Friday, February 14, 2025

NFR Project: 'Modern Times' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Modern Times’

Dir: Charlie Chaplin

Scr: Charlie Chaplin

Pho: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh

Ed: Charlie Chaplin, Willard Nico

Premiere: Feb. 5, 1936

87 min.

Charlie Chaplin resisted the coming of sound longer than any filmmaker. A stunningly gifted pantomimist, he knew his kind of comedy worked best without dialogue. He was simply capable of evoking whatever emotions he wanted to – laughter, tears, pity – through the vehicle of the camera. A decade after sound came in, Modern Times is his farewell to silence, and to his famed Little Tramp character.

Chaplin’s last silent picture is not a silent picture. There is music, of course, a score composed by Chaplin himself, and a plethora of sound effects as well. Some characters are given the power of speech – most notably, Chaplin’s micromanaging boss at the factory he works at in the opening of the film. As the Little Tramp, Charlie himself remains voiceless until the end of the film when, forced to sing without knowing any lyrics, he sings a long string of nonsense words, telling the song’s story eloquently through his face and body. So there, he seems to be saying. I don’t have to say a blessed thing to get my point across.

Chaplin starts out as just another worker in a great factory, tightening nuts on an assembly line speedily and spasmodically, working so hard that he keeps jerking his arms about when off the line. The pace is doubled and redoubled. Finally, Charlie goes berserk, has a nervous breakdown, and starts tightening anything that resembles nuts – buttons, noses, nipples. He spies a shapely young woman, and the wrenches he wields turn to horns athwart his head, and he pursues her like a stag. The human animal reasserts itself.

Charlie is taken away, cured, and released, only to fall afoul of the law when he is mistaken for the leader of a Communist rally. Charlie winds up in jail, where ironically, he finds stability, peace, and contentment. Meanwhile, we are introduced to the Gamin, a scrappy young girl (Paulette Goddard) who lives by her wits on the streets.

The two meet in a paddy wagon. She and Charlie wind up together, and dream of a happy domestic life. It is not to be. Charlie gets a job as a night watchman, then spoils the Gamin with food from the store, letting her sleep there in the furniture department. Meanwhile, real crooks try to rob the store and Charlie proves to be little match for them. Again he goes to jail.

Again and again, Chaplin and the Gamin try to go straight and play the game according to the rules – and again and again, they run afoul of the law. They are free spirits, and so don’t conform to the normalcies of the proper and upstanding. Society has no place for them. 

Eventually, the two end up in a tumbledown shack, and they get jobs entertaining at a café. But the law gets wise and seeks to arrest the Gamin and put her in a reform school. Once again, the two break away and hit the open road, journeying side by side down the center stripe of the road. The Little Tramp is still rootless, but here in the end, he has someone to share his wanderings with.

Chaplin’s grim assessment of the modern world, with its industrialization, riots, strikes, injustice, and inequality, is balanced by his unending playfulness, a refusal to take the human world seriously. It is subversive (the Nazis banned it) and thought-provoking. Chaplin could say so much with his movies; it is difficult to find a more profound cinematic influence.

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

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

NFR Project: 'Master Hands' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Master Hands’

Dir: Henry Jamison ‘Jam’ Handy

Scr: N/A

Pho: Gordon Avil

Ed: Vincent Herman

Premiere: June 23, 1936

33 min.

The corporate promotional documentary film, known as an industrial, has a much longer history than one might imagine. Earlier efforts in the National Registry such as Westinghouse Works 1904 show us manufacturing processes, with men scrambling around amid huge pieces of machinery.

Director ‘Jam’ Handy created this film to promote the car manufacturer Chevrolet. In Master Hands, the emphasis is again on workers and process, although this narration-less documentary leans in to get close-ups shots of hands at work, turning out auto parts and assembling cars until they, complete, at last roll out of the factory and onto the road. Throughout, there is a score underpinning the film, one that leans heavily on snippings from Wagner.

Ironically, it was these workers who would famously go on a sit-down strike against General Motors in 1936. The picture Handy creates the impression of a smooth, purposeful, logical process at work, it’s one that doesn’t include the faces or voices of the men that made the process possible.

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

Monday, February 10, 2025

NFR Project: 'Fury' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Fury’

Dir: Fritz Lang

Scr: Bartlett Cormack, Fritz Lang, Norman Krasna

Pho: Joseph Ruttenberg

Ed: Frank Sullivan

Premiere: June 5, 1936

92 min.

It is arguable that German director Fritz Lang had created his greatest films before he came to America. He had already made Metropolis and M, as well as lesser-known classics such as Destiny, Spies, Die Nibelungen, and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. His thrillers and fantasies enchanted the German and the international public.

His Jewish heritage, however, put him in danger with the Nazis in power. He was actually offered the job of the head of UFA, the dominant German film corporation, by Josef Goebbels. He wisely declined, and soon made his escape first to France and then the United States.

Fury was his first American film. It’s gritty and relentless, a “problem” picture that demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in human nature, especially that of crowds. Lang had a hand in the screenplay, and his cynicism and blunt truthfulness are unsettling, especially in an ostensibly mainstream picture.

The movie stars Spencer Tracy as Joe Wilson, a regular guy who plans to wed his beloved, played by Sylvia Sidney. Driving to meet her, he is stopped in a small town where a kidnapping has taken place. He is arrested and is taken to the town jail. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the town begin to gossip about him, and soon the rumors swell out of proportion until the whole town is convinced that he is the kidnapper.

After a lengthy barroom session, drinking their courage up, the men march to the jail to lynch Joe. Unable to get him out of his cell, they set fire to the jail, and dynamite it as well. Joe escapes with his life, but everyone assumes he was killed in the fire.

Joe wants vengeance. He hides out as 22 of the town’s citizens are charged with murder. The townspeople fight back by declining to identify any of the suspects, hoping to avoid evidence of their participation in the attempted lynching. Unfortunately for them, a newsreel crew captured the action on film. The prosecuting attorney plays the film for the courtroom, and there the proof is: freeze-frames of the rioting show the guilty. The defendants are doomed.

Tracy enters the courtroom just at that moment, to confess his malice and to let the defendants off the hook. It’s a pat ending that does not mitigate the indictment of mob mentality that Lang illustrates here. His experiences in Germany taught him what human nature was capable of, and he takes a dim view of the wisdom of the common man. He sees mankind as deluded and malicious – even Joe, formerly a sweet guy, is transformed into a revenge-obsessed maniac.

Lang would go on to tackle all manner of genre films during his time in Hollywood, most notably in film noir. He manages to smuggle in his subversive view of human nature in everything he makes, but it was never so openly on display as in this film.

The parallels with contemporary history are obvious. We just saw 1,500 violent rioters pardoned by a criminal president, and their crimes painted as innocuous, or denied completely. When people lose control and lash out at each other, it is their ill will that reconfigures their memories into more pleasing shapes.

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

Thursday, February 6, 2025

NFR Project: 'Flash Gordon' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Flash Gordon’

Dir: Frederick Stephani

Scr: Frederick Stephani, Ella O’Neill, George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey

Pho: Jerome Ash, Richard Fryer

Ed: Saul A. Goodkind, Louis Sacklin, Alvin Todd, Edward Todd

Premiere: April 6, 1936

245 min.

What fun! The best of the old movie serials is a wonderful science-fiction fantasy. Flash Gordon the comic was created in 1934, in response to the popularity of the sci-fi cartoon strip Buck Rogers, which debuted in 1929. The great comics artist Alex Raymond created multiple stunning worlds, creatures, and adventures for his heroic space traveler to experience. It immediately enchanted comics readers.

Movie serials were a unique feature of Golden Age movie making. Shown before the main feature, they were melodramas, episodic stories, pitting a hero against a villain or villains in a series of trials. Ten to fifteen minutes long, they ended with what was termed a "cliffhanger" -- a situation deadly to the hero that seems to be inescapable. The following week, the hero's escape from peril is revealed.

This story of the film concerns the imminent destruction of Earth, caused by a rogue planet that’s sailing through the aether on a collision course. The young athlete Flash (Buster Crabbe, an Olympic swimming champion, like Tarzan’s Johnny Weissmuller), with female companion Dale Arden (Jean Rogers), join the genius Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) in his home-made spaceship, to travel to the planet Mongo to prevent the destruction from happening.

When they land on Mongo, they find it full of strange, giant beasts (blown-up footage of lizards adorned with spikes and horns), and hostile soldiers. They are taken to the throne room of Emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton), where Ming decides he wants Dale, and does his best to rid the planet of Flash. And so, for 13 episodes, Flash and Ming battle it out, moving boldly from one cliffhanger to another. There are Lion Men and Hawk Men, and a city that floats in the sky, and an “ourangopoid” (a guy in a gorilla suit with a horn glued to his head). In all the places he finds himself, Flash never gives up his devotion to Dale.

Universal spent a lot of money on the production, and despite the limitations of special effects at the time, the filmmakers cobbled together a convincing enough series of settings. Props and costumes were recycled from the studio’s earlier horror films (Dr. Zarkov’s laboratory is filled with Kenneth Strickfaden’s machines created for Frankenstein). The project had a large budget, and you can see it in carefully made miniatures, sweeping settings (lots of curtains are used to cover the lack of money for sets), and convincing costumes.

All the performers do a decent job of producing a believable effort. Tops among them, however, is Charles Middleton as the bald-pated, merciless Ming. (Ming is unfortunately an Asian stereotype, based on the fictional character Fu Manchu). Middleton gets fully into the character, going over the top as he emphasizes Ming’s cruel and arbitrary outlook. Ming remains one of cinema’s great villains.

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

NFR Project: 'Dodsworth' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dodsworth’

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Sidney Howard

Pho: Rudolph Mate

Ed: Daniel Mandell

Premiere: Sept. 23, 1936

101 min.

This is an admirable example of the all-too-rare adult drama. There are no explosions, or chases, or gimmicks, just people relating. It requires a measure of maturity to appreciate, and as a result could never be made today.

Director William Wyler earned his first of 12 Oscar nominations with this film. He was devoted to detail, and was kown for getting the most of out his actors. Here he helps his cast negotiate complex and subtle states of mind, in a straightforward, transparent manner that lets us see into the characters as they change and develop.

The movie is adapted from the play by Sidney Howard, which itself was based on Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel. It concerns the middle-aged, wealthy industrialist, Sam Dodsworth (the great Walter Huston, father of John and grandfather of Anjelica), who decides to retire and travel in Europe. His wife, Fran (Ruth Chatterton, in a lacerating performance) is a snob and social climber, although Sam fittingly describes the two of them as “hicks.”

This is the story of a marriage coming apart. Fran starts a shipboard romance with another man (David Niven) that is rapidly crushed, but it serves as a presentiment of what the rest of the movie will entail. In Europe, Fran hobnobs with the titled and wealthy while Sam checks out the local monuments. Soon Fran is hanging out with another wealthy man, and it’s obvious that she’s being unfaithful to her husband.

Sam, being the hero, is as patient as Job with Fran and her willfulness. Time and time again he forgives her and tries to give the marriage another try. However, Fran remains socially ambitious, and terrified of getting old. Her attempts to travel with a younger man turns to talk of divorce and remarriage. However, in her very first film appearance the tiny but formidable Maria Ouspenskaya plays the young man’s mother, who quashes Fran’s plans bluntly.

Meanwhile, Sam is striking up an acquaintance with an expatriate widow, Edith (Mary Astor) who’s everything Fran is not – compassionate, thoughtful, loving. It takes more selfish behavior by Fran to drive Sam back into Edith’s happy arms.

Here the drama is all in the dialogue. Everything is developed through exchanges that are tense, fraught with unspoken anger and sorrow. Ruth Chatterton’s portrayal of Fran is complicated – she’s clearly the villain of the piece, but Chatterton injects her with desperation and sadness, making a her vulnerable and not just a stereotype. Huston’s performance as a typical American man is pitched perfectly.

Dodsworth liberates himself from a toxic relationship, and rediscovers his desire to work and be a part of the larger world. With Edith, he finds a partner to accompany him on his next big adventure.

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

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

NFR Project: 'Top Hat' (1935)

 

NFR Project: ‘Top Hat’

Dir: Mark Sandrich

Scr: Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor

Pho: David Abel

Ed: William Hamilton

Premiere: Aug. 29, 1935

101 min.

The plot is negligible. An American dancer in London, Jerry (Fred Astaire), falls for model Dale (Ginger Rogers), but she’s under the mistaken impression that he’s a married man. He follows her to Venice to straighten everything out.

That’s it. This gossamer thread of a storyline is, fortunately, entertainingly funny and staffed with great character actors – Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, and Helen Broderick. The farce is propelled through a series of wry observations, malapropisms, comic glowers, and slapped faces.

Likewise, the movie is set in Cloud-Cuckoo Land – a lavishly designed, palatial Art Deco setting all gleaming floors and crisp angles. It’s a perfect situation in which to stage a romantic fantasy, at heart which this is. Everything serves to deliver the goods – the dance numbers that tell a story in themselves.

On hand is a top-notch score from Irving Berlin, a soundtrack full of hits. Astaire starts out with a jaunty, aggressive tap proclaiming his singlehood in “No Strings.” His clatter awakens Ginger Rogers in the suite below. She complains. He spreads sand on the floor, and dances a gentle sand dance to soothe her to sleep.

Later the two meet cute in a rainstorm under a gazebo. He sings “Isn’t It a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?”, and the two dancing a courtship dance, tattooing the floor, testing each other’s tapping skills, spinning into glee together. Obviously, they are meant to be together.

Then Fred dances solo on stage to “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” banging out the rhythms while a file of similarly duded-up gents mirror his moves behind him Finally he turns and knocks off the members of the chorus with blasts of his cane. There can be only one Fred Astaire.

“Cheek to Cheek” is remarkable for its sinuously danced intimacy. Rogers wears a (notoriously) feathered dress which captures the light and shimmers as she moves. Astaire is elegance personified, wooing Rogers with words and music, and, finally, dance.

From this point on the end is in sight, and only the big number “The Piccolino,” an oddly uninvolving extravanganza, remains to be enjoyed. Astaire and Rogers literally dance their way out of the film.

In all cases, the camera does little more than record the full-figure dancing of the principals. There are no cuts, no close-ups, no cinematic cheating. These are real-time, insanely difficult routines, and to see Fred and Ginger step through their paces with easy grace lets us inhabit that higher realm for a time, to be dazzled by the possibilities performers present.

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

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

NFR Project: 'Ruggles of Red Gap' (1935)


NFR Project: ‘Ruggles of Red Gap’

Dir: Leo McCarey

Scr: Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thompson, Humphrey Pearson

Pho: Alfred Gilks

Ed: Edward Dmytryk

Premiere: March 8, 1935

90 min.

The most American of all screwball comedies is a gentle tale of an Englishman. From faceless subordinate to sole proprietor, the gentleman of the title comes to the New World and, enchanted by its possibilities, throws himself into the democratic and capitalist experiment with vigor and enthusiasm. His appreciation of his freedom transforms those around him, and makes him the most American of subjects – a naturalized citizen and an independent businessman.

The conceit of the movie is concise. In Paris, an English lord loses his butler Ruggles (Charles Laughton) in a poker game to a nouveau riche American, played by the great Charlie Ruggles. (His social-climbing wife wants a butler for the prestige it brings.) They live in the little Western town of Red Gap, Washington, so off they return, bringing a reluctant but tactful Ruggles with them.

Soon Ruggles is mistaken for a former colonel in the British Army, and paraded and feted around the small burg. He is harassed by a resentful, snobbish local, Belknap-Jackson, but maintains his poise. Soon Ruggles realizes that he no longer want to be “in service” to another man. Instead, he wants to open a restaurant. He does so with great aplomb. His former master the Earl comes to collect him, but finds Ruggles an entirely different person, one motivated and happily self-sufficient.

Director Leo McCarey was already a comedy expert, having directed some of Laurel and Hardy’s best movies, along with entries collaborating with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Mae West. Here he deflates Ruggles’ assumptions about class quickly and insistently. “I’m no better than you, and you’re no better than me,” insists Ruggles’ new American employer Egbert Floud, who keeps calling Ruggles “Bill” and inviting him to sit down and have a snort with him.

The centerpiece of the film is Laughton’s performance, and this great film actor, who usually played villains and oddballs, here portrays perfectly the quintessential Englishman – reserved and polite – but also gives us all the swinging, dizzying sweep of emotions that swim in Ruggles’ eyes as he stands patiently still, responding politely and complying with his fate. Without cracking a smile or frown, Laughton lets us know what Ruggles thinks of the crazy situation he’s in at all times, and his sympathetic vulnerability puts us on his side immediately. Ruggles is in some senses a babe in the wood, unexposed to democratic realities as he is.

Ruggles quickly takes to American ways. In a moving scene, everyone in the bar Ruggles is standing in tries to remember the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Quietly and somberly, but with great feeling, Ruggles recites the immortal words, transfixing everyone around him. (Laughton would become famous for this recitation.) Sometimes it takes the perspective of someone outside your cultural context to make you appreciate it.

So Ruggles creates his restaurant, earns the plaudits of the town, and wins the love of a local widow (the great Zazu Pitts). It is one of the most unvarnished and wel-earned happy endings in the cinema of the day.

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

Friday, January 24, 2025

NFR Project: 'A Night at the Opera' (!935)

 

NFR Project: ‘A Night at the Opera’

Dir: Sam Wood

Scr: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Al Boasberg

Pho: Merritt B. Gerstad

Ed: William LeVanway

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1935

91 min.

MGM ruined the Marx Brothers.

Not a popular opinion, as A Night at the Opera is often considered their best film. No, no, not so; that distinction goes to Duck Soup. Why? Because that film cut out the corny romantic/musical subplot found in their first two films, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers.

Let’s backtrack. The Marx Brothers’ first two films were based on stage shows. It was customary then for a romantic subplot, featuring a singing ingenue and a lead boy, to take the stage to provide relief from and variety to the evening’s entertainment. In their first two films, the musical interludes remain. In Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup the comedy got more filmic and less stagebound; filler was no longer needed.

When the brothers left Paramount for MGM, they came under the sway of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who had his own ideas on how to present them. First, they got rid of Zeppo. Then, they turned the remaining three brothers into something akin to magical helpers, who advance a plot concerning two young singers in love.

What did this mean? It meant that show-stopping sequences of music and singing infest the story of Opera. Instead of being able to mock and question everything around them, as they do in best films, the Marx Brothers are forced to do the one thing they don’t do well – take things seriously. They are tamed; they are no longer dangerous; they are castrated.

The emphasis on musical sequences, except for those that highlight Harpo an Chico, slows down the film immeasurably. In addition, the logic-twisting verbal comedy of Groucho and Harpo’s surreal improvisations are here replace by simple slapstick, often as not executed by stunt men. Thalberg didn’t trust the essence of the group’s success – its ability to confidently refute reality.

The story is in some respects a typical one. Here Groucho is Otis P. Driftwood, a shady musical promoter who seeks to exploit the rich and oblivious Mrs. Claypool (the always-wonderful Margaret Dumont). He signs an up-and-coming young tenor, and schemes to get him onto the New York Opera stage. This he does after a bunch of misadventures and unlikely plot development. It’s very contrived.

Individual sequences stand out. The “party of the first part” contract sketch, the stateroom scene, and the manic destruction of an opera performance are all fine, and stand out from the general lassitude of the rest of the movie.

In the end, the film was a huge success. Some Marx Brothers was better than none. But the quality of the scripts they were given would continue to slip. There would be notable moments of brilliance, but the bold anarchic quality of their best work was over.

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

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

NFR Project: 'Naughty Marietta' (1935)

 

NFR Project: ‘Naughty Marietta’

Dir: Robert Z. Leonard, W.S. Van Dyke

Scr: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, John Lee Mahin

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Blanche Sewell

Premiere: March 29, 1935

103 min.

Ah, operetta! Though largely forgotten today, the operetta was a key link between the worlds of opera and the development of the musical comedy. Operettas are different from operas in that they contain spoken dialogue between numbers, and usually focus on a comic or romantic theme.

Beginning in the 1850s, composers such as Offenbach and Johan Strauss II created important operetta works such as Orphee aux enfers and Die Fledermaus. In America, wildly popular creations by composers such as Rudolph Friml and Sigmund Romberg ruled the stage from the middle of the 19th century through the 1920s.

The king of American operetta composers, though, was Victor Herbert, who wrote a remarkable 43 operettas. Naughty Marietta is his best-known work. In fact, the only reason many know of it is because its hit song, “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” was used to great comic effect in Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein. The joke, funny in itself, takes on more hilarity when considering the sweet, fairy-tale context of the song’s introduction.

Naughty Marietta was first produced in 1910. Set in 1780, it tells the story of a French princess (here, the great soprano singer Jeanette MacDonald) who flees her country to avoid an unwanted marriage. She disguises herself as a commoner and joins a cargo of women shipping off to the New World to make wives for lonely men there. She winds up with them in New Orleans, where they are briefly captured by pirates before being saved by a platoon of soldier-volunteers led by Captain Warrington (the marvelous baritone Nelson Eddy). The rest of the story outlines their at first prickly courtship.

The show contained no fewer than five hit songs, so it was a well-known entity to people of the day, many of whom would attend the 1935 film in a wash of nostalgia. They got their money’s worth – the film is lavishly produced, and makes use of the filmic space to expand the story, including an exciting clash with pirates and an extended cruise through the bayou.

The movie rests though, on the combination of Eddy and MacDonald. They were two powerful singers, and they could act (OK, Eddy is definitely more wooden). Together, their marvelous duets were enormously entertaining, and audiences of the day ate it up.

They made seven more musical films together over the next seven years. Box-office favorites, they were the top couple in film during those years. Offscreen, they carried on a tumultuous decades-long affair, even though married to others, often living together, until MacDonald’s death. They were real-life sweethearts. Even though the music is now deemed too saccharine and sentimental, it represents a key link in the evolution of music onstage. There are very few places in the culture ny more where two people in love sing bee-yoo-tiful melodies to each other under the soundstage’s arc lights.

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

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

NFR Project: 'Bride of Frankenstein' (1935)

 


NFR Project: ‘Bride of Frankenstein’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: John L. Balderson, William Hurlbut, Edmund Pearson

Pho: John J. Mescall

Ed: Ted J. Kent

Premiere: April 20, 1935

75 min.

One of the finest of all horror movies is, surprisingly, a sequel. (Normally, sequels exploit the original, successful film’s concept but do little to improve on it.) Bride of Frankenstein outclasses Frankenstein, and it does so because its director didn’t think the effort would amount to much, so he decided to have fun with it.

It took the efforts of several writers to cobble together a script that both appealed to director James Whale, back for the sequel, and the censors. The spring of the plot is the monster’s quest for a mate, a “friend” who will love him. This is patently impossible, as he is a lurching, murderous hulk saddled with a criminal brain. Brilliantly, the film takes the monster’s side, turning him into a figure of pathos, a real character who changes and develops, and is arguably the wisest and sanest of the characters still standing by film’s end.

We are told that the film’s tale is intended to be a cautionary one, a “moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” However, we soon move on to the terrifying attraction of graveyards, dead bodies, and dank and dismal laboratories. Whale rubs our faces in the horrific. Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) often bemoans his urge to violate the secrets of nature, but he’s easily drawn back into dark science.

The film is shot in the studio, and its patent artificiality underlines the fairy-tale nature of the film’s events. Whale revels in the transgressive elements of the screenplay and exploits them to the fullest. We begin with a prelude featuring author Mary Shelley regaling her companions with a continuation of the story . . .

The monster survives the fire at the end of Frankenstein, and promptly kills the parents of the little girl he killed in the last movie. He also scares the bejeezus out of Una O’Connor, a British actress who specialized in playing malevolent, hysterical hags (Whale lets her overact her head off, providing us with a little comic relief).

Dr. Frankenstein is determined not to meddle in things beyond his ken, but the arrival of the severe-looking and coyly gay Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger), his former teacher, quickly changes his mind. Praetorius has half the key to creating life – he can do so, but only by creating miniature men, homunculi. Together the pair plan to try to create another living being.

The monster wanders through the forest, frightening gypsies, a shepherdess, and some hunters, who shoot him. An angry mob captures him, ties him to a pole in much the pose of a crucifixion (crosses are nearly everywhere you look in this film) and carts him off to prison. Chained there, he soon rips away his bonds and wanders off again.

It is then that he meets the blind hermit (O.P. Heggie). Taken in by the man and tended to, the monster finds compassion and understanding for the first time. Fittingly, it is only the blind man who can see the monster as a creature with a soul, capable of learning and doing good. The monster abides with the hermit for a time, until two more hunters (one of them a young John Carradine) enter, decrying the presence of the monster and starting a fight that ends up burning down the hermit’s home.

Lost again, the monster wanders into a cemetery, and flees down into a crypt, descending into the netherworld. There he finds Praetorius, who is assembling a creature out of the bones of the dead. (The great Dwight Frye, who played the hunchbacked servant Karl in the original Frankenstein, is back, reincarnated as assistant and body-snatcher Fritz.) The ghoulish doctor and the monster strike a pact.

Soon they are confronting Dr. Frankenstein, forcing him to create a mate for the monster by kidnapping his wife and holding her hostage. The sweeping, breathtaking climax is set again inhe laboratory, on a stormy night, with all of special effects creator Kenneth Strickfaden’s electric gizmos flashing and banging away in the background. The procedure is successful! And out comes the Bride (Elsa Lanchester, in a marked departure from her Mary Shelley earlier in the film). Stiff and ungainly, halting, topped with a flaring, flying, grey-streaked hairdo, she recoils from the monster’s advances. Even his intended is repulsed by him.

The monster lashes out, and touches a lever that could destroy the entire laboratory. Dr. Frankenstein’s wife comes for him. “Go! You live! Go!” cries the monster, saving the two of them. To Praetorius and the Bride, he turns and has the last word, saying “You stay. We belong dead!” And he throws the switch and destroys them all. (Or does he? Frankenstein had many Universal sequels yet to go.)

What seems relatively tame now was extremely transgressive for the time; many places cut the film down or banned it outright. It certainly has a whiff of blasphemy, with Praetorius acting as the devil’s advocate. Dr. Frankenstein is once again spared from his own folly, as the providential nature of his creation spares him from destruction.

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

Friday, January 10, 2025

NFR Project: 'The Informer' (1935)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Informer’

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Dudley Nichols

Pho: Joseph H. August

Ed: George Hively

Premiere: May 9, 1935

91 min.

It doesn’t rank highly on critical lists these days, but several decades ago this film was commonly regarded as one of the best ever made. Seeing it, especially in the context of the career of director John Ford, is a revelation. This dark tale of betrayal and death is redeemed by its profound depth of feeling.

What makes this film so extraordinary? First, Ford’s directorial assurance. By this time, Ford had made dozens of silent and sound films, including superior earlier efforts such as The Iron Horse and The Lost Patrol. Ford was unmatched in his ability to propel a film story forward smoothly, quickly, and unobtrusively. He wasted no footage. His touch is invisible, but his style is unmistakable. 

And of course he knew the setting. He was of Irish descent, and he idolized the Old Country. He left Maine as a young man to join his successful performer and director Francis Ford in Hollywood. He knew the culture and its people intimately, and that air of authenticity permeates The Informer.

It is 1922, and Ireland is in midst of the Troubles, its occupation by repressive British forces bearing down on the populace. An underground army of plain-clothes volunteers, known as the “organization,” carries out attacks on the occupiers. The British retaliate, and Dublin is a battle zone, heavily patrolled.

One foggy night, a big, beefy, n’er-do-well, Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen) is wandering the streets. He sees a wanted poster on the wall for his friend Frankie McPhillip – 20 pounds is the reward for turning him in. Gypo’s prostitute girlfriend Katie bemoans the fact that they haven’t any money, money that might take them to America and a new start.

Gypo is caught between the two sides. He had refused to kill an English soldier in the name of the cause, and thus was thrown out of the organization. “The English think I’m with the Irish, and the Irish think I’m with the English,” he says. He has no job, no prospects, and little self-respect left.

The dim-witted Gypo determines to sell out his friend. He turns him in to the police. Frankie is killed resisting arrest. Gypo gets his 20 pounds.

The rest of the film is a nightmarish odyssey through the fog-shrouded streets of Dublin, as Gypo careens from pub to pub, drinking like a fish, trying to put off the blame on an innocent man as the informer, and finally running for his life from the vengeful rebels.

A second great strength is the superior screenplay of Dudley Nichols. Nichols was a prolific and highly talented screenwriter – his works include Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, and The Bells of St. Mary’s. He was able to translate ideas into actions, and emotional states into images. He spoke film.

The story, adapted from Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel, is simple and powerful. We track the coming apart of a man, a tragedy sparked greed and short-sightedness. We could all of us be Gypo, if we were the sum of our flaws. Nichols paints the screen with recurring images – a wanted poster that keeps nagging at the legs of the protagonists, a handful of coins that jangle accusingly to the floor, the cash that leaks out of Gypo’s pockets as he attempts to rid himself of his ill-gotten gains.

The key strength is the performance of Victor McLaglen, who justifiably won the Oscar for Best Actor for his work. Gypo is an inarticulate brute, but McLaglen’s incredibly expressive face silently conveys shame, longing, anger, and fear with unprecedented subtlety. As McLaglen spent most of his film career as a comic Irishman, it’s astonishing to see him put so much humanity into Gypo. By film’s end, he receives a self-inflicted crucifixion, clinging with his last breath to the possibility of forgiveness.

Dublin’s foggy streets reflect the moral ambiguity and confusion of the situation. Ford and his cinematographer Joe August use the foggy night setting to exquisite advantage, moving characters in and out of shadow, stalking down the street to keep up with a frantic Gypo. Everything serves the story and nothing is extraneous.

A well-made film, this. In addition to McLaglen’s Oscar, Ford won for Best Director, Nichols won for Best Screenplay, and the wonderful film composer Max Steiner won for Best Score.

After this, Ford’s reputation was secure in Hollywood, and he began to craft a long list of classic films.

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

Thursday, January 9, 2025

NFR Project: 'Becky Sharp' (1935)

 


NFR Project: ‘Becky Sharp’

Dir: Rouben Mamoulian

Scr: Francis Edward Faragoh

Pho: Ray Rennahan

Ed: Archie Marshek

Premiere: June 13, 1935

84 min.

Becky Sharp is in the Registry due to its being the first three-strip Technicolor feature. However, it is also a classic example of a mid-century “prestige” film.

The color technique had been experimented with for decades, with a crude two-strip (red and green) color process that only approximated real color. With three-strip, the full palette of colors could be conveyed.

Unfortunately, the film’s first director, Lowell Sherman, contracted pneumonia and died during filming. Brought in to replace him was Rouben Mamoulian, known for his innovations and his strong artistic sense. He had already made important films such as Applause and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

It’s a period film, a costume drama based on the 1848 William Makepeace Thackery novel Vanity Fair. Set in England during the time of Napoleon, it’s the somewhat seamy saga of Becky Sharp, an ambitious young nobody who canoodles and intrigues to rise in society and gain wealth and comfort. Thackery was very discouraged about the human condition, and his estimation of human character is pretty low; this film adaptation brightens things up a bit.

Mamoulian makes incredible use of color, from the red uniforms of the dashing officers to bright blue and yellow gowns, flashes of fire, and sumptuously designed interiors. The art direction is superb – no expense was spared. The visuals are compelling and beautifully staged.

Miriam Hopkins, the blonde ingenue, plays Becky with a sassy wit and indomitable spirit. Her devil-may-care approach to life stands in sharp contrast to the more staid people around her. Her rapid rise pleases few, but seems to be irresistible. She falls from grace, but unlike in the novel, in which she pays dearly for her sins, in the film she simply moves offstage with her latest male conquest.

Another notable aspect of the film is the fine acting work by three English actors who would be cast in film after film in Hollywood – Nigel Bruce, famous later for playing Dr. Watson, as the buffoonish Joseph Sedley, Alan Mowbray as her true love, Rawdon Crowley, and Cedric Hardwicke as the lustful Marquis of Steyne.

Adaptations of “great novels,” often severely altered from the original, continued to be a Hollywood staple.

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

NFR Project: 'Twentieth Century' (1934)

 

NFR Project: ‘Twentieth Century’

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur

Pho: Joseph August

Ed: Gene Havlick

Premiere: May 11, 1934

91 min.

“When asked by John Barrymore why he should play the role of Oscar, Hawks replied, ‘It’s the story of the biggest ham on earth and you’re the biggest ham I know.’ Barrymore accepted at once.”

To make a great screwball comedy, you need a great script and actors who can commit to a loopy scenario. These director Howard Hawks had. He had a killer scenario from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, best known as the writer s of the immortal The Front Page. And he had two actors – one at the top of his game, the other just beginning her stardom – who chew the scenery as they play a couple of daffy dolts who also happen to be “great artists.”

The story is absurd from the word go. John Barrymore plays the great and blustery theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffe, who has just made a new discovery in the acting department, a former lingerie model with the lumpish name of Mildred Plotka, played by the great comedienne Carole Lombard in her first starring role. Oscar has a carapace of egomaniacal bluster that conceals the desperation of a con artist.

Barrymore is by far the dominant and motivating madcap. His own theatrical career is parodied; even his world-famous profile comes for derision. Barrymore gasps, gulps, strikes poses, goes cross-eyed, does everything but walk on his hands. It works because his supremely knowing performance goes right to the edge of believability and stays there for an hour and a half.

Rechristening her Lily Garland, Jaffe molds her into suitable Broadway material, and soon they embark on a string of hits together. However, Lily chafes under Oscar’s aegis and decides to head off to Hollywood, becoming a big success. Oscar has four flops in a row.

Now Oscar finds himself stuck in Chicago, unable to pay the bills and facing the seizure of his show by the sheriff. He sneaks out of town and onto the Twentieth Century, the train to New York. He discovers that Lily is on the train, and concocts a scheme – to get her signature on a contract with him so that he can raise the money to get out of debt and mount new shows.

The only problem is, Lily is thoroughly sick of him. “How about . . . your delusion that you were a Shakespeare and a Napoleon and a Grand Lama of Tibet all rolled into one?” she asks him.

 So how can Oscar get her to sign? The pace of the movie picks up slowly and steadily, becoming more and more fevered. Oscar freaks out, Lily pitches fits. The two are children disguised as grown-ups. Beyond their grand pretensions, they are two star-crossed lovers, relative idiots but shamelessly loveable.

Oscar is supported by two great character actors, the humble Walter Connolly and the brash and cynical Roscoe Karns. Oscar says of them: “It’s typical of my career that in the great crises of life, I should be flanked by two incompetent alcoholics.”

Oscar and Lily richly deserve each other, and soon the status quo is restored. By that, I mean the two are driving each other crazy on a daily basis – just like two people in love.

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

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

NFR Project: 'The Thin Man' (1934)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Thin Man’

Dir: W.S. Van Dyke

Scr: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich

Pho: James Wong Howe

Ed: Robert J. Kern

Premiere: May 25, 1934

91 min.

Wouldn’t you like to be rich, witty, in love, good-looking, awfully good at solving murders, and always slightly drunk? Thus the appeal of Nick and Nora Charles.

The movie is derived from the novel of the same year by the great American detective writer Dashiell Hammett; it is his last completed novel. MGM paid Hammett $21,000 for the movie rights, made this movie in 14 days, and reaped the harvest of a six-film series starring the charming couple.

Prohibition is over, and everyone, it seems, is having cocktails, especially Nick. We are in New York. Nick is a former police detective, and Nora is his heiress wife. She’s a knockout, and quick of thought and comic observation. He’s cynical but bemused – he’s seen it all. She wants to see him in action at his old position. He politely refuses, until the daughter of an old friend comes to him for help.

Now, Nick is not the Thin Man; that is a term for one of the suspects in a string of murders surrounding the disappearance of inventor Clyde Winant. Winant’s daughter Dorothy (Maureen O’Sullivan, fresh from playing Jane in the Tarzan movies) wants to find him. Meanwhile, Winant is implicated in the killings. It is up to Nick, with the unwelcome help of Nora, to solve the case.

The mystery part of this comedy-drama is fairly played, with a handful of suspects who are churned through by Nick, and a sufficient number of clues as to make the murderer deductible. That being said, the plot really takes a backseat to whatever magical thing that happens when William Powell and Myrna Loy are on screen together as Nick and Nora.

What is the source of their charm? They were both able to bring an urbane subtlety to their lines. They are not shocked by anything, imperturbable in the face of danger. Life is like a game with them, with points scored for acerbic put-downs and mocking double-takes. They clearly enjoy each others’ company. They represent a happy ideal of marriage in which both partners fulfill each other, play off each other like players on a team, like actors on stage. They are performing their relationship, constantly. (Their offspring, fittingly, is their dog Asta.)

The script, which adheres closely to the book, is dead-on funny, full of quips and double takes. Nick and Nora seem to live on another level altogether, one devoted to gaiety and laughter, no matter what the circumstances. The contrast between their moneyed comfort and the hard-edged world Nick came from provides a ready source of humor.

The direction by Woody Van Dyke is unassuming and to the point, steadily advancing the script without any authorial input. The images are ravishing thanks to cinematographer James Wong Howe. It is, all in all, a cocktail of mystery and comedy that’s pretty potent. Wouldn’t we like a couple of hours imagining ourselves in their place, dripping with wit and infused with gin?

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

Sunday, January 5, 2025

NFR Project: 'Tarzan and His Mate' (1934)

 


NFR Project: ‘Tarzan and His Mate’

Dir: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Conway, James C. McKay

Scr: James Kevin McGuinesss

Pho: Clyde De Vinna, Charles G. Clarke

Ed: Tom Held

Premiere: April 16, 1934

104 min.

It is a mystery to me why this particular Tarzan film was chosen, if not for its infamous nude scenes. (There were three different sequences of Jane swimming filmed: one attired, one topless, and one completely bare. What version you got depended on where you lived, how strict our local censorship laws were.)

It is not exceptional in terms of plot, basically repeating the story of the very first Johnny Weissmuller-starring Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), save for giving us a new batch of white hunters seeking the riches of ivory contained in the secret Elephant Graveyard, high atop the mysterious Mutia Escarpment in Africa. They encounter stock footage of jungle animals on their way. They make their way to Tarzan’s neighborhood. They beg Jane to go back with them to civilization, but she is too contented with her jungle home to do so.

Tarzan finds out about their ivory-poaching scheme, and firmly opposes them. So they, of course, shoot an elephant so that, dying, they can follow it to the burial ground where all dying elephants go. Then they shoot Tarzan. They achieve their goal, but are soon beset by natives who want to capture, torture, and kill them. Lions attack. Elephants attack. Evil is vanquished, and Tarzan and Jane return to their peaceful jungle home.

Throughout, Tarzan fights and defeats various jungle beasts (stunt doubles), mostly showing off for Jane by preventing her from being eaten. Weissmuller’ complete lack of acting skills pays off well for him as the semi-coherent Lord of the Jungle. He speaks in monosyllables, but with that body he can get away with it.

Maureen O’Sullivan (Mia Farrow’s mother) is fine as the feisty Jane; early sound era regulars Neil Hamilton and Paul Cavanaugh co-star as the ivory poachers. There is nothing extraordinary about the effort save the nudity (also stunt doubles), which you can find if you look diligently enough online. It is quite tame for the tastes of today, but back then it could get a filmed banned. The looming impact of the Production Code would eliminate controversial sequences such as this for decades.

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