THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 37

 

Two weeks of the bachelor life while the wife was away in Vancouver and a retreat (from me?) offered lots of opportunities to catch up on Blu-Rays ordered but not yet seen and movies on YouTube I'd either never watched or heard of. Just the thing to distract from a New York heatwave.

THE TELLTALE HEART (1928): 

OK, you know the story, right? A whacked-out guy who's killed and buried an old man under the floorboards of the house? Manages to fool a couple of investigators only to give the game away by "hearing" the heartbeat of the dead man beneath his feet? And, like everything Poe wrote, is almost impossible to believe was published in the 1840s?

There have been over a dozen film adaptations of The Telltale Heart, ranging from eight minutes to feature-length. And while the 1941 short directed by Jules Dassin is still startling -- especially for an MGM picture -- this silent two-reeler was the earliest and most unusual for its time. Directors Charles Klein and Leon Shamroy must have viewed every available German Expressionist film before embarking on this project. Tilted walls and doors, oddly-shaped furniture, the word KILL projected in squiggly lines over the lead character, the investigators speaking moving their mouths identically and simultaneously, this Telltale Heart was likely meant for the art-houses and film clubs attended strictly by the aficionados de film who wouldn't have known a Laurel from a Hardy.

The acting from Otto Matieson (as the killer) and William Heford and Hans Feurberg is, to be expected, highly-stylized, further creating a sense of dread and madness. Other than being a really interesting production, The Telltale Heart is one of the rare examples of silent American movies that, instead of pandering to audiences, actually brought them to a different level. It wouldn't have hurt to run it at the local Bijou before the latest Tom Mix western. Might have even been a good thing for the popcorn-munching kiddies.

BONUS POINTS: Otto Matieson played Dr. Joel Cairo in the original 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon. Co-director Leon Shamroy would go on to be the cinematographer (and later, director of cinematography) for over 100 movies, including Cleopatra, The Agony and the Ecstasy, South Pacific, and Snow White and The Three Stooges.

THE BIG TRAIL (1930): For "The Most Important Picture Ever Produced", The Big
Trail doesn't offer much difference from other major Westerns of the day as far as story is concerned -- it's your typical go-west drama featuring deserts, snowstorms, and murder. What definitely separates it from any movie of its day was being shot in the new 70mm Grandeur film process with hundreds of actors, extras, horses, cows, covered wagons... and, oh yes, 23 year-old John Wayne in his first starring role.

Even for a movie nut like me, a two-hour movie from 1930 almost promises to be something of a slog -- it takes a very full half-hour for the wagons to get moving, as characters are introduced, re-introduced, and re-re-introduced. The dialog tends get barked more often than spoken, with pauses adding to the film's length. But boy, does it look beautiful; aside from the occasional thin vertical scratches, the restoration job done on The Big Trail is pretty much perfect, giving a great idea of how it looked in the two theaters able to run it in 70mm at the time. (Each scene was also shot in 35mm, as were -- get this -- the four foreign language versions with different lead actors, all over the course of only four months. The budget was $1.25-million, or roughly $21-million in 2024 -- and still cheap at that.)

Watching a genuine, nearly century-old widescreen production, filmed entirely on location in six states, is remarkable and damn near uncanny. What's also uncanny is how annoying Fox Film's resident Swedish dialect comedian El Brendle can be as "comedy relief". The Big Trail could have been 20 minutes shorter without his endless "yackass" and "yumpin' yimminy" routines. 

But what of the barely out of his teens John Wayne? If you like him already, you'll like him here. If you never liked him, you'll at least be stunned by his movie-star handsome looks, decades before trucks of Chesterfields and barrels of Old Crow ravaged him. His delivery is exactly what you expect, only younger. What you don't expect is how is character, trapper Breck Coleman, is a friend to "the Injuns", preferring their company to that of whites. No matter what you think of John Wayne or Westerns in general, The Big Trail is one of those groundbreaking movies that you should see once, if only because, well, there was a time when a movie looked kind of like what you see now, and John Wayne hung out with Injuns.

BONUS POINTS: The Big Trail's original exit music remains on Blu-Ray and its occasional TCM broadcast.

HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950): A-list director Fritz Lang decamped to low-brow Republic Studios for a drama that mixes the worst sides of writers and family. After turn-of-the-20th-century author Stephen Byrne accidentally(?) kills his maid, he guilt-trips his gimpy older brother John into dumping the body into a river. As news of the maid's "disappearance" makes the news, Stephen is delighted to see the sales of his latest book rise, inspiring him to write a new novel about the real crime. Even better, once the body turns up, the locals believe big brother John is the murderer, giving Stephen the idea of arranging the guy's "suicide" to "prove" his guilt. And as long as he's at it, Stephen might as well strangle his own wife to death, too, because it would make a terrific climax to his book. But not even the cleverest writer can always make that kind of thing work.

From House by the River's opening moments, you know Louis Hayward's characterization of Stephen Byrne is going to be a quietly nasty one, gradually growing during its 90 minutes until all you want is for him to disappear from this earth, the more painful the better. I'm not quite familiar with Hayward's oeuvre, but this one performance alone is impressive enough to keep in one's memory. Just how much of it is strictly his own talent or brought out by Fritz Lang is not for me to say. All I know is, well, this is a Fritz Lang movie to the core. And with not necessarily well-remembered co-stars Lee Bowman (John Byrne) and Jane Wyatt (Stephen's wife Marjorie) doing first-rate work -- hell, even Dorothy Gaunt as the short-lived maid Emily has real presence -- makes me believe Lang knew exactly how to get the best out of actors. 

Lang was also smart enough to cast plenty of interesting, often familiar character actors in supporting roles, including Peter Brocco as the one-eyed coroner; Jody Gilbert as John's love-starved, frog-faced housekeeper; and Katheen Freeman as a giddy family friend. House by the River is not the easiest place to visit but is nevertheless worth dropping by just to see how easily a sociopath can manipulate neighbors and so-called loved ones alike. The only distraction is how the South African-born Louis Hayward resembles Desi Arnaz at certain angles. Babaloo!

BONUS POINTS: Paul Brocco's eyeglasses have one dark lens, evoking Fritz Lang, who wore a patch over one eye and a monocle over the other. 

THE ENFORCER (1951): The boys in the Warner Bros. publicity department must have been
aware that their studio's number one star was aging fast. Although Humphrey Bogart had entered the bowtie stage of his career, the posters for The Enforcer didn't just picture him with his '40s neckwear, his face was airbrushed to within an inch of Casablanca. 

And while Bogie is his usual tough guy persona, as D.A. Martin Ferguson he's definitely on the side of the righteous as he tries to bring down a ring of hitmen-for-hire.  If you didn't see the original trailer, you wouldn't even know who the enforcer is supposed to be -- the D.A. or the killers' ringleader.

The hitmen surrounding Bogart in The Enforcer are some of the most striking-looking character actors of the day, including the least-expected hitman ever, Zero Mostel, looking well over a decade than his 36 years. If you're used to Mostel as a comedian-par-excellence, his performance as Big Babe Lazick is a real stunner. More of a wannabe murderer than the real thing, Lazick is just a petty criminal trying to earn an extra buck for his wife and son. Others in this real rat pack are guys you've seen somewhere even if you're not sure where, like Ted de Corsia and Michael Tolan, the only one who doesn't look like he would kill your baby for crying. 

But the real scene-stealer is the most low-key, the great Everett Sloane as the ringleader who dreamt up the brilliant idea of hiring killers who have absolutely no connection to the victims in order to throw the police off their trail. The Enforcer has so many memorable actors that at times Bogart seems to be a supporting player in his own movie. Yet his final decade of movies gave Bogart a different, often deeper side; too, if you watch them in order there's a genuine poignancy as he seems to be gradually dying before your eyes -- which, frankly, he is -- but always putting up a fight. Even if he doesn't exactly run the board in The Enforcer, Bogart is, as always, a real screen presence.

BONUS POINTS: The only movie where a potential victim is warned off the streets by Humphrey Bogart speaking over a record store loudspeaker. I don't care how serious it's supposed to be, it's mirth-provoking as heck.

                                                                  **********

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 girlfriend 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.

                                                                ************

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "I CONFESS" (1953)

Twenty-five years ago, when first watching I Confess, I confess to being decidedly underwhelmed. Yet I couldn't figure out why. 
It has a first-rate pedigree: directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Montgomery Clift. An A-picture all around, one that shouldn't be anywhere near this blog. And unlike other, lesser Hitchcock movies of the era -- Stage Fright and Under Capricorn come to mind -- I Confess just seemed like it should have been better than it appeared to be. So when it recently ran on TCM, the time had come to give it another shot. Maybe I was the problem. 

I wasn't.

"You would have to drag me into this mess."

On the surface at least, I Confess is tailor-made for Hitchcock, not to mention Clift's patented tortured-soul routine. Rev. Michael Logan hears church handyman Otto Keller confess to a murder. Taking the rules of the confessional seriously, Logan refuses to go to the police -- even as he himself, through circumstantial evidence, becomes the prime suspect.

An innocent man suspected of a crime he didn't commit: if that's not the quintessential Hitchcock set-up, I don't know what is. Add Karl Malden as the detective hot on Logan's trail, and Anne Baxter as Ruth Grandfort, a woman with a secret pertaining to the murder victim, and you've got the makings for a dandy suspense movie. 

I said "makings," not "finished product."

The boy or the blonde --
which one will he choose?

 I Confess lacks the emotional connection Hitchcock had for, say, Vertigo or Rear Window. Bearing little of the director's visual flair, the movie just kind of sits there, piling up character after character, creating tedium rather than tension. (One priest seems to exist just to provide a running gag involving his bike.) Even the extras stand around dully, as if waiting for their coffee break. At times, you wonder just who this movie is really supposed to be about. Warner Brothers certainly didn't want to let the movie-going public know, taking great pains in the posters (see above) to hide the fact that Clift played a priest. And the I Confess tagline -- "If you knew what he knew, what would you do?" -- suggests someone in the publicity department fancied himself another Cole Porter. 

In addition to being really awkward,
this still from I Confess doesn't
have anything to do with
the movie itself.

As for Ruth Grandfort, the mysterious blonde -- well, pre-seminary school, Logan and she were a couple. After Ruth married another man, a certain Monsieur Villette (the eventual murder victim) wrongly believed that she and Logan were having an affair. Villette then spent the next several years threatening to blackmail her even though it wasn't true.

All of this could have been avoided if Ruth had told her husband the truth upfront -- Look, I went for a walk with an old boyfriend who wants to wear the white collar, we got caught in the rain, sorry I'm late. In an unsuccessful bid to free Logan, Ruth finally spills her story to the cops. 

This is where I Confess really jumps the rails. Told in flashback, her confession (I get it!) is a one-reel short unto itself. No detail is too mundane, no word of dialogue too banal, to be omitted. (Didn't these cops ever hear of, "Just the facts, ma'am"?) Making it more insufferable

Now that's vertigo.

is Dimitri Tiomkin's sappier-than-Log Cabin Syrup score, flooding the soundtrack with tsunami-like precision. 

One brief sequence, however, stands out: Ruth's memory of walking down her front stairs to meet Logan. Gauzy and processed just slightly in slow-motion, it captures perfectly the dreamy reveries of love. It's reminiscent of a similar situation in Raging Bull when Robert De Niro first sees Kathy Moriarty. The camera focuses on her legs splashing sensually (in slight slo-mo) in a swimming pool when the soundtrack suddenly drops out. If only Hitchcock had told Tiomkin to put down his baton for ten seconds!

Like many movie composers, Dimitri Tiomkin seemed to have been angling for a hit single -- call it "Love Theme from I Confess," an excessively-angelic chorus slurring its indecipherable lyrics -- which appears immediately under the credits and never quite lets go. Music plays a vital role in Hitchcock movies, but it's supposed to be in a good way. Romance -- unless mixed with danger or pathology -- was never Hitchock's strong suit, anyway. This was the Master of Suspense, after all, not of Love. Or love as most people outside a psychiatric hospital consider it to be.

Can you imagine that nose
if this had been a 3D movie?

There are a few scattered pluses found in I Confess, mostly in any scene involving Karl Malden as Inspector Larrue. Instead of playing him as a 1953-model Javert, Malden's take on Larrue is a cop simply doing his job, following the evidence where it takes him. Taking no personal pleasure in the case, he's kind enough to buy lunch for Logan when the latter turns himself in to avoid being arrested at church. (That moment follows a lengthy, pointless montage of Logan walking around town, eventually passing a movie theater running The Enforcer, which just happens to be a Warner Brothers picture.)

Rev. Top Gun

Then there's Montgomery Clift, the least-likely  man of the cloth since Little Richard dumped rock & roll. Ironically for a Method actor, Clift doesn't really inhabit the role of Rev. Logan as much as he stars in it by his very presence. It's a problem similar to that of Tom Cruise, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. (I Confess was shot a few years before Clift's physically and psychologically-damaging car accident.) Low-key to the point of being nearly invisible, Clift is interesting, but I couldn't tell you why -- or even if he was good or mediocre or neither. Maybe, like most people, he just is.

Right down to its Quebec location shooting, I Confess is one of the more unusual entries in the Hitchcock canon. (I had to use that phrase sooner or later.) But unusual doesn't necessarily make for successful. In later years, Hitchcock would claim that I Confess didn't resonate widely because non-Catholics couldn't wrap their heads around the sanctity of the church confessional. This, coming for a guy whose greatest movies were preposterous if you spent two minutes thinking about them. 

No, the problem with I Confess is that it's too straightforward. And Hitchcock is at his best when a little bent.

                                           **********************************

THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 18

Sex! Loansharking! Magical murder! A singer making a fool of himself for the sake of a TV show! It must be another Early Show.

SEX (1920): Now there's a 

 straightforward title for a straightforward movie
about a straightforward woman whose life eventually goes sideways. Sneering showgirl Adrienne Renault is enjoying an affair with Philip Overman -- until his wife divorces him. The thrill of the relationship now gone, Adrienne dumps Philip in favor of Dick Wallace, with whom she unexpectedly falls in love. Two years after they marry, Dick begins an affair with Daisy Henderson, a once-innocent dancer whom Adrienne had taken under her protective wing. Her marriage, heart, and spirit now broken, Adrienne sails to Europe on an ocean liner, where her previous lover Philip Overman has reconciled with his wife. How you like now, Little Miss Sex Queen?

As with similar dramas of its time, Sex wanted to titillate its audience with, um, sex, while making them feel guilty about it by the sixth reel (a trick Cecil B. DeMille successfully put to use in his career). Adrienne's cynicism is upfront, advising virginal newcomer Daisy to take what she can get without feeling sorry for anybody but herself. As for the millionaire businessmen, we never learn exactly what they do to make themselves wealthy -- they seem to spend all their time at their girlfriends' apartments, attending Broadway shows, and ducking their wives. 

By 1920, histrionics were becoming a thing of the past in movies, so Sex's actors keep the emotions on a low boil. Louise Glaum is excellent as Adrienne, pulling off two scenes that mirror each other -- first as the mistress and later the spurned wife -- quite well. Credit director Fred Niblo, too, for tackling a potentially melodramatic subject without going overboard. As movie historians like to say, Sex is ripe for reappraisal -- if only somebody could do a restoration of the current washed out print that often make the intertitles difficult to read. But who needs words with a movie called Sex?

BONUS POINTS: Wondering how audiences reacted to a movie titled Sex that never features anything stronger than a kiss.

I DEMAND PAYMENT (1938): Forced into joining a loansharking outfit run by Joe Travis, Toby

Locke marries his girlfriend Judith Avery solely to prevent her from testifying against him in court. When she learns the truth, Judith takes the easy way out by driving her car in front of a speeding train (wouldn't an annulment worked just as well?), but survives just so her surgeon, Dr. Craig Mitchell, can fall in love with her. Meanwhile, Toby kills one of Travis's enforcers, Louie Badolio, in order to get his hands on the ten grand he's carrying, before convincing Judith to run away to Mexico with him. Louie's brother, oddly named Smiles, and another enforcer, oddly named Happy, follow with murder in mind. Just as Smiles is ready to pull a gat on Toby, Dr. Mitchell shows up to try to win back Judith. Can't a couple honeymoon in peace?

And is it too much to ask for a movie titled I Demand Payment to live up to its promise of being strictly a low-budget indie crime movie? Apparently so, since the subplot involving Judith and Dr. Mitchell takes up too much cutesy time. I was really hoping the underrated Jack LaRue (the poor man's Bogart) would have more screentime than he does as Smiles, but what we see of him will have to do. (Unless I'm mistaken, LaRue starts out with an Italian accent before giving up midway through.) 

As dimwitted gunman Happy Crofton, Guinn (Big Boy) Williams, on loan from Warner Brothers, gives his usual better-than-expected performance -- the part seems like it was written specifically for him -- especially in the final scene, where all the actors finally have something interesting to chew on. LaRue and Williams do the heavy lifting for nominal "stars" Betty Burgess, Matty Kemp, and Lloyd Hughes. As loanshark ringleader leader Joe Travis, Bryant Washburn deserves a shoutout for a cleft chin deeper than the Erie Canal. The only movie I can find released by the who-the-heck-are-they Imperial Pictures, I Demand Payment will have you demanding why I wrote about it. (Because of the title, Jack LaRue, and its 58-minute runtime, OK?)

BONUS POINTS: Betty Burgess looks better after smashing into a train than most women do after a trip to the beauty parlor. 

THE STRANGE MR. GREGORY (1945): A magician known as Gregory the Great, having fallen in love with Ellen Randall, frames her husband John for two murders, including that of... Gregory the Great! Impossible you say? Not at all -- Gregory has mastered the mysterious "death trance", right down to losing a pulse. (I'm not giving anything away -- you'd have to be in a death trance not to have figured it out.) Gregory reappears as his twin brother, Lane, to resume his pursuit of Ellen. Ellen's friend Sheila smells a magic rat, and before you can say "hocus pocus", she and the D.A. are out to prove that Lane is really Gregory by visiting his tomb -- where the magician appears to be still dead. What gives? And how long do you think it will take before Gregory turns up again to put his final moves on the unwilling Ellen?

For a movie that runs 63 minutes, it took a lot of condensing to cram the general idea of The Strange Mr. Gregory into one paragraph. That's why today's screenwriters could learn from the guys who churned out movies for studios like Monogram: add a different plot point every three minutes, the better to keep the audience from realizing that what they're watching is a lot of hooey, and still wrap up the show at the end of lunch hour.

Like many former A-listers who found themselves freelancing on Poverty Row in later years, Edmund Lowe never phones it in as Gregory, even though he probably laughed all the way through the first table read (as if Monogram ever had table reads). Whether sporting a thoroughly unconvincing toupee and goatee as Gregory or his authentic thin moustache as Lane, Lowe likely reminded 1945 audiences that he still had what it took to be a star, doing his pitch-perfect best to pretend that The Strange Mr. Gregory isn't as silly as it seems. You won't miss anything special if you don't see it, but it's not an hour wasted, either.

BONUS POINTS: Jean Rogers, who plays Ellen, was the sexy Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon serials a decade earlier. If her voice is any indication, she was either stage-trained or smoked three packs of Old Golds a day.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO MEL (1955): Imagine an SCTV sketch directed by Ed Wood, and you have Everything Happens to Mel, an astonishingly amateurish unaired sitcom pilot starring crooner Mel Torme playing crooner Mel Turner. (Already you know the kind of deep thought that went into this.) After being mauled by a strange Southern hick named Millie, Mel brings her to his nightclub instead of the nearest police station because she's a good singer. Just as he's ready to become her manager, Millie's hillbilly father shows up to bring her home. And that's all she wrote. 

Well, maybe not she wrote. It could have been a he, or even an A.I. prototype -- it's impossible to know. While the cast is listed in the credits, none of the behind-the-camera "talent" takes the blame for creating the celluloid miasma known as Everything Happens to Mel. And my Ed Wood reference isn't necessarily a joke. While anybody can be a lousy writer/director, Wood leaves his uniquely inept stamp on his projects like a stray dog with an intestinal virus; this show has it all in spades. Yet nowhere in Wood's oeuvre does Everything Happens to Mel appear. It doesn't even come up on Torme's imdb resume. It's as if we're watching a bad Kodacolor dream brought on by an overdose of Robitussin. 

And perhaps that's how Torme would have wanted it. As good a singer he is, his songs here range from forgettable to abhorrent; only his ace drum solo makes a positive impression. Torme proved himself a fine dramatic actor three years later in The Fearmakers, but what happens to Mel here is an embarrassing attempt at spreading his wings before falling flat on his face. 

BONUS POINTS: The only thing that could make this thing worse is if former vaudeville comic/Abbott & Costello foil/short-lived Stooge Joe Besser (as the nightclub owner) reacted to Torme's sudden turn of bad luck by turning to the camera and bawling, "Everything happens to Mel!" So he does. Thanks, Joe!

                                                                    *************

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "SYMPHONY OF LIVING" (1935)

Some movies tug at your heartstrings. Symphony of Living yanks at them like the Minnesota Vikings and the San Diego Chargers playing tug-of-war. Why make a movie that simply touches you when it can bash you over the head with every conceivable melodramatic plot device? If nothing else, Symphony of Living just might be, if not the birth of a bushel of cinematic cliches, at least the distillation of them.

This is how every middle class
family in New York dresses at home.

Violinist Adolph Greig lives with his two layabout adult children, Pamela and Richard, who do nothing but complain that he's not bringing home enough money. Pretty soon, he's not bringing home any, having permanently damaged his hand when accidentally pushed into a window (it happens all the time to old violinists). Richard sees this as the perfect opportunity to shove off, while Pamela has already eloped with her rich, older boyfriend, leaving their father alone with his severed tendons and a bottle of Schnapps.

Time goes by. So disgusted is Pamela by the memory of her father's career, she refuses to allow her music-loving son Carl to continue with his violin lessons, driving her husband to pay her $75,000 to get lost in exchange for custody of the kid. (This being the middle of the Depression, most people would've said, "Where do I sign?") Meanwhile, Adolph becomes a music teacher, and... oh, hell, I don't have to tell you what happens next and next and next, do I? I mean, I figured it out by the end of the second reel.

Pamela's son wants to know why she
insists on dressing like Nefertiti.

Just to make sure we know whose side we're supposed to be on, the characters have been written with all the nuance of a short-circuited pile-driver. Adolph isn't just a nice man -- he makes St. Augustine look like Ted Kaczynski. Pamela and Richard aren't just ungrateful -- they're a full-fledged bitch and larcenist-in-waiting respectively. And did I say they were adult children? Make that middle-aged. Evelyn Brent, who plays Pamela, was 36 at the time of making Symphony of Living. Sheesh, lady, you don't like living with your old man, move out! Richard, meanwhile, hangs around the house all day in three-piece suits. Well, if you're going to do nothing, you might as well look good not doing it.

You want nasty? It isn't enough that Pamela asks her father to turn off his classical records; she has to sneer, "Muzzle that dirge, will ya?" When Richard, now a full-fledged crook, shows up at his father's music studio after 13 years, his first words are, "Nice little layout you got here" like an underworld enforcer. (He describes himself as "kind of a promoter," code for "crook.") One line of dialogue may be the first example of a particular kind of wisecrack that became de rigueur among jokesters several decades later. Noting the contempt he and Pamela have for Adolph, Richard scoffs, "Nice pleasant little family this is -- NOT!" Had he been born in another time, he'd have been a writer for Friends.

Those kids are actually
40 years old.

Like a lot of low-budget indies of the '30s, Symphony of Living plays fast and loose with its time frame. While the cars, fashion and even radio are vintage 1935, ten minutes into the movie we learn that it's supposed to be 1922. Although it seems like only a few months pass before Adolph becomes a music teacher, it's actually been eight years... until somebody says ten years... before reverting to eight again. Then I think a few more years pass after that, but it's difficult to say, especially when the main characters look the same throughout. Forget about teaching music, Adolph should bottle what ever it is that keeps these people from aging.

So invincible, it went out of
business a year later.

What cut-rate high class
looks like.

Symphony of Living is a poverty-row double-header, being an Invincible Picture released by the Chesterfield Motion Picture Corporation (no relation to the cigarette). The New York-based studios give Symphony of Living a low-rent, if ultimately artificial, feel. Adolph and his kids live at 170 W. 210 St., which, while referred to as "uptown," you'll never find on any map of Manhattan. His studio's address is 232 Christopher St. -- which would put it in the middle of the Hudson River. He performs at the Cosmopolitan Concert Hall, located in real life on the Invincible Pictures' soundstage. Pamela's 10 year-old son, however, has a genuine New York accent, despite being raised by parents with impeccable diction. Watch Sweet Smell of Success if you want authenticity.

The big draw here, if you can call it that, is Al Shean as Adolph Greig. Unknown today by anybody except kooks like me, Shean was, from 1912 to 1925, one-half of Gallagher & Shean, one of the most popular stage acts of their time. His portrayal of Greig, a

Al Shean refuses to allow his
grandson steal the spotlight
 like his damn nephews.

washed-up musician who guides his grandson to greatness, might have hit home just a little too hard. In real life, Shean was the uncle of a bunch of poor, rowdy siblings who entered show business when they saw how much dough he was raking in. Many years later, those same kids were conquering Broadway as the Four Marx Brothers -- just as Uncle Al's career was going into eclipse. (Look closely at Shean in Symphony of Living and you can see a resemblance to Harpo.) 

Four posters and ten lobby cards were
 created for the movie --
probably three and nine more
than were used.

Perhaps thinking he was still doing 1920s comedy shtick, Shean insists on speaking with an exaggerated accent (German? Viennese? Ottoman?) that positively screams old-hat vaudeville. This would be fine if Symphony of Living wasn't so intent on being a melodramatic tearjerker that melodramatically jerks your tears. In other words, a tearjerking melodrama.


I couldn't find any reviews of Symphony of Living from its original release, which isn't surprising. Mawkish pieces of entertainment like this were made for the masses who wanted a good, cheap cry, not the elites over at the Times. Maybe that was good enough for Al Shean, now that his salad days had wilted. But he must have wondered, after toiling away at the bargain-basement Invincible Pictures, how his nephews wound up making the classy A Night at the Opera at M-G-M the same year. Symphony of Just Existing would be closer to the mark.

                                                   *******************

NIXON'S THE SECOND ONE

I'll vote for her if she
wears this to her
inauguration.

Remember when Democrats rightly made fun of Donald Trump running for president? That he didn't have the experience to be the leader of the (rapidly-shrinking) free world? That their choice, whose name seemed to be The Most Qualified Presidential Candidate in History Hillary Clinton (®), was the only logical one? 

Well, that was, in TV terminology, almost two seasons ago. And since nothing in show biz succeeds like imitation, B-list actress Cynthia Nixon, best known from her role as Miranda on Sex and the City, is currently running against Andrew Cuomo to be the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York. She is second-best known as being gay, which, frankly, is even less interesting.

Gov. Cuomo's art of gentle persuasion.

Now, I'm not necessarily a fan of Cuomo. Nixon's description of him as "a vengeful bully" has been echoed by others. His administration's current corruption scandal is making headlines. As a public speaker, he confuses bellowing for oratory. And, like his fellow Democrat Alec Baldwin, his de facto mood is set to "angry". Relax, Andy, you've got the job.

Back when New York politics was fun.

However. Cuomo helped to get the Upper East Side's beloved Second Avenue Subway financed, so that alone will probably earn him my vote. (Back in the day, all you had to do was fix the potholes, so you can see how expensive votes have become.) Besides, the Republican candidate, as usual, will likely be a complete unknown who carries the stink of "loser" on him. The last time a Republican was Governor of New York, it took Howard Stern to bring him over the finish line. And Stern, now on pay radio, doesn't have that kind of clout anymore.

You mean Cynthia Lennon?

However again. I'm rooting for the underdog here, only because I like the idea of a "Democrats for Nixon" campaign, even if Cynthia Nixon doesn't; her official campaign posters feature only her first name. It's too clever by half, but that's what Cynthia's fans love about her.





But you know who doesn't love her? Christine Quinn,

Yup, and that's why you lost.

formerly New York's first openly gay Speaker of the City Council, making her then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's enforcer. That job backfired mightily when, in 2010, she pushed through the demolition of St. Vincent's Hospital, the most popular medical center for the West Village's gay residents. It was probably that move, more than anything else, that saw her lose the Democratic Mayoral nomination to Bill de Blasio in 2013. 

The loss must have been particularly galling to Quinn, since de Blasio was married to Chrilane McCray, a former lesbian, while Quinn herself remained the real deal. After only 100 copies of her autobiography sold in its first week -- and even that seems exaggerated by 50% -- she dropped out of public sight, only to return when Cynthia Nixon announced her candidacy.


Was Quinn throwing her support behind Nixon? Nope. Quinn, a Cuomo supporter, is still ticked off by Nixon campaigning for de Blasio in 2013. Or, as Quinn put it, "Cynthia Nixon was opposed to having a qualified lesbian become mayor of New York City. Now she wants to be an unqualified lesbian to be governor of New York."

Unqualified? Really?

Whoa there, Christine! Cynthia Nixon is no less qualified than you, as she is a practicing lesbian. If anyone's an unqualified lesbian, it's Bill de Blasio's wife.

If this was Quinn's way of getting a job in Cuomo's third term administration, it probably won't work, since she's become New York's latest punching bag, as I am a qualified lesbian is right up there with another Nixon's I am not a crook for its utter idiocy. 



Cynthia Nixon, of course, has absolutely no chance of winning the nomination, let alone the election. But, as a longtime political observer told me, since her campaign is focusing almost solely on city issues, what she's really doing is setting herself up to run for mayor of New York in 2021. By then, after the usual "listening tour", she will be without doubt considered a qualified lesbian, while Christine Quinn joins Hillary Clinton on her never-ending Sore Loser Tour.

                                            *****************************