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!

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), John Rawlins.

X-Ray hears the password at Wood Plastics, Inc.

All eyes are on the villains in this film (an unusually cool Boris Karloff as Gruesome, and craggy faced  Skelton Knaggs as X-Ray) who are far more captivating than the heroes Dick Tracy, Tess Truehart et al. This is a little different from some B-movies, in which everyone is dull as dishwater.  Ralph Byrd played Dick Tracy for much of his career but frankly, I just didn't think he had the jaw OR the nose for the part!  Playing a blandly assuaging type, he parades around with a smirk for many scenes, poking fun at the Irishness of Pat Pattin, Plainclothesman (who swears he hasn't had a single beer since he started the job).  Anyway, Gruesome stumbles across nerve gas which he and dive-bar pianist Melody use to rob a bank, killing a guard while making their hasty exit.  All the scenes with the veteran character actors move swiftly, but the story sags when it gets to Tracy.  In one spot, he alternately whines and threatens a woman who is an unwitting accomplice in the crime.  Nice tactics, Dick!  Well, at least this one didn't have a lot of rubber prosthetics flapping off of Al Pacino's mug!

The Damned Don't Cry (1950), Vincent Sherman.

 
Or, as it screeches on the box in lipstick red cursive: "The damned don't cry [EXCLAMATION POINT!]"  Just the right tone of batshit!  Hugely enjoyable women's melodrama with enough mobster action to keep your date happy too.  Joan Crawford shakes off her dusty, hardscrabble life and cheap husband (cripes, even her parents are packed into their tarpaper dump) and decides that she deserves more.  Making a series of moral missteps in her quest for dough she becomes entangled in the affections of the stone cold head of a crime syndicate.  Crawford -who was forty five at the time of  filming (!)- almost plays several different characters:  the naive housewife,  a gum-smacking model, an elegant society heiress and she waltzes through endless divine sets.  I love the story of the American nobody who apes the better classes in an unrelenting, nail-breaking climb upwards.  Is she wrong to want MORE?  Is the only way for a divorced woman to get more to sell out?  We can't help but cheer her on as she uses and dumps every sleaze-bag and chump that come her way.  She meets her match in David Brian or "George Castleman," the man at the centre of power.  Their first discussion sees him crack a window and ask in a snide voice what kind of perfume she's drenched in (must have been some kind of Axe Body Spray for angry 50s chicks).   Priceless!