Prison Mutiny/ You Can't Beat the Law (1943), Phil Rosen.

Stand on this dot for twelve hours, prisoner!

Boy, I felt like I was standing on a dot for twelve hours, and this only runs 61 minutes!  Johnny Gray is a carefree guy who gets into scrapes (i.e., speeding tickets) which of course means he's probably also a hardened criminal.  He gets ten years for robbery in a mix-up but when he's eventually pardoned he decides it might be fun to be a prison warden!  Huh?!  Definitely a sequence of highly unlikely situations made worse by terrible acting and dialogue as clunky and wooden as a trebuchet.  Here's a snippet:

Prison Guard:  There are some things you better find out before you get a lot of ideas.  You're here because you committed a crime.  You broke a law that society saw fit to enact for its own protection.  

Johnny:  Somebody better pass a law to protect me from society.  I was framed!  What do you think about that?

Prison Guard:  I don't think it's very original.  Every man in here will tell you that about himself.  You're here to do time.  To pay a debt.  We're here to see that you do.

ZZZzzzzz!   I'd like to arrest Phil Rosen and everyone involved for wasting my time!

The Return of Chandu (1934), Ray Taylor.

How refreshing to see Bela Lugosi paternal, protective and possibly even romantic.  This to me is so typically 1930s:  elegant and tinged with Orientalism.  In the story, Egyptian princess Nadji is at risk of being kidnapped by the priest of a mysterious cult who wishes to sacrifice her, thereby transferring her soul into the body of the cult's dead priestess.  In other words, the same plot as The Mummy (1999)! 

This is a serial B that originated as a radio program.  Initially in Chandu the Magician (1932), Lugosi was the evil nemesis but here he stars as Chandu, also known to a family of well-to-do wonderbread Californians as Uncle Frank. Each segment is 20 minutes long and ends with a crazy cliffhanger.  Loved it!  

 

 Slightly embarrassed henchmen praying to Bast in kitten garb.

Three Ages (1923), Buster Keaton.

Buster gives a guy in a lion suit a manicure.

Buster Keaton =  symmetrical films full of athleticism and self-deprecating wit.  Brilliant! 

Spooks Run Wild (1941), Phil Rosen.

Spider on a string!  Spider on a string!

My first look at any East Side Kids (/Bowery Boys/ Dead End Kids) vehicle hits the series in the middle.  Dead End, first a play (1935) and then a film (1937), examined the serious social issue of limited life prospects for the young in New York slums.  This story was re-told and recycled, using many of the same younger actors, and eventually  morphed into a comedy franchise.  Yes, within about ten short years, ghetto kids were making jokes about "bein' disadvantaged" and sent to summer camp!  The term "kids" should be taken loosely:  a number of these guys look like they are in their mid-20s, including a nicely built young chap named "Pee Wee" who meanders around in a wifebeater!  (Hey, someone had to say it)!

Spooks Run Wild, which fell into public domain, is a cheapie from Monogram that has the kids running amok in a heavily cob-webbed manor taken over by Bela Lugosi and Little Person actor Angelo Rossitto.  This makes about three B-movies I have seen with Rossitto as Lugosi's henchman.  There's a few strange sequences where Lugosi gently lifts him into vehicles, out of coffins, etc.  Rossitto worked for years on end, and even appeared in one of the Mad Max movies!  Plot predictably holds water like a sieve, and Lugosi appears to be on the verge of busting a gut in many scenes.  Hey, and now I know where to get PANTS in the Lower East Side!

 

 

Johnny Reno (1966), RG Springsteen.

Ain't no man alive that can whip me!

Poor Jane Russell.  Edith Head puts her in a tacky, hackneyed red and black dress worn by all whorey types in westerns, and all she gets to do is bitch and moan about a dull guy with an awesome name: Johnny Reno.  There's not even any snappy lines for her!  The indignity!  Plus, I'd like to know how bad this RG Springsteen was that I wondered when is this fight scene going to be over already!? 

The Most Depressing Biographies: If This Was Happiness, Barbara Leaming and Bombshell: the Life and Death of Jean Harlow, David Stenn.

Reading these two bios while being shack-wacky and suffering through PMS was probably not a wise choice.  I thought I'd try the Rita Hayworth one as a way to alleviate the crushing sadness I felt reading the life story of Jean Harlow - dear Lord, big mistake!  Both women's families saw their daughters as cash cows and pushed their daughters into work while the girls were still in their teens:  Harlow had Mother Jean while Rita had her father, Eduardo Cansino.  The antics of Rita's weasel face big band husband # whatever, Dick Haymes, just gave me a headache.  And, what was the attraction with this Aly Khan guy, can anyone enlighten me?  While reading about his playboy tendencies, I imagined a sleek and sexy creature that stepped out of a Mughal painting.  He looks like a balding bureaucrat.  Anyhoo, still looking for mid-winter pick-me-up, seeing as any kind of trip down south is out of the question.

Underworld (1927), Josef von Sternberg.

 "I guess this is why you're called Feathers?" 

They made Scarface right the first time, and it was called Underworld!  Ben Hecht scripted both; this one is the masterpiece and established the gangster genre.  Very dynamic camera use and full of wonderful details.  What other toughnut gangsters let starving kittens lick milk off their fingers?

 

Bull Weed finds a feather in his cigarette case.

The Corpse Vanishes (1942), Wallace Fox.

Daffy!  Trust me, it's worth suffering through the terrible dialogue because this horror B is fairly amusing and moves swiftly.  The premise is loopy (of course) and leaves us standing knee deep in unanswered questions and loose ends.  Lugosi is an orchid horticulturalist / mad scientist who extracts an unspecified liquid from the necks of young ladies with a long needle and transfers whatever this is (phlogiston?) into his wife's neck, providing her with everlasting youth.  Got it?  Frisky female reporter Pat Hunter catches on to this, and spends an eventful night at Lugosi's place.   Her beau Dr Foster is endlessly dull and dopey.  "Dr Foster!  A man broke into my room last night while I was sleeping!"  "Oh, it must have been your imagination, Pat."  OK, bub.  Foster is played by perfectly-named Monogram regular Tristram Coffin (no joke).

Tiger Shark (1932), Howard Hawks.

Now this is how you fish -- nets, forget about it!  Some kind of industrial accident happens every two minutes (quit standing in the coils of rope, guys!) but I guess it's all part of the game if you're after the tiger shark's favourite snacks.  Edward G Robinson plays a frontin' Portuguese fishing captain; he  marries a woman who confesses she doesn't really love him but only just appreciates him.  I could just smell the pungent cannery, with all the great footage taken along the California coast.  I think the same story (also with Edward G) came together better in Manpower but Zita Johann is less hard-bitten than Marlene Dietrich is in the same role.  Though no dope, Zita's very much a little deco statuette in place of the boxy, seedy creature of the noirish remake.

The best line of the movie has to be: "ONIONS!  I LOVE ONIONS!";  that is, aside from: "Imma give you the most best feesh you ever see!" and variations of the same.  On that note, it is interesting that in a film packed with characters of different ethnicities, it is "Pipes" Boley, the most clearly WASP character, and Quita who get together; there is a funny little moment where Quita admits her mother was not Portuguese, to the dismay of Robinson's character Mike Mascarenhas. Reminds me of one of my favourite "What's My Line" clips:

 

"Got for whaaat?"

 

Telephone Operator (1937), Scott Pembroke.

Corny Monogram story about two cute-as-button gals in a small town working as-- well, you know, telephone operators.  In an incredibly risk-averse story line, two drifters that also happen to be linesmen (they know how to string up telephone wires) come to town and chase after the operators like wolves after lamb chops.  A disaster strikes, and everyone has to help get the word out.  These poor girls live dreadfully parochial existences in Dog Poop, USA or wherever, having to uphold lily white reputations lest they be sacked without warning. Thank God for the bureau of employment standards!  Ends with an exciting finale that includes lots of stock footage clips.

And here we have the town heel, Mr Campbell.  He's wearing the "dashing" model, Moustache #248. 

The Hole in the Wall (1929), Robert Florey.

I'm going to be honest and admit that while watching this early talkie, I suffered from a New Year's hangover and probably missed a few details.  But as a total amateur unschooled in film history, my first reaction to it is that I would imagine it would be very rich to write about.  It's liminal, standing between silent and talking pictures; and it's unusual, being shot in New York by a French director.  This film belongs to Claudette Colbert, who gives a confident performance even though this is only one of her first onscreen; both she and Edward G Robinson come across as relatively mature performers in an embryonic art form.  The story goes that Colbert, recently released from prison, wants to kidnap the granddaughter of a wealthy woman who had her framed for theft to get her out of her house and away from her son's attention.  Colbert implicates herself in Robinson's fake psychic racket, hiding out as Madame Mystera until a newspaper man sniffs out the truth behind the kidnapping.

The sets and props have an expressionistic flair, and several scenes drift dreamily into silence and pantomime. The actors demonstrate a few wildly rhetorical stances from the silent era (or stage performances), but words are spoken very naturally.  Colbert especially has some touchingly realistic exchanges with the child actor Marcia Kagno.  And the little nightclub scene below is so lovely: in it, Robinson confesses he loves Colbert but is rejected, and the emotions are revealed mainly in the interplay of the actors' hands.

Once again, the antagonists are privileged individuals who tread over the rights of ordinary people,  their wealth allowing them to use the law to their advantage.  I wonder where this trope has gone to in American movies!