On the Big Screen: THE WALK (2015)

The fall of the Twin Towers was the apotheosis of Philippe Petit. If, as a character says in Robert Zemeckis's film, the french wirewalker gave the World Trade Center towers a soul, when they had before seemed to many like two obscene skyscraping file cabinets, in their absence the still-living Petit can be seen as the soul of the towers. The old testament of the gospel of Petit is the documentary Man on Wire (2008). Zemeckis's fictionalization of the story is the new testament, with his Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) preaching over an idealized Manhattan, the towers still in place, from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. No need is felt to remind us that Lady Liberty is an older New York deity that came to us from France. Petit is a particularly cinematic god. He is part Harold Lloyd, part King Kong; tethered to concrete though he may be, the sky is his playground. As played by Gordon-Levitt, he's the sort of charming, dashing Frenchman who used to be a commonplace in Hollywood, and The Walk plays like one of those international-cast caper pictures that played around the world when Philippe was growing up.  It's a charming throwback of a picture in many ways, but the main attraction, of course, is the three-dimensional illusion of going out on the wire between the towers with our hero. For the most part it's pretty spectacular, with arguably some of the best CGI illusions ever. It's more impressive than much of the turbulent business in sci-fi and superhero pictures because it meets a bigger challenge of passing for something real and solid. After growing sick of how blatantly fake CGI skies have come to look, I had my faith renewed a bit by Zemeckis and his special-effects team, who wisely focus on skylines rather than sky.

Overall The Walk is no masterpiece. It's a little too cute about its nostalgic Frenchness for its own good, and most of Petit's motley crew of accomplices are little more than sketches of characters, though Ben Kingsley inevitably stands out as a crusty mentor figure and Charlotte Le Bon charms as a musician who temporarily subordinates her ambitions to Petit's. Its attempts at suspense as Petit and a partner dodge guards on the 110th floor the night before the "coup" are pointless since we're all at the theater to see the walk we know will happen, but I suppose they serve to remind us how near a thing the walk was. If anything the night before is presented as more of a nail-biter than the walk itself. On the wire Gordon-Levitt is more Chaplinesque in his mastery than Lloyd-like; Harold would show fear all the way. Thankfully, cops appear on both towers to create more suspense through their holy-shit anxiety -- they're like characters in a found-footage movie that way -- and it's almost needless to say that their futile attempts to lure our hero back to safety take us back a little to silent-movie days. There's true thrill-comedy in the classic style every time Petit gracefully reverses course on the wire, first hoisting his balancing pole over his head and onto his shoulders, then turning on the proverbial dime, and with a bloody foot, to keep the show going on. The film's virtues may be wasted on audiences who want more out of a 3-D movie than a man walking a wire, but they're the ones missing out. The Walk is by no means the best movie of the year, but it's certainly one of the most likable movies we've had in some time.

PRE-CODE PARADE: Two By Ralph Ince

Ralph Ince was the younger brother of legendary pioneer film director Thomas H. Ince. Ralph started directing in 1912 after establishing himself as an actor. By the Thirties he was directing what might be described as B+ or A- pictures for RKO: short features packed with action. On the evidence of two films shown on TCM last month Ince was very good at action. Men of America (1932) crosses the western and gangster genres, pitting Chicago-style hoods against old-time cowboys and a young veteran of the World War (Bill "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd) who has to overcome the town's distrust of strangers and new ideas before he can lead the counterattack against crime. For most of the picture his main antagonist is the town patriarch, Smokey Joe Miller (Chic Sale), who we see in a prologue (with Sale out of his typical old-man makeup) taming the Wild West. He resents Jim Parker's potential status as the new hero of the town, and he really resents the attraction his daughter feels for Jim. When crimes start breaking out in town Joe's quick to suspect Jim of everything up to murder. The real culprits are a gang of bank robbers who've holed up in an abandoned, nearly inaccessible cabin waiting for the heat to die down and for their boss to figure out a way to turn their large-denomination bills into usable money without attracting suspicion. Ince cast himself as the leader, Cicero -- named for the Chicago suburb known as Al Capone's headquarters -- and gives a badass performance as a thug with cultural pretensions. When the gang surfs the radio dial and picks up a jazz station Cicero orders them to find some "real" classical music. Ince hardly comes across as an ethnic stereotype, but his film still bends over backwards to avoid any appearance of stigmatizing Italians. Smokey Joe's town is a limited cross-section of America that at least tries to be diverse. There are several ethnic types, including a friendly Italian who gets to tell the gangster's they're disgracing his people, and an old Indian pal of Joe's who boasts that "Indians can fly, too," one of his younger relations being a mail pilot. A lot of these characters die, most of them in a tautly shot siege of the gang hideout pitting sharpshooters against tommy guns. With more resources than a mere B picture would have, Ince covers the action from multiple angles with admirable, laconic clarity.

Three months later, Ince and Boyd teamed up again in Lucky Devils (1933). At first it looks like they've picked up where they left off, opening with a violent bank robbery. Something seems off, however; one of the bank's janitors is wearing blackface and proves to be that insufferable stutterer Roscoe Ates. The gun battle is a movie being filmed within the movie, featuring the band of stuntmen whose drinking club gives the show its title. Boyd and William Gargan are the alphas of the group, with Bruce Cabot and Creighton Chaney among the youngsters. The Lucky Devils roster is written in chalk on a speakeasy blackboard; every so often a line's drawn through one of the names. Another youngster, a newlywed, gets crossed out when he botches a car stunt, distracted by his wife's appearance on the set. Marriage is bad news for stuntmen, we're told, yet after this disaster Skipper Clark (Boyd) marries Fran Whitley (Dorothy Wilson). History threatens to repeat itself when Fran can't resist watching as Skipper has to shoot a risky stunt. He must swing across a street to rescue Bob Hughes (Gargan) from a burning building. In the film's most impressive set piece, Skipper freezes at the sight of Fran and swings too late. In an impressive-in-principle effect we see the roof collapse under Gargan and see him plunge into the flames below. Ince is at his best in the immediate aftermath, letting Boyd (or, ironically, his stuntman) dangle back and forth helplessly as the crew rushes to Gargan's aid before others laboriously haul him in. Even if Boyd is doubled, there's a veracity to the spectacle, as well as emotion without emoting as Boyd's predicament illustrates his guilty anxiety over his friend's fate. Bob Hughes proves a lucky devil after all, but a guilt-stricken Skipper quits the business, only to find job-hunting at the trough of the Depression just as demoralizing. He finally takes work as a menial member of a film crew, stuck on location while Fran faces a dangerous labor. In perfect melodramatic fashion, an opportunity for redemption arises that will also earn Skipper they money necessary to get proper hospital care for Fran. His dangerous trip over some rapids is overshadowed by a frantic race back home from the set, much of it in a stolen police motorcycle, the leads to a genuinely funny anticlimax. Again Ince proves adept at brisk storytelling. At 70 minutes Lucky Devils is epic in length compared to the 58-minute Men of America, but by modern standards its brief without seeming abrupt, a lean and mean storytelling machine. Alas, once I read more about Ince I found retroactive foreshadowing in Lucky Devils, since he, like one of his fictional stuntmen, died in a car wreck, aged only 50 and only four years after making this picture. He'd moved to Britain -- Lucky Devils was his last American film -- and seemingly had plenty of movies left in him. In fact, there's plenty of movies left to see out of Ince's 137 directing credits, and I'll be interested to see how many measure up to the two I've seen.

THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN (2014)

 

Adapted from Qu Bo's novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest, and filmed in 1970, the Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is one of the "eight model plays" canonized during the "Cultural Revolution" in the last decade of Mao Zedong's rule over China. The model plays were meant to counter bourgeois influences in popular culture, but as remade in prose and 3-D late last year by Tsui Hark it looks a lot like a western. That's not because of the period, because the story's set in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Presumably it's not because of any conscious or unconscious aping of American western genre motifs by any of the creators -- with Tsui Hark possibly excepted as a veritable sponge of influences -- because the main plot point, the thing that reminds me of westerns, is based on fact. Yet the story and setting are more evocative of the American west in many ways than what you get in kung fu or wuxia movies that are sometimes thought of as China's westerns. Specifically, The Taking of Tiger Mountain reminds me of "town tamer" westerns, where the subject is the bringing of order to a realm of violent anarchy. And who's more qualified to play the role of the bringer of order than the Chinese Communist Party?

They call it "Tiger Mountain" for a reason.

Take my snark with a grain of salt, though, because you can watch Tiger Mountain and hardly know, except for the references to "PLA," who you're rooting for. While the opera, if not the original novel, presumably had some didactic propaganda content, Tsui Hark's film is practically ideology-free. Mao's name is never mentioned, and nobody in the picture makes the case for communism. Moreover, Mao's great antagonists, the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, are relegated to the sidelines here. Tiger Mountain's PLA is less a revolutionary army than a band of brothers (and a few sisters) determined to bring order, not topple it. Their enemies in this story aren't the Kuomintang, though they loom in the background, but a warlord and his bandit army. Lord Hawk (Tony Leung Ka-Fei) has seized an arsenal abandoned by the Japanese and made himself a power in the north of China, living large by plundering the poor peasants. While the Kuomintang tentatively negotiate with Hawk at arm's length, the People's Liberation Army is determined to break Hawk's power, end his oppression of the helpless peasants, and seize his weapons for the bigger fight to come.

A sort of Lord Hawk did exist, it seems, though he most likely wasn't as bizarre looking as Leung, who's made up to look like a Dick Tracy villain. The comic book simile seems apt since Tsui Hark now strikes me as the man who should have directed the long hoped-for, now forgotten project of a movie version of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip. Tiger Mountain is a big color Sunday page of a movie; the only thing missing is the Batman-style onomatopoeia popping off the screen in three dimensions. The main story is a comic-strip sort of story that you mostly saw in westerns. One of the good guys, Yang Zirong (a real person played by Zhang Hanyu) penetrates Tiger Mountain's defenses by infiltration, pretending to be a bandit whom no one in Hawk's camp, conveniently enough, has seen before, yet bearing expected, important information. Yang goes through the usual tests of loyalty while struggling to preserve his secret. In addition, he must also rescue a captive woman (Yu Nan) who's the mother of the film's lovable scruffy kid. The outcome is certainly never in doubt for Chinese audiences, so the drama is what Tsui Hark, one of the pioneers of modern Hong Kong (and hence global) action cinema, will do with a story that is presumably beloved but is possibly also thought of as hokey relic of a repressive time.

 

  Zhang Hanyu as larger-than-real-life hero Yang Zirong

 

Tsui Hark appears to address the hokeyness issue with a framing sequence set in the modern day. It begins in New York as hip Chinese celebrate the New Year with karaoke. One young man feels nostalgic at the unexpected sight of (I presume) a clip from the 1970 Tiger Mountain movie. He's inspired to go home to China, and there's one poignant moment as the film dissolves from the rugged wilderness treks of 1946 to the modern man's comfortable journey through the same landscape on a high-speed train. This little bit is more effective propaganda for the current Chinese regime than any indoctrination the film might have intended. As one might expect, our traveler has some connection to the characters of the main story. In fact, as a mawkishly upbeat coda suggests, he's linked to all the heroes of the story. If you thought the framing sequences of Saving Pvt. Ryan were corny, avoid this film at all costs.  

Tiger Mountain might best be described as a Spielbergian take on the Chinese Civil War in the old, now slightly unfair pejorative sense of the word, without the gritty pseudo-realism of Spielberg's own war movie. Tsui retains an almost puerile enthusiasm for CGI and 300-type action effects. In a typical gimmick, he'll follow the path of some missile to where an explosion has already taken place, only to reverse time so we can see the actual explosion. Do kids still dig this sort of thing? I'd think they'd take you right out of the movie, but I suppose Chinese audiences aren't looking for gritty realism, regardless of the setting from a film based on Peking opera. Tsui can still put together some impressive set pieces; the most successful is the bandits' ski attack on the peasant village occupied by the PLA and their attempt to break out of a PLA trap, the running house-to-house battle putting fighters on both sides in constantly fluctuating from snipers and bazookas. Throughout, the director seems to have struggled with conflicting impulses: whether to show the action straight or amp it up with effects or crazy stumps. The final scene is his confession that he never actually resolved the conflict. It's actually an alternative ending of the main story, the showdown between Yang Zirong and Lord Hawk. He'd filmed it simple the first time, but calls a do-over so he can add a running fight on the wings of an airplane, a cliff plunge, and a Saboteur homage to the sequence. But by now who cares about all this showing off? It's no more than Tsui Hark shooting himself in the foot in his zeal to entertain, or his anxiety that he hasn't entertained enough. Overall Tiger Mountain is a somewhat childish but harmless romp, elevated by a fine heroic performance by Zhang Hanyu, so long as you don't think of what happened twenty years rather than sixty years later, but that ending leaves you thinking of the thing as a botch because it looks like Tsui thought he'd botched something. A film about a communist revolution for a communist audience ought to show a little more self-confidence. You'd think the government would have insisted on it.

DVR Diary: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS (2014)

 

The Ten Commandments is corny. Everybody knows that. Cecil B. DeMille cheapened the Bible story with melodrama and bad dialogue, but what else could he do? It fell to Ridley Scott, who had already tried to outdo DeMille in Kingdom of Heaven, and a team of writers, to show how the Exodus story could be dramatized -- for there seems to be agreement that the Old Testament narrative can't stand on film on its own -- without old-timey melodrama and corniness. But nearly every step Exodus takes to differentiate itself proves the old-timer's wisdom. C.B. knew your main story was the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh (popularly understood to be Rameses II). Scott agrees, and both directors understood that the conflict can't come down to the two men making speeches at each other. DeMille juices up the conflict by making the antagonists rivals for the same woman. That, presumably, was an element deemed too corny for our time, so instead Scott's writers give us a failed bromance, more like Ben-Hur and Messala than Moses and Pharaoh. Their bro-dom falls apart when Moses (Christian Bale) saves the life of Rameses (Joel Edgerton) during a battle with the Hittites, in apparent fulfillment of a prophecy that makes Moses a potential nemesis for the future Pharaoh. Moses, despite being brought up as a prince of Egypt, is a skeptic toward omens and prophecies, but while Rameses claims to share that skepticism he can't help feelings suspicious. His suspicions magnify when Moses goes on an inspection tour of the city being built with Hebrew slave labor. The prince and general is just as dismissive toward the Hebrew god, but the Hebrew elders (led by Ben Kingsley) have a surprise for him. Apparently the elders have known all along that Moses is one of their own, saved from a proscribed massacre of Hebrew firstborn by his older sister. You might not have realized that Sister Miriam herself was taken into Bythia's household, where she must keep her religion a secret. Anyway, Moses claims not to believe the elders' story, but he promptly begins acting stupid. Having traveled to their quarters incognito, he's accosted by two Egyptian guards who mistake him for a slave. The smart play would have been for our hero to reveal himself as Prince Moses and have the guards back off. Instead, since the Bible says he has to kill an Egyptian, he kills the two guards as two bums watch. They inform the governor, who resents the pressure Moses has put on him and reports the incident to Rameses, who has just become Pharaoh after the death of his father Seti (John Turturro). Rameses puts Miriam to an ordeal to get the truth out of her, while she lies at the risk of losing her arm. Now here Moses might want to intervene because he's a compassionate, progressive guy. He could stop Rameses with a protest that his methods are barbaric, but instead he stops the ordeal by confessing a truth that we weren't sure he even believed. Rameses now has no choice but to exile Moses to the desert, though he does leave his old friend with means to defend himself from assassins sent by the wicked queen mother (Sigourney Weaver).

The story proceeds as usual with Moses starting a family in the land of Midian until his curiosity sends him up the holy mountain. Scott has the mountain resist his advance with a mudslide, after which Moses meets his hotheaded young sidekick, God. The filmmakers try to fudge whether this willful brat (Isaac Andrews) is God himself or just some messenger, but he plays the role God usually takes in the story. Exodus imagines the deity rather like the kid in the Twilight Zone episode, aching for an opportunity to put the whole land of Egypt in the cornfield. Understandably, Moses grows increasingly annoyed with this bloodthirsty little rascal, and we're to understand that his attitude is appropriate as a representative of a people whose name means to wrestle with God.  It really seems appropriate to an age when it isn't cool to prostrate oneself to the great I Am, much less take your sandals off in his ground-sanctifying presence. And Moses above all must remain cool, even if his methods prove inappropriate for the divine purpose. Much as Ben-Hur in the novel and the original silent film organizes an armed uprising to liberate the captive Jesus, so Moses initially sets out to liberate the Hebrews through guerrilla warfare. His first raid looks like quite a success, but Rameses responds with Nazi-style reprisals, after we've seen a Shoah-esque burning of the daily slave casualties, ordering one family hanged daily until the enemy surrenders, while the Pharaoh harangues his subjects from a podium (as played by the pudgy, bald Edgerton) like an ancient Mussolini. So whatever damage Moses and his secret army are doing to Egypt, it rebounds on his own people. The film seems to be making a statement about the futility of violence as a means of liberation, but the force of the message is somewhat lost as God basically says, "Step aside, Butch," and makes with the plagues. Divine terror does its work as usual, and as usual Pharaoh's heart hardens after letting those people go, and I think you can take it from there....

Exodus makes two fatal mistakes in humanizing Moses and minimizing Pharaoh. Tim Burton was on to something, I think, when he remarked in an interview that he found Charlton Heston terrifying once Moses came down from the mountain in the DeMille film. The eerie power Heston has in the second half of that picture comes from the certainty the character has and the certainty the filmmakers have about the character. Modern audiences are thought to distrust certainty, however, and while an uncertain Moses isn't entirely alien to Scripture, Exodus predictably overdoes it by having Moses bicker constantly with his little snot of a god and fall out with his wife over his mission to Egypt. Like many serious-minded modern films Exodus seems more concerned with how its hero feels or thinks than with what he does; it wants us to empathize with Moses in a way DeMille could not have cared less about. While Bale probably does as well as he could with almost hopeless material, Edgerton is a disaster as Rameses. DeMille realized that Pharaoh had to be a mighty man to defy both Moses and God, and Yul Brynner awesomely filled the bill. Perversely, Scott and his writers envision Rameses as an emotional if not mental weakling who seems to be in over his head from the beginning and compensates with petulant posturing. There may be an implicit indictment of rulers who claim godhood or demand worship from their people, but when Edgerton rants about being "the god" it sounds like a childish tantrum rather than blasphemy. Any movie of the Exodus story needs to be a clash of titanic personalities, but Scott's Exodus botches both. The picture looks good if overproduced in that tiresome CGI way, lacking that genuine "ta-daa!" quality of DeMille's best set pieces. There's nothing as horrifically bad in Exodus as some of the bad acting, from Anne Baxter to extras, in Ten Commandments, but nothing in the new film rises to the level of the old film's magic. That may be because ultimately Exodus has no faith in itself or its story. I'm not saying you have to be a true believer, Jew, Christian or Muslim, to tell this myth right, but if you're going to tell it you've got to commit to it on its own terms, or else what's the point? So now Scott and DeMille are even. Scott easily outclassed the old man by making probably the best Crusades movie ever, but they'll probably still be playing DeMille's Moses movie on TV every Passover long after Exodus is justly forgotten.

009-1: THE END OF THE BEGINNING (2013)

 

The U.S. isn't the only place where moviemakers have polished up comic-book heroes for new cinematic life. In Japan, Toei released Koichi Sakamoto's update of a character created in the 1960s by manga legend Shotaro Ishinomori to commemorate Ishinomori's 75th birthday. 009-1 seems to have been a "mature audiences" conceptual spinoff of Ishinomori's better-known Cyborg 009 series. Maybe he had a lucky number.009-1 became a live-action TV show and an anime series in the 21st century. Sakamoto's film is an even more "mature audiences" take on the concept, though one of its more hair-raising elements, the machine guns built into the title-character's cybernetic boobs, apparently was there from the beginning. While Hollywood often tries to legitimize comic-book subject matter by making it "serious" to a sometimes-oppressive extent, Japan apparently upgrades similar material for adult audiences by making it kinkier.

 

Ishinomori imagined a bipolar world divided between East and West in which "J-country" is a neutral zone in which agents for both sides operate. Mylene Hoffman (Mayuko Iwasa) is Agent 009-1, investigating a human-trafficking ring. We see she's a cool customer early on; when the trafficking kingpin arbitrarily kills a niteclub waiter for serving an improperly-cooked steak, 009, disguised as a dancer, is the only girl still dancing afte the gunshot while the others cower on the stage floor. That gets the bad guy's attention. He takes her off for sex, arousing his moll's jealousy, after which 009 kills him, arousing the moll's lust for revenge. While routing the traffickers, 009 rescues a young man, Chris (Minehiro Kinomoto), who hums a tune that stirs long-buried memories in Mylene. She flashes back to childhood, when the tune was a lullaby hummed by her mother, whose face she can't remember, to Mylene and her brother. 009 falls in love with Chris, apparently not guessing what audiences ought to have figured out immediately, but there's other stuff going on they won't have guessed.

 

Above: Mylene dances with herself

Below: Busted.

The bad guys are after 009-1's mentor and maker, Dr. Klein (Aya Sugimoto). After 009 rescues the doctor, a seemingly superpowered female fighter, possibly another cyborg, appears to reclaim her, routing Mylene and everything else in her path. Botching her assignment in her distracted state gets 009 in trouble with her bosses, but she resolves to rescue Klein again and learn more about her past. She won't like what she learns.

 

009-1 gets a mechanical tongue bath, or do robots identify people by taste?

Suffice it to say that Mylene is in for some jarring revelations until nearly everything she thought she knew is proven wrong. Worst of all is the revelation of Chris's true identity and his true agenda. How bad is it? Let me assure you that building an incestuous lesbian robot is only the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Klein is determined not to be outdone, however. She distinguishes herself among modern mad scientists with her theory that cyborgs stacked with superweapons will be surpassed by undead mutants (in Japanese, "undead mutants"). The film distinguishes itself among modern mad movies by theorizing that Mylene, a cyborg, can telepathically read the minds of undead mutants. Their thoughts run along the lines of "please kill me," which would seem to prove Dr. Klein wrong, along with 009-1's ability to beat them all single-handedly. This is a film in which undead mutants are only preliminary adversaries, for there remains an uncomfortable reckoning with Mylene's dismal excuse for a family, with an exploding helicopter thrown in in case that gets dull....

 

On this evidence, the Japanese feel no need to legitimize comic-book stories by throwing money at them. End of the Beginning has the production values of a CW genre show, or slightly less. With most of the film's imagination spent on its icky plot, the action is unimaginatively staged and set mostly in the drab warehouse world of the B picture. CGI blood flows aplenty while a CGI helicopter is added to a background in order to explode on contact with a flying combatant, after which the filmmakers seem to forget that there should still be a burning hulk in some scenes. For all its theoretical transgressiveness, the picture proves strangely reticent about showing 009-1's deadliest weapons from the front.  End of the Beginning really does only two things successfully. It often fills the screen with attractive women, and that lullaby is one hell of an earwig. I watched this film a week ago and it's still looping through my brain. At the very least, this picture is a memorable experience. Whether you'll enjoy the memories is up to you.

Pre-Code Parade: THE ROADHOUSE MURDER (1932)

Chick Brian (Eric Linden) is one of the dumbest heroes you'll ever see in an ostensibly dramatic picture. He's a reporter on the Daily Star, struggling to win the approval of hard-charging editor Dale (Roscoe Karns). Chick is in big trouble with his boss because his attempted expose of a diamond smuggler has blown up in his face: the alleged smuggler, whom he captured in a candid shot in her bathtub, is the mistress of the newspaper's owner and Dale has to bury the story. Chick desperately wants a big scoop to gain the editor's favor and secure his future with Mary Agnew (Dorothy Jordan), the police inspector's daughter. Chick and Mary get caught in the rain while spooning in his dysfunctional convertible. They find shelter at the Lame Dog Inn, an isolated roadhouse with a creepy German guy (Gustav von Seyffertitz) for a caretaker and a lone guest.They're barely settled in for the night when they hear shots. They find one man shot and the other strangled, and stumble upon the perpetrator (Bruce Cabot) and his moll (Phyllis Clare) hunting for loot. The gunman holds the young couple at bay as he and the moll make their exit through a window, the moll leaving behind an incriminating handbag. Mary wants to call the police right away but Chick is thinking scoop. Mary warns him that the longer they stay without calling the cops, the more likely they could be incriminated by mistake. Why, look: Chick dropped a cufflink on the floor! If a detective found that he could trace it to Chick and assume he's the killer, which makes it a good thing they've got the moll's handbag. Here's where Chick gets real stupid. He knows that he could be easily incriminated and easily exonerated. So why not frame himself? Why not leave more incriminating evidence like a torn-up envelope with his name and address on it, along with the cufflink? Why not let himself be suspected, and pursued, as long as he can clear himself at any time with the handbag, which presumably would lead the cops straight to the moll and her man? What a story that'd be!

Chick reports the murder to the Star anonymously before calling the police and proceeds to act suspiciously as the cops investigate the scene, knowing in advance that two men, not one, are dead before they open the room where the second body lies. As they collect evidence, he knows it's just a matter of time before they piece the envelope together and suspect him of the murder. Without letting on that he can prove his innocence, he convinces Editor Dale to run his fugitive dispatches as front-page stories. Chick plans to milk the story for as long as possible before turning himself in and standing trial. The long-term plan is to prove his innocence on the witness stand, to have Mary bring the handbag into the courtroom at the crucial moment. I'm no legal expert, but I'm not sure that would work. The jury would only have Chick and Mary's word that they found the handbag at the crime scene, and that whatever evidence they produced out of it was in the bag when they found it. If authorities believe this, they should also believe that, at the least, our couple tampered with a crime scene and, at the worst, they obstructed justice by withholding evidence so Chick could publicize himself.

There's one problem with this brilliant scheme. The real killer, Dykes, knows who Mary Agnew is. We first see her posing for a newspaper picture with her dad, and when our villain reads the paper he recognizes the policeman's daughter as the girl at the roadhouse, who most likely has the incriminating handbag that his dumb moll left there. He's not taking chances until he can be more sure, but when Chick announces at the trial that he'll produce evidence to exonerate himself the next day, it's pretty obvious to those in the know what that evidence is. How exactly Dykes guesses that Chick wants Mary to deliver the handbag to him at the jail the night before the trial resumes, so he can reveal it from the witness stand, is unclear, but with criminal cunning Dykes manages to bump into Mary on the sidewalk, snatch the handbag and disappear. Oops.

Writer-director J. Walter Ruben really painted himself into a corner this time and had to resort to an unconvincing twist to save his hero, even if Chick really is too dumb to live. He and "additional dialogue" collaborator Gene Fowler must have realized they had a dud on their hands, for they attempted to redeem it with gratuitous, superfluous content. The opening sequence, Chick's attempted entrapment of the "smuggler," is pure Pre-Code titilation, the whole point being to see an actress strip (from behind, of course, and with the camera heading downward before her robe does) and get caught taking a bath. More gratuitous yet, more superfluous yet, and less forgivable, is the injection of stuttering specialist Roscoe Ates in two scenes as purported comic relief: an interview with a detective and a scene on the witness stand that seems to have no plausible motivation whatsoever except that stuttering is funny! Ates clearly was assumed to be an extra added attraction -- note the stuttering emphasis on him in the ad above -- but he only makes the picture worse for modern audiences. Pictures like The Roadhouse Murder are necessary reminders that the greater "frankness" of Pre-Code compared to the subsequent classic era of Code Enforcement isn't necessarily synonymous with sophistication, or wit, or even intelligence. I can imagine this same story being remade as a comedy today; that's how dumb it is.

Pre-Code Parade: MAKE ME A STAR (1932)

Merton of the Movies began its existence as a short story by Harry Leon Wilson. Two knights of the Algonquin Round Table, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, made it into a hit Broadway play in 1922. It was first made into a movie, now lost, two years later.  Paramount remade it as a talkie and for some reason redubbed it Make Me a Star. Did the studio executives worry that the story was already old hat in some eyes and needed to be disguised? Almost a generation later, M-G-M would take a crack at it and went back to the original title. It makes you wonder whether there's something qualitatively different about the Paramount film, directed by William "One Shot" Beaudine from an adaptation by three writers. Based on the evidence on the screen, one could believe that Make Me A Star is a somewhat darker version of the Merton story. It definitely taps into a sense of desperation appropriate to the Great Depression, especially when compared to Harold Lloyd's treatment of a similar subject the same year in Movie Crazy. That film was old hat insofar as it was the same old Lloyd persona from silent days, the bumbling but indefatigable go-getter, trying to make it in Hollywood. By comparison, Stu Erwin's title-fulfilling performance as Merton in Make Me a Star is a portrait recognizable to modern viewers of a troublingly obsessive personality, vested with as much pathology as pathos.

As spoken in the film by Merton Gill, the title is a prayer to God. Stardom is Merton's only possible escape from the small-town hell where he works as an assistant shopkeeper. His obsession ultimately estranges him from his adoptive father, who tells Merton that if he wants to get to Hollywood he better catch the morning train. Merton, of course, is only one of a talentless multitude trying their luck in the movie capital. His would be a dull story if he were only talentless, but the genius of the story is that he's pretentiously talentless. Merton is dedicated to the high dramatic art of moving pictures, despising comedy, but his idea of high dramatic art is the Buck Benson series of B-westerns (at best) made by Majestic pictures. In Hollywood he's determined only to work at Majestic, a mirror-universe version of Paramount where many of the real studio's real stars work and appear in pretty pointless cameos for publicity's sake. He haunts the Majestic casting office for days and weeks waiting for an opportunity, insisting that his correspondence-course acting class entitles him to consideration for speaking parts rather than extra work, until hard-boiled studio girl "Flips" Montague (Joan Blondell) takes pity on him and pulls strings to get him a bit part with one line in a Buck Benson picture. In an all too predictable progression, he nails the line in rehearsal but finds different ways to botch it in each live take, finally nailing it again after he's been thrown off the set and the crew breaks for lunch.

After noticing his absence for several days from the casting office, Flips finds Merton foraging for scraps in the wreckage of former sets, lamenting how he'd stashed a plate of cold beans inside a desk only to have the desk taken away. He'd never left the lot because he was afraid he'd never be allowed back on after his debacle. Flips tries to find work for him and finally convinces the studio's comedy producer to try him out. The diabolical idea is that Merton, using his chosen screen name of Whoop Ryder ("I bet there's a story behind that!" Jack Oakie opines) will star in a parody of the Buck Benson films. The key to the comedy, the director believes, is for naive Merton to play the part absolutely straight according to his idea of high cinematic art. He must not be allowed to realize that he's in a comedy picture, and he's clueless enough for this to be relatively easy. The only stumbling block is the casting of Ben Turpin (himself), a vulgar comic Merton despises so much he can't even call him by name, referring to him only as "the cross-eyed man." He accepts the explanation that Turpin has long aspired to change his image and prove himself as a dramatic actor. Special effects will take care of the rest.

The sneak preview of the Whoop Ryder picture is a hit with the audience but a nightmare for Merton and Buck Benson. Benson can't stand the parody of himself, while Merton can't stand that he's being laughed at after being tricked by the studio. Beaudine films this so you empathize with Merton; the comedy isn't very good, really, yet people are making braying asses of themselves laughing at it. In a Producers-like reversal Merton is poised to be a comedy star but he's ready to head back home in self-imposed disgrace, until he hears two studio men talk about the genius of his performance. Then, determined to prove to Flips that he's no fool, he returns to her to explain how he knew what was going on all along. Parroting what he'd heard from the studio men, he tries to build himself up into a comic genius until he breaks down in the girl's arms. It's a brilliant climax to what's probably the best work Stu Erwin ever did on film and a genuinely great performance, eloquently incoherent, naively insane, vaguely disturbing but indisputably sympathetic. The irony of it, at least as the publicists told it later, was that after this picture Erwin could have written his own ticket in Hollywood, but turned down a lead role in a forthcoming Paramount picture because he didn't feel ready for stardom. I wonder whether you can draw a line linking that self-analysis to the performance he gave and how much of himself he put in it.