Underground Rustlers (1941), S Roy Luby.

Hell, yeah!  B-westerns are not something I would have thought I could stomach.  They were the cheapest, straw-stuffed, manure-flecked B's, meant for the same type of viewer.  But, wait!  This is pretty awesome!  It has groaner jokes about combs that grow hair, a cowboy that has serious in-depth conversations with a ventriloquist's dummy and, OF COURSE, yodeling.  Ray "Crash" Corrigan is kind of a looker too.  Hilarity and mirth!

Why is it that I speak my lines clearly, wondered Elmer the dummy, but the hand up my ass sounds like he's reading off a card?

Paying the Bills: Damaged Lives (1932) and Diagnostic Procedures in Tuberculosis (1940), Edgar G Ulmer.

Damaged Lives came about, according to director Edgar G Ulmer, because of jealousy amongst the Cohn brothers:

Jack Cohn got in a fight with his brother, Harry.  Jack was in charge of sales in New York and was very angry and very jealous that he couldn't produce like Harry...And Jack Cohn, who I knew very well, brought up the subject one night.  He had to make pictures himself.  He went back to New York and called me.  We met the Canadian Health Minister who needed a picture for Canada... I wrote a script, and the Canadian Health Minister was delighted.  He didn't know a thing about pictures.  I came back to the Coast and shot it.

                            - Kings of the B's, Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn

Made in eight days for the Cohns at Columbia, Damaged Lives is a morality tale about the dangers of syphilis and made big money once released.   Though an "educational picture," it clings to a traditional everyman narrative, and looks quite rich.  In the shot above, cinematographer Allen G Siegler frames a gorgeous apartment using an art deco statue.  And, whoa!  What a fireplace!  As the story goes, a naive young man has one wild night with an older platinum blond (early 30s shorthand for bad news), catches syphilis and later passes it to his wife Joan.  The first half of the film is kind of a gas, with an all night bender and trip to some kind of classy bordello; the second half dwells on the after-effects of it all and even includes a few gag-inducing shots of presumably real patients with open sores and deformations. (Interesting how it looks even more horrific in black and white).  Oddly, the Canadian description for this film, as it appears in the Library and Archives catalogue, states that the actress Diane Sinclair, who plays Joan "may have been black."  Source?

Ulmer, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich (which is quoted from above), stated that though he became stuck in Producers Releasing Corporation and "couldn't get out," working for a Poverty Row studio did have certain benefits.  "I could use my crew, and I was running the studio from a technical end.  I wouldn't sign any contract with PRC, but this was my home and I could operate and bring any idea to the top echelon."  Though they are not for PRC, Ulmer's work on pictures such as Damaged Lives and Diagnostic Procedures in Tuberculosis are interesting examples of a craftsman working within given boundaries.  Diagnostic Procedures in Tuberculosis is another short film, this time the audience is the medical community; it documents how to perform particular tests for tuberculosis.  It's my bias, but lovely touches in a B or an education film made strictly for money warm my heart; we may all work, yet we are all not whores.  Ulmer's work also demonstrates that not all men working in B's were hacks.  Who else would shoot a scientific film in which a back-lit physician opening a lab kit looks like a magician about to perform a disappearing trick in an elegant nightclub?    

Irish Luck (1939), Howard Bretherton.

Teenage bell boy "Buzzy" O'Brien teams up with a hotel porter named Jefferson to solve mysteries.  I'm sure there's a lot of mileage here for film studies graduates but what can I say other than it just comes off as tiresome seventy years later.

 

"Awww, I get a case all built up and I have to make tea."    

Beggars in Ermine (1934), Phil Rosen.

Beggars in Ermine is a strange film full of unsettling images and ideas.   The story is that the well-liked owner of a steel mill, John "Flint" Dawson, loses everything including his wife to his second-in command, an enemy named Marley.  Marley tries to have Dawson murdered on the job, but the attempt fails, leaving Dawson severely handicapped.  Marley then wrests control of the company using power of attorney.  Suddenly the once prosperous Dawson is legless and destitute, unable even to pay for his private hospital room.

The film then moves into the realm of social issues, making it much more of a historical artifact than other films I have seen from the same time period.  We see Dawson find companionship amongst other men in his position: mainly previously able-bodied men transformed into society's rejects due to work accidents, illness, and some by congenital handicaps.  Dawson and his new friend, a blind accordionist, wander the country seeking to connect with the massive but largely invisible body of licensed beggars, men scraping by selling pencils and other trinkets.   Dawson sees great potential in this invisible army and organizes the beggars into a private society.  He then collects a membership fee of sorts, invests this and eventually regains his lost wealth but also brings material comforts to the members who had previously been left to the streets.  Actor Lionel Atwill's performance gives Dawson an irrepressible nobility, despite having been reduced to beggary.

It's possible some might think this is a story about rehabilitating the image of the working man, bringing dignity to the handicapped and celebrating collectivism.   I would instead say this is a story that celebrates the capitalist.   Whether or not he is liked by either his workers or the members of his society, this is a story of a wealthy industrialist who regains his wealth off of the backs of many.  By the end of the film, Dawson has control of his steel mill once again, and has Marley trapped in one of the offices.  Having achieved his main goal, he turns into a bit of a cruel fascist.  The final scene shows Dawson wheeling himself onto a balcony to placate a crowd of angry factory workers, the very image of a monarch waving to his subjects.

Transforming this novel (credited to Esther Lynd Day, an author that I could find absolutely no information on) into film posed some challenges that Monogram was not fully equipped to overcome.  Key scenes were shot on the site of a steel processing facility (I assume).  Yet there was difficulty capturing sound in outdoor scenes and, as can be seen below, the cameraman is quite visibly casting a shadow in one panning shot!  Still, a complex story and ambitious project for Monogram.

 

Invisible Ghost (1941) Joseph H Lewis.

Karloff, in Edgar G Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934).

Ah, these men of the 30s and 40s B's, keeping up appearances in their suits and smoking jackets, pining away for their lost wives.  Lingering before her portrait or erm, well, lovingly studying her embalmed body in their unwavering dedication to the notion of eternal marriage.  How romantic, this love that never fades and drives them all slowly insane.

Invisible Ghost is a terrible movie, let's not kid ourselves.  It's full of B-movie chestnuts, including the nightmarish court scene convicting an innocent man, the older wealthy man living in his exquisitely furnished home with his dutiful and gorgeous adult daughter.  We even have twin brothers.  Much of Invisible Ghost makes no sense.  So... Bela Lugosi's house has been the scene of multiple murders, you say?  And nobody thinks it odd that the whole famdamily stays there without starting to point fingers at one another?  The story is that Lugosi's wife has absconded with a strange man, only to end up in a terrible car wreck that kills her lover and unhinges her mind.  Weirdness creeps into this somewhat stilted film:  Lugosi's gardener finds the runaway wife and keeps her in his basement until the best time to inform his boss that she's returned home, not wanting to expose the family to her temporary insanity.  Lugosi of course is not quite mens sana himself we discover;  he has a bit of a fissure in his own psyche.  Not particularly original but in some instances eerie...  a temporarily mad Lugosi is stricken with murderous intent, creeps into his daughter's bedroom where she is sleeping, slips off his housecoat and holds it out like a garrote...

The Death Kiss (1932), Edward L Marin.

Bela Lugosi in a nicely cut suit, just hanging in the background with the other B actors.

Cruddy.  I'm not sure what morons hired Bela Lugosi only to keep him out of the film for most scenes.   Get ready for a lot of wooden lines explaining what is going on, and a movie studio owner who runs around crying "Oy!  The money this is costing me!"  Filmed very cheaply on the Tiffany Studios lot.  And the title sounded SO intriguing!

The Outer Gate (1937), Raymond Cannon.

This B is leavened with a little more creativity than usual for Monogram.  Young Bob Terry is convicted of embezzlement, and his future father-in-law John Borden decides to stick to the logical facts rather than trust in his personal knowledge of Terry's good character.  Terry's in the slammer for five years until the truth of his innocence is revealed and he is pardoned.  When he gets out, an opportunity arises for him to frame Borden for embezzlement in revenge!   Will he do it?  The scenarios are pretty far-fetched, but supporting actors are strong: Kay Linaker, playing Bob's girlfriend, brings dignity and the line, "Aww, come on, Bob.  You're young, white and twenty-one!" and endearing prison pal is played by B stalwart Eddie Acuff.  There's an unusual nightclub scene that has a very improvisational feel to it: a man performing animal impressions tries unsuccessfully to fend of an annoying drunk.  "One jackass at a time!" he begs, before launching into a harmonica performance.

This film does better than most Monograms which can be painfully tedious to watch, made up of nothing but stagnant medium shots.  There's greater variety of camera shots and angles, and, as can be seen in the screenshot above, some use of dramatic lighting.

From Shorpy.com:  the Alamo theatre in Washington, DC is plastered with ads for The Outer Gate (1937).   Photo by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.

Howard Hawks: the Grey Fox of Hollywood (1997) Todd McCarthy.

It's kind of hilarious that the man who learned his craft making silents but became known for fast-talking flicks when sound came in was apparently the type of guy who said very little himself.  When he did talk, he spoke slooooowly.  His film Twentieth Century is credited with introducing a faster pace and naturalness to dialogue by having actors' lines overlap.  Previous attempts to crank the pace of human interaction in film are attributed to fast cutting or the specific style of actors like James Cagney.  McCarthy's examination of Hawks' deliberate rethinking of the art of conversation on film is wonderful.  "You're liable to interrupt me and I'm liable to interrupt you," Hawks said, "so you write in such a way that you overlap the dialogue but not lose anything.  It's just a trick.  It's also a trick getting people to do it- it takes them about two or three days to get accustomed to it and then they're off."  I would love to take  acting tips from Hawks, but then, I'm already pretty good at interrupting most people I talk to!

McCarthy's subject, who kept almost no papers and was prone to tall tales (McCarthy's skepticism of oral history done by folks like Bogdanovich is very interesting), must have been a challenge to pin down yet he draws a very detailed picture of the man.  "No one has ever claimed to have seen Howard Hawks lose his composure, his calm demeanor, or his sense of control, even when drunk, angry or under severe pressure," writes McCarthy.  "By the same token, no one saw him deliriously happy or celebratory." I questioned, while reading, McCarthy's reluctance to make strong statements on Hawks' political views; for much of the book it appears as though McCarthy found his subject to be completely objective about politics, more engrossed with his passion to tell a good yarn, with only the most subtle right-wing leanings.  Is there such a thing as a person without politics?  McCarthy leaves it to his sources to let the picture of Hawks' views emerge.  In describing an abandoned film idea about the Vietnam war late in Hawks' career, McCarthy writes, "One can only agree ... that, given Hawks' naive refusal to engage the inevitable political implications of such a project and his lack of firsthand knowledge about the war, 'It's good for him that he never made the film'." 

Hawks, friends with both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, ruminated year after year about making The Sun Also Rises into a film.  It never came to be, but both the description of the relationships between Hawks and these authors, as well as the discussion of Hawks' approach towards filming written works is fascinating.  Unlike some, Hawks played loosely with original works yet transformed these premises into lasting films.  Despite his personal failings (McCarthy also makes interesting comments about Hawks' sexuality) Hawks emerges as a man committed above all to the craft of film-making, and one of its indisputable masters.

How unfair is it that some of these films are next to impossible to find.  No boxed set of Hawks silents, including the first definitive film of his career A Girl in Every Port?  Tiger Shark is not on DVD?  What is wrong with whoever owns the rights to these things?  How is it that von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) (McCarthy describes it as "one of the most important films to come out of the late silent period" and one of the first gangster pictures),  is basically forgotten?

Wild Style (1983), Charlie Ahearn.

So much fun!  Graffiti artist Lee Quinones basically plays himself, tagging up burned buildings in the South Bronx.  No plot, just the source of a bunch of good samples and culminates in a fantastic outdoor concert in an amphitheater with lots of popping and locking. 

Check out the girl in the background chuggin'.  In this scene, a stark contrast with the pseudo-documentary look of the rest of the film (this scene is starchy and stilted and filmed in your quintessential white-walled contemporary art gallery), Quinones talks with acquisitive Manhattan curators who want to commodify his talent.  I wonder what his pieces go for nowadays! 

Lee Quinones' more current work.