NFR Project: 'Freaks" (1932)

 NFR Project: ‘Freaks’

Dir: Tod Browning

Scr: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon

Pho: Merritt B. Gerstad

Ed: Basil Wrangell

Premiere: February 12, 1932

64 min.

This is not a film you should watch at night, or alone.

It’s at once a compassionate and a horrifying film. It ruined its creator’s career. It became a myth slowly, over decades of being classed as exploitation cinema. Finally, it is being seen as the unique, disturbing classic that Tod Browning was meant to make.

Director Tod Browning started off his career with 13 years of work in the circus and in sideshows. He was intimately familiar with this kind of life, and it gave him a special insight into and respect for the rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can “low-class” entertainers.

Browning’s work as a film director led to many team-ups onscreen during the silent era with “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” actor Lon Chaney. Together they explored the macabre underside of life, indulging in spectacular scenarios of revenge and degradation. Browning was tapped to direct Dracula in 1931, which became a big success and the real launch point of Universal horror franchises. Then came Freaks.

Freaks deals with carnival freaks; or, as we might say today, people with disabilities. Browning combed the sideshows of the land for performers for the film. Siamese twins, the bearded lady, the skeleton man, the half-man half-woman, a man with no legs, a man with no arms OR legs, and a smattering of pinheads and dwarves are the central characters of the story. They perform their disabilities, essentially, for the gratification of a rubbernecking public. Exploitation is the fate they are consigned to by society. They are strongly clannish. One of the characters states, “To offend one is to offend all.”

It is off-putting to see these figures plainly, in the light of day, and not pity them or sentimentalize them. Browning is absolutely unflinching in his commitment to film these people and make them appear much like “normal” people, to see them as three-dimensional characters with lives and souls, not simply as “freaks.” This subversive message, which goes against all societal conceptions of normalcy, comes through loud and clear.

The movie is set in a traveling circus. A young dwarf, Hans, is enamored of a “normal” trapeze artist, the cynical and manipulative yet beautiful Cleopatra. When she learns that Hans has money, she schemes with the brutal and contemptuous Strong Man, who she is sleeping with, to marry Hans and then poison him.

The two are married. At the lavish banquet afterward, everyone shares a loving cup. “Gooble-gobble, gooble, gobble, we accept her, one of us!” they chant. They try to make Cleopatra drink, too, but she throws the liquor in their faces and cries out, “You dirty, slimy FREAKS! FREAKS! FREAKS! FREAKS!”

The freaks, now watchful and alert, discover the conspiracy and tell Hans. He confronts Cleopatra, who escapes when the caravan overturns in a driving rainstorm at night. All of the freaks band together and attack. The Strong Man is castrated (this is cut out of the final print) and Cleopatra is mutilated, turned into a terrifying "chicken woman’' – one eye gouged out, legless, squawking like an insane thing.

The message is clear. The “freaks” are the sympathetic humans; it’s the beautiful and strong who are the real, oppressive freaks. This defiant assertion, combined with the sheer difficulty of watching these performers on screen, doomed the film. Its original 90-minute cut sent people scurrying out of the theater in previews. The studio took it and, cutting out everything objectionable, pared it down to an hour.

After massive protests, from critics and the general public, the film was pulled from distribution. The studio licensed it to exploitation-film magnate Dwain Esper (he of Sex Maniac and Marihuana: the Devil’s Weedl). It was only in the 1960s that the film was rediscovered by mainstream audiences and treated as a cult film.

Looking at it 90 years after its creation, it’s easy to see that it is a well-made film, despite its horrifying content. Browning moves the camera more than he has previously, and we weave in and out of the circus wagons and tents as the story unfolds. The final sequence, the freaks’ attack in the rainstorm, is as powerful and frightening as anything in film. As they crawl through the mud after the villains, their eyes glisten in the wet darkness, their knives flash in the lightning’s blast.

The violent reaction to the film meant that Browning was washed up. After making another handful of inferior films, he retired. He died in 1962, before the film that ruined him was given another chance by the viewing public.

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

NFR Project: 'Flowers and Trees' (1932)

NFR Project: ‘Flowers and Trees’

Dir: Burt Gillett

Scr: N/A

Pho: Ray Rennahan

Ed: N/A

Premiere: July 30, 1932

7:50

Walt Disney was smart. He was always looking for innovations, looking to be first. He did so with the first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. He did so again here with the first three-strip Technicolor cartoon, Flowers and Trees.

The three-strip color system was a huge advance on the older two-strip process, which read only in the red and green range. Disney signed an exclusive deal with Technicolor to use their new process for three years. He switched Flowers and Trees from black-and-white to color, markedly increasing his budget. Fortunately, the cartoon was a commercial and critical success, earning an Oscar for Best Cartoon Short Subject.

The film is relatively simple. The trees and flowers awaken. A young male tree courts a young female tree, incurring the wrath of an old, stumpy tree. The old tree starts a fire in spite, which every creature save the old tree itself escapes. Then the boy tree and the girl tree get engaged.

Now, depending on your attitude toward life you will either find this to be either enchanting or nightmare fuel. Disney films consistently take a light, sunny tone, and this one is no exception. Charming, anthropomorphic plants and animals would become Disney’s stock in trade.

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

NFR Project: 'Tabu: A Story of the South Seas' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘Tabu’

Dir: F.W. Murnau

Scr: F.W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty

Pho: Floyd Crosby

Ed: Arthur A. Brooks

Premiere: March 18, 1931

84 min.

Tabu is one of a small number of films that have been dubbed “docufiction”. This designation represents films that incorporate documentary observation and fictional narrative. It’s a slippery slope – many feel that such dramas are fundamentally dishonest, in that they impose a preconceived narrative onto a natural situation. Such was the dispute between the creators of Tabu.

F.W. Murnau was one of the silent era’s great directors, and he wanted to make a film set in Tahiti. He knew the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North was a primary example of docufiction (Flaherty was criticized for staging some sequences of that movie), was familiar with the region. The two decided to collaborate.

They went to the South Pacific. Flaherty filmed the first few scenes, but then he found himself by Murnau’s arrogance and insistence on having his own way. Flaherty spent most of the shoot processing film. Meanwhile, due to Flaherty’s difficulties with his cameras, Murnau brought out the cinematographer Floyd Crosby to film the rest of the picture.

Flaherty thought Murnau’s conception of the film was short on ethnography and long on implausibility. Murnau overruled him, and Flaherty eventually sold his share of the film to Murnau.

The film is set on the island of Bora-Bora, and we are treated first to a look at the idyllic existence of its natives. We are introduced to the protagonists, the young man Matahi and the girl Rehi. This is interrupted by the arrival of the aged warrior Hitu, who decrees that Rehi is to become sacred to the gods and as such is untouchable -- tabu.

This frightens the young lovers and they escape together, looking to avoid the curse that follows upon disobeying the tabu. Matahi finds works as a pearl diver in a French colony, and the two fit in awkwardly to the decidedly more complex and uncaring modern reality (Matahi has no sense of money, to begin with.) Onto this scene comes Hitu, who swears to kill Matahi if Rehi does not return to Bora-Bora with him.

She submits, and a distressed Matahi swims after the two of them, but the struggle is too great and he drowns. The last image is the little boat, sailing off to the horizon.

The film was shot silent, but the creation of the film soundtrack while Tabu was being made means that it was released with a musical soundtrack and select sound effects. (The film was originally made in color). It was not a box-office success. Tragically, a week before the movie opened, Murnau was killed as the result of a car wreck.

It’s a beautiful film, and it captures a culture now long vanished. It failed to make back its investment, but it did win Floyd Crosby an Oscar for his cinematography.

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

NFR Project: 'The Public Enemy' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Public Enemy’

Dir: William Wellman

Scr: Kubec Glasmon, John Bright

Pho: Devereaux Jennings

Ed: Edward Michael McDermott

Premiere: April 23, 1931

83 min.

“It is the ambition of the authors of ‘The Public Enemy’ to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.”

So states the movie’s prologue. What a bunch of hooey. The Public Enemy celebrates the gangster’s life, giving us a bitter anti-hero as its protagonist who goes on a Rake’s Progress, from scenes of kids scamming on streetcorners to grown men killing and being killed to control the illegal booze trade in Chicago during Prohibition.

At the center of the movie, in a star-making turn, is the charismatic James Cagney. He plays Tom Powers in a fierce, fearless, and powerfully open manner. In a time when most leading men were restrained, well-spoken, and dapper, Cagney was scrappy, rough, devil-may-care.

Powers is a dynamic criminal – always on the make, looking for a bigger payoff. He gets women, money, fancy clothes and cars. And he loves it! Cagney gives an iconic performance, moving fluidly, glancing around every room to look for a challenge, sneering slightly at the “straight” life. All the noise about this being a cautionary tale are contained in the movie’s printed prologue and afterword.

The story starts in 1909, when kids Tom and his friend Matt start petty thieving. They “graduate” to bigger things – lifting furs, selling bootleg beer to unwilling taverners. Tom gets a girl, gets tired of her, and pushes a half a grapefruit in her face (the iconic image from the movie). He gets a new girl.

Meanwhile, Tom’s older brother Mike lives morally, works hard, and studies to get ahead. Tom calls him a sucker. When America joins World War I, Mike joins the Marines. After the war, the death of a gang boss leads to a gang war, and Matt is killed in an ambush. Tom loads up on hardware and, in a driving rainstorm, shoots it out with the opposition. He staggers down the empty street, memorably murmurs “I ain’t so tough,” and collapses.

In the hospital, Tom apologizes to everyone he loves (pretty unconvincingly). His mother yearns for his to come home to stay. But Tom is kidnapped from the hospital, leading to one of the most pessimistic endings in American film. It is devastating.

All the while, director Wellman relates with glee Tom’s criminal adventures. He told producer Jack Warner, “I’ll make the toughest, most violent picture you ever did see.” And he did. The bullets fly, booze flows, women weep. The guiding principle is power enforced by violence. And the wages of sin is Death.

Audiences of the day could have it both ways. They could vicariously enjoy the transgressive acts of the anti-heroes, then enjoy the just demise of the movie’s villains. Warner Brothers became the masters of the crime film. Viewers loved it, and soon gangster movies came thick and fast to the nation’s movie screens.

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

NFR Project: 'The Front Page' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘The Front Page’

Dir: Lewis Milestone

Scr: Bertlett Cormack, Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur

Pho: Glen MacWilliams

Ed: W. Duncan Mansfield

Premiere: April 4, 1931

101 min.

When sound came in, it finally made sense to adapt dialogue-heavy source material for film. One of the first great sound adaptations was this, the 1928 hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

In it, a self-confessed anarchist is sentenced to be hung, unjustly, in an unnamed big city suspiciously like Chicago. A covey of reporters sits around the Press Room at the city courthouse, angling for new information on the impending proceedings.

One of the ace reporters, Hildy Johnson, enters. He is disgusted with the cheap, cynical world of newspapering, and is quitting to get married, move to New York, and work in the advertising industry. The only problem is, his boss, editor Walter Burns, wants to keep him on the staff and will do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to get him to stay.

The condemned prisoner breaks free, Burns comes to the Press Room to take command, and Hildy keeps getting blocked from leaving. All this is done with quick patter and overlapping dialogue, a heady rush of words between people trying to put one other on each other. It’s a proto-screwball comedy with serious underpinnings.

Hecht and MacArthur’s world view is pretty bleak. Journalists themselves, they conjure up a view of reporters as crass, cynical, and opportunistic, fabulists who think nothing of making up a story better than the one they’re working on. It’s a stereotype that’s been promulgated ever since in countless movies and TV shows. (Unfortunately, it is spot-on – as a former journalistic misfit, I can attest to it.)

The play is performed on a single set, a discouragement for a director used to moving the camera like Milestone. He cleverly escapes a few times from the Press Room set, but he is tasked primarily with making something dynamic out of a bunch of people yammering at each other.

This he does by unmooring the camera from its tripod and maneuvering around the room. Periodically, a character will paces around the set’s central table, and the scene crackles on as the camera does the loop-dee-loop, tracking the moving object. The camera swoops in on the ribald faces of the reporters.

And what faces! The casting is top-notch, with solid performances from Adolphe Menjou as Burns and Pat O’Brien as the rapid-fire Hildy. Add great character actors such as Walter Catlett and Edward Everett Horton. Even and especially biting are the portrayals of the sheriff (clarence Wilson) and the mayor (James Gordon), a perfect pair of conniving fools.

The play ends with the immortal line, “The son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!” This wouldn’t fly with the censors, so a typewriter is casually dropped to blot out the offending word. Still, this sprawling farce dealing with death, justice, and politics is edgy for its time, and certainly relates attitudes that, with the advent of stricter censorship codes, would be squelched.

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

NFR Project: 'Frankenstein' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Frankenstein’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: Garrett Fort, Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert Florey, John Russell

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Clarence Kolster, Maurice Pivar

Premiere: November 21, 1931

70 min.

Still scary.

Horror is critic-proof. It has a set of values, and an aesthetic, of its own – but if it does not frighten, it has not done its job. Frankenstein still delivers.

Universal Studios was encouraged by the success of Dracula, and sought to create more horror movies as quickly as it could. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel about a science-made man composed of parts of the dead and reanimated with electricity was a natural source for a horror adaptation.

Fortunately, the task of helming the film fell to James Whale. The director had one great talkie success, the war drama Journey’s End (1930), and was just signed to a five-year contract with the studio. He had his choice of projects.

Whale was a master of style, and he turned in part to the tenets of German Expressionism, and in part to the lugubrious Victorian obsession with death and gloom, to inform the way the picture looked. Set darkly in an imaginary middle-European kingdom, it mixes elements of the Gothic and of modernity, with little regard for stylistic consistency. The result is the creation of an unsettling world that seems to cycle in and out of various time periods.

The central role is that of Henry Frankenstein, the proverbial mad scientist who seeks to tamper with that which man was not meant to know. His defiance of moral strictures concerning the creation of life make him a tortured rebel. With the help of his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (an iconic performance by Dwight Frye -- Igor would not come along until Son of Frankenstein), he stiches together a body, unknowingly places an abnormal brain in it, and voila! The monster is born.

The monster’s cradle is the electric creche designed and created by Kenneth Strickfaden, an amazing collection of sparking and sputtering laboratory equipment that became standard in every mad scientist’s laboratory afterwards. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Henry cries.

But the monster is problematic. Hulking, childlike, immensely strong, and prone to violence, he could have been played as a merely destructive force. Fortunately, he was played by the genius of Boris Karloff. Karloff knew he had to make the monster sympathetic, and the reaching of the monster toward a shaft of light humanizes him beyond the extent that we feel sympathy for the human characters of the film.

The monster is doomed. He breaks free, and unintentionally terrorizes the countryside. Soon, angry peasants armed with pitchforks and torches are ready to destroy him. After a final angry confrontation between Frankenstein and his creation, the doctor finds himself thrown from the top of a windmill, presumably to his death. The crowd sets fire to the windmill, and the creature is burned alive.

The picture was a massive success ,and triggered a slew of sequels. Karloff would play the monster twice more, before the role was passed on to other actors. Whale would direct the first sequel – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – which is arguably superior to this first film.

However, the original still works. The stark gloom, the overheated emotions, the sheer strangeness of Jack Pierce’s incredible makeup for the monster, it all works to create a claustrophobic, terrifying tale.

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

NFR Project: 'The Forgotten Frontier' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘The Forgotten Frontier’

Dir: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Scr: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Pho: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Ed: (Mary) Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Premiere: 1931

59 min.

This fascinating effort is a dramatic reconstruction of life in the back of beyond and a documentation of an early comprehensive health system.

The Frontier Nursing Service was founded in 1925 by nurse-midwife Mary Breckinridge. Its goal was to provide health services to the unserved populations of deeply rural Kentucky. Breckinridge was born to affluence, and after the death of a husband and two children, she dedicated herself to help the health of low-income children and families.

She studied nursing and midwifery extensively in Europe, and surveyed rural health services in Scotland. She served as an administrator of the American Committee for Devasted France in the wake of World War I. She drew up a model of a new service – a decentralized, independent organization of nurse-midwives living far out in the country, making rounds that could only be navigated on horseback, providing pre-natal care, obstetric service, and pediatric care as well.

This was unheard of. The people the Frontier Nursing Service served were back in the deepest hollows of the mountains, desperately poor, subject to a lack of basic hygiene. Breckinridge ran the Service until her death in 1965. In that time, the service saw 58,000 patients, and delivered more than 14,500 children.

Her work inspired her cousin, Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson. Patterson was also well-off, and began a career as a photojournalist. Soon she was working with movie cameras. She went to work for her cousin and, largely self-taught, she began to film the activities of the Frontier Nursing Service.

The film is a documentary, but it is a staged documentary. Patterson filmed, silently, the nurse-midwives as they saddled up, crossed rivers, went up and down gullies – improbable feats of hardiness. The film is split into several parts. In the first, a child is brought into the world. In the second, the nurses convince the local children to submit to inoculation. They take in orphaned twins.

Most extraordinary is the treatment of a gunshot victim. Sixteen miles from the nearest hospital, the patient is carried on an improvised stretcher by shifts of volunteers. A surgeon, also on horseback, makes his way to the remote outpost and operates – successfully.

The film’s style is very straightforward, but there are moments of beauty – peeks down into mountain valleys, sweeping pans across broad rivers. The project is simply a way of illustrating the work of the Service, obviously useful to view when soliciting financial contributions to the program. (Many donors are mentioned in the title cards.) The difficulty of the nurse-midwives’ circumstances are underlined, but the tone of the film is ultimately upbeat. Where there was no medical care, suddenly there is a system in place that looks to establish and maintain a basic level of public health.

Patterson released the film as Marvin Breckinridge, presumably due to the perceived prejudice against women filmmakers. She went to a career as a photojournalist, and became the first female news broadcaster to report from Europe during World War II.

Mary Breckinridge continued her work for decades. Her record is only marred by evidence of her strong racism.

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

NFR Project: 'Dracula' (Spanish version) (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dracula’ (Spanish version)

Dir: George Melford

Scr: Garrett Fort; Baltasar Fernandez Cue

Pho: George Robinson

Ed: Arturo Tavares

Premiere: March 1, 1931

104 min.

This is an unusual entry. The film exists due a short-term practice in the early sound era, before overdubbing and subtitles came along. Foreign markets were an essential part of film studios’ strategies, but with the advent of sound, they had to figure out a way to present dialogue in other languages.

They did so by making alternate-language versions while they are making the primary, English-language film. Using the same sets, costumes, and props but substituting French, Spanish, German, or Swedish actors for American ones, they crafted an acceptable copy of the original film in the language of their choice.

This Dracula is one of those films. It has been argued critically that this is a superior film to the original; it is nearly a half hour longer, due to the lack of censorship in Spanish-language cinema – it is slightly creepier in spots than the original. While the original cast performed for the camera during the day, the Spanish cast would work in those same settings at night. The Spanish director Melford (he used an interpreter) would look at the daily rushes from the primary picture shoot to guide him.

Despite the slightly different styles of the two directors, the main difference in the film is the performance of Carlos Villarias as Dracula. Unlike Lugosi, who handled a difficult character and turned it into an iconic performance, Vilarias is over the top as the deadly Count, making the premise of the film seem unbelievable. Of note, however, is the performance of Pablo Alvarez Rubio as Renfield. He is as scary as Dwight Frye, in his own unique manner.

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

NFR Project: 'Dracula' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dracula’

Dir: Tod Browning

Scr: Garrett Fort

Pho: Karl Freund

Ed: Milton Carruth, Maurice Pivar

Premiere: February 14, 1931

75 min.

Tod Browning was not a great director. Nor was he a particularly nice person. He ended his life as a terminal, dysfunctional alcoholic.

However, he had macabre inclinations, obsessions that colored his life and made him a master of horror on film. Dracula represents his commercial apogee, before his subsequent film ruined his career forever.

He was a runaway at age 16, and worked in circuses, carnivals, and in vaudeville in all manner of capacities for 13 years. This exposure to the underside of the entertainment world gave him a twist for the bizarre.

He fell into the film industry, and moved to Hollywood in 1913. He was known primarily for his comedic performances. However, on June 16, 1915, he drove himself and two other men into the path of a train while driving drunk. One man was killed; Browning and the other were severely injured.

After the accident, Browning slowly recovered and began to work as a screenwriter and director. He specialized in melodramas. In 1919, he first worked with an up-and-coming actor who was a master of makeup and disguise. He was Lon Chaney, the fabled “Man of a Thousand Faces.”

Browning and Chaney made 10 more films together, with Chaney usually in the lead. These were tales of crime, vengeance, and intense suffering. Haunted, grotesque characters filled his foregrounds. From Outside the Law (1920) through West of Zanzibar (1928), their successful collaborations set the stage for the coming horror boom.

Chaney was, in fact, an early choice to play Dracula. However, Chaney’s premature death in 1930 due to cancer scuppered Browning’s plan, and he was forced to look elsewhere for his leading actor.

Universal Studio’s interest in Dracula was piqued by a successful 1924 Broadway adaptation written by Harold Deane and John L. Balderston. It turned to an obscure Hungarian actor who had played the title role in 1927 on Broadway, and was now touring with the play in Los Angeles – Bela Lugosi. Lugosi lobbied for the role and accepted a criminally small salary to appear in the film.

The script follows a 1927 rewriter of the stage adaptation, veering far at times from the original 1897 novel. Surprisingly, large chunks of the film are stiff and static, reading more like a filmed stage performance than as a film per se.

The film takes off cinematically, however, during its dialogue-less sequences. Here is where Browning deferred to his cinematographer, the brilliant Karl Freund. Freund was familiar with the convoluted, shadowy style of German Expressionism that flourished in Germany; here, in Hollywood, he would apply its aesthetic to American horror, a choice that would be imitated faithfully for decades.

For example, the camers sweeps in to Dracula’s castle along with the innocent young lawyer Renfield (Dwight Frye), who has come to complete a real estate transaction with the Count. The silent advance of Dracula’s wives is pulse-pounding. Soon Dracula had bitten him and made a mad slave of him. The two then travel to England, supposedly to feed all the better off of humanity.

Fortunately, Professor Van Helsing is there. An expert in the occult and the strange, he recognizes Dracula for what he is – a vampire who cannot even cast a reflection in a mirror. They battle for the soul of Mina Harker, a battle that ends only when Van Helsing discovers Dracula’s coffin hiding place and stakes him through the heart.

Look for the silent sequences to see where Freund’s camera comes into play, evocative and compelling. The film is also anchored by two stellar performances. Dwight Frye as the madman Renfield sets the bar for obsessive maniacs on film, going over the top in a delightfully creepy way.

Then there is Lugosi. Dracula was a far cry from the Shakespeare he performed on his native stages. Still, his magnetic aura and compelling stare proved hypnotic, resulting in fan fervor that hadn’t existed since Valentino’s death. Lugosi, an urbane and mild-mannered man in real life, became typed with the vampire role, and was condemned to smaller and smaller roles in cheap and cheaper horror films.

The movie takes place almost entirely at night, and the fog and Charles D. Hall’s careful art direction further propel the audience into a notional space where vampires could exist . . . and might be after you.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dracula (Spanish language version).

 

NFR Project: 'City Lights' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘City Lights’

Dir: Charlie Chaplin

Scr: Charlie Chaplin

Pho: Roland Totheroh, Gordon Pollock

Ed: Charlie Chaplin, Willard Nico

Premiere: January 30, 1931

87 min.

It was Chaplin’s favorite film, and his most successful. What makes it so great?

To watch Chaplin’s silent films in chronological order is to see a genius gain mastery over his medium. From the scattershot slapstick of his early one- and two-reelers, to more mature features such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925), you can observe him gaining confidence and control over the work. Chaplin was getter better and stronger as a writer, as a director, and as a performer.

In 1931, sound had already taken over film. No one was making silents anymore. That is, except Chaplin. As a profoundly gifted pantomimist, he must have seen sound as a drawback to the fuller expression he could evoke on a purely visual level. He had carefully nurtured the persona of the Little Tramp, and felt that silence emphasized both his whimsicality and his pathos.

So he proceeded to make a silent film in the sound era, only compromising by creating a track of musical score and select sound effects. In fact, he mocks the spoken word in his opening, when dignitaries address a crowd – the buzz of a kazoo takes the place of their words on the soundtrack.

Charlie is the Little Tramp, in his next-to-last appearance as the character. He is revealed snoozing in the lap of a new civic statue, and ruins the grand unveiling of same. He escapes, and wanders the streets until he comes upon a blind flower girl, who he is immediately smitten with. Due to a clever bit of business, she mistakenly thinks he is well-off. Charlie does not abuse this idea.

Next we come to a night scene by a river – a despondent, drunken millionaire intends to drown himself. Charlie saves him, and the man swears eternal camaraderie. Charlie is happy to be befriended, and takes money offered by him, and uses his car, to impress the flower girl.

Unfortunately, when the millionaire is sober he has no recollection of Charlie, and has him thrown out. Meanwhile, the flower girl is ill; Charlie becomes a street sweeper to make money to support her and her grandmother. He then finds that they are about to be evicted. He volunteers to fight in the ring for $25 of a $50 purse and a guarantee of not being hurt, but his opponent leaves and he is paired up with a bigger man who says, “Winner take all!”

After a wonderfully choreographed comic fight, which he loses, he finds the drunken millionaire again and gets not only the money for rent, but $1,000, which will pay for an operation for the blind girl to see again. Charlie gets the money to her before he is arrested.

We fast-forward in time. The girl, who can now see, has her own flower shop. The Tramp, now more raggedy fand forlorn than ever, sees her and is transfixed. She takes pity on him and gives him money. However, when her hand touches his she realizes that this man was her benefactor. “You can see now?” he asks. “Yes, I can see now,” the girl says. The last shot is Chaplin’s face, registering a mix of excitement and apprehension.

Is there a future for the two? As this is a comic romance, undoubtedly. Chaplin was heavy on the sentiment, and some today might find his pathetic stance unconvincing. However, for an audience conditioned to sentimental dramas, his approach is dead on.

The film works because Chaplin rigorously irons out anything inessential. He keeps the line of the film very pure, and simple, and believable. It is said that he shot thousands and thousands of feet of film to get the takes that satisfied him. Given his popularity and his financial resources, it makes sense that it would take him nearly two years to craft this picture.

The picture's success meant that he would continue to work silently in his next film, Modern Times, an anachronism of silence in 1936. IT would be his last outing as the Little Tramp.

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

NFR Project: 'A Bronx Morning' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘A Bronx Morning’

Dir: Jay Leyda

Scr: Jay Leyda

Pho: Jay Leyda

Ed: Jay Leyda

1931

11 min.

This is a remarkable first film, made by an adept student of European film. Having only read descriptions of great “city symphonies” such as Berlin (1927), 21-year-old Jay Leyda decided to create one of his own.

The result is a silent short that is half documentary, half avant-garde film. Leyda focuses on shadows, fragments of movement, quickly observed still lifes. Together, they create aa portrait of an urban landscape waking up to the day. Kids play. Housewives lean out of apartment windows. The subway rushes past. The produce man sets up his cart. ]

Leyda cuts off faces, gestures. We see only parts of actions and attitudes, leaving us with an architectural rather than an emotional portrait.

Leyda went on to work as a cameraman with Eisenstein, and he became quite a cinema scholar. This fresh and nuanced collection of shots looks to the past, in that it is silent; to the future, in terms of kickstarting an American avant-garde cinema.

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

NFR Project: 'The Revenge of Pancho Villa' (1930-36)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Revenge of Pancho Villa’

Dir: Felix Padilla

Scr: Felix Padilla

Pho: Felix Padilla

Ed: Felix Padilla

Created 1930-1936

Approx. 60 min.

Here is a fascinating piece of subversive cinema. (Read the National Recording Registry essay by Laura Isabel Serna here.) This film is a biography of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, but it is not a deliberate biography. No, the man who made this film, Feix Padilla, assembled it out of snatches of other films, creating a patchwork quilt of a movie that paints Villa as a great hero, instead of as the bandit that most of America considered him to be at the time.

Padilla was a touring exhibitor of film, reaching audiences in way out-of-the-way places along the Texas/Mexico border with a traveling cinema. Padilla made his money in small amounts, spending days on the road bringing movies to little towns that didn’t even warrant the building of a movie theater.

During his travels, he collected film sequences that featured Villa or the Mexican revolution, and cut them together in new combinations, bridging big continuity lapses with bilingual title cards. Again and again in the film, Villa defeats the Yankees. I have not seen the film, but it sounds like a big crowd pleaser.

No one knows why Padilla crafted this feature, but it is great to see people create an alternate history.

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

 

 

 

 

NFR Project: Hal Roach Presents His Rascals in 'Pups is Pups' (1930)

NFR Project: ‘Pups Is Pups’

Dir: Robert F. McGowan

Scr: Robert F. McGowan, H.M. Walker

Pho: Art Lloyd

Ed: Richard C. Currier

Premiere: August 30, 1930

18:24

The Little Rascals, aka Our Gang, series of comic shorts featuring children (1922-1944) is an acquired taste. Many of us were treated to incessant screenings of it on local television, usually on Saturday mornings. The kooky humor, the unfamiliar expressions, the weird slapstick, and the preternaturally advanced communication skills of these kids was fascinating, and in a way, disturbing. They seem to exist in their own weird, jazz-inflected universe.

You could not do better than the explanatory essay penned by Randy Skretvedt, which you can read here. I can only add my personal observations and explanations to it.

It seems that producer Hal Roach thought of the Little Rascals idea when he got caught up watching a bunch of kids arguing on a street corner. He thought people might be interested in the lives of everyday kids. He was right.

Soon he had begun the long-running series, enlisting producer-director Robert F. McGowan as the chief of the operation. McGowan turned out to have a knack for directing children, Kids aged out of the Gang, and new members were recruited. McGowan worked on the series as long as he could until, burned out, he quit in 1933. Roach kept up the series until 1938, when he sold it to MGM.

The Roach Studios made 88 silent Our Gang comedies, then reeled off 132 sound shorts. This is just the 12^th sound short by the Gang. Unusually, it is set in an industrial landscape instead of in a more affluent, middle-class neighborhood. The Gang is led by Jackie Cooper, soon to become a big child star. The story involves the kids trying to crash and win prizes at a national pet show. Subplots involving wandering puppies and a muddy pothole are included.

Though McGowan and company indulged in some cultural stereotyping, the sries is notable for treating white and Black children are equals. In fact, Ernie Morrison, an original member of the Gang, was the first African-American to sign a long-term film contract in Hollywood history.

Listen closely and you’ll hear the music of Leroy Shield, which became the catchy background for many Roach films, including Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy. The Beau Hunks have made a few albums that recreate those insistently listenable scores.

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

NFR Project: Nicholas Brothers' Home Movies

 

NFR Project: Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies

1930s – 1950s

This is another listing of material to which I have no access. Fortunately, there’s an excellent explanatory essay on it from two who have undoubtedly seen all the footage – Tony Nicholas and Luisa F. Ribeiro. You can read it here.

The Nicholas Brothers were one of the top dance acts of the 20^th century. Anyone who doubts this can look up their astonishing routine in Stormy Weather (1943). They were two of the most athletically gifted and imaginative dancers out there.

Which leads to the family home movies of them and their travels. In 1934, their father Ulysses purchased a 16mm camera and began recording their performances, vacations, and family gatherings. The result is evidently a treasure trove of unique experiences captured on the fly by what we might term these days a jet-setting family.

It is unique in that not many African-Americans were affluent enough to document their home life, as many white people were beginning to do with the advent of home-movie equipment. Evidently the resulting footage is a fabulous look into the life of one family.

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

NFR Project: 'Morocco' (1930)

 

NFR Project: ‘Morocco’

Dir: Josef von Sternberg

Scr: Jules Furthman

Pho: Lee Garmes

Ed: Sam Winston

Premiere: November 14, 1930

91 min.

The French call it amor fou, obsessive passion, mad love.

“There is a Foreign Legion of women, too. But we have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals. But we are brave. No wound stripes, but we are hurt.”

Love here is a delirious if unspoken ecstasy, a vehicle for suffering of the highest order. Romantic to a fault, this faux epic by the tempestuous von Sternberg is his second of seven pairings with Marlene Dietrich, and their first sojourn in English. This string of films established Dietrich as a film goddess, and von Sternberg as a master, if peculiar, stylist. (The film is viewable via the Internet Archive, here.)

Here la Dietrich is Amy Jolly, a woman on the down and out, a provocative entertainer with no better place to go. (In the original novel, she is a prostitute and drug addict.) She sails into Mogador at the same time as a pleasant, rich gentleman (Adolphe Menjou), and she is seeking a job.

Soon she is singing in a gay club in the native quarter, where sits the Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). Jarringly for audiences of the time, she steps out onto the stage in a man’s tuxedo, and sings a song of love in French. She strolls through the audience, and picks out a sitting woman, asking for the flower in her hair and kissing her. This wild upending of traditional sexual roles was revolutionary for the time.

She then tosses the flower to Brown, who puts it behind his ear. The female acts male, the male acts female. Gender here is fluid, and anything could happen.

Their unrequited passion plays out against the landscape of exotic North Africa, a landscape entirely notional and created by the filmmakers. It’s not meant to depict a literal location – it’s a dreamscape, really. It is the romantic Otherworld, the place where forbidden dreams can come true. All bets are off in a society and setting such as this.

Unfortunately for Cooper, he has been making merry with his superior’s wife and is singled out for punishment and hazardous duty. He and Dietrich almost decide to run away together, but he decides she is better off with a rich husband. While he is gone, she accepts the advances of the noble Menjou, to the point that they are to be married.

Suddenly, word of Cooper being alive rivets Dietrich. She must find him. Immediately. Menjou obligingly (he is practically a saint in this film) drives her out into the desert, seeking him. He is found, and denies his love for her . . . but she finds that he has carved her name into a tabletop.

Cooper’s squad must move out again, and as they march off into the desert, a handful of women, camp followers, tags along behind. Dietrich bids Menjou farewell, and stumbles just as she is out into the sand, casting off her high-heeled shoes and following the trail of the regiment. The camera holds on her as she and the other women march out of sight, and the wind howls and the sand blurs the vision.

It's all so very implausible. But who cares? Von Sternberg had crafted a similar story of love and sacrifice in The Docks of New York (1928). The sharp visual sensibility he gave to realistic films grew exponentially when he was allowed to create an entirely imaginary universe on film. His Morocco of brigands, soldiers, lowlifes, and charlatans is a narcotizing construct that frees up the audience’s imagination. In this way, they can read between the enigmatic lines.

Furthman’s script is brisk and to the point. Von Sternberg is acutely aware of the sound plot of his film, and he uses sound effects sparingly and with assurance. When Dietrich learns that Cooper is alive, she starts suddenly, breaking a pearl necklace that clatters to the floor. The string breaks, and her contract with Menjou, who undoubtedly gave her the pearls, is broken also.

Her final strides into the distance don’t portend that she will successfully transform herself into a soldier’s woman. The odds are that she might turn, exhausted, back to the outpost. And Cooper might be over her sooner than later. But none of that matters. Morocco insists that the burning ecstasy of love overrides all other human needs, and that such love is worth suffering the torments of a barren desert hell.

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

NFR Project: 'Little Caesar' (1931)

 

NFR Project: ‘Little Caesar’

Dir: Mervyn LeRoy

Scr: Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert N. Lee, Robert Lord, Darryl F. Zanuck

Pho: Tony Gaudio

Ed: Ray Curtiss

Premiere: January 9, 1931

79 min.

Gangster films were huge throughout the 1930s, and this film, along with The Public Enemy (1931) and the original Scarface (1932), started it all. The stories of tough guys who end up hoist by their own petard – crime doesn’t pay, after all – are miniature tragedies, with guns.

It was the film that made Warner Brothers studio the home of hard-bitten fare. Every major studio in Hollywood had a specialty, and this was its. Here a whole generation of cops and robbers performers would be bred.

The first great gangster film was Josef von Sternberg’s little-seen Underworld (1927), and much of the 1930s crime film style came from that picture. Others cite The Doorway to Hell (1930) as a precursor. However, it is the riveting story of naked ambition that elevates Little Caesar and makes it into a parable about the American imperative to “make it big.”

The central character is a classic antihero, and Edward G. Robinson deserved the accolades and success that accompanied his performance. On the surface, Robinson would not seem to be leading-man material. He is small and thick-featured. But he displays dynamic power as he plays Caesar “Rico” Bandello as a titanic figure driven by the need to dominate the criminal landscape. Robinson is arrogant, intense in the role, a man with a talent for murder and mayhem.

Set in Chicago, the action bears a strong resemblance to the real-life exploits of noted criminals. Rico and his buddy Joe (a young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) are small-time hoods. Rico dreams of making it in the big city, so off to Chicago they go. There Rico falls in with bad company almost immediately, while Joe leaves the criminal world and performs as a dancer. There is no romantic interest for Rico – he is all action, all the time.

The film then embarks on a kind of Rake’s Progress. Rico takes over the gang he joined, increasing his “territory.” He goes on to larger and better positions, until he is ruling over the whole North Side. However, since Joe had witnessed his murder of the crime commissioner earlier, Rico thinks he needs to rub his buddy out. He tries, but fails to do so. He runs, Joe testifies, and the reign of Little Caesar is over.

We finally find the gangland chief in a cheap flophouse, hiding out and drinking heavily. He hears a news report of a police detective mocking him, and, outraged, he calls the cop to lash out at him. The police trace the call, and Rico is run to ground. Hiding behind a billboard (advertising a show Joe is starring in), he is riddled with bullets from a tommygun. Astonished, Robinson utters the classic line: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” and dies. The wages of sin is death.

If the movie seems cliched today, it’s because it is the original, from which all the cliches descended. With a riveting central perofrmacne, Little Caesar is a classic lets the audience live vicariously through Rico, then absolve themselves with reacting pleasantly to his demise.

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

NFR Project: 'King of Jazz' (1930)

NFR Project ‘King of Jazz’

Dir: John Murray Anderson

Scr: Charles MacArthur, Harry Ruskin

Pho: Jerome Ash, Hal Mohr, Ray Rennahan

Ed: Robert Carlisle

Premiere: April 19, 1930

98 min.

All-talking! All-singing! All color!

No expense was spared to craft King of Jazz. With the advent of sound and two-strip (red and green) Technicolor, the chance to make a cinema spectacular was finally possible. All the major studios had issued music-filled big-budget films in the years following The Jazz Singer, and now Universal was ready to take the plunge.

The film centers of the performances of Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. Whiteman, a Denver boy who specialized in “sweet” jazz, that is, mellow and unthreatening jazz-inflected music, was marketed as the “King of Jazz,” especially in the wake of his commissioning George Gershwin to write the famous classical/jazz hybrid Rhapsody in Blue in 1924. Whiteman’s signature bulk and pencil-thin moustache were known across the country.

Whiteman had quite a say in the production. He replaced the original director, Paul Fejos, with John Murray Anderson, a stage veteran for whom this would be his first film. Instead of playing live, Whiteman insisted on pre-recording all his numbers and then having his band mime along to them during the actual filming, to ensure quality sound.

The result is a film that is not technically ambitious, but that comes very close to being a filmed recreation of the kind of variety show staged on Broadway in the early years of the 20^th century, shows such as the Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, and Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Big musical numbers alternate with smaller specialty numbers, an animated sequence (the first color movie animation) and brief, humorous sketches. Lavish costumes and set decoration mark the work.

Among the entertainers featured is Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys singing trio, one of whom was Big Crosby, in his first film appearance. Crosby was meant to have a larger part in the film, but he got into a drunk driving accident during filming, severely injuring a passenger. Unrepentant in front of the judge, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail. They shot around him.

The film did not perform all that well at the box office. It turns out that movie audiences were burned out on musical extravaganzas, even those filmed in color. It must also be said that the film is not gripping. The music and dance numbers clank clumsily across the stage, the comedic bits are stale, and the pacing is slothful.

The end product is designed to appeal to all ages, so it takes no chances, aside from a few risqué jokes in the blackout sequences. Whiteman’s band, was, appropriately, vanilla, all white – musical integration would have to wait for Benny Goodman to come along and change things with his insistence of putting the best musicians, black and white, together on stage.

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