DVR Diary: THE SECRET BRIDE (1934)

Released at the end of the transitional year from Pre-Code to Code Enforcement, William Dieterle's early political thriller for Warner Bros. has an air of obsolescence about it. Barbara Stanwyck was winding up her studio contract and virtually sleepwalks through her title role, while second-billed Warren William is already a shadow of his proudly predatory Pre-Code self. Whatever interest Secret Bride has is generic; what does a political thriller look like in 1934? This one has some of the paranoid vibe of the classics of the genre, only leavened with very conventional melodrama. The title is a last minute change from the title of the original play, Concealment, to emphasize the melodramatic angle. Stanwyck plays the secret bride of William, the state attorney general. Stanwyck is the governor's daughter, and the couple doesn't want to publicize their small civil ceremony once the public starts clamoring for William to investigate the governor's ties to a corrupt businessman who'd attempted to have an apparent bribe deposited into the governor's bank account. William's crack investigator (Douglas Dumbrille) catches the businessman's nervous secretary (Grant Mitchell) in the act, and new of the businessman's suicide soon follows news of the secretary's arrest. That makes things look bad for the governor (Arthur Byron), despite his denials of financial ties to the dead man. Once the investigation gets under way, William finds in the businessman's paper a letter, signed with the governor's initials, apparently soliciting a bribe. Analysis of the letter and the governor's personal typewriter point to his authorship, despite further denials.

I don't know how typed Douglas Dumbrille had become by the end of 1934, but he was eventually typed as a heel to the point that anyone watching Secret Bride now will automatically suspect that his character is up to no good. That's when the film throws a curve: as Dumbrille picks up his girlfriend, William's secretary (Glenda Farrell, nearly as noncommital in her role as Stanwyck), a shot rings out outside William's home and Dumbrille drops dead. Watching from a window, Stanwyck sees clearly that Farrell, however quickly arrested, didn't shoot Dumbrille. But she can't testify to this effect because -- the horror! -- she'd have to admit that she was at William's house, which would require them to fess up to their politically toxic marriage or face even worse gossip. The only thing to do is find out who shot Dumbrille before Farrell gets convicted, or worse. This means tracking down Mitchell, the increasingly frantic secretary who has to have the key to the multiplying mysteries. Stanwyck convinces him to talk to William, but Mitchell faints and then flees via a fire escape. The chase is on again, but now with Farrell's jury deliberating Stanwyck has no choice but to go to court and exonerate her, however damning the testimony may be to Stanwyck herself, her father and her husband....

There's plenty still unspoilt here, and Dieterle, working from an adaptation co-written by on-camera comic F. Hugh Herbert, spins a slick yarn with an energetic plot despite the lack of enthusiasm among most of the cast. The big exception is Grant Mitchell, who rather easily steals the picture in scenery-chewing support and gives the picture much of its nervous momentum. Dumbrille also does a decent job in an effort to keep his character ambiguous, while Farrell shows some of her Pre-Code spirit in a defiant interrogation scene. But reviewers of the time noted Stanwyck's lack of emotional commitment, while William often seems to vanish before our eyes. Was there something to the story that might have kept the stars interested had the film been made a year earlier, under Pre-Code conditions? It's hard to say, but however disappointing the leads are Secret Bride is still mildly entertaining as a fast-moving conspiracy play. There are worse ways to waste 65 minutes, but later generations knew better how to use this material -- except maybe for the secret-bride part.

If it's from Warner Bros., TCM.com has a trailer.

Koji Wakamatsu's CATERPILLAR (2010)

We've heard this story before: a young man marches off to war and comes back mutilated and crippled. It's the stuff of popular song and a metaphor for war's waste of youth. Inevitably the young man must seem a victim, but Koji Wakamatsu saw things differently. Caterpillar is his critical take on the maimed warrior motif, pitched somewhat closer to Johnny Got His Gun than to Born on the Fourth of July, yet closer in spirit, I dare say, to Tod Browning than to Dalton Trumbo. I have a friend who likes horror movies who found Browning's Freaks the most repulsive film he'd ever seen. I'll never show him Caterpillar.

Wakamatsu's film follows the misfortunes of Tadashi Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), the warrior idol of a small rural village who returns home a "war god." He's survived some terrible ordeal that cost him all his limbs as well as his hearing. Nearly half his face is scarred from burns. Given the reputed Japanese attitude toward death in battle I'm surprised the effort was made to save his life. Kurokawa was probably surprised as well. His wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) is horrified but eventually assumes a patriotic duty of caring for him: feeding him, cleaning him, dressing him up for outings and, increasingly, servicing him sexually. However improbably, Kurokawa's manhood survived his trauma, and he comes to crave sex as much as he craves food. Through the miracle of CGI we get to see him do the deed, frequently, albeit at a distance intended to be respectful. I imagine many viewers will find it neither respectful nor distant enough, but Wakamatsu specialized in disquieting cinema and wants you to be disturbed.

 

Kurokawa, before and after

 

We're used to an unfortunate like Kurokawa learning to bemoan war, but the man's deafness, and possibly other brain damage, make such pathetic eloquence impossible. He can barely choke out single words, though an attempt to write with a pencil in his teeth indicates that he's somewhat more sentient than he looks. Shigeko reads a little of his scrawl: the subtitles translate it as "I want to do it." Suicide? Sex, more likely, or so Shigeko assumes. Kurokawa, we learn, was a domineering, violent husband when whole, but war has reduced him to a sulky, demanding invalid. But maybe he was a big spoiled baby all along.

 

The symbolism of the "war god" as an embodiment of Japan's fatal militarism is pretty blatant, but the virtue of Caterpillar isn't its political satire but its unflinching examination of the shifting dynamics of the Kurokawa marriage. Just as mutilation doesn't confer sainthood on Kurokawa, neither can we easily identify Shigeko as victim, heroine or other. On one obvious level, Japan's defeat in war and its analog in the film's village, an impoverished yet strangely idyllic place haunted by a jolly village idiot and untouched by bombing, from what we can tell, are a kind of liberation for her. At the same time, she discovers a capacity for intimate cruelty, whether she's smashing precious eggs into hubby's face or mocking him (and giving the film its name) by singing some kind of nursery rhyme as he rolls on the floor in an agony of the damned, flashing back to his rape of a Chinese woman -- referenced briefly at the start of the show -- and the ensuing fire and building collapse that ruined him. The Kurokawas are a plausibly if idiosyncratically dysfunctional couple, and Wakamatsu's gutsy portrayal of it, aided by two gutsy actors, transcends the picture's more obvious political context. Caterpillar definitely works as a satiric history play, but it works best when Wakamatsu refrains from reducing his characters to generic or sexual-political types. That creative restraint makes Caterpillar probably the best mutilated-veteran picture ever made.

Koji Wakamatsu died on October 17, aged 76, after getting hit by a taxi. He made one more film after Caterpillar, a film about Yukio Mishima that should prove one of the must-see pictures of 2013 in the U.S. Long a cult figure for his provocative "pink" films of the Sixties and Seventies, Wakamatsu seemed to hit a new stride in his eighth decade, his global profile raised by his 2007 portrait of leftist self-terrorizing, United Red Army. One suspects, or at least hopes, that his last film will reconfirm what the two prior films suggest, that Wakamatsu, tragically, died at the peak of his powers.

Now Playing: DEC. 16, 1962

Here's the big one, this year's eventual Oscar winner, opening in New York City.

And here's the original trailer, with the same shadowy face for a logo, uploaded by Ray Acton.

Now Playing: DEC. 14, 1962

Cinema's Christmas gift to America arrives in Schenectady NY.

Given this Mexican import's present reputation, we can assume that a generation is about to be scarred for life.

Meanwhile, the build-up for The Longest Day continues in Milwaukee.

And here's a long, long trailer for it from TCM.com.

Now Playing: DEC. 13, 1962

Another of the big year-end roadshow pictures arrives in Pittsburgh.

This remake of the 1935 Oscar winner is one of the year's most controversial films if only because it was still novel for Marlon Brando to make an ass of himself on a shoot, but it wasn't the kind of controversy that made anyone want to see the picture.

Elsewhere, the new attractions aren't quite as prestigious. Here's a double-feature opening in Spokane....

...and in Miami.

Paul Frees pitches Varan in this trailer uploaded by Batmandingo007.

Pre-Code Parade: CLEAR ALL WIRES (1933)

 

Late in 1932 the Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that M-G-M had replaced Clark Gable in the lead role of Clear All Wires with Lee Tracy. "Now we know Clear All Wires will rate at the box office," Parsons wrote. That's because Tracy, "in spite of his many sick lapses, is the man of the hour [and] has never given a single inferior performance." His casting in Gable's place put the George Hill picture on a "flying start." If you're wondering what alternate reality Parsons was writing from -- other than Hollywood -- bear in mind that Gable in 1932 was just breaking out as a leading man, while Tracy was coming off a big hit in Warners' Blessed Event and certainly had made a strong impression with RKO's Half-Naked Truth. Still, compare your instant mental images of Gable and Tracy -- if you have one for the latter -- and you have to imagine two very different pictures. You actually don't have to think very hard, since Gable eventually got his chance in 1940, when M-G-M very freely remade Clear All Wires as King Vidor's Comrade X. That was such a free remake that it got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story, but contemporary reviewers noted its origins in the older film, itself an adaptation of a hit 1932 stage farce. All that remains of Clear All Wires in Comrade X, however, is the core idea of a cocky American reporter making mischief in the Soviet Union. The mischief is very different, however, and the remake is more overtly hostile toward the USSR than the original. A minor aspect of Pre-Code cinema is a relatively ambivalent attitude toward Communism -- the Code itself, I think, didn't require a harder or more critical stance but Hollywood did seem to take a harder line following Upton Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign, when M-G-M's Irving Thalberg -- who made the casting switch for Clear All Wires -- infamously produced fake newsreels warning of a hobo takeover of California should Sinclair win. Before that crisis, Hollywood seemed to regard the USSR as simply another exotic country with strange customs and eccentric politics. If the films of the period seem insufficiently outraged by Stalin -- well, it was a kind of amoral period. That's what the Code Enforcers were griping about.

Naturally, the abrasively loquacious Tracy plays an amoral star reporter. Buckley Joyce Thomas is the foreign correspondent for a major Chicago newspaper, and as the story opens he's reported missing among the Rif tribesmen, the notorious enemies of the French Foreign Legion. As a military force combs the desert for him, we find Buck enjoying the hospitality of a Rif chieftain, promising him favorable coverage in the global press. His liberation takes him quite by surprise, but he responds promptly, filing a dispatch reporting his narrow escape from captivity and death to the disgust of his main rival, the English journalist Pettingwaite. For his next trick, Buck intends to cover the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, determined to interview representative Russians, the head of the GPU (precursor to the KGB) and possibly Stalin himself. He won't take no for an answer. "The Kaiser never gave interviews! The Pope never gave interviews! Gandhi never gave interviews!" he reminds skeptics, "But they all talked to me!" With his trusty and helpfully named flunky Lefty (James Gleason) in tow, Buck invades Russia and tricks Pettingwaite out of his Moscow hotel suite, as well as his press pass for Lenin's Tomb for the big parade. In fact, we see Buck light Stalin's pipe in what may be Hollywood's first portrayal of the dictator.

Despite Buck's aggressive tactics, his interpreter is unable to secure an interview with the GPU boss, and their visit to the Lubyanka ends quickly -- though not without the chilling sight of an execution in progress -- with the reporter directed to the egress, po-russki. Also complicating Buck's plans are his new girlfriend (Una Merkel), who happens to be his publisher's regular mistress, and a lunatic dissident (John Melvin Bleifer) who wants him to publicize his anti-Stalin campaign. "Stalinism is not Leninism!" Sozanov raves, "Stalinism is not Bolshevism! Bolshevism is not Communism! And Leninism is not Marxism!" Buck can only share our own confusion. Despite the man's boast of attacking a radio station, Buck insists that he isn't worth covering unless he does more than talk. He shows Sozanov an American newspaper for examples of what he means. One woman dominates the headlines because "She did something worthwhile, murdered her husband."

Buck's ambitions fall apart as the publisher learns of his affair and fires him, leaving him and Lefty without funds in a strange country. Our hero rages against his former employer: "What did he ever do besides inherit a newspaper? Predatory wealth!...I'm telling you, Lefty, there's something to this communism...." The farce plot kicks in as Buck decides he has to make news in order to regain his job. After rejecting the idea of stealing Lenin's body ("Too gruesome, too macabre.") he exploits his acquaintance with a Prince Tomofsky, allegedly the last surviving Romanov in Russia, setting the hapless aristocrat up for an assassination attempt, with Lefty poised to shoot to wound. Just then, the interpreter arrives at Buck's suite in triumph: he has brought the GPU commissar (the usually vile C. Henry Gordon in one of his most strangely amiable performances) for an exclusive interview. Of course, Buck has ordered Lefty to shoot at a man in a chair at an exact moment, when in fact the commissar occupies the fatal seat. Now Buck is unable to end the interview soon enough, as the commissar is happy to ramble on about the Five Year Plan. Ultimately Buck has no choice but to take the bullet, making the most of it by filing a dispatch crediting himself with saving the commissar's life. Unfortunately, when Pettingwaite arrives on the scene, he finds the dispatch Buck had prepared in advance reporting the shooting of Tomofsky. He goes to the commissar and gets Buck and Lefty thrown in prison, where in an adjoining cell they find Sozanov, who had taken Buck's advice with no success. Now everything clicks, and in a darkly ironic finish, when you take Russia's near future into account, Buck rescues himself by convincing an innocent man to confess to a crime and conspiracy in which he didn't take part. But it's a happy ending after all after Buck convinces the commissar to spare the obviously insane Sozanov's life. There's also a happy ending to the romantic complications, but I admit losing track of the women in Buck's life, and the happiness of it all may be compromised by the closing newspaper headline indicating that he's set his new wife up to be kidnapped for the usual publicity.

Clear All Wires is more interesting than entertaining. Tracy is about as obnoxious here as he ever would be, displaying no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the farce aspect of the victim in the chair is laboriously anti-cinematic. For Pre-Code buffs it might even escalate to fascinating for its exceptionally whimsical attitude toward the Bolsheviks and its overall, almost overwhelming cynicism. Without much of a sex angle -- though Merkel gets to show off some lingerie -- Clear All Wires stands out as a distinctive Pre-Code film because it's the sort of movie, for many reasons, that you can't imagine Hollywood making just a short time later. And for some, it might be proof for the argument that Hollywood was better off stopping.

Now Playing: DEC. 12, 1962

Then as now, December is Oscar-bait season. Here's a would-be front-runner opening in New York City.

A biopic like this might have better luck today, but we had a Freud movie last year -- sort of -- that didn't get very far, either.

The following doesn't fall strictly into the "Now Playing" category, but the year's big war epic is already playing in the biggest cities at the time this teaser campaign starts up in Milwaukee. It's a neat way to emphasize the film's all-star element, though the player featured below wasn't exactly a star. We'll see a few more of these before the year is out.