THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 23

Two silent movies, two gangster pictures -- it's a good day to be alive.

FOR HIS SON (1912): A year after tackling the  question What Shall We Do with Our Old?, D.W. Griffith was back dealing with social issues that still resonate -- in this case, drug addiction. A physician decides the best way to keep his layabout son in money is to develop a soda with a special ingredient -- cocaine -- and marketed as Dopokoke. Before you can say "strung out", the whole town is going Dopokoke-crazy -- including the physician's son, who starts adding pure cocaine to his own soda stash. When his fiancée breaks things off with him, the son elopes with his father's secretary, another cokehead. Now shooting up the stuff, it doesn't take long before he overdoses, leaving his father bereft of both his son and, presumably, a thriving cocaine business.

There's nothing funny about drug addiction. But there are few things unintentionally amusing, or at least baffling, about the 15-minute long For His Son. A soda called Dopokoke sounds like a mock commercial from the first season of Saturday Night Live. People of all ages knock back glass after glass of the stuff at the local ice cream parlor, yet despite its effect -- and a promotional sign boasting FOR THAT TIRED FEELING -- nobody is aware that it's essentially liquid cocaine, despite being called, duh, Dopokoke. At least the son figures it out, giving him the chance to get the real deal without having it watered down. Too bad that once he and his bride start holing up in their drug den, they appear to age about 40 years in four seconds.

As with D.W. Griffith's other shorts at the time, For His Son was filmed at Biograph Studios in the Bronx; from the looks of it, it probably could have been in the can by the end of the first day of shooting. Simple sets, one exterior locale, a hand-cranked camera standing rigidly in one place. The actors ratchet up the melodrama to make sure we can feel their emotions coming through the screen. At times, they really do seem coked out -- not that I would know, of course. Sure, For His Son goes over the top -- what do you expect from a movie more than a century old? -- but can be seen as an interesting piece of American culture that can take modern audiences by surprise. Almost as much as Dopokoke does to its consumers.

BONUS POINTS: Blanche Sweet (the fiancée) is, as far as I know, the only person from D.W. Griffith's troupe of players who appeared on an episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

MENILMONTANT (1926): Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant, a 37-minute French silent movie, is likely considered "experimental" or "avant-garde". And by 1926 standards, perhaps it is. But unlike other movies with those two sometimes-dreaded adjectives, 

Menilmontant actually has an understandable throughline. Two nameless sisters, having discovered their murdered parents' bodies, move to the city (Paris), where they work at an artificial flower factory. The younger of the two eventually spends the night with a disreputable young man. Nine months later, having given birth, the young woman, now homeless, walks the streets looking for food and shelter. Before the day is over, she discovers her sister, having been "ruined" by the same disreputable young man, is now a hooker. Both women find their salvation in each other: the younger one gives her sister the baby, which presumably will set both of them on the right track. Meanwhile, the young man is murdered by another woman he presumably ruined. C'est la vie, mon ami!

From Menilmontant's first shocking frames -- the violent ax murder of the parents -- to the fade out, you know you're watching something unusual. Quick cuts, dissolves, double exposures, and tight close-ups set it apart from your average 1926 release. Much of Menilmontant has the feel of a dream; the performances of Nadia Sibirskaia, Yolande Beaulieu, and Guy Belmont (as the sisters and the young man) add to this quality. They are neither completely realistic nor artificial, occupying a strange in-between stage one finds only in the most unusual of silent cinema.

Not that I don't have some questions. The sisters were sharing a humble but perfectly nice apartment, so why is the younger one suddenly homeless? How did doing the dirty turn the older sister into a hooker? Will the baby really survive better with a hooker than her real mother? And why do the sisters go their separate ways at the end? I figured the now-impure sisters, along with the baby, would continue sharing an apartment and nobody would bat an eye, considering the French are tres sophistique. Funny how Menilmontant resembles an American movie in that respect.

BONUS POINTS: Plenty of location shots of the Paris neighborhood of Menilmontant (now you know what the title means).

THE SECRET SIX (1931): M-G-M must have noticed the kind of dough that gangster pictures were raking in for Warner Brothers, seeing that The Secret Six follows roughly the same formula as The Public Enemy: a newcomer brought into the bootlegging game quickly goes up the ladder of the criminal underworld, challenging and eventually bringing down his immediate superior, before meeting his own inevitable end.

But while The Public Enemy relied on newcomer James Cagney, The Secret Six stars Metro's longtime dependable character actor Wallace Beery in the lead as Louie "Slaughterhouse" Scorpio. Beery is quite good here as the bootlegger who never touches alcohol -- he always orders "a glass of cow" at speakeasies. Go ahead and laugh (if you haven't already) but he reminds me at times of Marlon Brando, using subtle physical and verbal "tricks" to seem believable as the guy who can never quite shake his days as a slaughterhouse worker no matter how fancy his clothes or plentiful his money. (Watch how he spits out his chewing tobacco. Disgusting.) Showing strong support is Lewis Stone as alcoholic lawyer Richard Newton, who also leads Scorpio's gang. Stone, better known for his paterfamilias roles, is startling as the soulless mouthpiece who has no problem turning one of his gunsels over to the cops for a murder Scorpio committed. It's just business, you see.

What makes The Secret Six  fascinating today is that it also acted as a launchpad for three new Metro contract players: Ralph Bellamy as Newton's second lieutenant, who makes the mistake of turning his back on Scorpio before the end of the second reel; Jean Harlow as a worker at a high-class speakeasy; and Clark Gable as the wiseass reporter who's doubling as an undercover spy for "The Secret Six", a group of businessmen out to destroy the underworld's grip on the unnamed city. It's always interesting to see Gable in his early, pre-stardom days; only Beery rivals him sheer charisma. Although billed seventh in the credits here, Gable runs every scene he's in, especially those with good ol' boy John Mack Brown (as a rival reporter), and even Jean Harlow -- only 20, and still in her awkward stage. Sporting an obviously higher budget than the Warners' crime movies, The Secret Six is great to look at in all respects and is worthy of any 1930s gangster film festivals.

BONUS POINTS: The titular Secret Six wear domino masks to disguise themselves from outsiders, giving them an unintendedly creepy look. 

LARCENY (1948): Any movie where Dan Duryea plays the heavy is 90 minutes well spent, especially in Larceny, where he helps to push things to the film noir goal line, even if it doesn't quite make the score. Duryea plays Silky Randall, the well-dressed leader of a pack of conmen. Silky sends his ace bunco Rick Maxon to a small town in order to swindle Deborah Clark by helping to set up a youth center in honor of her late husband killed in the War. Things are going well, although the scam gets mucked up by the arrival of Silky's trashy girlfriend Tory, who's been seeing Rick on the sly. And even as Rick finds it hard to shake Tory, he starts getting the guilts over lifting Deborah's hundred-grand contribution for the youth center. Will he pull out of the scheme? Not if Silky has any say in it -- even if it means framing Deborah for Tory's murder.

Yes, there's plenty of noir ingredients in Larceny, but we're supposed to root for the antihero, which is difficult to do when he's fleecing a war veteran's widow. Perhaps that's why John Payne is the perfect for the role of Rick. Unlike Duryea's characterization of Silky, you can tell almost from the get-go that Payne's Rick has something resembling a soul residing deep inside his otherwise steel-cold shell. And it's appropriate that Deborah is played by someone named Joan Caulfield, since she's one step removed from Joan of Arc. I don't want to feel bad for the sucker in movies like this! Every time Dan Duryea popped back onscreen, I breathed a little easier. Not only does he knock his slimy delivery out of the park, his fantastic late-'40s wardrobe is something I would con Deborah for.

The real surprise in Larceny is Shelly Winters as the tawdry Tory. Never one of my favorite actresses, she's fabulous as the hot hoochie playing Silky for a sap while riding Rick on the side, chewing on hardboiled dialogue like she hadn't eaten in weeks. "Stop twisting my arm!" she shrieks at Rick during a violent moment, "people will think we're married!" Payne can give as good as he gets: "You might have a brain, but you must've rented it out to a medical student!" As I think about it, Larceny is better than I initially thought it. I just wish that damn war widow didn't get in the way.

BONUS POINTS: Two years after appearing in The Chase, Don Wilson returns to the land of noir, auctioning off the Rose Bowl football for a good cause before returning to more familiar climes of The Jack Benny Program. 

                                                             ****************