NEW FACES OF 1937: Of producers and reproducers

Leigh Jason's RKO musical comedy is a footnote to the history of American comedy twice over. Comedian Harry Einstein, billed as his radio character "Parkyakarkus" (get it?) met actress Thelma Leeds on the set. They eventually married, and from their union came the comics we know now as Albert Brooks and "Super Dave" Osbourne. But that's just one footnote. Here's the other:

Based on a 1933 Saturday Evening Post story, "Shoestring," by George Bradshaw, New Faces of 1937 deals with the troubled production of a Broadway musical comedy. Despite the good intentions of the play's author and a sincere if simpleminded investor, the producer seems determined to sabotage the show by casting incompetents, most notably a deranged-seeming, apparently talentless idiot named Seymore Seymore. Why should the producer do this? Because, after a string of well-meaning flops, he has figured out a system to bilk the public and make a mint for himself. The system is to convince multiple backers and angels to "own" each play. For the current production, for instance, Robert Hunt sold 85% of the production to three different people who don't know each other. But if the play flops and closes after opening night, as Hunt's recent shows usually do, the producer doesn't have to pay anyone back and he pockets all the money that didn't go into the show.
You can see where this is going. I don't know if Mel Brooks has ever acknowledged either the Bradshaw story or the RKO musical, but what we have here, of course, is the core of Brooks's Oscar-winning original screenplay for his directorial debut, 1968's The Producers. Brooks was 11 when New Faces appeared, an age when he was presumably still more interested in horror movies. But that wouldn't stop him from seeing the film later, maybe on television. That's reason enough for New Faces to be better known -- not to prove Mel Brooks a plagiarizer, but to demonstrate what a genius can do with a plot device -- for that's really all that Brooks reproduced in his film -- compared to how New Faces turned out.

New Faces of 1937 is a train wreck of a picture that like many train wrecks remains oddly if not morbidly fascinating. Its purpose, as you may have guessed, was to put over young talent in the singing, dancing and comedy categories. The show within the show takes care of the singing and dancing, and some of the numbers and performers are charmingly bizarre. The title song showcases the girl singers in rocking cradles, each with side-table telephones, from which they emerge to sing like an army of Baby Snookses. I leave it to the specialists and the old-timers to be troubled by that images. More bizarre yet is "Peckin'," which appears to describe the viral spread of a new dance craze which consists of people bobbing their heads like chickens, from the original inspiration of three colored waiters obsessing in an unseemly manner over live poultry through a Cotton Club-like establishment with a vague Hell motif to a lady patron's employment as a maid to a white bride contaminating her wedding party. For those keeping track of The Producers' origins, this is one of the numbers that is meant to be good. The unsettling aspect of New Faces is that it's often difficult to tell which parts comprise the corrupt producer's sabotage and which represent the best efforts of creators and artists. This is something Brooks improved upon tremendously by making it clear that Springtime for Hitler in its original, sincere form is hopeless garbage. New Faces, however, wages a good guys vs. bad guys struggle for the soul of its play, which we are to understand would (or could) be good if the producer didn't sabotage it by cutting the best numbers (restored after he absconds) and casting losers like Seymore Seymore. Then it undercuts the good guys' commitment to the play by having the loser redeem it. Now we're in Producers territory, with Seymore Seymore a likely model for Dick Shawn's Lorenzo DuBois, the hippie moron who turns the planned atrocity of Springtime for Hitler into a comedy sensation. For the film to work, as opposed to the play within either film, the loser has to be funny. This is where New Faces proves an evolutionary dead end.

Seymore Seymore is played by Joe Penner. As Jack Benny used to say, there will now be a pause while the audience asks, "Who?" Penner himself is a sort of footnote to the history of American comedy, having provided the vocal model for "Egghead," the Merrie Melodies cartoon character who evolved into Elmer Fudd. Penner was a pop-culture meteor, emerging suddenly as a radio star, breaking into movies and scoring a Broadway hit in The Boys From Syracuse before dying from heart failure at age 35. He was a comic made for radio, no more than a voice really and that pitched somewhere between Larry Fine and Pee Wee Herman. He got by on catchphrases like "Wanna buy a duck?" "You naaasty man!" and the one he uses a few times in New Faces, "I'll smash you!" Penner is what they call a "nut comic." That means nothing he did really had to make any sense. He just went out and acted out and hoped people would laugh. People during the Depression, it seems, were ready to laugh at anything -- what else explains the Ritz Brothers? That's all that explains Penner from a modern perspective. In person, he is less than nondescript. If he looked like Egghead I might understand better, but he really has no memorable features, and that, more than his limited material, may have doomed him in movies. Yet New Faces of 1937 would have us think that this profoundly unfunny man could save its play twice over. Since the good guys are determined not to let him ruin the play, when Seymore shows up backstage they start chasing him around and end up onstage, or else silhouetted against sheer backdrops, making him an accidental sensation like Charlie Chaplin in The Circus. Then he manages to get in front of the curtain and compels the orchestra to play one of his specialty songs, something about something making his heart go bump-bump-bump, echoed by an uncooperative drummer. Despite his clear failure to be so bad that he's good, we are to understand that the audience likes him, though it remains unclear whether his act in particular put over the play. To this viewer it seemed like Robert Hunt should be laughing all the way to the bank, but this was the era of Code Enforcement and Crime Could Not Pay. Only under such circumstances, it seems, could Joe Penner be a success in movies.

While Penner is fatal, the supporting comics don't help much. Harry Einstein's Parkyakarkus character -- his accent is supposed to be Greek, I guess -- comes across here as a surlier, stockier, more thuggish version of Chico Marx, right down to the malaprops. If anything, "Parky" is more stupid than Chico. This film's idea of a joke is to have him, as Hunt's right-hand man, ask Hunt why he makes flops. After Hunt explains in detail George Bradshaw's golden premise, Parky says there's one thing he still doesn't understand -- why does Hunt make flops? Gene Wilder he ain't. And then there's 28 year old Milton Berle in the role that arguably set his career in the visual media back by a decade. Berle is one of the good-guy characters, the naive investor I mentioned a while back. He shines best in a lengthy digression I presume to have been taken from a vaudeville sketch Berle did (the sketch, "A Day at the Broker's," gets a separate credit from "Shoestring"), in which he happily abandons any pretense of playing a character and just does Berle, or an early version of Berle. Berle's talents, such as they were, weren't particularly suited to the narrative arts. He was a sort of nut comic himself, and it may be only because he only succeeded in middle age that he doesn't seem fully formed here. Outside the bubble of the broker sketch, a timely satire of the irrational swings of the stock market, Berle is virtually a straight man for the likes of Penner and Parkyakarkus, and it's a measure of how little impression he actually made that he actually works in that role.

New Faces of 1937 proves that you can have a plot idea of incredible potential and botch it with almost inversely proportionate perfection. Once can imagine Mel Brooks as a young comic analyzing all the ways this film went wrong and solving all the problems it made for itself. The smartest thing he did, I can see now, was to make the perpetrators of the production swindle the sympathetic heroes rather than the skulking villains of the piece. It helps to have them discover their criminal idea almost by accident, rather than opening with them as practiced operators of the con. As I wrote earlier, it helps above all to make clear that the play itself is hopeless until the producers overplay their hand and tip it into so-bad-it's-good territory. It may be that the so-bad-it's-good concept, with its nod to camp, may not have occurred to 1930s writers, though we should reserve judgment until someone reads "Shoestring" and tells us how it ends. The Producers itself illustrates the principle. By making its play as bad as possible and casting it as badly as possible, Brooks achieved a comic triumph. By not being bad enough, New Faces of 1937 is simply bad. It may simply be bad in the wrong places, but that makes all the difference.

On the Big Screen: THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le Gamin au Velo, 2011)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make a certain kind of movie, but it's the kind of movie you don't often see in American multiplexes and the Belgian brothers do it well enough that it's worth seeing what they'll do next. After catching up with some of their work on DVD, I decided to see their newest effort on the big screen even though the Dardennes are arguably the opposite of spectacle makers. They're lean naturalists concerned with low life at or near the fringes of society. Their interest is sympathetic rather than exploitative and the results look and feel authentic. I get a better sense of being in another world from their pictures than from many CGI fantasies, and even their small-scale studies are meant to breathe on as large a screen as possible. You can appreciate the way they choreograph action within long-take space better on a big screen. There's a scene in this movie where the kid, Cyril (Thomas Doret), is reunited with his bike and rides it in dangerous proximity to his benefactress's car, after impressing her with some wheelies, as she backs up and pulls out of the courtyard of Cyril's youth home, all in one take. It all looks authentically risky for the boy and the woman driving the car, yet it must have been staged to seem characteristically impulsive for Cyril. While some directors specialize in beautiful framing and the stuff of screen captures, the Dardennes excel in staging action within the frame and focusing our attention on the key details. That's naturalism, I guess -- or neorealism -- and done right it's as much of a feast for the eye as any kind of filmmaking.

This time around the Dardennes have come up with a story that feels especially archetypal; it's likely to evoke many an earlier film depending on who's watching. Cyril's in the youth home because his father was temporarily unable to take care of him. Dad promised to come back for him soon, but Cyril has grown impatient and obsessed. He wants his Dad and he wants his bike. He escapes from the youth home and sneaks into Dad's old apartment building, despite being told that Dad had moved out. Chased by his caretakers, he seeks shelter in a clinic waiting room in the same building, clinging to the legs of a patient, Samantha (Cecile De France), from the same neighborhood. She's surprisingly compassionate. You can hold on, she says, only not so hard. After he's pried off, she takes an interest in the boy and the bike. She's the one who presents it to him, explaining that she bought it from someone to whom Dad had sold it. Cyril won't believe that story; the bike had to have been stolen -- Dad wouldn't sell his boy's bike like that. But he ultimately finds proof that Dad had done just that, and sold off his own motorcycle, too. Suddenly, Cyril latches on to Samantha again, asking if he can stay with her on weekends. She agrees, and helps him track down his Dad, who now has a kitchen-prep job in a restaurant. Keeping the focus on Cyril, the Dardennes don't show us Samantha's first meeting with Dad, saving for Cyril and us together the big, yet inevitable reveal that Dad is some Guy played by Jeremie Renier -- the actor who more nearly embodies the brothers' work than anyone else and serves for them as an icon of feckless, pathetic masculinity. Father and son have an uncomfortable reunion in the restaurant kitchen; Dad seems in a hurry to be rid of the boy. Breaking focus on Cyril, we now see a private chat between Guy and Samantha, in which the father explains that looking after the boy is too stressful for him and asks Samantha to make sure the kid never visits him again. After learning from Cyril that Guy had promised to at least call him next weekend, she takes the boy back to the restaurant and compels Dad to tell him what he told her.

The paternal rejection is temporarily shattering but Cyril seems to recover quickly. He shows interest in playing with other kids for the first time in the picture, but his yearning for a father figure soon reasserts itself as he falls under the influence of the neighborhood drug dealer. Professing to admire Cyril's courage after one of his stoogest tried to steal the bike, the dealer dubs the boy "Pitbull" and invites him to his home (his grandma's, actually) to play Assassin's Creed. He's really looking for a fresh face to do a mugging for him, but Cyril's almost pathological urge to bond with an older man puts him at violent odds with Samantha and in danger of jail or worse when the mugging by baseball bat of a news dealer and his son doesn't go exactly as planned....

Some reviewers have compared Le Gamin with Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, but the similarities between those films seem superficial to me. The film reminded me more of one French movie and one American film. The French film is Robert Bresson's Mouchette, the story of a sullen girl with an unloving father that addresses the possibility of grace for the unwanted and put upon. Cyril strikes me as a sort of male Mouchette, and the ending of Le Gamin strikes me as a counterpoint to the close of the Bresson film, down to the closing burst of classical music. Unexpectedly, the film Le Gamin most reminded me of was Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker. Cyril's world so entirely revolved around his dad that Dad's absence plunged him into a sort of autistic void from which Samantha attempts to rescue him. Cyril's frantic flailing about, climaxing in a salon scuffle during which he stabs Samantha, reminded me of Helen Keller's violent tantrums in Miracle Worker. To be honest, an earlier scene in Samantha's salon in which Cyril compulsively scrubbed his hands in her faucet despite her insistence that he not waste water triggered the comparison for me. The way the film developed, I thought it would be a Miracle Worker without a miracle, but ... to say more would spoil things but see my comparison to Mouchette for those in the know. Compared to Annie Sullivan, Samantha's motives are kept deliberately obscure here, but Cyril clearly fills a profound void in her life. Forced to choose between the boy and a boyfriend after an argument, Samantha chooses Cyril. Even after Cyril stabs her -- it's little more than a nick, really -- she breaks down in tears at the thought of reporting him to the authorities. If she seems saintly, the impression is probably deliberate. The Kid With a Bike is essentially a sentimental story about the potential of persistent goodness, but it's no tearjerker. It seems almost Spielbergian in its vindication of matriarchy and goes beyond Spielberg in suggesting that Cyril is better off without a father figure, given the options in his milieu, but the Dardennes pull this off while appearing to remain clear-eyed and unsentimental. They don't manipulate the emotions in blatant Hollywood ways but theirs is the sort of story an older Hollywood would recognize. That's not a criticism, but it is a warning that the story might seem to belie the brothers' naturalist pretensions. But if you take Le Gamin as a kind of modern fairy tale or parable, albeit redeemed by its relevance, you should be able to appreciate it on its own terms as an outstanding film.

Now Playing: APRIL 13, 1962

It was  a Friday fifty years ago, too -- and you know what that means...

That was Eugene, OR. This is Daytona Beach:

And this is Jeannette, PA:

Modesto, CA:

Palm Beach:

And now for something really scary in Milwaukee:

And how about counterprogramming, starting in Youngstown, OH?

Or in Pittsburgh?

Or Meriden, CT?

And that's enough for tonight? -- I can't top "Wallop of a Trollop." But I will show you some kind of wallop from the picture. Florentine7 uploaded the clip to YouTube.

Now Playing: APRIL 12, 1962

Another world premiere in Florida, this time in Miami for one of the year's most memorable films.

This film needs no introduction, but I'll show you a trailer anyway. FilmTrailersChannel uploaded this version to YouTube.



One person does it, then everyone does it. Yesterday it was Milwaukee; now Miami has a Taylor-Burton double bill.

The funny thing about this trend is that it seems to underline how unknown Burton still was despite toiling in Hollywood for a decade -- he starred in The Robe, for Chrissakes. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if some of his films earned more in these Cleosploitation double bills than they did in their original releases in a lot of places. At this rate people will be seeing a lot of Burton before Cleopatra itself comes out.

Now Playing: APRIL 11, 1962

Ocala, FL hosts a world premiere:

Here's a full-page spread from an Ocala paper promoting the event.

And here's a trailer, uploaded by ElvisCommunity.



The world premiere of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra is still more than a year away, but the romance of stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, each married to someone else, has thrilled and scandalized the pop-culture world. That gives exhibitors something to exploit. This Milwaukee drive-in sets the pace, but there are more shows like this one coming.

It's a creative way to sell some old movies. Both pictures on the program are Fifties vintage.

Something else exhibitors can exploit this week are the Academy Awards. The Oscars were handed out last Monday -- that seems incredibly late by today's standards -- and here's one of the winners, opening in Meriden CT.

For the record, Sex Kittens Go to College did not win any Oscars. Was this unfair? Watch the trailer, uploaded by benitogatocool, and judge for yourselves!

DAY OF WRATH (Vredens Dag, 1943)

The Nazis couldn't kid themselves the way Communists did sometimes. You could get away every so often with making a movie about witch-hunting in a Communist country as long as the authorities could tell themselves it wasn't about them, but about the supersitious bourgeois past. But when Carl Theodor Dreyer made a film that superficially concerned with witch-mania in old Denmark, the country's Nazi occupiers apparently assumed it was about them. Thought they apparently let the film play, they gave Dreyer enough grief that he fled to Sweden. On one level, you can see a Nazi's point. Vredens Dag describes a society where people are put to torture and compelled not just to admit ridiculous charges against themselves but to denounce others for equally ridiculous offenses. That touches a sore spot with fanatics everywhere. But Dreyer's film isn't exactly The Crucible. It isn't about a heroic refusal to make false denunciations. It's about the double standards that spare some while sending others to the stake, and it ends with someone making an uncoerced confession of a ludicrous crime.

Absalon (Thorkild Roose) is a middle-aged widowed pastor who has married again despite the disapproval of his elderly mother. He has a grown son, Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye), who has a hard time thinking of Anne (Lisbeth Movin) as his mother. Once Martin is back from school, however, he has a hard time not thinking of Anne. Anne has an easy time thinking of Martin; the lad could give her the happiness Absalon doesn't seem capable of giving. The old man may be too preoccupied with his responsibilities as a minister to accused witches. He comes under pressure when the authorities catch an accused witch, Marthe (Anne Svierkier), hiding in his own house. The old hag had been picking herbs for Anne, who offered her shelter. Marthe thinks she has leverage on Absalon because he had once intervened to spare an accused witch who happened to be Anne's mother. Marthe insists that he intervene on her behalf or else she'll denounce Anne. Absalon refuses to comply but Marthe never follows through on her threat -- not under torture and not as she's sent to the stake. Not that you get much chance to rant there; in Denmark they drop you face first onto the bonfire. Meanwhile, Absalon's mother, who probably figures that Anne put some sort of spell on her son, now sees her working the same wiles on her grandson. All this stress is likely to drive poor Absalon to an early grave. If it happens, how much will Anne be to blame? And how do you characterize her offense in the idiom of 17th century Denmark. Could you call it anything else but witchcraft?...

While The Crucible focuses on the injustice of witch trials and builds up the background of accused and accusers to underscore the procedural injustice, Day of Wrath probes the intimate anxieties, rivalries and hatreds that must have seemed to simpler, superstitious generations like the devil at work in their hearts and minds. In its emphasis on overpowering urges and mortal consequences it resembles an American film noir, with Lisbeth Movin a worthy rival to Hollywood's femme-fatale specialists, more closely than it resembles a political allegory. Dreyer films the proceedings in an austere yet fluid style; his camera moves frequently without calling attention to its mobility. He doesn't fetishize the tortures of witchfinding, but the mere sight of fat old Marthe stripped topless for forceful interrogation is appallingly suggestive. Overall, Dreyer succeeds in creating a sense of lived-in antiquity and lets the actors do the rest. This is a film of memorable faces, with Movin, Roose and Sigrid Neiiendam as Absalon's mother making indelible impressions. Movin may have the more flamboyant role but Roose made the strongest impression on me. In many ways the image of a puritanical patriarch, he effectively embodies the contradictions and hypocrisies of his roles as confessor, counselor and comforter, spiritual leader and lonely man who's lost track of his longings. Nevertheless, the big moment and climactic mystery belong to Movin. Is her ultimate confession merely acquiescence to the inevitable once the wheels of injustice are set in motion, or is it a spontaneous confession of guilt, a revelation to herself of feelings she hadn't acknowledged for someone she'd wronged? Does she actually suddenly see herself as a witch, and what does the label mean to her? These questions transcend politics and elevate Dreyer's film above mere allegory. They remain relevant even when we don't call each other witches anymore, as long as we still seem capable of cursing each other merely by coexisting.

Pre-Code Parade: DIRIGIBLE (1931)

At the end of his career, Frank Capra wanted to make a science-fiction movie. It would not have been that futuristic a picture, its subject being the contemporary American space program. Marooned ended up being filmed by John Sturges, with Capra's son getting a producer credit. Had it been Capra's coda, we might think of his career differently, and films like Dirigible would loom larger in his filmography. Dirigible pretty much was the Marooned of its time, though its special effects were closer to state-of-the-art than the actual Marooned's were. For all that Capra is identified with the "corn" often suffixed to his name, he clearly thought of himself as an ultra-modern filmmaker taking on cutting-edge subjects. Technically and pictorially, Dirigible is a tour-de-force. Capra employs nearly every trick in the book to keep the picture lively. As far as effects go, he combines location footage from the airship base at Lakehurst NJ with authentic stunt flying, ambitious model work, and carefully composed process shots to sustain the illusion of stars Jack Holt and Ralph Graves taking part in the action. Cinematically, Capra films from every angle, assisted by a small army of cinematographers. His shot selection is more diverse and interesting than most 1931 pictures and he tries to do more with light and shadow than many contemporaries dared. Overall, Dirigible is visually spectacular, especially when you judge it by the standard of its time, but whether it really belongs in the Pre-Code Parade is another issue entirely.

Jo Swerling gets the main screenwriting credit but Dirigible's story is a product of Frank "Spig" Wead, now probably best known as the subject, played by John Wayne, of John Ford's biopic The Wings of Eagles. On this evidence, and in spite of the ad campaign, Wead hadn't a Pre-Code bone in his body. Dirigible was re-released in 1949 (which is why the current edition has a more modern Columbia logo) and I doubt anything had to be cut from it to meet Code standards. There is a sort of romantic triangle in the movie, but it's pure hoke. Flyer "Frisky" Pierce (Graves) and dirigible commander Jack Bradon (Holt) are friendly rivals for glory and rivals in the heart of Frisky's wife Helen (Fay Wray). Helen is fearful and starved for attention while Frisky seeks glory. She goes so far as to beg Jack to kick Frisky off his dirigible expedition to the South Pole -- the airship will have a plane attached, Frisky having proven the feasibility of a mid-air hook-up -- in order to keep her husband out of harm's way and under her roof. But when Jack's airship wrecks (he's rescued at sea) and Frisky attaches himself to a naval expedition -- he'll fly over the Pole -- Helen decides to divorce him. Her way of informing him is to put a Dear Frisky letter in a sealed envelope to be opened when the hero reaches the Pole. The letter will also inform him that Helen intends to make a play for Jack. But when word reaches the U.S. that Frisky's plane has crashed at the Pole, she freaks out in a manner that convinces Jack that he has no real chance with her. Like a good sport, Jack takes another dirigible to Antarctica to rescue Frisky and any other survivors of his plane. The melodramatic climax comes when the temporarily snowblinded Frisky, who has held on to the unopened letter through his ordeal, asks Jack to read it for him. Jack plays Cyrano (or John Alden) and recites what he presumes to be Helen's true present feelings for Frisky, though given the bromance aspect of the picture, Frisky might almost be excused for asking, "Why don't you speak for yourself, Jack?"

Holt and Graves were Columbia's counterparts to Cagney and Pat O'Brien at Warner Bros. or Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen at Fox -- belligerent buddies or intimate rivals depending on the story whose commitment to each other, or country, often outweighed the needs of women. They're likable enough here but lack the superstar charisma to stay foregrounded in Capra's spectacle. You wonder what Wray sees in either of them, but she rarely had a co-star worthy of her -- why else do people identify her most with a giant ape? Dirigible is also noteworthy for a Clarence Muse sighting. Muse is the black actor of the period most likely to get through any picture with his dignity intact. Here he plays "Clarence," a Navy steward who volunteers for the Antarctic expedition. When he explains that he's familiar with all things "South," having hailed from Birmingham, you sincerely wonder whether he's just putting his superiors on. Some of his behavior is stereotypical: he sings spirituals and puts store in a lucky rabbit's foot, but his best friend among the white crewmen is no less superstitious and takes the proffered charm with him on Frisky's flight for all the good it does him -- the foot ultimately becomes an ingredient in a desperation soup. Sporting sunglasses and a parka in one outdoor scene, Muse is unusually modern looking, adding to the odd impression that he's in but not of his time. I wish he had a bigger role, but people aren't really Dirigible's main attraction. It's not an inhuman picture in the cartoonish manner some Pre-Code pictures affected, but it's chiefly a technological spectacle that in its advocacy of airships became a kind of science fiction after the fact.