Sorry Cantinflas

Career movie comedians are generally considered beneath the dignity of serious critics world wide - so it's twice the fun when you come across the accomplished work of film makers like Italian Adriano Celantano,  Egyptian Mohamed Henedi or Hong Kong's Chow Ching chi - lots on You Tube, mostly unsubtitled. 

Mexico's national legend, Cantinflas seemed a likely candidate and I was was delighted to get my hands on his El Mago directed by Miguel M. Delgado in 1949, in Columbia Classic's beautiful transfer with excellent English sub-titles.

Unfortunately you can drop this one in another basket with contemporary Abbott & Costello, Louis de Funés or Ismael Yassin comedies, technically competent but totally unfunny. It may be that Cantinflas' work became more bland and uninvolving in the 1950s, the process we can see with Bob Hope, Toto or Fernandel.

In mythical Eastern country Hariche, that bears a distinct resemblance to Maria Montez’ Bagdad, the ruler dies and his evil brother plots to take over the throne and dispose of the legitimate heir who for some reason is telling fortunes in Mexico.

Meanwhile Cantinflas is answering the ‘phone at the Su Suotro Yo agency which supplies lookalikes to replace people who want to take a break. Mago José Baviera (El ángel exterminador) is kitted out with a double (split screen) who manages his crystal ball readings while he goes on vacation, leaving file cards with his client predictions and  secrets that must not be revealed to them, on the back. We expect merry japes in vain.

A series of misunderstandings has Cantinflas take the double’s place and he’s transported by a turban wearing delegation headed by an agent secretly in the power of the Uncle. Set up in a luxury hotel (jokes about fish eggs being smaller than chickens’ eggs) he becomes the subject of interest to glamorous Leonora Amar (with Richard Greene in Captain Scarlet), the agent’s two blow pipe assassins and a local gangster who wants him to predict the outcome of robberies.  Lackluster developments ensue as the assassins kill off the wrong dignitaries and the gangsters kidnap our hero and Amar.

After a Katzman-esque brawl, Cantinflas hitches back to base in a coal truck and is flown to Hariche where they talk about elephants we never see. He is set up as the ruler and bankrupts the country lazing about in a harem to the strains of Rimsky Korsakov’s "Scheherazade." He imports new bikini recruits, introduced in the manner of bulls at a corrida. (that will go down well in the present climate) The punch line is the arrival of a fat girl!

El Mago - Cantinflas & friends.

Baviera shows up and sorts things out (we still don’t know why he was in Mexico) and our hero has one request. Cut to him back home spruiking a tent show with (is that?) Olga Chaviano from the harem leading her hoochy coochy  dancers.

A succession of dumb routines have no dramatic impact and don’t get laughs. Bits of would- be comic business - Cantinflas’ tortilla lunch getting cold as the boss instructs him, swatting a bug on the hotel bed where he’s putting pillows under the sheets so he can visit Amar in the next suite, suggest being added by the lead - to no effect.

It's of interest to anyone curious about the star’s career but Sharp B&W and mundane scoring go with unremarkable support performances. The competent camerawork is not well deployed. An off-center composition telegraphs the fact that the lookalike will arrive through the door that occupies screen left etc. 

Finally if you want to investigate the prolific Mexican trash movie output of the day you're better off with Santo the Man in the Mask of Silver and his wrestler chums.

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Get Me to the Church on Time.

 This one has been a movie legend since before I was born, a Dutch version of "Pygmalion" that so incensed George Bernard Shaw that he refused permission to film any of more his work, until Gabriel Pascal, once the third member of the Hungarian Alexander Korda, Michel Curtiz trio, sweet talked him into the deal that produced the Lesley Howard Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.

Well now the Nederlands film has bubbled up from obscurity on You Tube in the Eye film archive copy complete, with good integrated English sub-titles. This one’s a bit rough around the reel changes but by and large we get an excellent transfer. It’s curious and off putting to see the familiar material playing out not in Covent Garden and Mayfair but in Amsterdam and Haarlem, with characters speaking  Dutch and paying in Guilders.

We kick off with Lily Bouwmeester, made up grubby, selling her flowers in the pouring rain. In the crowd Johan De Meester’s Prof. Higgins is taking down her dialogue phonetically and the familiar plot develops. There are minor variations like an attempt to get laughs out of the “not bloody likely” routine by extending the scene as hip current speech for the socialites.  Freddy, now George, is a silly ass comic who is likely to get cut out when a distributor wants a shorter version. Matthieu van Eysden’s “Doeluttel” is similarly expendable. Lilly and her accordion get a few musical numbers - that must have gone down a treat with G.B.S. - and there is of course the “happy” ending which the author objected to, though it follows, here  pretty clumsily, a line used in most adaptations.

Pygmalion - De Meesters & Bouwmeester.

The Dutch unit’s production values are a try for polished with small, busily decorated studio decors, but the piece is non stop talk. The few attempts at cinematic material, working with the kids gang, the shopping expedition and particularly the ball, are chopped off before they get a chance to work up any steam. Of the cast only Higgins’ mother, one Emma Morel who made just one other movie, seems to be at ease in front of the camera. De Meesters’ bombastic Svengali character totally lacks the charm balancing his arrogance, which Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison traded in.

However Lily Bouwmeester, here in her initial sound film role, scored a hit. She jams in a few moments - her delayed reaction to the first experience of chocolate - and nearly makes us forget she was going forty when she made the film, which became a personal triumph for her repeating Eliza Doolittle in stage productions during the rest of her career.

Director Ludwig Berger, then interdicted by Josef Goebbels, moved in exalted circles, making Ein Walzertraum for Erich Pommer at UFA in 1925, directing Emil Jannings in Hollywood, reworking Max Linder’s Le Petit Café for Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, presenting the then stellar Pierre Fresnay - Yvonne Printemps duo in Trois valses and filming on The Thief of Bagdad for Korda. He became a musicals specialist. You would have expected him to be totally within his element here but he fails miserably to make the piece build to dramatic peaks or present the characters as sympathetic. His command of the Dutch language is suspect.

It would have been a better story if this one had turned out to be a suppressed masterwork but sadly what we get is a rather draggy oddity. Still, how many pre-Bert Haanstra  Dutch movies have you seen?

Barrie Pattison 2021

Into the Archive.

Lockdown and what better time to look at hundred year old movies? I just jammed in two.

In 1920 Humoresque was Frank Borzage’s first major film, the foundation of his great Hollywood career. The opening (“New York a sample of all the civilisations of history”)  is frequently considered it’s major asset, with “stolen” actuality of the Albert St. Ghetto market and Jewish stall holders and customers, prefiguring hundreds of films like Frank Capra's 1929 The Younger Generation or The Jazz Singer.

A crowded tenement flat holds the Kantor family including the first appearance of mother, stage star Vera Gordon, along with dad Dore Davidson, who is in the business of "turning new brass into Russian antiquities", and  retarded son Sidney Carlyle, a mind that never developed after an incident fleeing the Tsar. 

Humoresque - Connelly & Gordon

On his birthday, then child star Bobby Connelly in his freakish new suit, is duffed up by the street kids but he comes to the aid of young Miriam Battista, getting all the endearing camera work when she cradles a dead cat on which she lays the potted flower’s blossom - nice bright light circle close up of young Connelly.

Dad Davidson offers Bobby a Harmonica toy gift but his heart is set on the shop’s violin. Mother Gordon is elated, her prayers for a musician in the family answered, but Davidson scoffs. “Couldn’t you have prayed for a businessman.” Archivist Robert Gitt thought he was onto something when he found this one but disillusion set in about this point.

 We dissolve from Connoly to Gaston Glass as his grown self, the concert star. Davidson is impressed by the medal they have given his son which he could sell for a tidy sum. Our hero gives a concert for the poor people of the ghetto in the huge theatre. “The Kol Nider played as if his very blood were weeping” one of Frances Marion’s flowery titles announces and Glass is offered a four figure contract by a celebrity producer. However he eyes the recruiter’s stand in the street below.  Remembering the injury inflicted on his brother, he has to take a stand against autocracy and with freedom. “Father I’ve just signed a contract with Uncle Sam.”

About now top billed Alma Rubens shows up as the neighbor girl Battista grown to be his
sweetheart. She is appealing before her tragic addictions took hold. The protracted family farewell is the film’s big tear-jerker scene.

We never see any combat footage but a cable announces Glass’ return and a car pulls up only to deliver his army comrade come to say he’s in hospital, injured. Glass’ recovery is hindered by his fear, which makes it impossible for him to play, but when he has to reach out to stop Alma from falling, he overcomes this and finds his skill (immediately) restored. Gordon has been praying again. This wind up is rapid and unconvincing.

Today Borzage’s film  hasn’t lasted well into the era of concern over race stereotypes and  “getting an operation so I can play the violin again” jokes  Dramatically unremarkable, the weak ending pretty much does in any conviction but in its day Humoresque was a whopping success for producer William Randolph Hearst and it’s WW1 and concert hall subject matter indicate directions Borzage will take in his more mature work. 

Humoresque - Ann Wallack, Vera Gordon, Alma Rubens, Gaston Glass, Sidney Carlyle.

The film is the root of two major Hollywood ventures - Borzage’s Seventh Heaven with it’s lovers divided by WW1 and the forties supposed re-make to which Clifford Oddets added elements of his “Golden Boy” in his adaptation for Joan Crawford and John Garfield. 

William S. Hart in 1920's The Cradle of Courage seemed a better prospect. Not without interest, this turned out to be one of the lesser Hart films.  Take Hart out of his westerner character and turn him into into a cloth cap workman, an Aztec Indian or a city cop, and he loses his legendary status.

Doughboys, “men who had faced Boche steel” are  disembarking at San Francisco after WW1 and among them we spot Hart as Sgt. Square Kelly of the 91st, one time burglar, and his officer friend who happens to be the son of the Police Lieutenant who had encountered our hero in his professional capacity. Bill hurries back to his white haired mother. She (switch)  happens to be a cop hating Irish criminal matriarch. She’s saved his burglar tools for his return. He puts them with the Luger he captured grenading a German dug out in a flashback.

While he’s celebrating with his old gang, including his brother, at Tom Santschi’s Tierney’s Bar, Bill gets a call from his war buddy inviting him to diner with the folks. Soon our hero is faced with a choice - go back to crime or joining the force now that the Policeman father has made him an offer on the strength of his distinguished military service. “As a Bull?” “As a police officer!” Santschi’s ward Anne Little (co-star of Broncho Billy Anderson and the second De Mille Squaw Man) slips him a note saying the stripes on his sleeve are better than the ones he’ll get from a judge.

Sgt. Hart with captured Luger.

A convincing punch out with Santschi (also duking it out in the 1914 Colin Campbell The Spoilers) resolves the matter and mum throws Bill out of the family home.

The gang has their eye on a mansion in his patrolman beat and Little goes there to alert him but he thinks she’s casing the joint for them and their kiss in the bar's family entrance was an idle gesture.

He interrupts the robbery and in the exchange of gun fire his brother is killed with Hart’s old pistol. Bill prizes the name of the heavy his mum sold it to out of her, though told “A Kelly never squeals to a cop.” Out of uniform, he confronts the dastard. Getting shot with the under the counter pistol lands our hero in hospital and, sunning himself on the roof,  he resolves his romance and family dilemmas which is kind of a lame ending.

When the tension between Hart’s up bringing and his new righteous way of life has been settled, Cradle of Courage is less involving. Instead of an Old Testament God, it’s the hallowed US Army that stirs his reverence here. The San Francisco setting, also featured in Hart’s The Narrow Trail, is an effective background, an intriguing comparison to the same locales used a quarter century later in Dark Passage.

I hate to say it, because his B films made up a slice of my movie education, but Hart’s old associate Lambert Hillyer was never a major talent and his script and direction don’t make this one of his star’s best efforts. Cameraman Joe August (later to shoot The Informer and  the Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame), on the other hand, covers himself with glory, capturing Hart in the Bay City panoramas and filming the shoot-out in the dark room illuminated by muzzle flashes - is this the first time? We get that again in George Bancroft’s  superior The Mighty ten years later, which this film intriguingly anticipates and - among many others - the Hopalong Cassidy Mystery Man eg.

Hart - Cradle of Courage

 

 

Barbara Bedford, Cora of the Tourneur-Brown Last of the Mohicans, debuts briefly as the officer’s sister.

There’s some bad matching on the cuts closer to medium shots of the leads, almost certainly not the fault of  Mr. Le Roy Stone who gets an editor credit, still unusual at this period. The Grapevine disk is passable. 

This pair of movies confirm my view that, while some outstanding films were made before the twenties, it took a couple more years before presentable entertainment became the norm.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2021