"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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Pre-Code Capsules 10: DAMES, BEAUTY AND THE BOSS, THE DARK HORSE, SVENGALI, THE MIND READER

DAMES
1934 - ***
Unlike breezier selections from the Gold Diggers series, Busby's DAMES suffers from a hefty share of cornball humor. As the allegedly fuddy and assuredly duddy Uncle Ezra, Hugh Herbert's schtick--his giddy titter and little hand claps--has not gone quite gold with age. One of those sexophobic millionaires who likes to form abstinence societies, Ezra promises to award his cousin-in-law Guy Kibee ten million dollars as long Guy refrains from tobacco and alcohol and behaves like a kiss-ass toady during Herbert's stay in New York. Kibee's wife, Ezra's cousin, Zasu Pitts seems uptight enough with her spindly walk and wavery voice, but Herbert is way too hiccup-ridden to convince as a reformer. Much shrill bowing and scraping ensues, especially since   the daughter is Ruby Keeler, which means her beau is Dick Powell, and neither is about to bow and scrape to some old corny duddy when there's pettin' in the park to be done.

WC Fields might call this "a double bargain..."

Ezra's also a hypocrite who cries for Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir whenever he gets the hiccups, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's 77% alcohol. And thus vice, as it so often must, takes the long way around, cuts through the pharmacy, and penetrates the guarded heart of the morally uptight.

Small wonder - DAMES came out in 1934, the year real-life versions of Uncle Ezra killed the spirit of louche cinematic insouciance in its cradle, i.e. ending the pre-code era. While Busby undoubtedly detests Ezra, it's no fun watching him suffer nincompoopery; we came for breezy laffs and psychedelic dance numbers not Tea Party-style hysterics. It's too close to home, man. Too relevant.

Meanwhile the fact that Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell take a ferry to Staten Island to sing while they're supposed to be bringing Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir to Uncle Ezra who is hiccuping nonstop and driving Zazu and Horace into a frenzy of anxiety leaves an odd aftertaste in the minds of we sensitive viewers, as does seeing Powell gets ripped off by a sleazy producer. Joan Blondell is the much wiser chorus girl who gets her hooks into Horace for the show's budget while on a train to the city from upstate.



It all comes down to Herbert hiring some goons to trash the show, and though it all ends happily enough Herbert's attitude lingers in the mind. Thank god he gets arrested, takes a shine to Blondell and announces he has officially given his old fashioned moral code the raspberry.

The songs include "Dames" and "I Only Have Eyes for You," which gets real post-modern meta with the opening of the number taking place in the crowd outside the theater and winding up on the subway -- it takes on the feel of an SNL opening sketch with the host running backstage or out onto the Rockefeller Plaza as the cameras follow him out of the studio. It can be very confusing until you remember Busby bows to no one when it comes to blurring the fourth. As always he makes the show within the film is a hundred times more like a movie than the stagy off-stage action. Soon Ruby Keeler is shooting up through a hole in an eye, and there's psychedelic flower leg shows, the fogeys are having a blast guzzling 79% alcohol by volume elixir (that's 158 proof!), profits, publicity, and credits ensue.

BEAUTY AND THE BOSS
1932 - ***1/2
 Warren William is in his lascivious wolf prime as an Austrian business tycoon who avoids the temptation of his secretaries by firing them if they catch his eye... then inviting them to stay for drinks and arranging them as mistresses. In his own way he's a Prince Charming forced by expediency to be his future bride's fairy godmother, doling out pink slip glass slippers and six month salary stipends instead of ball tickets.

Enter a Cinderella to make George Bernard Shaw light up, the button-cute Marian Marsh (Trilby to Barrymore's SVENGALI the same year). A worker of the starving class, she's super efficient, methed-out on hunger and moxy. Showing the same ease and playfulness here that she had with all those long bearded old painters in SVENGALI, Mars gets taken to Paris on business and transforms into a wide-eyed jubilant sprite in a sexy evening dress. David Manners as the brother tries the earnest pretty boy approach to win her; Frederick Kerr ("Here's to the house of Frankenstein!") tries the lovable duffer approach; but only Warren has the louche captain of industry approach this Ayn Randy popinjay craves. She even gleans tips on being sexy from one of Warren's other mistresses.

You can tell by the breathless dialogue pace, continuity and its relatively few sets that BEAUTY AND THE BOSS was once a play - so think Lubitsch in froth and Hecht in pace as well as Shaw in the terms of capitalist philosophy and Brecht in its unflinching narrations of life as a starving poor person who gladly becomes an office machine automaton if it means eating regularly. As in that film, the great Anton Grot did the sets.

Marion Marsh and wolves (Top: Beauty and the Boss / b: Svengali)

SVENGALI
1931 - ***1/2
There's three reasons to see this weird, lilted pre-code: John Barrymore's florid hamming as Svengali; Marian Marsh's sweet face and alabaster beauty as Trilby (cute in an oversize Parisian officer's topcoat;) and the crazy Anton Grot sets. The latter includes super wide doors, a nicely dilapidated Moroccan night club and Parisian rooftop miniatures seen in an extended crane shot from Barrymore's eyes to Trilby's apartment. For all its stodgy slowness it has a special magic, if for no other reason than these three ingredients and the bizarre inconsistency of tone as Svengali clowns around with his Leperillo-ish companion one minute then sends a foolish housewife to her death in the next. Killing makes him hungry apparently so he heads over to do some mooching off Paddy and the Laird, more humor, then stealing Trilby and proclaiming her mouth has a roof like the parthenon! Billee (Bramwell Fletcher) is her earnest, naive young lover, smitten and thinking of marriage until he sees Trilby posing in the nude for Paddy and his painter class brethren, and then runs away in horror. Good riddance! As Barrymore's own Oscar Jaffee might exclaim, "That eliminates the lover!"

Barrymore's great of course, but even for fans he relies an awful lot on his old schtick where he clutches his heart with one hand and extends the other out before him like he's trying to find the light switch in the dark, crying "Ack! Ack!" One wonders what Warren William would have done with such a part! Actually one knows exactly. Directed by the one and only Archie Mayo.

THE DARK HORSE
1932 - **
Allegedly a comedy about a random rube (Guy Kibbee) chosen by some shady power elites to run for New York State governor, DARK HORSE is really more a polemic against impulse marriage. Warren William is the ingenious PR man who sways the hick vote but he's dogged by a vicious ex-wife who hounds him for astronomical alimony. She later tries to seduce Kibbee into a frame-up of the "love nest... with singer" variety. Except she ain't no singer. At Warren's right hand all the while is Frank McHugh noting Kibbee's ready for the KKK when he peeps him in his long johns.

 A lengthy scene at campaign headquarters with the ex-wife having a tantrum and threatening to call the cops if he doesn't cough up four hundred smackers for alimony is kind of not what pre-codes are all about. In real life we have to deal with coughing up dough to people we hate, we don't want to see it in our movies. And Kibbee's not as endearing here as one would expect. He's playing the stupid hick a bit too broadly, flashing his terrible teeth and awesome belly like we didn't notice them the first 12 times. Meanwhile Bette Davis has a pretty thankless role as Williams' girlfriend and right-hand woman. She's still good and spritely... but really --WW scrounging for money to pay a gold digger? It's not right we should have to see that.

 THE MIND READER
1933 - ***
Williams starts out this NIGHTMARE ALLEY-esque fable as a sideshow dentist, but he and his pal Allen Jenkins get a load of a fortune teller on easy street...and Chandra the Magnificent is born! Jenkins is right to be aggrieved when "Chandra" falls for a gorgeous local girl (Constance Cummings), whose mother 'loses' her handbag to Jenkins' nimble picketpocking. Williams marries the daughter, even though she's clearly not too bright since she falls under the spell of a cheap carny hack so easily.

With the spooky subject matter and Williams as a star, THE MIND READER should be better; silly bits of plot waste time when the real story is in the dialogue (rather than the action) which runs counter to the grain of the approaching code. Jenkins makes a good case for why it's better to rule in hell than slowly starve to death selling fuller brushes in a desperate bid for moral character, but Williams is trying to reform! Why again? It's still 1933, after all. Jenkins meanwhile gets a posh chauffeur job and pays the other drivers for addresses of where the husbands are cheating on their wives and passes the dope to Williams, who tells the ladies of the husband's infidelities from his ball, and everyone cleans up but the husbands, who are soon coming in to see Chandra themselves, with murder on their minds.

In the end, Williams turns to drink and reveals his tricks onstage, disillusioning and slur-sobbing uncontrollably to the assembled rubes, "I've broken my home!" Williams playing drunk is like James Dean playing drunk in GIANT--in other words, doubly slurred to the point of true incoherence. And the crowd roars!

While it may sound trite, tasty insights into the lurid lengths men went to get laid in the 1930s are coded in chocolate and sprinkled all over the salty dialogue in THE MIND READER, saving it from being too contrite by the end. When Williams originally says he's going to marry the girl, Jenkins asks, "Legally?" If you wonder what that means in pre-code parlance, it's where--as seen in WAY DOWN EAST (1921)--you dress a friend up as a preacher so your girl thinks you're legally wed, then fuck and run before she gets wise. Just more grisly evidence of the fall-out from archaic 'important' concepts of 'virginity' in brides. There's also prohibition repeal references: Jenkins gets the best last word as his pal heads off to Sing Sing: "Sure is tough to be going away just when beer's coming back." Amen bruddah.

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Pre-Code Capsules 3: THE SECRET 6; SMART WOMAN, TARZAN, BLONDE CRAZY, THE MATCH KING

It was kind of disconcerting to hear Alec Baldwin and David Letterman this week discussing their love of old films, with Dave adding they start getting good only from after 1934. Say whaaa? Dude, Acidemic readers know the best cinematic times are the eras Letterman doesn't like, the post-silent/pre-code era of 1929-1934, before the code crushed womankind and made her wear ridiculous aprons and act in a fakely wholesome way the bourgeois woman's groups felt would be better for the 'masses.' Here's some 90 proof:

THE SECRET 6
1931 - ***
 Wallace Beery get top billing in this protean (for MGM) gangster drama set in gritty downtown Chicago (there's some chilling tracking shots of stockyards). Hard to believe Beery was once a huge box office draw, playing burly ruffians opposite Jackie Cooper or Marie Dressler. Times sure were different! Here he plays a ruffian stockyard worker nicknamed "Slaughterhouse" who leaves that job to become a gangster during prohibition, and eventually runs for mayor on the "pig-sticker" ticket, with the stockyards howling and mooing away behind his podium.

Andre Bazin would approve of this film since it operates on a loose semi-documentary style: lots of interiors packed with extras and activity and a sense of real time via long uninterrupted takes in medium frame. Everyone speaks slowly and carefully for the early sound equipment.  If nothing else it makes for an invaluable record of Chicago in the actual prohibition era. We see: press rooms, stockyards, nightclubs, bottling plants, breweries, money changing hands, receipt tallying, shakedowns, political rallies, checks being written, highjacking, and blackmail. The cast includes Lewis Stone as the bitter Irish rival, Jean Harlow as a 'hired to hook ya' nightclub hatchecker, and Clark Gable a two-timing no good rat finkwhyIoughtta....

SMART WOMAN
1931 - ** 1/2
Thanks to the light touch of director Gregory (MY MAN GODFREY) La Cava this soggy farce is pretty light on its feet, even with all that dead air, early sound hiss and TCM's print all but faded to light grey. Mary Astor stars as the martyrishly modern wife who comes home from a trip abroad to find her husband, Don (Robert Ames) wanting a divorce and planning to marry a blonde gold digger (Noel Francis) with a claw-hooked mother (Gladys Gale). Once again the gender neutral fuddy-duddy-isms of Edward Everett Horton (the pre-code Michael Cera?) attempt to liven the stiltedness. When Horton comes to pick Mary Astor up from the docks in a huge crowd scene there's a brief, horrifying minute when I thought he was the husband Astor's been boasting of to Sir Guy Harrington (John Halliday) during the voyage. Things get better when Don's gold digger hits it off with Sir Guy during a strangely sexy bicycle ride. Dewy, wild-eyed and seductive, she really wakes up the film in this scene, the exercise perhaps kicking in the bootleg backstage hooch   in her system, but the zzz's are never far behind, struggling to catch up like Edward Everett Horton on a girl's bike.

TARZAN, THE APE MAN 
1932 - ***1/2

There's been so many kid-friendly TARZAN films, from the silent era up through Disney's animated version, that it's easy to forget the first two films with Weissmuller were adult, intense, and uber-lurid. TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) gets most of the press, thanks to a nude swimming scene (restored!), wild-ass battles and sexy chemistry between Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in the hottest loincloth of any Jane ever. But if you can get past the dull-ish first half, which is a lot of mismatched rear screen projection of Maureen wandering past ceremonial dances, the original 1932 TARZAN is just as awesome. The big climax--a tribe of pygmies throws Jane and her father into a pit with a flesh-rending ape monster--is still unparalleled in sheer lurid extremity. A more terrifying version of the lollipop guild, the studio used real African American and African dwarfs in the scene, and to see them all decked-out in exotic furs and fangs swarming around the pit, yelling and screaming for blood, man oh man.... it's so splendidly disturbing, and racist and wrong, you may never want to watch it again, after just twenty more times...

BLONDE CRAZY
1931 - ***
A Warner Brothers Cagney film with lots of good-natured slapping, BLONDE CRAZY's got a little something for everyone... to be offended by, sooner or later, but nothing more shocking than seeing James Cagney--wearing lots of white make-up and eye shadow--getting taken for a sucker by Louis Calhern during a trip to the big city.  Wait... what? Louis Calhern!!!??

Noel Francis

Cagney starts out a bus boy and hooks up with Joan Blondell to implement his scrapbook full of scams. She's the cheese, he's the mousetrap, get me? Guy Kibbee's the first sucker they trim, his roll gets them to 'a big city' and all is well... at first. Cagney in these scenes is already super-modern and hip and making fun of the crisp early sound way other actors talk (Alec Baldwin did an impression of it on the aforementioned Letterman appearance) but I can't stand seeing him get took by the dude who'd later lose a war to Groucho Marx in DUCK SOUP (1933). Am I right, bud? Would you want to see John Wayne get his ass kicked by Franklin Pangborn? And speak of the devil, Noel Francis (above) is as dewy and weird-eyed in her few scenes as Calhern's chippy as she was for that hot bike scene in SMART WOMAN. More please! There's also an impossibly young Ray Milland as a wall street swine who sends Blondell tomes of love poetry (Cagney reads some Browning in amusing style) and look fast for a 'good luck' swastika key chain.

THE MATCH KING
1932 - ***
Thanks to TCM we've had the chance to discover a lot of pre-code stars that fell by the wayside over the years. Perhaps it's because being in the shadows helped stave off the draining of endless imitation. Warren William is one such fella, here as droll and pleasingly devilish as a no-good embezzler can be in a loosely biographical portrait of Ivar Kreuger, the guy who cornered the market on matches in the 20s via counterfeit bonds and inventing the idea of 'three on a match' to help sell more boxes. There's plenty of vicarious thrills in watching the swift rise and sudden crashing fall of William's smooth talker and his literal house of matchsticks. Incidentally, David Letterman mentioned this movie in that discussion with Alec Baldwin this week, though Baldwin hadn't heard of it. Baldwin, you'd do well to absorb a little Warren in your already scintillating rogue repertoire! He's just your type.

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