Tripping to Tortura: IN A WORLD, ADULT WORLD (2013)

Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors, like whores craving pimp slaps.

Why do I mention one film is made by a woman about a woman, and the other is about a girl made by men? I happen to be a pretentious Syracuse English major / poet who applied at one of the city's many local XXX bookstores ("the endless trains of the faithless" - spouts Robin Williams on the TV commercial playing behind me, advertising the Chevy Silverado, "Find new roads!") so I see deeplier (!) than most to this story so I can swear in court that Amy's adventures in that accursed city may look right (the film was shot there) but just don't add up. She says she's an over-achiever with a straight-A average and is a virgin, yet she is also hot, and yet she wants to be a furious poet?And she's an idiot! She lets her car get stolen and then admits she has no theft insurance because she spent the money her dad gave her on SASEs, confident of her imminent fame as a poet, which in itself is very suspicious for a supposedly straight-A student, this being the age when most submissions are done via e-mail. Alas, a great many people are willing to believe real life girls living alone for the first time are idiots like this, ala Juno and Frances Ha! --neither I've been able to see more than five minutes of at a time due to their complete cluelessness. (1)

But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would imagine, i.e. one who needs a man who's good at organizing, so said writer can toddle in her wake making exasperated sighs and treating her like a child. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson.

Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged semi-success poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors, and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy), but Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input into his character. He takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual cool aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards towards nearly everything including his own sexual desires. The pleased smile that comes across his face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find another guy as laid back.

And yet he can't even be bothered to take her virginity, even as a favor to her. Jean-Hughes Anglade would never stoop to such petty morality! He'd sleep with Amy even knowing it would destroy her respect for him and lead to blackballing and hushed whispers in the dean's council. He would do it because Amy needs disillusionment and to fathom that sex needn't be earth-shaking to count as experience--all good lessons that a truly good mentor wouldn't refuse. To paraphrase Wilde, the only thing to do with a cute student protege is make love to her if she's beautiful, and to someone else if she's plain.

At least that element of ADULT is not overly cliche. But alas, there's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her squat, and teaches her how to smoke weed and dance. Thank GOD she also doesn't get AIDS halfway through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. Even worse is that Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store (an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch) here she falls for the cute stockboy (Evan Peters) and lets the sort of bait-and-switch sordidness occupy the poster and tag line without adding up to anything truly subversive.  If XXX store had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something! Adult World, yeah RIGHT.

I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the fat suspicious owner who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day so I began to not try and seem reliable. "Ever take a polly?" he asked. He meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of listening to those shrill, echoing moans. He probably had applicants stand there talking as long as possible, to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths for more than ten minutes (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey). See, Adult World? That idea could have been a movie, call it "Ever take a Poly?" but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her; the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name; the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala John Lithgow in World According to Garp; the cute stock boy supports her and straightens her out as needed, patiently waiting to bust his move until at least an hour of running time and 'growth' has elapsed.

I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing? The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!

That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son (his only other child is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it AND making, and getting by with a little help from her friends, and dealing with a dad who doesn't understand why he so desperately wants to keep her from being a success. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps her get breaks but is too shy to bust a move -though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman, and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis) who has her own problems with sexism.

Many comedies featuring ditzy women have been made as well as about ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, and doting moms, all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares, to capture the awkward phase past the 'ditzy klutz in search of a man' phase, to chronicle the 'what goes on between the lucky break and established success' period. Every time Carol woke up I was worried she had slept through some big gig, because I've been conditioned to believe that if a film shows a woman waking up alone on the day of a big career-making event, she will wake up late and have missed her chance. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would.

Much as In a World seems remarkably astute in these areas, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even able to depict Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt, or the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave at passing cars, etc.  I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse), and I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but she's still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas --even when smashing Cusack's guitar she seems like she's just trying on emotions. Of course at that age all poets are too young to realize they can't bum-rush greatness, so she's either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie. Why not play herself?

It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks and shows us things that might make her friends and employers mad if they think the characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? She winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who in turn is screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But half-baked side plots are not something to holler over, and the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth any price of admission alone.

The ominous Hall of Languages at SU

Moving back to the idea of men (and women) being uncomfortable with movies where women move ahead without men approving and helping them (a theme central perhaps to the strange hostility towards the movie Scarlet Diva -- see "Her Body, Her Ashtray"). The year was 1987: I scored big at a Syracuse poetry reading, won acclaim and the plum spot opening for Allen Ginsberg when he came to town. Unfortunately circumstance were everything. For my big debut I had been drinking sangria with a lovely girl who had been letting me do all the talking - everyone before me at the reading was nervous and wobbly but I was a huge smash. I decided to always be drinking before readings from then on. In hindsight I realized it was the flirting.

But for Ginsberg, a semester later, I had drunk way too much trying to get that magic back, and now I had a legit girlfriend, no more flirting so I was nervous, the auditorium was packed, and I drank too much and couldn't get a buzz. My hand still shook holding the paper. I didn't stick around to go to the diner with Mr. Ginsberg after the show, as I had been invited to, citing my then-sick girlfriend as an excuse. I bravely ran away / away.

Flash forward: I didn't just leave it at not getting the XXX job. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, figuring money might be found there (as Amy finds in Adult World). Mine chronicled a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture, where people huffed laughing gas while chained naked to a merry go round in the middle of an array of robot whipping arms.

A housemate had an old LP called Tortura inherited from a crazy uncle -- and it was a very disturbing thing to listen to--mostly just the sound of whip cracks and impassioned screaming and moaning-- while tripping your face off, and it probably effected that vision. It was hilarious too, but on acid took its toll, and since we always had guests who wanted to hear it and we were always on acid, it seemed like whole cycles of death and rebirth and endless torturing jail sentences of moments passing and time stopping for this deeply-felt soul torture, and that I had been tortured in the past and would be in the future, and the album just ripped open soul scars I'd had far longer than my current incarnation. That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and "The Torture Never Stops" was also in rotation, and seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty that the LSD-enhanced Tortura, an apt summation of the painful truth behind 20th century first world existence's curtain of blasé painless decency. My opus, Shroomsadoplasticism, was, never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man... hell, I'm not even sure I still have those soul scars.

A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet anymore than a real erotic novelist, because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore --trying to understand their poetry was worse than tripping to Tortura. I did a bunch of open mic nights over the years but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my girlfriend. I soon realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other  / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Roberts' Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS afterwards. Didn't Emma Roberts even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH how to SLAM like a BAD poet?

Then in 1996 I lucked into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. Then I was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined - then they told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the strike. I was on the road again... (my demo reel here).

A few years earlier, in 1994, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for five years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:

No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.

Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation." "Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95 

My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter to the Times citing as an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that even though there was nothing sexual per se in it, just the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" brought waves of douche chill torture to our liberal arts cores.

"What do you think," Dobyns asked, "should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"

With that phrase we loved him. Out of politeness we refrained from applauding but most of us laughed. He didn't need guide rails from some PC Volturi to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one. Times were different and poetry, at least in his class, still had a violent, dangerous edge. We went to learn poetry not to have our hands held on the road to incompetency's supportive slaughterhouse. Tall, cold, like a Howard Hawks and Max Von Sydow mixture but with no accent or drawl, he taught us Chekov in a measured way that showed us one might be both masculine and sensitive, serious but with a self-effacing deadpan humor, quiet but with the kind of deadshot aim that means you don't need to waste words (or bullets), and an inflexible personal code that meant tolerance for everything but unconscious misogyny and mediocrity.

This Adult World, then reflects a PC dead zone of safety bars and bloodless ambivalence; even discovering promisingly sordid or 'authentic' real world experiences -- squatter drag queens, XXX video stores, older poet mentors living alone and with darting eyes -- leads Amy no closer to the disgust, disillusionment, the soul scars, she needs. Some PC chaperone herald gets there first, shaving it all down from an R to a PG-13 like a furious Olympic curler. The drag queen doesn't even smoke pot in a joint -- it's bad for the lungs! --but uses a vaporizer - and has to let us know that it's medical. The XXX video store is just a friendly family of genial eccentrics, they all but sing "Lean on Me" in perfect harmony to encourage Amy to run after Evan Peters as he saunters off into the midnight rain to catch a flight. And a guy named Rat refuses to take advantage of a willing, hottie protege as if his name meant nothing whatsoever. This the Adult World ain't! 

In a World by contrast is blissfully long past this kind of naïveté. Carol uses sex and the lack thereof with an adult's savvy of the world, knowing how sex changes things for the good and bad every single time; her scatterbrained aspects feel real - she still makes it to her big jobs, she knows how to not mess up good things, and to mess up the already bad because who gives a fuck? Best of all she's a real artist, fascinated with accents and determined to master them and to capture real dialogue and the naturalism of speech. Take the above scene for example - her sister's tearing her heart out like here is some big cry into your ice cream and talk about boys moment, and Bell is quietly pressing play on her recorder to capture her sister's emotional tonality for future use in voiceover and dialect coach work. That's the real trick to becoming a success, not to keep your eye on the big prize but on each successive small one and to never put boys over art, or even the craving for success and fatherly approval over it either, and not to succeed from sheer neediness but because artistic interests and career goals have coalesced and nothing can stop she who is already arrived. 

Cusack says as much in Adult World, but it's one thing to have an older man explain it to a young girl and another to see a girl just fucking doing it for herself with men telling her nothing of any value whatsoever. Cusack even tells Amy to make mistakes, to 'fail better' but the film overall fails failing. There's something a little off about a joint written by a boy about a girl taking life lessons from another boy, and then not even following that advice, delivering a stale set of characters that only the strong acting of the players can freshen (unless you find the nurturing gay male bestie of the frazzled heroine thing still subversive). If not well, PC chaperones can clean up 42nd Street all they want, can ban smoking and nanny state a poet's life into irrelevance, but in the real adult the torture never stops. Suicide isn't just a joke, it's a real option many take. If Adult World Amy ever wants to really want to find out what that sort of true life experience is, what true poetry is, she'd best make some genuinely bad decisions, fast, like suffering through the voiceover of Prozac Nation, listening to Tortura on acid, or dying accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation (as out guitarist did, two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing!). Finding a career writing erotica before you even lose your virginity doesn't really count as truth, he said, knowing of what he speaks, gesturing vaguely at the 'world' from the vantage point of his filth-encrusted podium of flies (all green and buzzlin'), rose thorn whip welts, funerals, and whores! (my voiceover demo reel here --interested parties contact erichk9@aol.com -- and weep). 

NOTES:

1. Strangely enough, those two films are highly praised yet I can't stand them, but I love Jennifer's Body, Margot at the Wedding, and The Squid and the Whale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, like flying itself, is often boring.

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Bellamy the Deflowerer: THE WEDDING NIGHT (1935)

If you want to see the cruel extreme barbarism of the sudden implementation of the Catholic Legion of Decency's enforced production code (which overtook Hollywood in 1934), look no further than 1935's THE WEDDING NIGHT, starring Gary Cooper, Ralph Bellamy, and Anna Sten (the 'other' Garbo). It helps when considering the Christian backlash hooplah about the morning after pill to see a film like this, and realize the extent of female subjugation in pre-industrial European culture, and the way it survives today in xtreme Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam and with some Mormons.

Ralph Bellamy with his wild hair, expertly applied peasant-stock eye-liner, and traditional Polish farmer garb actually gives Cooper a run for the money here in the god-like looks department. He's way too good looking to be so dumb, and what's this brood of crafty tobacco farmers doing up in Connecticut in 1935 in a place bordering open marriage-minded drunk writer Cooper's get-away lodge?

While Cooper's wife stays in New York City, he moves up there for inspiration, and decides on Anna Sten and her family's provincial Polish culture as the subject of his next book. The film thus sees the code mandate of 1934 as a property dividing line, between the home-grown social 'dissolution' of the post-WW1 Depression era of women's equality and hurrah for the next who dies, and a very fundamentalist old world patriarchy proletariat. A dissolute neighbor next door is demonized as brutally as the Nazis would later do the Jews; meanwhile the property-greedy tobacco-farming Poles and their outmoded values then can be read as the very reason for the barbarism inflicted upon them. As The farmer says to his daughter when she refuses to harness herself to the Bellamy plow, "stop making me hit you!"

Cooper's never been too convincing as a writer, but here he at least is convincing as a self-hating intellectual for whom literary 'research' has been the rationale for seducing women for so long he can't remember whether the book is in service of the affair or vice versa. Sten is a damn... good... actress and Sig Rumann is properly terrifying in an unusual role (for him). The code shock is of course that Sten must die, because her father pledged her to Bellamy, and was paid the dowry, and she refused to run away from the ceremony before saying "I do," which is the only proper thing for a bride standing on the lip of the 20th century. That she loves Cooper instead but still goes through with the Bellamy wedding spells her death under the draconian rubrics of the code. But if she'd just run out to the car and driven off and grabbed Cooper and fled to the city before saying she did, well you could roll the credits right then. But the post-34 censor had his eye on adulterers, even if they'd been forced into a marriage that was only minutes old.

And so... in the post-34 world of Hollywood, once-free women starting dropping like flies. At least they had time to take long Garbo-esque death scenes, but there's a thin line between good death scenes and the bitter aftertaste of deaths being forced by a code no one making the film has any faith in.  Religious censorship bleeds into the nature of the post-code era's stories -- where women marry even knowing it means their death, because marriage is the ultimate validation of woman, and then she may breed and create more Christians who can carry forth this fine, wretched, evil tradition of yoking the women to the Bellamies. Imagine the tale of Little Red Riding Hood if the Catholic Legion of Decency decided to update the story so that Red gets a chaperone through the woods, and the woodsman--her husband--regularly belittles her in a smirky way when she's caught talking to wolves. That wolf would be played by Cary Grant... the woodsman? That's right! It's no accident Bellamy is in THE WOLFMAN playing just such an impotent hunter.

To drive the point slamming home, the titular night of the film is a long wedding party for Sten and Bellamy at Rumann's house, with the Sten being 'prepared' for deflowering by the glum matrons of the clan upstairs, while downstairs Bellamy gets drunker and his cronies (and even Sten's father) encourage him to get up there and lay some pipe like they're the sloppy seconds-craving would-be-rapist brothers of the groom in Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The message is clear: the boys get to drink and goad each other one in lusty eggings-on below while the women, depressed and apathetic as if dressing a deer, prepare the next virgin for her code-sanctioned marital assault. Again, the message is that not only does marriage legitimize sex so you can have it right under your parents' roof, it frees you from the uncertainty of 'taking possession' of your spouse in copulation. In other words, she doesn't get to say no --only the dad does. Even screaming for help they'll just laugh and roar below.

Fundamentalist Christian adages against a woman's right to choose her own mate seem barbaric to most free thinking people these days but after the WEDDING NIGHT you may understand its origins better. It's not really the fault of the Bellamy - he's not a bad guy. He's been led to expect he will get a wife handed to him via her father, and his confusion when it's otherwise is not his fault --empathy takes the ability to think outside one's own immediate social mores, which he is mentally unable to do. Though many conservatives are desperate to pass bills that would revert woman's rights back to the patriarchs, nowadays at least, they can't get very far. The best they can do is close an abortion clinic now and again as they lament the loss of their old property, the Fertile Womb, so squandered in the hands of its wasted young women owners.

So yeah, drooling sexual relatives are written into the rocks of Plymouth but when a sensitive poet soul like Sten's comes along, that kind of violent burlesque of socially controlled reproduction is shocking and un-American. It's one thing if the girl is plain and not very bright and maybe can't get a date on her own. But then comes along a smart, poetic beauty and the Bellamy will crush her like an orchid under the plow. When choosing between the Bellamy for life (in Albany too!) vs. Gary Cooper for a just one weekend in Manhattan, is there any other choice, for a free woman, than the latter?

 

The worst that can happen is that they'll wind up destitute and abandoned on the streets of the East Village, and that is nothing in comparison to being kept down on the farm under the yoke of Bellamy's unconscious, never-been-outside-of-the-box sense of entitlement. Just ask One-Eye: (see: Bob Hope Vs. The Canadian Svengalis).

Thus the Coopers and Grants are like missionaries of pre-code enlightenment, bringing hope to the dark areas of the New England tobacco belt. Now more than ever, we need to ridicule our Bellamies, ban the incoming burkas of our immigrants, and rescue Mormon girls before they're married to lecherous cult leaders. I don't blame the Bellamies, or even the Rumanns --this is all they know. But the chain's gotta break somewhere. For too long our tall beautiful men and fast-thinking wabbits have held back, given the Bellamies and the Elmer Fudds the benefit of the doubt, presuming their old ways must have some merit. Our reward has been a trail of broken Stens. I say no more! Not one Sten, Bellamy! Not one Sten...

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pre-code capsules 5: WHITE WOMAN, RED DUST, GIRLS ABOUT TOWN, THE PURCHASE PRICE, MANDALAY

WHITE WOMAN
1933 - ****
Fans of KONGO, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and Charles Laughton in general, phone your dealer and demand they remaster and restore this film and stop worrying about its controversial title; there's really not much in the way of miscegenation but! Charles Laughton as a psychopathic but otherwise borderline lovable rogue who operates a rubber plantation far deep in the tropics more than makes up for it. Employing escaped convicts and wanted men so they don't dare ever leave him, he bribes the natives to kill anyone who does, if the crocs don't get them first.

A truly marvelous scene occurs early wherein Laughton seduces Lombard while he's out in Saigon or wherever getting supplies. Coming off all down to earth and humbled by the loss of his wife, he's  truly touching and then as soon as they're married and he has her deep in the bush he becomes a bully in high MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY / LOST SOULS style. However, I think he's better and more sympathetic here than in either of those films, especially in his bemused rivalry relationship with fellow jungle rat Charles Bickford, who shows up out of the soggy swamps looking for a job. Spotting Lombard, Bickford makes no bones about his intentions to steal her out from under his portly employer, but Charles would much rather have an honest-about-his-shady-intentions rogue as his rival than the mealy-mouthed 'moral' pretty boy who does steal Lombard's heart (Kent Taylor).

Laughton is always hilarious and you feel the pain at his new wife's revulsion towards him and his futile jealousy over the young Kent underneath his bravado and smirking. You hate him for shooting the porter's monkey but you'll cheer his poker-faced Englishness during the big native attack finale. Can you believe Laughton made ISLAND OF THE LOST SOULS the same year? Talk about a roll!

RED DUST
1932 - ****
More rubber plantation action with Clark Gable in the Laughton role, so he does much better with the ladies, particularly Mary Astor (wed to a naive fever victim) and traveling 'salesgirl' Jean Harlow (she takes her famous rain barrel bath). The plot is the usual W. Somerset Maugham-style steamy love triangle, in the jungle where white Christian decency melts in the tropical heat and monsoons. MGM keeps the lurid indecency on a tight chain but they keep it hungry too -that one rainstorm kiss between a soaking wet Astor and Gable is hotter than hell.

I like what Rupert has to say about it on Classic Movies Digest:

As Barbara, Mary Astor is even more unwillingly libertine in her adulterous lust for Gable's Denny when one knows the background of the actress' torrid and infamous real life amours. The fireworks are in their scenes together as well. Early on when Astor slaps Gable hard for a verbal offense, he enjoys it, grinning that Gable grin from ear to ear. Then she can barely conceal her growing desire for him as she watches the strong, dark and commanding Denny hold her fair and weak husband, nursing him back to health from the fever. The comparison of the two is indeed notable to the tingly Astor. Then in the scene immediately following, Vantine happily and boldly watches Denny undress for bed, only to be told to go to her own, which she does in disappointment. These two ladies have it bad. 

GIRLS ABOUT TOWN
1931 - ***1/2
I saw this at the Film Forum about ten years ago during their first pre-code festival, with a packed, delighted audience, and it was a hoot and a holler and a half. Seeing it at home is still good, though it helps to have seen a lot of other pre-codes first so you understand the haphazard amorality brought on by the Great Depression, when so many women were broke and on the streets and hustling in a kind of gold-digger limbo between outright streetwalking and showgirl social climbing. Like Liz Taylor in BUTTERFIELD 8, the GIRLS also have a phone service to get their dates, and while one or two of them get happily reformed by the end the final shot is of our fearlessly amoral survivor calling that number for yet another victim. Kay Francis and Lillian Tashman are the girls. Joel McRae is the reformer, Eugene Pallette is the A-list sucker, Lucille Gleason his hard-luck wife. George Cukor directed with his champagne touch already in evidence. Similar in a lot of ways to BED OF ROSES and dozens of other features of the early sound era, the story is predictable but pre-code to the core. Sure Francis reformed at the end but Tashman gets to keep her diamonds and booze, thus pleasing everyone long time. 

THE PURCHASE PRICE
1932 - ***
Barbara Stanwyck has probably never looked sexier than trying to seduce dumbass sodbuster George Brent in this weird pre-code crowd-pleaser. Tired of life as a New York City singing slickster, Babs runs away from her clingy gangster lover Lyle Talbot by switching places with a Montreal hotel maid who was supposed to marry Brent via long distance matchmaking newspaper ads. It's not quite fair the way Brent gradually changes from sullen hick to merely a college grad who's designed his own new kind of wheat germ but needs a bunch of money to pay the mortgage. Paramount's resident pre-code sleazebag David Landau (he was the villain in the Marx Brothers' HORSEFEATHERS - "Here's to dear old Darwin!" the same year) wants ti step in, buy the mortgage and get Babs as his, um, 'cook,' in the process (things aren't going great in the Babs-Brent marriage - she fends off his one lamely busted move and he sulks ever after).

The story's strictly from hicksville and Brent's too much a mealy-mouthed pretty boy to convince as either a hick or a horticulturist, but Wellman gives us, as is his wont lots of great pre-code nitty city and farm town grit, including: one pretty good barroom fight; a vividly etched and very drunken shivaree; burning cornfields, terrible wallpaper; and lots of leering through open doorways. No grit in the world is so nitty it can best Stanwyck in a negligee and thigh high stockings, though. Seldom before has adult sexuality seemed so tangible, vulnerable or rock-hard tough, via a young, rail thin and undressed woman who's still wearing all the pants in sight.

MANDALAY
1934 - ***1/2
If you're suspected of killing the guy who ran out on you, and get exonerated, and then the guy shows up alive, are you allowed to kill him? That is the question asked of many a pre-code heroine but few have handled it as coolly as Kay Francis in MANDALAY.  Ricardo Cortez is the good gunrunner fiancee who leaves her behind in a Burma nightclub to pay his debt to shady club promoter Warner Oland. At first she refuses to stay, but then gets a hang of the game, changes her name to 'Spot White' and is soon so deep in the bedrooms and pockets of the rich and famous that the wives move to ship her farther up river. But on the riverboat to Mandalay who should show back up? And right when she's trying to make it with one of the ubiquitous archetypes of these jungle expeditions, the drug-addicted (or here, drunk) but good-hearted doctor (Lyle Talbot) heading up river to work on yellow fever victims, which--as we learned from W. Somerset Maugham--is a great way to pay off your malpractice or adulterous guilt.

The code came in around halfway through 1934, so the whole RAIN / PAINTED VEIL-ripped subgenre of commonwealth sin would soon be extinct in place of frilly frocks, domestic breakfasts, nannies, angelic children, but here in MANDALAY things are still allowed to be rife with all the lurid trimmings: drugs, booze, depravity, prostitution, gun-running, miscegenation, and murder. Michael Curtiz directed so you know there's nary a dull moment, even when nothing happens, and Kay's seldom looked lovelier. Dig that slinky Orry-Kelly gown above! Oh you kid! Awooga!

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

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

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

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

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

BLONDE VENUS

1932 - ***

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

 

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

OUR BETTERS

1933 - ****

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

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

BEAST OF THE CITY 

1932 - ***

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

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

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

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

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

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