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.

 

NFR Project: 'Grand Hotel' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘Grand Hotel’

Dir: Edmund Goulding

Scr: William A. Drake

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Blanche Sewell

Premiere: April 12, 1932

112 min.

“Grand Hotel . . . always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”

So says the disfigured doctor, the cynical Otternschlag (Lewis Stone), at both the beginning and end of this movie. In fact, the film tells us, there is very much going on in this Berlin hotel, much of it life-changing.

This is one of the earliest “all-star” films, large ensemble works that showcase many big-name actors. Here the cast consists of John Barrymore as the impoverished Baron Geigern, his brother Lionel as the timid accountant Kringelein, Wallace Beery as the industrialist Preysing, Joan Crawford as Flaemmchen the stenographer who dreams of bigger things, and Greta Garbo as the prima ballerina Grusinskaya, whose best days are behind her.

This is not merely stunt casting. Each of the five main actors has a complex character to play, each is necessary to move the plot forward.

These five peoples’ fates will intertwine. The Baron, who’s a gambler and a sneak thief, befriends Kringelein, an accountant who has a fatal illness and plans to blow all his money in a stay at the Grand Hotel. Meanwhile, Preysing is trying to close a big business deal, and Flaemmchen is his secretary.

The Baron goes the Grusinskaya’s room to steal her pearls, but he is caught when she returns form the theater, distraught because she feels no longer able to dance. “I vant to be alone,” she tells her followers, memorably and miserably. Fortunately for her, the Baron makes himself known when she is on the verge of suicide, and the two fall in love.

The Baron swears to join her in Vienna, but refuses to take any money from her to leave town with. He has the chance to steal what he needs from Kringelein, but relents. Preysing, whose deal is falling apart, plans to go to England to fix things, finds the Baron in his room stealing, and in a rage kills him.

Grusinskaya leaves the hotel for the train to Vienna, not knowing the Baron is dead. Preysing is hauled off by the police. Kringellein and Flaemmchen leave together, to seek a cure for his illness.

The key to the success of the picture is its admirable use of strong source material. In this case, it was the 1929 novel by the prolific and popular Vicki Baum. Producer Irving Thalberg bought the rights to the book right away, then had it adapted into a play, written by William A. Drake. This 1930 Broadway version of the book was a success, running for over a year. (It was also made into a Tony Award-winning musical in 1989.)

The director, Goulding, was not overawed by his stars, and he summoned fine performances from all of them (the film won Best Picture at the Oscars). The art direction by Cedric Gibbons is superb, and William H. Daniels’ cinematography is a dazzling spectrum of gradations of silver. Whoever thinks of “black-and-white” film as just that should watch Grand Hotel.

Goulding keeps the actors moving, a priority in what might easily have been merely a “talkie” film. With daring close-ups, traveling two-shots, sweeps, and pans, the camera follows the performers around like a curious inquisitor.

John Barrymore is outstanding in what would become one of his best remembered roles, a debonair, devil-may-care patrician. Lionel Barrymore has a whale of a time as the mouse turned man Kringelein. Beery does well with the brutish, none-too-smart Preysing. Crawford is still at the height of her beauty as the sweet Flaemmenchen, and Garbo. Well, Garbo is at her peak here, and Goulding gives her plenty of time and space in which to emote. It’s a lavish set of interlocking melodramas.

I saw this film at the long-gone Ricketson Cinema – a pristine print perfectly screened, rich and detailed, working all in glistening degrees of silver. It was one of my top viewing experiences ever. It still holds up.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.