Black Angel (1946), Roy William Neil.

Solid thriller.   This film likely appealed to the women who were holding the fort back home during the war. When a shady two-timing husband is convicted of his girlfriend's murder, his wife (played by June Vincent) picks up where the overworked cops left off.   Vincent assumes a very male role, essentially playing the detective, in the very masculine genre of film noir.  She poses as a nightclub singer to keep an eye on suspects.  Her husband, played by John Bennett, is surprisingly a minor character and mostly unseen.  Peter Lorre appears as mystery man with the best office in LA.  What a view!

George Raft (1974), Lewis Yablonski.

Don Cherry and I have what I'd guess to be one thing in common:  we love the Hollywood biographies.  I am not a big drooler for George Raft, I only came to know him through a couple of recently viewed movies.  He seemed odd:  very taciturn, almost a ghost-like presence; all I knew is that he had a reputation for being mobbed up.

This book is bizarre - not only does Raft make Frank Sinatra look like a second-generation hanger-on, he's a full-on caricature of any "Ocean's Eleven" type guys.  So wounded by feelings of inadequacy, Raft makes bad decision after bad decision, building to a paralysis that prevents him from compromising the Raft image.  Unable to take on a role that he thinks will tarnish his image, countless opportunities go to Bogart, who turns them into iconic movie performances!  Unable to compromise on his flashy image by wearing slightly less expensive suits when the big roles stop coming, he fritters away the money he earned as one of the top stars of the 1930s. Yes, he's tightly involved in financial projects undertaken by guys like Bugsy Siegel.   No, he never seems to make a dime off any of it.

This is a genre I love:  a non-academic bio based on tons of interviews by a loving fan or friend.  Even though the author admits Raft was one of his childhood heroes, and backtracks a bit for him, the fact that Raft was deeply screwed up is not hidden.  I probably could have done without the description of the unending stream of hookers Raft went through, though.

Renfrew of the Royal Mounted (1937), Albert Herman.

Oh, man!  A mackinaw couch cushion!  It's like they skinned a hoser!

I was completely prepared to shut this off in two minutes, but... it's not bad.  It's a passable adventure story of Renfrew, an RCMP officer who stumbles on to a plot to kidnap an ex-forger and force him to create printing plates for ten dollar bills.  Oh, it's the cheese all right,  you can basically play Canada bingo:  we have an aboriginal guy in a canoe, campfires, the smell of venison, a vaguely British guy offering tea, the woods, and a she-wolf howling at the moon!  Renfrew happens to be the kind of Mountie that likes to break into song, with lots of tremolo.  I guess that's preferable to the kind we hear about these days that just want to tase everyone in the nads.  This is the first in the Sergeant Renfrew series; they made about eight in all.  

Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin & Violence on Screen (1994), Frank Miller.

If you ask me, the most shameful example of an embarrassing, tacked-on ending is that of The Blue Dahlia.  It's obvious even while you watch that some guy in Hollywood with a stick up his ass couldn't besmirch a war hero even if it makes a gripping, dreadful and totally believable story.  The twist ending that sidesteps a current social problem is dictionary definition willful ignorance.  As a viewer, from a very early age, I have been infuriated by false endings and the sanctimonious retribution forced on characters in classic movies.

Frank Miller's book is not new.  I had a copy when it was, fifteen years ago.  But it remains a solid entry on the mechanisms at work behind the censorship of film, both from within the industry and without.  Having forgotten much of the history and conflating everything in my mind to "the Hays Code," it was worth a re-look and it reminded me that there were many hands at work muddling messages from the script stage, to point the film went out of the camera and into theatres.  The industry's Production Code was presided over by many strong personalities (not just Hays), including Joe Breen.  His and his colleagues' Irish sensibilities, according to Jack Vizzard, were less concerned with the effects of violence than sex, an observation that may explain why to this day American films go lightly on blood but get queasy when anything sexual crops up.  Miller quotes Vizzard in saying, "to the Irish, violence was not necessarily connected with the debasement of human life.  It was frequently a sign of manliness...The Irish culture was infected with Jasenism, which dreaded sex as being identified with the darker forces, but which did not so fear brutality, since this was not as 'catching.'  It contained its own remedy in that it hurt." 

Miller presents many accounts of films that were presented to the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) for approval, then snipped and sliced into oblivion.  The littleness of the mentality behind the quibbles can be astonishing.  As Miller notes, it wasn't until well into the 1960s that censors considered a film and the ideas presented within it as an organic whole, rather than resorting to a checklist of forbidden actions.  The extent to which individuals such as Joe Breen would develop alternate ideas for a script so that it could avoid being censored, is equally astonishing.  Maybe Breen should have lobbied for a screenwriting credit, considering how many gay men he turned into Jews, how many abortions he aborted, and how many other sins he blotted from the sight of wholesome American families.  

It's worth remembering that most of this censorship was driven by the assumption that any of these products should be able to be viewed by children.  The notion that a film might have an adult-only audience was late in coming.  Cracks appeared in the Production Code when historic events (such as the Second World War) made audiences thirsty for realism.  The appearance of European films and their natural portrayal of human relationships also emphasized the exaggerated artificiality of American films under the Code.  As a non-American, it's interesting to observe how consistently this country's films have always been under attack by moralizing forces.   

I wouldn't have minded a few more photos, and had a bit of an issue with the statement Miller makes a number of times that "everyone in the audience knew what was really going on," (when, for example, a female character was a "dancer"  but in the original script a prostitute).  Miller's book's traces censorship of movies from its very beginnings right up to the mid-90s.  Having been a teen when it was published, I have to say that now as an adult I'm surprised that the efforts to edit and smother film was as busy in the 90s as it was in the 30s.  Yet I was one of those kids that got my hands on the video version of Louis Malle's Damage for the extra two minutes! 

The ultimate message I took away from this book is that there's always going to be someone out there who wants to squash your fun and call you a sinner. 

Little Caesar (1931), Mervyn LeRoy.

I liked this one.  Edward G Robinson plays a wholly unlikeable psychopath, dead-set on rising in the world of crime.  He's trigger happy, making his low-end crook buddies nervous, and throws his angry glare like a knife.  Rather than playing on accents and other affectations, his ethnicity comes out in the setting:  the Palermo Social Club, the corner store selling Italian products, the church.  Rather than a stereotype, he's a character.  He's a strange teetotaler who rebuffs half a dozen offers to drink but succumbs to his vice at the film's end.  Interestingly, no woman plays any particular significance - Rico has no mother, no sister, no girlfriend.  He doesn't even seem particularly keen on his buddy's girl - he'd rather shoot her into hamburger! 

A sweaty, confused Rico - back on the sauce.

Smart Money (1931), Alfred E Green.

"I don't 'spose it's very easy for you girls..."

Interesting little flick.  In the first scene, a thin girl whispers a sob story into Edward G Robinson's ear; he caves and gives her a hundred bucks to "get her out of trouble."  By the last scene, he's gone through multiple lovely girls, just about all out to swindle him out of something.  I swear, I couldn't tell many of these quintessential 30s platinum blonds apart!  Robinson plays Nick the Barber, who starts out giving shaves in "Iron City," but whose gambling smarts lead him to "The City," where he's king, running illegal gambling joints and pulling in wads of dough from elite clients.  I thoroughly enjoyed the bald-faced pleasure Robinson gets out of a good poker game, one upping a crooked gambler, or running his hands along his manicurist's pretty legs.  What the hell!  Despite his slight turn towards the arrogant when he starts winning the big bets, he actually remains highly likable right up to the end of the film.  It's refreshing to watch an old film and not be hammered over the head with moralizing!

Jimmy Cagney appears as his right-hand man.

Scarface (1932), Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson.

Boris Karloff plays Gaffney, a big Harp who is about to get X'd, if you know what I mean.

This may take another look, but I felt like Muni's Scarface was a slightly moronic Italian caricature.   Having watched I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang this week as well, each scene of which was unbearably taut yet refreshingly natural, this one comes off as a little dated and unfocused.  Like everyone, I consider the big three of the initial flicks in the gangster genre to be  Scarface, Public Enemy and Little Caesar.  Cagney is so compelling and charismatic in Public Enemy but Muni by contrast (often a highly enjoyable and even sympathetic actor, like Cagney) is more of a puzzle and his characterization suffers from a lack of background detail.  Why does Muni trust the half-baked dope he's got as his right hand man, and not (criminally underused) George Raft? What did he do to his mother for her to resent her own son so badly?  C'mon!

Even the ending was operatic, in the grand Italian tradition:  shootings!  secret relationships!  brother sister action!  

Question: where were any of the 30s Jewish racketeers?  Was it because they were playing the parts and running the studio, that they didn't want to draw attention to that particular type of 30s gangster?

Manpower (1941), Raoul Walsh.

 MANPOWER!  A crew of fist-fightin' tough guy pals working on heavy duty power lines!  Edward G Robinson, poor schmuck, can't get a woman (can he ever, in any of these flicks?) until Marlene Dietrich sees him as someone who can at least pay the bills and relieve her of a crummy job dancing with strangers at a clip joint.  George Raft plays his sensitive pal, who doesn't believe Dietrich will ever be the kind of woman to settle into married life.  The supporting actors are quite well drawn (and include Alan Hale as "Jumbo"); good to see a cast of twenty or so people where each actor has enough to chew on to differentiate him from the person standing next to him.

  

Bluebeard (1944), Edgar G Ulmer.

For some reason, I always thought Bluebeard was a pirate.  Wrong!  You know, when a prospective date tells you "you ask too many questions," and when he confesses he has "things to hide" he's probably not the man for you.  The Carradine family definitely has a cool gene.  But otherwise a sad, slapdash, badly told story with bad lighting.  

The Stolen Jools / The Slippery Pearls (William C McGann), 1931.

Strange little flick of about 20 minutes' duration which was apparently created to support National Vaudeville Artists, a union representing actors.  Nearly everyone who was anyone in 1931 is trotted out, playing themselves ("Why, look, it's Barbara Stanwyck!"), so it's more of a historic curiosity than anything.  As far as entertainment value goes, there's a couple of good gags, but for the most part I agree with this little chap, who promised to bury the reels in the backyard "before the department of health arrives." 

The World Gone Mad (1933), Christy Cabanne.

Still relevant flick about a Ponzi scheme perpetuated by seemingly noble industrialists.  A smart story, neither moralizing nor naive, about newspaperman Andy Terrell's quest to sniff out the truth behind a District Attorney's murder.  So, are there any real newspapermen left anymore?  Ones that pay a kid $10 to tail suspects?  One that questions the official story and hunts out the truth?  Terrell's character, a realist or cynic depending on your mood, hands the murdered DA's replacement a gun for protection saying, "Smith and Wesson makes all men equal.  And equality is the basis of a true democracy."  The DA responds by promising to protect the public from "these leeches who have chiseled and gouged and swindled them out of their hard earned dollars"!  Sit on that, Wall Street! 

I think this flick works nicely as a B-movie: because there are no capital-S stars (at least recognizable to a modern audience), the dialogue and story are in the foreground.  I found this one on Internet Archive http://www.archive.org, a non-profit group that makes digital material (including awesome, out of copyright films) accessible to the public. 

My Dinner With Andre (1981), Louis Malle.

Sigh.  Disappointed with both this and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two failed viewing efforts.  I felt like I was expected to write 2500 words on the concept of time afterwards.  I suppose some viewers enjoy a challenge, but I also wonder if they tend to be college aged guys that make you mix tapes on your first date.

It (1927), Clarence G Badger.

Blech.  Everyone falls over Clara Bow, who has "it".  Until they realize she might have a kid.  Quite humourless.

Escape from Death Row/Dio, sei proprio un padreterno! (1973), Michele Lupo.

Aside from the bathtub electrocution and prison fight scenes, this one plays it mostly for laffs.  Lee Van Cleef is a seasoned assassin, who is idolized by a naive, small-time crook.   We'll call this young man Honda, because that is what his t-shirt said while he was in prison (I guess they let you keep your duds in poliziotteschi prison).  Anywhat, the guys escape and Van Cleef spends the rest of the film tracking down those jerks that double crossed him, ending up in a fish-processing plant in Marseilles.   This one wins for costume design, but the poignant trumpet track gets a bit annoying after a while.  There's about a half-dozen alternate titles, but I think my favourite might be Mean Frank and Crazy Tony!

Prisoner #439527 in the mesh shirt is SO not impressed.  Prisoner #95847 looks like he escaped from mime school.

A Kiss Before Dying (1956), Gerd Oswald.

Is this a teen-noir?  Lusciously filmed in sunny California, there's also many shots such as the one above, that show how drippingly gorgeous all those neon-lit nightclubs really were.  This film is also robustly a 50s teen flick, with a very young Robert Wagner as a self-motivated college kid who goes on a killing spree!  OK, so it said "spree" on the box.  Rather, he rids himself of a clingy girlfriend who is on the outs with her wealthy dad.  Then Joanne Woodward walks into the picture, and completely steals it away.  Somewhat predictable, and maybe a gaudier A Place in the Sun, but intriguing.  Cinematography is by Lucien Ballard, who was later associated with Sam Peckinpah.  I would argue the mise-en-scene and cinematography combine to lend dignity to the characters, and just make the actors that much more beautiful.

 

Soda Shop, complete with View Master rack!