Pre-Code Capsules IV: PRESTIGE, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN, BLONDE VENUS, OUR BETTERS, BEAST OF THE CITY

PRESTIGE
1931-***
Melvyn Douglas dissolves before our eyes as a French officer put in charge of colonial Vietnam's most sweltering prison camp. Adolphe Zukor is the scheming major with designs on Douglas' new wife, Ann Harding; he probably sent Douglas off to the camp in the first place. Harding's dad says she shouldn't follow Douglas into this jungle hell, but if she does she already has the only thing that can save her there, the 'prestige' of being white. She must never slacken her grip or lose her superior breeding! Never! The natives are a mix of African-American extras, genuine Asians, and ugly white dudes in a lot of make-up, all depicted as little more than untamed animals in comparison with the staunch white man and his wife. The spectre of miscegenation hangs throughout!

A product of the relatively rough-edged RKO-Pathe studio, PRESTIGE has strong expressionist touches and excellent tracking shots: with fire dances, cockfights, guillotines, whips, chains, and general white-on-black brutality, it's like John Ford on bad acid and malaria. Simultaneously racist and anti-colonialist, PRESTIGE should be shown in every college class about Vietnam, as a horrific reminder of the wrongness of colonial rule. As the screwed-over 'hero,' Douglas sweats, collapses, shakes and turns sadistic, chaining up prisoners, guillotining rebel leaders while devolving into a hate-filled drunk. Harding is her usual lovely, wistful self. Her soft voice ever crackling with dignity and emotion, as befits her 'white prestige,' she does what she can, but they won't even let her hang curtains. And the ending is intense, lurid, and nihilistic. Hurrah!

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN
1932- ***
Edmund Lowe takes things a little lighter than PRESTIGE's Melvyn Douglas for this more kid-friendly but still decidedly racist and colonially smug pre-code film.  Chandu (Lowe) is a stage magician who's learned the mystic secrets of the Yogis so now can do wilder rope tricks while saving the world from non-white power mongers like Bela Lugosi, who's kidnapped Chandu's scientist brother-in-law (Henry B. Walthall) to work on a death ray that can destroy zee vorld!

Though one must put up with a shitload of tired comic relief from a drunken limey who bugs his eyes out over Chandu's magic tricks CHANDU's worth watching for the constant bizarre touches and Lugosi's scenery-chewing. Speaking of fiery death rays, check out June Lang (below) in her sheer white gown being auctioned at a slave mart filled with lusty sheiks! Like PRESTIGE, CHANDU considers it a betrayal of white breeding to be so much as pawed by non-white hands, which of course made such pawing a popular threat in pre-code exotica.

BLONDE VENUS

1932 - ***

The first and (wisely) last time Paramount ever gave Marlene Dietrich a kid and husband, Von Sternberg here seems to be lampooning typcal pre-code women's pictures, showing Marlene as a good mom who must go back to her old habits of vamping to pay for husband Herbert Marshall's radium treatments. He taciturnly snaps about his cuckolding benefactor: "I don't know whether to thank him or shoot him... dead!" When you're Herbert Marshall and the guy is Cary Grant, you're better off just thanking him, but Marshall instead labels Marlene an unfit mother. Much taking it on the lam ensues. 

 

As a swinger in retirement, nothing gets me down like watching a layabout like Herbert Marshall use a kid to keep his hotter younger wife imprisoned in his stifling patriarchal caress du condescension. First, we're 'treated' to the early days of how Marshall and Dietrich met--he and his student pals stumble on her and some friends skinny-dipping in a sparkly stream, and they proceed to leer to their heart's content, which right there seems shitty and frat boyish. Next we see the divine M with her sleeves rolled up, bathing little Johnny while Marshall looks on, and, yeesh, you can't wait for her to bail on them both and get back into a smooth nightclub with some folks her own age. So much as I admire it, BLONDE VENUS is my least favorite of Dietrich's films with Von Sternberg. Even the esteemed "Hot Voodoo" sequence loses its edge once she puts on that hideous disco 'fro wig (above). Still, there are more great moments scattered around it than a dozen ordinary films, like the innuendo-driven shot of a fat diner owner puffing his cigar in anticipation of how the now broke Dietrich is going to pay for the meal she just fed to her little Johnny. Du hast mich betrogen, Johnny, in der ersten Stundt, indeed!

OUR BETTERS

1933 - ****

One of my favorite recent TCM discoveries, this has great saucy dialogue and sophisticated ideas on lover-swapping, especially as concerns two ladies of title, the American-born heiress Lady Grayston (Constance Bennett) and her voracious Duchess pal Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) and her constant gigolo, Pepi (Gilbert Roland). A weekend in the country is called for, REGLE DU JEU-style, wherein Grayston hopes to get it on in the poolside bath house with Pepi and placate Minnie with the guest of honor, a fey dance instructor named Earnest, the hardest to get houseguest in the whole of upper crust London. Meanwhile Anita Louise, Alan Mowbray, and others look on, askance.

George Cukor--as few have before or since--really shows how the right gay male at the right time makes any party ten times better and Earnest's last act entry really kicks home the idea of a weekend party's hungover Sunday. Maybe you know the feeling: you've had a great drunken time but now its Sunday and you can barely remember how and when you may have made a fool of yourself the night before. You're anxious to leave before brunch so you can get home to your private bar and video collection, but are stopped on the way out by the late arrival of the very person you'd been hoping would come the night before. This late arrival's lack of connection with last night's damage makes him like an embodiment of fresh starts and forgiveness as he just starts rearranging everyone's mood even as the butler's taking your bag out to the car. So who laughs last? Call Earnest a stereotype, but he's delightful and even gets the priceless closing line: "There's no finer sight in the world than.. two women of title, kissing each other!"

BEAST OF THE CITY 

1932 - ***

"Instead of the glorification of the gangster, we need the glorification of the policeman" explains the scroll from Herbert Hoover that opens BEAST OF THE CITY. Indirectly justifying the existence of police brutality, Hoover's letter finds its poster child in Captain 'Fightin'" Fitzgerald (Walter Huston), the Irish-Catholic representative of pre-Dirty Harry vigilante-mindedness, struggling to keep the streets of his nameless city clean while gangster-glorifying reporters gum up the works. Yes, it's MGM doing what Warners did best, a nose-to-the-pavement gangster picture, and trying to do what no other studio was dumb enough to try (except maybe Columbia), take Hoover seriously and apply bourgeois downward flowing morals to a lowbrow genre. Nothing is more anathema to genuine art than the lionization of working class 'values.' The only person who could ever make working class sentimentality seem genuine--since he damn well drunkenly believed in it--was John Ford. And BEAST director Charles Brabin is no John Ford.

All early gangster pictures were forced by citizen's groups to insert scenes of 'ordinary citizens' protesting newspapers' glorification of the gangster--these scenes were hep people's cues to go the rest room or refill their popcorn-- but in BEAST the citizen's groups have a point about who the real enemy is--the press! The cops endure a regular drubbing from the reporters who in turn influence the politicians, who need the favor of those reporters for campaign PR. Thus, the public's morbid interest in hoodlums itself indirectly breeds corruption in local government! Ladies and gentlemen, writs of habeas corpus are the tool of the mobster even more than Tommy guns! Huston could slap the truth out of 'em in five minutes, but the politicians have taken away his most important tool, his fists!  

Of course one thing that made the gangster film so alluring was its wrongness, and since MGM's idea of glorifying cops is to make them into brutish, cabbage-fed simpletons (scenes include Huston reading the funnies to son Mickey Rooney over pancakes before church and other pious drivel), you no longer get that giddy feeling of wrongness that comes from the best WB pictures, especially since the police brutality isn't directly shown. 

There are perks though: Wallace Ford is good as Figthing Fitz's brother, a cop who doesn't mind taking a drink once in awhile, especially if it's with Jean Harlow (as an unreformed moll in reformed moll clothing who sends Ford down a slippery path), and there's complex pre-code politics involving citizen's groups dictating the concessions corrupt politicians must make towards law and order, something that results in Huston being elected police chief. After his men applaud his first speech, Huston barks: "Never mind those open hands, ball em into fists and use 'em!"

But this approach also illuminates how prohibition creates contempt for the law: when you prosecute victimless crimes (no one is really glad when Fightin' Fitz closes all the bars) the more violent (and foreign) elements of gangland eagerly step in to fill the need. So while Ford gets corrupted by Harlow's smooching and bootleg booze maybe Fighting Fitz is indirectly the one to blame. Meanwhile, there's lots of heroin references, as when Fitz barks: "Take away your guns and your hops and you're yellow crawling maggots."  The liberal media may have enlightened us all to the dehumanizing racism in films like BLONDE VENUS, PRESTIGE, and CHANDU, but when it comes dehumanizing opiate addicts. well, some things just never go out of style.

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KONGO -The ultra lurid 1932 saga of jungle sin!

 If you know in your heart that 1931-1933 was the most lurid era ever of movies, then dear heart, KONGO is your new king!

Here's what I wrote about the film in a post from last time it played TCM, October 2008:

Based on a play that originally ran in 1926 (with the film's same stars, Walter Huston and Virginia Bruce), Kongo is also a remake of the Lon Chaney silent film West of Zanzibar. Silent film devotees might laud Chaney, and/or say Huston is channeling Chaney here, but I'd say it's more the reverse since Huston originated the role in the theater. Plus, if you love Huston as I do, you will know he would never just emulate someone else, or phone it in, or just ham around in a role where he's the center stage tyrant. Lupe Velez is in the Jean Harlow role of good natured floozy who lives at Flint's trading post/bar, where she spreads her charms liberally and gets drunk with Flint's two dimwitted white flunkies. All is "well" until Flint makes his move for revenge... involving pulling a sweet innocent white woman played by Virginia Bruce out of her Cape Town convent and dragging her into the pits of HELL!

Infamous for his tight control of a vast 80 mile section of the Congo, Flint hoards ivory and controls the local tribes via displays of magic tricks all while planning his OLDBOY-style revenge against the guy who carved up his face and left him crippled to die. This plan involves Flint taking custody of his enemy's daughter and putting her through an all girls convent school, only to pull her out on her 18th birthday and throw her into a Zanzibar brothel for a year or two. After she's sufficiently debauched he drags her out to his godforsaken corner of the jungle, gives her "black fever" and strings her along on booze and beatings. Meanwhile, a white doctor (Conrad Nagel) in the throes of addiction to some kind of local opiate root shows up, and Flint tries to get him clean (via leeches!) so he can operate on Flint's back. But Lupe Velez secretly risks having her tongue cut out in order to bring the doc all the root he can handle in exchange for sex. And that's not all! A parade of sadistic horrors are either narrowly escaped from and/or inflicted offstage while Huston roars in sadistic laughter; and what about the native practice of burning women alive on their dead husband's funeral pyre? GOOD GOD! This was made in 1932!? It's almost too hot to handle!

Aint no doubt Billy Bob Thornton be good in the remake

Part of the pleasure of the pre-codes is in trying to fathom just how X-rated and lurid they can be; we're just conditioned from childhood to think of old black and white films as being safe, innocent fun. When we see something like Kongo  it's like having the bottom drop out on all our socialized expectations; like being all prepared for a boring three hour lecture and having the professor start shooting up speed, passing around brandy and reefers, flogging the latecomers, and cutting off the tongues of anyone who talks without raising their hand.

Time to bleed the junky...

Bruce and Huston's performances here are beyond "riveting"-- each feels very "lived in" (thanks probably to their time spent together in the 1926 play version), like they've been dragged through the ringer together. If you've had a chance to catch Huston's wild-eyed cattle patriarch perfection in Criterion's The Furies, you know how ably this man can embody a super-manipulative, authoritative nut job, roaring in laughter when a man tries to shoot him, weilding his whip like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and playing with his weird chimp companion or awarding bottles of brandy as rewards for debased behaviors. Like Brando in Streetcar, you hate him for crushing the spirits of the weak, but love him for his canny bravery and raw animal humor. (as opposed to, for example, Rocco in Key Largo, who wont give his poor alcoholic mistress a drink even after she debases herself by singing -like Brando in THE GODFATHER, that I do not forgive).

For her part, Bruce is a powerhouse who matches Huston in sheer seething rage, and despite all her torments, she still possesses a sense of humor and a grip on sanity and dignity that can't be destroyed; for all her ranting she's much more an Anna Christie than a Broken Blossom.

With typically detailed MGM production design, Kongo's action doesn't play out as much in the jungles (though they are represented) so much as the bar and bedrooms of Huston's compound - and holds just enough stock footage (probably taken from West of Zanzibar) to make it interesting: The only animals you see are crocodiles, snakes and spiders! No boring zebras or antelope herds. More than anything, Kongo is a valuable window into a time when "going native" in the mind of Hollywood and post-Victorian morality meant being a law unto yourself and indulging in whatever capricious and kinky cruelty suited your mood, the vice and evil stockpiled in repression's cobwebbed basement suddenly elevated to the drawing room, and the roof blown off. In addition to the vice, sex, violence, and vengeance, racism abounds: the film sees the native Africans as inferior savages to be manipulated and abused, and once the flames of sadism get going, the white woman is next! We see in pre-code jungle horrors like Kongo that the tortures and degradations of SAW, HOSTEL and their ilk are nothing new. Though this kind of kinkiness was abolished during the bloodless reign of "the code", before 1934 there was still a place for drugs, sex, slavery and sadism... it was called the jungle. Long may it reign, though thank god it's safely in the past... except for YOU, if you tune in today... on TCM!

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To dream some impossible tree sloth: FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)

For a lot of the new kids, 1950s science fiction is stilted, and dull, and perhaps those words could describe FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) if you were expecting constant laser tag and monster attacks, but a hundred viewings later and PLANET, for all its 50's patriarchal solemnity, still kicks ass. It just gets better, and its subtextual critique of its own patriarchal solemnity grows clearer. Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film is uninhibitedly Freudian in a way few science fiction films of the time dared to be. The name itself holds all sorts of clues:

Forbidden! Planet!

And who is doing the forbidding? Merely one of the driest and most patronizing of all patriarchy's authoritative voices, Walter Pigeon as the elusive Dr. Morbius. In elaborate dialogue that runs counter to most natural speaking patterns, Morbius lectures paternally, patiently, Disney-like, at nearly everyone he meets and "cannot be responsible for the well-being" of Commander Leslie Nielsen (POLICE SQUAD!) and his party if they insist on landing at the doctor's private, remote, and most forbidden planet.

Inquiring after a colony set up by the Bolero Fund years before, he's come out to see how the settlers are faring.  It's rare to have a movie start out in deep space, odder still to have earthlings piloting a flying saucer instead of the usual phallic rocket. Odder even still that a 1950s film bears a cold suspicion that private organizations will be colonizing and privatizing outer space, shades of Haliburton! Shades of ALIEN... and more ALIEN shades to come!

For Morbius, it seems, has found a groovy stash of ancient alien technology and doesn't want to share, like the Area 51 crashed saucer-hiders, like an acid dealer during a bad trip who decides "you aint ready" for this shit. "But Morbius, with his artificially expanded intellect, he's ready," notes Commander Nielsen, sarcastically.

Morbius, blind to his own amok tenure'd prof-style egotism, agrees that yes, he is ready: he took the Krell "brain boost" and survived the shock, but was then in a coma for "a day and a night." Having survived, he's in charge (in his boosted mind) and notes, "such portions of the Krell science that I deem suitable and safe, I shall dispense to earth."

Language like "portions" and "dispensing" perks up the ears of any dozing pharmaceutical enthusiast. How many grams in a portion and when will you please dispense it and should I wait an hour after eating and drink plenty of orange juice? The Krell "brain booster" seems not too far from, say, an upstate ayahuasca weekend (the death in this latter case being of the ego, far more draining and terrifying than real physical death). 

Still, both the captain and his own doctor want to try it: "One of us must take that brain boost!" they tell each other. But it's the measurability-fetish that indicates this intelligence-enhancement is all left-brained denial, the butterfly pinned to the wall by science and expected to still be ephemeral. We know this because when the doc sneaks off and takes it the best he can come up with by way of explanation is "you oughta see my new mind, it's up there in lights." Is he speaking in the vernacular for the sake of his captain, or is this Bowery Boys-ish metonym the height of his new Krell-heightened eloquence?

Either way for the doctor at least the brain boost is shown to be a liberator from the curse of intellectual showing-off which makes Morbius's loyalty to his dry Wonderful World of Disney-style of speech be still struggling with patriarchally antiquated egotistical insecurity. Morbius may have "beheld the face of the gorgon and lived," but he's still a squaresville "philologist." Strictly nowhere, man. No grasp of the cosmic joke. That boost was wasted on him!

And yet, there is also in Morbius something of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition. He verbally forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go visit the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but no one listens. Morbius listens. He listens to his daughter swoon about these wondrous creatures called officers. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence  becomes patronizing:  "Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?" It's almost like he's posing as the 'anal father' when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute! Or, of course, the more obvious Prospero.

Coyly innocent, yet hilariously knowing, Anne Francis leavens Morbius' dullness with her lovely legs and sexual openness. If you've seen her in the Honey West TV shows (and you should) you know her voice dropped a smoker's octave not to long after this film was made, and she could make that other broad with the surname West look bashful, so it's great to see her here kind of knowingly sending up the role of an innocent 1950s virgin as she teases the nervous, sexually frustrated and rather prudish Leslie Nielsen with her nudity in an outdoor swimming scene, or asks him "Why don't you kiss me like everybody else does?"

Yet another key element in FORBIDDEN's hard to immediately appreciate weirdness is the soundtrack: the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron are awesome, but totally unmusical. These tones are so random and abstract -- no orchestral swells or suspenseful string -- that when the invisible id monster approaches the tonalities merely swell up slowly and strangely, and merge with the sound of laser engines; when the danger sign is off and Robby and Alta are frolicking the music burbles like a fountain through a flanger.

This atonal bizzaro blend of tonalities both enhances and diffuses all tension as there's no  cliche-entrained expectations; there's no chintz or corn or bassoons or "paranoid" pizzicatos. The result is liberation,  a slowing down of expectations, allowing for an incredibly lyrical, relaxed quality in the home viewing experience. Crazy modern art sculptures and modular furniture enhance the experience of being over somewhere for drinks and gradually sliding from creeped out to enchanted as the whiskey takes effect. The movie is Acidemic in the way it illuminates the fundamental problem of western thinking in science and academia: the complete "blind side" to one's own inner demon, how all positions on issues are usually really only vain attempts to hide one's own warped desire from oneself. Our blind spots are synonymous with our inability to own up to them; the eye fills in gaps in sight and the brain covers its weak spots with camouflage and patriarchal bullying. Arguing with Morbius then becomes like trying to convince a Marxist professor... of anything. 

Adding to the spa-like fun is the leisurely goodwill and Bette Davis-ish sauce of Robby the Robot -- as he is voiced by a man who sounds just like, and is, one of the guys who do the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle -- but is not Paul Frees! His deep manly voice is both familiar, reassuring and completely cool. And yet the drunken cook comic relief has to ask of the robot - "Is it a male or a female" and we're supposed to infer that this cook is horny enough to give it a whirl. In the end--even better--the cook and Robby become drinking buddies, with Robby jovially making our visiting astro-lush a whole mountain of "Rocket Bourbon" pints.  Robby also makes dresses for Alta. When she asks for a long dress to please the prudish captain, he replies "Thick and heavy?" as if he's a wizened old Shakespearean housemaid teasing his beloved charge. Both Ariel and Caliban in one Michelin-esque frame, Robbie is the ultimate in fifth business. 

There's another coded gay character in Oscar Madison (ala his momma's boy in THE LONG HOT SUMMER!) as the brown-nosing chief spark-plugger-inner. The camera makes a point of showing his complete lack of interest in Anne Francis' devastating hemline, instead eagerly but low-voicedly informing the captain that "I borrowed some solanite from your gyro stabilizers." Spock, who cares? There's a chick here! He doesn't even try to fake it the way, say, Sal in MAD MEN used to!

Last bit of weird 'impossible tree sloth' quality I need to mention is the film's odd pedigree: MGM is known for delivering heavy bourgeois morality, but here the studio seems to have tapped into some alternate universe of cool, sexually liberated science fiction. FORBIDDEN PLANET appears suddenly out of nowhere, as if it traveled back in time from 1967, with lovely Star Trek-pastel sets of red leaf plants, alien handwriting and long triangular doors; laser beams that make no sound and shoot little dashes of light that seem ridiculously, comically/ineffectually phallic as they dissolve tigers into wavy Disney lines. It's the driest anti-authoritarian parable we got, and maybe still the sexiest as well. I'll leave you with these kinky words from Morbius: "Young man my daughter is planning a very foolish action and she'll be terribly punished for it." O words, where are thy talons?

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Idiot's Delight (1939)

Who are the idiots?
There must be some word.
I want them all.
I want all the idiots."
--Riffs' leader if "idiots" was substituted for "warriors" (THE WARRIORS, 1979)

And that's just what MGM does here. "Warrior's Delight" would be a much better title, because all the local soldiers at this Alpine border want to do is bomb some stuff, and stranded traveler Burgess Meredith gets all self-righteous about it: "Ten thousand tons of flaming death and none of you want to stop dancing!" Why doesn't someone shut that pacifist up, you ask, mootly, at the screen? Gable and Shearer are trying to play screwball and the soldiers are trying to dance with Gable's devoted dancing blondes, and the pacifist wants to rain on the parade.

The best thing about this play/movie is how transparently it reveals anti-war modernist tracts to be self-defeating. Now that an annoying sanctimonious tub-thumper like Burgess' pacifist has expressed all these humanist sentiments, humanist sentiments are suddenly very uncool. Once you hate the haters, you just switched sides.

Two big MGM stars were Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Both having been MGM top talent since the silent age, Garbo was basically retired by 1939 (though she came back the same year in NINOTCHKA), but Shearer was only slightly the less for wear, a little paunchy maybe, but bravely, brazenly--for endless pages of campy but gleefully nihilistic dialogue--willing to alternately satirize, celebrate and lovingly impersonate Garbo, at times coming off like a drag queen, other times like a legit and loving sociopath who "vonts to be alone." And then, when you're just about ready to press stop, Clark Gable busts loose in his big number, mocking both Fred Astaire and the whole concept of song and dance men in his hilarious "Puttin' on the Ritz." It's worth watching just for his facial expressions, which are pure Groucho Marx impersonating Maurice Chevalier in MONKEY BUSINESS.

Edward Arnold is pretty ballsy as the ruthless arms magnate (Shearer's his arm candy). He explodes in a big burst of anger when she's cynical about his genius at sewing death. "If someone's going to be so petty as to take up arms they deserve to die! I help humanity by getting rid of them!" Or something like that. No argument from me, brother! Probably not from MGM either, with scrappy little Burgess Meredith's hysterical outbursts. The self-appointed "prophet" spreading brotherly love and peace, he's the lynch pin by which to measure and hang the rest of the cast. Gable and Shearer's doomed couple ultimately transcend it all since they're not too terribly afraid of death. That's what true love is, after all, a kind of painful form of living death, in and of itself, like enlightenment, and death is just another station on the endless spinning dial.

In short, there's far worse examples of that Barton Fink feeling than this adapted pacifist play! Simmering with cross purposes, it fairly begs to get a post-modern de-adaptation by the Wooster Group. I can see Kate Valk acing the Garbo by way of Shearer MGM elocution accent, and Willem Da Foe a psychotically chipper Gable, acting out love scenes in front of a screening of some confiscated Third Reich Alpine nature documentary footage and psychedelic bomber shadow explosion lightshows. And the conscience represented by Burgess Meredith in the film could be one of Godard's deadpan commie sermons playing on an old reel-to-reel, before it's finally replaced by the smooth no worries shine of Compakt Disk.

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