REAL PULP FICTION: Johnston McCulley in Zorro-Land

Where can I get the man for the situation? I must have one well born and reared, who knows how to conduct himself in the presence of others well born. I must have one with a natural attraction for women, one skilled in wooing. I must also have one skilled in handling a blade and known to be quick and fearless in combat. There are many such, but they are not renegades, as you are.

-- Johnston McCulley, Don Renegade

After Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, Johnston McCulley's Zorro probably is the most famous character created in pulp fiction. Yet while Burroughs remains a household name in American pop culture, Johnston McCulley as an author has never come close to Burrough's fame. It wouldn't surprise me if many people assume that Zorro was a real person or, more tellingly, a creation of the movies. The easy assumption to make is that, unlike Burroughs, McCulley really was a one-trick pony. It didn't seem that way during his heyday. He was nearly as prolific as Burroughs, and may have created more series characters, from the prototypical masked avenger the Crimson Clown to his comic antihero, the lisping pickpocket Thubway Tham. None of these had Zorro's staying power, although McCulley continued producing Thubway Tham stories, as well as Zorros, until his death in 1958. If anything, McCulley seemed to prefer not writing Zorro, though the character became more of a meal ticket for him in later life. Look at McCulley's bibliography of works published in Argosy and it becomes apparent that the author was more interested in Zorro's milieu than in Zorro himself. He wrote numerous serials set in what one Argosy cover called "Zorro-Land," California under the rule of Spain and Mexico. Each of these, as far as I know, was a one-off story. McCulley may have never returned to any of these characters other than Zorro. If so, he missed an opportunity that may only appear obvious in retrospect. Zorro-Land was McCulley's universe, and in our time it would seem natural, depending on issues of chronology, for McCulley's California heroes to encounter one another or at least acknowledge each other's existence. Those who've read more McCulley can correct me if this did happen. My acquaintance with the author remains very limited. I haven't even read The Mark of Zorro yet, but I've read a couple of the later Zorro short stories. They are rather robotic affairs, and the difference in quality and energy between those and Don Renegade, which debuted in the November 11, 1939 Argosy, suggests that McCulley flourished when he was being most original, when he was thinking up however many variations on the Zorro type rather than following the Zorro formula.

The title character is an antihero in search of redemption, a man of giant appetites whose repasts McCulley describes in loving if not necessarily knowing detail. Marcos Zappa is a nobleman who turned against his class and led an Indian rebellion when society wouldn't let him marry a native girl. He was spared when the rebellion failed but branded with an "R" for Renegade that makes him a social pariah. For money, he makes himself the catspaw of another disgruntled don who seeks to avenge a slight from a lady. This villain wants Zappa, his brand disguised, to seduce the woman who rejected the villain originally and provoke a fight so he can kill the lady's current paramour. Once Zappa has won the lady's love, the villain will expose Zappa as a renegade, disgracing the lady, while arranging for Zappa's escape. Thus Zappa re-enters a decadent milieu of gaming halls where everyone wears a mask and estates where guest beds come with lovely young female bed warmers. While Zappa chivalrously makes no further use of his, it's obvious enough that most other guests keep the girls in bed past their bedtime. Of course, the master plan is complicated almost immediately. Zappa comes to the rescue of a coach threatened by bandits but is himself rescued by a dashing young nobleman who proves, as should surprise no one, as the very man whose lover Zappas is to steal, and whom Zappa is to kill. At the other end of the social spectrum, Zappa's imposture doesn't fool an old pirate crony of his who's happy to keep his secret, for now. None of this is original if original is the opposite of predictable, but starting from scratch once more in Old California allows McCulley to tell the tale with a fresh panache I found lacking in his later Zorro stories. While I've abandoned the idea of reviewing every story in the 1939 Arogsys, I definitely look forward to reading all the chapters of Don Renegade, and maybe I'll tell you how it ends.

Sometimes you can return to familiar characters productively after putting them aside awhile. The best stand-alone story in the November 11 issue was "Chaos is a Quiet Place," the latest novelette by Donald Barr Chidsey about his unlikely team of insurance investigator Nick Fisher and reformed (and supposed dead) pickpocket Eddie Savoy. This was their first appearance in Argosy in nearly two years, after a run in 1936-37 when they were Chidsey's most frequently-used characters. Chidsey must have been in the right mood because "Chaos" swings with hard-boiled irreverence as the heroes negotiate the return of a stolen treasure while suspecting a setup for an even bigger heist. Set in Egypt, the story probably fails political-correctness tests, though it's far from the most racist thing I've read from Chidsey. But I can't help liking that wisecracking smartass attitude, even if it makes Fisher and Savoy look like all too typical ugly Americans abroad. In any event, they're only dealing with crooks, only without all the moralizing you got in the actual crimefighter pulps. Not much else is memorable in this Argosy but this and Don Renegade make the issue worth a read.

On the Big Screen: BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) (2014)

Ever since D. W. Griffith we've accepted editing as the grammar of cinema, yet every so often someone acts as if eliminating editing, or at least the trace of it, is the acme of cinematic art. The long take and the tracking shot are a kind of alternate language that can call itself cinematic for emphasizing the mobility of the camera, yet to trade montage for mis-en-scene arguably is to exchange the cinematic for the theatrical. Projects like Rope and Russian Ark are impressive in both theory and execution, yet ultimately seem more labor-intensive than the results justify. They're masterpieces of a sort, but are more stunts than real classics. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is trying something different in Birdman, but the inherent theatricality of the long-take is still there, as is only fitting for a film about the theater and the mutual envy of theater and film. Inarritu, in a drastic departure from his signature style as the innovator and popularizer of the so-called lasagna movie (intercutting between "layers" of different stories as in Amores Perros, Babel), attempts the illusion, inside very early and very late brackets, of telling his story without a cut, but unlike the Hitchcock and Sokurov experiments mentioned above, he also attempts to sustain the illusion while taking jumps in time. Sometimes he uses devices that are more or less dissolves: the lights go out inside buildings while night turns to day; a video image on a smartphone becomes an image on a barroom TV set. Sometimes he does a kind of in-camera flash-forward, his camera panning across time as well as space. This latter trick is itself very theatrical; you can imagine, if you haven't actually seen, a stage director do something similar, lacking the luxury of the editing room.

Is there a point to this beyond showing off what Inarritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki can do? I'm not sure, but there clearly seems to be a point to Birdman's kulturkampf of theater and cinema, and there may be a clue in the "truth or dare" games played by Edward Norton's pretentious stage actor and Emma Stone as the main character's recovering-skank daughter. The Norton character is obsessed with "truth," though he warns that he's only ever "true" on stage, and refuses ever to take a dare from Stone. Michael Keaton's  protagonist, meanwhile, is taking the ultimate dare, risking his savings and his self-respect to prove himself as an actor after years playing superheroes by producing, writing, directing and starring in a highbrow vanity project based on a story by his boyhood idol, Raymond Carver. He's regarded with contempt by the Broadway regulars, barely disguised by Norton, playing a late addition to the cast, and blatantly undisguised by a powerful newspaper critic, a Frank Rich in drag who threatens to ruin Keaton's play by panning it sight-unseen out of resentment of movie stars usurping the legitimate theater. What does this mean to Inarritu and his co-writers? Does he have stage envy? Or had he heard too much about his films being gimmicky in some way or other that put his directorial legitimacy in question? However it works out, the publicity emphasizing the resemblance of Keaton's role, or his character's past, to the actor's own career nicely hides the extent to which the protagonist is more a surrogate for the director, down to the delusions of superhuman omnipotence, than for the star.

I'm afraid my theorizing isn't doing justice to the best and funniest film I've seen so far this year, a film that may owe as much to Mel Brooks as to higher things. The Broadway milieu and the troubled production and its almost accidental triumph automatically evoke The Producers, while Inarritu's occasional acknowledgment on-screen of the drummer providing much of the film's soundtrack -- you wonder sometimes whether this film traded scores with Whiplash -- looks like a nod to the Count Basie band's cameo appearance in Blazing Saddles. You might have expected something more pretentious if you recognized the Godard homage in the way the names in the credits appear a few letters at a time, and I suppose the playfulness on display in Birdman isn't alien to the dread Frenchman, but Godard is rarely this laugh-out-loud hilarious. Much of the credit for this goes to Edward Norton, who should be as much a shoo-in for a supporting actor nomination as Keaton seems deservedly to be in the lead-actor category. In fact, Norton nearly blows Keaton off the screen anytime they're together, even when their byplay is clearly improving Keaton's game. Had the film been made a decade later, the former Incredible Hulk could well have taken the lead, and even though Norton's actual role is crucially different from the actor in his aloof disdain for cinema, it's arguably more painfully closer to the mark than Keaton's in the master thespian's bridge-burning difficulty. More than in Keaton's case, Norton's departure from superhero cinema was a matter of self-sabotage; it may be easier to imagine him tormented by the Hulk's voice than Keaton by Batman's. None of this, however, makes Norton's performance so brilliant funny. The actor would have managed that had he never heard of Marvel. Keaton, too, is good enough to transcend his history; he'd be as good had he never been Batman. That's because Birdman isn't really about superheroes, superhero actors or superhero movies, except to the extent that superheroes give theater chauvinists a new excuse to belittle cinema. Ultimately, Inarritu may have intended his film as a vindication of cinema, a demonstration that it can play by theater rules as well as transcend its bounds. If we see Keaton's character as a representative or embodiment of cinema, rather than as a mere shadow of Michael Keaton, the film's mysteriously wondrous ending makes some thematic sense and the film itself remains a comedy. As a comedy, Birdman is in an ancient, classical tradition. Keaton's run through Times Square in his tidy-whities is something out of Keystone silents when the stars would run amok in public places, and it's set up with a classically simple sight gag. Exploiting the most modern technology, Inarritu in a way takes the art of cinema back a whole century, but if it's funny that's OK. Birdman's comedy, leavened in classic style with a little pathos, does much to redeem any seeming self-indulgence. Ideally, people will enjoy it without even thinking of it as an art movie, if it gets outside the art houses. Here's hoping it will.

DVR Diary: THE SECRET OF CONVICT LAKE (1951)

Convict Lake in California takes its name from an 1871 shootout between a posse and a gang of escaped convicts. For Twentieth Century-Fox, the secret of Convict Lake was that its violent history could be molded into a template set by a studio western of a few years earlier, William Wellman's Yellow Sky. Wellman's film had a gang of bank robbers trekking through the desert to find an old prospector and his tomboy daughter sitting on a treasure. Michael Gordon's Secret of Convict Lake has the prison escapees trek through treacherous snowy mountains to discover a colony of women and children led by a bedridden Ethel Barrymore by the lake, their menfolk having gone off prospecting. Wellman pitted gang leader Gregory Peck, playing hard boiled at first against type, against ambitious, greedy Richard Widmark. Gordon pits Glenn Ford, who had experience playing darker western types (The Man From Colorado, Lust For Gold), against ambitious, greedy Zachary Scott, who loses some of his essential smarm as a grubby convict. In both films, the lead outlaw is redeemed by love after grooming himself proper. Overall, Convict Lake seems designed to amplify Yellow Sky at every level. There are even multiple secrets of Convict Lake, depending on how you count. As in Yellow Sky, there's loot to be had, but for Ford's character there's also a secret personal agenda that brings him to the lake. He was jailed for murder, but while he admits killing his man he claims self-defense, but a former friend testified that the act was unprovoked. That man lives in the lake community, and his fiancee (Gene Tierney) ends up being Ford's love interest while he waits for his chance at revenge. Yellow Sky was an early "adult" western, and Convict Lake is more adult, at least by 1951 standards, addressing the needs of lonely women, attributing some mild masochism to the Scott character (he enjoys being slapped by women) and including in the gang a psychologically disturbed rapist and murderer (Richard Hylton). It's a crime of violence for him, we're told; he goes berserk when women -- and men, he says provocatively -- resist him. He ends up lynched by pitchforks and heavy logs by outraged femininity after going for one of the younger ladies, while the Ford character turns against the gang, having never really thought them his friends, before getting his crack at his returning betrayer.

All the pieces seem to be in place, but Convict Lake is no Yellow Sky, mainly because Michael Gordon is no William Wellman. The narration over the escapees' trek through the mountains is an immediate vote of no confidence in Gordon's narrative skills, and the director often seems to have no clue how to make use of either the outdoor locations or the spacious soundstage where most of the action takes place. Too many scenes are shot from middle or long distance, as if Gordon were a holdover from the earliest days of movies; the action is rarely framed as dramatically as it could be. Even during its initial release, the film was criticized for Leo Tover's overly dark cinematography, and the rather poor print shown on FXM Retro compounds the problem. As it stands now, Secret of Convict Lake is simply an ugly film to watch. In surer directorial hands the story certainly would be stronger, and while Ford and Scott are effective as antagonists there are a few too many characters for Gordon to juggle competently. Ford's showdown with his betrayer is inevitably anticlimactic, since nearly nothing has been done to build the latter up as an antagonist before he returns to the lake. If my hunch is right that Fox was simply trying to ape Yellow Sky, then the failure of Convict Lake proves that the power of the adult western wasn't yet something, this early in the greatest decade for Hollywood westerns, that could be reduced conveniently to a template or formula.

Pre-Code Parade: JOURNAL OF A CRIME (1934)

How do you get away with murder? Forget about it! No, really how can you possibly get off the hook after you've deliberately killed somebody. Forget about it, I said! The story conference at Warner Bros. may have been worthy of Abbot and Costello, but the writers of William Keighley's high-society melodrama actually were adapting a French play, though I don't know if we can blame the French for the film's conclusion. Whoever's to blame, here's a late Pre-Code picture with a finish that probably wouldn't be permitted a year later. Ruth Chatterton is the jealous wife of successful playwright Adolphe Menjou, who has a crush on the ingenue of his newest operetta (Claire Dodd). She shoots the singer in the back during a rehearsal, but by coincidence a bank robber, who has just killed a teller, is in the theater trying to ditch the gendarmes by blending in with the stagehands. His clumsy attempt to flee once the law shows up to investigate the killing only gets him caught and blamed for the singer's death. Menjou quickly figures out what actually happened, but finds himself emotionally blackmailed into silence when Chatterton threatens to kill herself if he goes to the police. Instead, he intends to wait her out while she goes the way of Raskolnikov, slowly consuming herself with guilt, as much over the poor robber/murderer having to die in part for her own crime. She feels compelled to visit the prisoner and confess the truth, but as he sees it he's already going to die for the bank teller so the false charge doesn't really bother him. It bothers her increasingly, however; she faints upon reading news of the convict's execution. Finally at the breaking point, by which time Menjou pities rather than hates her, she finally makes an appointment to turn herself in to the Attorney General (an unusually benign Douglas Dumbrille), but in a twist deemed ridiculous even by contemporary reviewers Chatterton redeems herself by rescuing a child from an oncoming car and taking the hit herself. She suffers one of those cinematically fortunate brain injuries that does no permanent damage to her cognitive capacity but wipes out entirely her memories of the past, including the murder. In a denouement that leaves the hitherto relatively sympathetic Menjou looking like a creep, he decides he'll now keep his wife after all, presumably reconstructing her personality selectively to suit himself while she lives innocently ever after. There's something almost preposterously Christlike about it all. Chatterton endures a kind of death for her own sin only to be reborn pure, after talking to a thief who was willing to take her sin upon himself, asking in return only to learn the ending of Robinson Crusoe. Spoiler alert: "He returns to England." It all leaves me wondering who exactly in the audience was supposed to be pleased by this story. It's okay visually, and the rehearsal scenes climaxing in the shooting and the capture of the thief are particularly well shot. But it's hard to imagine anyone empathizing with the Chatterton or Menjou characters, since the former is redeemed at the cost of her personality while the latter perpetuates a cover-up forever after for selfish reasons. Refined in tone -- consider the stars, after all -- it has none of the sleaze identified with Pre-Code, but Journal ends up one of the period's most amoral pictures, and not in any particularly likable way. If the peasants marching on Hollywood in 1934 had said "Off with her head!" I'd have to agree with them just that once.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY'S dilemma, Oct. 28, 1939

In this week's Argonotes pages we find an editorial confession that bears quoting at length:

If you are running a magazine concerned solely with fellows who plunge young women into steaming cauldrons, you can be reasonably sure that all your readers have a fondness for horrors. Otherwise they wouldn't buy the magazine. So you can go right ahead increasing the temperature of the cauldron, and everybody will be happy. The editor who publishes only fiction of a special sort -- detective or Western or fantastic -- has the comforting assurance that his public likes his specialty.

But it's different with us; we are infinitely more vulnerable. One week a letter will commend us on a recent Western story and demand more of same; the next week another reader will savagely dispose of that Western and beg to know why in heaven we don't eliminate that cowboy-and-Colt stuff, so that there will be more space for stories about the Australian bushmen. We could not satisfy all our readers if every published story were a masterpiece in its field; and that's why ours is the perilous and violent life.

At the start the editor is taking a shot at the so-called "shudder pulps" that were popular then and highly valuable as collectibles now. But the challenge of publishing a general interest pulp is nothing new for the Argosy. You can read Argonotes pages throughout the 1930s in the unz.org trove and see exactly what the 1939 editor means. Yet if Argosy has a problem in 1939 -- apart from having its fortunes tied to the Munsey company's reckless "Red Star" brand expansion --  it's not so much maintaining a balance of genres as maintaining a particular style. I've seen it said that the weekly was at its peak earlier in the Thirties, and by now I've read enough from that period, both at unz and in my own slow-growing collection, I'll at least agree that the 1939 magazine isn't as good as it was four or five years earlier. This issue, for instance, was almost unrelentingly mediocre. It's noteworthy only for the conclusion of Eando Binder's dystopian serial Lords of Creation, in which our hero, awakened from suspended animation 2,000 years in the future, improbably conquers the world. Most of the other stories were boring. Many seem boring in a particular way. My hunch is that Argosy in 1939 aspired to a status somewhere between pulps and slicks. Too many of the stories read as if they might have been submitted to Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post, or else they read as if they were meant mainly as raw material for movies. The tone is different from just a few years earlier. It simply seems less like pulp. There's less blood, less thunder -- to a certain extent less fantasy, apart from the designated "fantastics" that we'd call science fiction. As I've suggested before, the world seems less wide open than it did earlier in the Thirties, as if the buildup to a new world war was closing up other options for adventure, while higher literary ambitions, perhaps, often resulted only in a flatter tone, less perilous and violent despite the editor's joke. Certain stories and serials still manage the old feeling, but they seem increasingly like the exception that prove a rule.

The point of "Real Pulp Fiction" has never been to chart pulp's decline. What I really wanted was to call readers' attention to highlights from a wild world of pulp that parallels our wild world of cinema. Since I still want to do that, I'm going to give up the 75th anniversary march as a regular feature of the blog. I'll still report on the better, wilder stories from 1939 and 1940 as I read them, but I'll also spend more time further in the past exploring what I deem more classic pulp, not just in Argosy but in other magazines. As I start showing off my personal pulp collection you'll also see some later stuff, since I have a fancy for western pulps and feel they were at their best at the very end of the pulp era, from the late Forties to mid-Fifties, parallel to the evolution of the "adult western" in movies. Instead of reviewing entire issues, I'd like to spotlight specific stories in more detail as I did with Theodore Roscoe's "That Son of a Gun Columbo" earlier this month. Look forward to more and shorter pieces from this point forward, and maybe at long last a formal spinoff into a separate blog next year. Whatever happens, the focus from now on will be on pulps I really enjoy, from guilty pleasures to little classics of action and adventure in prose. This series is definitely to be continued!

DAY OF THE SIEGE (2012)

In the U.S. Renzo Martinelli's would-be epic has the title of a generic war film. That probably infuriated a director who opened the film with a quote from 20th century French historian (and victim of the Nazis) Marc Bloch: "Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from ignorance of the past." In Martinelli's home country, Day of the Siege is known as 11 Settembre 1683. On that day, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks was broken by an attack by a Polish army led by King Jan Sobieski. Martinelli's Italo-Polish production credits this rescue of Christendom from the last great Islamic military assault to date to the Polish king (played by director Jerzy Skolimowski) and an Italian friar, Marco d'Aviano (F. Murray Abraham), who was the spiritual adviser to the Emperor of Austria. The Poles, presumably having less of an agenda, or more likely seeing an existential threat coming from a different direction, call this movie The Battle of Vienna. For Martinelli and his writers, however, the immediate agenda is Islamophobic, though their hackneyed commitment to the conventions of historical drama, and perhaps a degree of good taste, make the film less of a hatefest than it could have been.

In 1683 Islam was on the march again, the Turks' ultimate goal being to turn St. Peter's in Rome into a mosque. The Sultan entrusts his grand vizier Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) to take the Hapsburg capital. Friar Marco, first seen in Venice almost reluctantly healing the blind, goes to Vienna to stiffen Austrian resolve and convince the haughty Hapsburgs to accept the aid of the Poles and their upstart King, whom the Austrians see as a social inferior. With the Poles finally on board Sobieski insures ultimate Christian victory by defying Kara Mustafa's expectation and dragging artillery up a steep mountain to a commanding position from which he can soften up the Turkish position before scattering it with the cavalry charge of his dreaded winged hussars.

 

Above: a Muslim's nightmare vision of a Christian army.

Below: the badass reality of the winged hussars

Martinelli -- last noticed here as the auteur of the boxing biopic Carnera: The Walking Mountain -- felt it necessary to add human interest to this epic subject. He does this in two ways. First, his writers invent a sort of relationship between Friar Marco and Kara Mustafa in order to justify a meeting between his two main characters. When they were young men, Kara Mustafa while visiting Venice saved Marco's life from a falling piece of ship's cargo. As the Ottoman army nears Vienna and the two men become aware of each other's role, each grows curious to meet the other, but their fictional showdown is necessarily anticlimactic since it can't change the course of history. Meanwhile, a subplot focuses on an interfaith couple in a village Marco visits. The husband is a Muslim, the wife a Christian mute. As news of the Turkish invasion spreads, the villagers want to lynch Abul (Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis), but Marco intervenes to save him. He is repaid by Abul's flight to the Turkish lines, where he advises Kara Mustafa about the holy man on the Christian side. Later, after the invaders sack the village, Abul's wife is taken prisoner. He ignores her squawking, grunting pleas for rescue and allows her to be herded into a stockade with other women, presumably to be used for sex or sold as slaves, but he returns at night to arrange for her release. Later still, he appears at the gate of Vienna to urge the Austrians to save their bodies and souls by surrendering, converting to Islam or paying the tax required of People of the Book. Abul's story ends when, with the Turkish army in retreat, he covers Kara Mustafa's escape by putting on the vizier's armor and charging the Polish cavalry single-handedly. His pregnant wife is left weeping over his bullet-riddled corpse. This little story ends tragically, it seems, solely because Abul is a Muslim and Muslims can't change their stripes. Martinelli seems to want it both ways, catering to liberals by having Marco save Abul from a lynching, yet pandering to Islamophobia by showing that Abul couldn't be trusted after all. That's a provocatively mixed message to send to audiences in Europe, where anxiety about Muslims in their midst is much greater than it is in the U.S.

For what it's worth, the screenwriters take the position that Muslims worship a different God than Christians. This would be news to Muslims, who believe themselves the most authentic acolytes of the God of Abraham; their idea is that Islam is the default religion of that God from which Jews, despite Moses, and Christians, despite Jesus, have deviated in dangerous if not damning ways. Many Christians believe, however, that if Islam can't imagine God having a son, or if it insufficiently emphasizes loving fatherhood as a defining divine attribute, then Allah may as well be a fictional character Muhammad invented. That point aside, the script tries to score more points against Islam by having Friar Marco argue that "the one true God" does not demand submission -- which literally defines Islam -- but wants men to be free. That in turn would be news to countless people who've lived in Christian countries under the dominance of various Christian churches, but to be fair that's another story for other films. For now it's enough to note that despite some sketchy efforts to humanize the important Muslim characters (Kara Mustafa is shown as a doting father, for instance), Day of the Siege is indisputably an Islamophobic film, though not grotesquely so. You can't argue that any film showing Christians fighting Muslims is Islamophobic because I'll throw Kingdom of Heaven at you to stop that argument. What makes Day Islamophobic is its constant implication that permanent peace with Islam is impossible. There's no other way to interpret the Marc Bloch epigraph, while Kara Mustafa in the story warns Friar Marco that defeating Islam before Vienna would only be "trimming the Prophet's beard," i.e. a temporary setback. Don't get me wrong; there's plenty to object to about Islam, and more still about Islamism, but Day of the Siege strays into "all Muslims are a threat" territory, where we shouldn't really want or need to go no matter what our beefs are with specific Muslim goons today.

The film's Islamophobia could be redeemed if it inspired some epic action, but Martinelli's reach exceeds the grasp of his international budget. He can compose some impressive images on a relatively intimate scale, but the battle scenes upon which the film presumably depends constantly betray limitations on budget, technology and imagination. Martinelli has to rely on CGI reinforcements to supplement his extras. Worse, he resorts to CGI explosions and musketry along with repetitive, too-familiar shots of stuntmen flinging themselves from explosions. It may be unfair to bring up Kingdom of Heaven again, but that underrated picture has perhaps the best portrayal of siege warfare ever, while the battle scenes in Day of the Siege are actually some of the dullest parts of the film. Bad acting also undermines the picture. It was reportedly shot in English, but that appears to have left everyone (who wasn't dubbed afterward, that is) except Abraham at a disadvantage. Predictably enough, he alone brings any passion or power to his role, and if anything he might have shot for over-the-top more often. Only he comes close to the intensity the whole show needed badly, and that Martinelli may have felt while shooting it but doesn't really show on screen. The Siege of Vienna should be the stuff of thrilling cinema, but for that to happen someone will have to attack the subject again another time. Marc Bloch's advice might come in handy then.

DVR Diary: RIFFRAFF (1936)

J. Walter Ruben's M-G-M film is a Jean Harlow starring vehicle but it seems like a Spencer Tracy type of movie. Tracy was still new at M-G-M and the studio, in its effort to figure out what to do with him, seemed to imitate models from the actor's years at Fox. This working-class melodrama reminded me somewhat of Raoul Walsh's pre-Code Tracy picture Me and My Gal in its raucous spirit. 1936 is Code Enforcement time but Riffraff still feels a lot like a Pre-Code picture and we do get a shot of Harlow in her negligee. The most interesting thing about the movie is its ambivalent attitude toward the struggle between capital and labor. Tracy plays a tuna fishermen convinced by his mentor, "Brains," to halt a strike against the local cannery boss. There's no doubt that the boss is a heel, but Tracy's character is made to understand that a strike will only allow Nick Lewis (Joseph Calleia) to replace the union men with strikebreakers. Understanding this, Dutch (Tracy) tosses a labor agitator off a pier, takes over the meeting and aborts the strike. Apparently the possibility of turning away the scabs never occurs to Brains or Dutch -- or else Metro didn't want the thought to occur to the audience. In any event, his coup makes Dutch a big man, just in time for his wedding to Hattie (Harlow), a cannery worker who was stuck living with her older sister (Una Merkel) and an obnoxious nephew (Mickey Rooney, natch). But while Dutch had steered clear of conflict with Nick on the labor front, once he sees Nick as a rival for Hattie, all bets are off. Against Brains' continued advice, Dutch eventually calls a strike to prove his own dominance, with exactly the consequences Brains feared. The union finally turns against Dutch and deposes him, the insult added to the injury of losing all his installment-plan property during the strike. Again, for all his bravado Dutch never seems to think of fighting the strikebreakers. He doesn't even attempt to persuade them to take his side. Instead, he leaves Hattie and ends up in a hobo jungle where bums talk Marxist jargon without necessarily comprehending it.

To this point Tracy has dominated the picture despite Harlow's top billing. She takes over when Hattie "borrows" money from Nick to help Dutch and gets thrown in jail. She gives birth in prison and turns the baby over to her sister. Finally she joins two fellow femcons in a jailbreak inspired by Dutch; in the film's most dramatic sequence, starkly shot by Ray June, they make their break on a rainy night, but one of them dies trying. While she hides out with her sister's family, Dutch starts a slow rise from the bottom, landing a job as a night watchman. While Hattie remains a hunted fugitive, Dutch becomes a hero once more when he stops some of his radical hobo pals from burning the cannery. In a corny finish -- but I suppose there could be no other -- Dutch's having made good again inspires Hattie to turn herself in and finish her sure-to-be-extended sentence, on the understanding that Dutch and their kid will be waiting for her.

Harlow and Tracy don't have the sort of chemistry Harlow shared with Clark Gable in particular. The Code has less to do with that, I think, than does Dutch's narcissistic personality and Tracy's steamroller performance. Rather than clicking romantically, Tracy tends to blast Harlow off the screen, in part because the actress is more subdued than normal in what was hyped as a change-of-pace dramatic performance. Harlow still shows some attitude and throws some choice insults at Tracy, but she's handicapped by an essentially reactive role for the first half of the picture. The clash of somewhat mismatched stars and the script's curious attitude toward organized labor make Riffraff more an item of interest than a really good film, but at its best it's entertaining enough to justify that interest.