Teeming Shores.

All the books tell you about the wave of German film makers who fled their home turf in the thirties, when the National Socialists took control. Find someone who can remember what the makers of Asphalt, Variety and Lucrezia Borgia got up to in the ‘states?

Pommer

Legendary Producer Erich Pommer’s US landfall was Fox’ now little seen 1934 Music in the Air. He brought with him Asphalt’s director Joe May, musician Franz Wacksman, soon to be Waxman, & writers Robert (Congress Dances) Liebmann and Billi / Billy Wilder. They got bundled up with Jerome Kern and Oscar Hamerstein. That sounds like enough talent to make three films.

The opening makes it look as if it was all worth while. To the then familiar strains of “I’ve Told Every Little Star” we find ourselves in a Germanic mountaineering film with young Douglass Montgomery in lederhosen climbing the back projected peaks before he shows up as the teacher in Alpine Ependorf’s school room, leading the kids in a prayer.

Dairy man Al Shean (of Gallagher & Shean fame) takes inspiration from a singing bird and writes the recurring number before he and daughter June Lang go off to the cow judging. May really gets into this with the crowd full of Tyrolean costumed extras milling between the camera and the leads. Montgomery finds himself involved in a choice between going to Munich with Shean and Lang or joining the mountaineers' chorus.

Music in the Air - Boles, Owen, Swanson, Shean & Montgomery.

 

 

 

Turns out that Shean is an old associate of Publisher Reginald Owen, now a theatrical entrepreneur with partner Joseph Cawthorn. The lively handling fades when Stars Gloria  Swanson and John Boles show up with Swanson giving us an overbearing preview of Norma Desmond and an atypical Boles trying to be animated while wearing (another) monocle - both determined to be larger than life.

Attention wanders, though a run through of their show with Swanson simulating jail with a wastepaper bin over her head is quite lively.

There’s the plot familiar from the Eddy-McDonald films where the couples split and re-group with opposite partners. Lang gets cast opposite Boles in the musical but they tell Shean his daughter is pretty and can sing a bit but she’s not a star, which must have been a downer for Lang who’d be opposite Frederic March in Hawks’ imposing Road to Glory. Montgomery actually had a substantial career doing the leads in a couple of remarkable films, the James Whale Waterloo Bridge and Asquith’s Way to the Stars, without anyone taking real notice of him.

Things sort out with the youngsters back with the dairy cows in Ependorf, Shean’s song in the big show and Swanson and Boles singing sweethearts again.

Production is studio ambitious but after that one hit song they can’t come up with anything else and interest fades. When Zanuck took over Fox, films which had predated him, disappeared from theatrical re-issue. There is a soso copy of Music in the Air on You Tube.

In the same boat (possibly literally) came Karl Freund, the the most famous German cameraman of the silent period and subsequent director of the two great Hollywood “Horror” movies, The Mummy of 1932 and  Mad Love of 1935. That pair book end his eight American feature films as director, among them 1933’s Universal Moonlight & Pretzels.

Hard to find any connection with Freund and this formula early thirties back stage musical.

Moonlight & Pretzels - Bryan & Pryor

Moonlight & Pretzels starts nicely enough with a piano mover shifting an upright in the street as Roger Prior is struck by his creative urge and starts working  (“I had a swell idea for a tune”) as it is wheeled into Mary Brian’s strip mall music store. Turns out that Mary’s seen him perform at the neighborhood theater and they hit on the idea of him signing on as song plugger (like Doris Day in My Dream Is Yours) which has him performing for potential sheet music customers including Hymn-singing Doro Merande or Snowball, the uncredited black kid messenger-dancer (the figures are right for this to be Sammy Davis).    

One of his numbers catches the attention of Louis Sorin and his partner, “the biggest theatrical producers on Broadway,” and the Bright Lights beckon but Roger promises to write Mary. His piano audition in their offices soon has the pair setting up his hit show, leaving little time for letters. Mary heads for the Big Apple but Roger is so busy that they only way she can get to see him is audition for his chorus. 

Lillian Miles

At this late point, the film takes an abrupt change of direction and top billed comic mispronouncing star Leo Carillo shows up as a high roller with the hots for Roger’s Platinum blonde star Lillian Miles (her best outing) conspicuous in the shiny form fit outfit. It then becomes a juggling act with his vacillating fortune, and fellow gambler, silent movie star and B movie regular Herbert Rawlinson, in one of his best later parts, moving on Mary making her an Indecent Proposal (“I’m not so hard to take”) to be decided on the toss of his double tails coin.

This is all spaced by dance director Bobby Connolly’s numbers very much in the manner of the contemporary Busby Berkley. Miles’ big finale is the Depression montage number that starts with Alexander Gray singing “Dirty Shoes”, moves into actuality shots and ends with Miles fringed by the dancers’ quivering hands. It unmistakably evokes the Berkley-Joan Blondell “Remember My Forgotten Man” in the same year’s Gold Diggers of 1933.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Moonlight and Pretzels, except possibly the way they make the normally appealing Mary Brian look dowdy - but watching it an audience must continually feel that they’ve seen everything there done better.

Beyond having a vaguely Bavarian title song there’s also nothing to connect with the skill set of Freund, one of the all time greatest technicians. After Mad Love, he moved back behind camera and stayed there filming some of the biggest MGM super productions (Camille, The Good Earth) till they appear to have got tired of him, at which point he invented a multi-camera system for shooting the Desilu programs.

Tarzan Triumps - Weismuller, Sheffield & Gifford.

There is a down beat pattern in all this. Wilder and Robert Siodmak did thrive in the ‘States but, without Pommer, Joe May found himself floundering in B movies. Vincent Price commented that the studios had him doing Americana like The House of the Seven Gables when he couldn’t even speak English. Similarly Ewald André Dupont (Variety)  saw out his days on items like 1953’s Problem Girls, Frank Wisbar (Fährmann Maria) did The Devil Bat’s Daughter, Richard Oswald (Lucrezia Borgia) helmed Island of Missing Men and Wm. Thiele (Die Drei von der Tankstelle) found himself guiding Tarzan. How many of that lot have you seen lately?

The question of why America proved a fertile field for a few German big time movie makers and a calamity for so many others deserves more space than I can give it.

 Barrie Pattison 2021.