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!

The Lineup (1958), Don Siegel / 5 Against the House (1955), Phil Karlson.

Reno, Reno, Reno, baby, Reno, Reno, Reno!

Finishing up the first volume of my Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics set, I'm licking my chops ready to start the second.  I found 5 Against the House the weakest film of the whole collection.  The title alone screams heist, but none of this gets going until Kim Novak and boyfriend Guy Madison have canoodled for a half-hour or MORE.  Zzzzzzzzz.  Actual heist concept these middle aged "college kids" (Korean war vets) dream up is totally corny and doomed to fail.  You know, you just never hear about Reno anymore.  Does anyone still go? 

The Lineup by contrast, while not a perfect film, is pretty darn slick.  Based on a popular TV show, there's an obligatory but completely pointless line up scene which must have been there just to satisfy studio execs who wanted people to make the connection between the film and the show.  Filled with gorgeous location views of San Francisco, the story turns on a completely hokey concept:  that an Asian based heroin trade would plant teeny quantities of drugs on unsuspecting tourists and then employ psychos to retrieve it once they are back home in America!  OK, but listen-- Eli Wallach as said psycho, his elderly mentor and their "wheelman" make this too thrilling!   Bonus:  crazed banter between noir buff Eddie Muller and author James Ellroy on the commentary track make this an incredible package.  I'm your kind of people, guys! 

 That's some collision!  From The Lineup

Slaves in Bondage (1937), Elmer Clifton.

I wish I could walk right into nightclub scenes of 30s and 40s movies, past the characters and the plot, pick up an imaginary cocktail and hang out & listen to the performance onstage.  I can't think of better accompaniment to a dinner than professional dancers and musicians.  Unlike the diner, these deco clubs seem not to exist anywhere anymore.  The shot above is from a beautiful scene in Slaves in Bondage:  a sensual tango accompanied by soft xylophones.   I always wait for characters to comment on these amazing acts - they rarely do.   In this scene, our villain says, "I'm bored.  Let's get out of here."  What!  

Slaves in Bondage is supposedly an exploitation flick about prostitution rings.  It's actually a decent mystery with likable leads.  Condemned in '37 as "wholly objectionable" by the National Legion of Decency, this film would likely earn a PG-13 these days.  All the risque material fits with the narrative - hardly exploitative.  (OK, there's that one spanking scene - big whoop).  Lona Andre has cartoonish cute looks and her character is no dummy.  A manicurist in a barber shop, she twigs onto the fact that one of her best paying (and overly attentive) customers has sidelined her journalist boyfriend by saddling him with a pocket of marked bills.  While this client (Wheeler Oakman, playing Jim Murray) is the nominal bad guy, house madame Belle Harris (played by Florence Dudley) is the more disturbing character who does all the hands-on work finding naive young ladies desperate to make a few dollars.  There's a sizable cast of fascinating nobodies but I especially liked the hopeless acrobats, even though we never discovered if they ever paid the rent!

  

A Successful Failure (1934), Arthur Lubin.

Lovely Ruth thinks twice about Mr Pencil Mustache's latest offer, one which does not involve marriage.

Dreaming of having his own humour column, henpecked Ellery Cushing cranks out one-liners by day in his study.  By night he is a copy editor at the local newspaper until he's canned by a cranky, penny-pinching boss.  Cushing is rescued from poverty by an old newspaper buddy who helps him parlay his mountain of jokes about the follies of domestic life into a new job in radio.

Crumpled old Cushing is the timid voice of traditional values that keep his family together.  William Collier Sr does a good job depicting the exhausted head of the family, a man struggling against the challenges of modernity.  His pretty daughter Ruth is steps away from a ruined life at the hands of a millionaire creepster, and his son Robert is an enthusiastic but naive supporter of "proletariat" politics; both hound him for money and are apparently too lazy to actually look for work.  More typical of earlier Monogram productions (i.e., Beggars in Ermine), this film recognizes the contemporary politics and events of mid-30s America.  In fact, A Successful Failure is explicitly anti-Communist.  By the film's end Cushing has denounced rabble rousing, decried the fall of Wall Street and praised the New Deal.   Despite the reactionary tone that makes an everyday father a "successful failure," the film likely struck its contemporary viewers as realistic and relevant. 

You can tell they are Communists, because they meet in the dark with torches!

Isle of the Dead (1945), Mark Robson.

Sadly, one of the weakest Lewton films.  One-dimensional story basically laid bare from the opening title card, so every subsequent plot point can be easily guessed.  Lewton recycles from his earlier works and Karloff is no great asset, sporting a curly mop of grey hair that makes him look like a depressed clown.  Apparently Karloff suffered from spinal pain that necessitated surgery around the time of filming, but still, this film is a mess!