Myrna Loy: December's Salve

The holidays is a time for joy, giving, family, religious or cultural iconography, cold, boredom, old people smells, excited new dogs, alcoholism, despair, sunshine, candy caning, and-- saving every cold, old dying soul from the terror of time--there's Myrna Loy. She's the ultimate salve for a wounded bloody and so very bowed end to the year, century, mankind, era. She was in THE THIN MAN, Myrna Loy, and FU MANCHU. That heavenly vixen so able to embody exotic blends of counterespionage agents, sexy sadists, loving witty and wry detective wives, good-natured prostitutes always willing to testify against the mob if it means saving an innocent whatever, and vamps with secret hearts of gold. Button-nose cute, too, with a twinkle in the eye so pronounced it's like looking into an ice-packed highball on a country club veranda as the sun sets...

TCM digs it, so Fridays they're pulling out the stops, it's Loy Fridays all month, and Acidemic has culled from its totterirng archives to tell you which ones might well be missed (post-code gender straitjacket re-donning) and must be watched, taped, adored, applied.

FRIDAY 12/9:

2 PM -MASK OF FU MANCHU  

(1932) - ***1/2

MGM's contribution to racist sensationalism, this great punchy little film plays like a massive headrush serial, with elaborate exotica sets: opium dens, expressionistic corridors, eerie operating rooms, lightning, crocodiles, spiked crushing walls, ear-drum bell torture, mind control and above and best of all, Myrna Loy as Fah Lo Suee, the sadistic-kinky daughter of the exonerated Fu Manchu (Karloff). As if that wasn't enough, one of the 'good guys' is Karen Morely, who insists she come along on the expedition to rescue ancient Chinese artifacts (the sword of Genghis Kahn) from the Chinese (i.e. Fu), who'll use them to stir a revolt to "kill the white man, and take his women!"
(for more: Free Fu and Fah Lo).

8 PM - LOVE ME TONIGHT

(1932) - ****

I haven't written much about it in the past, but I love this, for if he never made another film, this would make me a big Maurice Chevalier fan. A musical perfect even for those who dislike the genre and Jeanette MacDonald's trilling operetta singing. Here she's pretty sexy as is sister Loy, but not in a winky way - it's knowing and wry without being tawdry (and my favorite spoken song lyric, "you're not wasted away, you're just wasted." Amen. Myrna--playing a sex-starved sister trapped by her moral father at the family estate where no man is under 60, is alas mostly cut out due to being too sexy even for 1932. Every time I see it I long to crawl inside the screen and hurl myself into her welcoming boudoir. France, monsieur, ah France. The quest to find the footage of her singing her verse of "Mimi" while in lingerie in her boudoir is one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. All we have is the above still for now, but one day a pre-release print will be unearthed and the sky will crack open.

11:30 PM- NIGHT FLIGHT

(1933) - ***1/2

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) might not give Loy more than a scene or two but turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic meditation, full of great cool midnight moments all its own. Unfolding over one long night in the early days of night flying over the Andes down in Argentina, a very dangerous and historic period in post-WWI aviation--when planes were still open cockpit single propellors unable to get over the peaks, so they have to kind of wind their way through on instruments and one strong wind can blow them off course and straight out to sea or into the face of a mountain--it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and, sadly nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator in the cockpit down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction and the sublime moment he clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in Buenos Aires tango music on his headphones, and looks up at the dreamy moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Of course, if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy waiting at home, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile another isolated wife played by Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting.  (See: Andes Hard)

 1 AM: THIRTEEN WOMEN

(1932) ***

Myrna Loy may be gliding through her then-typecast parts as Asian or half-caste femme fatales but she's still got Loy star powers, so evil or not,you'll be rooting for her vendetta against a now-married and settled down pack of girls' college alumni racists, all the way (unless you're a prom school snob who's never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself), even if it would stung more and been more daring if Georgie was played by Anna May Wong instead, i.e. actually Asian or half caste. The racism would have some real bite, then, but one understands if not forgives perhaps these pre-code baby steps, and if you love Loy as I do you have a special spot in the dark of your heart for her early Asian vamp roles. What she lacks in the warmth and wit of her later persona she makes up for in slow measured cobra staring, taking full advantage of the unwritten rule where a vamp could get away with all sorts of verboten sordid sadism, as long as she was at least a half-caste (for full review - here)

 3:35: PENTHOUSE

(1933) ***1/2

This was the one that made critics and audiences perk up and go whoa, this girl is a frickin' star - it just took us awhile to catch on as she was trapped under all those faux-epicanthic folds and exotic headdresses. Warner Baxter is the typical mob lawyer with a secret heart of gold and a shocked butler - and Loy is a party girl his grateful mobster client (Nat Pendleton) hooks him up with, who then winds up helping him get the goods on a dickhead rival mobster who offed Myrna's roommate (Mae Clarke). Either way, she's resourceful, fearless and genuinely touched when he doesn't molest her the night she first sleeps over. You can actually see Loy's wings come out of her back and expand as her character realizes this guy's no naif-in-the-woods, but at the same time no douche, and so, now she doesn't have to get tiresomely noble like Clarke in Waterloo Bridge or resort to her old exotica spellbook. She sees the chance and blooms, and flies clear away with the picture. Nat Pendleton smiles like a helpful marriage counsellor, and it's that even-keeled honesty about character and innate nobility over labels, social standing and circumstance that prevail, leaving up feeling pretty optimistic about the future and smitten beyond words with little twinkly-eyed two-fisted Myrna.

5 AM: THE BARBARIAN 

(1933) - **1/2

Of course she still had a bunch of MGM contract parts to fill, and those miscegenation fantasies were big business - here it's the reverse where she's liberated from stodgy British marriage (she's half-Egyptian but--like Zita in The Mummy, Egyptian royalty, so it's okay) by a smoov tour guide gigolo (Ramon Navarro) who's thing is seducing rich bored British wives. (Like Svengali, we first meet him saying goodbye to one, and immediately setting out after another). At first she's just sport, but then he's so fed up with Loy's resistance he abducts her out into the desert, whips her, bathes her and ta-da, it turns out he's the son of a rich sheik on walkabout, so it's okay. As I wrote while in a pervious incarnation: "If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO ending winds to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders." (pop the full capsule here)

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That concludes the 9th. Coming up the following Friday (the fightin' 16th), most of the morning and afternoon are those quality but inert post-code MGM triangulated weepers that bottom out Loy boxes but then:

5 PM: STAMBOUL QUEST

(1934) Dir. Sam Wood

**/12

I must preface this recommendation by saying I'm personally no fan of the inescapable soap peddler George Brent. A holdover from the pre-Gable kind of pursed-lip romantic acting which seems today as gooey as a molasses spill, so that he's the bumbling American tourist (allegedly) who knocks the sublimely urbane counterspionage super spy Fraulein Doktor off her heels is a kraw-sticker in this otherwise enjoyable addition to the many pre-code movies made about either Fraulein Doktor or Mata Hari or some fictional combination, ala X-27 (Dietrich's DISHONORED). Why? Maybe it's the weirdly condescending trill in his voice, the way he talks to every girl like she's six and just skinned her knee, or his stupid face that kind of leans out with his nose like a self-satisfied anteater, or his wholesale buying into terrible romantic lines. He was made for woo, and his behavior here would today be hopefully labeled as stalking.

Here, as Doktor, Myrna Loy is in slinky and exotic mode (probably close to the last time - she had just made THE THIN MAN) and wears a fabulous dress in the climax, a big finale which leaves us with the notion, at least for awhile, that ardent Loy-wooer George Brent has been shot by a firing squad. Hinting at the steep 'price one must pay' as a hot female spy in Austrian counter-intelligence, she starts the movie ratting out Mata Hari for falling in love with a Russian officer --fatal for a femme fatale, we know from her strident position on the subject (and since Ben Hecht isn't writing it) that 'Fraulein Doktor' has doomed herself. Too bad for us it's the naive whimsicality of George Brent that woos her away from trapping double agents, and he treads all over her sublime machinations with his muddy American bungler feet.. (full)

Friday 12/23

Merry Xmas!

9:15 AM - THE GREAT ZIEGFELD 

(1936)

Trippy musical numbers evoke a time before TV or 3D movies, when the eye was courted as if an indulged royal baby. Or maybe I was just super strung out from a terrible weeklong fever last time I saw it (see: Flo, the Great and Powerful: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD and the Ludovico Flu)

4PM - I LOVE YOU AGAIN

(1941) - ***1/2

Loy and Powell are by now too old for the previous meet-ups' debonair sparkle; Loy's no-longer-amused and patient wife is now debating wether she has the energy to waste time yelling at him. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts to see them play characters who hurt themselves by hurting each other. It hurts her to be mean to him, to force him to re-examine his notion of himself as an adorable souse. Drinking men Loy's age slide into sobriety, moderation, or an alcoholic ward. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle. For an actress who's been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity to make her romance with either version of Powell believable, Loy's had to mellow, and so they seem like Nick and Nora Charles if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy. But then Nick relapses she loves him again and hence the title! His co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk makes a weak wooing combo, but it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't, and takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon beneath. But who can't forgive a little torture if provides even a moment of true bliss? (more: William Powell's Psychedelic Amnesia)

8PM - Dawn: THIN MAN MARATHON

 (See: Notes from a class struggle in a THIN MAN marathon)

--
Sorry loyal readers if my output late has slowed - I'm writing, but finishing things has become difficult - Diffused, scattered, trepidatious is my heart, even my usual pre-apocalyptic black humor is failing me. BUT things are coming, soon. Crom bless us, every one. fejjpfpdew[

PS - I missed the 1930 advocation of May-December romance, THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUTH, it was on last week, before I knew it was Loy month, but it will come again... and is avail on DVD... R

Pre-Code Capsules IV: PRESTIGE, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN, BLONDE VENUS, OUR BETTERS, BEAST OF THE CITY

PRESTIGE

1931-***

Melvyn Douglas dissolves before our eyes as a French officer put in charge of French Vietnam's most sweltering prison camp. Adolphe Menjou is the scheming major with designs on Douglas' new wife, Ann Harding; he probably sent Douglas off to the camp in the first place, hoping she'd stay behind so he can get his dirty little hobbit hands on her, as he's fond of doing in these sorts of FAREWELL TO ARMS-ish variations, but who can prove it? Harding's dad says she shouldn't follow Douglas into this jungle hell, but if she does she already has the only thing that can save her there: the 'prestige' of being white. She must never slacken her grip or lose her superior breeding! Never! The natives are a mix of African-American extras, genuine Asians, and ugly white dudes in a lot of make-up, all depicted as little more than untamed animals in comparison with the staunch white man and his wife. As with all the Commonwealth-set pre-codes, the specter of miscegenation hangs throughout!

A product of the relatively rough-edged RKO-Pathe studio, PRESTIGE has strong expressionist touches and excellent tracking shots: fire dances, cockfights, guillotines, whips, chains, and general white-on-black brutality, it's like John Ford on bad acid and malaria. Simultaneously racist and anti-colonialist, PRESTIGE should be shown in every college class about Vietnam, as an illustration of the colonialist root chord underwriting the rise of Ho Chi Minh. As the screwed-over 'hero,' Douglas starts out wanting to be nice, but gets a fever, sweats, collapses, shakes, and turns sadistic: chaining up prisoners, guillotining rebel leaders, and generally devolving into a hate-filled drunk. Harding is her usual lovely, wistful self. Her soft voice ever-crackling with dignity and bruised emotion. As befits her 'white prestige,' she does what she can, but they won't even let her hang curtains! And the ending is intense, lurid, and nihilistic. Hurrah! Only in the pre-code, and even then... only abroad.

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN

1932- Dir. William Cameron Menzies, Marcel Varnel
***1/2

Edmund Lowe takes things a little lighter than PRESTIGE's Melvyn Douglas for this more kid-friendly but still decidedly racist and colonially smug pre-code film.  Chandu (Lowe) is a lordly traveler who's learned the mystic secrets of the Yogis so now can do wilder rope tricks while saving the world from non-white power mongers like Roxor (Bela Lugosi). Chandu's scientist brother-in-law (Henry B. Walthall) is abducted by Roxer's dacoits, forced to work on a death ray that can destroy zee vorld!

Though one must put up with a shitload of tired comic relief from a drunken limey who bugs his eyes out over Chandu's magic tricks, it's worth watching for the constant bizarre touches and gorgeous art direction (William Cameron Menzies at his best) and one of the sexiest, wildest performances from Bela Lugosi. Lean, dashing, dressed in black like a cool pre-beatnik, he's at the height of his insane scenery-chewing, alive with gleeful menace. Speaking of fiery death rays, check out June Lang (below) in her sheer white gown being auctioned at a slave mart filled with lusty sheiks! Like PRESTIGE (above), CHANDU considers it a betrayal of white breeding to be so much as pawed by non-white hands, which of course made such pawing a popular threat in pre-code exotica. 

All in all, with its narrow escapes, cliffhanger derring do, visible nips, and Lugosi firing on all engines, Chandu is a great undiscovered (for most of us) treat. Playing like an excellent big-budgeted condensed serial, layered with fun, menace, and intrigue, great sets and wild rides, aside fro the racism, what's not to love? Some people have a problem with Edmund Lowe. Not me, I think he's great. He's no Gable or Grant, but he's cooler than Ronald Coleman.  Irene Ware is his love interest, the glamorous Princess Nadjii (it was OK for white men to marry foreign gals as long as they were royalty - a popular loophole to let America's horrific miscegenation hysteria go unchallenged even while living the fantasy.

BLONDE VENUS

1932 - ***

The first and (wisely) last time Paramount ever gave Marlene Dietrich a kid and husband, Von Sternberg here seems to be lampooning typical pre-code women's pictures, showing the divine Dietrich as a good mom scrubbing her son up German-style in the bath, and enduring her near-squalor apartment while hubby Herbert Marshall diddles in labs to no great effect except to give himself radium poisoning; she must go back to her old habits of vamping to pay for an expensive European treatment. When he finds out what she's been up to, he taciturnly snaps about his cuckolding benefactor: "I don't know whether to thank him or shoot him... dead!" When you're Herbert Marshall and the guy is Cary Grant, you're better off just thanking him, but Marshall instead labels Marlene an unfit mother. Much taking it on the lam with the kid ensues. 

 As a swinger in retirement, nothing gets me down like watching a layabout like Herbert Marshall use a kid to keep his hotter younger wife imprisoned in his stifling patriarchal caress du condescension. First, we're 'treated' to the early days of how Marshall and Dietrich met--he and his student pals stumble on her and some friends skinny-dipping in a sparkly stream, and they proceed to leer to their heart's content, which right there seems shitty and frat boyish. Next we see the product of their union, with her sleeves rolled up, bathing little Johnny while Marshall looks on, and, yeesh, you can't wait for her to bail on them both and get back into a smooth nightclub with some folks her own age. So much as I admire it, BLONDE VENUS is my least favorite of Dietrich's films with Von Sternberg. Even the esteemed "Hot Voodoo" sequence loses its edge once she puts on that hideous disco 'fro wig (above). Still, there are more great moments scattered around it than a dozen ordinary films: take for example the innuendo-driven shot of a fat diner owner puffing his cigar in anticipation of how the now broke Dietrich is going to pay for the meal she just fed to her little Johnny. Du hast mich betrogen, Johnny, in der ersten Stundt, indeed!

OUR BETTERS

1933 - ****

One of my favorite recent TCM discoveries, this has great saucy dialogue and sophisticated ideas on lover-swapping, especially as concerns two ladies of title, the American-born heiress Lady Grayston (Constance Bennett) and her voracious Duchess pal Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) and her constant gigolo, Pepi (Gilbert Roland). A weekend in the country is called for, REGLE DU JEU-style, wherein Grayston hopes to get it on in the poolside bath house with Pepi and placate Minnie with the guest of honor, a fey dance instructor named Earnest, the hardest to get houseguest in the whole of upper crust London. Meanwhile Anita Louise, Alan Mowbray, and others look on, askance.

George Cukor--as few have before or since--really shows how the right gay male at the right time makes any party ten times better and Earnest's last act entry really kicks home the idea of a weekend party's hungover Sunday. Maybe you know the feeling: you've had a great drunken time but now its Sunday and you can barely remember how and when you may have made a fool of yourself the night before. You're anxious to leave before brunch so you can get home to your private bar and video collection, but are stopped on the way out by the late arrival of the very person you'd been hoping would come the night before. This late arrival's lack of connection with last night's damage makes him like an embodiment of fresh starts and forgiveness as he just starts rearranging everyone's mood even as the butler's taking your bag out to the car. So who laughs last? Call Earnest a stereotype, but he's delightful and even gets the priceless closing line: "There's no finer sight in the world than.. two women of title, kissing each other!"

BEAST OF THE CITY 

1932 - ***

"Instead of the glorification of the gangster, we need the glorification of the policeman," explains the scroll from Herbert Hoover that opens BEAST OF THE CITY. Indirectly justifying the existence of police brutality, Hoover's letter finds its poster child in Captain 'Fightin'" Fitzgerald (Walter Huston), the Irish-Catholic representative of pre-Dirty Harry vigilante-mindedness, struggling to keep the streets of his nameless city clean while gangster-glorifying reporters gum up the works. Yes, it's MGM doing what Warners did best, a nose-to-the-pavement gangster picture, and trying to do what no other studio was dumb enough to try (except maybe Columbia), take Hoover seriously and apply bourgeois downward flowing morals to a lowbrow genre. Nothing is more anathema to genuine art than the lionization of working class 'values.' The only person who could ever make working class sentimentality seem genuine--since he damn well drunkenly believed in it--was John Ford. And BEAST director Charles Brabin is no John Ford.

All early gangster pictures were forced by citizen's groups to insert scenes of 'ordinary citizens' protesting newspapers' glorification of the gangster--these scenes were hep people's cues to go the rest room or refill their popcorn-- but in BEAST the citizen's groups have a point about who the real enemy is--the press! The cops endure a regular drubbing from the reporters who in turn influence the politicians, who need the favor of those reporters for campaign PR. Thus, the public's morbid interest in hoodlums itself indirectly breeds corruption in local government! Ladies and gentlemen, writs of habeas corpus are the tool of the mobster even more than tommy guns! Huston could slap the truth out of 'em in five minutes, but the politicians have taken away his most important tool, his fists!  

Of course one thing that made the gangster film so alluring was its wrongness, and since MGM's idea of glorifying cops is to make them into brutish, cabbage-fed simpletons (scenes include Huston reading the funnies to son Mickey Rooney over pancakes before church), you no longer get that giddy feeling of wrongness that comes from the best WB pictures, especially since the police brutality isn't directly shown. 

There are perks though: Wallace Ford is good as Figthing Fitz's brother, a cop who doesn't mind taking a drink once in awhile, especially if it's with Jean Harlow (as an unreformed moll in reformed moll clothing who sends Ford down a slippery path), and there's complex pre-code politics involving citizen's groups dictating the concessions corrupt politicians must make towards law and order, something that results in Huston being elected police chief. After his men applaud his first speech, Huston barks: "Never mind those open hands, ball em into fists and use 'em!"

But this approach also illuminates how prohibition creates contempt for the law: when you prosecute victimless crimes (no one is really glad when Fightin' Fitz closes all the bars) the more violent elements of gangland eagerly step in to fill the need, the ones not cowed by jail and cop beatings. So while Ford gets corrupted by Harlow's smooching and bootleg booze maybe Fighting Fitz is indirectly the one to blame. Meanwhile, there's lots of heroin references, as when Fitz barks: "Take away your guns and your hops and you're yellow crawling maggots."  The liberal media may have enlightened us all to the dehumanizing racism in films like BLONDE VENUS, PRESTIGE, and CHANDU, but when it comes dehumanizing opiate addicts. well, some things just never go out of style.

KONGO -The ultra lurid 1932 saga of jungle sin!

If you know in your heart that 1931-1933 was the most lurid era ever of movies, then dear heart, KONGO is your new king!

Here's what I wrote about the film in a post from last time it played TCM, October 2008:

Based on a play that originally ran in 1926 (with the film's same stars, Walter Huston and Virginia Bruce), Kongo is also a remake of the Lon Chaney silent film West of Zanzibar. Silent film devotees might laud Chaney, and/or say Huston is channeling Chaney here, but I'd say it's more the reverse since Huston originated the role in the theater. Plus, if you love Huston as I do, you will know he would never just emulate someone else, or phone it in, or just ham around in a role where he's the center stage tyrant. He gives it 11,000,000 percent. Lupe Velez is in the Jean Harlow role of good natured floozy who lives at Flint's trading post/bar, where she spreads her charms liberally and gets drunk (and other things) with Flint's two dimwitted white flunkies. All is "well" until Flint makes his move for revenge... involving pulling a sweet innocent white woman played by Virginia Bruce out of her Cape Town convent and dragging her into the pits of HELL!

Infamous for his tight control of a vast 80 mile section of the Congo, Flint hoards ivory and controls the local tribes via displays of magic tricks all while planning his OLDBOY-style revenge against the guy who carved up his face and left him crippled to die. This plan involves Flint taking custody of his enemy's daughter and putting her through an all girls convent school, only to pull her out on her 18th birthday and throw her into a Zanzibar brothel for a year or two. After she's sufficiently debauched he drags her out to his godforsaken corner of the jungle, gives her "black fever" and strings her along on booze and beatings. Meanwhile, a white doctor (Conrad Nagel) in the throes of addiction to some kind of local opiate root shows up, and Flint tries to get him clean (via leeches!) so he can operate on Flint's back. But Lupe Velez secretly risks having her tongue cut out in order to bring the doc all the root he can handle in exchange for sex. And that's not all! A parade of sadistic horrors are either narrowly escaped from and/or inflicted offstage while Huston roars in sadistic laughter; and what about the native practice of burning women alive on their dead husband's funeral pyre? GOOD GOD! This was made in 1932!? It's almost too hot to handle even today. With all the implied sexual and physical abuse and degradation it would likely get an NC-17.

Aint no doubt Billy Bob Thornton be good in the remake

Part of the pleasure of the pre-codes is in trying to fathom just how X-rated and lurid they can be; we're just conditioned from childhood to think of old black and white films as being safe, innocent fun. When we see something like Kongo  it's like having the bottom drop out on all our socialized expectations; like being all prepared for a boring three hour lecture and having the professor start shooting up speed, passing around brandy and reefers, flogging the latecomers, and cutting off the tongues of anyone who talks without raising their hand.

Time to bleed the junky...

Bruce and Huston's performances here are beyond "riveting"-- each feels very "lived in" (thanks probably to their time spent together in the 1926 play version), like they've been dragged through the ringer together. If you've had a chance to catch Huston's wild-eyed cattle patriarch perfection in Criterion's The Furies, you know how ably this man can embody a super-manipulative, authoritative nut job, roaring in laughter when a man tries to shoot him, weilding his whip like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and playing with his weird chimp companion or awarding bottles of brandy as rewards for debased behaviors. Like Brando in Streetcar, you hate him for crushing the spirits of the weak, but love him for his canny bravery and raw animal humor. (as opposed to, for example, Rocco in Key Largo, who wont give his poor alcoholic mistress a drink even after she debases herself by singing -like Brando in THE GODFATHER, that I do not forgive).

For her part, Bruce is a powerhouse who matches Huston in sheer seething rage, and despite all her torments, she still possesses a sense of humor and a grip on sanity and dignity that can't be destroyed; for all her ranting she's much more an Anna Christie than a Broken Blossom.

With typically detailed MGM production design, Kongo's action doesn't play out as much in the jungles (though they are represented) so much as the bar and bedrooms of Huston's compound - and holds just enough stock footage (probably taken from West of Zanzibar) to make it interesting: The only animals you see are crocodiles, snakes and spiders! No boring zebras or antelope herds. More than anything, Kongo is a valuable window into a time when "going native" in the mind of Hollywood and post-Victorian morality meant being a law unto yourself and indulging in whatever capricious and kinky cruelty suited your mood, the vice and evil stockpiled in repression's cobwebbed basement suddenly elevated to the drawing room, and the roof blown off. In addition to the vice, sex, violence, and vengeance, racism abounds: the film sees the native Africans as inferior savages to be manipulated and abused, and once the flames of sadism get going, the white woman is next! We see in pre-code jungle horrors like Kongo that the tortures and degradations of SAW, HOSTEL and their ilk are nothing new. Though this kind of kinkiness was abolished during the bloodless reign of "the code", before 1934 there was still a place for drugs, sex, slavery and sadism... it was called the jungle. Long may it reign, though thank god it's safely in the past... except for YOU, if you tune in today... on TCM!

To dream some impossible tree sloth: FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)

For a lot of the new kids, 1950s science fiction is stilted, and dull, and perhaps those words could describe FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) if you were expecting constant laser tag and monster attacks, but a hundred viewings later, for all its 50's patriarchal solemnity, PLANET still kicks ass. It just gets better every time, every year: its subtextual critique of its own patriarchal solemnity grows clearer, its solemnity undermined by its underplayed deadpan cheek. Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film is uninhibitedly Freudian in a way few science fiction films of the time dared to be. The name itself holds all sorts of clues:

Forbidden! Planet!

And who is doing the forbidding? Merely one of the driest and most patronizing of all patriarchy's authoritative voices. Walter Pigeon, as the elusive Dr. Morbius. In elaborate dialogue that runs counter to most natural speaking patterns, Morbius lectures paternally, patiently, like the dull film shown before entering some Disney attraction. He emphatically maintains that he "cannot be responsible for the well-being" of Commander Leslie Nielsen (POLICE SQUAD!) and his party if they insist on landing at his most forbidden planet.

Inquiring after a colony set up by the 'Bolerofon Expedition' years before, Nielsen and his crew have come out to see how the settlers are faring.  It's rare to have a movie start out in deep space, odder still to have earthlings piloting a flying saucer instead of the usual phallic rocket. Odder even still that a 1950s film bears a cold suspicion that private organizations will be colonizing and privatizing outer space, shades of Haliburton! Shades of ALIEN... and more ALIEN shades to come!

For Morbius, it seems, has found a groovy stash of ancient alien technology and doesn't want to share, like the Area 51 crashed saucer-hiders hoarded by MAJ-12, like an acid dealer during a bad trip who decides "you aint ready" for this shit." With his artificially expanded intellect, Morbius, he's ready," notes Commander Nielsen, sarcastically.

Lucifer Sam / Zion cat! 

Blind to his own amok tenure'd prof-style egotism, Morbius agrees that yes, he is ready: he took the Krell "brain boost" and survived the shock, but was then in a coma for "a day and a night." Having survived, he's in charge (in his boosted mind) and notes, "such portions of the Krell science that I deem suitable and safe, I shall dispense to Earth."

Language like "portions" and "dispensing" perks up the ears of any dozing pharmaceutical enthusiast. How many grams in a portion and when will you please dispense it and should I wait an hour after eating and drink plenty of orange juice? The Krell "brain booster" seems not too far from, say, an upstate ayahuasca weekend (the death in this latter case being of the ego - just as exhilarating and terrifying as any physical death). 

Still, both the captain and his own doctor want to try it: "One of us must take that brain boost!" they tell each other. But it's the measurability-fetish size comparison obsessiveness of it that indicates this intelligence-enhancement is all cock-centric left-brained denial, the butterfly pinned to the wall by science and expected to still be ephemeral. We know this because when the ship's doc sneaks off and takes it while Leslie and lovely Nordic hybrid alien Anne Francis are making out and arguing over whether to drag Morbius off by force. Now a super--dying--genius, the best the doc can come up with by way of description is "you oughta see my new mind, it's up there in lights." Is he speaking in the vernacular for the sake of his captain, or is this Bowery Boys-ish metonym an example of his new Krell-heightened eloquence? The boos seems contagious for soon Leslie too is talking down to Morbius like an interplanetary shrink, "your unconscious mind, the inner savage, was made strong enough!" 

The brain boost for the doc (his mind is "bigger than his (Morbius's) now") shows up Morbius's loyalty to his dry Wonderful World of Disney-style of speech as a sign he's still struggling with patriarchally antiquated egotistical insecurity. I.e. Morbius "ain't" as enlightened as he thinks. The ship's doc is free of trying to sound intellectual; he's gained confidence enough to sound stupid. Morbius may have "beheld the face of the gorgon and lived," but he's still a squaresville "philologist" who never lets you forget it. No grasp of the cosmic joke. That boost was wasted on him--he's still hung up on measuring IQ power, which all we know has turned out to be an unreliable, race-and-class-based logocentric yardstick.

And yet, there is also in Morbius something of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition, a kind of male version of Mrs. Hemoglobin in NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK: he forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go near the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but neither listens. (After all we're not very near, " Alta says when visiting their ship, and earlier "you said not to join you for lunch, you said nothing about coming for coffee.") On the other hand, Morbius listens to her. He listens to his daughter swoon about these wondrous creatures called officers. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, even as his daughter rants against the captain's prudery, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence becomes patronizing ("Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?") It's almost like he's posing as the stern forbidding father (masking incestuous subconscious intent - as in the arm he puts around her waist when waving goodbye after the first visit) when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute! Or, of course, the more obvious Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.

Coyly innocent, yet hilariously knowing, Anne Francis leavens Morbius' dullness with her lovely legs and sexual openness. If you've seen her in the Honey West TV shows (and you should) then you she could make that other broad with the surname West look bashful, so it's great to see her here kind of knowingly send up the role of an innocent 1950s MGM virgin as she teases the nervous, sexually frustrated and rather prudish Leslie Nielsen with her symbolic nudity in an outdoor swimming scene, or asks him "Why don't you kiss me like everybody else does?"

Yet another key element in FORBIDDEN's hard-to- immediately-appreciate weirdness is the soundtrack: the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron offer no familiar orchestral swells or suspenseful string sections to guide our emotional responses. When the invisible id monster approaches, the tonalities merely swell up slowly and strangely to evoke moans and our monster footprints, or to merge with the sound of laser fire. When the danger sign is off, and Robby and Alta are frolicking, the music burbles like a fountain through a flanger, merging with monkey chatter and fractured Hawaiian guitar twangs. This atonal bizarro blend of 'tonalities' both enhances and diffuses all tension, as there's no  cliche-entrained expectations. The result is perhaps tranquilizing at first, even boring, but-- once our first viewing is over and we know what to expect--the slowing down of expectations allows for an incredibly lyrical, relaxed quality in successive viewings. Crazy modern art sculptures and modular furniture conjure the familiar feeling of being over at a cool great uncle's bungalow for drinks and gradually sliding from creeped out by all the 50s metal wall sculpture (on our first visit as children) to enchanted as the whiskey takes effect (as adults).

Acidemic in the way it illuminates the fundamental problem of western thinking in both mainstream science and analytic academia, PLANET reveals the complete "blind side" to one's own inner demon in the Freudian composite of the mind, how all dry and respectable positions on issues are usually really only vain attempts to hide our warped desires from ourselves ("what's wrong with theory?" Alta asks before Leslie finally breaks down and plays his first game of what Uncle Bill in the very similar Neve Give a Sucker an Even break called Squigilum (funny too that a tiger growls during their kiss here, mirroring the great dane barking and ape howling in Fields' 1941 film) 

These recurring motifs illuminate the blind spots that always run synonymous with our inability to own up to them. The eye fills in gaps in sight and the brain covers its weak spots with camouflage and patriarchal bullying. Arguing with Morbius then becomes like trying to convince a Marxist professor... of anything.

Adding to the spa-like fun is the leisurely goodwill and Bette Davis-ish sauce of Robby the Robot -- as he is voiced by a man who sounds just like, and is, one of the guys who do the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle -- but is not Paul Frees! His deep manly voice is both familiar, reassuring and completely cool, yet the drunken cook has to ask "Is it a male or a female" and we're supposed to infer that this cook is horny enough--and deaf, dumb and blind enough-- to turn a blind ear as well as eye.

"Smooth, too!" 

In the end--even better--the cook and Robby become drinking buddies, with Robby jovially making our visiting astro-lush a whole mountain of "Rocket Bourbon" pints (he's "the most understanding soul" the cook's ever met).  Robby also makes dresses for Alta. When she asks for a new dress Robbie all but rolls his eyes, "Again?" She says it must be a long dress to please the prudish captain, Robbie asks "Thick and heavy?" as if he's a wizened old Shakespearean housemaid dryly teasing his beloved charge about fair Romeo. Both Ariel and Caliban in one Michelin-esque frame, Robbie is the ultimate in Shakespearian fifth business. 

There's another coded gay character in Oscar Madison (ala his momma's boy in THE LONG HOT SUMMER three years later) as the brown-nosing chief spark-plugger-inner. The camera makes a point of showing his complete lack of interest in Anne Francis' devastating hemline, while his puppy-like eagerness to impress the captain, informing the captain that "I borrowed some solanite from our gyro stabilizers." Spock, who cares? There's a chick here! He doesn't even try to fake it the way, say, Sal in MAD MEN used to!

Last bit of weird 'impossible tree sloth' quality I need to mention is the film's odd pedigree: MGM is known for delivering heavy bourgeois morality as well as fine Freed musicals, but here the studio seems to have tapped into some alternate universe of cool, sexually liberated science fiction, like the subject allows for some of that repressed desire to leak out in a way the churches won't notice (though the 'lord sure makes some beautiful worlds,' and 'after all we are not God' lines seem inserted to win their favor). In the midst of the early 50s landscape of giant bugs and military investigations (with the one woman in the cast always a professional working scientific expert, desexed in her status as 'one of the new women' unless she gets a bathing scene) FORBIDDEN PLANET appears suddenly out of nowhere, as if it traveled back in time from 1967, with lovely Star Trek-pastel sets of red leaf plants, alien handwriting and long triangular doors; laser beams that make no sound and shoot little dashes of light that seem ridiculously, comically/ineffectually phallic as they dissolve tigers into wavy Disney lines (and offer no 'kick' - i.e. they dribble). Altogether, it's the driest anti-authoritarian / openly Freudian sci-fi parable we've got, and maybe still the sexiest, despite all the paternal lectures and tours. 

I'll leave you with these kinky words from 'philologist' Morbius: "Young man my daughter is planning a very foolish action and she'll be terribly punished for it." O words, where are thy talons?

Idiot's Delight (1939)

Who are the idiots?
There must be some word.
I want them all.
I want all the idiots."
--Riffs' leader if "idiots" was substituted for "warriors" (THE WARRIORS, 1979)

And that's just what MGM does here. "Warrior's Delight" would be a much better title, because all the local soldiers at this Alpine border want to do is bomb some stuff, and stranded traveler Burgess Meredith gets all self-righteous about it: "Ten thousand tons of flaming death and none of you want to stop dancing!" Why doesn't someone shut that pacifist up, you ask, mootly, at the screen? Gable and Shearer are trying to play screwball and the soldiers are trying to dance with Gable's devoted les blondes, and the pacifist wants to rain on the parade. Live for today, tomorrow we die of boredom listening to spittle-flecked lectures on the brotherhood of man, the exact same nonsense that allowed Hitler to build up his armies unchecked in the first place. But this is all based on Robert Sherwood's anti-pacifist tract, with the Nazi influence toned down to the typically vague fascism of the Hollywood era.

The best thing about this play/movie is how transparently it reveals anti-war modernist tracts to be self-defeating. Now that an annoying sanctimonious tub-thumper like Burgess' pacifist has expressed all these humanist sentiments, humanist sentiments are suddenly very uncool. Once you hate the haters, you just switched sides. If only our modern agonized bleeding hearts could savvy this complex message. Sherwood fought in the trenches, so it's not like he was an armchair general like our red staters. He saw Hitler and he just knew the writing was on ze wall.


Two big MGM stars were Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Both having been MGM top talent since the silent age, Garbo was basically retired by 1939 (though she came back the same year in NINOTCHKA), but Shearer was only slightly the less for wear, a little paunchy maybe, but bravely, brazenly--for endless pages of campy but gleefully nihilistic dialogue--willing to alternately satirize, celebrate and lovingly impersonate Garbo, at times coming off like a drag queen with shrill monotone satire, other times like a legit and loving sociopath who "vonts to be alone" and loves to imagine beautiful Englishmen being dragged underneath tanks. And then, when you're just about ready to press stop, Clark Gable busts loose in his big number, mocking both Fred Astaire and the whole concept of song and dance men in his hilarious "Puttin' on the Ritz." It's worth watching just for his facial expressions, which are pure Groucho Marx impersonating Maurice Chevalier in MONKEY BUSINESS.

Edward Arnold is pretty ballsy as the ruthless arms magnate (Shearer's his arm candy). He explodes in a big burst of anger when she's cynical about his genius at sewing death. "If someone's going to be so petty as to take up arms they deserve to die! I help humanity by getting rid of them!" Or something like that. No argument from me, brother, population control advocate that I am. Probably not from MGM either, with scrappy little Burgess Meredith's hysterical outbursts all but meant to be mocked. The self-appointed "prophet" spreading brotherly love and peace, he's the lynch pin by which to measure and hang the rest of the cast. Gable and Shearer's doomed couple ultimately transcend it all since they're not too terribly afraid of death. That's what true love is, after all, a kind of painful form of living death, in and of itself, like enlightenment, and death is just another station on the endless spinning dial. I guess that's chivalry. I been there. It's just that love makes you feel invulnerable, it's the one thing that transcends fear.

In short, there's far worse examples of that Barton Fink feeling than this adaption of Sherwood's typical-for-the-time anti-pacifist play. Simmering with cross purposes, it fairly begs to get a post-modern de-adaptation by the Wooster Group. I can see Kate Valk acing the Garbo by way of Shearer MGM elocution accent, and Willem Da Foe a psychotically chipper Gable, acting out love scenes in front of a screening of some confiscated Third Reich Alpine nature documentary footage and psychedelic bomber shadow explosion light shows. And the conscience represented by Burgess Meredith in the film could be one of Godard's deadpan commie sermons playing on an old reel-to-reel, before it's finally replaced by the smooth no worries shine of Compakt Disk.

A Val Lewton-style Nancy Davis (Reagan), M.D. in SHADOW ON THE WALL

Nancy Davis (pre-Reagan) is superbly understated as Dr. Canford, child psychologist, in SHADOW ON THE WALL (1950), a B-movie psychodrama with a progressive feminist center and a weird Edgar Ulmer / Val Lewton-style whispery coating.

The plot and mood keep you guessing whether WALL is one of those dreary post-code screwball-with-kids concoctions, a shadow-bestrewn film noir, or a minor-key divorce drama. Plot centers hinges on gun is brought into the house as a WW2 souvenir on the same day daddy finds out mom's been cheating on him with her sister's fiancee. The kid is the only witness of who really shot who, but it's buried deep in her subconscious. Enter cool-headed child psychiatrist Nancy Davis, who rules her roost (a children's hospital) absolutely and without losing any feminine charm in the process.

Whoa, Nancy! Right here in the middle of some half-forgotten MGM B-picture we've got a fascinating early example of a fully developed female mental health professional, one who isn't bogged down in cliche'd male attention. There's no smug, bitchy fellow doctor trying to smarm his captive co-worker into marital submission ala SPELLBOUND, no condescending pretty boy rogue or square-jawed intern who expects her to stop working once they're married.

Perhaps this unique character slipped by the censors because having an adult male doctor playing dolly games with a child would be creepy, but it's even rare today to see an unencumbered professional female character like this in a Hollywood film (compare her with, say, the insecure, sex-starved female shrinks in THE DEPARTED, TOP GUN, and BASIC INSTINCT) and Nancy Davis pulls it off very well: she's sexy and uninhibited without ever being unprofessional, nor does she say or do anything that's not somehow related to her sincere desire to help her patient. She's allowed to take over important medical duties from men without them squawking or belittling her, and she even educates older men lawyer friends of the family on the latest breaks in the developing field of child psychology, without the men having to 'put her in her place' with smug passive aggressive code-instilled put-downs. While it's great this film exists, it makes Hollywood's long history of sexist inequality that much more glaring by contrast.

But even chiller: the accidental Brechtianism in the drably painted cityscapes outside the windows of the children's hospital.  In their closed-off theatricality they mirror the dollhouse maze in which Davis plays with her young patient. It would all be kind of rote in lesser hands, but director Pat Jackson has the right touch. He's in the moment, giving each scene it's own charge and mood --you never know where it's gonna go. It's off the rails in a quiet, whispering SEVENTH VICTIM sort of way.

The end is very satisfying with Dr. Canford waving good-bye and a "we'll be seeing this character again" vibe in the air as adult and daughter ride down into the elevator sunset. The children's hospital setting, with its endless playtime and flat city backgrounds has such a low rent yet comfortingly post-modern charm that you want to just lounge around there as a troubled child yourself and let Nancy run the country for awhile. While the character of Dr. Canford disappears back into the obsidian ooze of the collective unconsciousness, Nancy Davis the woman moves forward, inch by inch, through the patriarchal darkness, until it's far too late to just say no.

Ten Dollars a Fifth.

You know that TCM Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2 set? If you get it and expect a good time, well, watch out for Norma Shearer, that's all I can say. She's trouble. She's in the first two films: MGM's THE DIVORCEE and A FREE SOUL. If sex, drugs and hot jazz were cake, the Warner girls--Stanwyck, Clarke, Harlow--could be said to have it and eat it too, then keep quiet about it until they need another fix; the MGM girls like Shearer would have their cake and then feel guilty, complain to all their friends that they "shouldn't have eaten it" and then go to the Ladies room to "heroically" renounce it back up.

That's not heroism, Norma, that's bulimia!

Where MGM makes its error is in presuming that their audience genuinely believes that premarital sex is an evil on par with murder, rape or (gasp!) gambling. Where Warners throws scenes of their starlets changing in and out of their sexy underthings, MGM has Shearer do it all behind partitions; when Shearer is raking in jewelry we see only her hands and his, never any mention of the implied quid pro quo. Shearer scenes of implied sin feel like she's counting money from a stolen wallet in a bathroom stall, sober, terrified, with three paranoid look-outs. Such nervous guilt isn't up to pre-code so to speak, since, as Dave Kehr puts it: the "heavy hand of MGM respectability presses down," forcing her to realize "that such dalliances are meaningless without love, marriage and the promise of a family."

One of the parallel points of interest in pre-code films is the handling of alcohol, the modern equivalent of pot in films like HOW HIGH or FRIDAY (at Warners) or heroin in films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (MGM). Prohibition was still in effect for most of the pre-code era, and the films in this set are rife with briefcase-carrying bootleggers, secret knocks at hidden doors, and whispers from drug store clerks to shaky customers about some "secret stock in the back room." In A FREE SOUL, we even learn the typical price when a drug store clerk sells a St. Vitus-dancing Barrymore a fifth of whiskey for "ten bucks." Ten bucks! In 1931 that was like $80, or the price you'd pay now for a delivery of... "ahem." What were we talking about? The evilsh of drink, oh right. There's something legit about it being destructive but, ah, who caresh? MGM will get all the Barrymores sober one day, but for now, let's get Norma Shearer safely wedlocked.


Kehr's article points out that NIGHT NURSE (1931)--easily the pick of the set--was directed by William Wellman right after PUBLIC ENEMY. It makes sense, seems of a piece, and makes me want to immediately research Wellman as a hidden auteur. Andrew Sarris rates him a mere "Less than meets the eye" in his American Cinema book, asking why PUBLIC ENEMY isn't as good as SCARFACE. I'd say there are streaks of laziness in Wellman, but also fearless genius in trusting his actors to do fierce bits of business, trusting their personas and letting them go the extra mile where most directors would probably balk and cut their extraneous antics short. Cagney and Stanwyck both get chances to go apeshit on people in such a way as to make cinematic myth on the spot. Gable punches Babs in NIGHT NURSE, knocks her right down - boom!; Cagney shoves grapefruit at Mae Clarke; nurse Stanwyck screams in unbridled rage at the drunken mom who's letting an evil chauffeur and doctor slowly starve her two stepchildren to death (and she can't stop it due to AMA rules).

Right or wrong, these sorts of violent Wellmanian outbursts are electric, like whole Sam Fuller movie coiled up and sprung through a brick wall.  They more than make up for any dull stretches. They are what is best in cinema, i.e. when it stops preaching and starts hacking at the chains of the truly unfree soul.

PS - There's also a great bit in ROXIE HART, a (post-code) Wellman film I just happen to have recently seen, where Ginger Rogers does an impromptu softshoe up and down the prison steps after striking some sparks with smitten reporter George Montgomery. The camera doesn't move much, like Wellman is just watching rather than filming. It's just Rogers banging out a dance on the tinny jail steps because she's kind of turned on from her sparks with old George, and it's the best moment in the film. To a judgmental classicist like Sarris, this scene is probably uninspired and lazy. He'd probably think Wellman just left the camera running and went out to have a smoke, letting Rogers and Montgomery do what they wanted. That's it exactly, Mr. Sarris! That's it, exactly....

The cinema is full of hacks that obliterate termite freshness in the name of white elephant emotional dictation, killing material the way Lenny kills puppies and blondes in OF MICE AND MEN. We know they don't mean it, but there it is, lifeless and big as all indoors. Wellman isn't like that. He keeps his grip light and if it don't come out SCARFACE, so what? It could be worse. It's still breathing. That's what being A FREE SOUL means, Norma, so swig a little!