The Rogues Tavern (1936), Robert F Hill.

Lazy, lazy, lazy!  Indistinct characters, corny jokes and someone running around with a puppet made from a stuffed dog!  Aside from the decent finale in which one of our B-actresses is allowed to chew the scenery to her heart's content, this one's a dud.  The foley artist was on the ball though, I definitely heard every shoe step.

American Grindhouse (2010), Elijah Drenner.

American Grindhouse is Exploitation Films 101: a good overview of movies that fall outside the realm of good taste, movies that were generally excluded from the mainstream viewing experience.  It explores the evolution of the genre from the first moments of nudity caught on film, to the educational sex pictures, to women-in-prison movies, to gore and eventually porn.  American Grindhouse posits that there's often been a great, productive relationship between the taboo and the mainstream and at times often not much difference between the methods of an exploitation film dismissed as trash (Blood Feast, Last House on the Left) and methods used by directors who couldn't be more revered (Psycho's Hitchcock, Jaws's Spielberg).

John Landis, one of the interviewees, is delightfully entertaining to listen to as is Kim Morgan, film writer and author of Sunset Gun blog:  http://sunsetgun.typepad.com.  In Sunset Gun she appears fully immersed in the long lost world of the Hollywood golden era, speaking intimately of stylish, long gone film icons.  I would suggest she may even be depicting herself as a character who could have walked out of a film noir:  sexy L.A. blonde with a taste for classic cars.  I got a big kick out of Morgan because in American Grindhouse she's surprisingly funny.  Big noir thinker Eddie Muller also appears and many of the ideas he expressed in his 1996 book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema gives American Grindhouse its intellectual backbone.  Hey, don't skip over this - picking through trash can be quite revealing.

Dear Boris: the life of William Henry Pratt a.k.a. Boris Karloff (1975), Cynthia Lindsay.

Boris Karloff (far right) and his brothers, London 1933.

It must be next to impossible these days to build yourself up from scratch, successfully effacing all things you did that wish you could forget about.  Did you marry the wrong guy and don't want anyone to know?  Want a more appealing surname?  Seems like most of our favourite personalities from the golden age of Hollywood transformed themselves into whatever they wished; recordkeeping was perhaps less reliable (especially in frontier territories) and of course google didn't exist to put everything you ever did or said in stone for all to see, forever.  Boris Karloff is a great example.  Born the very English William Henry Pratt, he spent several years in British Columbia performing in theatre troupes and doing odd jobs.  He's remembered fondly in Regina for pitching in when a tornado blew through town in 1912, leaving the streets strewn with planks and debris.  (The tornado also bankrupted the troupe he had been associated with, the Jean Russell Company). 

Author Cynthia Lindsay was a friend of Karloff's (godmother to his daughter) and this book has a chummy if undisciplined tone.  She calls herself a detective as she attempts to sniff out facts like how many times he really was married (we never find out).   While not prudish, she's polite, yet her insertion of herself into this biography has little value.  When interviewing Karloff's ex-wife Dorothy (and an old friend), she describes herself as somewhat uncomfortable in the role of biographer:  "we both immediately got the giggles," she writes, "and it wasn't easy forcing myself into the role of 'Brenda Starr, reporter.'"    The book is more of a scrapbook than true a biography, scattered with amusing anecdotes and family photos.  But for all her detective work, Lindsay digs up very little on Karloff's pre-Hollywood years.

Lindsay does discuss the ghettoization of actors by ethnic background in early Hollywood.  Though Karloff left England to escape its class-based rigidity, he seems to have projected a thoroughly English persona while in the actors' colony:  he played cricket, posed for a portrait with a cup of tea, and used distinctively English words and phrases.  Karloff cites Bela Lugosi's inability to launch a mainstream career as stemming from his difficulties assimilating completely into American culture.  "He spent a great deal of time with the Hungarian colony in Los Angeles, and this isolated him," Karloff is quoted as having said to an interviewer.   Karloff cleverly adopted an exotic mystique (and surname) but was never saddled with it, as was a truly foreign actor.  Like fellow Englishman Cary Grant, Karloff went out of his way to obfuscate his past; yet still I would have preferred something richer than this picture book.

The Jazz Singer (1927), Alan Crosland.

Oh, it gets worse.  WAY WORSE!

HILARIOUS. People will tell you this is boring and mainly just a landmark because it's one of the first films to use synchronized sound.  Wrong!  The sound segments pop out and grab you.  They move faster.  To my eyes the differences were stunning - I can only imagine the impact on its contemporary audiences.  

Gut reaction:  Al Jolson's eternal fame is a total fluke.  He doesn't have much screen presence, he talks through his "jazz songs" and he's no looker.  Like mama Rabinowitz, I don't get it.  The scene (pictured above) where he readies himself for his blackface act was oddly protracted as he methodically applied all that facepaint.  What really gave me the creeps was the little scrap of fabric he pulls over his hair to complete his look.  What the eff was that made out of? 

I think it's time for a 2011 reboot.

AAAAAAAAAA!

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now (2006), Phillip Lopate, ed.

Having come from a place of (sometimes deliberate) not-knowing,  I have been walking around telling anyone I run into the amazing things I learned from this collection of essays.  Did you know Carl Sandburg wrote movie reviews for the Chicago Daily News in the 20s?  Did you know, did you know?  I feel like a ten year old that just got the first volume of the World Book in the mail.

Lopate's choices are marvelous; bold ideas resonate throughout the book.  I feel as though I should have been acquainted with Manny Farber years ago, who touts the "toughest, most authentic native talents" in his essay "Underground Films."  And why I haven't read Pauline Kael's fundamental piece "Trash, Art and the Movies," until now-- augh!   How did she know why I never wanted a PhD in film studies?  "We shouldn't convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of other arts," she writes.  "If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition."  As one that sighs deeply at Analysis of the Obvious:  Turning Common Sense into Academese I'd like to quietly applaud Kael for her words.  (Sadly, Susan Sontag's offering "The Imagination of Disaster" is the kind of dull analysis that seems to have spawned even more dull analysis).  Yes, I prefer the tacky, from-the-gut reactions to film, the ghostwritten autobiography, the Million Monkey film blogs to the overblown, dry jargon laden junk found in the cranky peer reviewed cliques.  American Movie Critic's strength is that the authors talk film, but are not all film theorists or academics.  They are writers first.

Nightfall (1957), Jacques Tourneur.

Insurance adjuster James Gregory is keeping the wife up.

Hot damn!  He's got thugs and insurance fraud investigators on his tail.  Aldo Ray is keeping the lowest profile possible, making a few bucks sketching ad concepts in a crummy walk up.  Why's he laying so low - did he just pull off a bank job?  Stiff his crook buddies?  Maybe it's the ripple effect of Double Indemnity, but whisper "insurance fraud" and I'm there; it's one of those premises used to press down hard on a character, revealing his moral code and whether his hide is tough.  Nightfall --who pulled this title randomly out of their arse, by the way?-- takes off running and doesn't stop 'til the last frame.  Loved it.  A bit talky, yeah, but grown up talk and succinct overall, taking us from neon-lit LA to snow-capped peaks in "Moose, Wyoming" all beautifully photographed precisely as I'd expect from Jacques Tourneur. Tiny cast is perfect with hulking Aldo Ray linking up with little cropped-hair beauty Anne Bancroft, and James Gregory using his everyday looks to blend in with the wallpaper and take notes. 

The Coen brothers must have seen this one-- there were shades of Fargo throughout Nightfall -- stumbling through snow, the cozy ordinariness of our pseudo public servant Gregory, the wildcard psychopath that casually flicks chaos all over the place.  Gosh, I had no idea that the dad from The Parent Trap (Brian Keith, who's just about ubiquitous in these Columbia noirs) was such a freaky deak in the 50s.

The olden days: let me help you choose from this mind-boggling number of newspaper titles, sir.

Shockproof (1947), Douglas Sirk.

Good heavens, that is a lot of pattern.

My first taste of Sam Fuller's writing, which may have been diluted/mangled by co-writer Helen Deutsch.  Shockproof has an interesting premise:  that parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) falls for his pretty new parolee Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight).  But each step forward in the unfolding of the story I thought to myself, as if!  I did get the sense that some old biddy crossed out a lot of passages from a pulp novel while shaking her head & clicking her tongue.  But there's too much gone haywire with this script for me to think we can blame it all on co-writers.

  A passerby catches sight of a suicide.

The Ape (1940), William Nigh.

Oh, if only they'd had some money for classy camera work and editing because this is not a terrible film-- it just looks like crap.  Mellifluous-voiced Karloff is an oddball doctor obsessed with curing spinal injuries and is distrusted by the local townspeople.  The circus comes to town, an ape gets loose, and somehow Dr Adrian's experiments make miraculous headway!  Not a bad Monogram horror:  it has a story with a linear trajectory and logical conclusion, some moments of suspense (rather than outright confusion) and some of the players (outside of headliner Karloff) do make an impression.  Ape suit worn by Ray "Crash" Corrigan, one of the "Range Busters" from the Monogram series of B-westerns.

In a later interview, Gene O'Donnell (who played Danny, numbskull boyfriend of Dr Adrian's patient Frances), claimed, "You want to know how much I got for The Ape?  A hundred and twenty dollars, man!"  That's worth about $1000 today, for seven days' solid work.  I don't even want to know how Snooki manages to pull in $30,000 an episode.   http://www.tvguide.com/News/Top-TV-Earners-1021717.aspx

How much did they spend?

 

B-movie budget summary sheet

As Charles Flynn and Todd McCarthy explain in their article, "The economic imperative:  why was the B-movie necessary?" (1974),  Republic was "the largest and most stable" studios turning out B-movies, even after the mid-40s.  Their article shows that Republic had four general categories of films:  "Jubilee" (cheap B-films, two of which were made a month), "Anniversary"(typical budget in the range of $200,000), "Deluxe" ($500,000) and when the studio tried its hand at A-quality, the "Premiere" class (over a million).

The Missing Corpse (1945), Albert Herman.

Oh my God, he's in the linen chest!

One-note comedy of manners in which a murdered body is planted on an innocent businessman who happened to have a grudge against the deceased.  Everyone turns in their work on time, but nobody shows any imagination.   Do you hear me, PRC? 

Oh my God, he's in the woodpile!

Possessed (1947), Curtis Bernhardt.

Joan Crawford loses it for Van Heflin (!), a smug engineer who claims to be more in love with the curve of a parabola than anything she's got and blows cigarette smoke in her face while "making love to the piano."  Crawford plays nurse Louise Howell, a woman who from the first moment we see her does not have much of a grip on reality.  Very strange tone to the film - is it a soap, a horror? - it's kind of everything.  And I'm not very interested in parsing the term "noir," which also gets attached to this film.  I was surprised by one sequence in which Howell's husband brings her to his lake house, which is draped for the winter season and was the site where his previous wife drowned; Howell had been this woman's aide.  Even though the house is deserted, Howell is convinced she can hear her old mistress buzzing for her through the intercom.  As she makes her way upstairs, we get a proto-hand held camera effect.  The shaky shots follow Crawford's figure up the stairs and into the empty bedroom, giving that same immediacy and intimacy than it's meant to do today.  OK, so I might have jumped when let out that blood curdling yell once she gets to the bedroom.  Very cool! 

The themes in these "women's pictures" intrigue me.   I can never tell if any of the men are supposed to be romantic ideals or if they are all meant to be seen as total unreliable dopes and scoundrels.  The trope of the wealthy man who stands by his psychotic, bedridden wife:  frankly, it seems to grate depressingly against any kind of fantasy - well, I'd rather be enjoying his cash, not going nuts laying in a four-poster.  This would be why I found The Damned Don't Cry far more fun than Possessed.  Van HEFLIN?  OK, I'll dip my toe: maybe Possessed could be seen as a women's noir, with hommes fatals the total undoing of our protagonist.

There's a lot of chitchat between Raymond Massey and Van Heflin about Canada which is amusing - apparently people are all "spread out thinly" (where did they go, Pickle Lake?) and we all drink a lot of "Kentucky Whisky" (not anymore).  Massey of course was born in Canada to a well-established family; while a grad student, I once volunteered to give historic tours of his childhood residence.  It was super deluxe, with built-in hardwood cabinetry, plenty of decorative plaster molding.  I followed a script and monotonously repeated that Raymond Massey was best known for playing Abe Lincoln.  The house by that point had fallen on hard times - in the 70s or 80s the basement was kitted out as a DJ booth for a radio station and by the 90s it was abandoned and used by squatters.  I came across a few forks while escorting the Raging Grannies through this interesting piece of architectural history.  I couldn't tell you if it is even standing today but another adjacent Massey residence is now The Keg.  Ah, Canada! 

Don't move, or I'll turn the Governor General's grandparents' place into a steak house!