Blondie Johnson (1933)

An interesting twist on the usual Warner Bros. gangster film. This time, Joan Blondell is a downtrodden woman who turns to a life of crime to gain power and control over her own life. She becomes involved with gangster Chester Morris, and uses her wits and determination to rise to the top of the Chicago underworld. 

This is another one of these early talkies that packs an incredible amount of plot into its brief running time of just over an hour. Similar to the "rise and fall" plotlines of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Blondell's character starts from nothing and claws her way up to the top of the criminal ladder, but her ambitions ultimately lead to tragedy.

It's also a nice, if all too rare, opportunity for Blondell in a starring role where she really carries the film on her own as the lead.

Night Nurse (1931)

I'd never seen this one before, one of the most notorious pre-Code films. Barbara Stanwyck is a down-on-her-luck young woman who gets a chance to train as a nurse at a hospital. Joan Blondell is her tough, wisecracking colleague. At first, it looks like this is going to be a gritty and sensational expose of the goings-on at the hospital, but quickly turns to melodrama as Stanwyck is stationed at the home of a wealthy couple whose sick children, it turns out, are being neglected and mistreated. The mother and her boyfriend, both negligent alcoholics, are completely disinterested in the children's well-being, and Stanwyck learns about a plot involving the family chauffeur who has his own reasons for wanting the children dead.

It takes a very dark and unpleasant turn in the second half of the film, with Stanwyck a powerful presence as she holds her own against the gangsters and corrupt doctors that she must deal with in order to save the children.

Directed with characteristic economy by William Wellman. Also starring Ben Lyon and Clark Gable in an early role as the villainous chauffeur.

Dames (1934)

Coming after the hit trilogy of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, Dames feels like a re-tread of those earlier films, both in terms of its backstage plot and its music numbers. This time, Guy Kibbee and Zasu Pitts are a New York couple who stand to inherit ten million dollars from their wealthy eccentric uncle Ezra (Hugh Hubert), provided that they prove themselves to be moral, upstanding citizens. Problem is, their daughter Ruby Keeler is in love with cousin Dick Powell, the black sheep of the family, and both of them are putting on a Broadway show. If Uncle Ezra finds out, then the inheritance is off. 

That's just a set-up to the big show, showcasing Busby Berkeley's signature choreography. There are fewer really memorable numbers here, but the highlight is "I Only Have Eyes for You", featuring Ruby Keeler's face multiplied dozens of times over. It's a feat of staging and special effects and ranks as one of Berkeley's finest achievements.

Less iconic than the previous three Berkeley musicals, this one still recaptures much of the charm and ingenuity of those films, perhaps just in smaller amounts.

The Crowd Roars (1932)

Gripping melodrama directed by Howard Hawks, about troubled racecar driver James Cagney and his younger brother who idolizes him. Cagney agrees to help him break into professional racing, but the brother's career takes off as Cagney's hits the skids.

Ann Dvorak (whom I had just watched in Three on a Match) is Cagney's long-suffering girlfriend who puts up with his drinking and hot temper, and Joan Blondell is the woman who ends up falling in love with Cagney's younger brother, driving a wedge between them.

The racing scenes are incredibly well-shot, only a handful of shots relying on back-projection. The camera is right there in the action, and there are more than a few scenes that had to have been extremely dangerous to shoot. About half a dozen actual racecar drivers are credited for their assistance with the filming, and performed in the driving scenes themselves.

The story, by Howard Hawks, was loosely remade by him in 1965 as Red Line 7000.

Nocturama (2016)

 A thriller about a group of young French terrorists who hole up in an expensive department store after committing their attacks.

From there, it turns into a kind of Dawn of the Dead-type commentary on consumerism and self-destruction, as the young terrorists grow restless and bored as the night drags on, engaging in increasingly stupid and reckless behavior that will eventually lead to their downfall. They turn the department store into their playground, blasting music on the stereo system, dressing up in the expensive clothing, playing with the toys, and raiding the kitchen for their own little feast, like Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard in Modern Times.

The story is slow to get going -- a lot of time is spent building up to the acts of terror, but these seem almost secondary once the real story takes over: how could these young people, capable of pulling off such carefully-plotted catastrophic destruction, also be so incredibly stupid and careless in the aftermath.

Murder My Sweet (1944)

Based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, Murder My Sweet is one of the great Film Noir pictures. Former song-and-dance man Dick Powell brings a vulnerability to Marlowe that heightens the danger he's in -- especially when being beaten and choked within an inch of his life by tough guy Mike Mazurki. He lacks the sort of toughness that Bogart brought to the character in The Big Sleep, but Powell is quite effective at this interpretation of Marlowe. It's an incredibly tough and brutal picture, too -- with Marlowe taking quite a beating at the hands of his captors. Mazurki delivers a deceptively nuanced performance as the hulking brute who is searching for the woman he loved and lost. There is a hallucinatory dream sequence in the middle of the film that is a delirious nightmare vision of Marlowe's trauma.

The book was filmed again under its original title in 1975, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. It would have been interesting to see what Mitchum would have done with the character if he'd played him in the '40s.

Directed by Edward Dymtryk. Also starring Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, and Miles Mander. 

Busy Bodies, The Chimp, The Midnight Patrol

Laurel and Hardy in The Midnight Patrol (1933)

A Laurel and Hardy triple feature on the Movies! network this morning. 

The first two were among the very first Laurel and Hardy movies I saw. Busy Bodies (1933) is one of their very best, as far as I'm concerned. The Boys work at a lumber mill and cause no end of chaos. The final scene, with Hardy being sucked through the scrap lumber disposal, is reminiscent of Chaplin getting pulled through the machine's gears in Modern Times.

The Chimp (1932) is a silly one, and a lot of fun. After a circus shuts down, the owner can't afford to pay his employees, so he gives them all a piece of the circus instead. Laurel gets the flea circus and Hardy gets the dancing chimpanzee, Ethel. In a variation on Angora Love and Laughing Gravy, they spend the rest of the film trying to hide the chimp in a boarding house. My favorite line: when Laurel sees the lion run loose through the streets, he tells Hardy, "I just saw MGM."

Laurel and Hardy are policemen in The Midnight Patrol (1933). It plays like a variation on Night Owls, with the Boys breaking into the police chief's home, except this time they're on the other side of the law -- but they still cause just as much trouble. My favorite scene has the Boys obligingly negotiating a court date with a burglar whom they've caught in the act, checking his datebook for conflicting appointments.

Grand Hotel (1932)

This is one of those classic Hollywood movies I had somehow not seen before.

It's an excellent ensemble piece, following five people, all staying at the Grand Hotel in Berlin, whose lives intertwine over the course of a couple days. Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery head the all-star cast. 

The hotel itself is the kind of place that could only exist in a Hollywood studio film of the '30s. It's hard to imagine a place so opulent in real life -- the sumptuous Art Deco interiors looming impossibly large above the characters, every single detail perfectly in place.

Interesting discussion about Edgar G. Ulmer

This is an interesting panel discussion about Edgar G. Ulmer's life and career:

Lawyer Man (1932)

William Powell is an attorney on the Lower East Side of New York who rises to the top after winning a big case, but his underworld connections pull him back down until he launches a one-man crusade against the corrupt political machine.

It strikes me that these tight, lean early talkies are similar to the kind of storytelling that I enjoy with micro-filmmaking. It allows us to see a character study conveyed with extreme economy and no extraneous details. We learn everything we need to know about this character, and his rise and fall (and rise again), through a minimum of detail that still provides a clear picture and keeps the plot moving. These films could be a model for low-budget filmmakers looking to tell their stories as economically as possible.

Burns and Allen

I've been watching some of the George Burns & Gracie Allen shorts and TV episodes available on YouTube. I watched one tonight called 100% Service, a short subject they made in 1931. It's little more than a filmed vaudeville sketch consisting of banter between the loopy Gracie and the bemused George, which is really all they needed to be funny. Burns & Allen never really became top-billed movie stars, typically appearing in supporting parts or with ensemble casts, as in International House or Six of a Kind. Aside from their vaudeville performances, which of course we have no real record of, they were probably at their best in radio (and later on TV). Their comedy was perfectly suited to this shorter format where they could present their sketches.

I was talking with someone about this just the other day. Comedians who did some of their best work in movies are at an advantage, because those movies are still readily available for the most part, and represent the comedians well. W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and others had their reputations cemented largely on the basis of their movies. But there are so many other wonderful comedians out there whose recorded performances may consist almost entirely on radio or later TV, and you sometimes have to go out of your way to seek out their best work and appreciate how brilliant they were. 

Jack Benny is a good example of this, I think -- he made one great film, To Be Or Not To Be, which despite its considerable strengths was not really characteristic of his other work (although Benny was perfectly cast as the vain Shakespearean actor). He did appear in a slew of other movies of varying quality, sometimes as a star and sometimes in a walk-on or cameo. If you judged him only on his film work, you might say he was an amusing presence in a few good movies. But to experience his radio -- and later TV -- work is to see why he ranks among the very top tier of comedians. 

Fred Allen is another good example of this. One of the absolute geniuses of comedy on the radio.

Dixiana (1930)

An overblown hodge-podge of music, romance, melodrama and comedy set against the backdrop of the antebellum South. A wealthy plantation owner's son falls in love with a circus performer, Dixiana, but his mother's objections put an end to their engagement. Dixiana returns to work for a sleazy gambling hall owner who has his own designs on her, but soon her ex-fiance son shows up to reconcile their relationship.

Worth watching for fans of Wheeler and Woolsey, who are relegated to largely supporting roles here but provide some good comedy relief from the cumbersome, lumbering romantic plot. The final 20 minutes are filmed in Technicolor, and showcases tap dance number by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Dixiana is in the public domain and can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.

Short Features

One of the things I enjoy about the pre-Code films like Three on a Match (1932), which I watched this morning, is that they often have fairly short running times by the standards of Hollywood theatrical features. Three on a Match, for example, runs just 62 minutes, and packs a lot in to that length. As a result, it's fully engaging for that duration, and is easy to watch casually without having to commit too much time to it.

I watch a lot of B movies while working out at the gym, because the roughly hour-long running time is perfectly suited to the amount of time I spend on the exercise equipment, where I watch the film on my phone. And the relatively simple and straightforward plots do not require a great deal of attention.

Three on a Match is not a B movie, really, but a smaller film from a major studio (in this case, Warner Bros.) In those days, the studios could release a 60 minute feature because it would be part of a program with shorts and other supplemental films, and after the emergence of double features, B movies provided the second half of the program.

Thinking about it, though, there were still some big studio "A" pictures that had short running times: Intermezzo (1939) ran 70 minutes, Nothing Sacred runs 77 minutes, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Roxie Hart (1942) were both 75 minutes, and Preston Sturges' Christmas in July (1940) was just 68 minutes. The shorter lengths were more common with comedies: Laurel and Hardy made a couple of features that ran just under an hour, and W.C. Fields made one that ran 58 minutes. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope ran 80 minutes.

The term "featurette" was used to refer to these movies that ran longer than a short film, but shorter than the usual full-length. Hal Roach had a whole series of "streamliners", as he called them, in the 1940s. I've seen a few of these, and the running time works quite well for these comedies.

Anyway, I could go on, but the point is there were plenty of commercially-released feature films during the '30s and '40s that ran around the hour mark. It seems that once double features started to disappear in the '50s, films began to get longer in general. It seems that 70 minutes was sort of the extreme end of a short feature by the '50s and '60s, maybe reserved mostly for drive-in fare that would often be shown on a larger program. I remember in Ed Wood, the producer of Glen or Glenda tells Wood that he just has to make the film 70 minutes long in order for him to sell it. I think Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960) runs 69 minutes.

More recently, it seems like anything less than 90 minutes for a commercial theatrical feature is pretty rare. Most of the films I've seen in theaters in recent years are closer to 2 hours, with many running longer than that. Comedies may be an exception, but even those seem to have gotten quite a bit longer. I'd say generally that anything over 90 minutes for a comedy is really too long, and anything over two hours is lethal. Billy Wilder made some comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Apartment that ran over two hours, but I think in those cases he justified the length. And of course there was It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. I was astonished to see some of Judd Apatow's movies running over two hours in length, and I remember being similarly amazed that The Blues Brothers ran nearly two-and-a-quarter hours, though that was largely due to the music numbers.

I read that John Waters had a rule that his movies should never be longer than 90 minutes, and indeed they've all been in that range. It seems like a good strategy when you're aiming for theatrical release. Also it forces you to be judicious in your editing and really be more economic in what you're trying to accomplish.

I've seen some short, independent features on YouTube that ran around an hour or just over. These tend to be mostly improvised films shot in a single location with a limited number of actors, which can be quite effective. It's interesting to contrast these, though, with some of the B movies of old, which would pack so much in to their short running time. I would say that unless the material justifies it, even 60-70 minutes can be quite long for a truly no-budget film. It seems like streaming video really opens up the possibilities for micro-short films.

Three on a Match (1932)

Pre-Code melodrama about childhood friends Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis whose lives remain intertwined as they grow up. Dvorak is the good girl who marries millionaire Warren William, but soon grows bored in their marriage and seeks escape with low-level crook Lyle Talbot. Meanwhile, troubled showgirl Joan Blondell steps in to take care of Dvorak's son and eventually marries her ex-husband as Dvorak descends further and further into a life of desperation. 

Davis unfortunately, isn't given much to do with her role and stays largely in the background. Apparently director Mervyn LeRoy was not happy with her performance here, which perhaps explains her lack of screentime in the final film.

Humphrey Bogart turns up in an early appearance as a gangster, and his star presence really dominates the scenes he appears in.

There's an inordinate amount of time spent on the newspaper headline montages showing the passing of the years through the events of the day. Aside from indicating the passage of time in the three friends' lives, it seems redundant after a point, especially since the whole film runs just 62 minutes.

Virginia Davis, star of Disney's silent Alice series, plays Blondell's character as a young girl in the opening scenes.

Half Shot at Sunrise (1930)

In this rollicking musical comedy, Wheeler and Woolsey are a couple of soldiers who go AWOL but have a chance to get in the good graces of the colonel and his daughter (the team's regular leading lady, Dorothy Lee) when they take a dangerous mission to deliver important papers to the front lines. 

Fatty Arbuckle did uncredited writing work on the screenplay. Also features the first film score by Max Steiner, who would go on to score dozens of films including King Kong and Gone with the Wind.

The film is in the public domain and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Improv Filmmaking

Recently I watched part of an improvisational feature film.

Improv is a great skill for low/no-budget filmmakers. When you get on set, even the most carefully-planned production will require some last-minute workarounds and creative problem solving. Being able to meet those challenges quickly and keep everything moving is essential. And if you keep re-writing and re-writing in the hope of achieving a "perfect" script, you'll never get around to making your movie anyway.

I was reminded of an interview I'd seen with B-movie director Ray Dennis Steckler. He said that he'd begin shooting his films without a script, because by the time he got everything together that he'd need to produce the script, it would be too late to make the movie. I know what he means.

Thinking back on it, when I first started making my own little movies with the family video camera, I only recall one time where I went out of my way to write a completed script. It was for a Hitchcock-inspired comic thriller about two detectives investigating mysterious pools of what appear to be blood that are materializing in a man's basement, but the culprit turns out to be a leaking bottle of ketchup. But even there I think I veered from the script quite a bit after I began shooting. My problem is I get impatient and begin improvising when I see other ideas present themselves in the moment.

I've made quite a few short films over the years without a script, though I have a clear idea of the action and plot before I begin and even then, dialogue is usually at a minimum in those projects (or consists solely of voice over, which I write out in advance, and then improvise the action around).

I do wonder about improv features, though. Cassavetes mastered this approach, but he was working with first-rate actors and would workshop his ideas extensively before committing them to film. If you're relying on the actors to come up with their own dialogue, they really need to be able to get into the characters and have a fully-fleshed idea of how they would react under the situations. I'm reminded of an acting exercise -- which I think is mentioned in the film My Dinner with Andre, actually -- where you take characters from an established play, but come up with a scene for them that does not occur in the play, and have the actors improvise how those characters would act under the circumstances. If you're going for a feature-length film, something along those lines seems like a solid approach to fleshing out the characters.

And speaking of My Dinner with Andre, it's another one of those films, like Kevin Smith's Clerks, that consists almost entirely of people talking. Some people seem to think this approach is "easy", but don't consider how carefully scripted and acted these extended conversations are, not to mention the technique that has to go into making them interesting for 90 minutes or more.

There's another issue I have with improv feature filmmaking: as a viewer, I often find the approach tedious after a certain point. I have an easier time watching an improvised short film than sitting through an hour or more of it. 

Kings Row (1942)

This is one of those films that used to play on TCM constantly back when I had cable, but I never watched it, so I took the opportunity to see it on the Criterion Channel before it leaves tomorrow.

Bob Cummings and Ronald Reagan are childhood friends in smalltown, turn-of-the-century America who each go their separate ways but remain close through life's ups and downs. And man, are there a lot of downs -- by end of the film, the number of painful incidents that pile on top of each other strain credibility even for a bleak melodrama such as this. Apparently the source novel was so downbeat that both the producers and the Hays Office initially considered it unfilmable.

Practically the definition of a "prestige" studio film, lavishly produced by Warner Bros. and scoring a smattering of Academy Award nominations. Also starring Ann Sheridan, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Harry Davenport, and Charles Coburn. Directed by Sam Wood, and shot by James Wong Howe. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score was later borrowed in part by John Williams for the Star Wars theme.

The Violent Years (1956)

 At just 56 minutes, this was a good movie to watch at the gym tonight.

An all-girl gang of juvenile delinquents carry out a series of robberies and assaults for the thrill of it. It's implied at one point that they rape one of their male victims. Their final act of rebellion is trashing their school classroom. "Social value" is added in the form of bookended scenes with a judge admonishing the girls' parents.

I had thought this was directed by Ed Wood, but it turns out he only wrote the script. William Morgan directed -- I haven't seen any of his other films, so I don't know how this one stacks up against them, but it looks like it could have been directed by Wood.

Herschell Gordon Lewis, Creativity from Limitations

I was watching the documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis: Godfather of Gore (2009). In it, he tells a story about when he was editing his 1967 movie The Gruesome Twosome. Seems that he'd committed to delivering a 70 minute film, but his final cut ended up only running 62 minutes. He was already back in Chicago and wasn't about to travel back to Florida to shoot pick-ups, and had already dismissed the cast and crew in any case.

What to do?

To fill in the eight extra minutes needed, Lewis had the idea of taking two Styrofoam mannequin heads, put outlandish faces and wigs on them, and had them talk to each other (through voice-over), exchanging some amusing banter about their experiences that the audience was about to see in the movie. And he filmed them right there in his office in Chicago.

It's a clever idea, a great example for low-budget filmmakers to get creative when it looks like all your other options have run out.

Big City Blues (1932)

Gritty Depression-era melodrama about a naïve young man from rural Indiana who comes to New York City to seek his fortune, and ends up becoming implicated in the murder of a showgirl during a wild party in his hotel room.

Stars Eric Linden, who apparently enjoyed a brief career as a juvenile lead in the early '30s. I only knew him from his appearance as the soldier whose leg is amputated in the Atlanta hospital scene in Gone with the Wind. Also starring Joan Blondell, Walter Catlett, Guy Kibbee, Jobyna Howland, Ned Sparks, Lyle Talbot and Humphrey Bogart in an early, uncredited appearance as one of the partygoers.

Directed with strong energy and pacing (running just over an hour) by Mervyn LeRoy.