On the Big Screen: THE CRUISE OF THE JASPER B (1926)

In the mid-1920s Cecil B DeMille became a sort of movie mogul as the mastermind behind the Producers Distribution Corporation, which later merged with the more established Pathe company. DeMille's biggest hit as an independent was his own Jesus picture The King of Kings but his company released pictures from many hands, in all genres. DeMille as a comedy producer sounds like an unlikely proposition but The Cruise of the Jasper B. allowed him to tap, at whatever remove from the actual creators, into his inner Mack Sennett. Director James W. Horne filmed an adaptation by three writers (including future director Tay Garnett) of a novel by humorist Don Marquis. Best known now for his whimsical "archy & mehitabel" pieces, allegedly written by a cockroach jumping on his typewriter keyboard, Marquis wrote Jasper B in 1916 as a kind of mock epic, and Horne's film is even more mockingly epic. It mocks the conventions of melodrama and adventure by taking them way, way over the top, into the realm of the absurd.

Swaggering in his pirate shorts, star Rod LaRocque (who'd go on to play perhaps the most smart-assed version ever of The Shadow in the movie International Crime) looks like a parody of Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate, which came out nine months before Jasper B. A prologue establishes the storied history of the Cleggett dynasty as the original Jeremaiah Cleggett wins a wife by rescuing her from scurvy ravishers. Since then, the heir to the line comes of age and into his fortune when he takes the old pirate vessel Jasper B onto the open sea to be married on it. By the eighth generation, however, the Cleggett line has grown decadent and bankrupt. The present Jerry Cleggett, whose exact likeness to his distant ancestor raises suspicions of inbreeding, will sleep through the auctioning off of his estate if not for the dedication of his manservant Wiggins (Jack Ackroyd). The beleaguered man must dress in front of prospective buyers, including plenty of women. He insists that they turn their backs, but the ladies whip out their trusty mirrors in the meantime, supposedly to adjust their lipstick. Rarely since the 1920s has the Hollywood male been so subject to the female gaze, but LaRocque is a good sport and unashamed. His performance requires comic timing worthy of the great clowns, especially early on as his bath goods and wardrobe are being snatched from him every time he turns his back. It's starting out as the worst day of Jerry's life, but his salvaging of his ancestor's original pirate costume augurs a change in fortunes.

And just across the way, the ink hasn't dried yet on a revised last will that bestows a fortune on the dying man's niece Agatha Fairhaven (Mildred "First Mrs. Charlie Chaplin" Harris) while virtually disinheriting the hateful Reginald Maltravers (Snitz Edwards). A maid taunts Reginald by waving the new will at him until the wind blows it out of her hand, after the runty villain jumps for it in vain, the will blows through a bathroom window to plaster itself, ink side down, on the bathing Agatha's naked back. Now it's not enough for Reginald to rip the paper text to shreds. To win his fortune, he must scrub the fatal backwards lines off Agatha's body. And so the chase begins, the villain pursuing with a loofah, until Agatha seeks shelter with Jerry Cleggett. It's love virtually at first sight under fire, and the dramatic title cards give an idea of the sensibility at play here:

Agatha: "Don't let him wash my back!"

Jerry: "NEVER!"

Jerry subdues the despicable Reginald and orders Wiggins to "soak" him. The loyal manservant misunderstands this as a command to "croak" the offender, but fortunately lacks the killer instinct. Instead, Maltravers plays dead in hope of escape and gets stuffed into a coffin-like crate which the men then dump out a window. But like Dracula aboard the Demeter the un-dead villain rides the roof of the Cleggett car, somehow unconfiscated, to where the old Jasper B is moored so Jerry can come into his own before the boat is turned into a floating chop house. They barely make it to the boat as Wiggins abandons the driver's seat to investigate the roof and the brake slips. A crash landing luckily leaves everyone unscathed, and Wiggins rejoices that they're at least rid of the accursed box until the thing slides down the hill to cut his legs out from under him.

Meanwhile, gangsters are robbing a mail truck to steal a priceless tapestry stored a in a crate that farcically resembles Reginald Maltravers' quasi-coffin. You can see where this is headed, but you probably don't know how far it's going. You can probably guess that Maltravers will end up leading the gangsters in a raid on the Jasper B. But while this storm gathers the wheels of government keep turning. The driver of the mail truck appeals to the local constable for assistance. "It's a federal matter," that official answers before taking him to the police. "It's a federal matter," the police agree before taking it up with the militia. "It's a federal matter!" an officer affirms before consulting the Navy. An admiral reviews the information up to this point and is about to deliver an opinion when everyone in the frame draws close to hear exactly what they, and by now you, expect. This gradual escalation features some of the best use of title cards I've ever seen in a silent film, and this extra beat of anticipation as everyone cocks their ears is a stroke of genius. And when the admiral (or his card) screams silently "IT'S A FEDERAL MATTER!" it's the cue for the film, already screwy, to go howling mad.

For as a federal matter the theft of the tapestry brings the full military power of the United States to bear against the Jasper B. In a sequence that may have inspired scenes from Duck Soup, infantry, air and naval power and even those newfangled tanks are mobilized against the pirate ship and its crew of three. A montage of stock footage and special effects portrays an apocalyptic assault on the plucky boat. Shelled by naval guns and land artillery, carpet bombed from the air, the ship somehow remains intact as Jerry battles Maltravers and the gangsters, though the villain himself is blown out of his clothes by one lucky shot even as our hero chastises him. Now that's a climax!

I wasn't surprised to learn that James W. Horne's subsequent career was split between slapstick and serials. Immediately after Jasper B. Buster Keaton recruited him to do the directing chores for College. He later directed Laurel & Hardy in Way Out West and some other films before ending his career in the Columbia serial department. You can see the knack for thrills and the comedy timing in Jasper B., which for all I know (which is little) of the man's work is his masterpiece. It definitely proves again that silent comedy had more going for it than the canonical clowns, yet it was a film I hadn't heard of before it was announced as part of this weekend's Jazz Age film program at the Madison Theater. The definitive work of genre criticism, Walter Kerr's The Silent Clowns, had nothing to say about it. That just goes to show how deep the talent pool was in those days, and how much possibly this good remains to be discovered once we look past the big names of comedy.

Pre-Code Parade on the Big Screen

I'm just back from the Madison Theater here in Albany, where today the Pine Hills Film Colony hosted a one-day film festival called Lost Paradise: Four Films from the Jazz Age. Chronologically speaking the feature program covered the late Twenties up to 1930, including two silent pictures, one early talkie and one early musical. These were interspersed with Charley Chase short subjects, though they inexplicably were from his end-of-the-line Columbia period instead of his golden days with Hal Roach. The best I can say about them is that they were better than Buster Keaton's work for the home of the Three Stooges. The features deserve coverage in more detail, and this post serves as a preview of coming attractions. In the coming days I'll be posting reviews of the four features, which in chronological order are: James W. Horne's Cruise of the Jasper B. (1926), Harry Beaumont's Our Dancing Daughters (1928), Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party (1929) and the Lloyd Corrigan-Laurence Schwab collaboration Follow Thru (1930). For now, here are some general comments about the event:

The program extended over 9.5 hours, including a dinner break of not quite two hours between the third and fourth features and about a half-hour apiece separating the earlier segments. Film Colony director Michael V. Butler acted as MC, delivering a general introduction to moviegoing during the 1920s, emphasizing the multimedia experience of film, live music and occasional olfactory effects, as well as individual intros for the features. Source materials varied extremely, Follow Thru being a digital burn of the Museum of Modern Art's copy of the all-Technicolor musical while Jasper B. was an Alpha Video disc with predictable limitations. Technical problems were perhaps too evocative of the early days of sound as the theater staff struggled to call up the soundtrack for Follow Thru, while the aspect ration on Wild Party was juggled a little to make Clara Bow appear less chubby than she initially appeared. These can be written off as learning experiences for the event organizers, who should be forgiven much for putting this program together. Once everything was in sync Follow Thru was a spectacular experience, while the humble-seeming Jasper B. was a hilarious surprise from producer Cecil B. DeMille in Mack Sennett mode. The Wild Party was the nearest thing to a dud on the program, while Our Dancing Daughters is elevated above its soapy subject matter by powerhouse performances from Joan Crawford and Anita Page. But I'll have more to say about all of them in short order. For tonight congratulations are in order for the Pine Hills Film Colony along with encouragement for their next program tentatively scheduled for the fall. As for the Madison, despite switching to a primarily second-run format after being a repertory house for much of last year, the historic neighborhood theater still runs classic oldies or cult films every week, including Metropolis this week. Albany's a lucky town to have this theater as well as a thriving arthouse like the Spectrum. I hadn't been to the Madison for several months, more for personal reasons than anything else, but today was a perfect day to come back.

Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015)

The title of world's oldest person has changed hands twice this month but amid the coverage of those milestones I missed the passing of the world's oldest film director until I saw a small item on the Milestones page of the newest Time magazine today. To be exact, Oliveira (who died on April 2) had been the world's oldest active director, having released a short subject last November. If his name didn't pop up on Google News despite his record that was probably because he has no truly canonical classic in his filmography. He started out as a documentarian and really came into his own relatively late, in his sixties during the 1970s. As he pushed on, his work gained curiosity value, and curiosity was often rewarded by the quality or at least the ambition on Oliveira's work. I haven't seen very many of his films but was impressed by I'm Going Home (2001) and the death-enamored Strange Case of Angelica (2010), though less so by Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl (2009). Even then, I saw proof of a rigorous pictorial intellect, and Oliveira understandably worked in continuity with older literary and cultural traditions, so that his later films have always looked interesting, at least, on their own terms as well as for their testimony to their director's endurance. It's hard to know who to put on Oliveira's throne since the really old timers may put several years between projects. How much time must pass since the most recent feature before you can say a director's no longer active? For that matter, should we distinguish between fiction film makers and documentarians? Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, is still turning interviews filmed decades ago into feature-length films, most recently in 2013; he turns 90 this fall. Restricting ourselves to fiction film, the older of the Taviani brothers will be 86 this year and they have a new film out. Just behind Taviani in age are the always provocative Jean-Luc Godard and the sometimes indiscriminate Clint Eastwood, both of whom released acclaimed features last year. But who can say, other than their doctors, if older folks like Agnes Varda or Andrzej Wajda are really done yet? Oliveira gave them all something to shoot for, both by retaining his capability for so long and by actually having things to say until the end.

James Best (1926-2015)

 

Twilight Zone screencap from the Shadow & Substance blog (thenightgallery.wordpress.com) 

The other day I was watching Apache Drums (1951), a Hugo Fregonese western that was producer Val Lewton's last film. Early on a young man volunteers on what will prove a suicide mission. As soon as the actor spoke I recognized him as James Best, then nearly as young as I've ever seen him in movies. Best was going on 25 at the time and had only been making movies for about a year, including a small role in Winchester '73. Over the past couple of years I've watched a lot of movie and TV westerns from the genre's classic era. During that time I learned to appreciate Best as a welcome name in the credits. His versatile work as a character actor redeemed a performer I once despised by association with a show I despised and for which he'll regrettably be best remembered. On The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85) his Rosco P. Coltrane was a one-note clown who struck me as not just a poor man's Buford T. Justice (and that's starting poor) but an even poorer man's Sheriff Lobo, since Claude Akins, one of Best's classic-era peers, was also toiling thanklessly on redneck TV at the time. Best had his chance at bigger things. He came closest to genuine movie stardom in 1959 when he was top billed in Samuel Fuller's Verboten! and Ray Kellogg's The Killer Shrews. Of course the latter film is better remembered, thanks partly to Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's so well remembered that Best recreated his role in perhaps the most belated movie sequel ever, released in 2012. That was his penultimate film according to IMDB, but he was scheduled to appear in a new film before pneumonia claimed him this spring. Nearly everything he made had at least him going for it. To honor his memory, watch anything but the Dukes.

Too Much TV: GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF (2015)

If the fiction film Timbuktu tempts you to punch a Muslim until you recall that a Muslim made it, Alex Gibney's HBO documentary expose of the Church of Scientology leaves you with fewer reservations about your desire to punch a Scientologist. You'll most likely want to punch a specific Scientologist: David Miscavige, the successor to founding father L. Ron Hubbard and the Stalin, it would seem, to Hubbard's Lenin. As portrayed here, Miscavige is a sinister twerp with none of Hubbard's lunatic charisma but plenty of dead-eyed will to power. Hubbard himself looks like a classic American mountebank, though he looks and sounds even more like that creepy "Friendly Angel" of that Star Trek episode. Like a figure possibly out of one of his own pulp fictions, Hubbard's face looks like a map of his character or lack of it. Gibney tells the old story, which Scientologists have struggled to discredit, of Hubbard telling folks that founding a religion was the way to make a fortune, but concludes that the old man came to believe his own buncombe, perhaps as part of a decline into paranoia. Nothing seems inspired or spiritual about Miscavige, but spirituality isn't what makes Scientology a religion. Actually, a campaign of harassment against the IRS made it a religion for the purposes of tax-exemption, but Going Clear suggests that Scientology is a more orthopractic than orthodox faith, defined less by Hubbard's mad mythology than by the constant practice of auditing for personal regulation and discipline.

The most alarming thing about the show was the resemblance it exposed between Scientology, and by extension many of the more notorious cults, and the totalitarian political movements that were its contemporaries. This became most clear when Miscavige was shown waging a kind of Cultural Revolution against his peers in the "Sea Org," the Scientology elite. He subjected them to a regime of constant auditing and humbling menial labor, much as those Chinese who ran afoul of Chairman Mao or his Red Guards were subject to constant struggle sessions, compulsory self-criticisms, menial labor -- and much worse, of course. Like the Marxist Leninists, Hubbard saw his revelation as a key to salvation, but salvation in each case required submission to unceasing self-surveillance and constant accountability to guides and guardians. Scientology promised empowerment, hence its continuing appeal, but as is often the case with religion or ideology empowerment came from submission, often to an abject extent, to an unworthy master. Yet the sympathy you might feel for the victims may be tempered by recalling that they were all of the elite that bilked the real rubes out of millions, if not by now billions of dollars. As in 1984 a special terror was reserved for those in the Party, so to speak, while the proles mostly went about their stupid lives. How much those suffered who merely bought copies of Dianetics without throwing thousands away on advanced study is hard to say. The show itself quotes Scientology advising such small-timers not to worry about believing all the mythology as long as practice improves their lives. For many if not most, Scientology is probably no more than another form of self-help, perhaps with special appeal for ambitious entertainers who look to John Travolta, Tom Cruise and others as models of success, while viewers of Going Clear may find those two more contemptible than ever. That this racket could also inspire terror in virtually political fashion makes the story of Scientology farcically tragic, but if my own reaction is typical you'll neither laugh nor cry but rage at what you learn. You'll want to see Miscavige in the stocks, or ridden out of some town, any town, on a rail, preferably in tar and feathers. Going Clear is one of the most infuriating movies I've seen in some time, but for once I'd like to compliment the director for getting me that way.

Pre-Code Capsules: THE TENDERFOOT (1932)

The interesting thing about Joe E. Brown as a comedy star is that you can never be certain how dumb his character's going to be. Brown's persona was neither the pathetic incompetent of silent days nor the verbal warrior of early talkies. His characters were often athletes or otherwise displayed some form of physical prowess, often accompanied by a naive arrogance that set him up for a temporary fall. Sometimes he could be more naive than arrogant, but you can never be as sure about him going in as you could be about his rivals. In Ray Enright's Tenderfoot Brown arrives in New York City braying like an idiot, playing a Texan with a big bankroll. At the station he's instantly beset by the big-city types who know a sucker when they see him. One tries to butter him up by calling him Colonel. How'd you know I was a colonel? Brown asks. Why, I just guessed, is the answer. Well, guess where I'm going he says, blowing the predator off. He runs a mini gauntlet of these types, from low-level gold diggers to a panhandler who can't take up Brown's offer of a free meal because he can't leave his "station" at the station. Brown may look and sound like a yokel -- his accent is more generic Yokel than authentic Texan -- but he's no fool, or so it seems. He seems a bit crazy, though, thinking he recognizes a junkman's horse as an animal he raised years ago. And when he goes crazy over Ginger Rogers his cunning fails him. She's no gold-digger but the long suffering secretary of a hack theatrical producer looking for an angel for his latest flop. The promise of proximity to her persuades him to buy 49% of the production, virtually wiping out his bankroll but leaving him with no authority. Brown may be cunning and he may be the best shot in his county of Texas but he has no taste in drama. His show has a disastrous preview in Syracuse -- how bad it really is is left to our imagination -- but he doubles down on it by buying out his senior partners, seeing that as the only way to keep an increasingly disgruntled and infatuated Ginger employed. We see him repeat to a new potential investor the same pitch he was given, and you'd think from that that he's acquired a sense of showmanship that can save Her Golden Sin, especially when he casts Ginger as the leading lady, but The Tenderfoot turns out to be a distant ancestor of The Producers, as the show succeeds only as an unintentional comedy when our hero has to dress his cast in Shakespearean costumes when those prove the only ones available.

Since we're denied the expected climax of the show's Broadway premiere, and because the main plot fell well short of feature length, Enright gives us an extended epilogue in which Brown must rescue Ginger from Broadway extortionists who kidnap her to induce him into paying $1,000 per ticket for a "benefit" event. This last reel makes up for any slapstick deficit in the main story as Brown goes full cowboy, raiding a tenement building (and bumping into an unbilled, malevolent Nat Pendleton along the way) and getting the drop on the extortionists. A brilliant little bit sums up Brown's appeal. He's just subdued a gangster who tried to jump him from behind and has the whole gang at bay before his two guns. He orders Ginger to get into a waiting getaway car while he boasts of his abilities. However, he's lost track of the layout of the room. Still talking, still boasting, he opens a door behind him. We see that it opens not into the hall but into a closet. Enright holds the moment so Brown's mistake can sink in for everyone, while Brown keeps up the rodomontade. Once everyone realizes what's going to happen the simple action becomes one of the best gags in the picture. He escapes, of course, and the ultimate climax is a slapstick montage of Brown's gunmanship and ropemanship wreaking havoc on the crooks. After that, Brown and Ginger go to Texas and have profoundly ugly children. Brown eschews his trademark yell in favor of presumably Texan whoops and hollers but remains a loveble bigmouth. He's not as smart as he thinks -- he uses "Ejaculations!" as a pretentious greeting, mistakes a swishy line of chorus cowboys for fellow Texans, and has never heard of matzoh balls -- but he's still smarter than most of the saps who star in slapstick, and his comparative independence from pathos makes Brown a perfect slapstick star for the Pre-Code era.

Pre-Code Capsules: CROONER (1932)

 

David Manners top-billed! Who knew the old boy, that avatar of bland, that pillar of ineffectuality, had it in him? Remembered today as a Jonathan Harker whose presence explains women's attraction to Bela Lugosi in the Universal Dracula, Manners was more than a male mannequin in horror pictures. He was very busy in the Pre-Code era, but usually in support of a female star. In that capacity he's probably at his best in Frank Capra's Barbara Stanwyck vehicle The Miracle Woman, for Columbia, but he spent most of his time at Warner Bros., and for his trouble Warners gave him the lead in this Lloyd Bacon satire a clef. The studio didn't do Manners any big favor, since the title character is an overrated jerk. The picture looks like a dig at Rudy Vallee, the "vagabond lover" who did the most to usher in the age of the "crooner," the popular singer whose style didn't depend on classical training. As Teddy Taylor, Manners wields Vallee's, famous megaphone, the device the crooner needed to project his voice in live performances back before they miked singers in clubs. In the film, Teddy's a bandleader filling in, badly, for the band's regular singer. Guy Kibbee as a drunken heckler hands Teddy the megaphone that will make him famous. To the confusion of many, the kids on the dance floor like how Teddy's voice sounds, and after some hard bargaining with niteclub manager J. Carroll Naish, and through the intervention of an agent (Ken Murray) who becomes his romantic rival, our hero becomes a radio star. Success predictably goes to his head, unobstructed by the revelation that the agent actually writes most of Teddy's fan mail himself. Soon Teddy has delusions of artistry, and Crooner becomes what I presume contemporary audiences would recognize as a parody of Ramon Novarro, M-G-M's latin lover who made a successful singing debut in talkies but tried to make too much of it with operatic training. Teddy's classical training produces results closer to Susan Alexander Kane than Novarro, and while Novarro was still a star, though fading, as Crooner came out, Teddy quickly sinks under the weight of pretension, abandoned by all his old friends until the agent nobly steps aside to let the girl (Ann Dvorak) rediscover him playing pickup gigs in a New Jersey nightspot. Whether it's back up from there the film doesn't say, and it doesn't matter since love, not Teddy, has won. As noted, this isn't a role designed to flatter its star, even though many actors played this rise-and-fall theme at the time. Suffice it to say that Manners is convincing as a smug and overrated jerk, while the story held my interest for its satiric and historical elements.  Notice, too, that despite Warner's good-faith effort, the newspaper ad gives Dvorak top billing. Some things just weren't meant to be. Manners would get top-billing twice more before he retired from cinema in 1936, if IMDB is correct, but both were Poverty Row pictures. Whatever fans he has today ought to treasure Crooner since, though neither his best or his most memorable picture, it shows the great mediocrity at the peak of his career.