Pre-Code Parade: FLYING DEVILS (1933)

Ralph Bellamy is one of the rare actors to become an archetype. It wasn't exactly flattering to the show-business survivor who got his Hollywood start in 1931 and endured to appear in movies people today may still recognize as "modern" (Trading Places, Pretty Woman, etc.). Bellamy is remembered by film buffs for his 1930s roles as a romantic loser, the guy who lost the girl, often to Cary Grant. During the "classic" era of Code Enforcement, to be a Ralph Bellamy type was to be ineffectual, a little dull in more than one way, and hopeless in competition with the leading man.

In the Pre-Code era, Bellamy sometimes got the girl. More to the point, Pre-Code Bellamy fought for his woman, sometimes to the death. In Russell Birdwell's Flying Devils, an RKO aviation picture from the Merian C. Cooper era, that makes Bellamy the villain. He plays Speed Hardy, the impresario of a flying-circus thrill show featuring "The Black Cats." The team includes his wife Ann (Arline Judge), his alky mechanic Screwy (future Jiminy Cricket Cliff Edwards), and aloof Ace Murray (top-billed Bruce Cabot). Birdwell and his writers portray the flying circus as a desperate, dissolute lot. Screwy acts crazy but his girl-chasing -- women around the world have autographed his overalls, one in Chinese -- suggests another meaning to his name. For Ace stunting is a dead end. It's the only flying work he can get after a conviction for bootlegging. He also fits the "lost generation" type of men damaged by the late war. He shies away from displays of affection, telling Ann that he's "not into that stuff," while Screwy invites girls to play "airplane" -- lips touching equals "contact." All is well, as well can get with this lot, until Ace's younger brother Bud (Eric Linden) shows up intending to drop out of college and join Ace in the air. Ace tries to talk him out of it. If he must fly, Bud should get an air mail or airline job instead of the no-future of stunt flying. Bud is irrepressible, however, and so is his passion for Ann Hardy, which awakens a jealous monster in Speed.

Ace and Bud aren't competitors, but their relationship reminded me of the romantic competition between brothers in another flying picture, William Wellman's Central Airport. That's another picture in which the hero's younger brother gets the girl, as if signalling that the lost generation needs to step aside -- to get lost, one could say. In Central Airport Richard Barthelmess simply goes on his way, but Flying Devils is more melodramatic and more pessimistic in its climax.

Speed hires Bud for the Black Cats and features him and Ann in a double parachute jump routine. Nature takes its course, however, and a joyride crash landing forces the unhurt youngsters to take shelter in someone's home. In a moment of Pre-Code subtlety Ace and Speed find them and Speed inspects the house. We don't see what he sees, but we just know it from his reaction: Bud and Ann stayed overnight, but only one bed was used. Speed conceives a revenge out of pulp fiction -- the real stuff, I mean. He sells Bud on the idea of staging a midair collision of expendable planes, both pilots bailing out seconds before the crash. Then he sabotages Bud's parachute, not knowing that Screwy saw him (two of him, in fact, Screwy is so hammered) do it. Word gets around in time for Ace to take to the air for unscheduled real aerial combat with Speed. This crowd gets more than they bargained for when Ace saves the day by ramming Speed's plane, blowing both of them out of the sky. It's an insane finish that hasn't really been built up properly. Ace may seem lost but he didn't seem doomed. His sacrifice seems less noble than senseless. But I guess the film had to end with one man standing, not counting Screwy, who's interested in every woman but Ann. Flying Devils is edgy in tone but too over the top at the end for its own good. I call your attention to it chiefly for the relative novelty of Ralph Bellamy with balls, before Code Enforcement neutered him for posterity.

Now Playing: JUNE 17, 1933

Eighty years ago today, Paramount Pictures called on the Four Marx Bros. to promote one of the studio's upcoming releases.

Now for what's playing in Milwaukee this week. Held over for a second week is Warner Bros.'s second blockbuster musical this year.

Gold Diggers prevailed over Paramount's International House at the local box office last week. This week, Paramount throws another Pre-Code haymaker at the champ.

One of the year's most controversial pictures, Temple Drake was an adaptation of William Faulkner's scandalous best-seller Sanctuary -- read it and you'll never think of corn cobs the same way again. You won't see the Faulkner connection made in the advertising, but people presumably knew who Temple Drake was.

The Sentinel's movie review gives Faulkner and the film credit where due:

 

 And here's my own review. Compared to this and Gold Diggers, everything else is likely to pale, but for those looking for summer movie thrills, the Garden offers the bombing of New York City.

I like the double-billing of Men Must Fight and an actual fight film. Baer and Schmeling should have satisfied audiences who might have expected more fighting from the main attraction. I try to explain what they actually got here. Hint: the woman of 1940 is pissed.

Here are the also-rans.

 

So who is Henry Garat? The answer is: a French actor who won international recognition for the art-house hit The Congress Dances. Fox Film must have hoped he would prove another Maurice Chevalier, but William Dieterle's Adorable would be his only American film. Throwing some sort of Ruritanian whimsy into theaters at the moment when Busby Berkeley and his gold diggers were running amok probably sealed Garat's fate in Hollywood.

On the Big Screen: MAN OF STEEL (2013)

When I was a kid I hated the Adventures of Superman TV show. What bugged me about it was the absence of supervillains. Why was Superman dealing with dumb gangsters all the time? Where was Lex Luthor? Where were enemies Superman could really fight? When would Superman really get to show off his powers? Makes me sound like the target audience for Zack Snyder's new movie, but as the years went on I discovered the old Superman comics and I gained an appreciation of what he stood for back then. I could understand the fantasy Superman still satisfied even in those boring old TV shows. I could see, too, that modern comics sometimes went too far in subjecting Superman to grueling, sometimes lethal slugfests, as if he had to prove something by taking a punch, losing the primal appeal of the man who can't be hurt by our usual oppressors and can do what we only dream of. And as a comic book fan, I bought into the dichotomy DC Comics has asserted for the past quarter-century: if Batman is dark, Superman must be light. With that baggage, I read early reviews of Man of Steel with some trepidation. The shadow of Christopher Nolan had fallen across Superman, and to many people that wasn't right. People whose main point of reference for Superman was the 1978 Richard Donner movie approached the new film expecting it to be the antithesis of Donner's, and as such, wrong. A complaint I've read often in the last few days is that Man of Steel is no fun. Fun is subjective, however. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Others have called it monotonous, particularly in its more violent moments. Monotony is in the eyes of the impatient or the intolerant. I thought Snyder found fresh ways to portray comic-book violence, more Homeric on the man-to-man (and man-to-woman) level than the dispatching of alien hordes in Marvel's The Avengers. The problem with the scale of action in Man of Steel isn't that it was repetitive, but that Snyder has painted himself into a corner. How do you top this? If this is to be the start (so Time Warner hopes) of a DC movie universe, wouldn't it have been wiser for the long term to start on a slightly smaller scale? Fortunately, we don't have to judge Snyder's movie by its usefulness to his employer.

Man of Steel starts unsteadily by turning the legend of Krypton's destruction into an action movie. Snyder puts himself in the "how do you top this?" hole immediately as Jor-El (Russell Crowe)  not only has to get his baby son Kal safely into space before the planet blows up, but also has to defeat a coup d'etat launched by everybody's least-favorite Kryptonian, General Zod (Michael Shannon). After much dragon riding, deep sea diving, etc., Jor-El has sort of saved the planet, in the less meaningful political sense, and Zod's clique are launched into the Phanton Zone. While there was an elegant austerity to the Phantom Zone concept, and to all of Krypton, in the Donner film, here the authorities generously equip the criminals with an easily-weaponized spaceship for when they wake up. When the planet's demise wakes them ahead of schedule, Zod seeks out Jor-El's little rocketship, knowing that his enemy had secreted the Codex, a complete inventory of Kryptonian genetic codes, on board the vessel.

Meanwhile, we see Kal-El's coming of age as an Earthman in a non-linear fashion that is now pretty common in comic books but in movies gets a director compared to Terrence Malick. Snyder clearly owes a debt to Malick for Man of Steel's flashback to life in Smallville, but that's just one of his debts. Perhaps the most obvious is to the second Battlestar Galactica series, shown by Snyder's penchant for zooming in and out during flying scenes. For what it's worth, there are at least two Galactica actors in the cast, but I digress. The Smallville flashbacks are intercut with Clark Kent's wanderings up north, where the bearded drifter (Henry Cavill's facial hair has inspired an ad campaign) does odd jobs, including saving lives during oil rig explosions. He keeps a low profile because his terrestrial father Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) warned him against using his powers lest he accidentally harm or terrorize people. Jonathan is coldbloodedly earnest on this point in a way that maybe only Kevin Costner can be, considering seriously the notion that Clark ought to have let a busload of classmates drown rather than call attention to himself. Never let it be said, however, that Pa Kent doesn't remain true to his principles to the bitter end. Despite this, Pa and Ma (Diane Lane) have done their best to raise Clark as a decent person, and it shows. Regrettably, even Superman has to go the reluctant-hero route in our time, but Man of Steel fortunately doesn't go overboard with this motif. Clark is a hero many times over before he dons his costume or learns about his heritage; he just keeps his identity very secret.

Give Lois Lane (Amy Adams) one lead, however, and Clark's identity isn't secret for long. Snyder, Nolan and credited writer David S. Goyer bend over backward to make the archetypal nosy reporter a kind of superwoman in her own right instead of the legendarily clueless ninny she was for much of her history in the comics. Investigating reports of an anomalous object discovered in the Arctic, she penetrates an ancient Kryptonian spaceship at virtually the same time Clark does. Seeing a sample of the stranger's strength, she follows a trail of urban legends straight to Smallville. Clark convinces her to keep her story under wraps, but she'd already shared information with an irresponsible blogger (insultingly named "Woodbern") who fingers Lois once the world learns that visitors from Krypton are looking for one of their own in our midst. The government quickly grabs her, but that's a good thing, since it'll keep her in proximity to the main action for the rest of the picture. The Kryptonians prove helpful as well, taking her with Kal-El onto their spaceship, though they'll have cause to regret their hospitality.

I think we all know the rest. Zod and friends want to conquer the earth and make a good try at it. Smallville, Metropolis (where Lois, as usual, works for the Daily Planet) and someplace in the Indian Ocean get devastated. Superman (a military tag for our hero, though Lois has the idea first) gets a workout, but it's a relatively modest feat of strength that gets the biggest gasp from the audience. Ironic, isn't it?

Superman emerges from Man of Steel still a far "lighter" character than Batman. He earns acceptance, even though the government inevitably remains wary. His anxiety over whether people will accept and trust him is resolved in part, and neatly, when a priest suggests that he trust people -- make a leap of faith -- first. However alienated he still feels, he decisively rejects his alien-ness in favor of his humanity. While some may deplore at least one thing he does, he remains far from "dark." The essential Superman is still with us, and ideally will be back someday. Henry Cavill will definitely be welcome. As Superman he is more inhibited than tormented, more principled than defensive, but his integrity is unquestionable -- and the actor, as everyone has observed, definitely looks the part, especially from the neck down. Cavill had failed to impress me in Immortals, and I've never seen The Tudors, but now I can say with confidence that he's no Brandon Routh, and I may go further than that. Snyder's ensemble is strong across the board. Michael Shannon gives a jarring performance as the villain mostly by underplaying. Compared to other Kryptonians, Zod has a flat, very American voice, and Shannon tends to bark out his lines in the manner of a singleminded, soulless man. He's disappointed people who love Terrence Stamp's Zod as a camp icon, as well as people who expect the villain to have the best lines. But I appreciate a villain who is just plain mean, and Shannon's Zod definitely meets that standard. By comparison, Russell Crowe is actually overused, his AI presence in later scenes serving too much as a deus ex machina -- or in English, an info dump for both Clark and Lois. Meanwhile, the sleeper of the picture, the unexpected scene-stealer, is Christopher Meloni of Law and Order fame as an Army guy who starts out suspicious of Superman but finally recognizes him as an ally. Meloni gets mega-badass points for his showdown with a Kryptonian warrior woman (Antje Traue). After emptying his firearms into her superhuman and armored form to no effect, he decides to draw his combat knife. She respects the gesture, mirrors it, and tells him "A good death is its own reward." Later, he gets to throw that back in her face. Dunk-dunk. Man of Steel has quite a few little grace notes like that, along with the properly overblown mayhem. More so than in Watchmen, Snyder directs comic-book action with virtuoso assurance and dramatic momentum. People who claim that they lost interest in the movie because of the supposedly repetitive violence have it backwards: the violence seems repetitive because they've already lost interest, or lacked interest in the first place. I get that some people are sick of superhero movies, but that distaste has biased some observers against Man of Steel. If you're not sick of superhero movies yet, Man of Steel will prove that the genre has life to spare. And while it may not be saying too much, it's easily Zack Snyder's best film to date. It's enough of a stand-alone picture that there doesn't really need to be a sequel. But after asking what Snyder can do to top this, I wouldn't mind seeing his answer someday.

BAD COMPANY (1972)

Good westerns age well. As period pieces they ought not to date. There are exceptions like the singing cowboy films, but those aren't really good. In a different category are the American "revisionist" westerns of the early 1970s. They haven't aged as well as their Italian contemporaries because the American pictures more obviously reflect the political and cultural attitudes of the time when they were made than do the westerns made twenty or thirty years earlier. You can argue that they are more Seventies movies than westerns. Robert Benton's Bad Company is an exception despite its obvious relevance to the time it was made. In some ways, Bad Company seems ahead of its time. In one respect, it's almost prophetic. Harvey Schmidt's austere solo piano score and the occasional narration of actor Barry Brown make the film sound like a parody of Ken Burns's The Civil War nearly twenty years in advance of its appearance. Looking further ahead, you can imagine Jeff Bridges's Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' True Grit as the older version of the character Bridges plays in Bad Company. The two films seem to take place in the same sardonic west, a wasteland of eccentric encounters and sudden violence. Benton's seems like a very influential movie, yet I get the sense that it's underrated. It doesn't come to mind immediately in discussions of the decade's major westerns. I wonder if that's because Barry Brown's prominence dates it more than anything else. Brown didn't make it out of the Seventies, killing himself in 1978. After seeing him here, I wonder why he didn't do more in the time he had, not to mention what he might have done in later years. See him in Bad Company and you'll want to see more of him, but there isn't much.

Benton and his writing partner David Newman made their names as the authors of Bonnie and Clyde, and Bad Company is in the same mode. They may still have imagined themselves the American Godard and Truffaut at this point -- don't ask me who was who -- and their western is appropriately ambitious. It opens with the grimmest of ironies. In 1863 Americans are being drafted to fight in the Civil War -- to free the slaves in the imagination of posterity. Benton shows young men being dragged from their homes -- one is disguised in a dress -- and thrown into cages to be carried off to war. Drew Dixon (Brown) is a draft dodger. The war has already taken his brother and he feels his family has given enough. He heads west with $100 in his shoes and a dream of becoming a silver baron in Virginia City. Along the way he blunders into the film's larger irony: Drew and young men like him escape war only to enter a zone of constant war of all against all. This film's west is no land of milk and honey -- nearly everyone we meet regrets having gone west -- but a place where most people prey on each other to survive. Drew himself ultimately joins a posse besieging an outlaw gang in what looks a lot like a small-scale war. The temptation for contemporary audiences must have been to see Benton's picaresque adventure of Civil War draft dodgers as a commentary on Vietnam War draft dodgers. I'm not sure that precise parallels can be drawn, but a broader point is clearly being made: refusing war doesn't mean you renounce violence.

The main storyline of Bad Company is the love-hate relationship that develops between Drew and Jake Rumsey (Bridges), a would-be outlaw who rolls Drew for some pocket change but misses the big bankroll in his victim's shoe. After some misadventures in St. Joseph, Missouri, Drew joins Jake's little gang and heads west to seek their fortune. The young men -- the youngest is just a boy -- are incompetent pioneers. Jake's the only one who knows how to dress fresh kills. After alarming animal lovers by appearing to show the shooting of a rabbit, Benton cleverly keeps the process of dressing the carcass just out of camera range, allowing some nauseating sound effects and Bridges's matter of fact descriptions of his work have their suggestive effect. While he may have marginally more survival skills than his pals, Jeff isn't much of a leader. He sleeps on his watch overnight, allowing the Big Joe Collins gang (led by David Huddleston) get the drop on them. His incompetence is a revisionist motif, a deconstruction of the myth of the hardy pioneers. His gang is rapidly reduced -- one is killed Bonnie & Clyde style while stealing a pie; two more quit, robbing Jake and Drew in the process, only to get hanged almost instantly; another simply hops a passing stagecoach he was supposed to rob. The survivors' haplessness grows blackly comic. In the end, they can survive only by becoming true outlaws. Drew may escape war, but he can't escape violence, and embraces it instead.

 

Benton and Newman play with notions of sexual dysfunction as they did in Bonnie and Clyde. Jake is strangely offended when virginal Drew refuses to join in the gangbang of a pioneer woman -- she makes no objections when her husband offers her for money and flashes her boobs to prove that the boys aren't getting "a pig in a poke." Jake insists on having the woman first and finishes with unusual quickness (the husband asks "Are you done already?") while boasting of his prowess. Later in the picture, after finally robbing Drew of his shoe money, Jake boasts of spending the loot on whores because that's just what Drew wouldn't have done. The film shows us no more than this but it's enough to make you wonder about Jake. Bridges goes to town with the role, nailing Jake's apparently arrested development and his compensatory arrogance about what little competence he has. Brown complements Bridges by making Drew both self-righteous and cynical, obsessively possessive about his martyred brother's watch yet ultimately and consistently selfish.

If Benton shows considerable narrative confidence as a first-time director -- he blithely jump-cuts past moments we expect to be suspenseful, taking some of his heroes' few successes for granted -- his not-so-secret weapon is the cinematography of Gordon Willis. His work in Bad Company is just about as impressive as his work on The Godfather the same year. He gives Benton's western a pictorial gravitas that alone ought to have elevated the film's standing for posterity. But Bad Company probably suffers for its lack of conventionally likable characters, even if the refusal of likability is part of its point. If you really need to like someone in a movie, Bad Company is not the film for you. I think you can like a film without liking the people in it, and I liked Bad Company a lot.

DVR Diary: BATHING BEAUTY (1944)

Turner Classic Movies was quick to rearrange its schedule in order to do timely homage to Esther Williams, the movie-star swimmer who died on June 6. From 8:00 p.m. on June 13 through 8:00 p.m. on June 14 the cable channel devoted 24 hours to a Williams marathon. Since I went to the trouble of acknowledging Williams's demise on this blog, yet had never sat through an entire Esther Williams movie, I thought I should do so now. I chose the movie that made her a star, George Sidney's Bathing Beauty. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer recognized what they had in Williams and retitled their Red Skelton vehicle Mr. Co-Ed to spotlight the newer star. It remains a Skelton vehicle, though -- and that's the problem. I should add that the problem isn't necessarily Skelton himself, but the fact that, as a musical-comedy leading man, he's probably a toned-down Skelton compared to his just-plain comedy movies. He plays a songwriter in love with the Williams character, a student at a women's college. Nightclub impresario Basil Rathbone trembles at the thought of Skelton retiring once he marries Williams, so he contrives a situation to prevent the wedding -- a woman shows up at the church claiming her three redheaded boys are Skelton's. This works. Williams flees back to college and Skelton follows her, only to be barred at the gate because faculty members are the only men allowed on campus. Fortunately, Mr. Co-Ed was not a drag comedy, for the most part. Instead, Red encounters the college's legal counsel (Donald Meek, who gets a single scene), who relates that he's redrafting the school charter to make it women-only, but that for the moment it's actual co-educational. Such was the higher education system in that simpler time that Red is able to apply for admission and, despite some qualms, be admitted on the spot. Now he must remain in good academic standing, avoiding demerits that the administration is eager to impose, in order to regain Williams's love. Taking classes with the girls creates opportunities for allegedly comic setpieces for Skelton. He gets to do an extended pantomime impersonating a woman making herself up in the morning. In ballet class, he finally must don drag because the class uniform, apparently, is a tutu. All of this is dull stuff. Buster Keaton worked on the picture as an uncredited gag-man, but he couldn't do much to keep the ballet scene interesting. It comes down to Red and the girls struggling with a sticky candy wrapper while keeping time to the music. Har har de har har.

This leaves us depending on Williams for our entertainment by default, but she only really stars at the beginning and the end of the picture. She's introduced in a poolside sequence designed to show off her swim skills, and closes the show with the big aquatic ballet you can watch back at my Williams obituary. Contrary to the impression I may have given then, the big Bathing Beauty number was directed not by Busby Berkeley (who would get to Williams later) but by John Murray Anderson, a peer/rival of Berkeley known for his innovative staging of musical numbers on Broadway. Anderson had tried to make his big splash in movies back in 1930 with the Paul Whiteman showcase King of Jazz, but had not worked in Hollywood since then until Bathing Beauty. There are Berkeleyesque touches in his big number, especially when Williams swims through human hoops of shapely flesh, and the costuming of Williams's dry-land attendants strikes a slightly decadent note, but overall the big finish is relatively uninspired to the apocalypses Berkeley and others would stage later, though definitely eye-opening as a first outing for the title character. Otherwise, neither Sidney nor Anderson do much interesting visually, except for the big band numbers featuring the Harry James and Xavier Cugat units. Directors knew they had to work to make these bits interesting, and the band numbers at least feature creative camera movement, lighting, etc. They don't help the story any, of course. Leave Williams out of the picture, or leave her out of the water, and Mr. Co-Ed would have been a lesser Skelton movie if not a just plain dumb comedy. With her in it, M-G-M learned that people would sit through plenty of dumb comedy for glimpses of girls in swimsuits. Thus movie history was made.

Pre-Code Parade: SUCCESS AT ANY PRICE (1934)

Douglas Fairbanks jr. and Frank Morgan are the Mad Men of 1934 in J. Walter Ruben's film version of John Howard Lawson's play Success Story. Lawson himself, a future member of the Hollywood Ten, collaborated in adapting his play which, as you may guess from the author's history, is not the most flattering portrait of the advertising business. But while Lawson takes predictable potshots at the marketing of junk as luxury goods -- the beauty cream flogged by the film's ad agency proves most effective for polishing doorknobs -- the film is more a portrait of a stunted personality than an indictment of an economic system. If anything, the film might create the unfortunate impression that low class will ultimately tell, that a silk purse could never come from the sow's ear played by Fairbanks, the sullen brother of a gangster recently killed as the story opens in 1927. Lawson and Ruben trace the rise of Fairbanks's character, Joe Martin (in the play he was Ginsburg) from clerking to control of a powerful agency. In time, Joe usurps both the mistress of his boss (Morgan) and his position in the firm. Joe has street smarts and a drive to succeed, as well as one crucial insight. The agency's having trouble putting ad copy together for that beauty cream. Joe proves at least a generation ahead of his time by recommending a mainly visual approach to the ads. The success of his campaign sets him on his way. Careful with money, he gets out of the stock market just in time to escape the Great Crash, while Morgan is forced to borrow to keep afloat. Joe ruthlessly gets control of Morgan's debt and control of Morgan's money. He doesn't have so much against Morgan as he does against the Ivy League types who started ahead of him and look down on him. But he wants what Morgan has, including the mistress (Genevieve Tobin), whom Joe courts and marries while neglecting his old girlfriend (erstwhile film flapper Coleen Moore), who got him his job in the first place. Joe gets everything he wants but doesn't know what to do with it all. This is especially true with his new wife, who quickly grows restless while Joe remains focused on business. There's a hint of Charles Foster Kane in Joe's soulless accumulation of stuff without emotional fulfillment, but Joe lacks even Kane's impulse to play the public benefactor. Instead, he's an abyss of narcissism who finally repels everyone in his orbit. Ruben (doesn't his full name sound like an ad agency?) stages a coldly brutal finish as a self-pitying Joe bemoans his fate to an exhausted Moore, who simply walks away while Joe keeps babbling. The denouement is more brutal as Joe, now irrevocably alone, shoots himself. This may be how Success Story ended, but whether or not that's the case, movies couldn't take such a close. So RKO had Ruben end the picture with a reversal of what we'd just seen, Moore returning to nurse the wounded Joe (he went for the body, not the head) back to health with a promise that she'll never leave him. Pure hokum.

If people remember Fairbanks jr. now it's probably as a swashbuckler in the image of his father thanks to movies like Gunga Din and Sinbad the Sailor. He was rarely like that, if ever, in the Pre-Code era, and the end of that era -- which for him was Success At Any Price -- was the end of a phase the 25 year old's movie career. For most of the Pre-Code era he was a Warner Bros. star and his persona suited the studio. The younger Fairbanks was often a nervy city boy and often poor, whether a gangster's brother, as here, or a gangster in his own right as Edward G. Robinson's sidekick in Little Caesar. There's something alive and hungry in his Pre-Code work, as if Junior were urgently aware of the challenge of proving himself as something different from his already-legendary father. After Success he made films in England, starting with an underrated villainous turn in The Rise of Catherine the Great, until returning to Hollywood to play a swashbuckling villain in 1937's The Prisoner of Zenda. By that point, to some extent, Fairbanks had surrendered to his heritage, and we hardly ever saw again the interesting young man of Pre-Code days. Code Enforcement itself may not be to blame for that, but the twists of Junior's career make his younger self a defining figure of the Pre-Code era. Thanks perhaps to studio tampering, Pre-Code Fairbanks takes his final bow in Success At Any Price, only to be reborn for future use as someone more benign and perhaps more bland.

Now Playing: JUNE 10, 1933

A confident Warner Bros. has a follow-up to this spring's big hit 42nd Street ready for release little more than three months after the prior picture changed the face of musicals.

 

Some exaggeration is going on. The ad claims 12 big stars but I count only eight. The trailer isn't very helpful on this score, but it's something to look at, and TCM.com has got it.

TCM also has this film's show-stopper, "Remember My Forgotten Man." That Warners would use a big musical extravaganza to make this kind of social commentary makes this a definitive Pre-Code moment.

How does anyone compete with this? Paramount Pictures, at least, agreed with Warners that quantity equaled quality.

 

And you know what? A lot of people will say that this, too, is a masterpiece of its kind. And it has an ultimate Pre-Code moment of its own -- Cab Calloway singing "Reefer Man." GodGaveUsCannibis gave us this copy of the clip.


All right, then: how do you compete with them? The Garden's attraction may have had a fighting chance if the studio had left it alone.

The ad copy echoes the movie's original title. Walking Down Broadway was to have been Erich Von Stroheim's belated debut as a talkie director, but to the surprise of few Fox sacked him and largely reshot the picture.

Meanwhile, M-G-M tries for class -- with the usual Pre-Code spin.

And the Alhambra decides that the best answer to Busby Berkeley is a live stage show.

I give them credit for "Dusky Devastators of Depression." They don't write ad copy like that anymore. And there's a movie, too, an RKO melodrama about stuntmen. Overall, a lot to see in Milwaukee eighty years ago this week.