1934 - ***
Unlike breezier selections from the Gold Diggers series, Busby's DAMES suffers from a hefty share of cornball humor. As the allegedly fuddy and assuredly duddy Uncle Ezra, Hugh Herbert's schtick--his giddy titter and little hand claps--has not gone quite gold with age. One of those sexophobic millionaires who likes to form abstinence societies, Ezra promises to award his cousin-in-law Guy Kibee ten million dollars as long Guy refrains from tobacco and alcohol and behaves like a kiss-ass toady during Herbert's stay in New York. Kibee's wife, Ezra's cousin, Zasu Pitts seems uptight enough with her spindly walk and wavery voice, but Herbert is way too hiccup-ridden to convince as a reformer. Much shrill bowing and scraping ensues, especially since the daughter is Ruby Keeler, which means her beau is Dick Powell, and neither is about to bow and scrape to some old corny duddy when there's pettin' in the park to be done.
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| WC Fields might call this "a double bargain..." |
Small wonder - DAMES came out in 1934, the year real-life versions of Uncle Ezra killed the spirit of louche cinematic insouciance in its cradle, i.e. ending the pre-code era. While Busby undoubtedly detests Ezra, it's no fun watching him suffer nincompoopery; we came for breezy laffs and psychedelic dance numbers not Tea Party-style hysterics. It's too close to home, man. Too relevant.
Meanwhile the fact that Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell take a ferry to Staten Island to sing while they're supposed to be bringing Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir to Uncle Ezra who is hiccuping nonstop and driving Zazu and Horace into a frenzy of anxiety leaves an odd aftertaste in the minds of we sensitive viewers, as does seeing Powell gets ripped off by a sleazy producer. Joan Blondell is the much wiser chorus girl who gets her hooks into Horace for the show's budget while on a train to the city from upstate.
It all comes down to Herbert hiring some goons to trash the show, and though it all ends happily enough Herbert's attitude lingers in the mind. Thank god he gets arrested, takes a shine to Blondell and announces he has officially given his old fashioned moral code the raspberry.
The songs include "Dames" and "I Only Have Eyes for You," which gets real post-modern meta with the opening of the number taking place in the crowd outside the theater and winding up on the subway -- it takes on the feel of an SNL opening sketch with the host running backstage or out onto the Rockefeller Plaza as the cameras follow him out of the studio. It can be very confusing until you remember Busby bows to no one when it comes to blurring the fourth. As always he makes the show within the film is a hundred times more like a movie than the stagy off-stage action. Soon Ruby Keeler is shooting up through a hole in an eye, and there's psychedelic flower leg shows, the fogeys are having a blast guzzling 79% alcohol by volume elixir (that's 158 proof!), profits, publicity, and credits ensue.
BEAUTY AND THE BOSS
1932 - ***1/2
Warren William is in his lascivious wolf prime as an Austrian business tycoon who avoids the temptation of his secretaries by firing them if they catch his eye... then inviting them to stay for drinks and arranging them as mistresses. In his own way he's a Prince Charming forced by expediency to be his future bride's fairy godmother, doling out pink slip glass slippers and six month salary stipends instead of ball tickets.Enter a Cinderella to make George Bernard Shaw light up, the button-cute Marian Marsh (Trilby to Barrymore's SVENGALI the same year). A worker of the starving class, she's super efficient, methed-out on hunger and moxy. Showing the same ease and playfulness here that she had with all those long bearded old painters in SVENGALI, Mars gets taken to Paris on business and transforms into a wide-eyed jubilant sprite in a sexy evening dress. David Manners as the brother tries the earnest pretty boy approach to win her; Frederick Kerr ("Here's to the house of Frankenstein!") tries the lovable duffer approach; but only Warren has the louche captain of industry approach this Ayn Randy popinjay craves. She even gleans tips on being sexy from one of Warren's other mistresses.
You can tell by the breathless dialogue pace, continuity and its relatively few sets that BEAUTY AND THE BOSS was once a play - so think Lubitsch in froth and Hecht in pace as well as Shaw in the terms of capitalist philosophy and Brecht in its unflinching narrations of life as a starving poor person who gladly becomes an office machine automaton if it means eating regularly. As in that film, the great Anton Grot did the sets.
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| Marion Marsh and wolves (Top: Beauty and the Boss / b: Svengali) |
1931 - ***1/2
There's three reasons to see this weird, lilted pre-code: John Barrymore's florid hamming as Svengali; Marian Marsh's sweet face and alabaster beauty as Trilby (cute in an oversize Parisian officer's topcoat;) and the crazy Anton Grot sets. The latter includes super wide doors, a nicely dilapidated Moroccan night club and Parisian rooftop miniatures seen in an extended crane shot from Barrymore's eyes to Trilby's apartment. For all its stodgy slowness it has a special magic, if for no other reason than these three ingredients and the bizarre inconsistency of tone as Svengali clowns around with his Leperillo-ish companion one minute then sends a foolish housewife to her death in the next. Killing makes him hungry apparently so he heads over to do some mooching off Paddy and the Laird, more humor, then stealing Trilby and proclaiming her mouth has a roof like the parthenon! Billee (Bramwell Fletcher) is her earnest, naive young lover, smitten and thinking of marriage until he sees Trilby posing in the nude for Paddy and his painter class brethren, and then runs away in horror. Good riddance! As Barrymore's own Oscar Jaffee might exclaim, "That eliminates the lover!"
Barrymore's great of course, but even for fans he relies an awful lot on his old schtick where he clutches his heart with one hand and extends the other out before him like he's trying to find the light switch in the dark, crying "Ack! Ack!" One wonders what Warren William would have done with such a part! Actually one knows exactly. Directed by the one and only Archie Mayo.
1932 - **
Allegedly a comedy about a random rube (Guy Kibbee) chosen by some shady power elites to run for New York State governor, DARK HORSE is really more a polemic against impulse marriage. Warren William is the ingenious PR man who sways the hick vote but he's dogged by a vicious ex-wife who hounds him for astronomical alimony. She later tries to seduce Kibbee into a frame-up of the "love nest... with singer" variety. Except she ain't no singer. At Warren's right hand all the while is Frank McHugh noting Kibbee's ready for the KKK when he peeps him in his long johns.
A lengthy scene at campaign headquarters with the ex-wife having a tantrum and threatening to call the cops if he doesn't cough up four hundred smackers for alimony is kind of not what pre-codes are all about. In real life we have to deal with coughing up dough to people we hate, we don't want to see it in our movies. And Kibbee's not as endearing here as one would expect. He's playing the stupid hick a bit too broadly, flashing his terrible teeth and awesome belly like we didn't notice them the first 12 times. Meanwhile Bette Davis has a pretty thankless role as Williams' girlfriend and right-hand woman. She's still good and spritely... but really --WW scrounging for money to pay a gold digger? It's not right we should have to see that.
1933 - ***
Williams starts out this NIGHTMARE ALLEY-esque fable as a sideshow dentist, but he and his pal Allen Jenkins get a load of a fortune teller on easy street...and Chandra the Magnificent is born! Jenkins is right to be aggrieved when "Chandra" falls for a gorgeous local girl (Constance Cummings), whose mother 'loses' her handbag to Jenkins' nimble picketpocking. Williams marries the daughter, even though she's clearly not too bright since she falls under the spell of a cheap carny hack so easily.
With the spooky subject matter and Williams as a star, THE MIND READER should be better; silly bits of plot waste time when the real story is in the dialogue (rather than the action) which runs counter to the grain of the approaching code. Jenkins makes a good case for why it's better to rule in hell than slowly starve to death selling fuller brushes in a desperate bid for moral character, but Williams is trying to reform! Why again? It's still 1933, after all. Jenkins meanwhile gets a posh chauffeur job and pays the other drivers for addresses of where the husbands are cheating on their wives and passes the dope to Williams, who tells the ladies of the husband's infidelities from his ball, and everyone cleans up but the husbands, who are soon coming in to see Chandra themselves, with murder on their minds.
In the end, Williams turns to drink and reveals his tricks onstage, disillusioning and slur-sobbing uncontrollably to the assembled rubes, "I've broken my home!" Williams playing drunk is like James Dean playing drunk in GIANT--in other words, doubly slurred to the point of true incoherence. And the crowd roars!
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