LOVE IS A RACKET
1932 - ***
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. fares well in Clark Gable hair and soul as Jimmy the gossip hound in this ultra-typical (in the best of ways) WB film of the era. As a columnist who tangles over Francis Dee with generic gangster Lyle Talbot, Fairbanks races around and seeks counsel from fellow reporters Lee Tracy and Ann Dvorak who are hep enough to know their boy's getting taken to the cleaners by slumming Dee, but keep their yaps shut like a true pal.
There's nothing quite like this film's ambitiously cynical ending, the sort of loose-ended defiance of the crime-must-pay adage only possible in pre-code conditions. Dialogue is pitched at such a darkly cynical height that censors ears weren't young enough to hear it: "Looks like you been up at Sing Sing looking at a burning!" Sex is everywhere, as when Tracy and Dvorak are out at a nightclub eating dinner and she says "if you loved me half as much as you love that steak I'd break down out of self-pity" (meaning throw him a sympathy fuck, yo!) Fairbanks describes Dee--to her face!--as having "a beautiful can." and that she's "as pretty as a little red wagon." Lots of phone calls are made and received. The TCM print looks real nice. Can't go wrong with a rooftop in the rain spying on murders that you thought about committing yourself, and now don't have to... that's pre-gode cold!
1934 - ***1/2
Saucy pre-code Warner Brothers at its best. All that's missing is Barbara Stanwyck but here's punchy Aline McMahon filling in as a semi-butch mechanic at a lonesome desert gas station / auto camp, haunted by the usual Mad Dog gangsters: Lyle Talbot as a shaky safecracker and Preston Foster as McMahon's ex boyfriend from when she was an adventuress out in Tulsa. Ann Dvorak is her usual vivacious self as Aline's naive sister, and gets the most pre-code juice when she returns from a dance at dawn, kicked to the curb of the station by the town's most notorious womanizer; her face puffy, her lipstick long ago kissed and licked off; limping in her tattered dress... god knows what happened, but after 1934 and the advent of the code it sure wouldn't happen again. And if that's not enough: Bang! Bang! And the heat lightning is no mere metaphor. Meanwhile Frank McHugh adds beery acumen as an easygoing chauffeur for two bespangled divorcees (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly) who become stranded on their way back from Reno. When one guy dies his last words are "oh who cares?" We do, maybe for the first time ever.
1934 - **
This an informal little Vitaphone crackler, dated and hokey but still existant thanks to Bette Davis stealing scenes as a perky counter girl for straight edge pharmacist Charlie Farrell. He gets roped into counterfeit drug manufacture by Ricardo Cortez, a mobster thrown out of work by the repeal of prohibition and looking for a new product to make and shake down unwilling druggist throats. Glenda Farrell (no relation?) also lends some extra oomph as a cat-fightin' moll, but neither she or Davis get enough screen time to liven things up. The only glimmers of termite originality occur via Cortez's breezy leadership and fondness for his mug underlings, all played by WB stalwarts like Allen Jenkins, who's scared of the drug business, 'cuz his brother's in jail for 20 years "and he only had two decks of coke on 'im."
See, before they took the cocaine out of Coke (tm) they didn't have that problem: coke should be in coke, anything less is false advertising! What a fucked up system. In point of fact, the worst culprit for stepping on medication is the big corporations themselves! And if they hadn't made beer illegal in the first place, mugs like Cortez would never have gotten their first taste of big business. That's not part of the implied moral here, but it should be, as there's little else to go on. Niven Busch was a screenwriter, which probably explains the moments of gang camaraderie and business insight.
1931 - **1/2
Monroe Owsley specialized in sleazy gigolo bad guy roles, and here he even wears an odious greasepaint mustache. Ex-wife Kay Francis is a victim of his blackmail schemes. She's remarried to an older man who's terribly rich and jealous, to the point he hires gigolo detective George Brent to catch her in the act and/or seduce her himself to prover her infidelity. The supporting roles couple are Allen Jenkins, who you may remember from films like THE BIG SHAKEDOWN, one capsule up, and Ruth Donnelly (HEAT LIGHTNING two up and also THE BIG SHAKEDOWN) as a schemer who thinks Jenkins is the rich one. The problem is, Brent is so annoyingly full of himself that halfway through the film you start to appreciate Owsley. In fact you can't really scrape a single human character worth saving out of this mess, but Francis does look amazing in those feathered hats and capes (courtesy Orry-Kelly) and pre-Castro Havana is worth a look, even if it's all rear-projected and drenched in overlapping nightclub montage.
1933 - **1/2
A twelve chapter serial was shot, according to star Buster Crabbe, in a week, on the back lot, several years before FLASH GORDON. Crabbe's pretty buff but he has a yell that sounds more like a man getting a prostate exam than Weissmuller's archetypal yodel. Julie Bishop, aka Jacqueline Wells (THE BLACK CAT), is the sweet young thing at the heart of it all; her dad discovered a lost tribe of ancient Egyptians led by Mischa Auer (who holds a candle eternally at his chin so his eyes always have that spooky bughouse aura) and she's got to find him. One of her evil white guides steals a gem, and it's on.
The film version condenses all twelve chapters down to a short film and the action goes fast and repetitive until it's all just a meaningless stream of pith-helmeted actors running back and forth; rifles being aimed; Tarzan swinging to the rescue; some more running, animal fight stock footage; and the chimp. The two bad hunters are continually allowed to tag along even though everyone knows they're the bad guys (one presumes 'cuz white folk need to stick together in Africa, even if they're mortal enemies, and that's racist). Eventually TARAZAN THE FEARLESS runs over so much ground with such a diverse surplus of stock footage and mismatched stunt doubles that the best way to take it is as some post-modern found art collage. TCM showed it as part of their Arabs in Cinema series, because some Arabs show up with a sexy sultana as their leader. Halfway through the film these Arabs just disappear, but whatever. Tarzan... dives... again!
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