Early Hawks: THE CRIMINAL CODE, TIGER SHARK, CEILING ZERO, BARBARY COAST, ROAD TO GLORY

Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for his Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked to name the three greatest American directors and answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." How dare he exclude our greatest director, Howard Hawks? Of course it should be: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges. Ford was brilliant visually and emotionally but easily mired in his misty-eyed Irish sentiment. He wasn't American -- he was "Irish-American." Sturges is the most American, and Hawks is the most of what makes America great - the knowing the difference between being brave in the face of death and just being an imperialist swine. Of the three when it comes to comedies, only one made The Lady Eve, so earns his spot right there. When Ford tried to do comedy he got lost in children's choirs and rollicking brawls. There's never any religion, or children to get soft over with Hawks. What these men do instead is to face danger on a daily basis, not necessarily externally but internally, so when violence comes their way it's already after they've conquered themselves; and they sing and play music together, and drink and smoke. And when they die, they die like men, or they survive like men, either way without speeches. And if they meet a woman it's ten times faster and more disorienting than a Maginot line charge. There's no chaperone, no parson beaming, no dance, no time for blarney --they have to face that woman alone, and no amount of inner death-defying can prepare them. The whole fabric of the John Ford fort, the small town unity that extends in generations for centuries back, is sublimely pared down to a gummy old cripple, a drunk, and a limping sheriff, holed up in a jail and visited daily by attractive women who seem more modern and free of phony glamor than even Ford's wild Irish tomboys. There's no mutually consenting nonmarital sex in a Ford film, and nothing but nonmarital sex in a Hawks. No weddings, no stern cockblocking elders (only Walter Brennan), no kids (unless they're froggy-voiced old people in kid bodies, like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Ideally, the heroine and hero are dead before they either become or produce either end of the generational spectrum.

Needless to say, John Ford John Ford John Ford has won the history, the legend's been printed; he's got dozens of boxed sets in his name, Hawks none (aside from R2 where he has but one), and part of that may be that Hawks films are still very modern. There are very few misses in his canon but also nothing of superficial (i.e. bourgeois) importance like GRAPES OF WRATH. The closest Hawks gets is maybe his most unHawkslike, SGT. YORK. Usually, instead of emotion, race, and historical accuracy, Hawks' films are fun, archetypal, witty, engaging, resonant more on a Jungian than Freudian level. In some ways it's as if Hawks films take place in the universe that Ford has set up, the same towns and valleys, but then the Hawks characters are never seen in Ford's films because they hide out from all the boring town functions, they'd never dream of going where Fords' camera would be waiting for them. While the Ford characters are off square dancing, speechifying, voting, learning to read and write, and eating big breakfasts, Hawks' characters quietly grab a bottle of whiskey off the table, sneak out back, roll cigarettes and shoot the shit. Fords films are about obeying the rules, worshipping tradition, joining the social order with a deep Catholic devotion, Hawks films are about breaking rules, sidestepping tradition, and letting Dean Martin suffer through the shakes and PTSD brought on by past films enduring Jerry Lewis. "In case you haven't figured it out yet," John Wayne explains to his prisoner; "the minute your brother starts somethin' you're liable to get accidentally shot." The way Wayne says 'shot' is a chilling reminder of death's finality. In some films, guns are just toys and marksmanship is almost irrelevant - the heroes never miss and the villains never hit- but in Hawks it's about being a dead shot even with a pistol fired from the hip, or else staying the hell out of the way of those who are. The rules in most westerns seem very arbitrary and inconsistent: good guys stand around like idiots and bad guys only rarely realize the good guys have been sitting ducks the entire time; in Hawks' films it's always perfectly clear how the sheriff and deputies handle even a walk around town, with hostages and cover fire and every last struck match out of line of fire. It's not that all good guys are great shots, in a Hawks' film, it's that only great shots are welcome. In Ford's, it's that only men good to their saintly old mom are welcome.

In the 30s, though, Hawks was still figuring himself out. He had some great writers, many of whom, like William Faulkner, had served with him in the escadrille signal corps (so had to deal with death daily) or gone hunting with him, BUT Hawks had yet to find his signature action movie style, the male bonding-in-isolation, the querencia mentality, wherein courageous, noble, chivalrous marksmen, pilots, or hunters band together against great odds in an enclosed space. He had some early masterpieces, like SCARFACE, but in some of these early films he's bound by love triangles and other structures odd for Hawks but ubiquitous at the time. Anyway, maybe examining these five early films (in order of release) will help. They're all rather obscure, so I mention how to locate each film, be it available only on VHS, DVD-R, or TCM--which is a crime considering nearly every John Ford movie ever made is remastered out there on disc--and my own ratings.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Avail. on VHS and Region 2 DVD

***

Walter Huston is a tough but fair warden who, as DA, sends a naive kid (Phillip Holmes) up the river for ten years. The kid whacked a masher with a bottle in a notorious speakeasy, and the masher died. It's a bad break, but as Huston tersely snaps, "an eye for an eye - that's the foundation of the criminal code!" Waving a black book like a blackjack, Huston has no choice eventually (once he becomes warden) to realize there's a different criminal code, which means don't rat out your fellow inmates. And there's a climax wherein if Holmes rats out a killer of a squealer he'll walk out a free man, but he won't violate the code. He won't! He won't he won't! he won't! Huston gets in some intense acting, grabbing the boy by the lapels and demanding to know who did it. WHO DID IT!??

There's some good press room overlapping dialogue introducing the action, but this doesn't feel particularly like a real Hawks film. Once he becomes warden, Huston gets some chances to be super tough, like walking unarmed into a throng of hateful prisoners, or getting a shave from a lifer who cuts another man's throat, and there's a great silent build-up to the whacking of a squealer, with Karloff looming around like a white tunic-sporting Frankenstein, but otherwise characters are trapped in situations clearly contrived for the demonstration of Big Moral Issues, and an air of existential gloom hangs heavy uber alles. There's not much room for Hawksian heroics in such a clamped-down situation (like if the whole of RIO BRAVO was told from the point of view of the imprisoned Joe Burdett).  In TARGETS (discussed here) it's the film Peter Bogdanovich and Karloff watch on TV while getting drunk in Karloff's hotel suite. The VHS I have is pretty solid, made back in the day when they built them to last.

TIGER SHARK (1932)

Occasional TCM airings, Warner Archive DVD

**1/2

When Hawks focuses documentary-style on a tuna fishing off the coast of a Steinbeckain California, going into the heart of tuna schools and pulling them up one after the other, throwing them all into a big trough around the boat, where they flip and flop trying to escape, slicing each other up with their razor fins, you get an idea this was what John Huston was trying for with his mustang hunt in THE MISFITS. When one man fishes for himself, it's the natural order; when a crew fishes for half a state, it's mortifying. The good part here is that man's not strictly the sole apex predator, because where there's fish there's tiger sharks, and they love the spicy tang of a Portuguese-a commercial a-fisherman for-a the nice-a dinner. Edward G. Robinson's jovial capatin loses his hand to one, and so wears a shiny hook (he gets it polished on his wedding day). Another guy loses his legs, dies, and leaves his daughter (Zita Johann) powerless against Eddie's boastful charms. Johann's weird pallor worked in THE MUMMY but she doesn't have the inner fortitude of, say, Greta Garbo's Anna Christie, and so when she falls for Eddie's partner (two-handed hunk Richard Arlen) there's only the sense that he might have access to some benzos that would make the overacting of Robinson's angler bearable. Wrote Andrew Sarris, "Hawks remorselessly applies the laws of nature to sex.The man who is flawed by age, mutilation, or unpleasing appearance to even the slightest degree invariably loses the woman to his flawless rival." There's some good scenes and no bad ones in TIGER SHARK, but Robinson seems miscast. His constant chatter and Portuguese accent seem unduly weak for such a great actor. When he shoots at sharks from the safety of the crow's nest it only makes a sensitive viewer sick, rthough it's when the illicit couple are making out and the bullet fire off camera suddenly stops--that the film's sole moment of 'whoa!' occurs, as how often does a cease fire signal the start of real danger?
 

CEILING ZERO (1936)

VHS

****

Here's the first film where Hawks shows the rapidfireoverlapping dialogue style that would become his trademark. A chronicle of the early days of Newark airport, wherein stray pilots are nursed through heavy fogs by hungover radio operators and ex-daredevil-turned air traffic warden Pat O'Brien deals with overlapping crises via radar and radio while old friends and a snoopy aviation bureau rep (Barton MacLane) try to interfere and/or say hello. We come to admire the way O'Brien can refrain from snapping people's heads off while engaged in life-or-death radio contact and some oblivious person walks in with an oblivious joke and a pat on the back.

Then, enter (tumbling) James Cagney, who served with O'Brien in the Signal Corp (where Howard Hawks served with William Faulkner). It's a bit similar to DAWN PATROL in that O'Brien doesn't fly the planes, and has to send men up in bad conditions (ceiling zero means the fog is so high even the sea gulls are grounded) and he doesn't like it.

A highlight is when they're all trying to help a lost Stu Erwin after his honing beam goes out, and he can't get their radio signal but they can all hear him shouting in panic and rage, him presuming everyone on the ground is off playing poker and they're all shouting into different phone lines all along the flight plan to various listening posts and police stations, and the one girl in the room cries and shouts "Why don't you do something?" and they all bark at once "SHADDUP!!!!" Awesome. We see a slight demerit in Hawks here, not misogynist per se, but his Hawksian woman was still being formed and while the girls are of varying degrees of toughness, they crack up in a crisis, throwing little tantrums when things get terse. There's also some surprising sexual frankness: June Travis offers herself to Cagney for succor after the death of the pilot who took the doomed flight so Cagney could have a date with her -- a shadowy prefiguring of Joe's death in the early section of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS two years later.

The ending is one of those trite bits where everyone's noble self-sacrifice has to constantly trump one another's, but it's almost beside the point; Hawks has found the zippy overlapping dialogue of a bunch of professional men united against the weather, and the (notably Irish blarney-free) velocity of the Pat and Jimmy chemistry is at full manly throttle, setting a benchmark for all the two man hetero bromances to come.

The VHS I got is blurry, not built to last. There is no DVD. It is a crime.

BARBARY COAST (1935)

(DVD)

**1/2

Miriam Hopkins is the first white woman in San Francisco, back in the 19th century gold rush boomtown days, when a pre-Panama Canal ship had to travel all the way around South America to get there and took the better part of a year. Arrivers found a city of unpaved mud roads so nasty they could suck a pedestrian under like quicksand, a dense fog filled with scammers, pickpockets, and ruffians, and inside thenothing but crooked roulette wheels, murderous bouncers, and that pint-sized unlucky-in-love big shot Eddie G. Robinson controlling the works.

There's a few elements that let you know Hawks isn't fully himself here. COAST is one of the films he made as a hired gun of Goldwyn's and he's not particularly enamored with his leading man, Joel McCrea, a foolish poet-type who loses his hard-earned sacks of gold in one turn of Hopkins' fixed roulette wheel, a "cheap price for such an education." This after they fell in love as strangers both seeking shelter from a rainstorm at an old deserted cabin, the period equivalent of running out of gas, myeah. Notes Cinephile:

"There’s little sexual tension, chemistry, or even the vaguest hint of innuendo between the two leads, it would seem a sign attached to one of the gambling tables in Robinson’s casino which reads “No vulgarity allowed at this table” is a rule disappointingly applied to the rest of the film as well. It has little visual identity beyond Ray June’s atmospherically foggy night-time photography (which does some fine work with shadows towards the end) and little of the cynicism or edge which marked out other collaborations with screenwriter Ben Hecht, instead opting for flowery, pretentious dialogue many of the cast clearly struggle with."

Gambling is a hard trick to do right cinematically speaking and Hawks isn't a great one for making money seem important. Lugging sacks of gold through throngs of thieves seems foolhardy, unrealistic, i.e. you can't show a guy getting his pocket picked one second then another one lugging overflowing sacks of gold around by himself and not getting his corpse picked clean insider of six seconds. This inconsistent financial environment takes us as far from the usually clear-cut Hawksian sense of group solidarity and danger pinpointing as you can get. As Old Atrocity, Walter Brennan alone seems to achieve some sort of noble 3-D savagery. His survival in this place, his disheveled, foul-smelling self being welcome even in the glossy casino (where he lures strangers for a cut of the trimmings) makes him one of those rare figures (like C3PO or John Holmes in WONDERLAND) who can wander back and forth between classes, enemy camps, nature and civilization at will.  Add some throw-away lines like "it's hard rowing when I'm so emotional" and it still adds up to a formulaic but well-detailed socio-historic romantic thriller that's no SAN FRANCISCO (1936), nor even--when all is said and done--a TIGER SHARK.

THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936)

(Portugese DVD - Region 1)

***1/4

William Faulkner co-wrote this name-only remake of one of Hawks' silent films. It's hard to imagine it was made a year after BARBARY COAST as it looks straight from 1930, which is a compliment. As as a dreamy WWI Parisian combat nurse with a beautiful black velvet choker-wrapped neck, pale skin, bangs, sexy Red Cross on her cape, and a low-registered speaking voice, Hope Lange has the air of Lauren Bacall on the cover of the March 1943 Harper's Bazaar --which first won Hawks' notice.  You can see the same prematurely world-weary petulance in Lang's face, her moment of self-reflexion (thinking about a dead soldier lover?) a prelude to walking through selfless sacrifice's vampiric portal.

The plot to ROAD is an uneasy mixture of inter-generational jealousy and the same old love triangle and how both are bad for victory: new officer Frederic March meets Lang when they take shelter together from a bombing raid in a blasted-out basement saloon. He plays some tunes on the dusty piano, and puts his coat over her as the rafters rattle. Next day he's bothering her at the hospital while she tries to bandage the wounded, unaware she's the mistress of shaky drunk Warner Baxter, his new C.O. Once Baxter finds out, of course, it's suicide mission time for March, a bit like the situation in Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY or Von Sternberg's MOROCCO, or any of a dozen other films (or FRIENDS AND LOVERS, reviewed a few posts ago). Adding to the trouble is Baxter's father (Lionel Barrymore) wanting to get into the young man's game of soldiering to prove his worth. He ends up hogging screen time before grenading his own team, Lionel-style. March puts up with it all stoically, and there's never a guess how it ends, DAWN PATROL-style.

A memorable segment of the film involves Germans digging underneath the allied lines while the allies can do nothing but wait it out, rolling cigarettes with their shaky hands as the Germans scrape away below, knowing that as soon as the scraping stops the bombs are likely to go off. That's where the true courage is tested, that painful, prolonged waiting... and smoking. There's a rousing charge across no-man's land and a sneaky night time flank maneuver, but there's still the same auld love triangle, sermons on the ignominy of war, the sense of being pawns in the grip of a writer with a theme and message rather than a director with the guts to let that highlighter pen fall to the floor and trust his own shoot-from-the-gut sense of comedy, overlapping dialogue, cigarettes, whiskey, coffee, and one damned good looking girl.

See also, the 1932 Hawks film THE CROWD ROARS, which I capsuled earlier. 

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Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: DARK KNIGHT RISES, TARGETS

"And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did." --Hildegarde Johnson, His Girl Friday (1945)

"Gunman turns movie into surreal horror: 'This is real'" - News headline (Aurora Shooting)

"Those who see and are seen seeing are seen because they destroy. Recognized subjects are seen because they destroy and because they destroy what they see. Those who merely see have a lot of destroying to do before they can be seen seeing. - Jon Beller - The Cinematic Modes of Production (p. 279) 

"Monsters come out of screen! Invade audience!" - Promo 

for Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (1965)

Even without the the Aurora massacre casting its shadow, DARK KNIGHT RISES would be a lot to take in; shadows of Occupy Wall Street, terrorism, aging, irrelevance, environmentalism, and vigilante ethics all merge together in coded idolatry of the Kennedys and revulsion at the French revolution. Add Aurora's shooter--who opened fire at a midnight premiere showing of the film--and one allegory emerges from the rubble, Peter Bogdanovich's first film, TARGETS (1968).

Boris Karloff plays more or less himself as Orlok, old bogeyman who's lost his bogey because real life mass murderers are so much scarier than some old man in a robe with a candelabra walking along shadowy Corman corridors, he thinks. He gets a chance to test that theory when things get all post-modern during a confrontation with a Whitman-style mass murdering sniper who has opened fire at a drive-in showing THE TERROR (1963). Karloff/Orlok is scheduled to make his 'final personal appearance' there and when he figures out what's going on, he steps up to the plate with relentless big star authority.

Targets (1968)

 I watched my old DVD of TARGETS after a Sunday matinee screening of DARK KNIGHT RISES as an attempt to situate the post-modern metatextual meltdown of Aurora, and then to find the common ground between the Aurora shooter and the chaos of TARGETS' drive-in massacre finale with its honking cars and THE TERROR's thunderstorms erupting from speakerboxes, muffling the shots and making it difficult for word to spread between the cars, the killer firing out of a small hole in the drive-in screen (thus shooting from 'out of the screen' or facing the same way as the Aurora killer - who broke in, armed with teargas, guns, and with Batman-style body armor). From accounts of the Aurora incident, there was naturally some initial confusion similar to that in TARGETS, as a gunfire-racked action film full of masked armed monsters seems to spill right out of the screen, launching bullets into the audience in a random attack style that opens so many action films.  It's the sort of thing midnight spook shows used to do all the time in the 50s and 60s, as in MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY, presented in 'Horror-Vision' (which meant actors dressed like the characters came out from behind the screen at key moments)



If you watch some of the video footage shot outside the Aurora theater (above) during the attack you see just how disturbingly apt this comparison is; there is after all a lot going on at a big multiplex even at midnight, making the event seem strangely muffled; while wounded survivors file out of the building all bloody and red in the face from tear gas, there are enough people in Batman costumes standing around in the lobby, enough loud video games being played, that it's hard to think the blood isn't part of some fan tribute; the people aren't screaming and causing a commotion, they're wandering through the lobby like stunned, doped-out, half in-shock viewers who've just been traumatized by a particularly brutal horror film.



In deconstructing the tragedy in Aurora please note I mean no disrespect to the victims (or the violence in the Sikh temple in Wisconsin which erupted as I was writing this) but since the actual text of RISES involves random acts of political violence and random mass murder--and the subtext critiques America's love for guns and action movies, celluloid, tear gas, blood and torn flesh--it's worth noting the metatextual resonance. The real-life violence in Aurora was senseless and horrific, but there it is, and has to mean something in relation to the themes of the film, even if neither the shooter nor Chris Nolan meant it that way. It can't be an accident, even if it's totally random. One must find the metatextual kernel, the Rorschach blot of terror mustn't stay unlabeled, because no man is an island, no act ever isolated from its context. So perhaps this post is sort of like the cracked 'production for use' explanation Hildy dreams up for Earl Williams, the murderer of the 'colored policeman' in Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY. Williams' having been enthralled by a soap box preacher's sermon on 'production for use' relates perhaps to whatever the Aurora shooter gleaned from the America's own obsession with guns and violence, particularly in Arizona, where half the population has concealed weapon permits. Never using your expensive gun collection for anything other than target practice has to create some deep resentment on the part of gun nuts; they all, I theorize, secretly long for a zombie attack or commie invasion so they can board up their house and start blasting with impunity. If they should lose touch with reality via schizophrenia, or angel dust... then that attack may seem to have already happened, so anything you do is all right with God, and the talking dog next door.

His Girl Friday (1944)

And this not the first time 'real' murder has mixed with the movies in a very uncomfortable way. There was all that gang violence that erupted at screenings of his 1979 film, THE WARRIORS:

"If someone comes to a movie with a gun, who's at fault?" asks Warriors' film editor David Holden. Someone did just that at a drive-in showing on the night of February 12 in Palm Springs, Calif. and killed a teenager. Some 165 miles away, on the same night, an 18-year-old bled to death in a darkened theater in Oxnard, Calif. after being knifed by an unruly gang. And three nights later a Boston high school student was murdered outside a subway station, allegedly by two young men who had just come from the film."  -- (People Magazine) (see my piece "Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock")

The question of who's at fault has still never been answered, but Peter Bogdanovich had already the writing on the wall and over 40 years later the craziness of his white-clad sniper finds an even more horrific expression.

The bland new breed of bogeyman in TARGETS isn't a gang-banger or orange-haired schizophrenic but a young man named Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly), who is still something of a 'nice' boy, with a big normal man smile for the world. But things aren't right under the surface: he and his wife still live with his parents and sleep together in his old room, an extended family shoved into a nuclear suburban space. We see a scene of Bobby and his dad bonding over shooting some cans out in a field, demonstrating their excellent aim, and talking of a hunting trip, so clearly this is how Bobby Thompson sees becoming a man, a head of the household, eventually getting out on his own--with a gun. Of course that's conjecture too. Bogdanovich leaves the man's motives for his random violence deliberately vague.

To jump back to Aurora it's worth mentioning that two of the people who escaped the theater that night were a marine couple who, having ducked out as soon as they smelled the gas, and helped save a few others from going in, were compelled to come back a few nights later to see the rest of the film (the shooter came in after the first 20 minutes of the film had elapsed, through the fire exit, first tossing tear gas canisters up the aisles):

Don and I had decided that it was vitally important to go back as soon as possible to the movie theater and finish watching The Dark Knight Rises. The shooter’s intent was to cause fear, injury, and death. We escaped injury and death. Whether it was due to luck, fate, our military training, or all three, we’ll never know. But we both refuse to let fear consume us. We refuse to allow this one madman to injure our minds and spirits the way he tried to injure our bodies. If we let fear overtake us and prevent us from living bold, authentic lives, the shooter—and other murderers like him—wins.

I love the rhetoric in that quote, because it sounds so much like the dialogue of DARK KNIGHT, a grand statement of principles. By seeing RISES, it implies, one is taking a stand against those who would prevent them from living bold, authentic lives. Of course this can't actually be true in any literal way.  Seeing a film wherein people get shot through to the end can't be more 'authentic' than the real life act of being shot at. But the letter does illuminate the way 'real' violence, as we perceive it when it's happening around us or to us, in the moment, seems more unreal and dream-like than the violence onscreen. The military training of this couple saved their lives since they were familiar enough with tear gas and guns through their basic training and service overseas that  their feet carried them out faster than most of the audience, who didn't have the response deliberately built into their reflexes, but I can only imagine being an Arizona suburbanite, a bit sleepy from waiting around for hours past bedtime to catch this screening, and now, just when it's getting good, this nonsense. It was probably, some thought at first, just some kids sneaking in from outside and setting off smoke bombs and firecrackers to get people to run out of the theater so the kids could grab the vacated seats. That's probably what I would have thought. Having never been to war or boot camp or fired a gun more than a few times. I doubt I could have shaken off my complacent, hypnotized film viewer veneer in time to save my own life (see my piece on the '70s Savagery Switchpoint'  here). In Israel or Iraq I bet you they'd be on their feet and outside in seconds, and six armed guys or girls in the theater would return fire, but in the U.S., even those with concealed weapon permits aren't going to bring their gun to a midnight movie.

But back to the idea of 'authentic lives' --- why is it so easy for the digital sound, massive crowd scenes and swooping CGI of Gotham City under siege to resonate as authentic but not the actuality of a 'real' in-theater attack, which conversely resonates only as a surreal nightmare? Maybe because movies start at a certain time, and the placards for no talking, smoking or cell phones, the darkening of lights, the playing of the theater chain's theme music all work like Pavlovian hypnosis to prepare us to submerge into the realm of a group waking dream. But when a madman opens fire in real life where are the Pavlovian triggers to warn us, to signal to our reptilian brains to disengage from heightened relaxation and into fight or flight? The theater is generally one of the only places outside of our own homes where we feel, if only for an hour or two, secure.

In TARGETS the surreal disconnect when movies step out of the screen is fortunately the killer's problem not the audiences. In the big climax, when Bobby sees Orlok advance on him in 'reality,' while at the same time sauntering towards the camera on the giant drive-in screen, he panics and shoots at both, and thus runs out of bullets faster and so Orlok's life is more or less saved. This event makes Orlok realize that the banal new face of evil isn't scary as much as pathetic. He realizes his crazy doctors in black velvet suits working in cardboard dungeons don't need to be scary for real - they are the comfort food of scary. And the world needs comfort, to paraphrase SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS.

But I wonder if Nolan feels the same way. He seems to need to justify the idea of a rich orphan in tights and a cape. He wants to make an 'important' picture about the 99% but he still needs to factor in superheros, gadgets and villains. Half the movie goes by with Wayne and his butler and Commissioner Gordon talking about how important it is that the cape be worn, as if the film is afraid someone will laugh at it instead of with it, like some jocks will sneer at old Batman as he flies by and crush his iron spirit. But what Nolan doesn't understand is that we can accept a guy in a bat costume easily as long as he's onscreen. Offscreen he's just a nerd. And nerds aren't a threat.... r-r-right?

Wrong. We don't need civics lesson sermons to think of Batman as 'important' to Gotham. The more you try to make a superhero 'realistic' the less realistic he is. For example: I have lived in New York City since 1993 and inhaled some white dust  during 9/11 and there was nothing noble or heroic about it as a bystander (rescuing people or being rescued was different I'm sure). For me and my friends at least, it was just surreal, like a Bruce Willis movie came down and swallowed us whole. We thought the world was over, and here we were with nowhere to go or idea of safety, so we went out and got ice cream. I didn't get the full emotional weight until I went to my uptown AA meeting which had always been rich with cops and firemen -- and half their friends and co-workers were gone. If  Batman had raised his hand in that meeting and started croaking sanctimoniously about how this beautiful city must be saved because the people need a hero and blah blah we would have shaken our heads in disbelief the way Jebediah shakes his head at Charlie Kane thinking he can "make them a present of liberty."

And that's why on some level--within the context of the film and not in any real life anti-American way way---Bane becomes the real hero of DARK KNIGHT. His posh Germanic nasal accent makes him continually hilarious--he's the Arnold Schwarzenegger body with the Jeremy Irons as Claus Von Bulow voice, and even if his whole shebang turns--SEMI SPOILER--out to be a dead ringer plotwise for a certain Bond movie co-starring Sophie Marceau, and is structured like an inverse version of V FOR VENDETTA--END ALERT, Bane's got natural charisma and oomph that contrasts with Wayne's morose state of Hughes-ish retirement and preference for natty ethics lectures over light-hearted capering.

As for the rest of DARK KNIGHT there's the feeling of constantly counting down to some big event that never quite lives up to the momentum and gravity of the build. "The storm is coming" as Cat Woman (Anne Hathaway) says, and for awhile we can really feel it, as if the stretch of time in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS between when Lecter first snatches the paper clip to when he 'unmasks' in the ambulance is stretched out to an hour length. But after that, RISES loses its momentum and gets stuck in the sand, no longer SILENCE but HANNIBAL.

Incidentally it's Anne Hathaway as Cat Woman who saves the movie, with flexibility, roundhouse kicks, gigantic pointed heels (which she uses like Elektra uses sai) great eyeliner, and a flair for one-liners rare in this genre. As did Heath Ledger before her, she figured out how to vibe with Nolan's gloomy urban studies project and still have a good time. She reminds us that what made the 1960s TV show so amazing was that we were always secretly rooting for the hip villains. Batman and Robin were hilariously square and anyway it was just endless fisticuffs and letting the other side get away either by not chasing them very hard or letting them keep their utility belts even after tying them up and subjecting them to that week's cliffhanger deathtrap. That sense of droll sportsmanship was removed for the original Tim Burton remake and never returned, replaced now by a doom metal depressive version of a metropolis, where courage and honor and pain and blood are endlessy debated in low, hissing whispers as pounding tribal drums vibrate the theater into submission.

The surreal meta highlight for me, seeing the film this afternoon in a dingy black shoebox theater at the edge of Prospect Park, was the momentary silence amid the din of thundering, booming percussive soundtrack, the momentum which has been slowly increasing for the last hour suddenly stops and it's just a child singing the Star Spangled Banner at some sparsely attended football game. The whole incessant countdown of Bane's evil plan of citywide rising up from the sewers of unemployment, lost boy syndrome, and toxic repression, is go, and the rockets red glaaare / bombs bursting.... and in the silence of just this kid singing suddenly I looked around and up at the round dimmed lights above and around me inside the shoebox and there was a sound like a radio or some other movie maybe blasting behind us, and around us, and it seemed like it was playing in the stadium onscreen and for a moment the film loomed forward and swallowed us like an inverse 3-D.

And it felt like all America was clued into this same movie screening; this overpopulated urban sprawl of a nation always one step away from opening fire on itself had found its Stalin/Lenin/Robespierre/Humongous from THE ROAD WARRIOR combination, and he was funneling the whole 99%er rage thing into super expensive action sequence about to erupt that spew real grime and black resinous urban dust all over Brooklyn. The rupture between inside and outside the screen had come-- and I remembered the same 'this is it' feeling of surreal disconnect I had on 9/11, the smell the ozone and burnt chemicals of the falling wisps of gray insulation that rained down on Brooklyn Heights as we looked over the river at the smoky plume. This is it. This is the moment 'reality' is absorbed into the movies, never to return.

Actually in a weird synchronistic turn of events, the actor who plays Klaus, I mean, the Humongous, or toe-cutter, is Thomas Hardy, who was set to star in MAD MAX: THUNDER ROAD.... as Max. But it stalled... two years ago. This apocalypse, sshhhhh, never happened.

What a puny plan.

Just walk away

Like 9/11, however, once the plan is in motion and the rockets' red glare comes up in RISES, things never really add up to a full-on 'change' in our perceptions of civilization; the screen shrinks back to a far-off rectangle and Bane's whole plan to create a mini people's revolution for a few months before nuclear annihilation never really makes a whole lot of sense. Does he think the world will be inspired by this little experiment in street thug utopianism when it inevitably ends so harshly? And didn't someone do just this to Manhattan around thirty years ago, cut off the escapes and turned Manhattan into a thug-run state prison, and then they sent in someone named Snake Plissken to save him, since if he didn't the world would be destroyed by nuclear war?

Actually RISES and ESCAPE are a lot alike in more than that respect. Both have heroes with boyish faces who talk in whispers like they're trying to be super tough (don't forget that, like Bale, Kurt had been a child actor), and both have the same great premise: Manhattan with the power out as a criminal utopia, and both spend an hour leading up to some big promise of a huge apocalyptic adventure that never pans out. At least one takes itself seriously enough to not take itself serious at all. And that one has Black Moses.

DARK KNIGHT instead has Morgan Freeman, and prefers being about becoming old and established and suddenly dreading the dirty unkempt youths clamoring at the gates. "The world belongs to the young -- let them have it." says Orlok in TARGETS. Like Wayne hanging up his mask, Orlok surrenders the keys to horror's vehicle to the bland mass murderers like Holmes, Whitman, Huberty, and Bobby Thompson while Wayne lets Gotham turn Batman into a villain to protect the reputation of Two-Face. "I'm to old for play acting; it's not fun anymore," Orlok repeats, as his assistant, agent, and Bogdanovich himself as a writer, try and talk him out of leaving. As Orlok gets drunk he sound like Bruce Wayne arguing his justification for hiding out to Alfred, and looks a little like Alfred.

Orlok's little tantrum is in a way as detrimental to those around him as Wayne's feeling of irrelevance, or Sullivan refusing to make any more comedies while people are starving in the world. Orlok doesn't realize that we've never been really scared by films like THE TERROR, rather they serve a purpose similar to Sullivan's Ants in Your Plants of 1939, or the 1960s Batman TV show; they actually reduce terror through a kind of camp filtration. We recoil from the mundane reality of true horror; we wince to see how Bobby's clothes and family home furnishings even match the industrial white/gray of the industrial silo tower from which he first opens fire on passing commuters, reflecting him as the ultimate product of banal American conservative conformity. Bobby's mass murdering rage is a result perhaps of feeling trapped in the kind of beige neo-realist movie Sullivan wants to make, the kind Orlok thinks would be scarier than his Victorian Gothic Poe adaptations. What Orlok, Wayne, and Sullivan doesn't see from their upperclass vantage point is that people like Bobby Thompson are already walled-in, buried alive, beyond help, THE PREMATURE BURIAL or Madeline Usher writ upon the dry-wall and beige house paint of suburbia.

And the flairs of conscience, his need to protest his own craft's irrelevance in TARGETS, mirrors Bobby's trying to confess his feelings of dread to his family. Neither can escape their destiny, Bobby's family can barely move their eyes away from the comedian on TV as he tells them of his dread, nor can Bogdanovich and Orlok look away when watching THE CRIMINAL CODE. When Orlok fnally gazes down at the face of the new banal evil he's been fearing, he's not impressed. His rage over this interruption of his film overwhelms any fear of being shot and he advances on Bobby like he truly is the kind of unstoppable killer Bobby only pretends to be 'at  movies.' Bogdanovich films Karloff looking down in rich dark shadows, his face menacing, the bullet graze on his forehead ignored, and suddenly he's the looming monster he was in THE CRIMINAL CODE (1929), which he and the director Peter B. watched--drunk--on TV the night before.

If we can learn a lesson from either--or both--DARK KNIGHT RISES and TARGETS it's that in the end, the celluloid always wins. The intended victims must go back to finish watching the movie with no further 'real life' interruptions, or else live inauthentic lives. Whether it's a super-expensive three-hour tour of guns and sound and urban studies-signifying fury, or just a super-cheap Gothic faux-Poe AIP Corman production like THE TERROR, the show must go on. And in a world full of banal chaos and unlimited ammo, the old monsters with their caves, castles, bats, spiders, science gadgets, high-tech motorcycles and swanky bullet proof bat armor-are our only true defense.

Of course I see it all through my own life lens, as someone who has THE TERROR on blu-ray and loves it to death even though he knows it pretty much sucks. My mom decorated our house growing up in the same damned beige and sickly pale greens of the Thompson house in TARGETS, and I climbed the walls like an entombed Usher before I learned to escape into the deep shadowy colors of whiskey and 60s horror movies on TV. I survived thanks to Karloff and thanks to Vincent Price and thanks to Julie Newmar, and Howard Hawks, and Tom Fergus as Claude in OVER THE EDGE. I didn't survive because of gritty urban neo-realism--ugh! who needs it?--or movies too mature for gaudy capes and ray guns. But if angry young hotheads of the future can similarly escape thanks to Anne Hathaway and Thomas Hardy, can avoid going postal by one more viewing of their favorite DC superhero, then Frank Miller and Bob Kane be praised, even if it means that things are so weird out there that the urban grit of neorealism has seeped into our escapist universe and the screen will eventually widen until its edges can no longer be discerned and CGI will be bleed into our 3-D grungy suburban wasteland of world like the soul bled into the flesh of Ahab as he stays home from the sea to catch White Whale Week... only on the Discovery Channel. Thar she blows, right after this message. 

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Pre-Code Capsules 9: BEHIND THE MASK, DR. X, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, BLESSED EVENT, THE BLUE ANGEL

BEHIND THE MASK
1932 - ***
The great forgotten Jack Holt plays the worst federal agent in the world  in this pulpy thriller, endangering his witnesses and letting himself be snowed over by any old disguise or pretense. His saving trait is a masochistic yen for weird undercover work; he's not afraid to go to jail and pose as a convict so he can win the trust of nervous flunky Boris Karloff, so he can hit him up later for a job in a racket that hides dope in caskets and is masterminded by a shadowy doctor. Edward Everett-Sloan is around and there's a vast spy network full of dark-eyed bit players.  Meanwhile Holt's girl, Constance Cummings, tries to save her dad, a doctor in 'a lot of trouble' and a little romance bloometh 'twixt her and Holt. And she's even remarkably capable with a .45, which is a switch for these things.

It all climaxes in a scene where the masked evil doctor makes a great show of refusing to give the tied-down Holt anesthetic for a planned vivisection, because he wants him to experience the magic moment when excruciating pain becomes ecstasy. Batailles-esque philosophy and dimestore pulp come together with the Universal horror stock company! But it's not until the last five minutes that it approaches the cock-eyed madness of any five minutes of DR. X (1933).

BLESSED EVENT
1932 - ***1/2
If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. He's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with the adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. Highlight: Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via a monologue about an electric chair execution he witnessed that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places, such as his imitation of the wobbly walk to the chamber, his voice cracking with hysteria, body spazzing sharp and jerky like a Zulawski hero as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of  a reprieve, the shaky steps of the last mile, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated.

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down. Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham all come over to the table, adding plenty of moxy. Add references to Jews, ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" - "Oh, dozens!"), Amos and Andy, and a wild-eyed girl 'in trouble' begging for a reprieve herself, played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (left), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end. PS - You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE
1932 - ****
It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room.

Many viewings later I love the elaborate conveyance of gossip, so that Miriam Hopkins is getting verification requests from duchesses mere minutes after being spotted in the lobby of her lover by a nosy count. (and it's all rot, of course). While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or Melvyn Douglas, or even Ronald Coleman, he swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely confident in his sexuality, in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than that moon.

And who wouldn't be in love with both Hopkins and rich perfumier Kay Francis? Hopkins displays her wide, loose midsection proudly in some tight-clinging dresses, giving you the vibe she moves from the center of her c-nt. I love the way their first kiss on the couch seems to make them slowly dissolve until the couch is empty--and Francis is at her most glamorous and poised, even while maintaining some of her flat-chested androgyne aura earlier films like THE COCOANUTS (1929). As always, Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles are effete, bitchy suitors; Gustav Von Seffeyritz  humbugs with gusto as the chairman of the board who suspects Marshall is a crook, just as he is. But who would be able to resist robbing Kay Francis?

"I'm a saaad panda..."

THE BLUE ANGEL
1930 - ***
BLUE ANGEL might best be understood as the chrysalis between the caterpillar of the silent era's 'deformed circus freak loves pretty trapeze artist' plot boilerplate which Acidemic contributor Budd Wilkins has termed the "masochistic melodrama" genre (See his fine Chaney reviews here)  and the sound era pre-code butterfly of the Hollywood Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations. As such it's neither here nor there, like watching Wallace Beery get stuck in the doghouse door trying to sneak out of the cast of MGM's FREAKS so he can defect to Paramount (though in truth, he went the reverse direction).

Either way, Emil Jannings is a damn unsightly kind of creepy crawler, way uglier and uncharismatic than Beery, and it's clear Sternberg can't stand him so rather than stir our sympathy, Jannings' out-maneuvered Herr Professor inspires nothing but disdain. His smug judgment of Lola and her postcards (which he finds in his student's schoolbooks) makes his downward spiral far less interesting, his slow motion expressionist pantomime reaching for grand tragedy in a way that makes you think Chaney is down to his last few faces. With his bug-eyed outraged head facing the camera from the same angle, round glasses and Satanic facial hair swirling, Jannings works very hard at keeping his head always in the center of the frame while his body twists and turns like a big old bug caught in a spider web. But to what effect? Nevah vanted doo.

 

Shot in Weimar Germany just before her Paramount-ordered nose job, molar removal, and strict diet, the Dietrich we see here could be her own sister, one who stayed in Berlin mit die schwarzwaldkuchen und bier. But Von Sternberg is in fine form; he lights the Blue Angel club like a crazy expressionist side show and if you focus in on the lighting and shadows as opposed to Jannings, it definitely does become the masterpiece so many claim.

Still, more than in any subsequent films, Sternberg's masochism in DER BLAU ENGEL is a downer. Always portraying the suitors of his lovely star Dietrich as buffoons, bug-eyed blowhards, shameless masochists, or authoritarian bullies (or else they rarely speak at all and operate as sex objects themselves, like Gary Cooper in MOROCCO), Von Sternberg's obsessions can sometimes seem the cinematic equivalent of a jealous, angry lover defacing pictures of his rivals even as his studio bosses insist he cast them. One would normally say of a Paramount pre-code that it's fun and sleazy but is it art? But in DER BLAU ENGEL we know it's art, and it's sleazy, but is it any fun?  Nein!

DR. X
1933 - ***1/2
Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to the early technicolor hues of DR. X. What used to look blurry and muddy and depressing now glitters with glowing emeralds, murky pinks and streaks of deep, bloody reds that make it like a candy fountain of shadowy death. Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his atmospherically-lighted collection of scientific colleagues, each of whom grows more indignant and suspicious the longer we hang out in their labs: Dr. Welles has made a 'study' of cannibalism and keeps a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines on the other hand was shipwrecked for years on a desert island and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays' effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are 'normal' people." Mmm...hm.

And dig the post-modern self-reflexivity of the the climax, with the doctors all chained to their chairs, their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester when they're aroused by the murder tableaux staged before them, just like you in the audience! Scream ladies and gentlemen! The Tingler is in this theater! In the subtext, the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its antithesis: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means the opposite, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it, as expected by the morgue attendants and security guards he bribes to look the other way. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements of things like "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" are allowed no argument since they carry his medical weight. And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore (see BLESSED EVENT) maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained for your own amusement, indeed.

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Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Secret panels, stormy nights, dying heirs, hairy hands, Karloff, candles, lawyers; priceless mcguffins stolen from a dead man's watch pocket; maybe a coroner, woken up at this ungodly hour of the night; guys in ape suits for the medium shots, stock footage of a monkey for the close-ups; Bela Lugosi stuck playing a butler with barely any lines because the producers are worried about his morphine addiction; shrieking maids; bats; black cats; skulls on desks; conniving trophy wives everyone wants dead. What could be more Halloween-ish? It's the Old Dark House genre, basically forgotten today because there are no more old dark houses. Now they're either 'haunted' or long-since converted to apartments.

But if you've ever spent a weekend at a rich friend's mansion then you know how weird it can get: a late night trip to the bathroom after everyone else has gone to bed can be a terrifying, surreal nocturnal journey ala THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER river trip. The walls are so thick that if someone were screaming for help downstairs in the study you'd never even hear them, or be able to find them.

And no longer can eccentric millionaire uncles just caper down to Egypt and help themselves to whatever cursed, ancient artifacts they care to dig for. The colonialist yard sale is closed! But the films, thank Ra, remain open! Here's five I know like the back of m'hand: 

 THE GHOUL
1933 - ***
British studio Gaumont's attempt to make a 1930s Universal horror reveals just how great Universal horrors were by contrast. At any rate, GHOUL's foggy and cozy as a cup of Earl Grey at a midnight graveyard picnic. Karloff is an eccentric Egyptologist who spends 75,000 pounds on an emerald he thinks will bring him back from the dead. He dies soon after and is entombed to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Sigfried's Funeral March" but apparently without the gem. Soon thereafter a cast of skulking emerald seekers materialize out of the fog including Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorious!) and a grumpy Dickensian lawyer who employs rather elaborate strings of words like "I intend to grant myself the pleasure of calling on her this evening." They're all either looking for the emerald, stealing it from someone else, having sadomasochistic fantasies (how very British!), writing notes, making peace with angry cousins, or being strangled by a Karloff back from the dead!

The grand guignol moment is when Boris carves a bloody ankh symbol on his bony chest, cut from many prints. Overall THE GHOUL would make a fine, weird double bill with the original MUMMY (1932), and possibly even stole its props, but alas, like so many British-Egyptian Museum horrors of the era all the supernatural elements must be conveniently explained away by film's end. One mustn't leave the queen's subjects thinking such things are true, you know... a gullible lot they are, I'm afraid, sir. That's not to say this jewel still isn't a little loose in its setting, if you know what I mean, guv. Say no more...

THE CAT AND THE CANARY
1939 - ****
My favorite Bob Hope movie! I've seen it 1,000 times! Dragging my canoe behind me! I taped it off 'Spotlight' in 1980 and, in some ways, I'm still watching it. Bob Hope is the perfect mix of romantic hero and scared goofball quipper as Wally Campbell. The leading lady is Paulette Godard, who turns out to be the sole heiress to her eccentric Uncle Cyrus Norman's estate, which is an old house way out on le bayou, where an escaped maniac who calls himself 'The Cat' is prowling for victims. Guest must take canoes to get to the mansion, and Hope's stoic creole paddler has already heard Hope's jokes "last year... Jack Benny Program."

George Zucco reads the will and is the first to get murdered. Gale Sondergaard is the housekeeper in tune with the mysterious chimes and 'murmurs' of the old house. The other relatives all play up the notion Paulette is insane (she keeps seeing hands come out of walls) but it's mainly so they can lay claim to the fortune, thanks to the sanity clause, and don't tell me there ain't no Sanity Clause because if there's one movie I've seen even more times than CAT it's NIGHT AT THE OPERA (I taped it off Prism).

You lucky stiffs, Uncle Cyrus' ghost must be holding bank night because CAT AND THE CANARY has been restored on DVD and glows like never before so you don't have to put up with my olde dupe which I once would have been happy to dupe for you in exchange for REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? Now it's available in that Thanks for the Memories - Bob Hope DVD set, which is a must even if you already have ROAD TO MOROCCO and GHOST BREAKERS (which everyone says is better than CAT, but I disagree. CAT is the shit!).

THE MONSTER WALKS
1932 - *1/2
An old creep in a wheelchair with a big old dark house? Check. Ape in a cage in the basement? Affirmative. Mischa Auer as the illegitimate son of the old creep in the wheelchair and the maid, angry he's denied any of the family fortune after all the hours he's slaved for that old man? Check but ick, now it's depressing in its offhand illumination of social injustice. Willie Best furthers the social injustice angle as the shuffling, uber-cowardly stereotype chauffer to the bland honky hero. Ape man hands coming out of the wall to strangle blonde poseur to the fortune are cool, but not enough. It puts the 'ugh' back in enough.

I know the Leonard Maltin review by heart: "Willie bests Mischa for laughs, but it's a close race." Lenny, you're my racist wheelchair-bound true father who taught me to write like a subliminal weisenheimer. Still, the stormy night-rattling-sheet metal makes it nice to fall asleep to as the sun comes up on another frosty November 1st, your blood levels of alcohol, ecstasy, nicotine, and candy now dwindled to a shudder no amount of coffee can allay.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE
1932 - ****
I had such high hopes for this film, the 'lost' Universal horror of 1932. For decades it was a holy grail for Universal horror nuts like me. Old VHS copies were nth generation dupes, horrifically murky. Then Kino came to the rescue via a restored, lone surviving print, and its star Gloria Stuart even did an audio commentary for the laserdisc! I never had a laserdisc player, but James Cameron did, loved the commentary and that's how she came to narrate TITANIC! It's awesome to hear this no-nonsense 1932 starlet tell you about shooting in the rain with James Whale and Boris Karloff and putting up with a cast of intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics and their clique-ish tea rituals, as meanwhile the shots all go down smooth as a Knobb Creek skinny dip... death where is thy sting?

The stranded travelers include: Charles Laughton as a blustery captain of industry; Lillian Bond as his chorus girl traveling 'ahem' companion; Melvyn Douglas the cheerful forgotten man; Stuart and her taciturn husband Raymond Massey as Mel's sophisticated, supportive friends. The old dark's residents include: Ernest Thesiger ("Dr. Pretorious again, sir!") as the brother of the bitchy no-nonsense, no-teeth old pious Christian woman Rebecca Fem (Eva Moore), who shouts "No beds! They can't have beds!" Decent old Thesiger lets them park it by the fire anyway, and even busts out his secret stash of gin - much to his pious sister's disapproval. Karloff is a bit underused as the  violent, scarred, mute, horny, and exceedingly drunken butler ("a night like this could set him off!"), he'd have been great as Saul... not that... oops, four o-clock! Break for tea, everyone!  Sorry Gloria,  intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics only... there's a dear.

 THE BLACK RAVEN 
1943 - ***
When I'm having a travel-induced panic attack this is my go-to PRC for nonstop black-and-white storms,  muffled dialogue, and George Zucco's silken voice all serving to make things extra cozy, and it all takes place--as do all the best old dark house films--over one wild-ass crazy 'dark and stormy' night, ending as the sun comes up. Zucco plays a kind of posh Moriarty-ish version of the Dude from Big Liebowski, moving around the waterlogged cardboard sets in his robe and slippers. He's the titular Raven, a retired criminal par excellence who now runs a small inn which he uses as a front for an operation that ferries criminals over the Canadian border. No actual ravens appear in this film, but Glenn Strange is the idiot manservant and Charles "Ming" Middleton is the dour but clueless sheriff. An assortment of would-be border-jumpers check in because the bridge is washed out; a suitcase of embezzled cash changes hands, corpses accrue and if you're me, a dark part of you really responds to the killer's climactic rant against smelly garlic-eating working class bus commuters! Make sure to get the best available edition as there's lots of crappy public domain copies out there where everything is too dark and and half the dialogue is hopelessly muffled. Though if you get a little dark and muffled yourself tonight, you just may not notice... a night like this could set him off! Hmmm?
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Special shout-out to Verdoux! - it seems to contain the same eerie alchemical magick as celluloid itself!

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