Old Movies

De Mille's Male & Female -Swanson, Daniels, Meighan & friend.

Card only box offices which were going in before Covid - no matter what they tell you -  combined with ragbag programming and Hollywood shuffling it’s prestige product to cable have meant my intake of theatrical first runs has dropped to a life time low. For better or for worse this has switched my attention to vintage material. I’m sorry I’m losing touch with the new face stars and film makers for the first time since I was a beardless youth. 

On the other hand, this new frame of reference is something that is welcome. The Talmadge Sisters and early De Mille hold no surprises for serious U.S. enthusiasts but for me this is catch-up time and by and large that’s good news.

De Mille’s silent Male and Female finally turned out to be grotesque and the 1930 Only Saps Work demonstrated Paramount’s bad judgement in believing Leon Errol could be funny for a whole movie but they represent the down side of raking through old Hollywood and even then you get a better grip on the work. On the other hand, as I’ve always suspected, received opinion was often not all that sharp. 

John Cromwell was an actor/producer who arrived in Hollywood from the East Coast with the wave of hopefuls drawn by the opportunities in sound film. Though the director proved winning in person, I’d never been all that enthusiastic about his movies, even though he managed to notch up a few like the Ronald Colman Prisoner of Zenda, Bogart’s Dead Reckonning and the out of character Ava Gardner portrait The Goddess. I’d like to see the 1945 short he split with Hitchcock and Elia Kazan. 

Accordingly  1930's The Mighty, Cromwell’s’s first solo director credit and near contemporary with All Quiet came as a surprise. It’s remarkable by any standard and extraordinary for it’s day, the work of people, for whom sound filming must have still been an intimidating novelty. The Mighty has a great central premise - Gangster George Bancroft is drafted and finds a front line unit is a great way to deploy his old skills. 

George Bancroft - Sternberg's Dragnet.

Bancroft had been conspicuous in silents, notably the James Cruze Pony Express. Von Sternberg cast him (third billing) in Underworld and he emerged the star with a couple more Von Sternbergs to come. A young Budd Schulberg thought he was a blow hard but Paramount featured him in their first sound films and, though Bancroft’s status declined, he was still personable in major films like Angels With Dirty Faces, North West Mounted Police and Stagecoach.  

The Mighty opens as troops march down Broadway to an “Over There” accelerated to match the silent speed footage and Bancroft and Raymond Hackett are in the crowd watching. George has to be prompted to take off his hat as The Flag passes. In a saloon, the camera travels the length of the bar with him, picking up individual conversations as it goes. In the back room, Warner Oland’s mob are plotting and George showily tears up his overdue draft notice (Fort Fleming). A team of MPs arrive but the bar man says he’s never heard of George, who comes out at that moment. A bar fly calls out his name, fingering our hero, and four soldiers have to get stuck in with Billy Clubs to subdue him. 

Like Deer Hunter there’s no training material, just a cut and, courtesy Wings stock footage, we’re in combat, where tough guy George has made sergeant. Though indifferent to the patriotic ideal (“fighting for the democrats!”), he’s totally in his element, while his young, upper class Lieutenant Morgan Farley (personal best for the perennial bit player, later the minister in High Noon)  quivers with nerves, despite his convictions. ”There’s a yellow streak down his back you could parade a company on” George, now become Captain, observes. Comes the big battle and they advance (impressive traveling camera crane) across a limited but convincing front line, with shell bursts and soldiers dropping all round - the film’s only process work is included, with smoke in front of the screen to disguise it. Farley dies a hero in George’s arms - telling scene. 

The Mighty - Morgan Farley

George promises to visit the dead officer’s family - cf. Lubitch’s much inferior Man I Killed.  Repatriated bemedaled, George is with his Doughboy mates (include Edgar Dearing & Jack Pennick) on the troop train, when he encounters Hatton, noting “There seems to be a band at every station”. He’s amazed at his stop off to find the reception is for him following Farley’s letters home - great traveling shot through the station entrance to the car, where the dead officer’s sister Esther Ralston waits for him. Hacket hops off the train to lead the cheering, sensing opportunity. Welcomed to their home by stilted dad, Australia’s own O.P.Heggie, George finds himself offered the job of police captain, to use his military methods to combat the reign of post war lawless elements. (prohibition is not mentioned) He’s persuaded and Oland and his gang show up to harvest the cluster of town banks, which would make a suitable target once the local criminal competitors are eliminated, “the biggest take in history” cf. The Big Caper. 

The Mighty - Ralston & Bancroft

 Of course George is attracted to Esther, understandably as she manages an appealing blonde vulnerable but alert persona, handling dialogue better than most of the East Coast Imports around her. He puts forward his notion that a war is a confrontation of gangs driven by loyalty and she counters that George Washington was someone who rejected the old allegiance for something more important. The town mobsters are disposed of and Warner sees his chance to do the bank job on his own. A complaining woman customer is puzzled, when the tellers all raise their hands but faints when she turns in camera direction. Floozy Dot Revier (also good) is sent in to warn George that she’ll rat him out to Esther if he interferes. Action climax, where George ignores the threat and leads the cop cars racing to the scene, while he cranks the siren. Shoot out on the roads and in the dark room streaked by chinks of light. Things end well (if unconvincingly). 

The only original music is under the titles but the extensive use of source music is remarkable - parades, under montages like the “War Ends” headlines or the Heroes’ welcomes. The film anticipates Henry King’s 1944 Wilson in this way.  The mix of plot themes that will animate the better action films to come, effective battle, small town staging and full-on confrontation of the new sound medium make this a large piece of neglected film history. Dialogue is still quite awkward, with the pause for effect before last words, labored. Bancroft has trouble with the significance-loaded speech, once he’s abandoned his “Fighting Fool from the gasworks” character but he gives it a good try and his physical presence is commanding. The adventurous handling is the antithesis of Cromwell’s conservative later work and this appears to be the peak achievement of his first period. It was also a great year for cameraman J. Roy Hunt adding this one and The Virginian to his c.v. 

The Mighty : Bancroft & Ralston.

Unlike MCA and these early Paramounts, Universal were notably apathetic towards their early films, burning their silent negatives and not bothering to put into theatrical re-issue anything other than their ”Horror” films and a few westerns among their early sound output. The rest remain largely unknown though a few were made up in bundles for late night TV, some making their way to Australia in the sixtties. That’s how I saw the early William Wylers. 

Monta Bell’s 1931 Up For Murder comes out of this void. Bell had been a prestige silent film maker working with Garbo, Gilbert and Jeanne Eagles. The opening of his Personal Maid where they load the camera into a dumb waiter and take it up a tenement where residents are arguing with one another on every level is a great piece of imaginative staging. Unfortunately nothing else in that film is as good. By the time we get to Up for Murder, Hollywood’s re-tooling for sound is pretty much complete and the piece is surprisingly assured for a now totally forgotten early sound film. Working on the opening scenes’ real news paper presses, young (the film is supposed to end with his 21st birthday) Lew Ayres takes no interest when the switch board blonde comes on for him. He is hit up for a two dollar loan by drunken reporter Frank McHugh who in return suggests to editor Frederick Burt he should take Lew on as a journalist. Shown to a desk with a typewriter, Lew asks what he should write but Burt scornfully calls him “Kipling” and has him checking lists. His twenty dollar pay check is a marvel to Lew, stuffing notes into mother Dorothy Petersen’s cookie jar. 

 

There’s one brief scene of management laying out the edition to give prominence to the sensationalist stories. Bell had worked in newpapers. 

Then in the first of the film’s hard to swallow developments, glamorous Society Editor Genevieve Tobin, who has lost her flair since she became publisher Purnell Prat’s Tootsie, needs to be squired to the Mayor’s ball and spots Lew at the back of the office. They get him a voucher from accounts to hire a diner suit (which fits perfectly) and he’s off in his top hat with Genevieve on his arm. Pratt with his family are in the loges and Polly Ann Young his daughter notes that Genevieve’s jewels are real. So rapt is Lew that he just has to write up an account of his big night and this gets scooped out of his typewriter and run next to Genevieve’s routine coverage. He comes on for her (understandable) and gets her to a picnic at the zoo, taking her to his favorite view point over the city. They go back to her flat and she emerges in her glittery cape over lingerie outfit but Lew is put off and leaves - thus winning her over. They plan on spending an evening together but Pratt wants her that night and she stalls Lew who turns up anyway with Pratt putting him in his place in the film’s strongest scene. ”Maybe you’ll pay her rent next month.” 

Up for Murder -  Tobin & Ayres in Charles Hall decor.

In a scuffle, Pratt falls hitting his head and dies. Genevieve gets Lew out and calls editor Richard Tucker who goes into fixer mode to protect the paper’s reputation, having the body transferred to the office and claiming he heard an argument in the next suite there. His attempt to square away the murder on an unknown is scuppered when Lew insists on confessing without giving details. Third Degree scene - (cops with Robert Emmett O'Connor prominent, assuring the kid “We’re your friends” while fiddling with the spotlight) and Tucker, who promises to get Lew off, arriving and adding in detail about Ayres and Pratt arguing because the kid was a dangerous radical cf. Rozalind Russell's great scene with John Qualen in 1940’s His Girl Friday or the Larry Parkes sub plot in Sam Fuller’s 1943 Power of the Press script. The judge reads out a guilty verdict and Lew is in the cells playing solitaire on his blanket as they march a condemned man on his last mile with the preacher - montage of close-ups of the other inmates, including yet another single black prisoner, all shouting “Take me!” 

At this point Genevieve cracks, precipitating a totally incredible happy ending. Pity this finale is so cursory because the simple handling in realist decors and the performances have held interest well. The film’s strength is a beautiful turn by Tobin managing just the right amount of world weariness to to go with her glamour. Attractive and having what we can recognise as the Broadway delivery then familiar from Helen Hayes or Ruth Chatterton, Tobin was a talent largely wasted by Hollywood. Her lively Mimi in One Hour With You is the character she has here, played for exuberance rather than resignation. She did co-star with Jack Hulbert in a forgettable English movie along with her dispiriting support roles in subsequent US productions. She and Ayres make an involving couple. 

Putting it where his mouth was comes WW2 and Lew Ayres, star of the great pacifist classic All Quiet on the Western Front, refused combat service and became an army medic.

Still the fresh faced Karl of All Quiet..., Ayres would manage to continue re-inventing himself, MGM’s young Dr. Kildare, Johnny Belinda, Battleship Gallactica. The playing is so good that McHugh and Peterson doing their type casting drunk reporter and suffering mum characters actually manage to convince - especially when they are on screen together. The handling is straight forward with even a few rough touches like an out of focus linking shot but the celebrity technicians manage to hint at their presence - Carl Freund, the light master of the German silent film and cameraman on Dracula and The Good Earth here at a point where he was about to launch his brief but intriguing career as director, contributes what looks like a snatch of hand held running in the dark street with Ayres while Charles Hall offers the high fashion decorating of Tobin’s apartment. Radio source music buts a snatch of what sounds like Bing Crosby onto an orchestral of Ed. Goulding’s “Mam'zelle” number. This is well on the way to being Bell’s most assured film. 

Old Hollywood - there’s more of this material than any one person can hope to see in a lifetime. Take my word for that. Discovering it is nearly as good as watching it.

Barie Pattison - 2020

HELLO MINI SERIES.

 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy

While I was at the BBC, one of their Mandarins gave the explanation “Series are the same chaps doing different things; serials are the same chaps doing the same things and anthologies are different chaps doing different things.” If you follow his definition the newly dominant TV form isn’t mini series but serial. It isn’t even new. Hitchcock had Bob Stevens doing Alec Coppel’s “I Killed the Count” in three weekly 1957 episodes. (That one had already been a 1939 Ben Lyon Movie and a 1948 BBC play) I’m sure that earlier efforts could be found. These have been bubbling to the surface at regular intervals. Dan Curtis’ 1983 version of Herman Wouk’s Winds of War attracted attention as did Simon Wincer’s 1989 Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove or Josée Dayan’s 1998 Le Comte de Monte Cristo and 2000 Les Miserables. We’re up to four on Fargo. What is new is that an attempt to make streaming the dominant model of presentation has attracted a new level of talent and ambition. 

I’ve been watching this without great attention. Even the best ones had always tended to have a strong exposition followed by repetitive central sections and a rushed finale put together with an eye to a likely sequel. Think Paolo Sorrentino’s two handsome Pope series. Pieces by cinema celebrities like Martin Scorsese’s 2019 The Irishman or Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 Roma clearly played better in theaters and they take time that could accommodate several movies 

The Queen's Gambit - Taylor-Joy & Scott Frank

Netflix' The Queen’s Gambit was recommended to me and I wanted to watch Marielle Heller, the director of Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, in something. This one proved to be the most adept use of the format I’d seen. Show runner Scott Frank had a history as a movie writer which you could think of as solid rather than brilliant - Little Man Tate, Out of Sight, Wolverine. His break through appears to be the 2017 western Mini-Series Godless. He is credited with writing and directing all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, drawing heavily on the original novel by Walter Tevis who also authored The Hustler. Stand-out in a gallery of superior performances is star Anya Taylor-Joy who takes over the central character from young Ilsa Johnson, as a teenager in the second episode. She got her experience being a scream queen in horror flix like Witch and Marrowbone. She’s so good in this one I should seek some of those out.  

 

The Queen’s Gambit has a lot going for it. It’s subject is meant to be chess and they put in a bit of effort on explaining the game with second billed institute janitor Bill Camp reluctantly teaching Johnson in the opening and sympa brothers Matthew and Russell Dennis Lewis briefing Taylor-Joy as she signs on for her first tournament at Henry Clay High School - Home of the Fighting Owls - and explaining to step mother Heller during the games she watches uncomprehending. One of the things that makes the piece superior is the way Heller however spots what is happening by seeing the audience reaction to the girl’s moves - her successes from intuition. This is the way the production works with the camera focused on the people rather than the contests. For the match with the Dutch champion we don’t even see the board. An understanding of the moves isn’t really an assist in watching the film. 

They do come up with some striking effects work - the motif of imagining the pieces on the ceiling, chessmen self animating on the board while the characters perform at normal speed and the screen as a checker board with characters and objects in the squares.

Taylor-Joy & Thomas Brodie-Sangster

The production’s achievement is that it fields a whole range of things that are as important and as involving as the chess. 

Most obviously is parenting, with the disaster of Johnson’s own incapable "trailer trash" mother landing her in the severe Methuen Children’s Home where religion cops the first of several serves in the film. While her friend Moses Ingram is left behind (“Too old, too black to be adopted”), Johnson is handed off to Heller, who is in a rocky marriage with Patrick Kennedy, shortly before he departs taking the family car, to leave their leafy suburb for Detroit. Their house, grotesquely over furnished with modern home items (“prints, copies not the real thing of course”) becomes another major element of the film. 

Marielle Heller & Taylor-Joy

It looks like Heller is going to screw up like Taylor-Joy’s previous mentors, sending her off to fetch the over the counter drugs that already have a grip on her and getting her school clothes from sale at Ben Snyder's, the local department store where the snobby school mate says she would never dream of shopping. This girl keeps on showing up, paralleling the lead’s life with her own conformity,

Heller’s character proves to be one of the piece’s strengths. A loser after she settled for less when stage fright ruined her chances of becoming a Pianist, she discovers that being a chess wiz is a way of getting ahead. (eating air plane diners while flying to a tournament has Taylor-Joy say “This may be the best Xmas I ever have”) Heller realises that her  way of living is no kind of role model and doesn’t try to assert herself. She’s not Mildred Pierce. Their brief negotiating a manager's fee is one of the film's nicest scenes. 

This is something new and a strong dynamic leaving us wondering how they are going to keep going without it. When we are settling in to the idea of the Kentucky home as a cage to escape, we get the Harry Melling sub plot contrasting with the cosmopolitan existence of fellow prodigy Thomas Brodie-Sangster (in a cowboy hat to point his participation in Godless), who was a celebrity at nine while Johnson was playing the institute janitor, along with Bodie-Sangster’s fashion model friend Millie Brady. The neighborhood druggist, treated as a simpleton, proves to have a shrewd notion of events. This is not a piece that lets you settle into comfortable expectations. 

It offers the multiplex big budget strategy of shooting in a variety of real and simulated locations - Kentucky, New York, Mexico City, Paris and Moscow which the characters discover as most of their audience will be doing. Uli Hanish's design is particularly strong - the conversion of the house, the imposing Russian interiors. 

 

We see Taylor-Joy’s Russian lessons setting up the elevator ride in the luxury Aztec Hotel and, when we think we understand the format, there’s that knife that Brodie-Sangster carries but  never comes into play - unless it is part of that material with Taylor-Joy as a blonde that hasn’t made it into the final edit. Keeping the Newman score for The Robe running under the break-in is effective but they do it again with the singalong. Did we really need the inset of the old man laying out pieces for the game in the Moscow winter street? 

Taylor-Joy, Heller and fifties decor

 

A major part of the package is locating it in the fifties and sixties (JFK magazine covers, big cars, pop music on black & white TV), shown as alarmingly ugly with tensions with the Russians for whom Chess superiority is part of the national honor. Brodie-Sangster fumes at playing with plastic pieces in high school halls while sports draw crowds of thousands and the Russians nurture their champions. “They pay people to play chess!” We learn that Taylor-Joy’s Christian organisation funding depends on her making a dim wit statement about the infamy of communism and the State Department sends along minder John Schwab who offers her the contents of his flask to top up her orange juice before telling her to lay off alcohol (“You just offered me a drink” “It was a test”), a nice contrast to the scene with Heller and the second beer.

This comes after we hear Russian master Marcin Dorocinski is planning on working on the girl’s character flaws and learn that the Russian female masters are never allowed to play against men. It all builds our anticipation of the inescapable Moscow championship game with Dorocinski and they even manage to work suspense and surprise into that. The final image with her coat the one white element in the desaturated frame is great. 

It’s not that elements of this one are predictable but that they field familiar situations and concepts in a way that we are not used to, managing to keep the viewers off balance without alienating them. It’s a show of considerable skill. 

Never since the nineteen tens has there been such uncertainty about not just the length but also the structure and pacing of movie entertainment. It will be interesting to see what kind of a reception Queen’s Gambit gets and whether it has an influence on the form in which it has been presented. 

 And before we leave this one, an observation. The film is all I know about the chess fanatics, complete with the unkind scene of Taylor Johnson telling the nerdy kid with glasses that he’s stereotypical. It keeps on referencing children whose lives chess has absorbed, getting the bug age nine, excluding other elements, social unease, impatience with conformist values. I couldn’t help making a comparison with movie freaks. It’s not a little disturbing in the same way that Cinema Paradiso is, under it’s much admired charm.

Taylor-Joy and Brodie-Thomas

 

 

 

 Barrie Pattison 2021