THE SKIN (La Pelle, 1981)

The ending of Liliana Cavani's account of the ambiguous liberation of Italy feels like a culmination of trends high and low in postwar Italian cinema. After spending most of the picture in Naples, the American army is finally closing in on Rome. Once the locals are persuaded that the men on tanks aren't Germans, they welcome the advancing troops, singing, dancing and waving American flags.  It's the sort of image Americans got used to seeing in newsreels. Here's a guy waving a flag with his kid riding on his shoulders, dancing backwards in front of a tank, until he stumbles and falls.

 

Cavani pulls no punches here. For one moment she nearly out-gores all her Italian peers. The effect is crude but effective and the director lingers on it. We get one more close look at the bloody sludge that had been a man moments ago -- his son managed to fall between the treads and scrambles out from under once the tank stops -- and then we see Marcello Mastroianni observing the spectacle.

 

 

Mastroianni is only the most obvious Felliniesque element in this account of la dura vita. He's playing Curzio Malaparte, the author whose book Cavani adapted, a onetime fascist and onetime prisoner of Mussolini's regime, now commissioned as a captain and acting as an interpreter for the Americans. There's something odd about the interpreting that makes me question whether the Cohen Media DVD has the definitive soundtrack. Their edition is in Italian but dubs the American actors (or actors playing Americans) almost entirely into Italian, so that an Italian character will speak Italian, and then an American character will ask Malaparte, in Italian, what the Italian said, and Malaparte will translate from Italian to Italian. Maybe that didn't bug the Italians the way it bugs me, but it would have been cool to hear Burt Lancaster's own voice. Lancaster for the Italians seems to have been what Olivier was for Americans: the mark of quality for a prestigious production with international aspirations. For once the American star plays an American in an Italian film. While IMDB and Wikipedia identify his character as General Mark Clark, the film's English subtitles dub him Mark Cork, perhaps out of deference to the actual Clark, who was still living when the film was first released. Cork is not flattering to Clark. He's an egoist fond of referring to himself in the third person and describing the army he commands as his personal possession. He spends most of the film negotiating with a local mafioso (Carlo Giuffre) over the transfer of a few hundred German POWs. They haggle over the local's compensation: he wants to be paid back for feeding his prisoners, by the pound. At least the Germans are assured of eating heartily, whether they want to or not.

Most of the people in Sicily aren't as assured of daily meals, and for the most part La Pelle chronicles their survival measures, most of which involve offering themselves to G.I.s or whoever shows up seeking supple flesh. Whatever indignities fascism imposed on Italians, liberation brought something seemingly new: the commodification of modern man. While the powerful men haggle over the sale of former warriors, the poor can only sell themselves, or their children. The common American soldier proves a willing customer -- the lines at a brothel wind down several flights of stairs -- but the higher-echelon types Malaparte has to show around get indignant at Italians' apparent surrender of dignity. For much of the picture our hero has to squire around Col. Deborah Wyatt, a military aviatrix and powerful politician's wife (Alexandra King, apparently in her only film role) whom Cork wants to get rid of as soon as possible. Some characteristic Mastroianni comedy ensues, particularly an upside-down airplane ride that Caviani ought to have milked for more of Marcello's comic discomfort but films flatly with an exterior process shot. Things get more Felliniesque as Malaparte introduces Wyatt to the dregs of society. Here are mothers prostituting their young sons to turbaned strangers -- where on earth are they coming from in the middle of a war? Here is some sort of homosexual party (with some rocking Sicilian folk music) highlighted by the ritual birth to a male mother of a mythologically endowed baby; its phallus is as big as the rest of him. Wyatt is horrified by it all, as are other idealistic Americans; none of this matches their expectations for the behavior of a liberated people. Malaparte has to remind them that the Italians have lost the war, and that women and children have lost more than others.

Curzio Malaparte seems to have been an early observer of American indignation at the inadequate (or perhaps inappropriately abject) gratitude of liberated peoples. The point certainly isn't that Italians were better off under fascism, but it does have something to do with the rather heedless manner in which Americans rush about liberating people and expect them to begin living happily ever after immediately. An aristocrat jokes that the Americans are the first occupiers of Sicily who took the trouble to knock before coming in; Gen. Cork jokes back, noting the damage from bombings to her ceiling, that perhaps we knocked a little too hard. If the Americans of La Pelle often seem obtuse, I don't think that makes the picture anti-American. The historical coincidence of an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius -- the mass evacuation under a fiery shower is one of Cavani's best sequences -- suggests analogically that the American occupation is a similar force of nature, no more comprehending of the damage it does and no more malicious at heart. The occupation seems like a supreme subject for Italian cinema, so it's surprising that it fell to Cavani, whose main credential was that triumph of arthouse Nazisploitation, The Night Porter, to put The Skin on film. She's not enough of a stylist, nor enough of a comedian, to make the film fully successful, but it has plenty of memorable moments and has clear historic interest as one of the last gasps of Italian cinema's aspiration to world leadership, and one that seems like a summation of everything that cinema had to offer in its golden age.

DVR Diary: DRACULA UNTOLD (2014)

If "zero to hero" is the popular paradigm today, the reverse of the coin is the villain who has his reasons. Just as we seem uncomfortable with characters who are inherently good or effortlessly competent, so we seem, if anything, more uncomfortable with characters who are innately wicked, neither reformable nor redeemable. Given a widespread inclination to see the mythic Dracula -- a modern amalgam of Bram Stoker's fictional character as interpreted in numerous films and the historic Vlad Tepes -- as a tragic figure, something like Dracula Untold was inevitable. It's not exactly "hero to zero," since this film's Vlad is always too scrupulous and sensitive to truly go bad, but it still reflects audiences' presumed obsession with the becoming of heroic or legendary figures, and in this case especially, to understand is to excuse.

Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) is the stren, protective ruler of his people after a hard childhood as a hostage and child soldier of the rising Ottoman Empire, where he learned the fine art of impaling and its strategic uses.Gary Shore's film is at pains to tell us that Vlad doesn't impale folks gratuitously, but as a deterrent, for all the good that does when Islam is on the march. But despite what I just said, Dracula Untold admirably underplays the Turks' religious aspect. For this film's purposes they're generic invaders and enslavers, the better to make clear that Vlad does what he must for his people to survive. Understanding that the odds against him are hopeless, he takes interest in a legend of a powerful, demonic figure dwelling in a cave recently occupied by now-dead Turkish troops. This mystery man is a very old vampire (Charles "Tywin Lannister" Dance) who offers Vlad a deal. He'll let Vlad drink his blood, which will give the prince vampire powers for three days, time enough to fend off the Turkish threat, and when those days expire that will be that -- unless Vlad should drink human blood, at which point he'll become a full-time vampire, while his sire will be freed from his cave prison to pursue some nebulous mission of vengeance that may require Vlad's assistance down the line. An optimistic judge of his own integrity and willpower, Vlad accepts the generous offer.

Turk-trained Vlad is already a formidable fighter; we see him take out a half-dozen Turks singlehandedly to save his own son from enslavement. Now, with vampire blood seething through him, he's literally a one-man army, not to mention a one-man flock of bats. It's no longer cool enough for Dracula to turn into a bat; he's got to be lots of bats, a cloud of them, though there's no practical point to this. Shore clearly though it was a cool video-gamey effect for him to turn into a cloud of bats when he flies speedily from one opponent to another, but wouldn't it make his task easier if he could, in bats-form, attack multiple foes at once? Well, it's a moot point, since even in his own pokey one-at-a-time fashion he can take out an entire Turkish army by his lonesome. This show of power takes his people aback ever so slightly, but it's not until he starts to sizzle in sunlight that they really start to take offense. Still, they're going to need him when his childhood pal Mehmet II, the Conqueror, the man who took Constantinople (Dominic "Howard Stark" Cooper), comes calling with the main Turkish army. For the big battle he gets help from an actual flock of bats, and when his lady love (Sarah Gadon), dying from Turk treachery, begs him to drink the blood he'll need to finish the job, even at the cost of his soul, it looks like another rout. But Mehmet's not "the Conqueror" for nothing. He lays a trap for Vlad, luring him for a final battle in a tent piled ankle-deep with silver coins, nullifying our hero's vampire powers. But don't assume that history's a guide to what happens next, because there weren't vampires in history, after all.

Dracula Untold is unrepentantly preposterous but the director and writers brought some redemptive imagination to what could have been simply a by-the-numbers origin story. The fight in the silver-tent is an inspired idea, and despite the inevitable dull CGI skies the picture has some decent production design. Its main fault is its dogged refusal Dracula become truly evil -- though I suppose you could see something evil on the level of hypocrisy about the denouement. While Vlad's been fighting Mehmet the Turks have pretty much massacred his incompetent subjects. Our hero finds a handful of wounded survivors to whom he offers vengeance via vampirism. A total wipeout of the Turks results, until the only humans left alive our Vlad's son and a monk. The other vampires are his people now, but Vlad suddenly grows less protective of them. To be fair, their desire to drink his son's blood has something to do with that. After sending his son off with the monk, Vlad uses his vampire magic to part the clouds and expose himself and everyone else to purging sunlight, but before he can join them in deserved oblivion, a gypsy proto-Renfield he met earlier in the story (Zach "Captain Charles Vane" McGowan) drags his scorched form to shelter, and that leads us to the present day. Has Vlad lived out Dracula's legendary career of wickedness or has he just hung around Transylvania as a benevolent spirit? The film isn't telling, but the filmmakers feel that one thing Dracula must do is meet a reincarnation of his lost first love -- and it also chooses this point to remind us that Vlad still owes that older vampire some service, hopefully in a sequel that a worldwide gross of a quarter-billion dollars may justify. I understand that hopeful filmmakers like to leave their pictures open-ended, but it was kind of demoralizing to have this film's last words be "Let the games begin." The film we have is a tale told by talented idiots, but a lot of that was due to the pictorial potential of the period, and I doubt strongly that they can repeat what modest success they had with a period piece in modern dress, especially when burdened with the tired gimmick of the reincarnated lover. Better, I think, to quit when they're slightly ahead and leave the rest of this story untold.

Pre-Code Parade: THE NARROW CORNER (1933)

One of the things insisted on most vehemently in the period of Code Enforcement, from 1934 through the mid-1960s, was that movie characters couldn't get away with crimes, especially killing. Something like The Narrow Corner, despite its literary credentials as a W. Somerset Maugham novel, probably couldn't be made as a movie a year or two after Alfred E. Green's film came out. The hero (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is clearly a fugitive as the film begins, though we don't find out why he's on the run until later in the picture. An American (or English) fugitive in exotic exile was a popular motif at this time; the idea combines the appealing prospect of starting over with the persistence of threat if not outright guilt for whatever you've done. This time there's the added terror of repeating your original mistake. Fred Blake, it turns out, killed a man back home. Green illustrates this awkwardly, in a manner presumably inspired by the Rouben Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, using a split screen to show both Fred telling the story and the story itself in flashback. Showing Fred talking really adds nothing to the sequence, which is highlighted by the faceless shot of a woman's hand putting a gun in Fred's hand as he grapples for life with her husband. This matters because Fred is falling in love again with another man's woman. The man is Ralph Bellamy in something like his eventual archetypal role as the loser boyfriend, the guy who gets dumped in favor of the more charismatic star. But this was still a time when Bellamy could win the girl in some of his pictures, and even when he doesn't you're in for a fight if you try to take his woman. In Narrow Corner he sort of wins but definitely loses, choking out Fairbanks in a fit of jealous rage but horrified immediately by what he's done. "I killed him," he moans in exactly the tone of voice you associate with those guilt-stricken, stupid predators who think they've done in Bugs Bunny, but before Junior can pop up and kiss him the inconsolable lug goes and kills himself. Bellamy dies, dead, as Old Ygor might explain it, Junior dies, live! The way is now clear for Fred Blake to get the girl, and as long as he can steer a boat through some treacherous reefs he and she can start over, presumably without worries over the man he did kill or the man for whose death he bears at least a little responsibility. Not that I object morally, mind you, but a lot of people in 1933 did seem to object to such seemingly triumphant immorality. For me it was just in keeping with the admirable seediness of the whole project, and it's preferable to some stories I've seen where the big twist is that the hero (or heroine) didn't actually kill anyone back home. Fairbanks, Bellamy and female lead Patricia Ellis are surrounded by a strong cast of grotesques, from alcoholic sea captains and opium-addicted doctors to cantankerous old codgers boasting of their ancient conquests in the islands. The show is purely studio and soundstage bound but the special effects for the story's dangerous sea voyages are, if modest, at least dramatically effective also. Narrow Corner is another entertaining Pre-Code star vehicle for Fairbanks Jr., for whom the period meant freedom, above all, from having to be his father's son on film. He showed a range in these few years at Warner Bros. that, his other virtues notwithstanding, he would never show again.

Wes Craven (1939-2015)

Without necessarily being a great filmmaker, Craven was a historic figure in the horror genre. What set him apart from other horror directors was an evolving sensibility that resulted in him making three very different game-changing films over a quarter-century. The first was the reputedly Ingmar Bergman-inspired Last House on the Left (1972), which not only set a new standard for relentless cruelty  but also inspired the epochal "Repeat to yourself: It's only a movie..." ad campaign. In 1984 Craven made A Nightmare on Elm Street and created Freddy Krueger, giving the era's serial-killer boogeymen a new glib irreverence that made Freddy a cultural icon and aligned him with the subversive TV horror hosts of yore, so that it was natural for Freddy to became one. Finally, at nearly a polar remove from Last House on the Left, came Scream (1996), a film that was arguably more immediately influential on the horror genre than anything Craven had done before. Resented by some fans, Scream was a definitive pop horror film, as much a crowd pleaser as a crowd spooker. Scream 2 was more of the same and a much underrated film, one of the most purely entertaining sequels ever. The third Scream couldn't keep up the pace and Craven declined from there, with the modest thriller Red-Eye the only real highlight of his last decade. His record as director and producer was decidedly mixed -- the "Wes Craven Presents" tag never really inspired confidence -- but his three milestone films, augmented by many more obscure fan favorites and sleepers, make his place in movie history pretty secure.

Pre-Code Parade: DOWNSTAIRS (1932)

 

At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in the death throes of his stardom, Buster Keaton pitched what he thought might be a career-saving story idea. Having lobbied unsuccessfully to be cast in Grand Hotel, Buster proposed a full-scale parody of the movie, featuring himself and all the studio's comics and grotesques. The studio shot down the idea. They weren't out to sabotage Keaton, or so we assume, but still thought, with an eye on the box office, that they knew best how to make Buster Keaton movies. Meanwhile, according to legend, M-G-M was out to sabotage the career of John Gilbert, their great lover of the silent screen, but when he pitched a potentially career-saving story idea around the same time, the studio bought it and made his authorship a selling point for the finished film.

As it happened, Downstairs had some more selling points. On the set, Gilbert had wooed and won his leading lady, Virginia Bruce, and Metro emphasized this as fresh proof of the actor's great-lover status. To drive this point home more strongly, after repeatedly trying to sell the public a "new" Gilbert the publicity department let people know that this time, at last, the old Gilbert, the one everyone loved, was back. Such audiences as took the bait, drawn by the ads or rave reviews in the newspapers, were in for a shock -- or so we might assume. But Gilbert may have understood something about his star appeal that doesn't necessarily match our distant view of him as a silent lover but makes Downstairs his best talkie. Some instinct may have told him that in a fight for his professional life in the Pre-Code era, it was time to get evil.

Two words show up in a lot of contemporary reviews of Downstairs: "Von" and "Stroheim." Gilbert had starred in Erich von Stroheim's Merry Widow in 1925 and seems to have been taken with the man. One paper reports that at one time Downstairs was envisioned as some kind of Von Stroheim movie, but with Gilbert directing Von rather than vice versa. Whatever might have been, the character Gilbert ended up creating for himself, Karl the chauffeur, was described as a Von Stroheim type. Presumably that means he was a man you could love to hate. Karl is clearly a man you're supposed to hate, but part of that, I think, is because he might also be easy to love. Another part is that he loves, or makes love, too easily.

I've heard Downstairs described as a precursor of both the old Upstairs, Downstairs TV show and the present Downton Abbey, so I was surprised to see it take place not in Britain, but somewhere in Mitteleuropa. The Baron (Reginald Owen) is celebrating the wedding of his head butler Albert (Paul Lukas) and Anna the maid (Bruce) in Universal-village style, complete with knee-slapping, yodeling and some ceremonial grape-stomping by the bride. In this environment, hearing Lukas's Hungarian accent left me wondering how many chances poor Bela Lugosi didn't get simply because Lukas existed. That led to me wondering whether Gilbert as a vampire would have been a good career move, but clearly I digress. Anyway, the happy day is Karl's first day of work for the baron, and how appropriate it is that he begins as a wedding crasher. We're warned early that Karl is bad news, but apparently aristocrats have no blacklist to put him on and the Baron and Baroness (Olga Baclanova) have no worries about hiring him. One of the subtle messages sent by Gilbert and the actual screenwriters, Melville Baker and Lenore Coffee, is that the different moral standards that apply upstairs, where the rich dwell, and downstairs, where the servants live, give an unscrupulous servant plenty of room to maneuver. Karl is ready to exploit every opportunity, either to make money or to score with Anna behind Albert's back. It becomes apparent that Karl will screw, or screw with, everybody. He seduces a rather homely cook to get at the bankroll she stuffs in her stocking while blackmailing the Baroness once he realizes she's having an affair. Having stolen one of her jewels and given it to Anna, he saves Anna's job, when the Baroness accuses her of stealing it, by claiming to have bought it himself from an address the Baroness recognizes all too well.

Albert the butler is our hero by default, but he's a bit of a prig, and his reserved attitude of propriety and duty leaves Anna vulnerable to Karl's attentions. His weakness, the film makes clear, is his dispassion. When Anna finally succumbs to Karl, and Albert discovers it, the maid challenges her husband, throwing in his face the profound difference between the way he "makes love" and the way Karl does. Even for a Pre-Code film, it's bracingly clear that by "making love" Anna doesn't mean serenading her under the balcony or saying, "I love you, I love you, I love you!" To win Anna back, Albert has to discover some passion of his own. Fortunately, he becomes passionately motivated to kick the crap out of Karl, though the climax proves slightly anticlimactic, if only because it looked for a brief moment as if Karl was going to get shot by "accident" during a boar hunt. That wouldn't have served Gilbert's purpose, however. Karl may lose this battle, and he may have to abandon the field, but in his downstairs-upstairs world there's always another castle where he can land on his feet and hit the ground running. But really! Does no one ask for references? Not in Karl's world, it seems...

Gilbert's grafting of himself on a Stroheim model was a self-reinvention that may have been decades ahead of his time. Karl seems more modern than his surroundings, and with sympathetic writers realizing Gilbert's ideas, along with producer-director Monta Bell, Downstairs seems adult in a modern way even by Pre-Code standards. In my survey of Gilbert's talkies I've cited approvingly the arrogance of his escape-artist character in Phantom of Paris. Downstairs takes that positive arrogance to amoral heights. It's essential to the aggression that re-energizes Gilbert, and if it makes him more modern in our eyes it also really does bring back the old Gilbert if we accept that the old Gilbert was first and foremost a sex symbol. Downstairs depends absolutely on Gilbert's sex-symbol status; it presumes that audiences want to see him seduce women. Only that expectation makes Karl tolerable as a human being, and it also gives him a fantasy's freedom of action. In an age of gold-diggers, Gilbert's instinct seemed to tell him that he had to be not just an aggressor but a predator, and his gamble was that he could make audiences like it. For film buffs his gamble paid off in the long run, but in 1932 Downstairs could succeed at the box office only if women still dreamed of Gilbert seducing them, or if men imagined themselves as Gilbert seducing women, or imagined themselves kicking Gilbert's ass -- and since the next Gilbert picture was Fast Workers, once more promising a "new" Gilbert in a working-class milieu, we must presume either that Downstairs flopped or that, as many still assume, the fix was in at Metro. It's a shame either way that Gilbert couldn't follow up on this breakthrough, since Downstairs fully lives up to its reputation as his best sound film. For once you don't find yourself analyzing his voice because what he's doing commands your attention. This film restores the pure physicality that was his primary asset in silents; it's quite well-written but Gilbert's body language is just as important in building his performance. The saddest thing about it is that Gilbert finally solved the problem of sound film himself, by becoming as close to an auteur that he'd ever get, but was still chained, like Keaton (who had his own interesting ideas about sound comedy that were ignored), to an unsympathetic studio. By the time Metro was done with both men, they were alcoholic ruins. Keaton recovered, though it took a while and fully regained his old stardom, but Gilbert was dead by 1936. He's still remembered best for his silent films, but while they're monuments to what he was, Downstairs is a monument to what he could have been.

Pre-Code Parade: WATERLOO BRIDGE (1931)

1931 was a busy year for Mae Clarke. She had dues to pay on screen. Among other things, she had to take a grapefruit in the face from James Cagney and be menaced by the Frankenstein monster. At the end of the year, however, she could be excused for not believing that these would be just about the only two events for which she'd be remembered 84 years later. Wasn't this the year she became a star in her own right in one of the most acclaimed performances of 1931? Of course, Waterloo Bridge was a lucky break for Clarke, who replaced Rose Hobart (who would achieve a sort of immortality in another, indirect way) in the lead at the last minute. She would never be so lucky again, apart from those fateful encounters with Cagney and Karloff. Within two years (after a nervous breakdown) she was getting thankless roles like the gold-digger in Fast Workers. By then she had run the gamut, for the heroine of Waterloo Bridge is the antithesis of the gold-digger.

In this tale of Americans in Britain during the Great War, we meet Myra Deauville (Clarke) on the closing night of The Ring Boys, a musical in which she was part of the chorus. In the festive farewell atmosphere she pulls faces during the finale and seems pretty hard-boiled about her misfortune. Two years later we see her outside a theater wishing she'd done the show now entering its third year, and by her banter with a friend it becomes apparent, without the dread word being said, that Myra has become a prostitute. She works Waterloo Bridge (shown by director James Whale and the Universal effects team in a rather spectacular process shot and there finds an American, Roy Cronin (Kent Douglass) in the uniform of the Canadian Army. After taking shelter from a German air raid they go to her apartment, the innocent American boy still ignorant of her profession. Now she seems less hard-boiled than she had been, because she can't take money from Roy, even though all he wants, smitten on sight with her, is to help her with her rent. Presumably she responds to something guileless about the lad that compounds his appeal, and fortunately Whale gets a guileless, natural and likable performance from Douglass (aka Douglass Montgomery) in a role that could easily end up contemptibly obtuse. She isn't going to stop working, mind you, but she isn't going to go to work on him.

Roy doesn't take no for an answer, however, and finally convinces Myra to meet his family: his mother, his Whale-worldly father-in-law (the inimitable Frederick "Baron Frankenstein" Kerr) and kid sister Janet. In this last role, Bette Davis steals every scene she's in, in retrospect, just by being in it, though she really has very little to do, still having years of dues to pay, and is relegated at one point to an offscreen tennis match with Kerr while the rest of the cast watches. They're all lovely, classy people, and while the true gold-digger might do a Walter Huston dance upon hitting paydirt, Myra, the veteran prostitute, can't pull the trigger. Waterloo Bridge is based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood, a sophisticate of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, but when all is said and done it's the same old pathos of renunciation we know so well from Hollywood hokum. Confiding in Roy's mother, Myra admits her love for Roy but also confesses her unworthiness. The old lady is sympathetic and understanding, assuring Myra that she's a good girl after all by virtue of renouncing Roy. But since no one's going to tell Roy flatly that Myra won't marry him because she's a hooker, he keeps on trying to win her until Myra's nasty landlady (Ethel Griffies is like a more malevolent Una O'Connor) blasts him with the truth. Douglass's best moment in the film is when Roy interrupts the harridan's moralistic tirade by shouting, "Shut your dirty face!" That same inner goodness that inspires Myra to keep her distance from Roy keeps inspiring him to close the distance -- but now it's making her worthless as a prostitute. She seems to land a john, only to rebuke him before entering a coach with him, only to plead as he rides off that she didn't mean it. Numbly she returns to Waterloo Bridge, where Roy finds her and demands that she marry him, regardless of everything. With an army truck idling to take him back to the front, Myra finally consents just to be rid of him, or to get him out of harm's way as a zeppelin raid begins, while she idles on the bridge as if uncertain whether she wants shelter or not. She finally seems to pick up speed just as a bomb, seemingly meant for her and her alone, finds her. Boom. Dead. The End. It's a Universal Picture. A Good Cast is Worth Repeating.

What the bloody hell...? Was that supposed to be just desserts or cruel irony, or are we meant, like old-time superheroes, to look on death and mutter, "It's better this way?" The abruptness of it, the quick close without further commentary, reminds us that Whale is still somewhat raw as a director, though Waterloo Bridge is overall a slicker film than the perhaps deliberately rougher Frankenstein, released two months later. It also underscores that the scene doesn't really stand interpretation. It's a contrivance that should have grown increasingly intolerable as Depression audiences wanted to see scrappy heroines win and propriety be damned. If it didn't launch Mae Clarke into lasting stardom that's probably because, despite the versatility she shows, the role really is too good to be true, her fate too neat to be good. Or so it seems now, but the story was popular enough to be remade, with compromises required by Code Enforcement, twice over in the next quarter-century. Either it made sense then in a way it doesn't now, or the figure of the martyred prostitute had an appeal for quite a while that it has no longer. Whale's Waterloo Bridge -- long unseen after M-G-M bought the rights in order to remake it with Vivien Leigh -- is a historical artifact of a particular sort. Certain aspects of it have timeless virtues, and it will always have interest as part of Whale's filmography, but overall it has become a lesser film the less willing we are to believe it.

Pre-Code Parade: FAST WORKERS (1933)

From 1930 through 1933 it seemed that every John Gilbert film promised a "new" Gilbert. What this means was nothing was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's erstwhile romantic idol, whose lack of an effectively cinematic speaking voice was already a matter of legend. Fast Workers had an air of doom about it because the fan press had already made it known that it was Gilbert's last film for Metro -- though he'd be called back later that year at Greta Garbo's request to co-star in Queen Christina. This latest attempt to craft a "new" Gilbert was really like many of the others. The object was to make him seem more virile, as it had been when he played a seaman in Way For a Sailor and a gangster in Gentleman's Fate. The specific idea this time was to make him one of the working class, a riveter helping build skyscrapers and the sort of lout who'd have Robert "Carl Denham" Armstrong as his best pal. If this seemed an unlikely role for Gilbert, given his silent typing as a period romantic, it seems a still more unlikely film to be directed by Tod Browning, at least until a plot asserts itself. What's the director of Dracula and Freaks doing here? If it wasn't a punishment project, the idea probably was that, back in Lon Chaney's heyday, Browning specialized in stories in which jealousy drove men to diabolical extremes. A skyscraper under construction offers plenty of diabolical opportunities, but until it sort of becomes a Browning film Fast Workers is a knuckleheaded misogynist comedy whose title is a double entendre. The riveters work fast, or so they boast, with the ladies as well as the rivets.

The plot is a triangle pitting Gunner Smith (Gilbert) and Bucker Reilly (Armstrong) against each other and gold-digging Mary (Mae Clarke). The comic angle is that Bucker -- you can easily imagine him having a different but rhyming name, and that's probably no accident -- is one of these would-be wise guys who claims to know all about women, only to be whipped by one. He regales his pals on the girders by pantomiming how he'd treat a gold-digger, punting her down the stairs, through the halls and out the door. He and Gunner are eligible prey for gold-diggers because riveters make good money by Depression standards. Gunner, arrested for fighting, can pay a $10 fine without batting an eye. But when he gets too flippant within the judge's hearing the fine is jacked up to fifty bucks, and he can't cover that with his cash in pocket. Who should he call for the extra money but Mary, an acquaintance of his, and who should she have in her room but Bucker, who has just boasted to her that he'd figured out her schemes, only to have her turn the tables? He'd anticipated the sort of sob stories a gold-digger might tell, but she catches him flat-footed by asking tearfully how he knew about the spot she was in. Now comes an emergency call for urgently-needed money, which a conscience-stricken Bucker readily provides. Before long he wants to marry the girl.

Strangely, the avowed cynic Gunner grows jealous. He finally arranges for Bucker to see photographic proof that Mary had been cheating on her with him, and now our poor sap gets a murderous look in his eye. Armstrong seems to devolve before our eyes, somehow growing more stupid looking by the second until he stalks off in a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed passion. This is Tod Browning territory now, only Chaney never had a chance to drop someone off a skyscraper like Armstrong has. The mere shifting of a plank means that Gunner will fall to his doom, but at the last moment Bucker impulsively reaches out to catch his pal. In a scene that echoes through movie history from Saboteur to The Hudsucker Proxy, Gunner clings to the sleeve of Bucker's sweatshirt, which is rapidly coming undone. I guess he should have gotten the double-stitch. Still, he manages to save Gunner by helping him swing out enough so that he lands on a scaffold only a few stories below. The final reconciliation comes in the hospital as a repentant Bucker sends an unrepentant Mary away for good, only to appear instantly smitten with Gunner's nurse, leaving his bedridden buddy to lament that all his broken bones have gone for nothing.

Armstrong's moronic turn as Bucker reminds you of how exceptional his performance as the masterfully desperate Carl Denham was, and his coarseness could only remind audiences of how out-of-place Gilbert seemed in his milieu. If anything, Gilbert's problem here is that he speaks too well; his voice is too clipped and refined for his role in the lack of any backstory explaining a social scion's fall from grace. Despite that handicap, as the film darkens a funny thing happens: Gilbert gets better. No, he doesn't suddenly acquire a working-class voice. What he acquires is real emotion. You hear it in small moments like when he roars in anger at being lowered to ground level only to have to dodge a truck. As he broods over his jealousy during an extended sequence in Atlantic City, Gilbert does some of his best acting in talkies. He does a lot with little, mutely and drunkenly keeping time on a bass drum with the house band, the monotonous beat signalling the buildup to an explosion. Looking at one of his better sound films, The Phantom of Paris, I wondered whether Gilbert needed more arrogant, domineering roles. What he needed even more was passion, and Fast Workers shows that that passion could just as easily and effectively take the form of jealous rage, which he conveys far more convincingly and far less cartoonishly than Armstrong does. The sad part was that I started wondering whether Gilbert was drunk in his best scenes. But I know better to say that he should have worked drunk, because I've seen his miserable last film, The Captain Hates the Sea, where he seems to have been drunk much of the time,and I know that drink killed him soon afterward. Just maybe Browning got something out of Gilbert that none of his other talkie directors managed to elicit. Fast Workers is not a good movie, and must have been a step down from Gilbert's most acclaimed performance in Downstairs, the film he co-wrote (coming soon to the Pre-Code Parade!) but just as it may have justified Metro cutting him, it also proved that Gilbert still had something that he probably had all along, if only the studio knew how, or really wanted to use it.