I always thought of Columbia as the most anonymous of the Hollywood “Golden Era” studios. However the sudden accessibility of their thirties product has made me revise that idea.
The film that brings things into focus is the 1932 Washington Merry-Go-Round / Invisible Power. It’s full of material which evokes later Columbia elements like The More the Merrier’s Washington, designer Lionel Banks notion of high society living, all vertical lines, Talk of the Town’s corrupt officials, The Big Heat’s influence maker card game, the sharp talking girl insider represented by Jean Artur in her films for the studio. Add Wallter Connolly who was their resident character actor, like Frank Morgan at MGM or John Carradine at Fox.
Starting yet again with a (model) train roaring through the night, this one launches into a Columbia rom com set up with congress freshman Lee Tracy playing against character an idealist (“all front and no back - wears star spangled underwear”) called on to produce the letter from his signatory of the Declaration of Independence ancestor folded in his pocket for the pair of stereotype comic porter darkies. The letter blows into glamorous Constance Cummings’ compartment and she rips it up only to be told that it was worth fifty grand. Aunt Jane Darwell finds them both under the bunk scrambling for the pieces. The fact that such a valuable document wasn’t more carefully handled is a detail that irritates.
Rapidly Washington Merry-Go-Round shapes up as a first sketch for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. When they get to D.C., the rail station has a Temperance Women’s group lined up and marching scouts milling about. Tracy pulls up to gawp in wonder at the (back projected) Capitol Dome - one tacky process shot rather than the Capra film’s stiring Vorkapich Montage followed by the saver gag of Jimmy Stewart realising that the imposing building he wants identified is a movie theater.
However the earlier film immediately gets down to business. Tracy comes upon the the Ex- Serviceman’s Tent City Camp, living in squalid conditions to demand their promised Bonus. His former army commander Arthur Vinton (“You never could peel potatoes”) is running the show. When introduced to the crowd, instead of feeding them comforting platitudes, Tracy tell them he was elected on bought votes and canvases the mob on how many of them sold theirs in the last election. He tells them to go back to their homes and root out the corruption. “You call yourselves ex-servicemen. Well why don’t you become servicemen?” This gets some antagonistic responses, notably from one of the wives sharing the camp. The script by frequent Capra collaborator Jo Swerling and Maxwell What Price Glory? Winterset Anderson has already got my attention.
Meanwhile conscience stricken prohibition official Wallis Clark is confronting boss Alan Dinehart, to be told that if he tries to go whistle blowing he’ll be the one that gets taken away leaving Dinehart in the clear. Dinehart, normally an inconspicuous performer (Jimmy the Gent’s “the biggest chisler since Michaelangelo”) asserts his menace without any dramatics, immediately lifting things. Clark is left with the open drawer containing a revolver (first time for this?) but uses Dinehart’s stationary, paying for the stamp, to drop a damning letter to Tracy in the mail chute before he offs himself - feet protruding from the elevator.
Tracy immediately faces hints of invasive corruption on the Washington Merry Go Round. “From the nickels in the street cars to the millions in the power trusts.” Congressmen have to use paper towels because defeated predecessors souvenired all the monogrammed linen ones. So-helpful Hotel manager Ernest Wood has already had temporary business cards printed for Tracy and all he wants in return is a Congressional page job for his nephew
Wood is whipped in to formally introduce Tracy to Cummings now sveltely glamorous in lamé at the hotel Dinner Dance. She’s with Dinehart and proves to be the grand daughter of amiable veteran Congressman Connolly who plays cards with the magnate. Facing Dinehart, Tracy shows him Clark’s letter. The South American Alcohol deal where they will have to send in U.S. Marines is in the air.
At the Congressional library, Tracy researches General Digger whose multi million dollar memorial bill is about to be passed and finds the man’s major accomplishment was stealing Indian land. Meeting Cummings he takes her to see the framed Declaration of Independence there, pointing out the name of his ancestor among the signatories. The group that gather applaud his comment that the men who signed were not afraid of losing re-election. There’s a nice balance between the pair. Tracy doesn’t buy her common people sympathies (”Why if you got in a covered wagon you’d ask for a chauffeur”) and she jokes about him having come to destroy the scribes & pharisees. The leads may be out gunned by Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in a masterwork but they are still two of the most interesting players of the day here given substantial material to handle.
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Constance Cummings
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Tracy rehearses his maiden speech to Cummings (right), complete with a Lincoln quote, only for the film to cut to the House Floor with a pompous delegate voicing the same passage and when Tracy opposes the Digger Bill which is being passed without discussion, as a piece of blatant pork barrelling, he is not indulged by a sympathetic Chariman Harry Carey the way Jefferson Smith will be but thrown out by the constable on the instruction of dour Berton Churchill. A few of the members cheer him with big grins. A couple comment across the aisle, an incident to be repeated exactly in Mr. Smith. Afterward Cummings observes “Some of the applause was genuine.”
Similarly the power broker interactions between Alan Dinehart and Walter Connolly anticipate those between Ed Arnold and Claude Rains and, while we’re referencing Frank Capra, newbie politician Tracy’s orations can also be seen as a run-up for Walter Huston’s in
American Madness which also features Constance Cummings, even if Connolly being bribed with his poker wins is less weighty than the Presidential nod being used to lure Claude Rains’ White Knight in
Mr. Smith.
The Cummings socialite character is replaced (whatever became of Astrid Alwyn?) by Jean Arthur's girl reporter in
Mr. Smith for a stand out Capra characterisation.
However, for Merry Go Round Dinehart is busily giving the big pitch to Cummings. “I have plans. Many plans. Never in the history of this country has there been a greater opportunity offered a strong man. Italy has her Mussolini, Russia her Stalin. Such a man will rise in America. A man, not a follower, but a leader. One strong enough to take the law into his own hands if necessary - a man of destiny.” This is the recuring, never realised leftist fantasy of an American dictator which is put forward with variation in Hollywood movies like Gabriel Over the White House, Meet John Doe, Keeper of the Flame or All the King’s Men - Columbia prominent in that list. However our ex-soldier hero confronts Dinehart precipitating an ending where the American Way is triumphant as it is in all of these films - count Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds, Wild Boys of the Road, The Farmer’s Daughter on through The Best Man and All The President’s Men along with those other oval office features The President Vanishes, Gabriel Over the White House and the lighter The Phantom President, to produce a persuasive national self-image, one that many observers ridicule.
Washington Merry Go Round, like David Harum or The Mating Call which I’ve previously commented, are all directed by James Cruze of Covered Wagon fame, whose sound career we’d all written off because the examples that were available were pretty punk - The Great Gabbo with Von Stroheim as a ventriloquist or Gangs of New York which they assure us is derived from the same piece as the Scorsese film and has Charles Bickford in a double role doing an early Sam Fuller script. As more of Cruze’s lost work bubbles to the surface, we start to sense a grossly under-estimated talent.
I was particularly aware of the Capra comparison having just watched that excellent 2 K restoration (James Stewart - right) of
Mr. Smith,
the last film I’d seen theatrically before lockdown, a benchmark theatrical movie experience. While
Washington Merry Go Round occasionally approaches the later film and, in a couple of places, excedes it (the veterans’ tent city exposition), it is finally overshadowed because Cruze’s technique has become limited (awkward cuts, reliance on studio and process) and the small scale ending is tame after this build-up. It’s high points, Tracy’s two orations, come early in the film where Jimmy Stewart’s is properly the finale of Mr. Smith. Both films rely on simplification and melodrama but Capra was a master film maker at the peak of his powers - not afraid to stage the re-energising of Jefferson Smith by the crusading girl reporter in the molded shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, where Cruze falls back on a straight forward presentation of the script content. Well that’s pretty good but...
You never get to the end of old Hollywood and that’s a big slice of what makes it rewarding. Researching these I was going to look at Constance Cummings in 1932’s Behind the Mask on YouTube but that proved (curses!) to be a second or so out of synch.
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Lee Tracy
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For Lee Tracy I came across Power of the Press from 1940, one of the B Movies he was reduced to after his dismissal from Viva Villa ended his run as one of the most conspicuous and individual early sound Hollywood leads - think The Strange Love of Molly Louvaine, Hold All Wires Dr. X or Blessed Event. Well, the good news is that the copy on You Tube is excellent, probably lifted from the transfer used for the much admired Sam Fuller box set. Fuller gets story credited on Power of the Press which has no connection to the silent Capra movie of the same name. Hopes rise when we see it’s set in Fuller world of newspaper journalism throwing around the names of Horace Greeley, Henry Dana and Abraham Lincoln.
We kick off with New York Gazette editor Minor Watson reading an editorial attacking the anti patriotic stance (“We are fighting England’s wars”) of his paper written by one time colleague jowly Guy Kibbee for his back water local sheet where businessmen pay for advertising space with sacks of unsprouted potatoes and the type-setter bangs the front page in by hand. Watson is about to denounce the un American interests of publisher and 45% shareholder Otto Kruger, yet another would be despot running “his own little private Gestapo” who has his hitman Victor Jory shoot Watson at the banquet microphone and manages to plant the blame on young “Radical” Larry Parkes, who Watson had fired leaving Parkes to struggle to look after his ailing mother.
Bottle blonde secretary Gloria Dixon (They Won't Forget) however has a letter from guilt- ridden Watson appointing Kibee the metropolitan paper’s editor and she waves a “photostatic copy” of it under Kruger’s nose. He steps back giving Guy enough rope but News Chief Lee Tracy has already plated a story about a dollar a year man hoarding wartime supplies, which runs. In the resulting riot and fire, stores intended for a secret government military operation are destroyed. Kibee is about to admit defeat but a Taxi Driver friend of Frank Yakonelli, who has been represented as jumping off the news building roof, shows up with the information that he had actually come to provide an alibi for Parkes and they deduce that Yaconelli too was a victim of Jory, only to find Vic. shot dead in his flat. The piece gains a little urgency when Tracy now conscience fired intervenes, giving this talk bound programmer a bit of a lift.
The piece keeps on pulling up short for propaganda harangues which is neither interesting or convincing. The phrase “fake news” is already being repeated. For a film extolling diversity all we get is Yaconelli with a fruit peddler accent doing an ethnic, along with endless WW2 references - “His son is with MacArthur in Australia.” Director Lew Landers often had a deft hand with these (Night Waitress, Under the Tonto Rim). His B Movie Seven Keys to Baldpate is best of four versions. Here he has no scope. The warehouse fire is done in shots of reporter Don Bedoe ‘calling it in from the drugstore pay ‘phone. Landers probably shrugged his shoulders and started preparing for the next of the eight films he made in 1943 never imagining that anyone would scrutinise his work three quarters of a century later as an example of his studio employer’s house style, while Sam Fuller used his pay packet to go on a bender before they shipped him to Europe.
Barrie Pattison 2020
