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.