Ready When You Are Mr. De Mille.

Mitch Leisen, De Mille and Kay Johnson.

 

 

I've already mentioned my satisfaction in finally seeing the early films of Cecil B. De Mille, after hearing about them for the better part of a life time. Thank you Pordenone, You Tube and import DVDs.

It's interesting to recognise the things I enjoyed in my early years of film going with the re-runs of his big sound epics. The same personality shows in his silent era beginnings. Doing these justice is a major undertaking. I'm not sure that I'm going to get through it. Consider this a down payment on the De Mille account.

De Mille was one of the few people (Jack Warner was another) who had the foresight to take a personal interest in archiving his work and the greater part of it does survive.

We are lucky that a beautiful tinted copy of 1921's Forbidden Fruit is still about though this is minor De Mille. More a curiosity, it fields all the crassness that De Mille is abused for, alongside sophisticated camerawork, overpowering design and determined miming by a cast of De Mille regulars.

We find Oil magnate Theodore Roberts (Moses in the silent Ten Commandments) with a wall chart with little derricks on it. Katharine Williams, whose busy career includes playing Cherry Malotte in the 1914 The Spoilers, is his “Mrs. Fix It” wife, also into visual aids, with name tabs on her diner table model. To further her husband's deal she conspires to keep independent oil man Forrest Stanley (The Cat & the Canary) around by promising him he’ll be seated at diner that evening next to the most beautiful woman in New York but their choice ‘phones in sick. (inset of pudgy girl with tooth-ache). However poor (of course) seamstress Agnes Ayres (opposite Valentino in The Sheik) is fingering the glittery Mitchel Liesen and Natacha Rambova costumes and they put it to her that she can be rung in.  Agnes gets the attention of hair dressers and maids to turn her glamorous.

What De Mille’s target audience will take as manifestations of luxury abound - giant cigars, meals with five forks, an art deco indoor ‘phone booth, “Clothes by Poiret, Perfume by Coty, Jewels by Tiffany." Servants include Ethel Wales, Julia Faye, uncredited Claude Allister and Theodore Kosloff  (“served the best families in NY but also two years in Sing Sing”).

Agnes is married to abusive (of course) Clarence Burton  (King of Kings) who is agro when she’s not there to make his evening meal and he has to put coins into the meter to light the functioning gas bracket. He cheers up when he sees the extra $20 that she brings home.

Forbidden Fruit - Ayres

Agnes and Forrest of course hit it off with her treasuring the orchid he takes out of the center piece to give her and Kathryn bribes her to come back so he will stay for the weekend. They watch the “Forbidden Fruit” play with Katharine Loomis and Conrad Nagel, from Robert’s velvet lounge seat box. The little band of gold, which Agnes removes to put on the finery, gets to stand for duty.

Back in the tenement home with the sewing machine, Burton gets meaner and Agnes’ chirping tweety bird is victim. That’s going too far, with Agnes heading back for more high life with Forrest while Clarence heads out to The Happy Hour Social Club where they keep gin in a hidden bin. There he meets Kosloff, who alerts him to the house guest with all the jewelry. If Clarence steals it, he gets half. The characters converge and Agnes is humiliated. Tempo picks up in a tenement confrontation with bodies stuffed in the Murphy bed.

The main intrigue is simple minded and not helped by panel filling captions and labored Cinderella allusions, complete with with over the top inset sequences featuring see-through hoop skirt and glass floored ballroom but no slipper. Forrest putting a leaf from the table decoration over the saucy place marker at diner sets the tone. 

Performance is quite animated for this period but without any subtlety. The grotesque women’s costumes get attention and the camerawork is remarkably sophisticated - horizontal wipe between scenes, dollar signs appearing in Burton’s eyes well before Tex Avery, the shadowed menacing close up of him when Agnes wakes, the tiny live action figures of Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother vignetted into the lower right of the title explaining their scene.

This one is for movie history enthusiasts who will find their time repaid. The unprepared viewer possibly less so. 

Dynamite of 1929, his first sound film, is recognisably De Mille, mixing intriguing and preposterous at two hours plus. A few years back I was at a fan conference in the Tri State Area where they showed De Mille's Madam Satan (Kay Johnson in form fitting demon outfit and a zeppelin) The collectors there wanted to know if I'd seen this one which was thought inaccessible. My having watched his sound The Squaw Man on Oz TV cut no ice. Since then TCM has come to the rescue and a murkey copy of their version is on You Tube.

We kick off in court with Charles Bickford in his first screen role. He hears the judge sentence him to death for murder, watched by his distraught little sister Muriel McCormac. Charles is quite casual about it “These birds are only doing their stuff, OK.”

Meanwhile in a sky scraper office, the trustees of her grandfather’s estate are telling heiress Kay Johnson that the old man foresaw her irresponsibility and bad company and made a lawyer proof will where she only gets his fortune if she’s married by the age of twenty three - in a fortnight! Kay is skeptical. “Will someone please tell me what money will do with settling down?”

  Dynamite - Nagel, Johnson, Faye & McCrea.

Her idea of the good time is cutting it up at the Napewood Country Club. Entertainment there includes a sword swallower and a women in hoops race, which ends in the Club pool. They film synch. dialogue with  the female leads as rolling contestants - but not much. Kay has her eye on polo playing Conrad Nagel who is married to Julia Faye (Kay objects “I’ve only got the next option on you”) Julia in turn is squired by young Joel McCrea in his first major role. Kay and Julia are in negotiation about how much she gets if she lets spouse Conrad go. (“I’ve never bought a husband before”) Man of integrity Nagel resents this.

We cut to a track along Death Row, with the obligatory black prisoner in one of the cells and the guard playing the radio. There’s an abstract shot of hammers banging on the scaffold, which provides background noise for the scenes. Kay has read about Charles’ offer to leave his remains to science for ten grand to cover the up-keep of the sister after he’s gone and Kay spots an opportunity. They stage their wedding ceremony, complete with all the implied ironies noted by the condemned man.

Meanwhile Leslie Fenton is goading the real killer in a night club. (“The guards with three knives are taking their places” -  like Intolerance) This works out with released newly wed Bickford presenting at Johnson’s luxury home ("You sure make a swell widow”) where the aged butler is unsuccessful at expelling him and Charles rejects the prospect of the servants’ quarters.

The obligatory De Mille wild party ensues with Tyler Brooke’s comedy, “limousine sports” doing suspiciously well rehearsed variety turns  and “Kiss of Fire” playing in the background. “I never call anything informal while people are still standing up.”

Dynamite - Bickford, Johnson & Leisen mural.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles throws the party people out with Kay distraught at him ruining her social status, and punches in the door she locks against him (“Stop it you brute!”) before returning her ten grand and  leaving - if Dynamite finished there, it would be one of the more presentable of the twenties sound films, comparable to the Norma Shearer vehicles.

However there’s more - lots more. Cut to the wide shot of Bickford's home town where Charles has gone back down the mine. Sitcom developments present when Kay turns up in the jazzy roadster he insists she lock in the tool shed for the duration of her stay. She explains she has to be cohabiting with him for the Trust Fund to pay out. He agrees on the basis that she undertakes wife duties - “You don’t mean?” “No, not that” - and we go into joke mode with her failing to make a cake from a cook book like Dorothy Dalton in De Mille's Fools Paradise, both anticipating Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, and Kay having trouble with the hick neighbors like the problems he had with the nobs. Compare Theodora Goes Wild.

There’s a mining disaster (ahah!) but it happens off screen. Then little Douglas Frazer Scott is in a road accident (also off screen) and Kay, whose fault it was in the first place, saves the day by crashing the car out of the shed and bringing back the specialist in record time. The Towns-women bring her flowers.

Conrad shows up to take her home and, being a man of integrity, he insists they go down the mine to face Charles. “A woman in a mine means trouble” and sure enough there’s a cave-in (OK) trapping the leads in a diminishing air pocket (lamp dims as Charles lifts it) while it will take weeks for rescue to arrive. (“You can pray if you know how”) Master miner Charles plans on blasting through the wall into the next chamber but whoever hammers the dynamite home will be wiped out in the explosion. Both men declare their love for Kay and don’t want to be the one stuck with her remembering a heroic admirer.

Dynamite - Nagel, Bickford & Johnson underground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who is going to survive? Despite all the Pre-Code daring the matter is decided as always in favor of the marriage knot. By this time the film’s qualities have sunk in a mire of formula plots and unreadable dialogue. (“You know a lot about coal, don’t you?”) De Mille rises to the challenge of the new sound format with only a few lapses - the view of bar stools being re-arranged which doesn’t belong in its sequence. Dialogue shots that look as if they were taken in succeeding runs in the sound proof booth are smoothly edited for the interiors. However his ambitions and crassness defeat a production which would have played nicely at half the length.

The leads are assured and occasionally impressive, with Bickford and Johnson (Mrs. John Cromwell) on film for their first time. She had quite an impressive career at this stage with her  De Mille leads and her husband's films - but twenty three - c'mon! The De Milles must have thought rough-hewn Bickford played well opposite elegant leading women. Brother William De Mille fielded him with Kay Francis in Passion Flower a year later. Julia Faye is awful and McCrea doesn’t have anything much to do except look young. The one who does register is designer Mitch Leisen and his modern decors - the pan round Johnson’s lavish flat where Bickford inspects the abstract murals before tasting the bath salts. However Leisen's know how defeats some material, as with attention being stolen from the killer by the patterned fabric of the dress an extra passing in front of him is wearing.

Passion Flower - Francis, Johnson, cleric, Bickford and Lewis Stone.

 

It wasn't till he got back to putting the wrath of Jehovah on display back at Paramount that Cecil B. De Mille resumed his dominant position in Hollywood, but these MGM early talkies have a fascination of their own. Dynamite is particularly striking as much for its excesses and missteps as for the pieces of staging that showed its director asserting himself. I enjoyed it.

Barrie Pattison - 2022.