MOVIE OF THE DAY: "THE LETTER" (1929)

It's a tale as old as time, or at least Hollywood. A young wife, ignored by her older husband, finds solace in another man's, er, arms. When her lover tires of her, she empties a revolver in him. Placed on trial, she gets off the hook by reciting a cock & bull story about how she had to save herself from the actions of the drunken brute. 

Too bad she forgot about that love letter she had written him before he died.

The Letter was a first on more than one count. The first talkie shot at Paramount's Astoria Studios. The first talkie starring Broadway star Jeanne Eagels. And, ultimately, the first movie featuring an actress posthumously-nominated for an Academy Award. Sorry you couldn't stick around for the ceremony, Jeanne! But don't worry, you lost to Mary Pickford anyway.

Clocking in at a mere 65 minutes, The Letter undoubtedly moves a lot faster than the original stage version written by W. Somerset Maugham (which, as time goes by, sounds more and more like a character from a Cohen Brothers picture). At the same time, being a product from the early days of talkies, nobody hurries their dialogue when speaking slowly and clearly will do. Nor does the director play around with fancy edits. In fact, much of Eagles' courtroom statement plays out in one very long take, as if you were watching a Broadway show.

"Frankly my dear, I don't give --
whoops, wrong movie."

This isn't a bad thing, for it gives you a pretty good idea of what the already-legendary stage actress Jeanne Eagels was like nearly 100 years ago. As with early George Arliss talkies, The Letter is a time machine of sorts to study the once-great, now nearly-forgotten actors in the early decades of the 20th century. 

Yet it also offers the rare chance to see how another actor -- in this case, Herbert Marshall -- has already adapted to the more subtle art of movie acting. In their one scene together, Eagels' desperate amorous declarations contrast mightily with Marshall's quiet, bored responses. (During my dating days, the roles were usually reversed.)

Languid, thy name is Herbert Marshall

Taking place in a Malaysian rubber plantation, The Letter, being a pre-code melodrama, gladly offers us negative Asian stereotypes. Marshall's "half-caste" mistress, with whom he lives in unmatrimonial sin. A brothel featuring prostitutes kept in a giant cage. The use of the word "yellow" (and they don't mean scared). The repeated use of the classic phrase, "Damn clever, these Chinese." Hey, it's a compliment, right?

Really, he had it coming.

But the big gaping hole in The Letter is the letter itself -- or, rather, how it comes into the hands of Eagels' lawyer. Eagels wrote the letter to Marshall, who was at home with his mistress. Why would Marshall casually drop it to the floor before visiting Eagels for the final time when his gf is right there watching him? Had we seen them smoking opium, perhaps this would be explanation enough. (I probably did worse under the control of grass.) I mean, the guy is literally asking to be found out. 

White lady red in the face and feeling blue.

No matter. It's what gives the movie its name and most eye-opening scene. Having blackmailed Eagels and her lawyer for handing over the letter for $10,000 -- a price that no letter on Wheel of Fortune would cost -- the mistress toys with her, allowing Eagels to be gaped at by a john and laughed at by her caged prostitutes. For the first time, the Asian woman is on top while her white rival is the object of derision. 

And if to drive the point home further, Eagels watches the analogous entertainment (and The Letter's most bizarre moment) going on for the johns: a giant rodent fighting and ultimately swallowing a hapless snake. I have no idea if this footage was taken from a documentary or staged for the movie. Either way, I thank the snake for his service to his studio.

Ahhh, tell it to the judge! Oh wait, you are.

Its 1929 release edit long lost, a work print of The Letter was discovered some years ago. Being a work print, it lacks an underscore (there's not even music during the credits) and most sound effects, so that there are moments (like the rodent and snake fight) that play out in dead silence. While this wasn't the way The Letter was supposed to have been seen -- there are editing marks from time to time -- it gives the movie a dreamy quality that the "real" print likely lacked.

The unintentional silence plays particularly well after Eagels' climactic speech to her

"The good news is, I'm not going to jail. The bad news
is, I screwed your best friend for five years!"

husband, who, following his wife's acquittal, learns of her years-long infidelity. I hate to give it away -- although some movie fans already know it as one of the most famous lines of dialogue of its time -- but trust me, when "The End" appears, you're left stunned in a way that closing credit music would have negated.


And unlike the 1940 remake starring Bette Davis, the wife gets away with murder! Show the 1929 version of The Letter to a group of women today -- you'll be deafened by their cheers.

Jeanne Eagels had one more movie, Jealousy, left in her before a combination of heroin, chloral hydrate, and "alcohol psychosis" did her in a few months later at 39. Lady Tsen Mei, who played the damn clever mistress Lin-Ti, outlived her by over half a century, dying in 1985 at age 97. Ha! How you like that, white lady?

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DUEL IN THE SUN" (1946)

Oh my God. Has there ever been a more oversexed, overheated, overproduced, overacted movie than Duel in the Sun? With phantasmagorical three-strip Technicolor and shouting-to-the- rafters dialogue making it look every inch the fever dream of amphetamine-addicted producer David O. Selznick, Duel in the Sun was intended to top his previous epic Gone with the Wind. 

Instead, the huge, grossly-expensive (almost $100-million when adjusted for inflation), two year-long production is still considered one of the most harebrained movies from Hollywood's "golden age." Director King Vidor handles Selznick's risible script with the same anvil-like touch that he would bring to The Fountainhead three years later. Vidor, by the way, was one of six directors who helmed Duel in the Sun during its lengthy inception -- or is it ejection? -- including Selznick, who, in a rare moment of lucidity, fired himself. As for the acting, there's so much ham on display that it's probably banned in Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods.

The tale of a young, half-breed trollop who causes havoc between two brothers and their racist father, Duel in the Sun intends to be spicy but winds up being tasteless. It would have fared better as a low-budget RKO black & white programmer as originally intended, but once Selznick got his Oscar-winning paws on the project, all bets were off. 

Warning: staring at this sun on a high-def
TV for 10 straight minutes can cause
permanent eye damage.

The movie announces its intentions to epicdom (a word I just made up) with a 10-minute instrumental prelude by Dimitri Tiomkin, which never manages to string together more than three interesting notes at a time. 

The difference between "prelude"
and "overture" is 7 minutes.

Just as it comes to a thudding end, and you're settling in for, you know, a movie, the voice of character actor Reed Hadley announces, "Ladies and gentleman, the overture to Duel in the Sun!" -- followed by three more unmemorable minutes of the Selznick Studio orchestra sawing away while Hadley describes the movie you're about to see. Show, don't tell! 

Then that's followed by the credits, and that's followed by a magniloquent prologue spoken by Orson Welles (presumably to make it sound classy) before the movie finally kicks in. I guess Selznick had to do something to make it seem as long as Gone with the Wind. (Without the music folderol, Duel in the Sun runs only a little over two hours.)

Now we know where Elvis Presley got his sneer.

If Duel in the Sun was Selznick's attempt to turn his then-mistress, Jennifer Jones, into another Vivian Leigh, he should have spent more time on his shrink's couch and less time popping bennies. Wearing dark "Injun" make-up, Jones instead resembles a drunken Emirates Airline stewardess. And rather than being sexy, as was Selznick's intentions, she often appears to be having a seizure. But as she admits, "I'm trash like my maw!" A moment later, upon reflection, she writhes on her bed shouting, "Trash, trash, trash, trash, trash!" Yeah, like the script, script, script, script, script!

"After we do the nasty, I'm going out to kill
a mockingbird."

Anyone familiar with the stolid Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mockingbird will be shocked by the horny, violent sociopath presented here. Unlike, say, Alfred Hitchcock's multidimensional bad guys, Peck's Lewt McCanles is a rotter through-and-through, licking his chops like a hungry wolf eyeing a defenseless lamb -- in this case, Jennifer Jones' Pearl Chavez. As for Pearl, it winds up being one of those I-hate-you-so-much-I-love-you relationships that always work out real well in the end. (Note: that was delivered with a heavy dose of irony.) If nothing else, Peck has the time of his life playing a heel for a change, far looser in Duel in the Sun than anything else he ever made, even if he is more cartoon than human. 

Joseph Cotten is amused by Jennifer Jones'
attempt at catching flies with her mouth.

Jessie McCanles, Lewt's younger brother, hasn't got a chance with Pearl. While having pledged her love to Jessie, she's far more attracted to bad boy Lewt. Just to show you how low Pearl is, she  allows Jessie to enter her room just as Lewt is in there lighting up a post-coital smoke. (What's Apache for "bitch"?) Cotten is saddled with pity-me dialogue, but so underplays his part that he comes off better than most of his co-stars. (The only other actor in Duel in the Sun who avoids histrionics is Herbert Marshall as Pearl's father, and that's because he's killed off after ten minutes.)

The good preacher takes a personal interest in
Pearl's salvation.

Yet despite Jones' and Peck's grandstanding, it's up to the old-timers to really pull out the stops. Walter Huston's brief appearance as a shady preacher proves that the actor knew kitsch when he saw it, and, as with his role as Doc Holliday in The Outlaw, plays it with outsized tongue in cheek. King Vidor probably didn't get the joke.

"I look like Hillary who?"

Nor did Vidor do poor Lillian Gish any favors as Lewt and Jessie's mother Laura Belle McCanles. Perhaps not having seen any Gish performance since The Birth of a Nation, Vidor appeared to have instructed her to telegraph her emotions by opening her eyes like manholes, dropping her jaw to the floor, and placing her hands on her cheeks whenever possible. Her final scene -- crawling from her bed to console her grumpy husband before dropping dead at his feet -- is perhaps the cruelest, most unfortunately-hilarious thing a legend like Gish ever had to suffer. Other than the rest of her scenes in Duel with the Sun.

Lillian Gish wipes away the
spittle from Barrymore's
line-readings.

But nobody -- no body -- overdoes it like Lionel Barrymore as Sen. Jackson McCanles, the family patriarch. Once a wonderfully subtle actor, Barrymore had by now settled comfortably into the wheelchair-bound lovable crank character that defined the latter part of his career. Under Vidor's direction, however, Barrymore crosses the divide between crank and bull undergoing a wide-awake vasectomy. Bellowing, bawling and roaring his dialogue like a one-man zoo, he officially becomes a self-parody in Duel in the Sun the way his brother John did in Playmates. But at least the latter was supposed to be a comedy.

At least you can see the (over)budget on the screen.
An impressive sequence featuring hundreds of cowboys charging down a steep hill and across the plains is still exciting (and today would be recreated with CGI). The psilocybin-like Technicolor is wildly vivid, with fiery red sunsets and gorgeous blue skies popping out of the screen, while Tiomkin's score never, and I mean never, stops. As Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review, "Oh, brother—if only the dramatics were up to the technical style!"

D.W. Griffith visits Huston and Barrymore
on the set of Duel in the Sun, and decides he got
out of pictures at the right time.

Thanks to the lurid promise of SEX SEX SEX, Duel in the Sun actually turned a financial, if not artistic, profit, becoming the second highest-grossing movie of the year. It would go down in history as being the first movie little Martin Scorsese ever saw -- such are legends made.

Love means never having to say you're
sorry after shooting each other to death.

Today, Duel in the Sun divides viewers. Scorsese, still a fan, believes it was ahead of its time. Everybody else thinks it's the work of a madman. But the best part -- the absolute icing on the cake -- follows the climax. Pearl and Lewt shoot each other a dozen or so times before dying lustily in each other's arms in the hot desert sun. Pull back, fade out... to five minutes of Exit music. 

Two hours and 20 minutes of non-stop music -- and I still can't remember a frigging note.

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To read about John Barrymore's swansong, Playmates, go here.
To read about King Vidor's The Fountainhead, go here.

 

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "THE FLAME WITHIN" (1935)

Psychiatry. Unrequited love. Emotional adultery. Clown costumes. The Flame Within is a veritable textbook of classic movie genres. 

Dr. Mary White, apparently confusing her occupation of psychiatrist for relationship counselor, is treating Linda Bolton for suicidal tendencies, and Linda's fiance Jack Kerry for alcoholism. Now there's a fun couple! The good news: Linda and Jack are eventually cured. The bad news: Jack and Dr. White fall in love. Ha! Better get out those razor blades, Linda!

Paging Dr. Bozo, paging Dr. Bozo...

Writer/director Edmund Goulding appears to have consulted Symbolism for Dummies when putting together The Flame Within. Mary White's name recalls both the name of Jesus' mother and the color of purity. Dr. Gordon Phillips, the man hopelessly in love with her, dresses as an especially sad-eyed clown at a costume ball. Jack Kerry, who sobers up to become an inventor, develops an inflatable airline seat, symbolic of the kind of plot device that actors were paid to deliver with a straight face.

Advice for the man on the make:
get rid of the costume before you put the
moves on a woman.

Despite its soap opera aura, The Flame Within features some fascinatingly progressive notions, not the least of which is a woman who prefers her profession over marriage. In fact, Dr. White alarmingly considers psychiatry "a religion," perhaps allowing her to take a tax exemption. For doubtful patients like Jack Kerry, however, she refers to herself as a "nerve specialist." Make up your mind, lady!

Pining in the background for Dr. White is the older Dr. Phillips, who appears to have taken the Hippocratic oath from Hippocrates himself.  Perhaps most startling for its time, Dr. White is herself several years older than her object of lust, Jack Kerry. Unintended laugh alert: somebody refers to him as John Kerry, another fellow with a penchant of collecting rich, older women.

Director Edmund Goulding, Louis Hayward
and Ann Harding (Dr. Mary White) look
for a greater ecstasy than themselves,
and fail.

Seeing that The Flame Within was a product of 1935 Hollywood, all this refreshing progressiveness flies out the window in the last reel. Having returned from a trip to Europe, Kerry wants to dump Linda for Dr. White, who's equally in love with him. But Dr. White, taking that psychiatry-as-religion jazz seriously, advises him that doing something good for someone who needs him -- like staying with the wife whom he doesn't love -- will provide a "greater ecstasy" than his own happiness. 

While there might be an argument to be made for that schlocky slice of philosophy, most people would reply Buuuuuuullshit. I mean, tell that to Louis Hayward, the actor playing Kerry, who was married twice, all the while carrying on a long-term affair with Noel Coward. Tell that to anyone involved in the making this movie. That "greater ecstasy" routine was just a sop to both the censors and the saps in the audience who were living lives that couldn't compare to those they saw in glossy, upscale M-G-M pictures like this.

Most disappointingly is The Flame Within's final moment, when Dr. White decides to take her own advice, and announce that she's going to give up her profession. What will you do, her wannabe-paramour Dr. Phillips asks. Turning to him soulfully, she whispers, "You tell me." While their colleague Dr. Frazier smiles approvingly at their sudden engagement, the lesson for women is to marry a guy you don't love only because he needs you. Just for laughs, somebody please run this movie for Gloria Steinem.

"Can you treat my daughter
once she comes of age?"

It's appropriate Linda Bolton -- who tries to commit suicide a second time by jumping out of Dr. White's window --  is played by Maureen O'Sullivan. During one of the two costume ball scenes, she wears a blonde wig -- and, for a moment, becomes the spitting image of her equally-nutty daughter Mia Farrow, who's had, um, relationship issues of her own. Until her final moment onscreen, O'Sullivan's character is quite unlikeable throughout The Flame Within, making you wish she'd successfully jump out the window for a change.



What keeps The Flame Within worth watching is Ann Harding as Dr. White. Unlike her drag-queen contemporaries Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Harding doesn't indulge in histrionics. Her subtle, empathetic performance is so different from everyone else's that at times she appears to have come from several decades in the future. No wonder she's been pretty much forgotten -- there's nothing to parody. 

Harding, too, might have been more self-aware than the character she plays. Finally succumbing to Dr. Phillips' amorous entreaties, the expression on her face is anything but ecstasy, probably unnoticed by audiences 80 years ago, leaving one with an uneasy feeling as the movie fades out. There's plenty of drama in The Flame Within, alright, but not all of it intended.

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