, a lengthy montage of international newspaper headlines is spoken in about a dozen different languages, from French to Hebrew -- the latter always good for a laugh back in the day.

STEP ON IT (1936): Former motorcycle cop Larry Evans takes a job with Frank Banning to find out who's been hijacking the Banning Fuel trucks. 

There's no reason to delve further into Step On It's logline any more than there is to the Fast and Furious movies. All you have to do is look at the tagline on the three-sheet to the right to find out who was responsible for lines at the box office. The now-forgotten Richard Talmadge was a stuntman in several silent movies before becoming a B-movie action star in his own right. Talmadge isn't much to look at, and his voice would never have gotten him into A-pictures. And, oddly, the guy can't even throw a punch convincingly, his arms swinging back and forth like a rag doll; when he's not punching with the side of his fist, he's hitting people's backs rather than faces. 

But when Talmadge is required to jump from a car onto a driverless runaway fuel truck, hoist himself upside down onto the roof of a house, fly over the handlebars of his motorcycle when he crashes into a fence, or jump down an entire flight of stairs onto the bad guys, you can definitely imagine the excitement 1930s audiences felt. For once, you see an actor face-on when he risks his life, rather than the back of a stuntman's head. Take that, Vin Diesel! Fast forward through Step on It to see some genuinely impressive stunts that hold up today, even if the movie itself doesn't.

BONUS POINTS: Talmadge was 44 years old in Step on It, which to me seems kind of old for a guy doing these impressive stunts.  (Yeah, I know Tom Cruise is 60, but I'd like to see him fly down a flight of stairs.)

THE BLACK RAVEN (1943): It's a dark and stormy night at the Black Raven Inn. Over the 
course of an hour, its proprietor Amos Bradford will play host to his former criminal sidekick Whitey Cole; gangster Mike Bardoni; eloping couple Allen Bentley and Lee Winfield; Lee's father, powerbroker Tim Winfield (who wants to prevent her marriage); mousy bank teller/embezzler Horace Witherby; and the shoot-first-don't-ask-questions-later Sheriff with no name. When the storm ends, four people will be dead, including Winfield. Did Allen murder him in order to marry Winfield's daughter? Was it Withersby, because Winfield took the embezzled money? Or was it Bardoni, who wants the now-missing dough? Whoever it was, the survivors will probably book an Airbnb next time. 

You can usually count on a PRC movie to resemble a B-movie Hall of Fame, and The Black Raven is no different. George Zucco! Glenn Strange! Byron Foulger! Noel Madison! Charles Middleton! I. Stanford Jolley! Robert Middlemass! For the cast's lone femme, the oft-uncredited Wanda McKay, the Black Raven Inn must have been her own Grand Hotel. I would have been happy just to spend lunch hour with them at the PRC commissary. No doubt Zucco had a good time ribbing his co-stars that he was the only one who didn't have to get soaked under the rain and wind machines. 

The introduction of Method acting was all well and good, but something was lost: the sheer delight of getting what you were expecting when slapping down your quarter at the box office. Zucco & company didn't know from sense memory, unless they were remembering how they played their last 50 roles. No one, save Lionel Atwill, could deliver a line like, "He's suffering from rabid delusions aggravated by a moronic mentality" like Zucco and make it sound classy. When Byron Foulger -- the actor who looks like his name -- explains his embezzlement by whimpering that he was tired of riding to work in subways that smelled like "sweat and garlic", you believe he's a little guy with too-big dreams. Are movies these days better today than The Black Raven? OK, sure, fine, whatever you say. But they aren't better. 

BONUS POINTS: In a reminder that there was more to life in 1943 than double features, a message at the end of the credits calls on "30,000,000 Moviegoers" to purchase war bonds at the theater. Remember when Americans pulled together for a good cause? Me neither.

THE CASE OF THE BABYSITTER (1947): If there's such a thing as a C-picture, this is it.  Private eye Russ Ashton sends his idiot sidekick Howard "Harvard" Quinlan to keep an eye on the valuables -- and the baby -- of a visiting Duke and Duchess while they're out to dinner. The "royal" pair are actually a couple of jewel thieves named Phil and Mamie who are in possession of a stolen diamond very much wanted by another criminal gang. A couple of knockout drops later, the diamond is stolen yet again -- or so people think -- leading to Russ, his girlfriend Susie, and Harvard to try to figure out why this script was even written.

The only reason I bothered watching The Case of the Babysitter is because it's the sequel to a movie discussed a while back, The Hat Box Mystery (did producers think these titles would bring in audiences?) and felt compelled to complete the Russ Ashton trilogy duology. Tom Neal, Allen Jenkins, Pamela Blake, and Virginia Sale (as Harvard's hash-slinging girlfriend Veronica) repeat their roles from Hat Box; all are as IQ-deficient as ever. Ashton still appears to be the worst gumshoe in town; neither Harvard nor Susie make any attempt to hide their contempt for him, even as they, too, are equally incompetent. 

Movies like The Case of the Babysitter never played the first-run theaters; I'm not even sure they hit the second-runs, either. Like The Hat Box Mystery, this seems to have been made for the bottom of a triple-bill for the more undemanding winos looking for a place to nap before getting thrown out to the street. Ace character actor Allen Jenkins was probably happy to collect a paycheck for dreck like this, secure that there would be quality work from time to time to balance things out. But the ill-fated Tom Neal must have known it would never get any better than starring in a movie that no person in their right mind would sit through without one or two better ones at the top of the bill. Which explains all you need to know about me. (Further proof: I paid 15 bucks for an original Babysitter one-sheet!)

BONUS POINTS: At 39 minutes, The Case of the Babysitter is 180 seconds shorter than The Hat Box Mystery. If only it seemed like it.

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