THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 35

Three Paramount pre-Codes, two John Carradine appearances, two stories involving soul transfers, and one Monogram B-picture. Is this heaven or what?

PICK UP (1933): Mary Richards (not the news producer in Minneapolis with the wacky friends) is let out of prison after serving time for an extortion racket -- which ended in a mark's suicide -- run by her husband John, who has three more years to serve. Having nowhere to go on a rainy evening, Mary ducks into a cab driven by Harry Glynn, who takes pity on her, invites her to move in with him, and gets her a job at the taxi garage as a phone operator. Mary, who hasn't told Harry of her unsavory past, urges him to pursue his dreams to open his own auto repair garage. Over time, they rise the up the social ladder. Just as Mary gets her marriage annulled, John breaks out of prison with the idea of killing Harry, who's fallen in love with a shallow rich divorcee. Mary manages to convince John to hit the road with her in order to save Harry's life. Tell it to the judge!

Pick Up has plenty of pre-code moments, starting with references to "the badger game" (where a woman entices a man to a phony romantic liaison, only to have her husband break it up and force the victim pay hush money). Because Mary is still married, she and Harry shack up for three years; while they're never seen in bed together, you get the idea they're not just roommates. The subplot of the wealthy woman who strings along a "caveman" for her own amusement was typical of the time, as was her horselaugh when the sap proposes marriage. (Pre-codes were often down on rich people, who do stupid things like throw parties where guests dress like children, play on see-saws, and drink out of baby bottles as they do here.) Even the typically sleazy opening theme by the Paramount orchestra promises a good time. 

So why is Pick Up just kind of meh? Other than the slow pace, the fault ultimately lies with George Raft as Harry. An actor's flat, low-key style can often be interesting, drawing you in, making you wonder what makes him tick. All you wonder about Raft is if he would have even gotten a movie contract had he not been best friends with Bugsy Siegel. A pro like cutie-pie Sylvia Sidney, as Mary, leaves him in the dust in every scene they share. In fact, everyone in Pick Up outshines Raft, whose one moment of drama -- hiring a lawyer to defend Mary when she runs off with John -- sounds no more emotional than ordering a new set of tires. Hell of a shiny head of hair, though. (If you're going to watch Pick Up, stick with it 'til the end just for its ludicrous only-in-the-movies courtroom climax.)

BONUS POINTS: An outrageous phallic symbol is provided by close-up of Harry's fuel pump overflowing into Muriel's gas tank. Honest.

SUPERNATURAL (1933): Supernatural's poster promises a great time, and by and large delivers, well, a good one. One doesn't expect a dish like Carole Lombard in a borderline-fantasy/horror movie, where she plays Roma Courtney, who has inherited her late brother's fortune. Desperate to know how he died, Roma falls for the promises of Paul Bavian, a sham psychic who tries to worm  his way into her heart money. His plans are interrupted by Dr. Carl Housan, who has revived the spirit of executed killer Ruth Rogen. Guess whose body she decides to park in? By the end of Supernatural's 65 minutes, Bavian learns the hard way that you don't want to get involved with a woman whose soul has been hijacked by a very unpleasant dead murderer.

Supernatural, a Paramount Picture influenced by Universal's horror shows, is unique by offering two views of the fantasy world. It presents psychics not just as scammers, but criminals -- Bavian kills his landlady when she threatens to spill the beans on his phony baloney. Yet it totally accepts the possibility of the revival of a dead person's soul. (You may recall Man With Two Lives passing off a similar idea as a coma-induced dream.) Perhaps to make sure audiences knew Dr. Housan wasn't a nutty scientist like Dr. Frankenstein, he's played by H.B. Warner, best known for starring in King of Kings six years earlier. How bad could he be if he played Jesus, right? 

Carole Lombard is quite good as the before-and-after Roma Courtney; her style -- even her looks -- change dramatically when becoming possessed by Ruth Rogen.  Roma is such an innocent that you kind of understand why she doesn't see through Alan Dinehart's Paul Bavian -- he has such a kind manner (for a murderer). Pre-cowboy Randolph Scott looks good in a tux, but it's difficult to picture Lombard falling for him. Supernatural is no classic, but it's an interesting change of pace from Paramount's usual sexy comedies and pre-codes. And from what I've read about the guys who ran movie studios then, they all could have used a soul transplant. 

BONUS POINTS: The bizarre, montage-heavy prologue featuring Ruth Rogen testifying in court and newspaper headlines playing up the trial. The rest of the movie doesn't live up to its promise, but it's a nice opening.

THIS DAY AND AGE (1933): So connected is Cecil B. DeMille to Biblical epics that it's a little stunning to stumble across his early pre-Code talkies, especially This Day and Age. A beloved tailor named Herman Farbstein is gunned down by gangster Louis Garrett for not paying up for a protection racket. After Garrett is found not guilty, three high school seniors look for proof of his crime, leading the gangster to murder one of them. Fully expecting that Garrett will once again get off scot-free, a bunch of the victim's friends decide that vigilantism is their only choice. But don't worry -- before they string him up, they'll make sure he gets a fair trial with a jury of every blood-hungry teenage boy in town. Wait, don't they know females are allowed to serve, too?

With a climax almost-embarrassingly influenced by Fritz Lang's M, This Day and Age plays on the crime-weary audience's disgust with pesky things like law, evidence, and guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Perennial heavy Charles Bickford plays Garrett as such an evil guy that you really don't mind seeing him lowered into a huge hole of hungry rats. Don't ask me to recount the name of the high school kids or the actors who play them -- most of them are interchangeable pretty boys who dress more like legal interns than highschoolers. 

There's enough spectacle and violence here to keep modern audiences alternately entertained and shocked. (The murders are particularly brutal, while a teen girl essentially volunteers to be possibly raped by Garrett's bodyguard in order to distract him from his job.) Per usual with DeMille pictures, every dollar of the budget is onscreen, with hundreds of extras, large sets, and handsome cinematography making This Day and Age an unusually impressive-looking Paramount production. 

And don't worry about the girl and the bodyguard. When he learns that she's a virgin, he shakes his head and mutters, "I like my olives green, but I don't pick 'em." See, he's a nice guy after all!

BONUS POINTS: The brief role of the extraordinarily articulate school Vice-Principal is credited to John Peter Richmond, who would soon change his name to John Carradine.

VOODOO MAN (1944): It's an adage first spoken by Aristotle: a movie doesn't
have to be great to be a great movie. Exhibit one: Voodoo Man, wherein two fellows named Nicholas and Toby are kidnapping young women in order for their boss, Dr. Marlowe, to transfer the right soul into the body of his wife who's been dead 20 long years, yet kept in excellent condition somehow or another. Plenty of people would like anybody's soul transferred into their living spouses, but that's another story entirely.

A major studio would have made a B-picture like Voodoo Man an utter bore thanks to writers, directors and actors who were ashamed of the assignment. But the behind-the-scenes folks at Monogram knew exactly how to excite the audience and find the right actors who could sell the product. And in this movie, Bela Lugosi (Marlowe), George Zucco (Nicholas), and John Carradine (Toby) not only sell it, they offer a money-back guarantee if you aren't entertained. 

As usual, Lugosi plays it totally straight, putting memories of his stage days in Hungary out of his head for the sake of the movie. Zucco is hilariously out of place as the owner of a gas station (where the women are kidnapped) who doubles as a boogity-boogity-chanting shaman during the attempted soul transfers. The relatively young (38) whippersnapper Carradine successfully goes to toe with these two legends, channeling Lennie from Of Mice and Men as the IQ-deficient Toby, running around with his arms stiffly at his sides with his mouth agape like the Bryce Canyon. Movie snobs who go gaga for Godard or run tout suite to Truffaut don't know what they're missing by turning up their snooty noses at Voodoo Man. It even features a subplot about a screenwriter named Ralph who's trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing women in order to write a movie about the disappearing women starring Bela Lugosi! That's kind of Fellini, isn't it?

BONUS POINTS: The legendary director William "One Take" Beaudine lives up to his nickname when the gas-ration sticker on a car windshield changes from shot to shot.

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "WHITE WOMAN" (1932)

 Was there ever an actor who enjoyed acting with such sordid gusto more than Charles
Laughton? If Warren William was the King of Pre-Codes, then Laughton was its manipulative Crown Prince, humble and by-your-liege one moment before pulling out the dagger the next, sweating, slobbering, and spitting his way to the throne. 

Laughton isn't just aware of his homeliness -- he positively relishes putting it on display, exaggerating his already outsized features to the point of repulsiveness. Even when dressed to the nines as a navy captain in The Devil and the Deep, he's a hideous excuse of a man. But give him tacky clothes, sloppy hair, and a ridiculously archaic walrus moustache as in White Woman, while coated in humid jungle sweat and speaking with a proud cockney accent, he's a nightmare come to life for the likes of a knockout like Carole Lombard.

The look of love is in your eyes...

While the movie's title is White Woman, it might as well be White Slob. Laughton is top-billed and gets the lion's share -- make that wild boar's share -- of screentime as Horace Pin, the autocratic owner of a rubber plantation. Lombard is Judith Denning, a singer who is ordered to leave the Malaysian city where she lives for the crime of -- gasp! --working at an integrated nightclub. Yup, we're in pre-code territory, alright.

Judith, a woman "with a past" (her husband blew his brains out under mysterious circumstances) has nowhere to go. Pin, possessing the amorous style of an overfed hyena eyeing a baby gazelle, offers his pudgy hand in marriage so she doesn't have to wander the world like women with a past have to do. Before you can say "There goes the bride," Judith is living in connubial hell in the middle of a jungle, where all the plantation workers are on the run from the authorities for crimes ranging from drug dealing to murder. At least they didn't sing at integrated nightclubs!

David marvels at how Judith's make-up never
runs in this blasted heat.

One of the workers, David von Elst, isn't so bad -- he just went AWOL from his outfit after one of his fellow soldier's severed head was tossed through his window by angry natives. (I guess they'd have to be angry to do that.) When he and Judith ("the first white woman I've seen in ten years") start doing the hubba-hubba, Pin transfers him to his other plantation downriver. Hey, it's the Depression, and it's better than being fired.

Ballister and Judith decide who has better
cleavage.

David's replacement, a roughhouse named Ballister, doesn't care that Judith is married to the boss, either. But unlike David, he enjoys rubbing it in Pin's face. Too bad for Ballister that Judith isn't interested in rubbing anything in his face. It doesn't matter, anyway; once Pin insults a tribal chief, the natives are out for revenge. David, having risked his life making his way through the jungle, returns to take Judith away, leaving Pin and Ballister to face their fate alone. Some honeymoon!

The menage-a-trois of your nightmares.

Laughton hovers over White Woman -- one of the more outrageously sleazy studio pre-Codes -- like a putrid Geppetto. As in The Devil and the Deep, he manipulates everybody around him for his own amusement. Having grown up poor and looked down upon, he now relishes the reversal that money has brought him. Some bosses feel like killing their employees when they quit -- this guy outsources it to the locals with poison spears. 

To Pin, Judith is just another of his employees, her job merely to be brought low as with the others. Continually addressing her as "your ladyship", you can't be sure if he's serious or sarcastically reminding her how far she's sunk. When he brings her home after the wedding, the first thing he does is show her the bedroom -- articulating the word in a way that sleep is the last thing on his mind. As Judith enters and tries closing the door, he immediately steps in behind her, slamming it shut so that we know what's about to happen is going to ugly indeed. 

Laughton tells Bickford to stop trying to steal
his scenes.

Of the other men in White Woman, only Charles Bickford, as Ballister, can stand up to Laughton both physically and professionally. Whereas Pin mumbles his words, Ballister barks them like a ferocious pitbull. He regards Pin not as his boss so much as his damaged equal, and doesn't care what fate brings him. Despite being only slightly less uncouth than Pin, he's got more personality than Judith's lover David, who, as played by Kent Taylor, doesn't seem like the kind of man a hot number like her would go for. But perhaps that's the whole idea -- she's one of those "bad girls" who comes to realize that a "nice guy" is exactly what she needs. Only in the movies, kids.

Ladies, how would you like this guy
gazing at you every morning?

And then there's Carole Lombard (thought I forgot about her, eh?). Her portrayal of the

unfortunate Judith is sincere and sympathetic. She's lovely to look at, of course, and she can actually sing. You definitely feel bad for Judith being stuck on a tropical hellhole where she gets more enjoyment from the camp's pet monkey than her husband. And even that doesn't last. (I'll let you find out for yourself -- it's too good to spoil.)

But nobody can outdo Charles Laughton, who conveys more with a leer than a dozen leading men can do with an entire script. More than anyone in the pre-Code days, he delights in disgusting the audience to the point where they probably regretted buying a ticket to the movie. That's a real actor.

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For more Charles Laughton pre-Codes, go to Payment Deferred and The Devil and the Deep.

THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 6

What would I do without YouTube and TCM? Well, have a more meaningful life with time for charity and volunteer work. But who needs that when there's so much celluloid and kinescope history to discover? I'm approaching the last chapter of my life, and I'm going to have fun!

 

ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY (1949): Charley Enley Kyng (yes, that's how his name is spelled), the  owner of a high-class gambling joint, has problems. He's losing the respect of his college-age son Paul; his wife Lon is on the verge of leaving him; one of his employees is in debt to a couple of low-rent gunmen; and his heart is ready to give out. Otherwise, things are going great. On the night one craps player is about to break the bank, the gunmen make a move to rob the joint.  Paul and the gamblers put their lives on the line to force the crooks to flee. Deciding to cash in his chips, Charley sells the casino to his employees in order to spend his remaining years with his family instead of slot jockeys and card sharks.

Nothing particularly outstanding about that outline, I admit. But thanks to director Mervyn LeRoy, Any Number Can Play feels like a preview of the more adult dramas that would come along in the 1950s. Even the fluid cinematography and occasional long takes separates it from other studio releases of its time. Clark Gable seems to enjoy his interesting dialogue, while the women in his life -- played by Alexis Smith, Audrey Totter, Mary Astor, and Marjorie Rambeau -- are all strong and smart. 

Best of all are enough familiar faces to fill a card deck. Some, like Wendell Corey as the crooked dealer, and William Conrad -- brilliant as a sleazy, sociopathic hoodlum with the annoying habit of addressing everyone as George -- were fairly new to movies in 1949. Yet the old timers stand out, too, many of them playing against type. It's the closest that they or Gable came to film noir. If you're tired of Mutiny on the Bounty or It Happened One Night, put your chips on Any Number Can Play some evening. (That's the final gambling pun you'll be reading here.)

BONUS POINTS: Imagining Louis B. Mayer having a fit in the screening room as he watched MGM's longtime loveable actors Frank Morgan and Lewis Stone playing, respectively, a nasty craps shooter, and an alcoholic, suicidal degenerate poker player. 

GANGS OF NEW YORK (1938): No, this is isn't the original version of the Martin Scorsese movie. It isn't even based on the 1927 book of the same name. What it is, is one of Republic Pictures' rare non-Westerns. When gangster John Sullivan is preparing for parole from prison, he's put into a cell behind a wall in the warden's office. (Sure, every prison has one of them!). Undercover cop Rocky Thorpe, a dead ringer for Sullivan, takes his place as a gang boss, gathering evidence to pass along to authorities. But not everyone in his gang believes he's the real deal -- not even his dog or girlfriend... especially when he starts falling for Connie Benson, the sweet sister of one of the gang member's wannabes. Good thing  the real John Sullivan breaks out of his one-man cell to set things straight for all involved!

Absurdities abound in Gangs of New York, which doesn't negate its entertainment value for a moment. It just might be one of the best B-movies of its genre even as you're thinking I don't believe a second of this from the first scene right through its happily-ever-after climax 67 minutes later. 

Charles Bickford puts his rough manner to good use as Thorpe/Sullivan, although at times you get the feeling he realizes how nutty the script is. It's always nice to see the classy Ann Dvorak (as Connie) even as she's slumming in poverty row epics like this. Former boxer "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom plays it serious for probably the first and last time of his movie career. And the should-be-better-known Harold Huber hits his usual home run as Bickford's sidekick Panatella. He's smokin' good!

BONUS POINTS: Gangs of New York was written by the eventually-legendary Sam Fuller. See, even the greats have to start somewhere.

PAGLICACCI (1936): My problem with operas is that they never stop with the
singing. And it's always in a foreign language! So props to the producers of Pagliacci, because this version from the UK is a drama with half a dozen songs from the opera sung in English!

 A traveling opera troupe is performing Punchinello, in which a sad-sack clown discovers his wife cavorting with a handsome young man and her former lover. Lead actor Canio has no idea that his wife, Nedda, is doing the same thing offstage. (Pagliacci was meta before people knew what it meant). Finally discovering life imitating art, Canio exacts deadly revenge on Nedda and her bf during a performance in front of a shocked audience. Yeah! That's what we wanna see!

Pagliacci, then, is like an RKO noir with a higher pedigree. The songs roared by star Richard Tauber (a big noise in the opera world back in the day) are often difficult to understand due to his Austrian accent. But the story itself is so clear that Tauber could be singing in Mandarin and you'd know what was going on -- unlike that shmuck Canino not knowing what's going with his cheating wife. If nothing else, by watching Pagliacci you can pass yourself off as an opera buff at your next party. 

BONUS POINTS: Pagliacci's prologue and climatic opera scene were filmed in the German film process Agfacolor under the name British Chemicolor. I guess the Brits were expecting Germany to become the enemy any day. 

SMOOTH AS SILK  (1946): Broadway actress Paula Marlowe two-times her boyfriend Mark Fenton and drunk rich kid Don Elliot in order to star in a play written by Don's uncle Stephen. (If she's two-timing two guys, does that make her a four-timer?) Mark gets his revenge by murdering Stephen and pinning it on Paula. When that ruse starts to fall apart, he convinces Don he did it while blackout drunk. But you don't think ace District Attorney John Kimble won't see through that, do you?

Even with Smooth as Silk running 64 minutes, the above synopsis sounds a little thin. That's because I've left out a few subplots that are introduced before going nowhere. Early on, it seems like Paula's kid sister Susan is going to be John Kimball's love interest, but that never happens. A guy shows up to warn Paula being accused of murder isn't going to help her career, then disappears before we find out exactly who he is. Paula herself vanishes from the movie 10 minutes before the climax, so we never find out if that mystery man's prediction is correct. At one point, it even seems like kid sis Susan is going to hook up with Don Elliot before that, too, fizzles out. Now that I think of it, you could take Susan out of the story and it wouldn't affect the story one bit.

Ahh, who cares? It's Smooth as Silk's fast pace and host of B-movie actors that make for fun viewing. Virginia Grey makes Paula Marlowe as hideous a creature as one could find -- you kind of wish she goes to the chair for a crime she didn't commit. As Mark Fenton, Kent Taylor -- a two-bit version of the similarly-named Robert Taylor -- oozes anti-charm from every pore. Familiar character actors John Litel, Charles Towbridge, and Milburn Stone round out the cast, helping to make Smooth as Silk live up to its title.

BONUS POINTS:  John Litel and Kent Taylor light up their cigars at a smoke shop with a gas-powered lighter, something that today is likely quite illegal. 

THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW (12/30/53): A year before originating the Tonight show, Steve Allen hosted a similar live series local to New York, airing from 11:20 p.m. to midnight, sponsored by Ruppert Knickerbocker Beer (100% starch free, as Steve repeatedly reminds us during the live commercials where he actually drinks the stuff).

The Steve Allen Show, then, provided the template for the original Tonight. Steve comes out, adlibs some comments, answers some audience questions, and plays a number on the piano before getting the show rolling.

 Other music segments feature Steve Lawrence (singing a torch song on a set made to look like a tavern) and, later, his wife Eydie Gorme. In between, Allen interviews humorist Roger Price ("humorist" meaning he's unfunny), someone with the honorific American Campus Queen, and the astonishingly dull members of the audience. At some point, Father Knickerbocker (the sponsor's logo come to life) talks about the Brooklyn Children's Museum in excruciating detail.

Obviously, The Steve Allen Show is absolutely nothing like today's counterparts, where everyone involved appears to have been shot up with amphetamines. The whole idea of Steve's show seems to be lulling you to sleep with very gentle humor and easy-listening music. It makes more sense than Jimmy Fallon playing Charades while giggling like a maniac.

BONUS POINTS:  The Steve Allen Show (and the original Tonight) originated from the Hudson Theater, where my wife and I saw Plaza Suite earlier this year. Considering tickets to the TV show were free, Steve's audience got the better deal.

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