Medusae of Asia: THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941), RAIN (1932)

Pre-code neo-Jacobean Tragedy's final venomous wheeze, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) sinks its cobra fangs deep into the mongoose of censorship, self-abasement, and social taboo, to levels only Josef Von Sternberg dared go, Josef, wrangler of Marlene! Bunuel and Chaney but coarse brutes by comparison. Exploring an array of sins that the Breen Office demanded over 30 script revisions to obscure, it stars Dietrich's old 'sewing circle' pal, Ona Munsen (1) as a dragon lady named Mother  Gin-Sling, owner and operator of a Shanghai casino structured like the rings of Dante's Inferno: as the wheel spins and a Russian threatens to kill himself there's also gigolo-ing, gold-digging, murder, drug addiction, alcohol, white slavery, elaborate revenge, smoking, and Super Masochist Sublimation Power, though by then that power was reduced in wattage. Based on a play by John Colton, GESTURE bid 1941 America pretend Shanghai wasn't then locked in a death struggle with the Japanese. What are you going to do? Pearl Harbor was drawing near.

We've always needed a slinky broad for these Pacific fantasias to sizzle properly: TERRY AND THE PIRATES would be nowhere without the Dragon Lady; RAIN would be a mere drizzle without Joan Crawford; KONGO (1932) would be pure misery without Lupe Velez; RED DUST (1932) lost without Jean Harlow; MANDALAY (1934) an empty shell without Kay Francis shimmering as Spot White; THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1934) a lot of bluster and skulking without the celestial and unworthy daughter Fah Lo Suee (Myrna Loy) and Josef von's whole oeuvre just chiaroscuro exotica if not for the enigmatic Marlene. THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) would have been perfect for her. She was even the right age. Where was she? Munson has charm, and is commanding and regal, but so was Helen Gahagan in the 1935 SHE.


Munson, her headgear wild enough to play an 'Oriental' Medusa in Flo Ziegfeld's Mythology Revue, is certainly commanding but can't infuse a single glance or wave with enigmatic playfulness and subversive innuendo, or radiate hypnotized cobra calm like Dietrich could. Gale Sondergaard's relaxed but stiff-upper-back regality instead infuses her aura. Munson has great things going, like a cokehead's way of caging her formal dialogue with nasally enhanced sonorous jubilance and no accent whatsoever. She's great in all respects but, in the end, her headgear is what we remember no matter how sublimely her balance of camp and dramaturgy. There's a splash of Norma Desmond in there, too... claws bared.

Munson split our mortal plane in '55 with a note that read "This is the only way I know to be free again...Please don't follow me." Classic Munson.

The other players, meanwhile, seethe and stagger about the casino's few sets but never quite find a frequency they can all share: Gene Tierney pouts and sulks so much Poppy, an obnoxious daddy's girl gone wild, we wonder why Victor Mature (as Mother's perennially fezzed gigolo-pimp-procurer, Dr. Omar) is so interested. Seducing her with Song of Solomon quotes and lines like: "My mother was half-French and the other half was lost in the dust of time, related to all the earth, and nothing that's human is foreign to me," he's actually a perfect match. Then there's Walter Huston as a tycoon buying up her block and planning to evict her (at least it has nothing to do with morals). Maria Ouspenskaya hovers below decks as Mother's pint-sized Mongolian assistant; Eric Blore provides a welcome breeze as the casino's accountant and political connection forger; Mike Mazurki is a 'coolie' rickshaw spy (there's no real Chinese stars in the film, as far as I could see); Michael Dalmatoff the Russian expat bartender; Ivan Lebedeff about to blow his own brains out as an unlucky Russian expat gambler, and of course, looming on the horizon... Walter Huston. With eyes calmly alight, Mother Gin-Sling encourages our confidence that she has a plan, but it all depends on fate's fickle finger dialing her New Years dinner party into a third act denouement of MADAME BUTTERFLY self-immolation with Huston as the prize goose. Bad drugs, drink, gambling, and sex only worsen Poppy's abrasive moods make up the difference. Tierney here is more than a bit like Tippi Hedren in parts of MARNIE, i.e. so busy trying to act bratty and deranged they forget to still be charming (Marlene never forgot!)

It's not up to his Dietrich collaborations at Paramount, but part of this could be the relative blurriness of the 'they did what they could' restoration. Part is also the attempt to have myriad threads instead of focusing on one character, the way Marlene was the focus in his earlier work. In those we had a very vivid feeling of the street or train in relation to the interiors, to each room. We entered Dietrich's domiciles via slow moving crane shots through rainy exterior street windows. In GESTURE, we have to take Von Sternberg's word for it that the bar and upstairs of the multi-tiered casino are even in the same building. There are some good crowded Shanghai street scenes early on and towards the end, during the big Chinese New Year celebration, shot in the same writhing cacophony of Chinese hustle and bustle (lots of rickshaws) that made the opening of SHANGHAI EXPRESS so effective, but again, they never feel connected to the casino nor the casino connected to its adjacent rooms and bars. Von Sternberg's ornate mise en scene surrounds Munson in exotic murals. Turns out they painted by Keye Luke, who--though Chinese--doesn't appear. The not-adding up things keep adding up. But Tierney is beautiful enough that disinterest seems a small price to pay. Even as you come to hate her character, you just know you'd jump off a bridge if she asked you to.

That said, slowness and pointless bits of business are the side effects of JVS's style--where every character is always moving towards or away from sex or death.  Here, unlike many of his later films there's no feeling this was ever taken out of Von Sternberg's fussy hands by anxious producers (i.e. Howard Hughes with the leaden MACAO or the genuinely sexy JET PILOT).

As per JVS' usual tricks, there's very few daytime exterior shots and only one bit of Shnaghai stock footage letting us know that it might seem like midnight in the casino ("Never Closes" is their motto) but it's actually a weekday morning. I love the idea of coming out of what seems like only a few hours of nightclubbing at a busy casino, drinks and decadence in full flower, to find the sun is up and fresh-scrubbed bright-eyed people are going to work etc. It brings back a lot of memories.

That would seem to conclude the tour, so what of the antagonist? What of the... Huston?

Maybe it's his clipped delivery and rigid military posture, dart-like rapid sudden movements, the way he kind of leans back as if ready to hurl himself across a table at his quarry as his vowels shorten, but Huston always excelled as inflexible moralist captains of industry, those never hip to their own flaws. He was a cop fond of beating the truth out of suspects in BEAST OF THE CITY, a tough-ass warden in CRIMINAL CODE, a King Lear-ish rancher in THE FURIES, and he bullied and cajoled threatened witnesses to testify. The rafters shook at his inflexible (but blind to its own prejudice) moral indignation. He was like the Old Testament of male authority, just as the New would become embodied by Spencer Tracy. I know it's a side note, but Tracy never worked with Howard Hawks, and I can see why: Hawks had a code, and it had nothing whatever to do with the following the letter of the law. Tracy's characters were law fetishists, treating the strict rules of conduct like Jimmy Stewart treats his flag. At his worst, Huston would use his moral weight to ruthlessly intimidate tribes of Congolese with juju magic tricks; Spencer might do similar things, but would think he was the good guy doing it, because he'd have a bible. He would do with a dopey smirk meant to win a Hepburn heart. Huston had no interest in being seen as good or attractive, only in achieving his grand design. Surely his son John drew on that persona for his own quintessential titan of industry in CHINATOWN.

So it's this paragon who goes up against Mother Gin-Sling. At a climactic "Chinee New Year" she tells him the lurid portrait of her grim early life feigning happiness after being abducted and sold to a 'pleasure boat,' and having pebbles sewn into the bottoms of her feet after she tried to run away (and these grim details survived the 30 rewrites!) And Mother Gin Sling even gives a New Years' eve floorshow out in the street in front of the casino, of girls being hauled up in cages as a reminder of the old white slave auctions. And that survived the rewrites too!

Chinese New Year, celebrating five thousand years of white slavery.

For Huston, it turns out, all this slavery and oppression hits close to home, especially as Poppy's his daughter and she's in debt to the casino, hooked on gambling, drinking, and presumably opium, and it's up to dad to pay her tab, like he's Colonel Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP. And Huston's tycoon is his own worst enemy, as doomed to confront his past crimes the general in UGETSU. Alas, UGETSU this ain't, and the total of its parts adds up to a shocking denouement that leads inevitably to tragedy. Walter Huston always realizes sooner or later he's his own worst enemy, and that's a sad, crazy day. He's like the censor finally realizing he's cutting off his own genitals every time he cuts a film. He forgot he had a whole other world below his own belt and when he saw that thing rising up from the bedsheet depths in the morning he thought it was a cobra.

RAIN (1931) finds Huston trying to do the reverse, to get a very young Joan Crawford out of tropical prostitution but you know how it is. Once she learns he's arranged to haul her back from the tropics to stand trial (these expat prostitutes are always on the lam after murdering either a violent john or pimp, but it was in self-defense!) she gets religion and he finds her, finally, attractive. Turns out he re-baptizes slutty Christians only so he can corrupt them anew.

There's a great scene in RAIN I was lucky enough to see by chance while tripping one afternoon, wherein Joan's angry as hell, trying to escape up a set of stairs while he stands at the bottom, reciting the lord's prayer over and over again while she screams and yells and then starts moaning and sobbing in despair at the thought of going back to the states and certain execution. I never liked Joan until I saw this scene, on shrooms, watching as she went slowly in perfect modulation during the long single take, moving expertly from demanding him to leave her alone, to begging for mercy, to pleading for her life, to sobbing in despair, to finally joining him in his prayer. Somewhere along the line their two voices entwine, entrain, and she starts reciting the prayer too, stands up, super calm, walks down the stairs, ready to go; in her darkest hour, she finds the lord. Maybe it was the mushrooms that afternoon but I've felt ever since that RAIN is a horror movie. With her thick make-up, Crawford's Sadie Thomson has a ghoulish obscene demeanor; Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE or Irving Pichel in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER could borrow her lipstick; and Huston is her Van Helsing, but thanks to being swamped into a remote midway station on his way to the interior to convert missionaries, he takes it as his duty to convert her back from vampirism, only to turn bloodsucker himself. Naturally because of the code (though it was still weak in '32) there has to be a redemption possible in the form of a Marine who just wants to marry her and lead her into a bright light of avoidance, ala Dorothy Mackaill in DOORWAY TO HELL.

As Marlene said in MOROCCO, "there's a Foreign Legion of women, too."

Kongo (1932)

But that's the thing, if there's an entrainment of the lord, there's an entrainment of the jungle, too. And it entrains Huston's Henry Davidson just as the lord's doctrine entrains Sadie. Huston who clearly doesn't have her interest at heart, but is just a sadist, adhering to the letter of the law out of a kind of continual self-denial, the way senators campaign against gay rights and then go have a men's room tryst.

Just how many movies had women of adventure expatriating in some remote tropical outpost, either servicing the local sailors, or just drinking with the other refugees? Oh, countless. But it all stemmed from two things:

1. Miscegenation -  It's important to remember that censors weren't just patriarchal prudes, they were racist: pre-code never meant no censorship, just less 'clear' rules of conduct: sex outside wedlock between two white people could occur if the woman was a divorcee or widow, or if it occurred in the land of savages--Africa, the tropics, Asia-- where they're more or less the only 'civilized' people around, and the jungle entrainment rules; usually the only thing remotely like a white authority figure is a drunk or junkie priest or doctor or ship's captain under some sort of fever or addiction, to further break down the veneer of modern civilization so that morality can't help but buckle. MGM was the worst, in films like RED DUST: being around 'the coolies' with only a small number of white people around, well the censors were so nervous about miscegenation breaking out that the white-on-white adultery and call girl-trysting was overlooked. A trick still used on racist parents by manipulative white high school girls to this day!

2. Maugham -Just advertising your film as about some hottie who thinks she killed a man taking it on the lam to the tropics where she hooks up with a junkie doctor means you want the public to associate it W. Somerset Maugham, the E.L. James of the 30s. Any film that wanted to have 'steam' just cherry picked plot points from his RAIN, SEVENTH VEIL, and THE LETTER.

2. Prohibition - Only America could be crazy enough to try to enforce such a law, so voyaging abroad where liquor didn't taste like Turpentine became double sexy. Also in the Post-WWI economy, the dollar went farther than most, so one could live the high life in Europe on a pittance, and the kingly life in the tropics. It was on everyone's mind. .

3. Exotica - There would still be flak from minority groups, but the Great War had forced us to get social; we came back interested in the art and cultures, keeping and even further weirding up the aesthetics, creating a picture of the 'other' as kinky, lurid, savage, totally class-conscious, but with exquisite and bizarre taste.

And the Brits always loved Egypt.

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"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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John Monk Saunders' Flying Death Drive: THE LAST FLIGHT, EAGLE AND THE HAWK, ACE OF ACES, DAWN PATROL (vs. DRACULA)

If you want to scoop deep into the real murky moral ambiguity of war, the heart of the heart of darkness, take to the air and hunt the pre-code 1930s WWI flying ace movies written by John Monk Saunders, where dogfights and aerial maneuvers are performed in the era's rickety biplanes by day and mortifying guilt and despair is drunk away with rousing camaraderie by night. Footage recycled from the silent film Wings (1927- based on Saunders' book) depicts the war almost metatexutally, disconnecting the violence via quasi-kabuki anonymity as pilots are shot at through rear projection, adding to a sense of depersonalized, out-of-time aloneness 'up there' in the deadly skies. Since all the pilots wear the same evil-looking goggles it becomes important to cast actors with differing jaw lines, leading to some pretty strange specimens and accentuating the anonymity of death. The same Red Baron-type hun shoots and dies and salutes either way, in the same footage, in almost every one of these films but that only serves to unite them, and together they make a startling picture of a moment in time in between the advent of sound and the arrival of Hitler, Joseph Breen, and Hirohito crushed out Hollywood's anti-war sentiment.

It's hard to imagine there was ever such a time, when it was possible to think no overseas war could ever be worth fighting, before Hitler made such thinking forever naive. But there was, and in the era of 1930-34 the conscience-stricken flying ace films of Saunders' were more than up-to-the-minute reflections of the forgotten man's deep disillusionment over coming home to the Depression, or providers of flying ace thrills. They also eyeballed the sketchy border between war as a boy's holiday from the Ten Commandments and the post-war (or even post-battle) isolationist post-traumatic stress. Looking back from our 21st century high, wherein hindsight has been proven our involvement in WWII a worthwhile endeavor, Saunders' 1930-33 films haunt the landscape like a dark shadow. No wonder they were seldom re-released and are now available only on Warner's Archive or Amazon downloads.

Saunders and wife, Fay Wray

A professional aviator and trainer of WWI fighter pilots,  Saunders was a good-looking, intelligent, heavy-drinking depressive genius. His published stories of WWI aerial combat and heavy drinking provided perfect pre-code script material. He became a hot commodity in hard-drinking Hollywood and married Fay Wray! Was he flying the bi-plane that got Kong? Was it Saunders killed the beast? No, 'twas beauty, but Saunders' powerful, alcoholic thousand yard stare can't be dismissed from the metaphor, as we shall see...

As you know, I take a strong stance on the importance of death and drugs / alcohol abuse in being able to face the existential horror of the void and, more importantly, stay sane enough to tell the tale while remaining poetic enough to make it flow like wine to the eye drums. Death opens the door to the screaming Lovecraftian horror of life, the terrifying tentacled devourer in the blackness waiting right outside your bubble of delusion, and the booze allows you to stare right into its gleaming, rotten yellow eye, and wink like a half-digested Jon Voight. Without booze, this grim confrontation which all sensitive poet hunters and fisherman must make every time they look into the terrified, dying eye of their prey, would be unendurable. Where would Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, or John Monk Saunders be without the booze OR the horror, the 'blue devil', the 'spook' that comes with war or delirium tremens? Like W.C. Fields keeping serpents handy to warrant his use of 'snake bite remedy,' without these visionaries would not our generation, too, be lost, falling in a downward spiral like Major Kong? You may argue that it is in such a spiral, and you'd be right, but man have we learned how to plummet!

Saunders' first filmed story was WINGS (above) in 1927. A turning point in aerial combat war realism onscreen, Saunders provided a probably accurate recording of the bloody birth of the modern mechanical man and the nerves of steel that allowed him to soar into machine gun fire at 3,000 feet, and the way the alcohol and mademoiselles of gay Paris provided a welcoming bubble in which to crash. Audiences loved the aerial stunt photography, and thanks to Saunders they also caught a whiff of the full-on madness of cartoon champagne bubbles and Clara Bow's imitation of an uptight nurse's imitation of a vampiric courtesan.

But it is later, in the sound era, in a disturbing, brilliant WWI quadrilogy of pre-code sound films, where Saunders finds his true naked lunch 'how to keep your cool even when the walls are trying to eat you' calling.

The early 30s pre-code years were themselves naturally existential: Remember my Forgotten Man?  He hurled his lunch across the land? Remember how a totally ineffectual censorship board made it easy to tell the truth about the pre-Social Security and unemployment insurance-era's widespread poverty, horror, disillusionment, sexual double standards, war-related post-traumatic stress, and the seething resentment over prohibition?

The time had come to reflect the horror of the previous war, as isolationists were already looking anxiously towards Hitler's rise and Japan's aggression against China. Saunders was the right man for the job, giving us a little aerial action in the process via: THE DAWN PATROL (1930), THE LAST FLIGHT (1931), and THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933) and ACE OF ACES (1933). Let's examine!

THE DAWN PATROL (1930)
Directed by Howard Hawks (Warner Bros.)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Neil Hamilton

In the first scene of this early Howard Hawks film, Commander Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon) rants on and on about the cold idiocy up the chain of command, but from then on, the film gets better, and was even remade by Edmund Goulding in 1938 as a vehicle for Errol Flynn and David Niven. Basil Rathbone took Hamilton's role and his pointed fey affect made the anti-idiocy rants better but there's a brooding soulfulness missing from Flynn that's all over the joint with Richard Barthelmess. As with Hawks' best films, there's a querencia, an enclosed shelter within which our brave group waits, drinks, smokes, sings, and passes out.  And like all the best Hawks, we're made aware of every drink poured and cigarette rolled and match lit, and no one leaves a drink behind half-full. We come to know the layout of the place very well, like a second home. The bunks are upstairs, the bar is downstairs, and the CO's office opens out onto the bar, making it easy to hear your orders, get drunk, and then carry the lightweights up to bed all without going outside in the rain or having to deal with women.

I was a big fan of the remake (here) and longed to see this one, and it's available at last via WB Archives. It turns out Goulding's film borrowed most of the dogfights, and as such should take a knee and heed the older film's wisdom. Richard Barthelmess as Capt. Courtney isn't quite as dashing as Flynn, but he's more believable, more method. When he gets out of his plane after a mission his legs wobble, like mine after mowing the grass. He's far less boisterous than Errol Flynn, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is less jolly but more authentically inside a war than David Niven. Sometimes it may be hard to understand why Barthelmess was considered such a star, he's so stocky and short and thin-lipped, but there's a lot of acting going on behind his lidded Peter Lorre eyes, even while the rest of him stays posed like a wax statue. But all his statue posture is worth savoring because of the flickering warm light in those eyes when he sees Scotty come back alive (with bottles) that made me almost choke up, whereas in the remake the same scene is merely jubilant and exhilarating.

All in all and remake aside, Hawks' 1930 version is the CITIZEN KANE of WWI ace pics, and balances the anti-war sentiment with a more stoic existential acceptance of duty, which is where it comes in as a great acid film, since part of tripping involves keeping your cool and shrugging it off even when the walls are melting and the handrails down the stairs are like two pincers and the steps the tongue of some throbbing scarab beetle, and everyone you see seems to be bleeding even when they're not and you can see the blood pulsing through their translucent skin. Oh my god, so much blood almost always about to spill. Maybe it's not the same as 'really' being in a war, but then again, maybe only schizophrenics, war vets, and survivors of 12 hour-long nightmare STP trips truly understand one another. BANG!

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After the credits, sometime, the war ends and the surviving pilots go in various directions, usually after some opening scenes borrowed from WINGS and DAWN PATROL. Some pilots go home to usher in the early days of commercial flight, ala AIR HOSTESS (1933) and CEILING ZERO (1936). Some go into barnstorming. If they're too shot-up or broken and can't even fly a safe boring passenger route (which according to one ex-barnstormer is "like being a trolley conductor") they can try air mail routes in South America, over the Andes ala NIGHT FLIGHT (1933, my appreciation here) or ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939). If they're too damaged even for that, there's always staying in prohibition-free Paris and drinking themselves into sweet oblivion, as with: 

THE LAST FLIGHT (1931)
Director: Williem Dieterle (for Warners)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Helen Chandler, David Manners

After opening on a wordless montage of war footage that stretches from random explosions and WWI shots of tanks, exploding boats, the overhead bomb money shot from DAWN PATROL, and aerial footage from WINGS, there is, spliced in, anonymous goggled close-ups showing the fiery crash that has allowed pilot Cary (Barthlemess) and his rear gunner Shep (David Manners) to be too fucked up to fly again. They are, as their doctor describes them as they're discharged after the war, "heading out to face life, when all their whole training was in preparation for death." It was the preparation for death that had been, of course, Saunder's job during the war as a flight trainer. "I'm afraid they're like projectiles, shaped for war. Hurled at the enemy, they described a beautiful high-arching trajectory, and now they've fallen back to earth... spent... cooled off... useless." The doctor keeps going, noting that they fell 600 feet, "like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement - it shattered both of them." On the plus side it legitimizes their desire to live and die awash in a sea of boozy screwball gibber-gabber.

Saunders had clearly been reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald before writing this and it could have become a cult classic if directed by a rapidfire overlapping dialogue and smoking and drinking wiz like Hawks, or a good dialogue director like George Cukor or someone with a dark-streaked screwball comedic humanism like Leo McCarey, or even Norman Z. McLeod. But, in the hands of once-impoverished German immigrant Willam Dieterle, the champagne bubble dialogue sinks down and strains against the wind, revealing only a prefunctory understanding of boozy tuxedo modernism and the natural flow of spoken English. Everyone over enunciates, waiting for the other to finish talking, allowing a long pause between each speaker, like a tableful of drunks never would in real life. The result feels like a 1929 Paramount Marx Brothers movie directed by a drunken Todd Browning, with the cast of DRACULA (1931) all playing Groucho and Geoffrey from UNDER THE VOLCANO at the same time though without a slur. Which sounds great, by the way, and almost is 

Another unsolvable problem with THE LAST FLIGHT is that, aside from Barthelmess and Manners, the crew of fellow drunk aviators aren't very hip. It's really only Richard Barthelmess and David Manners that Nikki likes, and we like. The others are all fairly unexceptional, especially the creepy masher they can never get rid of Frink (Walter Byron, whose creepy lingering stops most of the zaniness from being really fun; then again, "who cares?" is their motto) and the loud Texan played by Johnny Mack Brown, who tackles horses and rocks the flattest of twangs. There's also Elliot Nugent (who'd go on to direct the awesome 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY) as Francis, the shot-up, dour marksman who ends up spending most of the time eyeballing Frink, though he waits until almost the end to finally do us all a favor and shoot him. Luckily for us there's a weird poetry in the casting of Helen Chandler as Nikki and David Manners, who seem even more ESP-whisp-thereal than they did in the same year's DRACULA (1931). As Barthelmess's tippling pal and ex-gunner, Manners' dreamy poeticism finds a great natural outlet--we believe he's forgotten what month it is due to round-the-clock drinking for weeks-- and when he dies shot in a cab and proclaims "in a way this is may be the best thing that ever happened to me" I, at least, believe him. And it's understandable that both he and Nikki would be so drawn to the quiet strength of Barthelmess' scarred pilot: he's rooted, planted, and they seem to float when standing still, their eyes following wisps around the room only the two of them can see, making them like a taller, drunker version of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

And the similarities of DRACULA and FLIGHT don't end there: Chandler's character Nikki is much more like the Mina in Stoker's novel of DRACULA than her Mina was in Todd Browning's adaptation. She might be reading crazy gonzo lines but she's delivering them like she's about to cry or relate her strange dream of a dark figure coming out of the mist to a shrink. In the novel she becomes a kind of revered icon-mascot for Van Helsing, Harker, Dr. Seward and Lucy's three grief-stricken suitors, including a Texan. If Walter Byron's sleazy masher was Dracula, it would all be set, but in a way, the war already had that role, making it really like Dracula part 2, wherein Manners, Chandler, Van Barthelmess and co. all try to drink away the awful memories of, and wounds from, their big climactic staking. In real life, Chandler would later experience kinship with monsters horrified by their lack of recognizable mirror reflection, as Wiki notes that "she ironically fell victim to alcoholism later in life and was badly disfigured in a fire caused by falling asleep while smoking." And of course vampirism is a great metaphor for dependence on alcohol, morphine, or the horrors of war ("the tic doesn't work when he's tight, so he stays tight"), the keys that open the lock of great literature and art. If only I was there, I could have helped them ditch Frink sooner and man we'd have a time - they drink like I used to, and have the same infallible sense of surrealist absurdity and a hatred of mashers. Brushing aside Frink's dour lechery, Mick La Salle notes in his essential 2002 book, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (where I first learned about Saunders' films, so this post owes La Salle a heavy debt):

"These men are past an interest in sex, too smashed up inside for small human things to make much difference. Their playful mooning over [Nikki's] legs, feet, and back is ghostly, as if evoking a dim memory when such things were to live and die for...."

"Nikki isn't a woman of the world, but an airy figure with a child's honesty and an adult's sadness, a female version of the men. (Chandler, whose own hopeless alcoholism would lead to tragedy, couldn't help but bring a special truth to the role.)" (p. 100)

La Salle's take on DRACULA in the preceding chapter seems welded to these Saunders' films: "With Dracula, American cinema stumbled on a way of depicting life on the absolute edge, one step from the abyss." (p. 80)

The presence of Barthelmess makes it also a sequel to THE DAWN PATROL, and a perfect distillation of trying to drink away one's broken watch status via the icy abstraction of martinis and a beautiful, hard-drinking girl (a Zelda). 

Throughout the film the idea of being 'a big success' is played with, and the competition to be the last one in the room with Nikki is part of that, and also what drives Francis to finally off Frink, requiring Francis's subsequent disappearance into the Lisbon shadows. "This is the first time he's looked truly happy," notes Nikki as she watches Frances disappear. Manners has also been (accidentally) shot in the fracas, and a sense of VERTIGO / Purloined letter circular death drive-aliciousness ensues for as he slowly dies in the back of a cab, Shep reports feeling like he's falling, and falling... like he and Cary did in the opening scene over the skies and screens of France. "He was ready to die once," he notes, "and he was ready to die again."

Here it is, the real love affair of the story, that between Barthelmess and Manners, the way men bond eternally in the field of combat, like orphans forever clinging to paddle-less rafts during battles with shadowy Robert Mitchums (imagine if Stewart in VERTIGO had a buddy to fall into the infinite with, someone other than motherin' Midge). "Comradeship," says Barthelmess, "was all we had left."  

And maybe that's what the real lure of war is for men at home: as an escapist grim fantasia of true brotherhood and comradeship and no prohibition or small town morals, a place where it's just buds against the world, fire arms instead of nagging wives, the chance to prove one's mettle when it's all stripped down to just you and the guys experiencing the same hell the next seat over. And Barthelmess--his usually impassive face contorting into a slow burn wide-eyed terror at being finally unable to save his gunner's life (they finally crash after all these years of falling)--cradles Manners as he dies like a lover. But when it comes to pitching confessional woo to Nikki in their private train car back to Paris he seems to doing some lipless burlesque of what having lips is like. Still, the pair's lonesome auras collide finally and the sense of two lost souls clinging to each other continues, both are grateful that something and someone at least lets them pretend they're not already crashed.  

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Then, in 1933, the year Hitler consolidated power, Saunders wrote two movies that reflected a new isolationist propaganda stance. This was when the need to start mobilizing one's military industrial complex was vastly more important than most people in their sloshed disillusionment then realized, not only because arms build-up would lift us out of the Depression (there was no need to stay in Paris to get drunk now that Prohibition was repealed). but because as Mick La Salle notes in his chapter on Barthelmess in Dangerous Men, "In the same year (1933) that The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces debuted, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. Had the United States found the will that year to throw a net over Hitler, tens of millions of lives might have been spared."

Well, anyway, they're great stuff now that they can't do any real damage to freedom, so here we go:

THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)
Directed by Stuart Walker (for Paramount)
Starring: Frederic March, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Jackie Oakie

The description of this film tend to describe it as a love triangle between Frederic "King of the Triangles" March, rising Paramount star Cary Grant (in the same year he played opposite Mae West in her two best pictures), and a vamped-to-the-point-she's-ceased-to-look-human Carole Lombard (billed only as 'the beautiful lady' she seems daemonic enough to be a bit like the bloofer lady in DRACULA). But Cary Grant and Lombard never actually share a single scene in the film, and at left Lombard more resembles a wife or WAC in a WWII home front propaganda piece rather than a mysterious sympathetic ear wrapped in ermine who March trysts with in Hyde park on leave. And Cary Grant is no hero, but a sociopathic if ultimately loyal gunner to March. Grant's hawkish vibe allows March to play the guilt-stricken noble. He becomes a top ace, he has to get progressively drunker to keep it together once his body count rises, to the point a grinning French general pinning a medal on him can smell the alcohol on his breath even in the pouring rain! Death, where is thy sting?

The thing that tears the game up more than anything for March's character is that he can't admit how much he loves to kill. When he comes back from his first foray over the lines he's exhilarated and giddy, only to find his gunner is dead behind him. From then on, he's horrified not by fear of being killed, but of being responsible somehow for the deaths of his gunners (he loses five in a matter of months) while he gets his kicks. It's guilt for loving killing and facing death. These bi-planes have never before seemed so rickety, ready to fall to pieces at a moment's notice, and when one of his gunners later simply falls out during a loop-de-loop maneuver, March's decent into alcoholism and existential guilt goes from spiral to straight downward dive-bomb.

What's less exciting is the way, just like Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957), March's self-righteous anti-war stance includes blissful freedom from the big picture, i.e. the responsibility endured by Neil Hamilton in DAWN PATROL. It's very convenient to bad cop it to a higher up and play the wounded dove without worry of the long-ranging sociopolitical consequences. That said, March's performance is brilliantly modulated and it's quite intense watching his polite veneer slowly crumble under strain of conscience, until, during the big binge in his honor (after he shoots down Voss, a Richtofen-like ace who's barely out of his teens), March finally snaps, interrupting his fellow flier's drunken singing with a crazy rant ending with: "I earn my medals for killing kids!" He then staggers off to his room and commits suicide, a tour de force statement!

La Salle notes that Jerry's suicide had a real-life parallel to Saunders' real life booze-enhanced turmoil:  "Seven years after the film was made, Saunders, age 42, hanged himself." (105) That would be 1940. You do the math; he died along with any socratic ideal of a future negotiated peace with Hitler.

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But war was still a ways off in 1934. Saunders could, at least for awhile, channel his depressive drunken combat envy to pictures and literature. We alcoholic poets come alive when our paranoia and sense of immanent calamity finally have a proper setting. Saunders' anti-war sentiment always includes pro-war relish, a mix of emotions including a paradoxical sense of brotherhood with the enemy fliers. As long as he could seethe with isolationist fury he could indulge this Hyde-like dark twin as well. One can imagine the outlet for such isolationism being choked off after 1938, never to return (until Vietnam). But post-WWI American pacifism which was all the rage in 1933, the year of such polemics like MEN MUST FIGHT and political satires like DUCK SOUP and DIPLOMANIACS all of which adds up with Saunders' relative homicidal glee confession feeling like PATTON pretending to be ashamed of his yen for slaughter, or Dr. Strangelove's amok hand making peace signs instead of Nazi salutes.

I'd hazard a guess too that, for one of WWI's more peerless Air Corps. fiction authors, Saunders' lack of actual combat experience equal to that of his characters reflects his guilt more than his characters' killing kids. This is perhaps the one weak aspect of his work but as far as weak aspects go, you won't find these kinds of sentiments voiced so clearly anywhere else in pre-code film. Other writers were either anti-war pacifists, or "over there / over there" lemmings but Saunders really explored the actuality of the grisly homicidal fish that bites the propaganda lure, with a boozer's realization that they were two sides of a same lousy nickel-plated excuse to get away with murder.

ACE OF ACES (1933)
Director: J. Walter Rubin (for RKO)
Starring: Richard Dix, Elizabeth Allan, Ralph Bellamy, Theodore Newton, Joe Sauers

Rocky (Richard Dix) and his fiancee, Nancy (Elizabeth Allan) begin the film in an idyllic upper class garden guarded by a strangely disagreeable garden gnome. Another man runs over. It's war! He just saw the paper! Rocky ain't having it, and he and Nancy later have an argument of principles while parade footage unfurls below his sculpture of a winged angel. She leaves him for his 'cowardice.' Which leads to the next scene, Dix entering his new barracks to meet his fellow fliers, while a guitarist sings "Ten thousand dollars for the folks back home / ten thousand dollars / for the family," while they roll up the possessions of the latest killed flier whose bunk Rocky's taking.

It's a startlingly modern scene, too hip for 1918 or even 1933. It's like they should be swindling Tony Curtis out of his sax or chasing James Dean around an abandoned swimming pool. "This is tombstone Terry, the Tennessee Terror, otherwise known as Dracula!" The man leans forward to eye Rocky's neck, "Welcome to the ranks of the undead!" (WWI ended 13 years before the premiere of the 1931 Lugosi original, mind you). Weirder, they each have a pet of the power animal emblazoned on their ships: Rocky has a lion cub and there's a chimp who drinks, a dog, a parrot, and a pig with an iron cross tattoo. Each bunk has a flag with the amount of killed enemy planes represented on it by big 'X' stickers. The plane of each man is taken care of like a teenager takes care of his Pontiac Firebird.

Then there's the ingenious way Rocky's artistic understanding of natural light benefits him in dogfights. He becomes an ace via a montage that suggests Saunders was quite taken with SCARFACE. Rocky chokes on the trigger at first and has to get winged in the shoulder by an enemy bullet before he mans up and squeezes his trigger. The boys celebrate his kill and Dix realizes that he may never make the grade as a sculptor, but this bloody brand of performance has a nice adrenalin kicker.

But what is the 'meaning' behind this art? When we see the bloody face of the enlisted man Dix smacks with an ammo belt because he loaded it wrong, we know we're not supposed to be buying war bonds in the lobby. This shit gets personal. And the very hip disaffection of the fliers bears out my theory that war and acid are just two different sides of the same empty, terrifying void.

The Lemming and the Lion

When, in his initial coward-branding by nurse Nancy, Rocky decries war as a chance to duck out on your wife, and work, and responsibility, you know he's right, and he gets to say I told you so after she's dealt with being shelled and overrun by mud and the bloody wounded. She later regrets goading him into enlisting but he'll have none of it: "This is a great war and I'm having a grand time; every minute is grand!"  He's high on the cleanness of the war up where he is, the feeling of life and death so close and all that separates them the movements of his plane and firing of his guns: "Yes, it's a great war. I hope the next one is half as good!" He's giddy with insane sardonicism but his eyes look empty, reflecting DEATH DREAM somnambulism that some critics dismiss as Dix's wooden acting style. But behind that wooden mask lurks an agonized sculptor who has given up trying to hold onto his humanity, since he knows it will only get him killed. Like all sensitive artists, he starts out with far too much humanity to begin with, so has to just jettison it all. When he makes a brusque pass, Nancy balks. He exclaims war is is no time for scruples: "How can you refuse whatever you have to give?!" He all but twists her earlier words back into her face, and the moral hypocrisy of placing import on a woman's virginity dissolves in WWI almost as if that was the whole point of the war in the first place.

All in all, Rocky ends up being the more complex and interesting figure than March's Jerry in EAGLE. March endures his tenure as ace, but any joy in the sport of it falls instead to Cary Grant's sociopathic gunner. We know from DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE that March could have chilled us to the core as Rocky, but Dix is almost better for being less versatile, more stiff (in both senses). Just as Cary shoots an unarmed parachutist in EAGLE, Rocky shoots down an unarmed German cadet and winds up in a hospital next to him. This finally snaps Rocky out of his psychotic stupor but he was already self-aware, as good artists must be, before the film began, so it's understandable he would relapse when his record is threatened by a kid known as the "Fargo Express."

Luckily there's a happy ending, albeit with a strange 'is this just a dream' quality, like the end of TAXI DRIVER or VERTIGO or LAST FLIGHT. Rocky winds up the film back in the garden and in Nancy's arms, harmony restored: "We'll live only for ourselves, and by ourselves," she says, an eloquent if impossible advocations of the romantic ideal behind isolationist pacifism and the fantasy that America could take all the time it wanted to lick its wounds and Europe would just sort itself out on its own. America was still a teenager at 157 in 1933 it was clear that the nation would never get a chance to even get comfortable with itself before being shipped off to die in yet another country's war. Rocky's last line, though meant as a joke, leaves a chilling after-effect: as he and Nancy embrace in the garden, Rocky eyes the garden gnome that bugged him in the film's first scene, noting cryptically, "I still don't like the looks of that guy." Who else could that gnome be, but Adolph Hitler?

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Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with the DeMille-level lurid tortures of the Proletariat at the hands of the Cossacks. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like a tall shadow person with sable highlights in the stuffy Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, and things start looking up, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time going. One unbearable matriarch after another pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps. But Moscow is just more poking, at the hands of the reigning queen in Russia, a perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser overplaying to near Shelly Winters-ish levels), and her no-good nephew Peter (Sam Jaffe), the half-wit prince and Catherine's betrothed, prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than bedding his young wife. She's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male offspring out of her, in a way that makes Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of compassion.

Well, if Peter won't bed her, she better find someone who can, fast, and keep it on the DL. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"),  intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"), drab nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches, endless ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded.

That said, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin) you can forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera, and sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and be able to just lean back and watch Dietrich age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty inflicted on his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and though she never came out of the closet it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking a (possible) fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors and stern masseuses (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at but never bullied, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear, deep back into the closet.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in sacrifice and honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to help her. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted feminine shots at chin of the status quo, the kind of target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered like Babs does here. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave; hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except. When Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and deeply racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and afterwards affixes himself to a striking British socialite played by Myrna Loy. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that --like all British socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs--she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead before the film starts, saving any alleged social discomfort with the all-white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny) and his unbearably controlling mater, she's blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is pointing towards two 1932 hits for its box office hopes ---Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Paramount's surreal charms or Universal's lurid expressionism, even Columbia's humanist handball, even if the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene mad with magic.

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British and then turning the tables. If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders.

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always squarely on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim (as Damita's aesthete husband) lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort as one of his wife's lover caught with a lame alibi. It turns out Erich's habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady. Nice legs, though. Too bad that fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings).

This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot familiar (for the era) triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor in shards if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce, scandalous, risque and o-so progressive in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers, so here's novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably but Brent always presumes that is the case, which is one reason I dislike him. His whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of rapists. Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new, younger Paris Hilton-esque wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest string of words ever uttered.  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, for example, she's instantly killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

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