THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 73

 As the world marches further into self-destruction, I retreat further into cinematic and televised obscurities. Do you blame me?

DER KAISER VON KALIFORNIEN (1936): One of the more bizarre moments in motion picture history, German actor/director Luis Trenker brought his cast and crew to the U.S. in order to film Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, the biopic of the German-born John A. Sutter, whose trek to California in the mid-19th century led to the eventual discovery of gold in them thar hills, and the expansion of the nation's territory.

But this being a Nazi-endorsed picture, calling it a "true story" would be a stretch, seeing that the real Sutter came to America to escape debtor's prison, and looked more like Edward Arnold (who starred in Sutter's Gold the same year) than the handsome Trenker. Nor did Sutter have two young sons who were shot down by his one-time friend. And there's no mention here of Sutter enslaving entire Indian tribes and, when that didn't work, engaging in genocide. Best not for the German movie public to be reminded what was happening at home, I guess.

The whole idea behind Der Kaiser von Kalifornien seems to be that it was a strong, noble German cowboy who turned the arid deserts of the Golden State into a lush paradise through hard work, wisdom, and paternal leadership, only to be brought down by greedy rivals. (You know they're bad because they hang out with black women.) 

Der Kaiser von Kalifornien is more of an interesting piece of cinema history rather than cinema itself, little different than your average forgotten Western from the time, other than Deutsch sprechen cowpokes. It even features the old saw of a spirit leading Sutter to America and, at the end, into the Great Beyond. A shame the spirit didn't have the foresight to tell him how that world war was going to turn out for the fatherland.

BONUS POINTS: Look carefully at one scene and you'll see an automobile speeding in the distance.

PLAYHOUSE 15 ("PARTNERS IN LAW") (1953): For those who found Playhouse 90 too long, the one-season anthology series Playhouse 15 was the answer. So much for the internet being the cause of short attention spans. 

In this episode, legal partners Phillip Manning and Arthur Saunders have survived a train accident. Phil's okay, but Arthur has amnesia. Phillip tells a former client, Dr. Yardley, to perform a fatal brain operation on Arthur -- because if he regains his memory, Arthur will tell the authorities that Phil stole money from a client and hid evidence that the doc was drunk during a previous botched surgery. That way, Arthur dies "accidentally", the doctor keeps his practice, and Phillip can run away with Arthur's wife. Phillip even suggests the doc find a fly-by-night mortuary to get rid of the body! Boy, if I'm ever in a jam, I know just who to call.

Playhouse 15's "Partners In Law" is impressive for packing in a complex story in such a short runtime, as well as the number of times Arthur rubs his head when repeating his I-can't-remember-a-thing mantra, and the ease with which Phillip tries to convince the surgeon to destroy Arthur's memory for good, The doc's response -- "You'd have to remove so much [brain] tissue that you'd reduce the individual to an imbecile!" -- made me think that just taking this show seriously would do the job.

Yet everything about Playhouse 15 -- the overwrought dialogue, melodramatic acting, and especially the music -- gave me a quarter-hour of warm, comforting nostalgia of childhood afternoons in front of the TV watching old reruns while drinking Cocoa Marsh. Such moments mean more now than they did then. 

BONUS POINTS: Bart Robinson, who plays Phillip, appeared in Woody Allen's Sleeper as Dr. Orva.

ANYONE CAN WIN (8/11/1953): Don't be fooled by the hyped-up announcer's promise of Anyone Can Win being "fabulous and exciting". It's just one of a billion stupid 1950s game shows created to give celebrity panelists a paycheck, and a host to crack wise. 

The twists here are that celebrities Laraine Day, Jackie Cooper, and Wendy Barrie are joined by a mystery guest disguised as Hairless Joe, a character from the "Li'l Abner" comic strip, and that the host is "Li'l Abner" creator Al Capp. (Gee, I wonder how they convinced him to take the job.) But as with many game shows of its time, Anyone Can Win has rules ridiculously complex yet sound like they're being made up on the fly. Something about questions, answers, lights, buzzers and phoning somebody at home to see if they can identify who's behind the Hairless Joe mask. 

Anyone Can Win's frenetic atmosphere is heightened by the audience. You see, they're divided into four groups, one for each panelist. Whoever wins will allow their group to split the money earned. Talk about greed -- by the end, these folks actually scream out the answers to the players, which should be against one of the show's 75 rules. 

While Al Capp tries keeping things relatively sane, Laraine Day throws a fit when one of her answers isn't accepted by the judges. And she ain't kidding -- Day is such a big baby that they give her the win just to shut her up. Maybe they were afraid her husband, New York Giants coach Leo Durocher, would come by and beat them with a baseball bat. The way Anyone Can Win operates, it wouldn't have looked out of line.

BONUS POINTS: The commercial for Carter's Little Liver Pills, before the feds forced the company to remove "Liver" from its name. Which makes sense, since according to the spot's "doctor", the stuff was for constipation.

I'LL DO ANYTHING (UNRELEASED ORIGINAL EDIT) (1994) A rare floppo for writer/director James L. Brooks, I'll Do Anything was filmed as a musical with most of the songs composed by Prince, with Carole King and Jackson Browne chipping in one each. Following a disastrous sneak preview, Brooks cut the musical numbers, did reshoots to cover what was lost, and released it as a straight romcom, receiving reviews ranging from sympathetic to hostile.

Recently, somebody uploaded a bootlegged workprint of I'll Do Anything's musical version onto the internet. Forget about a cast made up almost entirely of non-singers (read about At Long Last Love to see how that kind of thing turns out). The problem is the story -- or, rather stories. Nick Nolte is an out of work actor in Hollywood suddenly given custody of his bratty young daughter while romancing production assistant Joley Richardson. Meanwhile, Albert Brooks is a self-centered movie producer who can't commit to Julie Kavner, the owner of a company that sets up sneak previews for studios. Memo to Hollywood: nobody cares about your problems. Nor do they find the movie business as fascinating as you do. And when in hell will you learn that LOUD, BRATTY CHILDREN ARE NOT AND NEVER HAVE BEEN FUNNY. 

This is why the musical version of I'll Do Anything is interesting in its daring, even as it took me five hours to slog through its 140 minutes. Not that the numbers are particularly good. It's just that, well, if there's a chance of your movie being a debacle, you might as well swing for the fences as James L. Brooks does here. 

In other words, give the lead role to an actor with the comedy chops of Richard Nixon! Hire songwriters lacking musical comedy experience to write the score! Make sure only one of your actors (Tracy Ullman) can actually sing! Have your dancers jump around instead of dance! Without these gaffes, I wouldn't have made it past the first 20 minutes. 

BONUS POINTS: I'll Do Anything would have been made for a far better, funnier romcom focusing on Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner. Maybe somebody can edit out the Nick Nolte throughline and fill out the rest with A.I. 

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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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THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 71

 A trip into the time machine to 1929 and 1930, dropping in on Germany and England, while making two stops in the USA. 

§173 ST.G.B. BLUTSCHANDE (1929):  Or, in plain English, Section 173 of The Criminal Code: Incest. So much for the "innocent" days of silent movies. (The literal translation of the German "blutschande" is "blood shame.")

 Martin Hollman and his late wife's adult daughter Lisbeth (from a previous marriage) fall in love. The local amtmann (i.e., bureaucrat) refuses to grant them a marriage license, citing the incest law, despite the couple not having a blood relation. When informed that Lisbeth has a pea in the pod, the outraged amtmann arrests them, and, following a trial, puts them in separate slammers. Reunited after several years, Lisbeth again gets pregnant. Despite the support of the villagers (including the local pastor), the amtmann once again arranges for their arrest. Lisbeth decides a walk in front of a speeding train is preferable to another jail jolt. 

Clearly, this silent drama would never have been made in Hollywood. Like the 1919 German production about homosexuality titled Different from the Others, §173 St.G.B. Blutschnade is a sympathetic take on its subject matter; while the couple might be in the wrong legally, even the town pastor recognizes they've done nothing untoward morally, including having two kids outside marriage. Lisbeth recognizes the societal hypocrisy when getting a post-prison housemaid job for a rich woman and her unfaithful husband. The wife encourages her adult daughter from a previous marriage to seduce and marry her own stepfather in order to "keep the money in the family."

A fascinating movie for its time, §173 St.G.B. Blutschnade is also kind of a slog to sit through. While the first two reels move at a good pace, the following 70 minutes drag; more than once I hit pause to see how much time was left. It's also an occasionally odd mixture of surreal imagery and over-the- top acting, especially from the nefarious amtmann (which might be deliberate, the easier to hate him). Still, §173 St.G.B. Blutschnade worth a viewing to be reminded how Hitler destroyed Germany's innovative movie industry in a few years' time. Hey, that reminds me, remember that American amtmann who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples? Good things we've come a long way since 1929 Germany, amirite?

THE VERY IDEA (1929): After a German drama about incest, it's time for a palate cleanser with a Hollywood a proto-screwball comedy about... eugenics! Get ready to laugh, America!

Alan Camp, a firm believer in "breeding" the right kind of baby via the best genetic lineage, convinces his strong, handsome chauffeur, Joe Garvin, and Joe's beautiful girlfriend Nora, to provide a child for his friends Gilbert and Edith, who are unable to conceive. One year later, Gilbert and Edith return from a "vacation", ready to pick up "their" baby without anyone else being the wiser... over Nora's motherly dead body.

There are some odd things in The Very Idea. Obviously, the idea of eugenics being played for laughs. The eugenicist himself being about the only intelligent person here. And you can tell, too, it was originally a Broadway show, with its lengthy dialogue exchanges, dull direction, as well as adult sophistication that still surprises today. (The movie was banned in a few cities during its original release.) 

While the dialogue is often more silly than witty, The Very Idea provides some good laughs, mainly when Gilbert and Edith give different, increasingly outlandish reasons for their year-long disappearance. Scenes like these offer a rare opportunity to see how a Broadway star of a century ago -- here, Allen Kearns -- would have been onstage, since he seems to be playing to the balcony. (He made only three features.) One sad piece of irony is that Hugh Trevor -- the actor playing the perfect genetic specimen -- died in 1933 of complications following an appendectomy, which should make the eugenicist's thesis questionable at best. Taking the good and the meh into consideration, The Very Idea is a fascinating way to learn that a movie from 1929 could be more adult than your average contemporary blockbuster.

BONUS POINTS: Now if we're talking good genes, co-star Doris Eaton returned to the screen in the Jim Carrey movie Man on the Moon in 1999 after a six-decade retirement. She also gave regular dance performances at AIDS benefits, making her final appearance one month before dying at 106. 

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN (1929): An example of the silent/talkie hybrid genre that fascinates an ever-shrinking cadre of movie fans (hello, me!), the UK production The Flying Scotsman -- that's a train, not a superhero -- chugs along at a brief 59 minutes. In its first (silent)

half, Crow, the train's former coal shoveller, is fired by Old Bob, the engineer, for drinking on the job. As Crow vows revenge, his replacement Jim unknowingly starts dating Old Bob's daughter Joan. The following day, Joan learns Crow is going to hijack the train, hoping to kill Old Bob and Jim in the process, and is determined to stop him.

The most interesting thing about the first 30 minutes of The Flying Scotsman is that it marks the lead debut of Ray Milland (or, as the credits read, Raymond Milland). Perhaps making up for the silence, Milland's facial expressions are rather, er showy; he tones things down in the talking second half, where you can hear his familiar Cary Grant-like diction underneath the character's Cockney accent. 

But what really stuns today are Alec Hurley and Pauline Johnson (Crow and Joan) climbing along and atop of the speeding train without any special effects, cutaways, or process shots -- and Johnson is in high heels!  I bet they didn't even get a "stunt pay" bonus, either. While Hurley keeps the tough-guy expression, I think that's genuine fear in Johnson's face.

Outside of former stuntman Richard Talmadge, I don't know of any other actor, British or American, who would have agreed to this literally death-defying scene. (Hurley could have been killed as the train passed through the tunnel.) If you're at all interested in seeing what was expected of actors back in the day, go to YouTube and fast-forward The Flying Scotsman to the 40-minute mark and settle in. It would have made a great short subject.

BONUS POINTS: Watching two actors almost get killed just to get a good shot makes you have even more contempt for today's "stars".

LORD BYRON OF BROADWAY (1930): You've never seen Lord Byron of Broadway, but you know the story: talented guy uses people on the way up until the tables turn and he crashes back to the bottom. Songwriter Roy Erskin, who gets creative inspiration from breaking women's hearts, hits the bigtime with his stage partners Joe Lundeen and lovesick Nancy Clover. Roy is ready to throw it all away upon meeting Ardis, a classy dame his equal in two-timing -- and who he doesn't realize is Joe's estranged wife. One death later, Roy is back where he started, where Nancy is waiting for him. 

The general idea could have worked as a noirish picture in the '40s -- it kind of reminded me of Blues in the Night -- but Lord Byron of Broadway lacks the polish of later musicals and the star power required to put it over. The two mediocre Technicolor production numbers create only derisive chortles, while supporting players Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin (of all people!) have more screen presence than the top-billed Charles Kaley and Ethelind Terry. If the names are unfamiliar, it's because Kaley never made another movie, while Terry returned to the screen just once seven years later as an extra. Today they'd call it cancel culture. In 1930, it was simply a case of You stink. 

Contemporary movie historians blame Lord Byron of Broadway's commercial failure on its cynical lead character. Me, I just think it was just not a very good movie, being the usual creaky, unsteady talkie prevalent at the time. So few people saw Lord Byron of Broadway that MGM could get away with recycling one of the Technicolor numbers in a 1933 short starring Ted Healey & the Three Stooges, and again a year later in another short starring Curly Howard with a different pair of stooges, without anyone noticing. But I noticed a stage curtain (above) that was originally in MGM's The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Again, I ask, how did I ever get laid?

BONUS POINTS: Something else I noticed: the uncredited voice of 36-year-old Jack Benny as a radio announcer, two years before his real-life radio debut.

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THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 70

Strap yourself in as we travel to Bengal, Jamaica, the old West, and a tool supply company. Oh, and Florida, too, but keep it to yourself.

BEYOND BENGAL (1934): The 1930s were a prime era for jungle documentaries, no matter the quality, e.g., the notorious Ingagi. Harry Schenck, Beyond Bengal's star/director, is credited on only three other movies. This made him as qualified as anybody else churning out these things, especially when it came to padding it out with phony footage shot in Florida. (You can figure out the Florida scenes because they're in focus and, well, look phony.) Even the industry trade paper Variety doubted Beyond Bengal's authenticity in its bemused review.

In fact, you can bet your last poisha that anything in focus is as fraudulent as Harry's on-camera friend Joan Baldwin almost dying of jungle fever. Not even the footage of a native guide almost eaten by a crocodile trying passes the smell test. On the other hand, another guide almost getting squeezed to death by a python looks genuine -- but if it is, why didn't the cinematographer help the poor schmuck instead of cranking the camera? Oh, I know why! Non-white = expendable. 

The Bengali segments that are definitely for real are when Harry's pals shoot animals. (At one point, the narrator gloats, "Boy, this is gonna be good!" as one poor tiger is ready to bite the dust.)  When the narrator describes a panther as "the most dangerous and hateful creature on the planet," it's clear nobody involved with Beyond Bengal ever went beyond 5th grade to learn the definition of "ironic". An interesting history lesson to see how you didn't need A.I. to fool the public. 

BONUS POINTS: "Produced in cooperation with HIS HIGHNESS THE SULTAN OF PERAK F.M.S." (as the credits read), Beyond Bengal was nominated for the Mussolini Cup at the 1934 Venice Film Festival. Do they give that out anymore?

VAGABOND ADVENTURE: JAMAICA (1934): In addition to pseudo-documentaries about jungle life, one-reel travelogues entertained audiences at a time when travelling the world was strictly for the wealthy. 

Unlike MGM's Technicolor Traveltalks, the Van Buren/RKO Radio Vagabond Adventures lived down to their name. Its 16mm black & white footage of Jamaica captures none of the "silver rivers", "verdant valleys" and "blue Caribbean sea" the narrator breathlessly describes. His patronizing description of "peasant Negroes" hasn't aged well, either.  And why does the accompanying music sound like a Jewish folk song? However, what it offers is a rare look at Jamaica decades before it was a tourist haven for vacationers and potheads.

The opening shot presents a shoreline without hotels or bars, while the rest of the area doesn't seem to have any buildings more than two stories high. Locals still make sugar the old-fashioned way (it involves an oxen team, which also takes the banana crop to the ships), and peddle their foods at the market.  

Outside of the trolley car and autos in Kingston, Jamaica as presented in this Vagabond Adventure is probably little different from how it had been a century earlier. If you can get past the annoying voiceover, it's more fascinating than any contemporary documentary on the country you'd find today.

BONUS POINTS: We see the statue of Queen Victoria, who the narrator informs us "is lovingly referred to as the supreme lady of Jamaica". Not anymore, I bet.

TRAIL OF THE VIGILANTES (1940): Tim Mason, a reporter from back East, goes undercover out West to expose a colleague's murder by Mark Dawson, a cattleman ripping off locals by running a protection racket.

If you think that's a fairly standard plot for a run of the mill oater, so did director Allan Dwan. That's why he hired someone to do a rewrite and turn Trail of the Vigilantes into a sly upending of the genre while maintaining its serious throughline. From the moment Tim Mason shows up in the ironically named dusty town of Peaceful Valley -- a scene awfully similar to anyone who's seen Blazing Saddles -- you know this is not going to be your typical B-western. 

Luckily, the cast is game, starting with Franchot Tone as Tim, the tenderfoot who doesn't convince anybody he's an old cowhand, with an amusing running gag of making an ass of himself while jumping on his horse. As two ranch hands, Broderick Crawford and Andy Devine send up their usual screen roles, while the great Mischa Auer gets the most laughs as a con man impersonating a Native American chief, Spanish bullfighter, Russian Cossack, and Southern shyster. There is nobody but nobody like Mischa Auer around anymore, and we're all poorer for it.

 And talk about out of the box casting -- Warren William plays straightman as the no-good polecat Mark Dawson. At 46, he carries the bearing of a man a decade older but looks as elegant in Western finery as he did tuxedos during his pre-code days at Warners. Trail of the Vigilantes doesn't always hit the mark -- a scene at a mudhole is straight out of a latter-day Three Stooges short -- but otherwise provides a ranch-sized number of genuine laughs while still providing the action and dramatic arc that comes with the (Western) territory.

BONUS POINTS: Co-star Peggy Moran later recounted Trail of the Vigilantes did good box-office with "New York's sophisticated audiences." 

IMPULSE (PILOT EPISODE) (1952): Before Alfred Hitchcock Presents, there
was Impulse. Or would have been had there been more than its unaired pilot episode. Going by the opening narration of this episode (titled "Mr. Pips"), the series would have explored the idea of the consequences from acting upon our worst impulses. Don't tell me you haven't had the urge.

The eponymous Mr. Pips, a mousy worker at a tool supply factory, is regularly humiliated by his repulsive boss into literally crawling through a rabbit-warren of sky-high crates piled dangerously high to retrieve items. These scenes -- far creepier and more claustrophobic than you'd expect -- are greeted by non-stop derisive laughter by the workers, including the woman Pips has a crush on. Eventually, the laughter stops when Pips, finally pushed to the breaking point, brings a gun to work in order to exact some well-deserved revenge. Never push a mousy guy too far.

Maybe you need some personal connection to the mousy side of life to appreciate it, but character actor King Donovan slams it out of the park as Pips, a perfectly nice guy who's allowed himself to be the object of ridicule by not standing up for himself. When he finally explodes by smacking his boss in the mouth with a gun, I almost shook with joy. Pips forcing the weeping guy to crawl through the crates and ordering the others to laugh at the threat of death? Heaven.  If this was the kind of series Impulse had been like, I'd have owned the entire run on 4K UHD Blu-ray. Oh, and the moral of the episode seems to be Chicks dig guys who threaten violence to others!  

BONUS POINTS: "Mr. Pips" was directed by Alfred E. Green, whose 119 credits include Dick Powell's NRA-rah rah short The Road is Open Again.

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THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 69

 

THE WITCHING HOUR (1934): "From the celebrated stage play by AUGUSTUS
THOMAS", as the opening credits inform us. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it, as it was first staged in 1907, and hasn't been revived since. 

Jack Brookfield accidentally hypnotizes his future son-in-law to murder a rival (you mean it hasn't happened to you?). The only lawyer who'll take the case is Martin Prentice, a former judge whose belief in the paranormal causes yet another climactic, borderline illegal courtroom stunt -- as in The Kiss Before the Mirror, involving gunfire -- we've all become accustomed to in movies like these. Which is why I love them! 

I don't know why The Witching Hour takes place in the South, other than to feature the usual black butlers speaking the way black butlers spoke in these movies. Keeping its timeframe in the turn of the century was a good idea since its basic idea would probably have been accepted by many people, just as the ghost of Martin Prentice's old flame visiting him every day was likely greeted by audiences with a shrug -- doesn't that happen to everybody? A fun, fast paced movie with the occasional welcome surprise -- the most welcome being how movie studios could whittle a four-act stage play like The Witching Hour down to 68 minutes.

BONUS POINTS: The only actor you'll recognize in The Witching Hour is William Frawley, two decades before his run as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy, as the cynical jury foreman who winds up playing a key part in the defendant's freedom. (SPOILER: It involves hypnotism. Of course.)

THE SECRET BRIDE (1934): Attorney General Robert Sheldon has secretly married Ruth Vincent just before her father, Governor W.H. Vincent, is accused of accepting a bribe. If word gets out Sheldon is married to the Guv's daughter, it looks bad for both men. If he delays the investigation, it looks really bad. Worse still, Ruth refuses to testify on behalf of a woman wrongly accused of the murder of Sheldon's assistant. Ruth, you see, witnessed the crime through the window of Sheldon's apartment at midnight -- they're not supposed to be married, remember? Impeachment or electric chair: what to choose?

Despite featuring two of Warner Bros. top  actors-- Barbara Stanwyck and Warren William -- The Secret Bride is a comedown for both, as it possesses the odor of a mediocre script that the studio thought could be saved by its stars. Released not long after the enforcement of the Hays "code", the movie plays like Warners' attempt into more generic dramas where sex didn't exist and crime didn't pay. Stanwyck didn't stick around long afterwards, becoming a freelancer within a year. William, his caddish roles behind him, was transferred to Warners' Perry Mason series before being shown the door.

While William -- who isn't even billed on some of the lobby cards -- accepts his role with grace, Stanwyck seems vaguely aware that The Secret Bride is a comedown after slam bang pre-codes like Baby Face, Night Nurse, and The Miracle Woman. Both actors disappear in the final reel, as a complicated flashback narrated by another character explains the whole confusing mystery. Had The Secret Bride been made three years earlier, the lead characters would have been shacking up rather than married, the Governor really would have been crooked, and the killer might have gotten away with it because the victim had it coming. Sounds better, right?

BONUS POINTS: It wouldn't be a '30s movie without the reliable gun-in-the-desk-drawer trope, and The Secret Bride gets it out of the way in the first five minutes. 

NON-STOP NEW YORK (1937): Jennie Carr, a witness to a murder, is flying from London to New York in order to stop an innocent man from getting the hot squat at Sing-Sing. Other passengers include Police Inspector Jim Grant, a professional blackmailer, a wiseacre adolescent violin prodigy, and the real murderer. And you thought your last flight was weird.

The through-line is secondary to that humdinger of an airplane showcased in the poster. That's the real star of Non-Stop New York, often placing it (wrongly) in the sci-fi category for years. The British production could have benefited from Alfred Hitchcock's sly touch, but director Robert Stevenson does a serviceable job with his engaging actors, many of whom went on to have fine careers both in the UK and the US. Anna Lee and John Loder pull the old will-they-or-won't-they routine as Jennie and Jim, while semi-familiar character actor Francis L. Sullivan is a proto-Victor Buono as the killer who has a couple more targets in mind. 

Absurd moments abound -- an outdoor deck with a guard rail only waist high, Jim climbing atop the plane while in flight, to name two -- but that's the fun of it, even if it wasn't meant to be goofy. Non-Stop New York takes a while for the story to get up to speed, but once the plane takes off, so does the movie, with a surprise twist courtesy of the violin prodigy. By the way, the wonder of the plane isn't just its futuristic double-decker construction, but that it flies 3,000 miles in "only" 16 hours! It would be nice to know why the designer thought it would be a good idea to put an outdoor flight deck on there, though.

BONUS POINTS: Twenty-five-year-old Peter Bull, possessing an almost unreal blobby face straight out of Alice in Wonderland, makes the most of his brief, slimy moments a blackmailer-wannabe. If his name isn't familiar, you may remember him as the Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove.

THE BOY WHO SAW THROUGH (1956): Through walls, that is. Not like he sees
anything important. A minister looking for his false teeth, a cook dropping a roast on the kitchen floor. Nothing that would get a kid in trouble. Unless you're living in a small town at the turn of the 20th century, and you're treated as a freakish troublemaker nobody believes.

At 24 minutes, The Boy who Saw Through plays like a lighthearted episode of The Twilight Zone. And like most of the Zone stories, it seems to be an allegory. The boy's therapist realizes the X-ray vision is real, but advises him not to mention it anymore -- the same way most children who see the truth are told to shut up. 

I couldn't discover if The Boy who Saw Through was part of a forgotten anthology series or merely syndicated to plug a half-hour hole in local TV schedules. Most everything about it is strictly so-so and is included here solely due to its 15-year-old star Ronnie Walken, who would later change his first name to Christopher. Already possessing charisma and ease before the camera, Walken also has a touch of the creepiness he would become famous for. But I guess that makes sense if he can see through walls. 

BONUS POINTS: The near-ever present shadow of the boom microphone is almost a star itself.

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