Pre-Code Parade: LIFE BEGINS (1932)

Over a beatific close up of Loretta Young, the words "Life Begins" appear where we expect to see "The End." There's irony, one part grim and one part devout, to the way co-directors James Flood and Elliott Nugent end this Warner Bros. picture. Irony reaches deep with this one: Life Begins is a maternity-ward (or "laying-in hospital) ensemble piece adapted from a play written by Mary McDougal Axelson. Forty-one years later, Axelson would be beaten to death in her hospital bed by her own daughter. I don't think we'll top that for irony all year.

The irony hits particularly hard because Life Begins is all about mother love and the sacrifices mothers are willing to make for their newborn or unborn children. While it's clearly an ensemble piece once you see it, Loretta Young gets top billing in what proves to be one of the most thankless starring roles in her career. She plays a convicted murderess (we're to understand that she was justified but lacked a proper legal team) sent to the laying-in hospital to give birth before resuming her 20-year sentence. Young doesn't show up until the film is about a third over. By that time Frank McHugh has just about wrapped up his character turn as a nervous expectant dad. His wife has a successful birth after their last try ended with a stillborn baby. McHugh credits this to his lucky rabbit's foot, which he hands off to Young's husband (Eric Linden). Combine that detail with the information that the wing of the hospital to which Young's assigned is for those cases expected to be difficult and dangerous for the mothers, and you can begin to see where the film is headed. Worse for Young from a professional standpoint, by the time her character has been installed in the ward, Glenda Farrell has already marked her territory. Farrell is an alcoholic showgirl preparing to deliver twins, whom she hopes to sell immediately, regardless of state law, having no interest whatsoever in motherhood. To compete with Farrell in this picture is like competing for oxygen with fire. The scenery goes up in flames as she parades through the ward drunkenly improvising verses to the tune of "Frankie and Johnny" satirizing her fellow mothers before she collapses with labor pains.

The ward collects a range of maternal types, from an immigrant mother who lost her baby but nurses Farrell's to (the horror!) a single mother -- her introduction as a Miss rather than a Mrs. draws gasps from some patients. Also wandering in occasionally is a crazy woman from one of the upper floors who claims to have been pregnant for years -- she blames the doctors' lack of faith for her failing to deliver the child -- and later steals a newborn from the display window where the brats were shown off in those days. Talking her down and otherwise keeping the other mothers in line is Aline MacMahon's gently no-nonsense head nurse. Underplaying with authority, MacMahon is the one actress who withstands Farrell's rampage to make a really memorable impression.

The theme of the picture and the source play has to do with a maternal instinct that overcomes all other character traits. The single mother who vowed not to get emotional over her baby violates her vow pretty quickly. Farrell, learning that potential foster parents don't want both twins and that one of the pair is sickly, takes the side of the underdog and decides to keep her babies. Her mother love appears to cure the sick twin on the spot. Young is faced with a medical if not an ethical crisis. She's having a difficult labor, as foreshadowed; her options are to endure a natural labor that will kill the baby or undergo a C-section that could kill her. Her husband resists what he takes as the doctors' insistence on the Caesarian, resenting the inference that jailbound Young might be better off dead. He demands that his wife be saved at all costs, but Loretta makes a different call....

 Life Begins was an adults-only attraction in some theaters, which tells you what Pre-Code cinema was up against in its time. It's hard to imagine anything about it being deemed inappropriate to children now, though some younger viewers may find Farrell a little frightening. 1932 was a more reticent time, and the times would get still more reticent soon enough. The overall sensibility here is less Pre-Code (despite Pre-C avatar Farrell) than Pathos of Renunciation from the previous generation. That actually works in the film's favor somewhat, since it probably was more daring, even in Pre-Code times, to have an unhappy ending, however transcendent the movie tries to make it, than to discuss the complications of childbirth. Combining those two elements makes Life Begins definitely worth seeing for Pre-Code fans, and pop-culture historians can certainly have a field day with it. Despite what I say jokingly about Farrell, she makes this fun to watch for general-interest film fans, too.

DVR Diary: LIFE OF OHARU (1952)

By coincidence, Turner Classic Movies is showing William Wellman's Heroes For Sale as I write this review. It's a coincidence because Heroes For Sale is the movie Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 film most reminds me of. Just as Heroes chronicles the ups and downs of one of society's victims, with an emphasis on the downs, Life of Oharu treats the fortunes and misfortunes of a promising young woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose life is cursed by one understandable mistake. She seems all the more accursed because the mistake is only in the eyes of her repressive society and culture in 17th century Japan. The mistake, to be specific, is that she fell for a humble retainer, a man beneath her class station. That the man is Toshiro Mifune, albeit almost unrecognizably clean-cut and romantic, matters not. Such a romance across class lines is a crime in the Tokugawa era. Oharu, along with her parents (for failing to raise her right, I guess) are exiled from court, while the Mifune character is decapitated, though not before dictating a last request that Oharu manage to find happiness with someone else someday.

For Oharu, the punishment must be like being sent back to live with your parents, only to have them evicted because of you. Her father certainly resents it and looks for every opportunity to exploit her in order to regain some of his former position or prestige. He hires her out to the local daimyo as a concubine who'll bear a child before being discarded. Dad expects at least 300 ryo for this, but only gets five. Too bad that he'd already bought some textiles on credit, expecting the bigger payoff. To help pay off dad's debts, Oharu is put to work as a courtesan. It looks like she'll find a sugar daddy in the form of a rich bumpkin who's been saving his coins for twenty years waiting to blow it all in town. Oharu intrigues him because she haughtily refuses to scramble like the other courtesans for the coins he scatters about the place. He offers to buy her off her employers while boasting to her that he'll find her price. Before he can leave with her, however, his money is revealed as counterfeit. A better man finally shows up: an expert fan maker who opens his own shop with Oharu as his salesperson, but this relative idyll ends abruptly when this rare good guy is mugged and murdered. From there the descent is swift, and before long Oharu is an aging street prostitute, as we found her at the start of the picture, all of the above being her flashback.

One more humiliation awaits. Rescued from her plight by her elderly mother, she's told that her son by the daimyo, now the daimyo himself, has invited Oharu to live with him in the palace. It turns out to be a set-up: Oharu is too much an embarrassment to everyone to be allowed to wander the world free. But before the authorities lock her up for life they allow her a Stella Dallas like look at her boy, whom she's never really known, as he takes his daily walk without acknowledging her existence. Somehow she manages to escape the grim fate planned for her, but the future she escapes to is hardly less grim. Just as Heroes For Sale ends with the hero's future still uncertain as he's driven out of town with a band of unemployed men, Oharu wraps with the heroine a Buddhist beggar going door to door as the soundtrack sings of vows to overcome the snares of earthly life. Mizoguchi toes the line between pessimism and philosophy. While Heroes still pays lip service to the American Dream, Oharu's close suggests that all dreams, like all desires, are hopeless, the only real hope being transcendence of desire. That's harsh for a movie that started with Oharu as a martyr for romantic love, but the song itself strikes an almost hopeful note with its beauty, even if the argument seems paradoxical: our only hope is to abandon hope, or at least one kind of hope in favor of another.

If anything, Mizoguchi's film may make you more indignant than the often furious Heroes, since at least some of the hero's misfortunes in the Wellman film can be written off to bad breaks, while Oharu is more consistently the victim of a vicious social system. In both cases, directorial craftsmanship softens the blow while making a point. Mizoguchi directs elegantly, relying often on fluid camera movements; his films that I've seen have always been enjoyable to watch regardless of the content. Oharu is a vehicle for Kinuyo Tanaka, regarded by many as Japan's greatest film actress, and while it may be stretching things for the 43 year old to play the young woman in the early scenes -- Mifune, more than a decade her junior, throws himself quite eagerly at a cougar's feet -- she hardly makes a false move thereafter. Oharu may seem like a thankless role, with one damn thing after another befalling her -- but Tanaka's poise and presence master the material and make Life of Oharu as much a tribute to female resilience as it is a protest against female victimization.

DEATH RIDES A HORSE (Da uomo a uomo, 1967)

Quentin Tarantino talks today about how much Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns influenced him and inspired Tarantino's own western Django Unchained, but no Corbucci film has as obvious an influence on the new film as Giulio Petroni's Da uomo a uomo had on Tarantino's Kill Bill. That film borrows Petroni's device of the red flashbacks, zooming into the observer's eyes, whenever the hero encounters a past tormentor. It samples Ennio Morricone's hellish chorus when The Bride invades the House of Blue Leaves. If anything, the absence of any obvious echoes of Death Rides a Horse may explain why Django Unchained seems relatively uninspired. It's as if Tarantino had already milked spaghetti westerns for all he could get out of them, so that by the time he did the closest thing to his own spaghetti western he was down to second or third choices in his head for the music or the visual motifs. As one of the greatest spaghetti westerns in the revenge category, Petroni's film shows up Tarantino's western for its lack of passion.

It opens with an atrocity, a gang descending upon a modest home and massacring a family. The masked men shoot down the father and rape the mother and daughter before blowing them away. In their fury they neglect the youngest child, a son, who sees the nightmare unfold in fragments from under a table. He catches random details that'll prove crucial later: a tattoo; a scar; a spur for an earring. But he might have died in the house when the gang set it afire except for a faceless figure wearing a skull pendant who takes him out and sets him under a wagon.

 

The boy, Bill, grows into a self-trained gunfighter (John Phillip Law), but before he even begins his mission we're introduced to a rival avenger. Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) rode with the same gang but was cheated out of his share of a job and framed for it. We see him released after 15 years on the rockpile, his gun implausibly in perfect working order after sitting in the wardern's desk drawer the entire time. The gang is waiting for him, but he eludes an ambush. Petroni cleverly avoids violence here, having Ryan cut the men's saddles so they can't ride after him, delaying the moment when hell breaks loose. As well, he and co-writer Luciano Vincenzoni immediately get us thinking that whatever else Ryan is, he could be one of the men who killed Bill's family.

The ingenious idea of Death Rides a Horse is its concept of rival avengers. Bill and Ryan fall into "Good" and "Ugly" columns, Bill fueled by years of rage, Ryan more of a Parker type (as in Point Blank) concerned with getting what was rightly his. Their paths cross repeatedly, beginning with Ryan's visit to the graves of Bill's family. Each wants first crack at the old gang members and finds ways to trick the other or leave him behind without a horse. As long as Bill doesn't suspect Ryan of being one of the killers and Ryan doesn't think Bill's after his money, theirs is an almost friendly competition, Ryan at times acting as Bill's mentor or backup in gunfights. But as long as they remain rivals they're at a disadvantage against a gang whose members, some of whom have settled into respectable or semi-respectable occupations, are not entirely stupid. In turn, their enemies will get the upper hand on each man, framing Ryan for a new robbery until Bill breaks him out of jail, simply overwhelming Bill and burying him to his neck to torture him. If the antagonists are stupid, it's because they don't see fit to kill either of their pursuers outright. But as plenty of people will tell you, spaghetti westerns are about cruelty, not common sense.

Petroni takes a final turn into Magnificent Seven territory as Ryan, while rescuing Bill from that last predicament, liberates an oppressed village the gang had made their territory, and the two men lead the villagers' defense against the returning remainder of the gang. Only at the brink of the final assault does Bill learn the truth about Ryan -- but whatever his responsibility for the past, can Bill indulge his rage when he and the village needs Ryan's gun? And will Ryan live up to his promise not to run from a final accounting afterward?

Death Rides a Horse was Van Cleef's first film after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and while he shares the show with Law the veteran character actor proves himself a star capable of commanding a film. He gives the film the gravitas his Col. Mortimer lent to Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More while portraying a quite different personality. In his best Italian westerns, Van Cleef infuses the sometimes superficial subgenre with the sterner spirit of the classic American "adult" or "psychological" westerns of the 1950s where he so often toiled as a minion. At his side, John Phillip Law is appropriately earnest above all, though Bill isn't entirely humorless. Part of the film's suspense is the way Bill gets caught up in the game he's playing with Ryan, tempting us to forget that he could find cause to kill the older man -- if he can -- at any random moment. Law has moments of almost childish rage that remind us of how emotionally dangerous he is; a standout moment is when he slaps a suddenly-drawn derringer out of an enemy's hand with a kind of infantile fury and a grunt expressing something between dismay and disgust, as if the man had shown him a dead bird or a severed finger as a joke. Law's volatilty counterbalances Van Cleef's stoic self-interest throughout, making them one of the better spaghetti teams for this one joint outing.

Carlo Carlini's cinematography is tremendous, from the horrific opening in a nighttime rainstorm to gigantic outdoor vistas. Morricone's main chorus is awe-inspiring: you can understand how that music would inspire fantasies in a creatively impressionable mind like Tarantino's. Petroni and Carlini had impressed me visually with their follow-up western, A Sky Full of Stars For a Roof, but the story here has the latter film beat by a mile. Death Rides a Horse is readily available on public-domain discs, and is sometimes shown in pan-and-scan form on the Encore Westerns channel, but definitely see it on a proper widescreen disc or on the Netflix stream if you can. Watch this spaghetti western and you'll understand why people make homages to the genre.

Now Playing: JAN. 7, 1933

Opening at the Alhambra in Milwaukee, a film utterly unknown to me -- intended to launch its co-stars as the "Sweethearts Incomparable."

Line of the day: "I like trees better than men. They're straight."

Farrell was usually teamed with Janet Gaynor, dating back to their silent hits Seventh Heaven and Street Angel.The Farrell-Bennett team in this Raoul Walsh western didn't work out, though Walsh would use Bennett in his next picture, Me and My Girl. While I haven't seen Wild Girl, it played the Museum of Modern Art in New York last fall as part of MOMA's annual film preservation festival, and with Turner Classic Movies showing more Fox films lately I'll probably end up seeing it eventually. Until then, here's TCM's synopsis and stats.

Now Playing: JAN. 6, 1933

At the Riverside in Milwaukee, Frank Capra before Capracorn: his fourth picture in as many years with Barbara Stanwyck, whom he made a star with 1930's Ladies of Leisure, and one of those conflicted Pre-Code pictures that implicitly criticize the taboo against miscegenation while bowing to its strictures.

Wrecking an empire may be an exaggeration, but that's what ballyhoo is for. Nils Asther follows in the footsteps of Warner (Charlie Chan) Oland as a Scandinavian passing for Asian, and while it would certainly have been better had Capra the courage to cast an actual Chinese actor as the tragic General Yen there's still some courage in this picture, even if it only goes as far as controversy in adapting a "hotly debated" novel.

At the Warner:

I saw this King Vidor film for Samuel Goldwyn last month. It has the producer's vaunted "touch," being slickly and tastefully made, but the Goldwyn Touch seems to sacrifice something essential to Pre-Code cinema. Cynara is mildly entertaining and well performed, but I emphasize the "mild" while steering those out for real Pre-Code meat or spice elsewhere.

Meanwhile, 1933 isn't even a week old and already Zasu Pitts has turned up twice. You can see Strangers of the Evening in some public-domain box sets. As the copy promises, it's an "old dark house" style comedy with Pitts in full nervous-Nellie mode. If you like that -- if you've seen it -- you'll like this.

At the Wisconsin:

Speaking of racial insensitivity not only does Warner Oland do his Chinese act again here, but Helen Hayes, Lewis Stone and M-G-M's all-purpose ethnic Ramon Novarro do the squint as well -- and there's a minstrel show on stage! Maybe it's OK because these are real black people -- but look at that ad art! This program definitely sets the political-incorrectness standard for the year so far.

DVR Diary: THE SHOW OF SHOWS (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

Now Playing: JAN. 5, 1933

Nowadays, one of the first releases of a new year is usually a horror movie. So it was in Milwaukee in January 1933.

 

Here's a local review of the movie.

I should note that, contrary to the first ad, there are no wolf women on the island of Dr. Moreau, but that's ballyhoo for you. Island of Lost Souls was recently canonized through its inclusion in the Criterion Collection, and it's one of the films from the golden age of horror that retains its power to give people the creeps. Those that do generally tap into our anxiety about the existence or proximity of subhumans -- think of Freaks or White Zombie, for instance. There's something about the idea that Pre-Code gets right that makes these films more disturbing, maybe in a subtle way, than more modern horrors with more sophisticated makeups and effects. Remakes of the Moreau story, at least, haven't topped Island.

More tomorrow!