A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
It may have been impossible not to romanticize World War I in the air, but John Monk Saunders did his damndest. He was the go-to-guy for air war pictures, whether original screenplays or adaptions of his prose stories, and his popularity in that role tells you something about what people thought of the Great War not so long after its end. Stuart Walker's Eagle and the Hawk is an adaptation in which Saunders himself, as far as I know, didn't participate, but inevitably his dark tone shadows the picture, and in hindsight the picture foreshadows his dark destiny. This may be the darkest of all Saunders' stories, following three American pilots, only two of whom will survive the picture. Walker uses admirable pictorial shorthand to establish the characters, using the actors' title cards to illustrate their social class. Jerry Young (Frederic March) is one of the idle rich, shown playing polo. Henry Crocker (Cary Grant) is shown supervising some construction project, which defines him as a worker and a more practical sort than Young. Mike Richards (Jack Oakie) has no obvious occupation; his characteristic moment is getting a coin-op fortune, predicting great danger, as he exits a restaurant. And sure enough, we dissolve to "Slug" in France, where he's become Jerry's best buddy. Jerry and Crocker don't get along at all. Crocker isn't a very good pilot and nearly gets both men killed when their plane ends upside down on the landing field. Crocker is relegated to the status of "observer," which means that he mans the machine gun, standing upright in the open in the rear of a two-seat plane. While he resents the seeming demotion, the work suits his ruthless attitude toward war. He commits the sort of atrocities the Germans were accused of, mowing down a helpless Hun who's bailed out of an observation balloon (in some of the footage this film borrows from Wings). That's tantamount to murder as far as Jerry's concerned, but to Crocker the point of war is to wipe out the enemy as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Jerry isn't seeing the point of the war they way he used to. Losing five observers in a matter of weeks will do that to you. And Crocker getting Slug Richards killed because he wanted to stay in the air to kill more Germans won't help, either. The breaking point comes when Jerry goes up with a rookie observer making his first flight. Of course the kid gets shot -- some rookies didn't even make it into the air because the Germans bombed their headquarters -- and of course the poor wretch plunges from the plane to a still more horrific finish when Jerry loops the loop to evade German pursuit. But the very last straw comes when Jerry actually brings down the German, learns that it's one of the top enemy aces, but only sees the face of a youth hardly older than the doomed kid who went up with him. And for that Jerry gets another medal! For that he's the toast of the base yet again, but he answers their toasts with a drunken tirade against war. Initially contemptuous, Crocker grows more concerned as he sees Jerry crack. But there's nothing he can do -- nothing to save Jerry's sanity or life, that is. Yet there's one thing he can do to save his frenemy's reputation, although that hardly matters to Jerry himself by the end.
This is a war film that ends with the hero killing himself, though technically the denouement comes when Crocker takes the corpse up for the last flight so he can blast its skull with machine-gun fire to make it appear, for whoever might care at the base or back home, that Jerry died nobly in combat. I guess that makes it a Pre-Code war film, though there are other touches that date it that way, like Slug teaching a French waitress English using A Night in a Turkish Harem as a textbook. Speaking of Jack Oakie, you've got to admire a film that slaughters its comedy-relief character, and you've got to admire Oakie for really being more of a character actor here, as he would be later in The Texas Rangers (where he also dies) and Call of the Wild. He may have been the only Thirties comic able to pull that sort of trick off. Meanwhile, its a bracing surprise to see Cary Grant, still just an up-and-comer here, playing a bloodthirsty asshole, though ultimately he's just a straight man for Frederic March's manic-depressive pyrotechnics. I like the way the screenwriters actually didn't stress the class differences among the characters illustrated in the credits, allowing you to speculate subtextually on how Jerry and Crocker's different social status may have contributed to their conflicts without forcing an explanation on you. The three lead actors in this nearly all-male picture -- Carole Lombard shows up for one scene as "The Beautiful Lady" -- bounce off each other to nice effect throughout, and their performances probably made Eagle and the Hawk worthwhile for audiences otherwise put off by its war-is-miserable message. As for John Monk Saunders, Code Enforcement led to tamer films like West Point of the Air, and before he could have his say on the next war, he hung himself.
This morning I was reading a review of a book about Alice Guy Blache, the pioneer female filmmaker, and while Guy worked in the silent era the reviewer found cause to comment on Hollywood's pre-Code cinema of the early talkie years. She mentioned the period's "sublime indifference to middle-class propriety," and that made me rethink A Free Soul a little. Middle-class propriety is exactly what's missing in that film's clash of wealthy lawyer's family and grasping gangster from the gutter. It can be indulgent toward upper-class frivolity and even a little sympathetic with the gangster's aspirations while affirming an archaic honor code that requires someone to pay for the heroine's indiscretions. By comparison, William A. Seiter's more modest Paramount feature deals with the middle class of small town America, and its view of middle-class propriety is contemptuously scathing.
In the little town of Marysville all the young people look forward to Saturday night, their only opportunity to cut loose with their little earnings from local jobs. They look enviously on the local millionaire, the playboy Romer Sheffield (Cary Grant) who keeps a summer home nearby, and they leap at the chance to spend a Satuday night at his place, even while they worry that "the town'd burn to the ground if we took the girls within a mile of that guy." We follow the adventures of one group of bank employees, particularly Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll), on whom Sheffield has a lusty eye. Also hot for her is co-worker Conny (Edward Woods, the Public Enemy who might have been), who grows jealous of Sheffield horning in on him. But we notice that the notorious Romer knows how to take no for an answer, while Conny, after an evening of dancing, resorts to caveman tactics on a rented boat. Fending him off, Conny chides him: "What do you expect for a boat ride? Marlene Dietrich?" Frustrated, Conny ditches her on the other side of the lake, where she ends up at Sheffield's place again. Once more, she rebuffs Sheffield's advances, but he admits to her that "A man would have to be very stupid to touch you without first knowing your heart." He has his chauffeur take her home with her virtue intact, but word spreads, fanned by an angry Conny, that she had done the unspeakable and spent the night with Romer.
Cary Grant's attitude toward Nancy Carroll evolves from playful to pensive over the course of a Hot Saturday.
Once again a heroine's reputation is at stake. Like Jan Ashe in Free Soul, Ruth is a daddy's girl with an indulgent father, but unlike Jan she has a living mother, a miserly tyrant (Jane Darwell) who sees her daughter as an extra source of income. Fair enough in hard times, but her reaction when the gossip gets Ruth fired from the bank on morals grounds tells the girl that Mom is less interested in morals than money, less worried about Ruth's reputation than its financial repercussions. For Ruth, that's just about as ruinous as the gossip. Luckily, she has someone to turn to: geologist Bill Fadden, a longtime family friend who's back in the area to do some research. The fact that he's played by Randolph Scott should tell you enough about the character, and the film is setting us up to think that this simple, straightforward yet reticent man is the right one for Ruth. But the film has set you up to have the carpet yanked from under you, as Bill proves just as susceptible to gossip and jealousy as nearly everyone else. In fact, there seems to be but one person of her own age bracket who respects her for herself rather than for her reputation -- the infamous playboy Romer Sheffield.
Given a choice between a cad, a creep, and a common man, Ruth and Hot Saturday's writers go with the cad -- who, admittedly, proves himself something slightly better than that. He never becomes a good bourgeois -- he shudders at the thought of marriage -- but he ends up the best partner available for a woman who remains free and virtuous, though the virtuous part apparently ends with an unseen tryst at the Sheffield place after Bill Fadden's first sudden fit of jealousy. When she confronts Bill with the statement that what he believed about her hadn't been true yesterday, but was true today, his hopeless dumbfoundment disqualifies him once and for all as a proper mate for Ruth. The film's message is that Bill no more than the rest of Marysville is fit to judge the heroine, not necessarily because they're hypocrites, but for any number of reasons that boil down to the town being a stupid, suffocating place unfit for, dare I say, a free soul. It doesn't seem to be a question of morals or ethics, but a matter of middle-class Marysville being contemptible, its people almost a pure booboisie.
If all that doesn't make Hot Saturday a definitive pre-Code film, then let's discuss the film's fascination with underwear. Seiter directs two extraordinary scenes, one erotic, the other just a little strange. The strange bit comes first, and strangeness of it is its casual intimacy. Ruth is getting ready for a Saturday at Sheffield's, but she's missing a new pair of "shorts." Where could they have gone? Her kid sister has no clue, but she can't fool Ruth. There's nothing to do but throw the girl on the bed and pull those shorts off.
Later, after she's been fired and rebuffed by her mother, a despairing Ruth treks out in a rainstorm toward the cave where Bill Fadden's doing his field work. Being only a weak female, she faints at the threshold and Bill finds her passed out in the mud. When Ruth awakens bare-shouldered under a blanket inside the cave, the first thing she sees is her own underwear hanging from a clothesline, alongside the rest of her clothes. It sinks in that she's naked under that blanket, as Bill looks down longingly upon her...
Wikipedia reports that Hot Saturday was Cary Grant's first starring role, but it's really Nancy Carroll's film. It's a woman's picture, after all, and Grant's too green to steal it from her. He hasn't yet fully crafted his persona, and he's kind of awkward on screen, looking down or to the side as if not wanting to look the camera in the eye. But he does convince us that Romer Sheffield is a bad boy in his own mind but not as bad as many think. His housemate Scott is also pretty raw here, but that seems to have been built into his awkward-around-womenfolk character. As Conny the creep, Edward Woods is at first just brash but blossoms into full-blown obnoxiousness as he emerges as the villain of the piece. He makes more of an impression than he did alongside Cagney after their roles in Public Enemy were switched, but it probably wasn't the kind of impression that wins one fans. As for Nancy Carroll, I don't believe I've seen her before, but she made a good first impression here.
Hot Saturday is the sort of story that Lifetime might tell today, though the heroine might be more worried about cyberbullying now than morals clauses. It was probably meant as a trifle back in the day and it's a trifle now, entertaining today almost as much for what it tells us about the culture that made it as for the story it tells. Universal's Pre-Code Hollywood sampler is the right place for it, and Hot Saturday helps make that six-film set worth having.
As an added treat, iieef has uploaded to YouTube a musical interlude from Hot Saturday including the song, "I'm Burning For You." Enjoy.
