"Forgotten Men with Steam" (Pre-Code Capsules): GOODBYE AGAIN, ARSENE LUPIN, HE WAS HER MAN, THE BOWERY, HELL'S ANGELS

HELL'S ANGELS

1930 - dir. Howard Hughes (w/ James Whale, Edmund Goulding - uncredited)

***1/2

All the Howard Hughes' Aviator-Womanizer Extraordinaire mytholos aside, this is a pretty interesting film marred solely by a pair of charisma-deprived actors playing unlikable WWI pilot Yank brothers from Oxford, one of whom, Roy (James Hall) is a cowardly womanizing douchebag, the other, Monte (Ben Lyon), a naive simp who expects nymphomaniac Jean Harlow (in the role that made her an instant iconic sex symbol) to live up to his goofy moralistic ideals since, you know, she kissed him once. Refusing even to believe his own brother shagged her, he's sneer-worthy, and Hughes invites us to share a conspiratorial groan at his old-fashioned naivete. Some guys, man, a girl winks at him and he suddenly insists they're going steady. You know the type. Hell, I used to be that type - weren't we all, once upon a time? I passed up on so many nymphomaniac hotties because I had to make them mix tapes first, and anguish and pine and call too soon even though it felt like weeks of agony to me; I couldn't just start making out with them within minutes of meeting, no matter how drunk I got, so they went off with someone else. But even I was never as big a chump as Roy. "Never love a woman, just make love to her" Monte tries to tell him, and so in a way, Hughes tells us. Indeed, HELL'S ANGELS fits squarely within my 'older brother cinema' concept, wherein the director aims his messages at an imagined younger brother, the way few directors ever do (Paul Thomas Anderson, Hawks, and Linklater are the only ones come to mind).

The thing about Hughes is, he walks it likes he talks it: there's a cool sense of uninhibited sexual congress, with one of the best all-time 'fade-outs' in the pre-code code, connecting a scene of Monte and Harlow making out on a couch, over to naive brother Roy sulking back at the bunks having been blown off by her, and then back to the couch at Harlow's pad where the vibe has shifted from simmering to cold and sad. Monte's ashen mood and Harlow's nonplussed attitude ("It seems colder in here now, doesn't it?") indicates how much he now hates himself and thinks she's a slut now because like a true douchebag he lacks the self-awareness to realize his post-orgasm depression is not her fault and will pass within an hour or so. Dude, this is pre-code shit we could have used all through the 40s and 50s. Damn Joseph Breen to an angel-less Hell, if he's not there already.

Anyway, the two boys are drags, as I say, and part of the blame lies with the actors and Hughes, who clearly casts lame ducks to make himself more charismatic by contrast: James Hall is like a vaguely bloated mix of Richard Barthelmess and Bob Newhart and he overacts horribly; as Monte, Ben Lyon is a big improvement, while unconvincing as a ladykiller he does a decent job with his scenes of his being seduced against his very weak will by Harlow, who with her jet black eyebrows and platinum wave almost steals the movie from the spectacular aerial combat. It's for her and the fighting we're here, so every scene of the two brothers engaged in their worldly nonsense seems worthless unless Harlow is there, coming between them.

A word on that: Harlow is a different beast here than she would be later for MGM -- less a gutter-baby-talking brawler who likes sex and lounging around eating bonbons and babbling to her maid--and more an upscale nymphomaniac whose refusal to be a one-man guy is never disparaged by Hughes' script. Instead it's Roy who comes off looking like a dopey punter and Monte not far behind. There's no Joe Breen around to hobble Harlow for Roy as he thinks is proper since she winked at him once, six men ago, to spot-weld her chains to the kitchen so he can fly away in confidence. And right behind him in assholery is Monte who seems to resent any girl who would be dumb enough to shag him. Two chumps from Oxford indeed!

 But who cares? I've never been a HUGE fan of Harlow's MGM baby-talk blonde but she's different here, maybe it's that she's a lot thinner, and younger, and those fierce black eyebrows make her seem accessible --you can feel the hair on her arms tingling with animal attraction. She's like a living electric sheet of fire. She's not perfect, but she's dazzling. (Compare to how kind of busted she looks just a year later in Public Enemy, below).

Second big bang for the buck here -- superb aerial action. This being the film that was begun silently and finished with sound there's a certain freedom to be found not worrying about sound in the lengthy aerial combat: all the sounds of all the guns and the humming of the biplane engines as they go buzzing about is strangely soothing, especially in a very long and riveting scene involving a German zeppelin attempting to drop bombs on Piccadilly Circus by lowering the bombardier down through the clouds on a cable (the zeppelin's only chance to escape getting blown out of the sky is to stay up where the air is too thin for the old school bi-planes). Hughes being an aviator delivers not just action thrills but a very clear and graspable sense of what was really involved in dogfighting and bombing - the mix of luck, patience, not freaking out or choking on the trigger, and just how damn slow those planes were compared to today. Hughes went all out for this stuff especially with hand-painted color tints. And nary a word is granted the brave young German lowered down on a cable below the cloud line from a gigantic German dirigible so he can direct the bombing of London - but who lies to his commander, and has them drop the full load of bombs into the Thames instead. And Hughes milks the tension - the Germans speak in dubbed German! (with silent film intertitles instead of subtitles! Ausgezeichnete!)

And as the German who first duels with Monte (before the war) and then later questions the boys after they're shot down behind enemy lines, Lucien Prival is a delight. A leaner feral version of Erich Von Stroheim, he steals the final chapter of the film. Don't forget the Germans weren't yet Nazis, there was still a lot of chivalrous, sporting blood between Germans and the Allies- they'd all been drinking and dueling together scant years before. Of all the characters in this filthy war, it's actually Prival who glows the hardest, seems the staunchest of fellows. Harlow also earns her bombshell wings and can make fans of even on-the-fence-about-her types like myself, but man, those two brothers are just stinkers.

GOODBYE AGAIN

1933 - dir. Michael Curtiz

***

Warren William is at his most frivolous in this Warner Brothers comedy, maybe even too much so, and I say this as a die-hard William fan who even like Satan Met a Lady, that original Maltese Falcon adaptation where he hams it up so much he seems continually buzzing on his first martini after a hard day. Here in Goodbye Again he's even airier, but he has a weird cool chemistry with Joan Blondell, with whom he's appeared in many a WB pre-code. Here she's his tolerant secretary and he's a ladykiller romance writer; Helen Chandler (Mina from Dracula) is the sister of WW's current (married) conquest (Genevieve Tobin). She's already looking a world older and stranger than she did two years earlier in Dracula (she was a notorious alcoholic who burnt herself up in a fire shortly hereafter). Wallace Ford--bespectacled!-- is cast against type as a litigious relative (and Chandler's husband). Dragging Tobin's husband (Hugh Herbert) in tow, they set about following William from Cleveland to Albany on the sleeper train, and there's a great scene where their presence in the next car all but forces William to sleep with Tobin, waiting in his sleeper in a sexy negligee. It all ends in William's Albany boudoir where he jumps around on the bed and generally carries on while Blondell is gradually revealed to be far more than a secretary but hitherto 'open-minded' to his dalliances with ladies such as Tobin - usually, but because she's married and he's lying to her about it, she gets pissed.

That's about it --not much to write home about though the actors sure strive for a farcical peak. It doesn't come but William is onstage every minute, almost, so it's tough to care about anything else if you're a fan (and why wouldn't you be?) even if this ain't his finest hour. He needs more menace to be really riveting. Here he's coasting on his wolfish charm like he knows we love him no matter what. We do.

HE WAS HER MAN

1934 - dir. Lloyd Bacon

**1/2

Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell hustle around from the Turkish baths of NYC to Chicago to Marina Del Rey or thereabouts before seeking refuge in a small Portuguese fishing community, the kind showgirls and good-hearted whores go for their second chances, you know, to be respectable, and marry some big hunk of hick local or dumb lunk of a fisherman (see also: Tiger Shark, Anna Christie, The Wedding Night, The Purchase Price, The Wind, to name merely a few) - almost like one last dig at the sanctity of, as Blondell's heart-of-golder puts it, "good honest decent hardworking people, which you wouldn't know anything about, Dick Jordan!"

Believe it or not, the big surprise here is Victor Jory as the hulking fisherman, the kind of guy usually played by Gary Cooper or George Brent (if he's the hero) or Edward G. Robinson or Ralph Bellamy (if he's the foil). Jory might not be as good an actor as any of those guys, but he does have a deep voice, a looming height, the stoic poise of a stock company Sitting Bull, and gravitas that belies his then-lean years. He might be burdened with a hack-accent and mangled syntax but he's no rube. Cagney and Joan might talk faster and hustle more but Jory actually steals the show, or at least gives Cagney a run for his money. It's even got one of those typically succinct encapsulations of the advent of Joe Breen's draconian code rubrick, the sanctity of marriage prevails and Cagney walks off into the sunset, arm in arm with his killers. Let it come down.

THE BOWERY

1933 dir. Michael Curtiz

***1/2

Robust Raoul Walsh direction makes this turn-of-the-century New York City Darryl F. Zanuck opus The Gangs of New York-style farce to beat, with all the downtown warring fire brigades (they brawl in the street while burning Chinese laundrymen plead in vain out their second story window in a bit of sly callous racism), Tammany Hall corruption, nickel beer, sawdust, playful brawling, tear-stained pathos, and freewheeling publicity stunts the era can offer. Wallace Beery plays Chuck, the big shot of the Bowery (the Bill the Butcher); Jackie Cooper is a racist version of his orphan self, who lives for throwing rocks through "Chink's winders;" Fay Wray is the good girl who ends up keeping house for the pair of them, and George Raft is Chuck's rival, an up-and-coming sharpie with a saloon and fire brigade of his own. Chuck don't like that much, and he's so tough he saps a broad who drunkenly crashes his table, as illustration to Cooper that women are "only after yer spondoolicks" since Cooper's gone in for trading cigarette cards "from guinea kids." Yeesh! Coogan's presence is somewhat superfluous, but he does his best with a third wheel role that seems affixed to Beery like some kind of blubbering lamprey.

The problem with the whole motivation of Leo DiCaprio in GANGS OF NEW YORK was swearing revenge on a man who his father fought fairly and is commemorated by. Swearing revenge would be like the grandson of a fallen German soldier tracking down the American who killed his grandfather on the battlefield, illogical and certainly nothing to root for and makes one wonder: does Scorsese even understand how vengeance works? Eventually the smoke clears and the auld love triangle coheres from the crowded streets betwixt Wray, Raft, and the jealous brute Beery --yawn. But at least it doesn't get it in the way of the scantily clad dancers. A better plot thread has Raft jumping off the Brooklyn bridge on a wager for Chuck's saloon; he makes it but almost used a dummy in his place, so reversals of fortune are always happening on the Bowery, including an appearance of vile liquor-bashing Carrie Nation and her armada of shrewish wives, living examples of the evils of sobriety. For a country finally free of the evils of prohibition (it was repealed in 1933 - the same year of THE BOWERY's release), the drunkenness on display here is almost patriotic.

ARSENE LUPIN

1931 - *** - dir. Jack Conway

Karen Morley is at her warmest in this pre-code MGM caper: The romance between her and John Barrymore starts with her naked in his bed at his party (he insists on being in the room while she dresses - with the lights off and it's pretty sexy -for he is no gentleman!) and --oh right, this is Paris, where such things are okay -- he doesn't have to go to the gallows to spare her having to confess she spent the night with him, and even if he doesn't believe her story about being an exiled Russian countess, he still likes her. I'm not a huge Lionel fan (he plays the head of the French Secret Service, sworn to bag Lupin before he retires - and is always is fussy and overly sincere) but I am a huge apologist and unrepentant fan for his great, drunk brother John - and the pair have more great rapport here than in all the other films together, and there's even some fun ambiance and dabs of old dark house mystery (it takes awhile to learn which brother is Arsène and naturally I can't spill it).

Even if, by the end, it's really not too much at stake and it all kind of resembles the later THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (i.e. no deaths), right down the daylight hour museum theft, it's a-pretty hot, breezy fun, and despite its rough treatment in the theft, the Mona Lisa is none the worse for wear. The real stealing going on here is the theft of Karen Morley from being in more films, appearing only sporadically after she left MGM (due to disputes over her private life, and later the blacklist). So we have only a handful of films with which to treasure her adult sexual openness and witty walk and the way she more than made up for actorly limitations through charm, wit, presence and her icy laugh. There's this film, PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, SCARFACE, MASK OF FU MANCHU, DINNER AT EIGHT and, well, they're all worthwhile anyway, but with her... sublime. You can have Garbo (though I always cried during GRAND HOTEL when I watched it really drunk back in the day), for my money its her sexual chemistry with John Barrymore here that kind of melted the keys in my pocket, like if the sexy Jean Harlow of HELL'S ANGELS grew a few years and inches and went to finishing school but got kicked out for opium smoking, instead of suffering from a terrible case of renal failure, and dying at the tragic age of 26. God bless and keep these angels both, in whatever macabre heaven they doth reign in.