THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 42

By sheer coincidence, three of these titles are from 1951, which will never be confused with 1939 as a classic year for movies. 

SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1932): Warren William, the King of the Pre-Codes, temporarily left his homebase at Warner Bros. for M-G-M as super-rich banker David Dwight, who isn't super-rich enough to outright own the skyscraper he's built. Nor is he moral enough to stop stringing along his loyal secretary Sarah while he woos her beautiful young niece, Lynn, who's currently dating Tom, a bank teller. Dwight solves the first problem by taking on a partner and issuing stock. As they start manipulating the market, everyone who bought shares in the stock -- including Tom -- lose their money, with unintended consequences all around.

While the story of Skyscraper Souls is pure Warners -- amoral boss, willing secretary, sex without guilt -- its gloss is M-G-M all the way. Warren William never starred in a better-looking movie, that's for sure. Louis B. Mayer must have gazed enviously at the box office take William's movies provided, and wanted a piece of the action, budget be damned. In fact, bigger budgets were the studio's whole reason for being. An overhead shot of the Dwight Building lobby is breathtaking in its size and scope -- this is a place where anybody would want to work, even if the boss is lecherous and, ultimately, near-sociopathic in his plan to bankrupt innocent  investors in order to gain entire ownership of his office tower, leading to one of the pre-codes' more genuinely shocking climaxes in what was, until then, something of a nasty joyride of a picture. 

Thanks to the seemingly different way people aged a century or so ago. 38 year-old Warren William and 29 year-old Verree Teasdale both look middle-aged, all the more commendable to be paired as lovers as well as boss and secretary, making his affair with 22 year-old Maureen O'Sullivan (who definitely looks her age) likely that much more risible to some audiences today but perfectly acceptable (and understandable) in 1932, even if she already has a boyfriend. There's a price to be paid for all those sexual and financial shenanigans, unusual in a pre-code like Skyscraper Souls, yet fitting nonetheless. 

BONUS POINTS: Boris Karloff can be seen in a two-second walk-on in a bank scene. Was his role meant to be larger, or was he between takes of The Mask of Fu Manchu at Metro when Skyscraper Souls director Edgar Selwyn put him through make-up and wardrobe just for fun?

YES SIR, MR. BONES (1951): Over five decades ago, I stumbled upon Yes Sir, Mr. Bones while flipping through the TV dial, and what little I watched scared the hell out of me. Since then, the very idea of minstrel shows has become more bizarre even as "all in good fun" blackface has had a resurgence. Ergo, I'm asking for trouble by even watching this super-cheap release from poverty row studio Lippert Pictures, while saving you the guilt you'd feel from watching it yourself. 

Hanging on by the barest of plot threads -- a little boy visiting a rest home for former minstrel entertainers gets to imagine what one of the shows was like -- Yes Sir, Mr. Bones is historically important for two reasons, even if only one of which would be acceptable today. First, it features entertainers who actually appeared in minstrel shows of yore, including husband and wife team Chick & Cotton Watts, the remarkably offensive Slim Williams, and the legendary Emmett Miller, whose eerie "high yodeling" singing influenced Jimmy Rodgers and, eventually, Hank Williams. Unfortunately, Miller gets only a few seconds demonstrating his style, spending a large chunk of his time doing a typical mushmouth routine with Ches Davis.

A more acceptable -- and entirely unsurprising -- reason to watch Yes Sir, Mr. Bones is that the handful of black entertainers featured are so much better than the ofays in blackface. Monette Moore's vocalizing of "Stay Out of the Kitchen" (likely sung this one time only) makes up for her Aunt Jemima wardrobe, while Brother Bones's whistling and "bones"-playing of "Listen to the Mockingbird" amazes even today. But it's the hilarious team of F.E. Miller and Scatman Carothers (who would later drop the "a" from his last name) that steal the show with a sample of the so-called "never-ending" conversation that Miller shared years earlier on stage with Mantan Moreland. (They were teamed in the previously-discussed Mr. Washington Goes to Town.) These two pros are so brilliant that it makes you wonder what they and their brethren thought of being onstage with dopey guys in blackface. From start to finish, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones is only an hour long, which, along with its restoration, may or may not be enough to get you interested in watching it on YouTube. (I know, I know -- somebody spent good money on restoring Yes Sir, Mr. Bones? There must be a big audience for blackface in the 21st century.)

BONUS POINTS: Never heard of Brother Bones? If you've ever watched the Harlem Globetrotters, you've definitely heard his 1949 recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown". Scatman Crothers went on to make 134 movie and TV appearances, his best-known being Halloran, the hotel maintenance man in The Shining. 

THE HOODLUM (1951): Against the advice of the warden, 12-time loser Vincent Lubeck is let out of stir and into the arms of his dear old mother. His younger brother Johnny isn't so welcoming, but at the behest of mom gives Vince a job at his gas station. Vince returns the favor by driving away customers, knocking up Johnny's gf Rosa, and plotting a bank heist with some of his chums from the old days. You can get dizzy counting the number of subsequent deaths, including mom (by heartbreak), Rosa (via swan dive off an apartment building) and Vincent himself. Well, at least Johnny still has the gas station.

Lawrence Tierney was still riding the fumes of his star making role in Dillinger from 1945 when The Hoodlum was released. This low-budget programmer has every cliche in the screenwriters' book, including the gray-haired mother with an Easter European accent, and a robbery that doesn't go as planned. But none of that matters with Tierney in the lead. Not a great actor by any stretch -- he's only marginally better than George Raft, whom he also sounds like -- Tierney nevertheless is one of the scarier bad guys of his time. Maybe he was drawing from his real-life exploits of bar fights and beating up cops (which derailed his career), but there's something undeniably unnerving about his performance in The Hoodlum, or any of his bad-guy roles. 

You can't say he has no depth as an actor; you can see Vince's shame when, on the run from the cops, his dying mom admits to being wrong about urging the parole board to free him from prison. But until that point, Tierney is at his best treating Rosa like dirt after she asks him to run away with her, splashing a car with gasoline because he doesn't like the driver, or shooting as many bank guards as possible at the robbery. 

Edward Tierney, Lawrence's real-life younger brother, is strictly one-note as Johnny, perhaps due as much to the script as his talent, although it's pretty interesting to see the two siblings going at it the way they do. By the climax, when Johnny pulls a gun on Vince with the promise to kill him at the town dump, you wonder if any of what you're watching was cathartic for Edward, whose career didn't go much of anywhere. As for Lawrence, he was already on the fast-track to smaller roles and only the occasional TV appearance before his great comeback in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in 1992, where he had become unrecognizable from the almost handsome but still scary actor he was in The Hoodlum. 

BONUS POINTS: Shaky rear-projection in the apartment rooftop scene makes L.A. look like it's experiencing a 2.0 earthquake.

SIROCCO (1951): Outside of In a Lonely Place, Humphrey Bogart's self-produced movies for Columbia aren't highly regarded. But give one of them, Sirocco, credit for being intriguing if nothing else, as Bogie portrays a genuine antihero that you're not sure you want to root for, seeing that his character, Harry Smith, is smuggling weapons to Syrian terrorists -- or are they freedom fighters? -- battling the French occupational force in 1923. (The sounds of violent street fighting run almost nonstop until the very end.) Smith finds himself attracted to Violette, the sidepiece of Col. Feroud of the French army, who makes the smuggler his number one target more for personal than professional reasons. After being informed on by a colleague, Smith suddenly finds himself shunned by almost everybody he knows -- except, ironically, Feroud, who does him a favor, ultimately at the cost of one of their lives. 

As with another of Bogart's Columbia releases, Tokyo Joe from two years earlier, Sirocco gives off a Casablanca vibe; hell, nine years after that classic's release, the tagline on the one-sheet above doesn't even try to hide it. Mideast intrigue, guys in fezzes, a foreign dame, and the lead character who has no cause to believe in, no loyalty to any side -- he can even get you out of the country for a price. The difference is that you know from the get-go that it's all a front for Casablanca's Rick Blaine. Sirocco's Harry Smith is a cynic bordering on nihilist, seeing that he doesn't care who or how many die as long as he gets paid. And he walked out on his wife back in the States!  In a way, it's kind of a refreshing change to see him not as a conventional hero or bad guy but something in between -- or, perhaps, out of bounds.

Also going for Sirocco is the fine cast of supporting characters actors. Bogart, comfortable in his own skin on and offscreen, seems to have no problem being upstaged every time he turns around. He must have enjoyed working with Everett Sloane and Zero Mostel on his previous movie The Enforcer, seeing they appear here respectively as the French commanding officer Gen. LaSalle and smuggler Balukjiaan, the man who drops a dime on Smith to save his own neck. The familiar Peter Brocco and Jeff Corey underplay to good effect as a sarcastic barber and witty jewel thief, while the lively Nick Dennis (Harry's sidekick Nasir) unashamedly steals every scene from Bogart with the ease of Jerry Colonna, whom he resembles. As with The Enforcer, Sirocco provides proof that a new generation of actors had come along who undoubtedly admired Bogart but had their own way of doing things. 

So it's kind of strange that the biggest name outside of Bogart, 40-year-old Lee J. Cobb, doesn't register well as Col. Feroud. Hulking, jealous, prone to anger yet desirous of brokering a truce between the French and Syrians, Cobb is nevertheless wrong for the part. (He and Everett Sloane might have swapped roles to better effect.) As for Marta Toren as Violette, whatever sex appeal she exudes -- which isn't much -- is overpowered by her character's greed. You just don't buy Smith's attraction to her, unless it's because she's a woman who matches him in misanthropy. These little problems aside, Sirocco overall is a well-made, fascinating drama, and probably the second best of Bogart's Columbia pictures.

BONUS POINTS: Cobb's dialogue with LaSalle and the emotionally cold leader of the Syrian underground proves nothing has ever changed in the Middle East and never will. Maybe Harry Smith was onto something after all.

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