THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 72

 
These four movies live up to the phrase Now I've seen everything. Whether you want to see them is another story.

THE BLACK STORK (1917): If The Very Idea presented the funny side of eugenics, The Black Stork is shocking in its casually positive perspective. Named for the animal that allegedly kills the newborns it deems unhealthy, The Black Stork is based on the career of Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, a surgeon infamous for doing likewise to human babies. Despite Haiselden's notoriety, his movie counterpart, Dr. Dickey, is presented as a hero doing God's work. And if you want proof, when the doctor goes to work on one unfortunate newborn, Jesus cradles the baby's soul in His arms upon its death, so there.

The story, about a man carrying a "defective" gene via his grandfather's "unclean" housekeeper, is extended an extra half hour or so by the mother's nightmare of how her newborn's child's life will turn out if he lives: ostracized by children, rejected and mocked by society in adulthood, killing the surgeon who let him live, and eventually fathering a whole brood of "unfit" kids with what used to be referred to as a downtrodden woman. And in The Black Stork, people unfit to live include those with Down's Syndrome and epilepsy. Oof.

Not once are society's visibly horrified reactions to these people considered out of line; instead, it's those people's fault for living. In order to give The Black Stork a documentary feel, authentic "deformed" children and adults are featured exploited, with Dr. Haiselden himself playing the hero eugenicist! Re-released in 1924 as Are You Fit to Marry? with an additional framing story, The Black Stork played the grindhouse circuit until the early 1940s, when Hitler made the concept of eugenics less acceptable for (public) endorsement.

BONUS POINTS: Henry Bergman, who plays "The Defective" in the mother's nightmare about her child's future, would go on to better things as a regular co-star and assistant director for Charlie Chaplin.

THE DEVIL'S ASSISTANT (1917): The long-forgotten, barely-known-in-his-time Harry Pollard careened between directing mainstream studio pictures and exploitation dreck involving the usual cinematic sins -- drugs, sex, and Satan. The Devil's Assistant combines all of them in a two-reel (cut down from its original five) whirlwind of madness. 

Oh wait, madness is the fourth sin here, suffered by our heroine Marta upon the birth of her baby. She's being treated by the evil Dr. Lorenz, the man who has secretly loved her forever, eventually turning her into a drug slave under his spell. During an attempted rape in a thunderstorm, the roof caves in on them, sending the shamed Marta brief to Hell for a look-see. But maybe it was only a dream, as her husband Jack rescues her from the clutches of the late Dr. Lorenz. (Jack had been dallying with Marta's friend Marion, but we'll forget about that.)

Other than not explaining what happened to Marta's baby -- it isn't clear whether the kid died at birth or went the way of the black stork -- the 30-minute hack job done on The Devil's Assistant's later rerelease doesn't matter to the story. Movies like this exist strictly for shock moments, like Lorenz briefly turning into Satan at Marta and Jack's wedding, Lorenz's chauffeur leering with approval at Lorenz assaulting Marta (probably the creepiest moment in the whole show), and the red-tinted visit to Hell.

Like the similar scene in Spencer Tracy's Dante's Inferno, The Devil's Assistant passes this off as a moral lesson rather than the cheap thrill it really is. But give director Pollard credit for attaching two phony heads and a cheap pair of wings on a real dog to create Cerberus, even if he looks no more evil than the participants in the canine costume contest in our neighborhood every Halloween. All things considered, The Devil's Assistant, even in its barely-rescued-from-self-destruction condition, is a morbidly fascinating psychoactive experience. But the only lesson you'll likely learn: if your current PCP sports a goatee and sinister smile like Dr. Lorenz, find yourself a new one.

BONUS POINTS: Say what you want, but there's something creepy about Death being portrayed by a guy in a skeleton costume and hooded cape.

IMPRESSIONS OF DISRAELI (1931): We're all used to celebrities making political endorsements. But the 15-minute Impressions of Disraeli takes it one step beyond by starring George Arliss as the famous 19th-century Prime Minister promoting Britain's Conservative Party. 

Mind you, Arliss never comes out and says, "Vote the straight Tory ticket!" Instead, he recreates a few of Disraeli's speeches that explained what the Conservatives stood for and why they were better than the Liberals. And what's fascinating is that they appeared to support equal rights, freedom of speech and justice for all, where no class was better than the other -- you know, liberal ideals. The closest he comes to sounding "conservative" is when he endorses tariffs, but only against countries who impose their own. If this is what the current American conservatives were like, I could sleep better at night.

By 1931, Arliss had portrayed Disraeli on the London and New York stages, as well as a silent and talking movie. As far as audiences were concerned, he was Disraeli the way Hal Holbrook was Mark Twain. And, gosh darn it, Arliss really pulls it off. Not that I was around during Disraeli's lifetime (1804-1881) to know for sure. Arliss' make-up and hairstyle appear closer to the real thing than in his 1929 bio talkie, which makes me think he applied it here himself, as he likely did onstage. Never seen in the US (and, for some reason, repeating one speech twice in a row), Impressions of Disraeli is riveting historically and artistically -- this is as close as you'll get to knowing what George Arliss was like onstage. Like anybody but me cares.

BONUS POINTS: The movie is introduced by Conservative Party leader and future Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (I had to go online to learn who the hell he was).

BOOM (1968): Tennessee Williams' Boom (the exclamation mark exists only in the posters, not the credits) encapsulates everything wrong with "edgy", "stylish" movies from the mid to late 1960s. Bad dialogue, gaudy color schemes, camera movements that call attention to themselves, and an A-list cast wallowing in trash, led by Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Noel Coward. Oh, what a free trip to Italy and a good paycheck will do to some people! 

Taylor is Mrs. Goforth, living in splendor on her private island where she screams at her employees between glasses of vodka and bottles of pills, when visited by Chris Flanders (Burton). Flanders, a distant acquaintance of Goforth's, is nicknamed the Angel of Death, which alerts you how the movie is going to end. At that point, you could go out to dinner and return to catch the climax because nothing but nothing outside of reams of bad dialogue happens in between. Trashy movies can be entertaining (see Machine Gun McCain), but Boom is a stupefyingly pretentious bore.

Aside from Michael Dunn as Goforth's security chief, the only person you'd miss by skipping the bulk of Boom is Noel Coward as the, uh, Witch of Capri. Thanks to his brilliant delivery, Coward actually makes his dialogue sound wittier than it is. Tennessee Williams seems to have had given up all pretense of offering some kind of a "message" in his screenplay, lapsing into either self-parody or the crime of WWI (Writing While Intoxicated). When near the end of Boom Taylor moans, "This is the worst day of my life," I thought, You don't know the half of it, Liz.

BONUS POINTS: Tennessee Williams considered Boom the best movie adaptation of any of his plays, which goes to show artists aren't necessarily the best judges of their own works. 

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