Fox and His Friends.

The films that had been made by the William Fox Company all but vanished after it was merged with Daryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Company. Fox stars, people like Warner Baxter, Tom Mix,  Janet Gaynor and the once enormously popular Will Rogers, were the ones about whom I knew the least for most of the years I spent on this. Fox Studios' history reel used the Zanuck - Wellman Call of the Wild which had no connection with Fox but got Clark Gable in.

DVD turned this around with the new owners realising that they had a store of all but untapped major Hollywood product. The new owners did a handsome Fox-Murnau-Borzage Box along with Charlie Chan and Will Rogers sets and now, out of this new activity, we are getting glimpses of hard worker studio directors who filled their A feature schedule - include Doug Fairbanks graduates Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh.

Dwan’s 1927 East Side, West Side makes the cut more as a record of the enormous New York construction effort of it’s day. There’s a then-and-now short showing its locations shooting.  The title is a the name of a popular street song and was used for an Irving Cummings movie in 1923, a super boring one by Merven Le Roy in 1949 and a 1963 TV series with George C. Scott, none of which are connected to this film but all have in common foregrounding the contrast of a milling working class and the penthouse people.

 

This one opens with George O’Brien, admiring the East River sky line of high rise construction his back to camera, and pondering how a brick from the load that his adoptive parents’ barge carries, can turn into sky scrapers. It’s not long before the barge sinks (disturbing this - the cargo of bricks taking it straight down) and George clambers out onto an East Side pier where, still sopping wet and in shock, he has to punch out the toughs from Dan Wolheim’s gang.  Virginia Valli, stereotypical Jewish tailor Dore Davidson’s daughter, jokes about her dad reluctant to kit George out from the store’s sales stock. Romance blooms.

East Side - West Side - O'Brien on the shore

The street toughs now cheer O’Brien when he takes on comers at the local boxing ring and promoter and Fox regular J. Farrel Mc Donald spots his potential and starts training our hero. In the gym, George meets socialite Holmes Herbert, who is actually his dead beat dad having lost contact with the boy when his snooty family had his marriage annulled. If Holmes revealed this, he would lose the respect and friendship of the boy.

Of course, O’Brien is drawn to uptown girl  June Collier (opposite Gary Cooper in The Man from Wyoming) and accepts architecture training set up by Herbert. Virginia, not wanting to stand in his way, claims to be engaged to a local club manager. This doesn’t work out too well with drugs being slipped into match books in the joint while she works there, and the dastard determined to have his will of Virginia.

Meanwhile Collier has taken passage on a Titanic-modeled doomed liner, waving good bye to Herbert from the life boat where her low life society lover has hidden himself, while the crew shoot men trying to take places reserved for woman and children only. This incident turns up again in Negulesco’s 1952 Fox Titanic movie. A punch out re-aligns the lovers according to the preference of a working class audience.

The thing which elevates this from Hollywood production line features around it is the presentation of New York as a dynamic, vital environment always in the process of improvement. The scenes of subway building are particularly vivid, with a work elevator large enough to drive a car onto, lowering the camera into actual construction. The cave-in (is 1949’s Le point du jour the only mining film without a cave in?) is a particularly impressive mechanical effect and the same crew seem to have staged the one shot of chairs sliding down the tilting deck, standing out in the otherwise mediocre studio tank model sinkings.

Cast are more than equal to their task. George O’Brien’s career was peaking at this point with the Murnau Sunrise and Michael Curtiz’ much abused Noah’s Ark. Like Philip Reed shortly later, body-builder-actor O'Brien anticipated the Stallone-Steve Reeves era.  They get him into his shorts whenever possible and we see a lot of Valli’s stockinged legs, giving the piece an effective physicality in all the studio artifice. In sound, O’Brien would become a B movie cowboy hero and regular John Ford featured player.

Dwan gave an interview where he claimed the way to survive in Hollywood was to never stick your head above the crowd. He mentioned the forties Dennis O’Keefe versions of once scandalous comedies Up In Mabel’s Room and Getting Gertie’s Garter as his favorite work. Like East Side West Side, these do stand out from an often mediocre output.  

 Eight years later Fox’s take on New York is much the same in Raoul Walsh’s Under Pressure, with a script that passed though hands including Borden Chase, Billy Wilder & Lester Cole. Irving Cummings again did some uncredited revisions on this one.

Uneven & crude but fascinating for a movie freak, this mid thirties Victor McLaglen - Edmund Lowe-Raoul Walsh piece works at setting up crews constructing a subway tunnel between New York and Brooklyn, “Sand Hogs - a short life at high speed” Boss McLaglen talks about the river “a thousand feet over your head - do you want it in your lap?” A shaky optical shows a cross section with McLaglen’s team tunneling from Brooklyn towards rival Charles Bickford working from the other side, with the crews betting their hefty wages on who will reach the center first. The newcomer is offered a cigarette to see it blaze up in his face from air pressure and a worker collapses in the street in front of Florence Rice, who finds the emergency disk he carries, rushing to put him in Dr. Sig Ruman’s decompression chamber to treat the bends.

This one has the director’s personality stamped all over it -  a cartoonish notion of masculinity that places it between What Price Glory and  Marines Let’s Go. There’s a saloon like the one in The Bowery, though here it’s Marjorie Rambeau who punches out the drunk rather than Wally Beery flooring a floozie. Rambeau even has a there are two kinds of women speech admitting appealing Rice to her blokes only establishment .

Rice looks good and has the character of a fashion illustrator who walks out on her editor to do her Sandhog story but, as in her MGM movies that include the Marx brothers At the Circus, she comes across as incidental. The relationship between McLaglen and side kick Lowe is more clearly important than those with the women.  

We’ve really got two films. There's the lumpen surface drama with dodgy process backgrounds of the wrong New York sky line and compressed air bubbling up from below the river’s surface in a poor matte shot. Among the tunnelers’ women watching it, Rambeau gets a monologue about seeing a thirty foot spurt from a leak bringing up mud, timbers - and men.
    

Under Pressure - Bickford, Lowe. McLaglen and (?) Thorpe.

The piece however comes to life in the imposing scenes underground in hellish conditions, where the men, sweat-covered half naked, race to complete the work. One of the first surprises is to see the grubby crews emerge at street level in smart suits.The outstanding feature is the studio built tunnel, a great piece of  construction by art director Jack Otterson in his second year on the job, soon to move into Charles Hall’s spot as prestige designer at Universal - the John Wayne The Spoilers notably.

There are  a couple of comic darkies again but we don’t see much of them. Jim Thorpe is a "mucker" and Ruman, Lynn Barri and Ward Bond, doing another bit part, figure early in their careers.

This is a very much the thick ear entertainment that earned abuse for Hollywood but European industries couldn’t match for energy. G.W. Pabst’s 1931 more documentary mining film Kameradschaft makes an interesting comparison.

The two films are represented by reasonable copies on You Tube and add to the newly unfolding picture of  the William Fox Company, one of the most rewarding and curiously neglected areas of Old Movie World. That pair are available to us, even without having any serious Cinematheque activity in this country.

Barrie Pattison 2022