"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.

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Sweetheart of the Somnambulist: SVENGALI (1931)

Perhaps its forgotten status is due to the one spliced-up source print being used on public domain DVDs, or it's the stodgy pacing and oversize performances or the highly unusual mixture of comic and dramatic/horror elements, but this Archie Mayo joint from 1931 seems right at home alongside similar early sound horror classics like FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and THE BAT WHISPERS, even though its horror elements come and go.  The plot involves hand-out hungry beard-so-pointy uber-manipulative music teacher Svengali (John Barrymore) discovering a “mouth with a roof like the dome of the Parthenon” in Trilby (Marian Marsh). She's an artist's model who poses at the expressionistic garret of artists Taffy (Lumsden Hare), the Laird (Donald Crisp) and naïve young Billie (Bramwell Fletcher), where Sven's been known to mooch. Finding out his would-be protégé suffers from headaches, he “cures” her using hypnotism, ensnaring her to his will in the process. Billie thinks he'd rather have her suffer the headaches than be cured that way --what a patriarchal little jackass! It's not up to him whether or not Trilby should suffer from headaches or be permitted respite. No sooner has he fallen in love with her than he feels dashed to despair finding Trilby posing in the nude. It's implied she's slept with nearly every artist she posed for. He should be psyched. Virgins suck. No wonder he couldn't handle more than a few scenes in THE MUMMY (1932) before turning into a blubbering mess. He seems to be cast in things to make David Manners appear earthy and robust.

Based on 1894 George L. Dumaurier novel, Trilby, the film contains a subtext of anti-semitism: Barrymore is in his “dirty Jew” makeup, greasepaint-slicked beard and his favorite soothsayer rags; he avoids water and never bathes, thus implying he is "dirty" -to the point Taffy and company feel it necessary to force him, fully clothed, into a bath. They lock him in the room, wherein he finds Paddy or the Laird's clothes and money and then blonde Marian Marsh drops by their pad. He answers the door in Taffy's finest duds, falling for her instantly. Who could resist? Wearing a man's army coat, with epaulets, she looks like she just snuck out of bed with one of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band and stole his jacket, just as Svengali has stolen Taffy's. Their rapport is great because there's more than just hypnotist and subject, lecher and sweet young thing (Marsh was 17 at the time). There's an undercurrent of otherworldly sympathy - the sort Veronica Lake shared with Alan Ladd - or David Manners and Helen Chandler (in The Last Flight, not Dracula)

Marsh (then just 18-years old) radiates modern cool in all her non-trance scenes and her initial appearance, with her sexy demure aura, those epaulets and long straight blonde hair with bangs, makes her seem like the source for all the Marianne Faithfuls, Nicos, and Francoise Hardys of the mod world to come. Barrymore of course brings his vast lifetime-accrued repertoire of comic tics, swaggers, and pauses to his strange role; together they seem light years beyond the wooden and/or one-dimensional characters that surround them. Taffy, the Laird, and Bille live comfortably and pursue art more as a hobby, as the hip thing to do in Paris. But Trilby and Svengali don't have trust funds. They depend on their respective charms, one literal in the sense of spells, the other tied up in those damn cute bangs.

The real show-stealer here, however, is not Barrymore or Marsh, but art director Anton Grot, whose expressionistic sets and impossibly wide doors linger in the mind like a dream. The big horror highlight of the film is all his, an incredible tracking shot that starts with the white glow of Svengali’s eyes and then backs out over the roofs out over a crazy miniature Paris and slowly makes its way across the rooftops and into Trilby’s boudoir. Occurring about halfway through the film, it signifies a drastic dip from the relatively innocuous stuff that has gone on before. Hypnotism is one thing but this is remote viewing, telepathy, a whole new ballgame, and there's not another shot like it anywhere.... even now.

From then on things pick up for this rough and tumble pair. Trilby heads to the Seine to throw herself in as was the style of the time for fallen, broke women, all because of Billie and his prudish rejection. This is the part that gets me madder than anything else. Fuck Billee and his judgmental scowl! Even so, Svengali rescues her and just fakes her Seine jump (the way he didn't with his previous "student") and the next time we see them she's adorned in furs and jewels and he's got a dandy white tux. But she's a zombie so all his seductions end up being just "old Svengali talking to himself again." It's sad, it's the crushing reality at the core of May-December relationships; for the older person, every new day brings a wider gulf as death, impotence, and a lifetime of indulgence roar up like a Forbidden Planet monster to claim you and young bucks skulk around in the periphery of your territory, sizing you up and waiting for their chance to steal yo girl if she's hot, and if she's not, more's the pity. I made it, ma! Top of the Parthenon! But now nowhere to go but up... in smoke.

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There seems to be only one existing print of this film. The best transfer I've seen so far is the old Roan DVD, with deep blacks, and more detail visible in the sets than I saw in my old VHS dupe, but also a fine layer of grain, and lots of film blemishes, lines, acid marks visible throughout, which to me is part of the charm. It's a constant companion in my little go bag of emergency DVDs, all that great Anton Grot expressionism, the unusual tone.

So is Svengali a monster ala Dracula, a sad clown ala Lon Chaney or comic relief ala Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY? There is no answer... only the lovely hiss of the film going through the sprockets and the gorgeous playful innocence--and occasionally lustful knowingness of Marian Marsh adding an ephemeral ache we wouldn't really experience for another actress until maybe... Heather Graham?

(this is expanded from an old review I wrote for Scarlet Street magazine back in 2002)

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"She Rises, the White Moon!" - NIGHT FLIGHT (1933)

"Fog... darkness.... surrounds us in its grip," John Barrymore intones at a row of aviation board trustee silhouettes,  "but no more!" Above him glows a giant topological map of South America. He's sending brave boys like Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery flying over and through and around the Andes, up and down the South American coast from Rio down to Buenos Aires and he's prepared for the inevitable crashes against the mountains in the fog and at night. The mail must go out on time! This is history. This is happening! The trustees wince in fear -- Buenos Aires is fogged-in! And the Andes are dangerous even in clear daylight due to treacherous wind currents. But flights leave on schedule even in ceiling zero!

Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--the radio operator down below him passing notes back and forth--clears the clouds and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But this is no guarantee any pilot in this film is going to survive the night, though if any do, just our luck it will be dopey William Gargan. I don't mean to hate, but he don't deserve Myrna Loy! He leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper while he's off in the storm, worrying the maid and those averse to overly theatrical acting. Her endless sobs invite the same sort of passive sleepiness as the drone of the planes.

Better moments: Pilot Robert Young's slow, careful dismounting from his plane after a flight where he nearly crashed deep in a canyon in the Andes. Bumming a cigarette from the prop man and slyly kissing of the ground while he tests the struts, Young tells him that an "air current... dropped me into a canyon... just missed the rocks. It's as if the mountains were crouching ready to spring at ya.... not a thing moved... almost too quiet.... as if a secret..." and he catches himself, pulling back from conjuring a silent demon incarnation of the Andes; the high strangeness of almost dying in the middle of nowhere without a creature stirring for hundreds of miles and how the landscape itself starts to seem like some giant, sentient ambivalent god (maybe if you've ever driven alone through an empty stretch of Montana or Wyoming while almost out of gas in the dead of night -- flat endless expanse for miles and miles --you too know that fear). "It's too good to be alive... on such a night." Young says, and his gratitude-drenched sardonic laugh feels real and beautiful. He even goes to dinner with Lionel Barrymore, an old codger who can't stop scratching and fining pilots for being even ten minute late in the darkness, fog, and wind. But Young says he's "not half-bad" and you feel some joy because hey, life is precious when death is so daily courted. Maybe that's why they do it and why it makes such a dreamy, fascinating, hypnotic film. Meanwhile the wives and girlfriends pine at home, fretting every unreported hour. And Dr. Irving Pichel waits for the medicine to come by plane - which a child needs or he won't live the night!

Long unseen due to expired author rights, Night Flight (1933) turns out to be quite modern, full of great cool midnight moments like this -- it never sleeps, we only see it wake. And so there's a real curious poetic-noir -- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will -- in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep.

To enhance the drama, there's some worried wives, the most floridly soapy of whom is Helen Hayes, inhabiting big ether-misted greenhouses of monologues, and bugging Barrymore to bring her man home in one piece, as if he can somehow stop the weather or the night. Even if he could, Barrymore refuses to let sentiment get in his way, and to bear out the need for these risky night flights there's a box of medicine for infantile paralysis that has to get to Rio by morning or a child will die! John doesn't even know that package is there, but he does know only a ruthless iron determination can create the impossible dream, and that night flights are already going on in Europe and North America and we have to keep up! Up! UP!

Aside from the beautiful muted poeticism there's a giddily unabashed look towards death that reminds me of The Little Prince, which makes sense since the book was written by aviator-poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry; you can tell its written by someone genuinely in love with the moon, almost painfully so, and with the freedom that comes from living on the lip of death. I am partial though, since films that occur in the middle of the night--that say fuck you to normal sleep schedules--really soothe my ruffled brow, and that for some stretches there's no talking in Night Flight at all, just the tick-tock of clocks and metronomes, the whoosh of turbulence, and weird ethereal vocalizing in amidst the lullaby soundtrack. Even the wives pining at home are helped by the silence deep dark spaces; their shadowy boudoirs are as expanseless as the moon and stars. And as they hover between life and death, love and loss, goodbyes and going back to sleep, a really dreamy, opiate sense of floating coheres.

While packed with MGM stars, ala Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, any sense of Night Flight being an ensemble film is undone by how seldomly two stars share one scene. The pilots are off on their own, up in the clouds, bathed in darkness, fog, and moonlight; their wives are home alone, eating dinner and crying into their champagne; over at the Buenos Aires air station, Barrymores try to hold it all together while gazing up at the big board and browbeating sleepy pilots. In his grim insistence on getting the mail out on time no matter how strongly the board members plead against it, Barrymore resembles Ahab (whom he played in The Sea Beast), whose single-minded pursuit of the white whale is mirrored in Barrymore's ruthless aligning of his dream to the very unassailable momentum of human progress:

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

Occurring over a 24 hour period, and mainly at night, there's a dreamy sense that everyone only imagines each other exists, they're all asleep and the empty night sky is the dream canvas. At home, the silence and dark tendrils of sleep seem to creep around Helen Hayes and gorgeous Myrna Loy like loving arms of night.

Some of the comments around IMDB I think encapsulate what is wrong with the film as far as conventional drama, but for me these same 'flaws' are why the film's so cool and beguilingly strange, so lyrical and even a little sad. Michael Elliot writes:

I think the biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't all that impressive and most of the drama never comes because the story never builds up any emotional connection to any of the people we meet. The Gable character is meant to be the backbone of the drama yet we never get to really meet him and we certainly never get to know him as all of his scenes are in the air and he's given very little dialogue.

But Michael, that's the point! These characters we meet in this period are all isolated, adrift in their little pocket of the world, sleeping in dark art deco rooms or crying in front of the nervous maid, waiting weeks for their husband to drift home for a few days where all he does is sleep and look wistfully out the window at that old devil sky. It's like the modern age is being born before our eyes and the sad faces of old widows and brides as their men take off to sea are frozen in amber honey and spread across die dunkelbrot nacht. 

Kudos to TCM for rescuing this film via assisting in getting the licensing issues between Antoine de Saint Exupéry and MGM solved after 75 years in legal limbo.  It's fitting, I guess that it was unseen--lost in the dark clouds of litigation--for so long. It adds to the mystery, you can feel the lack of eyes that have been laid on this, and while many critics and fans were perhaps expecting too much, I wasn't expecting anything except that it wouldn't measure up to the brilliance of another film about treacherous night flying over the Andes, Hawk's Only Angels Have Wings. And perhaps it's in the comparison wherein the Night Flight takes wing, the Fail Safe to Wings' Dr. Strangelove. In fact the two airlines could very well be connecting to each other along the South American flight plan! They might never meet, either, just a pilot once in awhile comes through, buys some drinks, and takes off again.

And you can find much breadth of vision between the two if you compare the warm camaraderie of Hawk's film, which takes place almost entirely in the cozy bar/saloon/airfield owned by Sig Rumann, with the shadowy isolation of the command center of Night Flight, wherein the only 'fun; moment occurs when Young and Dorothy Burgess drunkenly sing "How Dry I Am" as they drive up to the runway in her convertible. It's a single moment of merriment like a daring final laugh in the face of mortality, vs., say, a similar but post-mortem merriment, "The Peanut Vendor" in Angels (below), or the various macabre toasts, "Hurrah for the next who dies!" in the days of WWI pilots as seen in The Lost Patrol (see my analysis of the WWI anti-war aviation films of the early 30s).  The sun is just coming up, and Young puts his flight suit on over his tuxedo and gives his girl in the convertible a farewell kiss, and off he goes, still drunk off his ass. Even in these early days of commercial cinema pilots went to work drunk! Why not? It's not like there are pedestrians or stop signs in the sky, and you're already taking your life in your hands just going up there. You need courage, by the quart if needed.

But now that planes can fly fly fly up high enough to coast right over the Andes, thanks to pressurized cabins (and even heroes like Denzel get dragged over the coals for cockpit drunkenness) the ways a man can sneer at mortality right into the history books have come few and far between. Only The Hurt Locker comes to mind. That film won an Oscar while Night Flight won only a 75-year shelving and disappointed critical reception when it was finally released. It's not perfect, but perfection can be boring. And the weird disconnect between all the stars' big scenes (like each was shot in a day or two on a soundstage where they didn't have to run into each other) is perfect for the subject matter. In careening through the inky blackness of the night sky instead of coasting through the inky dark dreams of sleep with their Argentine wives, these brave men of the air mail routes are, just like Exupéry's Little Prince, unbound up by the laws of gravity or sleep schedule convention, or the normal routines of human relationships, refusing to choose life over death or home life over the air or vice versa, and if they go down, they go like men, with only bobbing jellyfish parachutes for gravestones.

Some more lines from Moby Dick maybe encapsulate the true kernel of poetic treasure within the seemingly disparate scenes of Night Flight:

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Other MGM star-studded prestige pics like Dinner at Eight may soar high in critical esteem but in its midnight confessional strangeness, Night Flight aces them in the dreamy disconnect department. It's so high up even the gorge is higher than a lot of films critics would put above it. Where conventional airplane dramas tend to just take a spin around the void, throw in some flares and then ride off back to safety, Night Flight plunges straight down into the black abyss, landing lights off, harpoons at the ready, all to get the postcards and insulin to Rio at the scheduled time. Call it crazy, call it suicide, but it's the kind of black art that stirs me up like Ahab's electric oratory. It's no surprise then that I'll defend the lonely black night beauty of this film though it crushes me to the core like gravity's ticking metronome....

And, like flying itself, is often boring.

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Pre-Code Capsules 6: THIS IS THE NIGHT, KISS AND MAKE UP, SHE DONE HIM WRONG, SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE, RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS

THIS IS THE NIGHT
1932 - ***
Lily Damita is a pretty earthy fox in some righteous satin black gowns in this early Lubitsch-esque Paramount gem.  Charlie Ruggles is the travel agent pal of rich Roland Young who's been courting married Thelma Todd; javelin throwing Cary Grant (in his feature debut) is the husband, begging an obvious question, since Young can't possibly top Grant in nearly any department (it should probably be the other way around). He comes home early and sees her in a compromising position, a lie is borne and they all head down to Venice from Paris and porters sniff the girl's luggage as they load it, all to the title tune, ala "Isn't it Romantic" in Love Me Tonight (made the same year). Nothing goes according to plan but the Hollywood Venice recreations are lovely, the night outdoor scenes tinted deep blue are too dark but beautiful. Damita's hair is thick and shaggy; her accent endearing; her spirit fiery; TCM's restoration rich and lovely, in short, this is quintessential pre-code Paramount and though it never rises to greatness, it's still adorable.

PS - This same boilerplate plot would be used again with most of the same actors in another Paramount production, KISS AND MAKE UP and again by Billy Wilder in KISS ME, STUPID.  Kiss kiss and make me up, Stupid! I can't stand watching dweebs like Ray Walston and Roland Young get jealous of the women they hire to pretend to be their wife. It's sleazy and uncouth!

KISS AND MAKE UP
1934 - ***
"Don't you know that ugliness is a disease?!"
The title is witty because Cary Grant is a Parisian plastic surgeon / 'cosmetician' / beauty spa impresario who gets a steady stream of high wallet women through his palatial parlor (Warren Beatty in SHAMPOO is a eunuch by comparison). Devoted and 'decent' secretary Helen Mack fumes in the background. Long tracking shots with direct-to-camera staring / POV action as hotties in various stages of undress and exercise greet our good doctor on his strolls through the girls in progress. The farce angles heat up once the action moves to the Riviera, where Grant's wealthiest patient, Eve (Genevieve Tobin) threatens to get fat "in all the wrong places" unless he sleeps with her, or at least attempts to. In order to preserve his masterful handiwork, Grant makes a tremendous sacrifice: he marries her and then finds her cockblocking him with all his own beauty tips, even sabotaging his career while she debates which outfit to wear.

Horton as the cuckolded husband has a great monologue about the hell of dating a too-beautiful woman, and he's right, it is hell. Helen Mack might change all that though with her modest Maureen O'Sullivan-style straight shooterhood. She and Horton sing a duet: "Corned Beef and Cabbage, I Love You." Man, Horton sure got a lot of hot young girls nearly to the altar before guys like Grant, Cooper or March woke up. Meanwhile Grant also gets a chance to sing--"Love Divided by Two," twice! These songs stick out like sore thumbs... and I like that. Meanwhile, a sheik brings his harem in to see Grant --they go in as old depressed old Muslim women and come out as El Morocco flappers. It's wrong on every level there can possibly be and just more reasons why Paramount is the pre-code studio of choice for the discerning acidemic (Find it in the Cary Grant - Screen Legends Collection DVD).

 SHE DONE HIM WRONG
1933 - ****
Continuing our early Cary Grant Paramounts, this was Mae West's big breakthrough and she's amazing. Even if you're not a fan of turn-of-the-century clothes and manners, this film is so mega rich in robust, beery good cheer and accumulated details you're apt to become one. The big saloon where Mae works, singing "I Wonder Where my Easy Rider's Gone," and "A Man That Takes his Time," is etched so well you can smell the beer-soaked sawdust and cigars. As a missionary next door trying to rehabilitate Mae, Grant lingers in the corners as saloon owner Big Dan rocks West, 24 karat-style, and maybe works a white slavery racket. Meanwhile Chick--a lifer up river at Rikers--is serving time for a crime he committed for Mae's benefit. The big lug bouncer is her pal and encourages Mae to take the train up the river and vist Chick, cuz "bein' up there without the woman what makes you feel that way? It ain't no picnic."

This one has passed the Erich acid test: the black and white air is thick and breathable, the death hangs in the air -- vice and despair are never more than a stone's throw away, and Mae's sense of humor is a warm beacon in the galaxy.

SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE
1933 - ****
The kind of cinema I love can be boiled down to a few images: Kim Novak hypnotizing Jimmy Stewart with her cat in BELL BOOK AND CANDLE; Marion Crane driving with a twisted look on her face in PSYCHO; and now Gregory Ratoff as a Lugosi-as-Svengali-esque White Russian in SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE, standing behind a hypnotic wheel while he programs a young Parisian flower girl into thinking she's Princess Anastasia. True sensationalist pulp, the film's awash in mystical pre-code gimcracks, some reminiscent of expressionist greats like TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE--with the criminal helping the cops, but this time robbing everyone blind in the process. At least he's patriotic: "I never rob a Frenchman." Frank Morgan is the very cool police chief, always acting a little behind the eightball when he's actually three yards in front of it--a good, rare strategy! This is the second awesome 'discovery' I made on TCM starring Gwili Andre, whom I never heard of before ROAR OF THE DRAGON. For just these two films alone, TCM has proved the worth of my entire cable package.

RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS
1932 - **1/2
MGM pulled out the Eisensteinian stops for this exercise. The FAIL SAFE to the Von Sternberg's Scarlet Empress STRANGELOVE, it's a fascinating and detailed look at a huge chunk of Russian history relatively unrepresented in Hollywood - the years preceding the WWI-revolution, with Rasputin caught trying to make it with the sexy young sister of the hypnotized czar. MGM goes all out with moody lighting schemes and Lionel Barrymore knows how to work a lantern in the dark to really amp up the evil lechery (see vid below). But man, how much better it would be if Lionel had switched roles with brother John, who's more or less wasted as the straight man? Was Rasputin too much like Svengali, who John played so ham-finitively the year before at Warners? Meanwhile sister Ethel Barrymore is pretty underused, looking the most hungover, which is saying a lot. And what an awesome and underrated movie SVENGALI was, much better than this, which is a little too talky, too many scenes of the royal court looking with unease at the million-strong peasant protests, And Anastasia is even in it, pre-revolution and before getting lost in the chaos and then turning up dazed in White Russian ex-pat circles all over Paris, as we saw in SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE.

PS - The real life version of John Barrymore's character was still alive in 1932 and successfully sued MGM for defamation, and that's why that "resemblance to living or dead" blurb would pop up even on historical biopics from then on, thanks for teaching me that, Robert Osborne! I like to imagine granddaughter Drew Barrymore as the czsar's little sister, thus completing the family portrait. But for all that, a much better film about the Barrymores, if you can find it, even though no Barrymores are in it, is THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY.

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Momentum Mori: TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

"I never thought I would sink so low as to become an actor."

A zany screwball masterpiece where for once all three of those words are stunningly apt, Howard Hawks' TWENTIETH CENTURY is a must-see regardless of its flaws and PS - it's called that cause it's on the train, the 20th Century Limited, that runs from New York to Chicago; it's not one of those historical odes to a simpler more morally repressive time that make you sleepy with all the trotted-out old frilly clothes and quaint old aunt spinsters. Man I hate period pieces (pre-1920s) but this aint that: this has John Barrymore as more or less himself, born under the sign of Sagittarius ("That's the Archer!!") harassing Carole Lombard, all night long!

I mention the frilly old clothes because TWENTIETH CENTURY is one of the more self-reflexively psychedelic of all the old pre-code comedies, not because of any surreal montages (has Hawks ever used a montage?) but because of the way it explores the nature of persona, of mask-wearing, of "Who am I this Time?"-style thespian identity melt-down. Consider Barrymore's co-star, a young girl named Jane Alice Peters who changed her name to Carole Lombard, here playing a girl named Mildred Plotka who is redubbed Lilly Garland so she can play Mary Jo in Jaffe's latest southern Gothic melodrama. "You're not Lilly Garland anymore," Jaffe coaches his terrified new protege, still under the delusion her name is Milred Plotka. "You're little Mary Joe. The scene is pure purple!"

Director is Howard Hawks working with a Ben Hecht-Charles McArthur script, adapted from Charles Millholand's play, Napoleon of Broadway, of which I profess to know little. I do know something of Hecht, who wrote SCARFACE (1933), a seasoned reporter with a rare ability to stare death and dysfunction straight in the face and laugh, wryly. Hecht liberates the Broadway-centric aspect Millholland's theatrical farce, blowing it out into the void the way Ahab might lob a harpoon at the vast white canvas of Moby Dick.

Death is all around in TWENTIETH CENTURY, as Oscar Jaffe threatens suicide (with sublime melodramatic flair) every time he starts to lose control of his actress or budget and the dialogue is choked with hilarious threats and insults, like "If he were dead and in his grave, I'd throw a rope around his neck and drag him on a Cook's tour!" But like some crazy shaman, Jaffe treads the lip between life and death in split second ham doses; in just one example he's contorted like his old silent version of Mr. Hyde, hands curled in pre-strangling mode -- only to lower them gently at his sides in the manner of a priest when said manager comes in and tells him a hick backer wants to finance his play "from a religious angle." In a split second Barrymore's whole countenance conforms to a benevolent sincerity. It's ham-shamanistic alchemy, and the  great, dark self-reflexive material brings out a full-on dose of Barrymore mania...kind of like what Robin Williams pulls off sporadically as the voice of the genie in ALADDIN or the TERMINATOR 2000 model dying in a molten pool of steel. A tale, ultimately, of a doomed impresario hurtling ever forward into the void, we wouldn't see a better locomotive-character/fearlessly self-depth-plumbing actor combo until Jon Voight's crazed escaped convict in RUNAWAY TRAIN.

It may be hard to believe for modern audiences, but Barrymore played romantic leads in silent films (he was known as the "Great Profile"), but with the coming of sound--though his was a most mellifluous voice (he was stunning onstage, and apparently did the best Hamlet ever)--he was already "washed up," an alcoholic for whom coherence was a matter of some effort and little regard. CENTURY was amongst his post-code last gasps, proving he could definitely be counted on to play himself, a gentlemanly but hopeless drunk with sporadic moments of genius clarity peppered through his UNDER THE VOLCANO-like staring contests with the Lovecraftian blackness of his impending mortality.

He brought plenty of tragedy as the debauched, broke count wooing Greta Garbo in GRAND HOTEL (1932); was a believably mentally ill father returned from the asylum to re-connect with daughter Kate Hepburn in A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932);  brokenhearted that Trilby doesn't love him as a hammy SVENGALI (1931); and like a gut-crushing portrait of me in the early 90s as a suicidal alcoholic movie star dealing with his much younger paramour named Paula in DINNER AT EIGHT (1933 - left). In all these he's alternately brilliant and unfocused, but also very cordial. In DINNER AT EIGHT in particular he's amazing, preparing his suicide (a recurring theme!) with great formality only to emit this pained choked back cry, only for a second or two, before choking it back, as if still acting for some unseen camera and determined to be stoic to the end for whatever ghost cameras happen to be around.

As Oscar Jaffe in TWENTIETH CENTURY however, he is transcendent, as if arising from the grave of EIGHT for one final phoenix expenditure. Imagine an alternative ending for SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), wherein Norma Desmond convinces DeMille to make Salome, bending reality to accommodate her grandiose self-image by, say, playing both herself, Von Stroheim, William Holden, the dead chimp and even Billy Wilder in a frenzied audition, channeling the spirits of every Broadway and Hollywood has-been and vindicating their endless struggles against death, disease, age, and--worst of all--obscurity. Good as that might be, Barrymore is better.

Lastly, there's the coolness of the train itself. Why are train movies so cool? What is it about hurtling through time and space aboard a giant locomotive (hopefully in a first class sleeper) that's so awesome? Something about the soothing rhythm of the rails, a sense of freedom from the illusion of control and permanence, maybe. It makes no sense to be walking around, sleeping and eating dinner in comfort while hurtling through the dark on complete faith that there are tracks ahead... or steep mountainous caverns, tunnels, and other dangers, whipping by at incredible speeds. No sense unless of course you're already hurdling through the cosmos on a spinning rock revolving around a star, then somehow it makes sense, somehow the two sets of motion cancel each other out to create a rare space of perfect stillness.

Then there's the light and shadow aspect of the film, deep shadows Hawks absorbed back in SCARFACE that allows the relatively cramped train sets to appear deeper than they are. At the end, after Jaffe's been shot and lies "dying" in the middle of his compartment the lights are dimmed for perfect mood and suddenly we too are swept up in the drama of it all. With everyone crying over the fallen Jaffe as he reaches into the approaching darkness for one last contract to get Lily to sign, you get the feeling that everyone is moving into a place of perfect freedom. In dramatizing death, we defeat it. With opened eyes you can see right into the frame, like they've conjured a rip in the screen via this self-reflexive celebration of ham acting and the power of pretend death to grant eternal life. The darkness of an empty theater becomes reflected now in every depth-filled shadow. As the stickers the crazy backer spreads around the train read: Repent, for the time is at hand!


It may be the healthiest choice of all to live in a state of constant morbid obsession, keeping reality forever at bay through constant play-acting, a kind of forward momentum mori. Or maybe it's just that TWENTIETH CENTURY was my first post-modern art wake up call, the Joycean slap in the face of aesthetic arrest, the first time the curtain pulled back for me and I realized that not only is all the world a stage and all the men and women in it merely players, but every action and reaction is properly blocked (with chalk) by some unseen guiding hand. Are we our own Oscar Jaffes, coming from a place far in our future, bedeviling our present time/space-anchored coils with outrageous stage directions from a place on high? Get free of your superego's incessant whining, open your mind and grab hold of Barrymore's coattails as he rides into the valley of the shadow of death at a mad gallop!

The tragedy is, don't go looking for anything else as good in the J. Barrymore canon, though you will want to later. Perhaps the only thing close is when Frederic March hams it up as John in THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY, a filmed version of the play based on the Barrymore family which is, irritatingly, unavailable on DVD. True to the reckless juggernaut character of Oscar Jaffe, Barrymore continued for a few years longer than pop culture could bear him. He found temporary shelter as a foil for tiresomely wholesome crooner Rudy Valee on the radio, and played woebegone deans in squeaky clean college football/romance films. Don't bother with those, just value the madness of the film wherein he and Lombard broke the illusory difference between sincerity and manipulation, persona and self, character and living creature, to reveal the dark ghost in the moving machine, the momentum of a huge tube of iron hurling through mountains and over rivers like an unstoppable plummet into the abyss.

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