DVR Diary: RIO RITA (1929)

The legendary Flo Ziegfeld opened the Broadway theater bearing his name with the premiere of Rio Rita in February 1927. It was a massive hit and as such was ripe for adaptation in a Hollywood just learning to talk and sing. Comedy relief actors Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey were brought west from Broadway to recreate their roles as a divorcee and his lawyer, with the slight change that Wheeler's character now was a bootlegger. Bebe Daniels had the title role as Rita, a Mexican beauty in love with a Texas Ranger (John Boles), yet anxious to keep him away from her brother, who is suspected of being that notorious bandit, the Kinkajou. He may sound like a Pokemon, but he actually takes his formidable name from the Central American "honey bear." In the comedy plot, Woolsey tries to arrange a Mexican divorce for Wheeler so he can marry another woman (Dorothy Lee), but some mix-up leaves Wheeler in legal jeopardy as a bigamist. Fortunately, his first wife (Helen Kaiser) appears and promptly falls in love with Woolsey. It's a double score for him since she's also come into an inheritance. Their story has very little to do with the Kinkajou story; the two plots seem merely to occupy the same space in this mostly stagebound production, directed by the undistinguished Luther Reed. Rio Rita's massive success revived Daniels' career and made Reed briefly Radio Pictures' (aka RKO) musical specialist, but the massive flop of Dixiana, which reunited Daniels, Wheeler and Woolsey a year later, put a stop to that. That setback notwithstanding, Rita made Wheeler and Woolsey in Hollywood, and rightly so. The film is alive only when they're on the screen, or during the song and dance number Wheeler and Lee share. Their best moment is their last big scene. While their girlfriends sing their love song at opposite ends of the foursome, Wheeler and Woolsey play pattycake with each other, but the play inexorably escalates into slapping and prodding until the two throw each other into the Rio Grande, with the girls tumbling after. This bit, like the last half hour of the picture, was shot in two-color Technicolor, which adds at least some visual interest to the main story. The loss of color in many early musicals really hurts their reputation as cinema because it flattens out the compositions. Seeing a comparison between a black and white print of such a musical and footage in restored Technicolor is almost like seeing a 3-D movie in its original format for the first time after years watching it on TV. Back in the day, though, color wasn't enough to keep the public interested in musicals, as long as they were feeble operettas like this one. They regrettably left their imprint on many comedy films subsequently burdened with insufferable singing romantic leads in an effort to please those parts of the audience presumably unsatisfied by comedians' antics. It's a testimony to Wheeler and Woolsey's success that they were able to escape that formula, and after seeing them in Rio Rita you can understand why everyone left the doors unlocked.

SINGAPORE (1960)

While the "Bollywood" practice of integrating songs into practically every genre of film has deep Indian cultural roots, it's not really much different in that respect from the melodramas of the Anglo-American stage. Not too long ago, in the long view, American producers could stick musical numbers in the middle of the grim antislavery drama Uncle Tom's Cabin in a way that would be as jarring to American audiences now as Bollywood melodramas often are at first glance. At some point, the English-language tradition evolved toward unity in tone in any given work, while the melodramatic tradition survived for a time in singing cowboy films. And yet, watching Shakti Shamanta's Singapore, I could imagine it becoming a model for American musical thrillers -- films where, say, Gene Kelly might get involved in international intrigue or noirish crime and still do his expected song and dance routines. Singapore itself looks more like Dean Martin and Lou Costello teaming up to solve a mystery in an exotic land. Shammi Kapoor, its Dean, is Shayam, a playboy businessman who travels to Singapore to investigate the disappearance of the manager of his rubber plantation. Agha, a comic who reportedly modeled himself on Bob Hope but strikes me as a Costello type, albeit without so much infantile whining, is Chachoo, one of Shayam's Singapore office flunkies who becomes the hero's sidekick and guide to the island city-state in its last days of British rule.

On the plane to Singapore Shayam meets cute with Maria Wango (Maria Menado), who has femme fatale written all over her. On the island, he'll be torn between Maria and the Indian dancer Lata (Padmini), but his main concern is tracking down his friend and  manager, whose disappearance seems linked to rumors of a buried treasure on the plantation. Lata's uncle is involved in the shady dealings, as is a mysterious gang boss, a female with a slouch hat, sunglasses and a scarf to cover her nose and mouth. While even the simplest viewer probably will recognize this as Maria Wango at first glance, the film teases us awhile by letting circumstantial evidence appear to incriminate Chachoo's secretary and love interest, Chu Chin Chu. Relying on disguises and sheer bluster, Shayam infiltrates the criminal gang in order to rescue his manager and a growing list of captives, and finally ends up clinging for his life to the side of a helicopter while Maria tries to pry him off.

 Chachoo finds a crucial clue in a gimmicked bottle of Vat 69.

It's always entertaining to see other countries' movie characters play tourist just as Americans did in this era. Singapore, largely shot on location, serves as a charming, albeit monochromatic travelogue of the place at a turning point in its history. Kapoor and his leading ladies, and a gaggle of amateurish chorus girls, perform a number of numbers at various local attractions, usually with crowds of spectators looking on. Our tour of Singapore covers some cultural attractions and a lot of consumer showcases, including some sort of shopping arcade with an array of brand-name products that isn't quite as amazing as Kapoor's rhapsodies make it out to be. What these numbers lack in sharp choreography they make up for in picturesque interest.

In disguise, Shayam is the Mullah of Rock-n-Rullah!

It's also fun to observe other cultures' stereotypes of other cultures. Exhibit A in Singapore is Shayam's lengthy imposture as a Pathan (aka Pashtun) thug who boasts, in order to infiltrate the kidnap gang, that it's his destiny to murder nine people and he still has three to kill. Kapoor's blustery performance would be equivalent, I suppose, to an American character making himself up as a Native American and threatening to scalp-um everybody who crosses him. I don't know if Indian cinema can still get away with that sort of thing, especially at a time when Pashtun bloodthirstiness probably seems far from funny to most people.

Still, whatever stereotyping Singapore is up to should be taken no more seriously than anything else in the picture. It's a shaggy dog of a movie, overlong by U.S. standards as Bollywood films often are, veering wildly from almost noirish moments to a goofy number with Chachoo wearing a bald cap and pretending to be a fakir.In the end, it exists only to entertain, and though it may try an American's patience it most likely will entertain, in some way or other, intentionally or not, anyone willing to give it a try.

AMRAPALI (1966)

I'm not familiar enough with vintage "Bollywood" cinema to have any idea whether Lekh Tandon's historical epic is typical of its time or exceptional. Wikipedia reports that Amrapali "wasn't a commercial success" but later "started being seen as a classic." It's certainly a lavish film, reminiscent for an American viewer of Cecil B. DeMille's work, yet with a culturally distinct Buddhist spin at the end that makes me reluctant to describe the story as a tragedy. In many respects that's exactly what Amrapali is: a tale of star-crossed lovers who were contemporaries of Siddhartha Gautama. In those days, the republic of Vaishali is menaced by the kingdom of Magadha and its aggressive ruler, Ajaat Shatru (Sunil Dutt, left in the screencap below). His army is state-of-the-art for its time, including war elephants, but the first major battle with Vaishali proves inconclusive at best. In fact, the king goes missing, leading the Vaishali people to proclaim victory.

Ajaat Shatru has been wounded and has gotten himself lost in a delirium. He finds himself in the care of Amrapali (Vyjayanthimala), a patriotic Vashali woman who has mistaken him for a soldier of her own country. Losing his well-known beard helps him stay incognito in the heart of the enemy camp, but a network of his own spies recognizes him and allows him to maintain contact with home, all unbeknownst to Amrapali, who starts falling hard for the unknown soldier after he rescues her from a falling, burning effigy of himself during a victory celebration.

Amrapali is moving up in the world. She's appointed the state courtesan, which apparently amounts to the entertainer-in-chief of the republic, after winning a dance-off with a rival whose misperformance of a traditional dance she publicly criticizes. She gets a statue made of herself by a soldier-sculptor who's been crushing on her the whole picture, and when she commissions a statue of her new soldier boyfriend, the sculptor recognizes him as the evil emperor and sculpts him as such. Realizing now how she's been tricked, Amrapali slices the statue in half and repudiates Ajaat Shatru, but refuses to denounce him. That gets her in trouble when the Vaishali authorities announce that they've captured the enemy leader in their midst. It's actually a lookalike the Magadha spies have provided in case of an emergency, but poor Amrapali doesn't know that. As far as she knows, the man she loved is dead, and she's in prison for treason.

Ajaat Shatru had already tarried too long in Vaishali and didn't get to say goodbye to his beloved dying mother, so he's already in a funk when he learns of Amrapali's arrest. That drives him berserk, and at this point Amrapali diverges from the path a western counterpart would have taken. In short, the Magadha monarch brings a mighty host down on Vaishali and utterly destroys it, sparing Amrapali but slaughtering virtually everyone else. He doesn't really comprehend why his beloved isn't happy to be liberated, and at this point you might expect the story to go fully tragic, western style, with Amrapali killing the king and then maybe herself. Again, no. Instead, Amrapali ditches Ajaat Shatru and heads into the forest, where mass chanting indicates that the Buddha is preaching. He's filmed in something like the old Jesus style, visible only from a distance. The noise of the chanting allows Ajaat Shatru to track Amrapali down, but when he hears the typical Buddhist message -- desire leads to fear, which leads to suffering -- he breaks his sword in a gesture of apparent renunciation. And that's it. The resolution isn't the couple living happily ever after, because Buddhism doesn't believe in that the way we do, nor the couple killing each other, for what would that prove? The only hope for either person in the tragedy, as for everyone according to Buddhism, lies in renunciation. The ending is a hopeful note, presumably, for its native audience -- though Buddhism has always been a bigger thing further east than in its native country -- while for many a westerner, Amrapali simply skids to a halt.

While Sunil Dutt was a legendary star in his own right, Amrapali is pretty much a one-woman show -- or a two-woman show if you give credit where due to the Marni Nixon of India, Lata Mangeshkar, who does Vyjayanthimala's singing. Surprisingly, Amrapali is the only character who gets to sing in the picture, and the film actually makes a fairly subtle transition to musical mode. The first "number" of any sort is the big victory celebration, which features a lot of festive dancing until the effigy collapses. Later comes the big dance-off for the Courtesanship, highlighting the star's putative versatility as a dancer, which I as an outsider to traditional Indian dance am not qualified to judge. Finally we get Amrapali expressing her moods privately in songs that are not public performances, but rather just the sort of numbers we expect in Hollywood musicals. These intrusions may make the film more campy than it really is in some eyes, but their main effect is to make the title character, appropriately enough, the absolute center of the picture. She's far from the only attraction, however, Dutt does a good job portraying the wild swings of Ajaat Shatru's personality, and the film's production design is mostly more impressive than you might expect from a 1960s India film. The big exception to that is the work of the film's armorers. While the battles scenes have the numbers (and elephants) to impress, and the director and editor Pran Mehra do a fine job reducing the final battle to an impressionistic montage, the armor and weapons often look suspect, and Ajaat Shatru breaks his sword far too easily at the end. Overall, taking cultural differences into account, Amrapali is an entertaining example of what the world's largest film industry was capable of fifty years go.

Pre-Code Parade: SHOW GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD (1930)

Mervyn LeRoy's film is a sequel to Show Girl, a silent film that only recently was rediscovered and restored, in which Alice White plays aspiring actress Dixie Dugan. Both films are based on novels by J. P. McEvoy, who later turned his character into the protagonist of a long-running comic strip. While the first film reportedly closed with Dixie destined for Broadway stardom, the sequel finds her and boyfriend writer Jimmy (Jack Mulhall) reeling from the flop of Jimmy's latest show, which both blame on a lovesick producer casting his girlfriend in the lead role while reducing Dixie to an understudy. She shows off what she could have done with one of the songs in an impromptu nightclub performance that impresses horndog Hollywood producer Frank Buelow (John Miljan). On his promise of a studio contract, Dixie goes to Hollywood, only to learn from Buelow's boss Sam Otis (Ford Sterling) that Buelow makes the same promise to dozens of girls wherever he goes. There's a waiting room full of them even as Dixie arrives. Discouraged Dixie has a chance encounter with her childhood idol, Donny Harris (Blanche Sweet), who's just been thrown off the lot by Buelow. Like every tourist, Dixie's awestruck by Donny's mansion, but the big house is little more than a facade. At age 32, Donny is finished in Hollywood. Only pride prevents her from selling the place. This being a musical, Donny abruptly sings some life advice to her admirer, but there's one thing she neglects to tell Dixie. We learn it a little later when she tries to ring up Frank Buelow. Donny is, in fact, Mrs. Buelow.

Buelow soon gets fired, but Otis presses on to produce a story Buelow had drafted. He soon learns that Buelow plagiarized the story from Dixie and Jimmy's flop show, but Otis and his yes men think they can do something with it just the same. Not knowing Dixie's tie to the show, Otis offers her a role in the movie because he feels sorry for her and sees some spirit in her. Meanwhile, he brings Jimmy to Hollywood and is stunned that the young man was dumb enough to take his first offer. It looks like a farce will break out when Otis insists on casting his starlet in the lead, while Jimmy insists on his girl, neither mentioning the name that would resolve the dispute, but fortunately Dixie herself appears in the office to abort that subplot. Remembering those who helped her, Dixie uses her newfound clout to get Donny a part in the picture, but the clout soon goes to her head. Impatient with retakes, she succumbs once more to Buelow's charms as he promises her better roles at his own independent production company. It's all a big lie intended to sabotage the production and spite Sam Otis, but it works almost too well. Dixie's prima-donna antics get her fired and do shut down the production, and that drives Donny, her comeback thwarted, to take poison. She makes a point of making a farewell call to Dixie, and that saves her life while scaring Dixie straight. Somehow Sam Otis resumes the production -- it probably has to do with Jimmy learning of Buelow's scheming and beating him up -- and the film closes with the triumphant Hollywood premiere of Rainbow Girl.

It would perhaps have been more triumphant had the Technicolor elements of the final reel survived. Color might have lent some visual interest to the inert goings on in the film-within-a-film that are only too representative of the dire state of movie musicals by 1930. The only interesting thing about it as it exists is one of those bizarre early-musical sets that has White emerging from the grinning mouth of some Moloch-like idol. Much more imaginative is LeRoy's filming of the filming of an earlier scene. The scene itself is stodgy, literally shot on a stage while the director sits in a front-row seat, but LeRoy turns the number into a montage, shooting from above as well as in front and cutting to the viewpoints of various technicians. It's the liveliest scene in a picture that awkwardly juxtaposes satire and a rather grim view of the film industry. Movies, it seems, never backed away from acknowledging how the industry devours its own. Donny Harris's story, though it has a happy ending, is an early example of this, as well as a prophecy of Blanche Sweet's own decline. My hunch is that Hollywood understood that these horror stories of falling or fallen stars only enriched the mythos and pathos of moviedom. Gods that can die might be worshiped all the more passionately. In a way Frank Buelow and Donny Harris are the spiritual parents of Norman Maine or Max Carey, the tragic protagonists of the A Star is Born/ What Price Hollywood? story, the perfected archetype combining the disreputable qualities of Buelow and the sympathetic qualities of Donny in one person. At the same time, Dixie Dugan is a less sympathetic version of the Vicki Lester archetype, less intelligent and less naive but more egotistical. Alice White has never gotten much love from critics and is savaged by Richard Barrios in his definitive early-musicals history A Song in the Dark, but while her limits are apparent I found her entertaining because her negatives complemented those of her character. White found her level eventually as a dumb-blonde type in the Warner Bros. stock company, which is what you might have guessed from watching Show Girl in Hollywood. I wouldn't call it a great or even good musical, but it's definitely one of the more interesting early musicals for reasons having little to do with music.

DVR Diary: BROADWAY THROUGH A KEYHOLE (1933) and GO INTO YOUR DANCE (1935)

One fine day in the summer of 1933, Al Jolson beat up Walter Winchell at a Los Angeles sports arena. Jolson was "the World's Greatest Entertainer" while Winchell has basically pioneered the concept of the celebrity gossip columnist. Since there's no one really like Winchell today in our crowdsourced gossip cloud, I can only try to suggest as a theoretical modern equivalent Kanye West punching out the host of an awards show on live TV for insulting Kim Kardashian. Winchell, you see, had come to Hollywood to make a movie for Darryl F. Zanuck's new studio, Twentieth Century Pictures, and from what Jolson had heard and seen, the story, directed by sometime actor Lowell Sherman, hit too close to home. It told of a young dancer who rose to stardom as a gangster's protege but fell in love with a singer. To Jolson this sounded uncomfortably like the story of Ruby Keeler, who rose to stage stardom while being courted by a real gangster, only to end up married to Al Jolson. Despite Jolson's forceful objections, the film was finished and released in November 1933. A year and a half later, Jolson and Keeler, mighty stars at Warner Bros., teamed on film for the first time in Archie Mayo's Go Into Your Dance. In some ways their film is a variation on themes by Winchell. These musicals, one pre-Code, one made during Code Enforcement, are two of a kind, proto-noirperas distinct from the vivacious ruthlessness and giddy cartoonishness of other films in the genre, injecting into the familiar backstage or behind-the-scenes proceedings the threat of violent death.

Broadway Through a Keyhole is literally a death-haunted film. Legendary nightclub MC Texas Guinan appears as a barely-disguised version of herself, down to her famed "Hello, Sucker!" greeting. Guinan died three days after the premiere. Russ Columbo, a peer pioneering crooner with Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, is the film's romantic lead, the singer who wins Constance Cummings from her gangland mentor. Less than a year later he died in what was reported as a freak accidental shooting. Before 1934 was over Lowell Sherman was dead of double pneumonia. Paul Kelly, the film's gangster, really killed a man, serving 25 months for manslaughter before marrying the man's widow. But for all of that, Go Into Your Dance is the more noirish musical, while Through a Keyhole resolves itself into a melodrama of renunciation that redeems the gangster.

Frank "Rocky" Rocci (Kelly) runs the American Poultry Protective Association, or something to that effect. It's a protection racket that collects tribute from anyone transporting poultry to New York City. Through A Keyhole establishes the violent manner in which Rocci establishes his hegemony -- Winchell describes a quiet night on Broadway until a poultry truck is suddenly rammed and wrecked -- but portrays him primarily as a nightclub impresario who amicably buys out Tex Kaley (Guinan) to make her club a showcase for Joan Whelan (Cummings). Rocci's patronage, Whelan's talent and the choreography of Max Mefooski (future director Gregory Ratoff) make Joan a star, making her immediately attractive to Clark Brian (Columbo), a handsome, hypochondriac bandleader at the Florida hotel where Joan vacations who has Hobart Bosworth as an unlikely wingman. Encouraged to cheat on Rocci by her traveling companion, the moll of Rocci's number two man, Joan reluctantly returns to New York when a suspicious Rocci summons her. Clark can't give her up and follows her north, impressing Rocci with his hopeless courage when the inevitable confrontation comes. However improbably, Rocci's convinced that Joan's sincere gratitude isn't true love and shouldn't be exploited by him at the expense of her happiness. The gangster consents to the entertainers' marriage, but on their way to the honeymoon the couple gets carjacked. Clark is tossed from the car while the kidnappers drive off with Joan. Assuming that Rocci is to blame, Clark confronts him, only for both men to realize that that's exactly what Rocci's sometime ally and constant rival Tim Crowley (dependably vile C. Henry Gordon) wants everyone to think. To show his bona fides Rocci goes on a rescue mission, only to charge into his enemy's trap; Crowley has called the cops to tip them off to where Rocci supposedly has Joan stashed. Rocci gets shot up, but the film actually leaves us uncertain whether he'll live or die, ending with him lying in a darkened hospital room, staring lovingly at the nearby lights of Broadway.

Sherman takes the "Keyhole" part of the title literally, using a keyhole as an iris-type transitional device at the opening and close of the film, and occasionally in between. But that's as gimmicky as the direction gets, if you don't count the sub-Berkeleyan dance direction that sometimes descends to raw cheesecake as chorines flex their bare legs, but also achieves the cool of a troupe of cross-dressing females in top hats and tails. The alliteration of Max Mefooski's name made me wonder whether Zanuck didn't intend him as a mild parody of the dancing master of his old stomping grounds at Warner Bros. In the end, Through a Keyhole isn't as edgy as it may have been meant to be, or as grim as Go Into Your Dance gets.

By 1935 Ruby Keeler had arguably eclipsed Al Jolson as a Warner Bros. musical star, thanks to Berkeley's spotlighting her in his epochal pre-Code musicals.  Jolson was actually on the comeback trail, bouncing back from the failure of the eccentric Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with 1934's Wonder Bar. Still, there were whispers that Keeler was now the bigger star of the family, while Go Into Your Dance itself presents Keeler as Jolson's redeemer while at the same time teasing a jealous fantasy of her destruction that actually was in keeping with the way Jolson played for pathos in his star vehicles.

A generation before Bing Crosby got an Oscar nomination playing a drunken singer, Jolson plays Al Howard, a problematic superstar who gets blackballed from Broadway for his bad habit of walking out on shows early in their runs. The implication is that he goes off on benders, but Jolson doesn't really do a drunk act here. He comes across more like a flighty, irresponsible brat. Of all people, Glenda Farrell, the apex predator of Warners' gold diggers, plays Al's responsible kid sister who struggles to get his career back on track. She arranges for him to headline at a Chicago nightclub, on the condition that he costar with a dancer. While stalker Patsy Kelly hankers for that role -- Al's contemptuous treatment of her only makes him look more like a big jerk -- the plum role goes to Dot Wayne (Keeler), with whom Al inevitably falls in love, insofar as Al can love anyone but himself. He does love that her dancing, combined with his putting over standards-to-be like "About A Quarter to Nine" -- I remember some commercial using Jolson's rendition sixty-some years later -- makes him a big enough hit again that he can think about reconquering Broadway on his own terms, by opening his own club.

Talent he's got, but to open that club Al needs mazuma. Enter Chicago gangster Duke Hutchinson (Barton MacLane), who likes the idea because it'd make an ideal showcase for his own lover, the singer Luana Wells (Helen Morgan, a real-life peer of Jolson). Luana wants to be Al's partner in more ways than one, forcing our hero to struggle between his loyalty to Dot and his obligation to the gangster. His balancing act is disrupted when out of nowhere Sis gets arrested for murder. She needs a huge amount of bail money but all Al's got is his seed money from Chicago, which he needs to post a bond for his new show. At last he's trying to be a responsible entertainer, and now Dot's pressuring him to drop everything and use the money to bail out his sister. He resists, then succumbs. Now the clock is ticking. Sis has to report for trial or else Al forfeits the gangster's bail money, his club never opens, and he's a dead man.

As the deadline approaches, Hutchinson sends two hitmen to New York to whack Al if the club fails to open. At nearly the last moment -- Al's already making an apology speech to his cast and crew -- Sis and her lawyers come through with exculpatory evidence and the show can go on. Word reaches Chicago, but Hutchinson already has his men staked outside the club and in this caveman age he has no way to contact them and wave them off. He tries to warn Al but the star is already on stage (in blackface, of course) and can't be interrupted. Finally Hutchinson thinks of his own girl and phones Luana to have her call off the hitmen. In a sublime moment of understated evil, she steps outside to verify that there are, indeed, hired killers at hand, and simply gives them a nod. If Al won't have her, he can die....except that it's Dot that takes the bullet. She lives, sure -- and as far as we know Luana goes unpunished -- but this is brutal stuff for a 1935 musical, and if we're to judge these two films as proto-noir musicals, then Go Into Your Dance actually ends up more hard boiled, despite Jolson, than the pre-Code Keyhole.

As a just plain musical, Go Into Your Dance is better at singing than dancing. The title song became a sort of unofficial theme for musical comedy at Warners for the rest of the decade; I recognized it instantly from many other studio films. As cinema it's Jolson's big blackface moment (he does a defensive sort of Mammy song in his own skin early in the picture) and despite the black it comes off better than the more ambitious numbers staged by Bobby Connolly, Busby Berkeley presumably being busy on Gold Diggers of 1935. The "About a Quarter to Nine" number is Berkeleyesque in ambition but Connolly and Mayo lacks the master's cinematic instincts or his way with bodies en masse. It reels into nonsense like a dissolve transition turning a Keeler solo dance into a minstrel show and an embarrassing shot of Keeler and Jolson sitting on the moon that Georges Melies could have topped. Neither movie discussed here really has a classic number to make it a great musical, though Go Into Your Dance clearly has the talent to be one. Together they take us to a fascinating dead end of musical-film evolution, along a path that probably could not be taken any further once Code Enforcement had fully set in and bubbly happiness was the order of the day.

DVR Diary: SLAUGHTER TRAIL (1951)

The 1950s were the golden age of the Hollywood western, marked by the flourishing of the "adult" or "psychological" western and the emergence of such master genre auteurs as Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Delmer Daves. At the same time, a folkloric element to the genre persisted, finding expression in the title ballads that occasionally crowned but more often marred western movies. The three leading directors mostly avoided this balladic imperative (exceptions include Mann's Man From Laramie and Boetticher's Seven Men From Now) but the blockbuster success of both Fred Zinnemann's High Noon and Dmitri Tiomkin's title ballad convinced many a producer that ballads were essential to the western genre. The balladic imperative, an arguable inheritance from singing-cowboy films which in retrospect makes many films sound more corny than they really are, predates High Noon. At the start of the decade, producer-director Irving Allen conceived a balladic western with a sung-through narration. Slaughter Trail isn't quite a musical -- characters never "burst into song" and the major characters never sing -- but music is its life blood. Pop music is in its DNA. RKO, the studio that distributed Allen's film, hoped to exploit the participation as actor, singer and songwriter of Terry Gilkyson, who had recently written a hit song, "The Cry of the Wild Goose," that had been popularized by Frankie Laine, whose earlier hit "Mule Train" probably helped inspire many title ballads in the coming decade. However, Gilkyson did not write Slaughter Trail's title ballad, also known as "Hoofbeat Serenade." It's a tune that actually grows on you once you realize that Allen is going to stick with it all the way. Its refrain, as I remember it -- "You can only hear the sound/Of the hoofbeats on the ground/And the bandits ride around the Slaughter Trail" -- has an undeniable momentum, but some lyrics are dangerously self-referential, acknowledging that we're watching a movie "on the Cinecolor screen," or explaining how "we add tension to the plot" by introducing Indians. That doesn't match the often grimly serious action of the film, and the inconsistency of tone makes it hard to take any of it seriously.

The Slaughter Trail is where three masked bandits rob a stagecoach. One of them (Gig Young) has a laugh the victims will recognize anywhere, but one of the victims, Lorabelle Larkin (Virginia Grey) is actually in cahoots with the bandits. After her lover pretends to rough her up, Lorabelle continues with the stage to a cavalry fort presided over by Brian Donlevy, a late substitute for abruptly-blacklisted Howard Da Silva. The switch was probably for the best, except for the mistreated Da Silva, who was nonetheless one of the few character actors less plausible, as a typecast heel, in the hero's role than Donlevy himself. Meanwhile, the bandits make their getaway, stealing fresh mounts from some Navajo Indians to, as they say, add tension to the plot. The bandits, masks off, will eventually arrive at the fort, while the Navajos, then at peace with the whites, will demand that Donlevy find the bandits and surrender them to Navajo justice. Once Young betrays himself with unguarded laughter, and is recognized by the Navajos -- his gang had their masks off when they stole those horses -- a common western scenario is set up. Donlevy cares little for the bandits and seems to be falling for their moll, who herself softens in the company of the camp's children, but he must uphold the white man's rule of law against the Navajo demand for tribal justice. The fun thing about Slaughter Trail is how screenwriter Sid Kuller cares about this point of civilization only to set up the Indian attack he needs. The bandits, of course, are trusted to help fight for their lives, and they all die. Once Young goes down, the Navajos pretty much say, "We're done here" and go home. As far as we can tell they'll face no repercussions or reprisals, and Donlevy's ultimate unwillingness to enforce his principle punitively makes his earlier stand on it look silly and wasteful of both white and red lives. Yet the film doesn't treat his character as a fool. Instead, it keeps the door open for an eventual romance between the commander and Lorabelle Larkin after she rides off into the sunset for a period of penance and meditation. It's a realistically ambivalent finish at the end of a musical trail with insufferable stopovers for songs by Gilkyson and purported comedy relief from Andy Devine. His bits may have been funny when different comics first performed them ages ago, but Devine only leaves you wondering where exactly you'd seen them before. There are more minuses than pluses on Slaughter Trail but western genre buffs ought to check it out, if only because there's really nothing else like it.

On the Big Screen: FOLLOW THRU (1930)

Movies have always been capable of making art of its absences. Silent film is recognized now as a distinct style rather than the mere absence of speech. At its best, black and white cinematography was a positive artistic choice rather than the mere lack of color. Shouldn't this also be true of movies made in "two-strip" or "two-color" Technicolor, before the process was perfected and could capture the color blue? Watching these films -- either special scenes in otherwise monochrome pictures (e.g. the silent versions of Ben-Hur and The King of Kings) or else full-length features (e.g. Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate) is like watching cartoons with an eccentric if not obsolete aesthetic sense. Hollywood was well aware of the limitations of the process and its pictures were art-directed accordingly until the world was turned red, green and brown. History has judged harshly, however, perhaps because the heyday of two-color was also the infancy of sound film, not to mention the epoch of the part-talkie, for which few artistic excuses can be made. Few of these early Technicolor films survive intact. Technicolor sequences or entire films survive only in black and white; some don't survive at all. Follow Thru is an exception: a full-length 1930 Technicolor musical that survives intact, though it was considered a lost film, like so many others, for a long time. Musical comedy seems like the ideal material for the two-color process, which highlights the essential, deliberate unreality of all the proceedings. Watching Follow Thru in 1930 may have been a little like watching an all-CGI picture today; you can tell it's not "real," but you weren't exactly looking for "real," were you? That Follow Thru is fantasy we can take for granted. That it's actually quite funny is what puts it over for posterity.

Follow Thru is about golf, sort of. At least that ensures a lot of green in the picture. The plot is typical musical comedy. Two female golf champions -- Nancy Carroll's the good girl, Thelma Todd the cheating villain -- are rivals for the affection of Jerry, a male golf pro (Charles "Buddy"Rogers). Jerry has been hired as a personal instructor for Jack Martin (Jack Haley), a girl-shy department-store heir. Jack goes into eyebrow-twitching seizures at the sight of pretty girls. Coincidentally, he once proposed drunkenly and gave a ring to Angie Howard (Zelma O'Neal), who happens to be the BFF of Nora, the good-girl golfer. Fearing girls, Jack wants to leave the country club where Nora and her rival are competing, but practically everyone contrives to make him stay so Jerry will. Acting as a facilitator, as far as his ability allows, is bra manufacturer "Effie" Effingham (Eugene Pallette), who's willing to help anyone out it gives him a better chance of having his bras sold in Jack's stores.  Because the characters usually act from ulterior (ableit benign) motives, many misunderstandings result from eavesdropping or too-candid conversations, but everything's resolved in time for Jerry to coach Nora -- the film makes clear that her talent only requires moral support -- for her ultimate showdown with her nemesis.

All of the above is scaffolding on which Follow Thru hangs its showpieces. The show was a smash hit on Broadway, and at least one of its DeSylva, Brown & Henderson songs, "Button Up Your Overcoat" ("Take good care of yourself/You belong to me") has entered the "Great American Songbook." The odd thing is that all the best songs go to the comics, while the romantic leads are stuck with several reprises of the uninspiring "We'll Make a Peach of a Pair." Even the third-rate juvenile couple (Margaret Lee and Don Tompkins) get a funny number, "Then I'll Have Time For You." The comedy numbers bring this Roaring Twenties relic close to the spirit of Pre-Code, as when Tompkins sings, "Once I've ruined the figgers/Of a dozen gold diggers/Then I'll have time for you." Probably the ultimate expression of this is Zelma O'Neal's big number, "I Wanna Be Bad," which is also the film's cinematic highlight. As directed by Lloyd Corrigan and Laurence Schwab, the number crosses what we could call the Berkeley Boundary. Angie Howard is supposed to be singing an impromptu song at a costume party with a live jazz band, but the directors jazz things up with double exposures and other special effects to make the scene a more purely cinematic experience. Just as golf as a subject suits two-color Technicolor's peculiar palette, so the process's favoring of red encouraged filmmaker to imagine vivacious visions of Hell, even if Zelma can't call the place by name. At this point you may as well see this clip of Technicolor Temptation Triumphant. Yellow42758 posted it to YouTube.


It falls short of the Berkeleyan standard mainly because the camera itself doesn't cross the Berkeley Boundary to roam among the ranks of falling angels. The song is virtually a Pre-Code anthem, though I'd argue that the more authentic Pre-Code sentiment is "I've Gotta Be Bad!" Still, for 1930 it's a great movie moment that I'm grateful to have seen on the big screen during the Madison Theater's one-day Jazz Age festival.

Overall, Follow Thru succeeds as much as a comedy as it does as a musical. O'Neal and Haley are holdovers from the original Broadway cast and really know how to put over the comedy songs. In their hands "Button Up Your Overcoat" is more reciprocal bullying than love song. Once the future Tin Woodsman makes clear that he's got more going on than the thing with the eyebrows he really grows on you. His non-musical scenes with Pallette are also good, especially a bit that must be one of the first scenes in which men invade a women's locker room. The idea is that Jack must get in there to recover the ring he gave to Angie way back when while she's showering, so that he isn't disinherited for losing a family heirloom. This is a country-club locker room so cocktails are served by a black woman in a nurse's uniform. Pallette's idea is that the boys play plumbers, and in their fake moustaches I'll be damned if they aren't spitting images of Mario and Luigi, except for the derby Pallette sports. There's good farcical slapstick here, and to top it off the plumbers escape by mugging two women, stuffing them in lockers and stealing their clothes. After that the conclusive golf match can't help but be anticlimactic. The main romantic plot often seems like an afterthought, so overshadowed are the stars by the comedians, but Carroll and Rogers are pleasant enough not to be as unwelcome as, say, the musical leads in a Marx Bros. picture. They certainly do nothing to suppress the spirit of fun that prevails here. There's pathos, too, though you have to read that into a picture that was popular, according to reports, despite being obsolete in many ways the moment it appeared. There's a temptation to treat anything that survives from this brief, doomed moment as a treasure, even though much of what does survive is as bad, if not worse with age now, as it was thought to be then. Fortunately, with Follow Thru you don't have to resist that temptation too much -- and that's just how the film would want it

Pre-Code Capsules: FLYING HIGH (1931)

Bert Lahr is one of the one-hit wonders of movie acting. That one hit so overshadowed a storied theatrical career, which climaxed with his starring role in the American premiere of Waiting For Godot, that his son, the acclaimed critic and biographer John Lahr, titled his father's story Notes On a Cowardly Lion. Except for theater historians, Lahr is now identified exclusively for his role in The Wizard of Oz. That's not for want of trying on Lahr's part. He was one of many successful stage comedians summoned to Hollywood in the early talkie ear to recreate Broadway hits. Lahr's was Flying High, a George White production adapted to the screen by director Charles Reisner and dance director Busby Berkeley. Lahr plays Rusty, an eccentric inventor if not an idiot savant who's built an "aerocropter" to compete in a big air show. Pat O'Brien plays a huckster who convinces Guy Kibbee (here married to future gossip maven Hedda Hopper) to invest in the unpromising looking device. Rusty is distracted from his work by marriage-mad Pansy Potts (Charlotte Greenwood), who ultimately goes up in the doomsday machine with him in the film's slapstick climax. Greenwood was a more established star at the time and more than holds her own with Lahr on the slapstick side. She wins our Pre-Code Play of the Film award for a scene in which Lahr repeatedly fends off her amorous advances by pushing her onto a couch. The long-legged and limber Greenwood sells the shove by yanking her legs up all the way to either side of her head, as if spreading them for her beloved, before hopping like a bunny for another round with him. As for Lahr, if 1931 movie audiences weren't asking what the fuss was about, as they did about many of the so-called nut comics imported from Broadway, then I will. He is profoundly unfunny. His schtick consists of an allegedly funny voice, a habit of repeating himself ("Put 'er there, boy, put 'er there!!") and, if not a catchphrase then a catch-noise for when he's alarmed. "Nyah nyah nyah!" is my best approximation of it. In short, it looks like no accident that Lahr scored his only real screen success when he played something other than a human being. Leaving him out of it, Flying High's main historical interest is as another prelude to Berkeley's epochal work at Warner Bros. a few years later. He's nearly there already, staging many mass formations for the overhead camera, but he doesn't yet have full control of the frame -- the angles often seem wrong somehow -- and hasn't yet broken the boundaries of a film set performance space to launch his fancies into full flight. If one scene sums this film up, it's the one where Lahr stumbles into the middle of one of the Berkeley numbers and flails about cluelessly. Everyone involved in this picture had some learning about movies yet to do.

DVR Diary: COLLEGE HOLIDAY (1936)

Looking at Pre-Code musicals over the years, I developed the notion that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers saved the genre from evolving into live-action cartoons by stressing virtuoso talent rather than mass choreography a la Busby Berkeley -- often brilliant visually but always potentially soulless -- or outright cartoonish stories with little real feeling, much less romance in them. But while Astaire and Rogers certainly revolutionized musicals in their own way, as Berkeley had revolutionized and "saved" the genre shortly before, the fact remained in the era of Code Enforcement that there were fewer virtuoso performers than could satisfy the demand for musical comedy films. As a result, you still saw musicals that were essentially human cartoons. Paramount seemed to specialize in these, as they seemed most committed to using musicals to putting over radio comedians as movie stars. As a result, here is a musical, directed by Frank Tuttle with a script by many hands, headlined by a performer best known as an anti-virtuoso. Jack Benny made a running gag that lasted almost his entire long career, until he staged some serious performances to set the record straight, that he was a lousy violinist. Benny must seem an enigmatic figure today, having risen to stardom on a perceived absence of talent. The gimmick worked on his radio program, in which he made himself the butt of jokes from his supporting players. But Benny didn't bring his radio support network to this project, and that exposes him somewhat as a personality with relatively little to offer. At the time, when people knew all he wanted them to know about his character, audiences presumably got what was funny in his mannerisms. At the same time, you get the idea that any comedian could have played Benny's part: a bandleader-turned-manager of a failing resort, dodging creditors and law enforcement until an improbable patroness (Mary Boland) gives him a gimmick that can turn the place's fortunes around.

Boland was a queen of misrule in the Pre-Code musical comedy Down to Their Last Yacht and her role here has the same potential. She's Carola P. Gaye, a wealthy widow determined to bankroll the enthusiasms of her latest paramour, Hercules Dove (Etienne Giradot). Hercules is a feeble old man with a Greek fetish. He dresses in classical garb and wants to revive classical ideals of human perfection through the new science of eugenics. He and Carola take over Benny's hotel -- he runs it for the film's ingenue (Marsha Hunt) -- and hope to turn it into a breeding ground for the best specimens of American youth, recruited from colleges across the country. They send Benny to do the recruiting, accepting his suggestion that they make it into a talent search for entertainers. They are adamant, however, that the breeding not begin until all the subjects have arrived at the hotel. There, boys will be paired with girls through the oracular intervention of Hercules's daughter Calliope, whom he touts as the perfect modern woman, and for whom he seeks a suitable mate with the dimensions of the famous Apollo Belvedere sculpture. It's up to Benny to keep the college kids from necking and petting on the transcontinental train trip. He then hopes to use the kids in a modern musical revue despite Carola and Hercules's eugenic intentions.

Presumably it was up to Benny to determine the kids' suitability, and he chose a lot of entertainers. Classical standards of beauty were waived, apparently, for the darling of Corn City College (Martha Raye), whose main attributes are a loud mouth and superhuman strength. She flings heavy suitcases as if they were softballs and does a Samson stunt -- not in the script! -- during the rehearsal of a number set in a classical temple. But classical standards are moot once we are introduced, after some build-up, to the vaunted Calliope. She is none other than Gracie Allen, a peer of Benny's as a radio comic and the wife and partner of George Burns. We first see her driving a four-horse chariot on the wrong side of a California road, with George riding along in panic. I think Burns and Allen survive better today than Benny. In part that's because people today still remember Burns from the days of his very late blooming solo stardom. It's also because the couple act, or Burns's role in it, evolved and improved over time. They reached their peak on television, where Burns made himself a kind of master of reality who was in on all the gags, watched the other characters' activities on his personal TV set, and addressed the audience regularly. Here Burns is still Gracie's exasperated stooge -- though Burns probably lays on the exasperation thicker in movies than in vaudeville or radio. Even so, Gracie carries the act because, unlike Benny, who may seem like a human void, she comes across as a legit crazy woman. The crazy rather than merely scatterbrained aspect of the character is more pronounced here because of Calliope's deranged upbringing and her obsession -- she carries a tape measure everywhere -- with finding her destined Apollo.

The female comics -- Boland, Allen and Raye -- really dominate the picture and give it whatever life it has. Raye gets the best musical moment, too, belting "Who's That Knocking at My Heart" out of the park. Her performance is so powerful that you can almost forgive the goddamn blackface. Yes, Benny's big idea to draw crowds to the hotel is to stage an f'in minstel show. He doesn't blacken up himself, and George and Gracie are also spared that indignity, but Raye's big number features a disturbing moment when tricks of lighting (and makeup) allow her to switch back and forth between white and "black." Still, her song is a showstopper, and George and Gracie, assisted by Ben Blue, can't quite top it with their knockabout minuet, which is still good enough to remind us that Burns and Allen had some talent as physical comics as well. After that, Benny descends to address the audience and declare the picture closed. It simply stops rather than ending properly, but things have sorted out as you'd expect. George turns out to be Gracie's perfect Apollo after all -- since she can only ever get a "32" measurement with her tape, who can say otherwise? Carola has dumped Hercules for a Hindu swami with powers of hypnosis and an astral-body gimmick. The girl who owns the hotel is reunited with the young man she encountered fleetingly at the start of the picture -- this is Leif Erickson, whom I'm used to seeing thirty years older on the High Chapparal TV show, and whose unlined features and singing here freaked me out a little. So it's not like they didn't bother resolving the plot, but it's not like they really cared, either. I couldn't help thinking how the filmmakers might have run amok with the eugenics and Greek concepts in the Pre-Code era, though I remind myself that Search for Beauty, the film I was most reminded of, was no great shakes. College Holiday is merely silly rather than salacious, and if you're going to like it it'll be for individual performances and not as a whole. The thing barely exists as a whole without a real virtuoso -- I guess Raye comes closest -- to hold it together. It has its moments, in short, but this sort of madcap musical may already have seemed obsolete to audiences in early 1937, when it opened wide, and it definitely looks obsolete today. Not that there's anything wrong with obsolete, but it'd definitely be an acquired taste today.

DVR Diary: IN OLD MONTEREY (1939)

The titles of Gene Autry's movies rarely give you much of an idea of what's going to happen. Most of the time they're song titles like Round-Up Time in Texas, most of which is actually set in South Africa, believe it or not. In Old Monterey isn't as misleading a title as that one, nor is it a song title, but it really gives no hint of the film's interesting historic context. Joseph Kane directs this "super" Republic production, which runs a good ten minutes longer than the typical Autry vehicle. Like most such, it's set in a present day in which parts of the west may as well be in the 19th century except for the occasional automobile passing through or, in this case, the increasingly frequent airplanes flying overhead. Released a month before Hitler invaded Poland, In Old Monterey is at once propaganda for American preparedness and an account of early ambivalence toward the idea. The Army needs land for a proving ground for its new bombers and wants to buy out the local ranchers in Gene Autry's home town. Gene himself is an Army man as the picture opens, as is his stooge Frog Milhouse (Smiley Burnette) and their musical buddies (the Hoosier Hot Shots). Frog drives a tank; indeed, he makes it practically fly despite his concerns about his weight -- he hooks himself up to a scale and dangles like a side of beef to see whether his newest weight-loss scheme is working. Frog and the Hot Shots want out of the Army, but Gene guilt-trips them into re-enlisting by singing "My Buddy." Gene himself is then demobilized so he can go back home and persuade the locals into selling out, and his buddies tag along.

Not many of the locals want to sell out. At the forefront of resistance is cantankerous Gabby Whittaker (George Hayes was given the "Gabby" name by Republic this very year for playing the same character in their new Roy Rogers series). The local industrialists aren't selling either, but they're only waiting for the government to raise their offer. These double-dealers want the ranchers to hold out, playing on resentment of explosions and planes flying loudly overhead. They're not above stirring up trouble to keep tensions high between the ranchers and the military. Meanwhile, Gene faces distrust from the community -- this is one of the films in which he's not known as a radio star -- while befriending a young woman (frequent Autry love interest June Story) and a small boy (Billy Lee). It's perhaps in keeping with the "super" ambitions of Old Monterey that the plot takes a drastic turn. The evil industrialist starts dropping bombs of his own, expecting the ranchers to blame the Army and stiffen their resistance, and in one of these incidents Gene's little pal is blown to bits. To repeat, a small boy in a Gene Autry musical western is killed stone dead. I still haven't seen many Autry films but I don't expect to see that happen very often, and I expect it must have come as a wallop to the familiar Autry audience.

Gene soon figures out that something was fishy about the bombing, but he also has to take drastic steps to reconcile the ranchers to the preparedness campaign. His strategy is to take over the local movie house and force the audience to watch newsreel footage of the Japanese invasion of China as he narrates the horrors of modern war. Soon enough, war comes to "Old Monterey" as the ranchers realize how the industrialist has been manipulating them. Horses, cars, trains, planes and Frog's tank, not to mention a crack army of stuntmen, are all deployed in the patented Republic action climax.

Before embarking on my Autry viewing, I had assumed that once you'd seen one singing-cowboy movie you'd seen them all. I continue to be surprised, however, by the individuality and occasional eccentricity of at least the early Autry films from before Pearl Harbor. None of these films are classics -- none even come close -- but some, at least, have more character than I would have given the whole series credit for before. I still can't say much for Autry as an actor, but there's often interesting stuff going on around him. Apart from the propaganda element in Monterey you have the rare and dangerous experience of Smiley Burnette and Gabby Hayes in the same picture. The Gabby character in this picture has a pathological disregard for truth that wouldn't be seen again until Heath Ledger's Joker; he tells at least a half-dozen different stories about how he won the medal he wears all the time. Hayes is too old to compete with Burnette in slapstick, but there's a frantic moment of one-upmanship as Gabby tells one of his tall tales while Frog performs some of his reducing exercises. Almost compulsively, Hayes begins doing deep knee bends parallel to Burnette while rambling on with his story. Additional physical comedy is provided by the Hoosier Hot Shots who go on an avant-garde instrument-destroying rampage during an impromptu performance. Between the slapstick and the stuntmanship In Old Monterey is a typically energetic Republic programmer with an added level of historic interest that puts it on a shortlist of Autry films to watch just to say you've watched one.

DVR Diary: TUMBLING TUMBLEWEEDS (1935)

 

The last time I reviewed a Bollywood movie I speculated that the nearest American counterpart to the Indian movie format was the singing-cowboy genre that flourished for not quite 20 years, from the mid-1930s through the early 1950s. The two types of movie aren't really the same, but the singing-cowboy westerns remind us of a time when "melodrama" meant a combination of drama and music, when the drama paused for a "specialty" of song and dance. The singing-cowboy film is melodrama par excellence, particularly when it's made by Republic Pictures. Republic specialized in singing cowboys, stunts and special effects. Many of their serials are still revered today by genre fans, but the singing-cowboy films tend to get dismissed as a creative dead end. If we think of them, we think of them as bowdlerized westerns, usually set in a dude-ranch sort of west of the modern day, complete with telephones, automobiles, etc. -- and in which the hero always shoots the bad guy's gun out of his hand. But if we think of them as musicals first, they represent another evolutionary step away from Busby-Berkeleyan spectacle and the musical as a syncopated live-action cartoon, contemporary with the rise of Fred Astaire at RKO, with an emphasis on virtuoso performance rather than mass formations. At Republic, you got the musical innovation -- their films are important in the evolution of country-western music as well -- along with as much mayhem as their legendary stunt men could throw in.

Joseph Kane's Tumbling Tumbleweeds was the first feature-length starring vehicle for Gene Autry, who'd made his starring debut earlier in 1935 in the one-of-a-kind singing-cowboy/sci-fi mashup serial The Phantom Empire for one of Republic's precursors. Autry was already a radio and recording star by the time he hit Hollywood, a fact often acknowledged in the films in which he almost invariably played "Gene Autry." With him came sidekick Smiley Burnette, who in this film is "Smiley" rather than his usual alias, "Frog Millhouse." Burnette was the Curly Howard of singing-cowboy sidekicks, younger and heavier than the bewhiskered codgers who more often attended the heroes. A frequent songwriting partner of Autry, Burnette had a bizarre gimmick, earning his movie-character nickname by taking his voice down to an Popeye-like throaty rasp for humorous effect, in contrast to his more high-pitched yet mellow drawl. Speaking of bewhiskered codgers, journeyman character actor George Hayes had not yet transformed himself into "Gabby" when he took the role of a clean-chinned yet mustachioed snake-oil salesman in Tumbleweeds. His turn here is a reminder that the New York native could act and wasn't merely something Republic found in the desert.

Although we learn during the film that this version of Gene Autry has made a name as a recording artist, we find him traveling with Hayes's medicine show as it visits his old family home. The story Autry may have had a poor agent, or he may have sought the opportunity to return to the land we saw him exiled from in the film's first act. He had refused to take his father's side in the typical range war, but intervenes to save his life at the climax of a furious action sequence in which film buffs may choose to see the hand of supervising editor Joseph H. Lewis. Since Papa Autry was unconscious during the rescue, and no one else witnessed it, he still thinks of Gene as a coward and repudiates his son before the young man can account for himself. Returning, Gene and his band take shelter in a shack still occupied by a wounded fugitive our hero recognizes as a boyhood friend. After helping him evade a posse, Gene learns that his friend is accused of killing Old Man Autry, and that changes things, at least until his friend's wife sets him straight about who really done it....

In later life Autry bought up the rights to his old pictures, and his heirs have had them preserved and restored for regular play on the Encore Western cable channel. So the first surprise about Tumbling Tumbleweeds for those with dim memories of lousy public-domain prints of singing-cowboy pictures on old-time TV, is how good this picture looks. It's a twofold surprise, since apart from the crisp picture Kane's direction is often impressive, not only in the action scenes but in the framing of many more sedate scenes. He has a knack for getting a camera into tight spots and making each scene as lively as possible. A performance of Hayes's medicine show, without Autry, is a highlight, thanks to Burnette and Eugene Jackson as "Eightball," at once a performer in the show and flunky to Hayes. Jackson does a frantic tap dance during a Burnette number, then tops himself (while Kane cuts to a tighter shot) by doing a James Brown bit avant le lettre, tiring of his pace and collapsing until dosed with Hayes's remedy, which brings him back to full power or more. Ernest Miller is the credited cinematographer and Lester Orlebeck the credited editor; both deserve credit for packing this little picture with considerable energy. Autry himself was never much of an actor but he is what he needs to be here. The players bring the enthusiasm of a new project to their first of many, many more pictures, and even if you don't care for the music you can appreciate the impression Tumbleweeds must have made. It's the sort of landmark movie film buffs may have to learn to appreciate, instead of appreciating it outright, since it set a standard few of us comprehend anymore. A reappraisal of singing-cowboy films is probably necessary before we can judge them on their own terms, rather than as compromised westerns or regional musicals. We shouldn't expect to find masterpieces anywhere in such a survey, but the films themselves might find some more respect than they get today.

Pre-Code Parade: GIRL CRAZY (1932)

 

Even the advertising is outrageous for this one.

I like a Gershwin tune; how about you? Hollywood liked them plenty, but there was somewhat less love for the Broadway shows for which many of George and Ira's standards were written. As hit shows their names had commercial potency, but the movie studios really just wanted the songs. Not all of them, though: for William A. Seiter's film of Girl Crazy RKO kept the two towering hits "I Got Rhythm" and "But Not For Me," but did without "Embraceable You." On the other hand, the Gershwins contributed a new (or hitherto unused) song for the film -- but "You Got What Gets Me" hardly counts as even third-rate Gershwin. What did the studio -- producer William LeBaron, director Seiter, and a team of adapters headed by Herman L. Mankiewicz -- think they were getting, and what did they think they were doing? It seems to have boiled down to this: the show that made stars of Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman on stage struck somebody as an ideal movie vehicle for Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.

Wheeler and Woolsey are one of the acquired tastes of the Pre-Code era. They made a hit as comedy relief in the big-budget musical Rio Rita and became RKO's answer to the Four Marx Bros. At least that was the idea, and it seemed to work for a time, at the time, but in retrospect the duo seem more like RKO's precursors to the Ritz Brothers. Disclosure: I hate the Ritz Brothers. I've never hated Wheeler and Woolsey, but I didn't get them. Woolsey looks and sounds like George Burns's dyspeptic uncle while Wheeler looks the part he played, a pleasant idiot. Together they were "nut" comedians, which means that, like the Marxes, they acted in films not to tell a story, but to act crazy. Like nearly all the Marxes' rivals, they lacked the personalities to make their craziness interesting. But maybe I'd just managed to miss the good Wheeler and Woolsey movies. They did quite a few before Woolsey died in 1938, but I haven't seen many of them -- definitely not enough to get them. Until now.

Reviewing some of RKO's Pre-Code, pre-Astaire musicals, I've noted that they verge on the cartoonish in everything from their comedy to the staging of the songs, that something human is lacking in the absence of a virtuoso performer like Astaire or Rogers. Because we identify RKO musicals with that pair, that inhuman cartooning effect seems like a flaw. In a Wheeler and Woolsey musical, it's a supreme virtue. Shaped to their needs, Girl Crazy comes about as close as early sound comedy could come to a live-action cartoon. You'll feel sure that you've seen some of the gags in cartoons from your youth. You may even see a hint of Blazing Saddles and its town's worship of Randolph Scott in the way everyone in Girl Crazy's western town removes his hat at the sound of the word "west." In all its versions, Girl Crazy is something that happens Out West, but the Seiter Girl Crazy is a ruthlessly irreverent travesty of the West, of the Broadway musical, of whatever you've got. It respects nothing, and in time you realize that it has to take the same attitude toward its source material, to the point that "But Not For Me" becomes but a platform for the obnoxious pre-teen Mitzi Green's long threatened imitations of stage and screen stars. These are actually quite good to the eyes and ears of a Pre-Code buff, but her riffs on the likes of George Arliss, Enda Mae Oliver and Roscoe Ates (a stuttering specialist) only make the film more defiantly obsolete today, adding an F.U. to the modern viewer on top of its similar salutes to everything else. If you can appreciate the way this picture doesn't give a damn what you think of it, then you'll get Wheeler and Woolsey.

Once upon a time there was this musical on Broadway called Girl Crazy. It was about a wastrel scion of a wealthy family sent west to run a ranch. The boy turns the place into a proto-Vegas, though maybe without the gambling. That's as much as I can get from Wikipedia. That character is still in the Seiter film; Eddie Quillan, a future Ellery Queen, plays him. But his story quickly recedes into the background. What counts is that his plan to turn his ranch into an entertainment destination -- with gambling, draws the professional gambler Slick Foster (Woolsey) westward to run Quillan's tables. Traveling with his nagging wife, Slick seeks the cheapest way to travel and chooses to go by taxicab. The driver is Jimmy Deagan (Wheeler), introduced preparing to drive a nail through his windshield, the sign on it aptly identifying car and driver as "Vacant." Jimmy unquestioningly drives the Fosters across the country as the slapstick gets off to a slow start. Leaving a gas station, the cab somehow ends up dragging a cardboard cutout of a motorcycle cop behind it. It takes a while for Jimmy to realize that the cop isn't passing because he isn't real. The payoff comes after he finally gets rid of the cutout, when he and Slick mistake authentic motorcycle cop Nat Pendleton for the persistent piece of cardboard. Poor Pendleton does his own stunt riding as Woolsey hurls objects at him, hoping to knock the offending attachment loose.

Finally our antiheroes arrive in the self-revering west, where Slick decides that the best way to avoid paying hundreds of dollars in cab fare is to have Jimmy lynched. Quillan's ranch is located in a community hostile to law and order; the sheriffs measure their tenure in minutes and one has just been shot when the taxi rolls in. From here Slick and Jimmy must help Quillan fight the local bully (Stanley Fields) who decides to run for sheriff himself, after killing many of his predecessors, in order to put the screws on Quillan and his resort. Our heroes need a candidate to run against the bully, but know that any candidate is doomed. Naturally, Slick and Quillan agree that Jimmy is the perfect candidate. With the help of Mitzi Green, who seems to have some crush on Jimmy (the actress was 12) and has followed him all the way out west, the good guys steal the election. No matter: the law will have little say in the outcome of the story. Instead, Wheeler and Woolsey will be compelled to disguise themselves as Indians (Woolsey playing a squaw) in a self-consciously outrageous bit made more funny by the presence of a real, "articulate" Native American witnessing the travesty -- until he speaks Pig Latin to the boys and proves himself a true brother, linking arms with them as they dance offscreen. They will plot to poison the bully with hooch spiked with gasoline, but must drink it themselves. Recovering from temporary stupefecation, an intoxicated Woolsey will recall his powers of hypnotism -- the reality of which is demonstraed when a bartender wanders offscreen sleepwalker style. And he will manage to mesmerize himself when the mirror on a door swings into his path as he prepares (he must count to five first) to overpower the bully. In the end, men will again pause to remove their hats in honor of the West, and ceramic urns will fall on their skulls. Quillan will propose to his girlfriend, only to be flattened once, twice, and a third time by a swinging door in the middle of a chase scene -- even the Marxes didn't treat the romantic lead like that.

In this manner Girl Crazy devours itself. Self-immolation might be the better metaphor; it gives you the idea of a spectacle, and the Wheeler & Woolsey Girl Crazy is spectacularly, amorally, triumphantly stupid. I've only described the tip of an iceberg of bad jokes and brazen gags, and I'm only now describing the film's "I Got Rhythm" number, which devolves in RKO style from Kitty Kelly's performance to some attempted artistry with light and shadow to all-out cartoon lunacy as everything from the cacti in the desert to the stuffed and mounted head of a buffalo keeps time with the tune. That's the kind of adaptation this is. It flopped at the box office; even Pre-Code audiences didn't get it -- or couldn't take it. For good or ill, this is one nut comedy that is indisputably nuts.

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.

DVR Diary: THE SHOW OF SHOWS (1929)

No genre or subgenre of film ever became more instantly obsolete than the all-talking, all-singing revue of the early sound era. Film historians disparage the revue pictures as an evolutionary dead end while salvaging individual performances or numbers as genuine or guilty pleasures. It doesn't help the revues' reputation that they are perhaps the most overtly branded corporate products in Hollywood history. Only a few actually bear their studios' names, but all of them were designed to showcase their studios' contract talent -- to show the public that hitherto silent stars had voices and could use them in the way talking pictures seemed to dictate -- in song. By their nature the revue pictures are plotless and suffer for that with most critics. You might expect some academics to come to their defense, seeing them as exemplars of the idealized "cinema of attractions," but I'm not aware of any defenders for the revues. That may be because everyone recognizes the corporate imperative behind those pictures, which doesn't fit with the cinema of attractions' supposed pluralistic or subversive potential. The consensus remains that these are bad movies: structureless, primitively staged, hopelessly dated. But aren't those the makings of cult cinema, and what could be more worthy of a cult than these innately weird movies that represent a road not taken, happily or not, by commercial cinema?

So much for devil's advocacy. John Adolfi's revue, a Warner Bros. showcase from before Warners acquired its historic identity as the home of Cagney, Robinson, Busby Berkeley et al, definitely qualifies as a weird amalgam, setting its strange tone immediately with a prologue set during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. In a brutal metaphor for the revolution wrought by the Vitaphone -- Warners had premiered The Jazz Singer two years earlier --  some hapless fellow is sent to the guillotine. After the blade falls, a sans-culotte proclaims: "On with the show of shows!" A fun evening for all is practically assured. There follows a musical number with 192 chorus girls in a variety of quasi-military uniforms performing precision marching up, down and across a vast flight of stairs. Adolfi adopts the vantage point of a lucky theater patron, and Show of Shows would have to be seen on a big screen to be given a fair chance. Concede objectively that Adolfi's direction is unimaginative compared to Berkeley's inventions of just a few years later -- he would actually start filming numbers from above the very next year in Samuel Goldwyn's Whoopee! -- but you might still allow that Show of Shows' numbers would work as simple spectacle, the way Adolfi intended, if you saw them on a screen bigger than 19 or 25 inches. On a truly small screen they can't help looking pathetic.

Adolfi moves in closer when star performers take the stage. Chorines can be faceless; stars can't. To no one's surprise, the star turns in Show of Shows are a mixed bag. The biggest curiosity of the picture is a number uniting several silent comedy stars in what was probably the first sound performances for all of them. Ben Turpin, Lloyd Hamilton, Lupino Lane and others are put to work in another commentary on obsolescence, in which they all portray aspiring entertainers who've ended up in all-too modest professions. Turpin stands out from the crowd -- with those crossed eyes he can't help it -- by throwing a "180" after his verse, pitching himself forward heels over head and landing on his back. He looks old to be doing that, but no worse for wear. If this number looks to the past, viewers will get a dim hint of Hollywood's future when Myrna Loy, in the early "foreign vamp" phase of her career, sings and dances in a "two-strip" Technicolor bit of chinoiserie called "Li Po Li." This number shows off the proto-surrealist potential in these early musicals, while the song itself is an oddity in which the title character "takes away all your rice cakes, takes away all your spice cakes." Speaking of surreal, the number is introduced by the figure often acknowledged as Warners' biggest star of the time, except perhaps for Al Jolson -- whose absence is acknowledged humorously in one segment -- the dog Rin Tin Tin. Rinty barks and pulls down with his teeth a small curtain to reveal a sign announcing Miss Loy and company in their number. No doubt his fans were relieved that Rinty had a voice.

Apart from Rin Tin Tin and Jolson, John Barrymore was probably Warners' biggest remaining star and certainly their most prestigious for the intellectual set. The Great Profile appears onstage in modern dress to introduce his subsequent appearance in medieval armor in an expressionistic excerpt from Shakespeare's Henry VI, in the role of the future Richard III. As himself, Barrymore appears hesitantly impromptu, nervously attempting to explain the psychology and foreshadowing of the scene to come. As Richard, he'll make you regret his descent into alcoholic clowndom more than you may have before. He may recite against a stage backdrop, but the precise lighting and the care clearly taken to get every possible effect out of his face make the recital the most vividly cinematic part of the picture. Barrymore may still strike you as a ham, but his scene is delicious -- and no matter how many singers and dancers Adolfi sends out afterward, including Barrymore himself in the all-star finale, nothing that follows will (or can) top it.

How the whole of Show of Shows relates to the sum of its parts will be up to each viewer to determine. With my tolerance for the archaic and my historical interest in even bad performances, I found the whole entertainingly alien in an acquired-taste way. Its utter lack of the sophistication that eventually defined the musical genre by excluding the revues worked slightly in its favor for me. And when Frank Fay was on stage/screen as master of ceremonies the movie actually seemed less archaic than it and the other revues are supposed to be. They seemed to become archaic instantly as talking pictures rapidly acquired sophistication and swiftness of speech, but something about Fay's clunky narcissism and his ball-busting interplay with such dubiously talented peers as Sid Silvers (offering to stand in for Jolson) seemed modern to me somehow. The era of sophistication that set the standards by which Show of Shows seemed hopelessly archaic is itself archaic now, like it or not. That should enable us to judge the revues by new standards. That doesn't mean they're good now, but just that we needn't take our fathers' judgment on our grandfathers' efforts as gospel anymore. It worked for Pre-Code cinema, after all. Maybe history will give the revues a second chance as well.