Guilty and De Mille.

Adrianne Ames - Guilty as Hell.

Whatever may be said about the Hollywood movie, it's market penetration and vigorous promotion creates a nostalgia that doesn't go away. Product, that commentators and educators originally dismissed, is often still around when culture they endorsed has faded. With a little effort you can still watch Paramount’s 1932 A feature crime piece Guilty as Hell or Guilty as Charged in more prudish markets.

After their success in the 1926 movie of the Maxwell Anderson - Laurence Stallings hit What Price Glory, Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen continued to be teamed for a decade and a half, as Sgt. Quirt and Captain Flag or their  characters re-birthed for copyright reasons.

The pull back from close-up of the name embossed on Henry Stephenson’s Doctor bag is the first of the film's flamboyant camera moves, roving the apartment with his shadow and rolling into the close-up of his face to be reflected in the lenses of wife Claire Dodd’s glasses as he throttles her.

Stephenson is using the neighbors as part of his alibi, setting the radio to come on (a seven second valve warm up was standard at this time) while he chats in the corridor. The sound of the broadcast (“crooning ... it’s supposed to be soothing”) makes a link to shady Ralph Ince’s Colombine Club where picture snatching journalist Lowe gives up a taxi to the always glamorous Adrienne Ames (Woman Wanted, Abdul the Damned). Richard Arlen (in an uncharacteristically subsidiary part) finds the body of his lover Dodd and tries to remove the traces of his visit.

Guilty as Hell - McLaglen, Kelso, Stephenson, Arlen, Noel Francis & Ince

 

 

 

Lowe and Police Capt. McLaglen are old associates, stealing women from one another, and the reporter injects himself into the crime scene, ashing his cigarette on the body, but mellows when he takes an interest in Ames, who is prime suspect Arlen’s sister. Passages like McLaglen's tricking Arlen's lying witnesses and the demonstration of the unreliability of recollected time might have played better on Broadway, however at this point, conventional detective movie plotting depletes attention - comic cop Fred Kelsey bumbling round with a screw driver to make off with the door knob for finger prints.

The prints montage is one of the bits of flamboyant handling that continue to be injected into standard cop film staging, along with revealing Ames at the head of the stairs in her stylish apartment or dialogue in big close ups with the cast looking into the lens and pointing fingers or documents intruding into the shots.

The film does spring to life abruptly with McLaglen’s pursuit of Ince, as the fugitive attempts escape down a snow covered fire escape and the policeman blazes away at the wrong man. 

Director, former Keystone cop Earl C. Kenton, was someone whose involvement with the horror cycle (Island of Dr. Moreau etc.) would make his output  more conspicuous. Here he’s got celebrity cameraman Karl Struss along to urge him into work more showy than what we were getting from his admired contemporaries, people like Josef Von Sternberg and Howard Hawks. Unfortunately, from this distance, Guilty as Hell just registers as an erratic attempt to add luster to a routine crime feature. It is outclassed by the remarkably similar Hecht- MacArthur Crime Without Passion made a couple of years later.

The Vintage Filmbuff.com disk on Guilty As Hell is passable.

The film was re-made by Ralph Murphy as 1937’s Night Club Scandal with Elizabeth Patterson in the same part in both.

 

Also coming my way was a copy of the believed lost 1926 Cecil B. De Mille Production Silence, from a play by Max Marcin and directed by New Zealander, the assured Rupert Julian (Phantom of the Opera) whose career didn't last into the sound era. The opening makes this look as if it will be another one of the agreeable De Mille efforts that followed his break with Paramount, polished production line efforts under his own banner in the last years of the Silents - Donald Crisp's Young April or Julian's own Walking Back.

We get the best yet rendition of the familiar scene where the condemned man hears the construction of his gallows - montaged hammer strokes, mixed to swinging pendulum, noose and superimposed bells.

Flash back gets us into H.B. Warner’s remarkable three ages performance, as he comes into the saloon run by bar keeper and landlady Virginia Pearson (lead in Theda Bara's debut The Stain). Wife pregnant Vera Reynolds is renting upstairs and H.B. isn't interested in Pearson’s come on.  She is hammy but it’s interesting to see a De Mille woman dishing it out, using a bottle to club the police informer drinker behind the bar. 

Silence - Warner, Pearson & Hatton.

While H.B. was away Vera was sustained by benevolent rich guy Rockliffe Fellowes. Events land our hero in the grey bar motel and Vera marries her protector. When Warner eventually shows up to check out the situation, his pre-teen daughter, little Violet Crane, cuts the hungry ex-con a slice of her birthday cake. We've moved from touching to maudlin. 

Years again pass and at the marriage of the daughter, again Reynolds now grown to be the dead ringer for her late (thus saving an outlay on split screen) mum.  H.B.’s low life side kick Raymond Hatton (once more excellent) tries to blackmail Fellowes and in the ensuing confusion Vera plugs him, with H.B. taking the rap.

So we get back to H.B with his lawyer Jack Mower on death row and another saintly chaplain accompanying him on a (suitably effectsy) last mile. A happy end destroys any dignity the piece may have left but the high pro De Mille technical finish persists - large elaborately dressed decors.

Performances vary considerably with the children awful, in contrast to aging-on-screen Warner giving a notable turn.

It's easy to joke about the DeMille melodramas but as I watched Silence, it started to seem familiar. I realised that it's shadow was visible in the 2015 Charlize Theron Dark Places, which I'd seen a few nights before. It's unlikely that its writers had seen a De Mille movie that had been lost for near a century but that underlying structure still managed to come down the years. 

Re-made in l931 by Marcin and Louis Gasnier with Clive Brook, Silence turned up on the free Cinémathèque Française Henri site in a beautiful tinted copy of the version released in France, which had shed a reel.

Barrie Pattison 2022