For Halloween: The top 100 horror films

 Hello! Since I wrote my books about horror films, people ask me what my favorite horror films are. These are many and mostly weird. I like such oddball choices as Island of Lost Souls, The Tingler, Society, Vampire Circus, and Quatermass and the Pit. 

However, when it comes to a definitive list, I was definitely scratching my head. Finally, I created a Top Ten for each decade of the horror film. Put these lists all together, and you have what I consider to be a pretty comprehensive assemblage of 100 films you can explore to your heart's content. 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1920s

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920)

Destiny (1921)

Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (1922)

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Waxworks (1924)

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

The Unknown (1927)

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1930s

Dracula (1931)

Frankenstein (1931)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

M (1931)

The Mummy (1932)

Freaks (1932)

The Invisible Man (1933)

King Kong (1933)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Mad Love (1935)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1940s

The Wolf Man (1941)

Cat People (1942)

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

The Seventh Victim (1943)

The Body Snatcher (1945)

Dead of Night (1945)

Hangover Square (1945)

Isle of the Dead (1945)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Bedlam (1946)

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1950s

The Thing (from Another World) (1951)

It Came from Outer Space (1951)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Godzilla (1954)

Them! (1954)

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

(The Horror of) Dracula (1958)

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1960s

House of Usher (1960)

Jigoku (1960)

Peeping Tom (1960)

Psycho (1960)

The Innocents (1961)

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Kill, Baby . . . Kill! (1966)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1970s

The Devils (1971)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Wicker Man (1973)

It’s Alive (1974)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Deep Red (1975)

Suspiria (1977)

Eraserhead (1977)

Halloween (1978)

Alien (1979)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1980s

Friday the 13^th (1980)

The Shining (1980)

The Howling (1981)

The Thing (1982)

Videodrome (1983)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Aliens (1986)

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)

Near Dark (1987)

They Live (1988)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE 1990s

It (1990)

Misery (1990)

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Candyman (1992)

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Scream (1996)

Cure (1997)

Funny Games (1997)

I Stand Alone (1998)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE OUGHTS

American Psycho (2000)

Battle Royale (2000)

The Cell (2000)

Audition (2001)

The Others (2001)

28 Days Later . . . (2002)

May (2002)

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

The Host (2006)

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

 

TOP TEN HORROR FILMS OF THE TEENS

I Saw the Devil (2010)

John Dies at the End (2012)

We Are What We Are (2013)

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Crimson Peak (2015)

Green Room (2015)

Raw (2016)

Get Out (2017)

It Comes at Night (2017)

The Shape of Water (2017)

NFR Project: 'The Power and the Glory' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Power and the Glory’

Dir: William K. Howard

Scr: Preston Sturges

Pho: James Wong Howe

Ed: Paul Weatherwax

Premiere: Aug. 16, 1933

76 min.

The real story here is the debut of the brilliant screenwriter, Preston Sturges. He was destined to be the creator of screwball classics such as Christmas in July, Hail the Conquering Hero, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. However, he got his start as a serious New York playwright.

He went to Hollywood to make money. He did, but he was unhappy with the group writing process of the time, in which draft after draft was tinkered with by successive waves of itinerant screenwriters on a studio’s payroll. Sturges wanted to be the sole author of a film. So, he sat down and dreamed up The Power and the Glory, and wrote out not a synopsis, as was common, but a complete shooting script.

The head of Fox Studios, Jesse Lasky, paid Sturges handsomely for the script and, for the first time, gave him a percentage of the film’s profits. The remarkable agreement they cemented allowed Sturges to attend the development and making of the film, giving him a valuable education in producing and directing.

The film is unique for its time in that it uses a number of non-chronological flashbacks to tell its story. The studio was so impressed with this device that they dubbed it “narratage” and put up a plaque recording this fact at the theater where the film premiered. Decades later, film critic Pauline Kael would make the argument that this device presaged and perhaps inspired Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane script, which certainly bears parallels with this film.

It's the story of a rich, mean dead guy (Spencer Tracy, who ages from his 20s to his 60s in the film, pretty convincingly). Everybody speaks badly of him after his funeral. His only defender is his childhood friend and business secretary, who walks us with reminiscence back through the hidden details of the tycoon’s life.

He starts off as an unambitious, happy-go-lucky track walker for the railroad. He falls in love, gets married, and his wife (Colleen Moore) urges him to educate himself and rise in the company. He becomes a designer and developer, rises higher and higher, finally becomes the head man. He grows hard and uncaring, all business.

Then he falls for a young socialite, leaves his wife, gets remarried. In a plot twist that wouldn’t be allowed later due to the Production Code, his adult son impregnates his wife. The tycoon finds out about it and kills himself.

This fairly turgid proceeding is innovative in the way in which it is told. However, the themes of ambition and betrayal are familiar melodramatic devices. Tracy shows off his range in the film, and Colleen Moore, a silent comedy star, handles the role of his wife ably. James Wong Howe’s beautiful cinematography helps too. Altogether, a rare example of mature movie art of a kind that soon would no longer be made.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: She Done Him Wrong.

NFR Project: 'King Kong' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘King Kong’

Dir: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Scr: James Creelman, Ruth Rose

Pho: Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, J.O. Taylor

Ed: Ted Cheesman

Premiere: March 2, 1933

100 min.

“Listen, I’m going to make the greatest picture in the world! Something that nobody’s ever seen or heard of!” – Carl Denham, Kong’s captor

It makes the impossible plausible. It makes a towering monster out of an 18-inch figure. It still confounds first-time viewers with its bold storytelling and astonishing special effects. One of Hollywood’s best movies still stands the test of time.

The film’s premise can be attributed to a dream of Merian C. Cooper’s. Cooper, an adventurer and movie maker, had with his partner, cinematographer Ernest B. Schoedsack, made several outstanding silent-era documentaries. (One of them, Grass (1925), is also on the National Film Registry list.) Cooper dreamed of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, fighting with airplanes. From this titanic climax, the story wrote itself backwards to its beginning.

Daredevil documentary film producer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) has a secret map, and a secret mission in mind. He’s going to make a new documentary on an unknown island, a film that will surpass anything ever seen. He hires a ship and crew, and prepares to head out to this undisclosed location.

One last-minute problem vexes him – he wants a beautiful girl to come along, to appear in the film. He can’t get any self-respective actress to sign on. Desperate, he searches the city streets, and finds a young, impoverished woman, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). He convinces her that he is on the up and up, and she joins the expedition.

On they travel, exposing the developing relationship of Ann and Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), the ship’s first mate. (We are unfortunately given a stereotyped Chinese cook.) Denham reiterates his movie as being about “Beauty and the Beast.” Finally, moving slowly through the fog, they hear the sound of breakers – only it’s not breakers, it’s the sound of drums.

They go ashore, finding a native village at the foot of an enormous wall that separates their peninsula from the rest of the island. There, the natives worship Kong. (Once again, racial stereotyping abounds, as these are bone-in-your-nose, gibberish-spouting Africans, led by the great character actor Noble Johnson, who does his best with the nonsense he has to recite.)

Of course, they want the white woman. No deal; the group returns to the ship. The natives, under cover of darkness, kidnap Ann. They open the enormous entrance set in the wall, tie her to two posts, and retreat to the top of the wall. A gong is rung, and out of the jungle comes . . . Kong.

It took a team of technicians and artists to create the effects that worked so wonderfully. Cooper and Schoedsack recruited the great stop-motion pioneer animator Willis H. O’Brien (already a known quantity due to his 1925 The Lost World, a dinosaur tale inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel) and his team, including Buzz Gibson and Marcel Delgado, to craft and operate miniatures in a convincing manner. By carefully positioning the elements to be animated, and moving them slowly, frame by frame, they could enliven their models on film and even endow them with personality.

But stop-motion was just the beginning of the production. Miniatures, matte painting, rear projection and more were combined with the aid of an optical printer. The resulting coordination of all the special and live footage so that it not only didn’t appear ludicrous, but absolutely swept the audience up with the illusion, was complete.

Any any rate, Kong makes his enormous appearance. He takes Ann and strides off into the jungle. The movie/ship’s crew go after her, equipped with rifles and special gas bombs. They run across various prehistoric creatures, and are massacred. Only Denham and Driscoll survive. Driscoll steals Ann back from Kong, and the two make it to the ship. Kong, enraged, smashes the wall and attacks everyone, killing many. Only Denham’s gas bombs get to him and put him to sleep.

We swing quickly to a marquee – “KING KONG Eighth Wonder of the World” – and the bustling Broadway crowd entering the theater. Backstage, Ann and Driscoll discuss their pending marriage. Kong is revealed, bound on a platform in steel chains. News photographers crowd forward, shooting off flashbulbs. Kong becomes enraged, breaks his chains, and goes berserk, searching for Ann.

The film’s climax shows him creating havoc across the city, grabbing Ann, and climbing the Empire State Building. There he staves off attacking Army planes for a time, but an excess of bullets leaves him bloody and weak. He plunges off the tower to his death. “So the planes got him,” a policeman says to Denham. “No, it was Beauty killed the Best,” he replies.

Kong can be interpreted in many ways – Kong as an outsized caricature of a Black man, Kong as Nature overpowering the modern world, Kong as a king made into a slave who regains his kingly crown only in the moments before his death. He is a noble creature, whatever other layers of meaning you choose to impose on him. You kind of love the big ape, and you are still rooting for him after all these years, though you know what his fate will be.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Power and the Glory.

NFR Project: 'The Invisible Man' (1933)

 NFR Project: ‘The Invisible Man’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: R.C. Sherriff

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Ted Kent

Premiere: Oct. 31, 1933

70 min.

In many ways, The Invisible Man is James Whale’s most audacious horror film, visually and otherwise. Despite the plaudits for Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Old Dark House, there is something desperate and unsettling about its protagonist’s precipitous descent into homicidal madness that is more compelling than the rest; it is eerie, uncanny, downbeat.

Its bold visual palette includes extraordinary special effects that bring the story to convincing life. Special effects artist John P. Fulton came up with ingenious techniques to make it seem as though an invisible man was plausible. Scenes were shot against a dead-black background, the actor completely covered in black, only his clothing and accoutrements filmed as normal. When printed against a positive print of the background, the figure vanishes, making the disembodied objects come to life.

Whale was fortunate in that he hired the excellent playwright R.C. Sherriff to adapt H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel for the screen. Sherriff is best known for his World War I play Journey’s End, which Whale directed and which led to his hiring by Hollywood. Sherriff adhered closely to the original, and created a pithy, expressive, and sometimes even humorous script.

The actor chosen to play Jack Griffin, the rouge scientist, was the then-unknown Claude Rains. It was vital for the man playing Griffin to have a strong and articulate voice, given that most of his performance would be communicated verbally, without benefit of expression. Rains was the man for the job. Born a Cockney, he quickly trained himself out of his lower-class accent and became one of the supreme speakers of the English stage.

The movie starts off in England’s provinces. A man struggles through the drifts of a daunting snowstorm, finding his way to an isolated inn. The locals are all gathered in the bar, whiling away the time, when the man enters. His face is covered in bandages, his eyes obscured by dark glasses. He seems more mummy than man.

He requests a room, and privacy. He is conducting experiments frantically, trying to find “a way back.” When confronted by the locals, he loses his composure, angrily stripping off his clothes and tormenting them in his invisible form. We learn through efficient exposition that Griffin discovered the secret of invisibility – but that, unknowingly, he injected himself with monocaine – a substance that drives its users mad.

The film’s razor-sharp editing gives us tantalizing glimpses of the invisible Griffin even as we are being fed his backstory; we are up to speed when he goes frantic and starts threatening those around him. He begins to kill without concern. He dreams of ruling the world in his invisible state, he rants about his power, suffers delusions of grandeur. Those close to him attempt to dissuade him and bring him in, but he grows more bloodthirsty, killing the weaselly informant that sets the police on him.

Whale has fun with the provincial setting that opens the film, portraying the local inhabitants as not too bright. As the country becomes alerted to the fact that an invisible man exists, all manner of people volunteer their own foolproof methods for catching the invisible man. Eventually, the powers that be catch up with Griffin, leading to his death – before which he exclaims, “I meddled in things that man must leave alone,” which was to become the familiar refrain of the mad scientist.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: King Kong.

 

 

 

 

 

NFR Project: 'Gold Diggers of 1933'

 

NFR Project: ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’

Dir: Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley

Scr: Erwin S. Gelsey, James Seymour, Ben Markson, Daid Boehm

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: George Amy

Premiere: May 27, 1933

90 min.

This third of the Busby Berkeley-involved musicals if 1933 is the most distinctive, in that it’s a musical that tries, however briefly, to deal with the problems of the Great Depression.

This particular plot is so familiar it has been parodied several times on stage (“Dames at Sea”) and on film (“Movie Movie”). Four young gal pals – the nice girl, Polly (Ruby Keeler); Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon, ang Ginger Rogers – are trying to make it big on Broadway. Producer (the cigar-chomping Ned Sparks) has his show attached for lack of funds, and all of them are on the outs.

But wait! A young man’s voice can be heard from the next window in the apartment building, belting out a wonderful song. Eureka! From this material a great musical could be made. But where to get the money? Fortunately, songsmith Brad (Dick Powell) is rich, and he backs the show. This raises the ire of his protective older brother (Warren William), who tires to sabotage his burgeoning romance with Polly. Trickery and mistaken identity carry us through to opening night, which turns out to be a smash hit, and one that finds all of the principal couples together at last.

The distinctive musical numbers by the great choreographer Busby Berkeley are evenly spaced throughout the movie, starting with a vibrant rendition of coin-clad maidens chanting “We’re in the Money.” Once again, these are fantastic sequences that soon move beyond their stage-bound limitations and fly into sequences that could only be capture on film.

“Pettin’ in the Park” gives the filmmakers a chance to get a bunch off girls wet, then watch them disrobe in silhouette. “The Shadow Waltz” includes neon violins. Finally, “Remember My Forgotten Man” tries, in a sincere way, to talk to the fact that millions of men were out of work and in need. It’s a notably downbeat finale.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Invisible Man.

NFR Project: 'Footlight Parade' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Footlight Parade’

Dir: Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley

Scr: Manuel Seff, James Seymour, Robert Lord, Peter Milne

Pho: George Barnes

Ed: George Amy

Premiere: Oct. 21, 1933

102 min.

Another great Warner Brothers musical. It’s another backstage affair, the plot of which factors in the new appeal of talking pictures, and the assertion that stage entertainment is superior, as demonstrated in sequences that, ironically, could only be realized on film.

Jimmy Cagney gets away from his gangster persona here, playing a song-and-dance man trying to make out in a new economy, right in the middle of the Great Depression. Perhaps Broadway doesn’t want musicals, but movies could feature live-entertainment prologues to selected pictures (an actual practice that persisted for years). These he produces, with the help of his long-suffering secretary, played by Joan Blondell, a dance director played by Frank McHugh, and a couple of opportunistic money men (Guy Kibbee and Arthur Holl).

Into this mix gets tossed the juvenile romantic team. Dick Powell plays the handsome young tenor, and Ruby Keeler plays a prim secretary who decides to let her hair down and go on the stage again. All these forces come together when another production company keeps stealing all their ideas, and they must rehearse intensely in secret in order to take the theatrical world by storm – staging three premieres in one night, at three different theaters, to sign up the owner of a chain of movie theaters (Paul Porcasi).

This they do, and how. The song-writing team of Warren and Dubin, still hot from the success of 42^nd St., wrote “Honeymoon Hotel” and “Shanghai Lil,” while the team of composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Irving Kahal, wrote the rest.

The real catalyst for this genre-changing film is the four dance numbers staged by Busby Berkeley, also lauded after his work on 42^nd St. The inventive and visionary choreographer extended his work with intricate patterned dancing with extraordinary camera shots – from above, mainly, but below and through and around his dance corps. He shot carefully, using only one camera so that no one else could re-edit his work.

Each musical number quickly moves beyond the limitations of a stage show into a cloud cuckoo land of outright fantasy. In the first number, newlyweds Dick and Ruby check into the hotel of the titles, dancing in ensemble with a crowd of others who are all registered under the name of Smith (a nod to the obvious hanky-panky going on). Famed little person Billy Barty is here, as a strangely disturbing child.

“By a Waterfall” is easily the showstopper of the night. Again, Dick and Ruby cavort, this time on an elaborate soundstage woodland, pierced by streams and chutes of water. Before you know it, woman in dazzling swimsuits are diving, swimming, posing, floating in and out of intricate patterns.

The film’s closing number, “Shanghai Lil,” is noticeable primarily for its showcasing of Cagney’s singing and dancing talents. He’s quite good, and when his character is forced to take the leading man’s role at the last second, he jumps right in and deservedly gets the spotlight. (Ruby here is Shanghai Lil, another instance of Hollywood “yellowface”.)

Of course the kids triumph, the business is saved, and Cagney realizes what a fool he’s been and gets together with Joan Blondell. In the depths of the Depression, anything that was cheery, like this film, was a welcome respite from the harsh realities of daily life.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Gold Diggers of 1933.

NFR Project: 'The Emperor Jones' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Emperor Jones’

Dir: Dudley Murphy

Scr: DuBose Heyward

Pho: Ernest Haller

Ed: Grant Whytock

Premiere: Sept. 29, 1933

76 min.

Another problematic entry. It is a record of a great central performance in a great American play. It is also irredeemably racist.

The Emperor Jones tells the story of Brutus Jones, a lowly Black Pullman porter who schemes his way into power. After killing a man, he winds up in prison, and escapes after killing a guard. He takes over a backwards country in the tropics, and begins lording it over the natives. Finally they, tired of his oppression, revolt. Seeking to make his escape, Jones flees through the jungle. As his pursuers grow closer, he begins to hallucinate, reliving past portions of his life, as he slowly loses his grip on reality.

The great American playwright Eugene O’Neill premiered this play in 1920, anchored by a great central performance by Charles Sidney Gilpin. The play, O’Neill’s second, was his first big hit. However, Gilpin objected to the extensive use of the n-word in the script, and changed it to “Negro” in his performances. When the play was revied in 1925, Paul Robeson was chosen to be the leading man.

Robeson was an American phenomenon. An academic and athletic star, he earned his law degree before devoting his life to acting and singing. His powerful baritone voice, expressive face, and husky frame made him a natural leading man.

O’Neill’s play is in essence a monologue interspersed with flashbacks and visions; for the screenplay, adapted by DuBose Heyward, who is best known for writing Porgy and Bess, made the plot linear instead of impressionistic, as was O’Neill’s approach. This removes some of the incantatory intensity of the original, but it delineates a rise and fall expertly.

The director, Dudley Murphy, had previously made shorts starring Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, as well as earlier experimental films; this experience was thought to qualify to treat this subject. Seeking to work outside the structure, and strictures, of Hollywood, the film was produced by two individuals and filmed on East Coast sound stages.

The problem at the film’s heart is this – can white writers and directors tell Black stories with any authority? For instance, censors declared that it was not to show a Black man killing a white man, so that moment was excised. In addition, actress Fredi Washington was forced to wear blackface, lest she be mistaken for a white woman (Washington was relatively light in color). In an atmosphere like this, how can an enlightened creation take place?

Jones is written as a powerful and three-dimensional character, but he is still a Black man perceived through a white sensibility. The extensive use of the n-word, and the tendency to see Black culture as an inherently inferior imitation of white culture, now distract from the genuine drama to be found in the film.

The most powerful part of the film is its end, when Jones is on the run, which is closest to the form and spirit of the original play. Robeson is amazing in the title role, moving from smooth self-assurance to outright, screaming frenzy at the end. For all its flaws, Jones is invaluable for preserving his performance.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Footlight Parade.

NFR Project: 'Duck Soup' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Duck Soup’

Dir: Leo McCarey

Scr: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin

Pho: Henry Sharp

Ed: LeRoy Stone

Premiere: Nov. 17, 1933

68 min.

If you think the Marx Brothers are the funniest comedians on film, you are right. If you think this was the funniest film they made, you are right. Therefore, this is the funniest film ever made.

The Marx Brothers had the funniest act in vaudeville, an anarchic explosion of comic energy that was so potent, W.C. Fields would not follow them on stage. Groucho (Julius) was quick with quips, and donned a greasepaint moustache and eyebrows, specializing in playing shysters and conmen. Chico (Leonard) played a comic Italian caricature, and Harpo (Adolph) worked silently, in a bushy wig, with only a horn and a harp to communicate with. (Zeppo stuck around through the five Paramount pictures they made, but he was a straight man.)

Together they rose in the business, disrespecting their material and constantly straying away from it, improvising and addressing the audience. Fortunately, when they did it, undisciplined as they were, they killed. Their aggressively transgressive approach meant that everything normally taken for granted was questioned, mocked, turned inside out. They took reality and made beautiful nonsense out of it.

Their initial movies were adaptations of stage shows (which allowed to perfect their material in front of a live audience), and included musical interludes, a nominal couple of ingenue and juvenile, and a semblance of a plot. Duck Soup was different, made from the whole cloth by a set of gifted comedy writers. It casts aspersions on patriotism, government, the justice system, society, marriage, and common sense.

Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, who for some reason is chosen to be the head of Freedonia by the obtuse Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont, a potent comic foil). Before long, he’s in a running battle with the ambassador from neighboring Sylvania (Louis Calhern, in an excellent supporting role), leading both countries to the brink of war. Meanwhile, Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo), spies for Sylvania, attempt to steal Freedonia’s defense plans. (Their musical interludes are excised here.)

This all culminates in Chicolini’s trial for treason, which soon goes off the rails. (“Look at Chicolini, an abject figure.” “I abject.”) during the middle of the proceedings, Sylvania declares war. Everyone springs into a minstrel-show production number, shouting in jubilation that Freedonia is going to war.

At this point, the movie rips free of reality and flies off into the stratosphere. Groucho commands his army, changing uniform in every take. Harpo puts on a sandwich board and goes out to recruit volunteers. Enemies are pelted with fruit. Even Mrs. Teasdale gets showered with foodstuffs. And the film just ends.

The Marx Brothers were blessed to have Leo McCarey as director. McCarey had honed his comedy skills making Laurel and Hardy shorts, and he knew how to stage a gag and get every laugh possible out of it. Harpo’s battles with Edgar Kennedy, the famous mirror scene, Groucho’s opening number, all use the same crisp, precise timing McCarey was renowned for. McCarey also knew how absurd he could get without losing the audience. All these traits magnified the Brothers’ natural humorousness and raise the film to the status of a surreal masterpiece.

After this film, the Marx Brothers would move to MGM, where producer Irving Thalberg thought their movies would sell better if they had musical numbers to punctuate them, and tasking the Brothers with helping a young couple achieve a happy ending. This set of changes to their anarchic style made them safer, more palatable, although many sequences from these later films can also be termed classic.

In Duck Soup, for the last time the comedians would work at full power, making fun of anything that came their way.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Emperor Jones.

NFR Project: 'Baby Face' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Baby Face’

Dir: Alfred E. Green

Scr: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Daryl Zanuck

Pho: James Van Trees

Ed: Howard Bretherton

Premiere: July 1, 1933

76 min.

Here’s another pre-Code film that got audiences all hot and bothered.

Technically, it was produced under the auspices of the censorious Code, but the Code was not strictly enforced until 1934, so it squeaked in under the wire. In it, a lack of sexual modesty leads to . . . not to doom and damnation, but to great things.

The movie stars a young Barbara Stanwyck as the ravishing and streetwise Lily. She’s a kid working in her father’s speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania. She’s routinely manhandled by the miners and factory workers that frequent the joint, and we soon find out that her dad’s been pimping her out since she was 14.

When her dad dies in an accident, despairing as to how to advance, she is counseled by an older man to follow the doctrine of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” She can’t get through his books, but she gets the message, and soon begins sleeping her way to the top.

She leaves for New York, stowing away on a freight train with her African American friend Chico. When they’re busted by a railroad guard, Lily trades a roll in the hay for the free trip to the big city. Her body is negotiable tender. In the big city, she sleeps her way into an entry-level position at a big corporation. Then she sleeps with a young executive, played by John Wayne who recommends her to his boss. Whom she sleeps with.

As she rises in the company, so the camera rises up the side of an enormous skyscraper to show her new location in the hierarchy. (Up and up the phallic symbol she goes, finally coming out on top.) Another executive and his father-in-law fall for her, leading to a murder/suicide. Seemingly above the scandal, she then hooks up with the playboy bank president. She marries him.

Is their no comeuppance for this sinful young woman. No, not really. The bank folds due to mismanagement, and her husband is blamed. He asks her for financial help (she’s saved up half a million dollars in cash and jewelry), but she refuses. He shoots himself.

Badly wounded, he is transported to the hospital, and she goes with him, because she loves him, by golly. Her money and gems scatter across the ambulance floor, and she states that none of it matters. Curtain.

So there is redemption of a sort, but it’s half-hearted. Her acquisition of money and power are much more interesting than her sudden change of heart. This subversive film is basically a blueprint for getting to Easy Street by being easy.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Duck Soup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NFR Project: Backstage drama in '42nd Street' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘42^nd Street’

Dir: Lloyd Bacon

Scr: Rian James, James Seymour, Whitney Bolton

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: Thomas Pratt, Frank Ware

Premiere: March 11, 1933

89 min.

 

 “I don’t want to go to Philadelphia!”

“Who does?”

 

This is the grandaddy of movie musicals, so full of cliches you don’t realize that this was the film that invented them. (It's been spoofed on stage in Dames at Sea, and in film in Stanley Donen's Movie Movie.)

Nobody loves a show-biz story more than Hollywood, and this adaptation of a 1932 novel by Bradford Ropes gives us a backstage look at the trials and triumphs of those plucky hoofers and singers who come out of nowhere to make it big on Broadway.

We are given several characters to root for. The show’s director, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) is dangerously ill, and broke. He needs one more hit to retire on. Thus the mounting of the production of the new Broadway musical Pretty Lady. He’s a demanding, despairing, chain-smoking maniac, but evidently he’s a genius at this sort of thing, so he is given his own head.

To the show comes the wide-eyed rookie, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), who gets a chance thanks to the machinations of a couple of wisecracking chorus girls played by Una Merkel and a very young Ginger Rogers. Soon she is time-stepping and falling in love along with the juvenile lead, played by Dick Powell, then at the beginning of his career.

Then – the day of the opening – the leading lady breaks her ankle! What are they going to do? Simple, says the juvenile lead. Put Peggy Sawyer in the lead role. Do it! The director smokes some more. Then he acquiesces. For hours, March and Peggy train. Finally, it is time for the curtain. The director grabs her and gives her the classic speech:

“Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”

No pressure. 

And what a triumph Peggy is! Everyone loves her. In fact, after the show, the audience credits her and not Marsh with the show’s success. To which Marsh merely tosses disconsolately his cigarette butt.

The most important innovation took place in the staging of the musical numbers. The songs – lyrics by Al Dubin and music by Harry Warren – are top-notch, and include the title number, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” and “Young and Healthy.” What’s unique is that, as soon as the musical numbers take flight, the camera moves freely through, around, and over the performers – all thanks to the genius of choreographer Busby Berkeley.

Dollies through sets of legs. Overhead shots of flashing limbs, shifting and curling into geometric patterns. The stage space evaporates, and we move fully into a filmic space, where only things that can be done with a camera can happen. Inventive cinematography takes over. It must have been like a roller-coaster ride for audiences of the day.

At the end, the show’s a smash, the lovers are united. Who could ask for anything more?

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Baby Face.

 

 

 

 

 

NFR Project: 'Employees' Entrance' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Employees’ Entrance’

Dir: Roy Del Ruth

Scr: Robert Presnell Sr.

Pho: Barney McGill

Ed: James Gibbon

Premiere: February 11, 1933

74 min.

This curio is an example of why I have taken on this project. It’s a hidden gem, something I’d never heard of. It was fascinating.

This isn’t a bubbly comedy, or a musical, or a gangster film. It’s simply the story of an enormous son-of-a-bitch, and as astute a critique of capitalism you’re likely to find in mainstream cinema.

The lead character, Kurt Anderson, played to straight-faced perfection by Warren William, is a complete bastard. He runs a major department store with an iron hand, ruthless ruining people who cross him. He is all business, 24/7. He demands complete and total dedication from his subordinates. He has no use for women, except sexually. He is a cad and a bounder.

The movie simply retails his business decisions and how they mar the lives of people under him. He is attracted to the young employee, Madeleine (a 19-year-old Loretta Young!), but she prefers his assistant, Martin (Wallace Ford). Martin and Madeleine marry secretly, but Anderson finds out – and gets Madeleine drunk and seduces her.

She quits, Anderson gets her to reveal her infidelity to Martin, Martin shoots him, but not too badly. Madeleine takes poison, but recovers. Martin quits as well, and he and Madeliene reconcile. Anderson, wounded but unmoved, continues being a total cock. The End.

Who greenlit this? It’s utterly unlike even the social-realist, social problem films Warner Brothers specialized in. It simply relates the story of a bad man. He’s isn’t really punished, as in many moral-lesson films, nor is he redeemed, nor is he rewarded. He’s a jerk, but he makes the company plenty of money, so he gets to screw up people’s lives, break them apart, drive them to suicide, ruin their businesses. This is the rule of unvarnished capitalism – nothing is off limits and nothing matters except money and power. A more brutal takedown of the entrepreneurial, can-do American spirit has hardly been screened.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt h.to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: 42^nd Street.

NFR Project: 'Dinner at Eight' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dinner at Eight’

Dir: George Cukor

Scr: Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Donald Ogden Stewart

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Ben Lewis

113 min.

Hollywood was always looking for new material. For as many original screenplays that were out there, there were as many based on a book or a play. Dinner at Eight is one of the latter.

The basis for the screenplay was the successful play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Kaufman was a playwriting genius, a celebrated maker of stage plays who put his name on dozen of productions; Ferber was an admired author (she wrote the novel from which Show Boat was made) who was moving into playwriting.

Dinner at Eight is a filmed play, in the best sense of that phrase. Given the strong source material, the script was a magnet for great actors, leading to the all-star cast of this ensemble dramedy. Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Billie Burke, Lee Tracy, and Edmund Lowe form a constellation of fine performances.

The story deals with the aspirations of a diverse group of urban American people, all brought together for a fancy dinner party for a visiting English lord and lady. (The lord and lady are never shown; in fact, they never make it to the party.) The hostess doesn’t know that her husband is severely ill. The parents don’t know their daughter is having an affair with a washed-up actor. One capitalist seeks to steal away the other’s business. His wife is having an affair.

This complex of plots weaves its way skillfully to the end, intermingling the participants freely. Director Cukor was known as an actor’s director, and he directs very unobtrusively, letting the performance carry the movie. Dressler, in one of her last films, is flagrantly witty; John Barrymore plays a part that, sadly, presaged his later career – an alcoholic and unemployable actor, a laughing stock.

The real fireworks erupt between Harlow and Beery, as they battle it out while dressing for dinner. Harlow plays the not-so-dumb blonde with relish.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt h.to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Employees Entrance.

NFR Project: 'Trouble in Paradise' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Trouble in Paradise’

Dir: Ernst Lubitsch

Scr: Sam Raphaelson

Pho: Victor Milner

Ed: N/A

83 min.

What is the “Lubitsch touch” everyone talks about?

The Lubitsch touch is an attitude as much as it is a style. In films that treat affairs of the heart and of the bedroom, Lubitsch projects a bemused tolerance for the romantic follies of humankind, detailing them with lovely and revelatory care. He is nearly always up to something, frankly outlining sexual relationships through subtle allusion, making his point through the symbolic use of objects. His visual wit, honed through his extensive work in silent film, is as sharp as the verbal wit that would soon festoon his sound films, classics such as this film.

Ernst Lubitsch started off his career in Germany in the silent days as a comic performer. He moved into directing and soon was celebrated for his prowess. His films were shown in America (Madame DuBarry was one of the first European films to be shown in America in 1919) and soon Hollywood (specifically, Mary Pickford) recruited him to make films there.

In a sense, “the Lubitsch touch” was a marketing ploy, but the publicity men were correct, Lubitsch was one of the first directors to have an identifiable style, working in a subgenre of his own creating, the sensitive, mature sex comedy.

In Trouble in Paradise, it is the scoundrels that are honorable and kind, possessing the best of manners as they fleece their victims. Two such guttersnipes, Gaston (the suave Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), discover each other’s game in a romantic villa overlooking Venice, where garbagemen ply gondolas as they trill songs of love.

They team up and go to Paris, where they find a new victim in Madame Colet (Kay Francis), a famous and rich perfume manufacturer. In seeking to defraud her, Gaston finds himself falling in love with her. He becomes her manager, and Lily her secretary. Meanwhile, as they scheme, Colet’s beaus, the absurd colonel (Charlie Ruggles) and Mr. Filiba (Edward Everett Horton), realize that Gaston is a thief, and they set the police on them.

Gaston is torn – between Lily and Colet, between getting away and getting away with considerably more cash than he previously thought possible. (He also reveals his discovery that Madame’s previous manager, the virtuous-seeming Giron (the venerable C. Aubrey Smith) has been stealing millions from her for years. It is the “respectable” people that are the real crooks.)

Discovering the resolution I will leave to you, because the film is well worth seeing. The dialogue (“Marriage is a mistake that two people make together”) sparkles, and the sly gags, involving bedroom doors, clocks, and more straight-faced suggestiveness than you have likely seen.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dinner at Eight.

NFR Project: 'A Study in Reds' (1932)

NFR Project: ‘A Study in Reds’

Dir: Miriam Bennett

Scr: N/A

Pho: N/A

Ed: N/A

20 min.

An oddity for sure. For some reason, amateurs ganged together to make this short film, a spoof of life in the Soviet Union.

At a women’s club meeting, a guest falls asleep and dreams of the group being submitted to Communist rule – placing their children in child care, working in factories, tilling the land – all under the watchful eye of the state police (who are distinguished by their paper G.P.U. badges and their long cigarette holders).

One worker is caught smuggling a single egg out of the chicken coop, and she is accordingly shot by a firing squad. “From eggs to eggsecution,” quips the simply typed intertitle. The dreamer wakes up and finds herself back among her friends again.

The filmmakers were members of the Amateur Cinema League, a hobby group that promoted amateur filmmaking across the country. This crude but whimsical piece of film seems to have been concocted entirely by women – an empowering fact that underlines how women-created film of the period could pretty much only be done at this level.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Trouble in Paradise.

NFR Project: 'Scarface: The Shame of a Nation' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Scarface: The Shame of a Nation’

Dir: Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson

Scr: Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett

Pho: Lee Garmes, L.W. O’Connell

Ed: Edward Curtiss

Premiere: April 9, 1932

93 min.

Three key gangster films hit the big screen in 1932, triggering a surge in the genre that would last until the beginning of World War II. Little Caesar and The Public Enemy launched the careers of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively. Scarface illustrated the versatility of its central actor, the great Paul Muni.

Muni had also played the tormented hero of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang that year. His Tony Camonte is light years away from that characterization. Tony is a regular guy, full of fun, admirably ambitious, certain of himself. He’s also a homicidal maniac with an unnatural attachment to his sister. How Muni negotiates the bizarrely conflicting aspects of this happy-go-lucky killer is a master class in handling ambiguity.

The film is framed as an indictment of gang violence, even more explicit in its contempt for gangsters and gangsterism than any other film out at that time. However, Tony seems to live a charmed life and rapidly ascends to the heights of power before his tragic flaws destroy him and everyone around him.

The story is a typical Rake’s Progress, a rise and a precipitous fall. Tony starts as a petty hood in what is assumed to be Chicago, but soon his passion for gunplay merits him advancement. He doesn’t strategize – he simply intimidates speakeasy owners, and murders his competition.

Howard Hawks helms this essential classic. More than other gangster films, Scarface seems to emerge from the gloom, taking place always at night, always in the heart of the urban jungle. Camonte is a predator, and the illegal booze business is just a dark arena for him to stalk.

The high-contrast cinematography marks the film with deep blacks, and shafts of light. At its most intense moments, the characters are submerged and reappear from the shadows. Hawks plays with the letter “X” – we find it everywhere mayhem occurs . . . like the Lucia di Lammermoor aria Camonte whistles whenever he makes up his mind to kill.

Ann Dvorak is a revelation as Camonte’s sister, a wild young thing who resents her brother’s constant interference in her affairs. George Raft makes an impression in his iconic role as the coin-flipping sidekick, Rinaldo.

Hawks’s tough style and Muni’s intensity raise this film far above others of its kind, and can be said to be a quintessential American movie. We love our gangsters, much as we might disavow them.

When Tony receives his comeuppance, the camera pans to a flashing billboard above the dirty street. “THE WORLD IS YOURS,” it blinks.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: A Study in Reds.

NFR Project: Gable and Harlow in 'Red Dust' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Red Dust’

Dir: Victor Fleming

Scr: John Mahin, Donald Ogden Stewart

Pho: Harold Rosson, Arthur Edeson

Ed: Blanche Sewell

Premiere: October 22, 1932

83 min.

Adultery in the jungle!

That’s the basic thrust, as it were, in this sweaty melodrama that stars Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in the quintessential pairing that demonstrates their chemistry together.

This is definitely not a family values film. Gable plays a rough, tough rubber plantation manager in what is now known as Vietnam. Harlow is a whore on the lam from the authorities in Saigon. They get along beautifully, trading wisecracks in every exchange of dialogue and obviously enjoying themselves immensely with each other.

This ends when a new engineer comes to the plantation, a civilized and decent young man with a civilized and decent young wife played by Mary Astor. Gable promptly sends the husband off on a three-week surveying expedition, and proceeds to fall in love with the wife, who simply can’t resist his rakish, manly self.

Gable soon realizes he’s being a heel, so he goads the wife into shooting him, precipitating the abrupt departure of the married couple, who weren’t built for this climate of sexual lawlessness. By movie’s end, the adulterer and the whore are back together again, cackling merrily.

The movie’s smart-as-a-whip dialogue really makes this an above-average film. Harlow and Gable were more movie stars than actors – capable of projecting an indelible persona onto the screen rather than submerging themselves in roles. Movies were optioned for them on the basis of whether they sold the popular image of the actor or not. Here, the steamy bush is a perfect setting for Harlow’s flip delivery and Gable’s dirty grin.

The Production Code, a strict censorship regimen, was instituted in 1930 but not strictly enforced until 1934. This movie and others like it brought that enforcement on. Here, the virtuous couple are naïve fools incapable of functioning outside of the universe of middle-class values. It’s the tramps and the sluts who’ve got life’s number, and can roll with the punches. It’s as subversive a movie as you might like to see.

Once the Production Code was implemented, it would be three decades until Hollywood started portraying men and women as sexual beings again.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Scarface: The Shame of a Nation.

 

 

NFR Project: 'The Music Box' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Music Box’

Dir: James Parrott

Scr: H.M. Walker

Pho: Len Powers, Walter Lundin

Ed: Richard C. Courier

Premiere: April 16, 1932

29:16

Comedic perfection.

This is the quintessential Laurel and Hardy movie, one that earned an Oscar for Best Live Action Short. It deserved it. In The Music Box the comic duo has but one job to do – and they most spectacularly, hilariously, fail to do it. It’s a perfect example of the comedy of mounting frustration.

The film is a partial remake of their silent short Hats Off, now a lost film. Fortunately, the comedy team and their gag writers decided to take another shot at this location. The setting is a precariously steep stairway in Los Angeles. The objective: to get a player piano, in a wooden box complete with casters on the bottom, all the way up to a house where it is to be delivered. Can they do it?

By this time, Laurel and Hardy had firmly established their onscreen personas. Stan Laurel was the hopeless numbskull, and Oliver Hardy was his bossy superior, who was actually no brighter than his friend. Again and again they struggle to reach the top of the stairs, only to be foiled by a nurse with a baby stroller, a cop, and a pompous professor. Each time they get ahead, they lose control of the piano and down it rolls again, all the way to the bottom. (The bizarre, discordant noises the piano emits during its manhandling are hilarious in themselves.)

Hardy always gets more physical punishment than Laurel, and it is dealt in spades here. Oliver gets dragged, run over, doused with water (twice), poked in the eye with a ladder, steps on nails, and punished with jabs to the belly – he even gets a baby bottle shattered over his head. Laurel’s double- and triple-takes as this progresses are priceless, as are Hardy’s periodic disgusted takes to the camera.

When the two find themselves at the top of the hill, they are told that there was a road directly to the summit. So of course, what do our geniuses do? They carry the piano all the way to the bottom, reload it, and drive up to the house. Then comes the task of trying to get the thing inside. This they do, with the attendant results – a ruined house.

There is one sublime moment, however. They turn on the player piano and begin to pick up shattered remnants of the room, and as the music plays, they begin to dance to it. Light on their feet, they move in delightful, perfect harmony – a glimpse of sheer magic.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Red Dust.

NFR Project: 'Love Me Tonight' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Love Me Tonight’

Dir: Rouben Mamoulian

Scr: Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr., Waldemar Young

Pho: Victor Milner

Ed: Rouben Mamoulian, William Shea

Premiere: August 18, 1932

104 min.

This frothy musical concoction is little remembered, overshadowed by influences such as the films of Rene Clair and Ernst Lubitsch. Still, it’s a solid effort in the vein of the whimsical European romance, in which star-crossed lovers overcome obstacles to be together.

Maurice Chevalier is a Parisian tailor, who tracks down a count (Charlie Ruggles) who owes him money. He arrives at the family chateau, where he immediately runs across and falls in love with a princess, played by Jeanette MacDonald. In order to avoid the wrath of his uncle (C. Aubrey Smith), the tailor is presented as a count. Complications ensue.

The highlights of the film as musical numbers, prerecorded to give the filmmakers more flexibility in staging. “Isn’t It Romantic?”, “Lover,” and “Mimi” figure prominently in the story, bouncing from character to character as the need arises.

Everyone does a smooth job of playing the screwball aspects of the script, and the ornate sets compete with the intimacy of the scenes set in them. Altogether a textbook musical comedy.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Music Box.

 

 

NFR Project: 'I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’

Dir: Mervyn LeRoy

Scr: Howard J. Green, Brown Holmes

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: William Holmes

Premiere: November 10, 1932

93 min.

It truly was a story ripped from the headlines. Its relentless depiction of a corrupt and inhumane prison industry caused a scandal, and was responsible for reforms. It was to cement Warner Brothers as the studio that made movies with a conscience, that tried to deal with real-world problems. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, no one thought a depressing slice of realism would succeed in a world of frothy musical comedies. However, it was the number-three film of the year and scored an Oscar nomination for its lead actor, the remarkable Paul Muni.

1932 was Paul Muni’s year. Earlier, he had starred as a brutal gang leader in Howard Hawks’s hard-hitting Scarface: The Shame of a Nation; now, he donned a different character – another tragic figure, but one who’s undone by an unjust society.

The story is based largely on the 1932 autobiography of Robert Elliott Burns, who was sentenced for robbery to 10 years on a Georgia chain gang, and who escaped and went on to lead a respectable life.

In the movie, Burns is James Allen, a World War I veteran who bums around the country looking for work. He is tricked into participating in a robbery, and is sentenced to the brutal chain gang. He loosens his shackles and escapes, making his way to Chicago. There, he gets involved in the construction industry, rising to a position of comfort and respectability, building roads and bridges.

Meanwhile, he has been blackmailed into marriage by the vindictive Marie. When he falls for another woman and asks for a divorce, she turns him in. He is promised that, if he returns to the chain gang for 90 days, he will receive a pardon. He goes, but soon finds that the promise was a ruse. He escapes again.

Here the true story and the scenario diverge. Burns successfully won his pardon after much effort. Here, Muni’s character disappears . . . until the brutal final scene. Bedraggled and dirty, he approaches his former love in a darkened garage. He is pursued constantly, he says. “No rest, no peace.” He backs away into the darkness. “How do you live?” she cries. He answers, vanishing, “I steal!”

Director Mervyn LeRoy sets up shots comparing chained prisoners to chained mules, emphasizing the dehumanizing treatment of the prison farm. Allen starts by building bridges, and at the end he gleefully destroys one in his escape. We are spared no details of the situation – despite the best efforts of good men, the system grinds down those caught in its meshes.

Muni is excellent as the everyday American who is lured into a life of crime and punishment. Soon the versatile actor would make a career of impersonating famous subjects, but here is magnetic and heart-rending as the hopeless Allen. He spent weeks with Burns, studying him in order to become him on screen as much as humanly possible.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang proved that movies could tackle social issues and create a positive result. People could take the movies seriously. And the downbeat ending is still a shocker. It’s a tribute to the studio that it trusted the intelligence and maturity of the viewing public – at least this time.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Love Me Tonight.