Goat Glands

Goat Glands

The great thing about the so called DVD revolution is that an enormous quantity of material that had vanished or was thought vanished has reappeared. I just caught Frank Lloyd’s 1929 Weary River with Richard Barthelmess in a nice Warner Archive copy.

I’m always fascinated by the twenties sound films where people with proven skills and large budgets floundered trying to master the new technology. Intriguingly the first directors to nail it were often people like Lloyd Bacon or Wesley Ruggles who in the long run made only marginal contributions to film history, while heavy hitters like John Ford, William Wellman or Howard Hawks ploughed under their own first efforts.

Weary River is what they used to call a Goat Gland Movie where scenes with synchronized dialogue and effects alternate with captioned material. Here that happens for no discernible reason. They add a door slam to one music only sequence. George E. Stone plays his early scenes in mime, only to get recorded dialogue at the end. As in other films of this period (Milestone’s silent The Racket and his 1931 The Front Page) Stone aces his part. The wait for the revenge attack is played on his sustained close up and is one of the best parts of the film. Audiences rapidly rejected the part talkies for All Talking Motion Pictures and they were virtually never re-issued.

Barthelmess was a major star in the silent period and made substantial sound films (Wellman's Heroes for Sale, Alan Crosland’s Massacre, George Wilhelm Pabst’s A Modern Hero, Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings) but starting his sound career here he is not well served by appearing with brilliantined hair and black silent movie lipstick. He plays a mobster first seen escorting glamorous Betty Compson in a speak easy where the light bulb door admits customers. He learns that a gang shoot out has killed an innocent bystander. Back at Compson’s flat, fatherly Sergeant Robert Emmet O’Connor arrests him for the crime. Surprisingly prominently billed black elevator boy Ray Turner is alarmed to see him cuffed.

Weary River - Compson and Barthlemess.

The judge sends Dick up the river for one to ten and he realises his predicament when he’s told to take a bath in the room where black prisoner Blue Washington is already soaped up in another tub. A year later in Paid,  Joan Crawford in the pen similarly faces the indignity of having to take discretely framed showers with Louis Beavers. The prison population in Weary River has only the one black where black inmates tend to proliferate in Hollywood jail movies of the day.

Our hero tries to tough it out but Warden William Holden (no, not that William Holden!) sets him straight with a man to man chat. There’s a title and some stock footage of a jute mill, like the one Warners will build for Jimmy Cagney in Each Dawn I Die, in place of what should have been the film’s most significant passage and we get reformed Dick conducting the convict orchestra in a broadcast and singing his own composition “Weary River - fate has been a very cheerful giver.” This (inexplicably) is such a hit he has to do it twice starting the film’s merciless recaps.

Released as “The Master of Melody”, Dick’s musical career falters when he hears people discussing his time in the grey bar motel. One of his fellow performers doubles back to lock her dressing room door when she sees him. Ernie Adams and his pan handler companions remind him that he is one of their kind.

Compson, who gave Dick up at Holden’s urging, is now sustaining him. A grossly underrated talent, she dominates her scenes, as she did in the James Cruze Pony Express, Docks of New York or even her end of career B movies like the chilling 1941 Joseph H. Lewis The Ghost Vanishes. When Dick determines to rejoin the mob to face off with rival Louis Natheaux, she rushes Holden to the scene. Gunfire in the dark bar and implausible happy ending.

Long lasting Frank Lloyd was a prestige director but his output was hit or miss even with a burst of quality product in the thirties, the maligned Cavalcade, Lesley Howard in Berkley Square, Mutiny on the Bounty where Thalberg and Albert Lewin sweated results out of him and the Ronald Colman If I were King, a non musical Vagabond King. Lloyd’s technique is text book with the occasional effective touch - Barthlemess spotting Compson’s double bed in the next room and, in a censor defeating move, throwing his hat onto it, his forced in the lab rush through real city streets at night or Stone’s close up.

Cameraman Ernie Haller on the other hand excels. This is a great looking film. You can’t but wonder if he suggested the film’s few resonant images - the distant shot of the two released prisoners making their way through the gate or Compson watching Barthlemess from the theater windows as he leaves unaware of her, very like the scene Haller shot for the 1946 Humoresque with Crawford passing the seried posters of John Garfield with violin.

Though Weary River fails on every level, as prison drama, star vehicle or musical, it drags, plausibility is missing and it’s owners were right to keep it away from their subsequent customers, for enthusiasts it is a continuous treat, a great record of the transition period. The 1929 Showboat eg. may be even better but the copies of that are inferior and hard to come by.

As these films re-surface I find my frame of reference changing from the European one (montage, René Clair, Neo Realism and sixties auteurs - think the Criterion collection) to the American, where those are just static on the Hollywood signal. The shift has it’s advantages as there is so much of the U.S. material, a great deal of that is excellent and it’s all in my first language. On the other hand you have to be wary of the tendency of adherents of either school to dismiss the other. That’s a trap.

Oh yes - and  spot Randolph Scott among the theater audience in Weary River.

Weary River - Warden Holden & Compson.