Slaughter

 
Coming off a Dario Argento retrospective, films that are stylish, master crafted and occasionally shocking, I was faced with, another shocker specialist, whose work was none of those things. You Tube fielded a nice, reduced-aperture transfer of Todd Slaughter's 1948 The Greed of William Hart, under its re-issue title Horror Maniacs, a reel longer than the abbreviated version that has been circulating.

English melodrama specialist Tod Slaughter is someone who has been hiding in plain sight for the better part of a century. After down market first runs, his film output never figured in theatrical re-issue or TV, film society or cinémathèque showings. You’d have to engage with sixteen millimeter distribution, VHS or DVD to reach it. There's a thirties Sweeney Todd movie in there. 

Slaughter established himself post WW1 doing blood and thunder pieces with his Elephant and Castle company and  touring regional British theaters. He appears to have made himself the front runner in an established British tradition.  His 1935 Maria Marten: Murder in the Red Barn film was preceded by four movie versions, including a (now of course lost) 1913 Maurice Elvey film shot in the actual Suffolk Red Barn.

Slaughter’s films played to the audiences who had hissed and jeered his characters on stage, as he delivered lines like “I’ve got my eye on yer, William!” or “There’s queer folk about at night.” Mainly directed by the largely forgotten George King, these were mounted functionally on modest budgets and the playing was relatively restrained, without the rib nudging and nods to the audience we see when such work is simulated in later productions.

Tod Slaughter.

Slaughter is sometimes compared to Charles Laughton and it is not hard to imagine either actor being assigned to the other’s roles but, after the relish which Laughton brought to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jamaica Inn or even The Strange Door,  Slaughter’s avuncular fiends are outclassed. 

The Greed of William Hart is another Body Snatchers film, made in the wake of the 1945 Robert Wise-Val Lewton movie and appearing about the time Dylan Thomas wrote  his “The Doctor and the Devils” script that was finally filmed by Freddie Francis in 1985. William Hart writer John Gilling would return to the subject in the 1960 The Flesh and the Fiends fronted by Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence, this time identifying the historical characters whose descendants had demanded the family names be changed for the Slaughter version. Retooling the sound track to rechristen Burke & Hare as Hart and Moore consumed the funds intended for the film’s music track.

Slaughter’s support cast is headed up by the admirable Henry Oscar (The Four Feathers, On the Night of the Fire, Murder Ahoy.) Oscar is a perfect foil, blending in impeccably without showing up the other cast members, though he deserved better. Presentable juvenile Patrick Addison made only this one film and Slaughter’s wife Jenny Lynn is an imperiled heroine. Director Oswald Mitchell also did The Old Mother Riley films. Confined to the small Bushey Studio, though photographed (there is no D.P. credit on the print) and edited on film, this one has the look and feel of then contemporary early TV drama.  

 The Greed of William Hart - Aubrey Woods, Slaughter and Oscar

Slaughter and Oscar arrive in Swanson’s Tavern, as the mist swirls outside, and angrily reject proprietor Hubert Woodward’s attempts to palm them off with “Yer Highland muck” instead of real Irish whiskey. Conversations reveal that the citizenry are becoming restless about frequent disappearances of locals like one of Slaughter’s hovel tenants. We hear the leads and young Aubrey Woods discuss their business arrangement about delivering boxes to Arnold Bell’s  Doctor Cox.

A drunken woman bar fly is murdered by candle light. No blood - nasty rather than shocking. However, after the doctor has removed the head off screen in his dissection class, it’s impossible to identify the body.  Addison finds tall hat Sergeant Dennis Wyndham reluctant to act without catching the ghouls in the act. There’s another murder and Slaughter is undone, when the body is revealed in the cupboard. An angry mob has gathered.

While vigilante-ism is endorsed in some American films (versions of The Virginian, De Mille’s This Day & Age) their cinema also fields imposing criticisms like They Won’t Forget, Fury and Try and Get Me/The Sound of Fury but it’s hard to find something comparable in British product - Captain Boycott and they do read the Riot Act in Fame is the Spur? Also notice that the privileged class doctor is given a speech about the need to advance science, while his menial associates are motivated by sadism and greed. There’s a lot that’s uncomfortable viewing in British film.

Slaughter’s product lacked the imaginative dimension that made the parallel American “Horror Movies” captivating to successive generations.  However, they do manage creepiness like that found in Edgar Ulmer’s work. The word “evil” was common in the films of the day. Think Gainsborough’s forties costume melodramas, particularly ones by Leslie Arliss. I’d always noticed those as the departure point for Hammer’s Horrors and it’s been pointed out that Slaughter represents an earlier cycle that both feed off. There it is, a straight line through some of the tackiest British filmmaking.  

I’ve been seeing Tod Slaughter films at twenty year intervals. On reflection that’s about the right rate.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Capra & Vidor

So This Is Love is near to the last missing piece in my viewing on Frank Capra, something which has turned into a lifetime project. I’ve still got The Donovan Affair to go but the YouTube copy of that is foul, while their So This Is Love is a beautiful lift of the T.C.M. transmission, running at the right speed - even if it is watermarked and mute.

Capra’s number eight movie shows him already established as a maker of assured program entertainment. The audience, who saw it in their neighborhood movie palaces in 1928, must have thought that one was pretty good as they gathered up their shopping and exited past the posters of next week’s attractions. The notion, that people would be streaming this made to order item into their homes nearly a Century later, would have seemed fanciful.

In So This Is Love, Greenwich Deli waitress, one time Edison star Shirley Mason, is first seen peering admiringly out of the store at local champion, toothpick chewing Capra regular  Johnny Walker, who is intimidating main street merchants into buying tickets for the up-coming Boxer’s Ball, with his associate pug uglies standing by to throw rocks at the windows of anyone unwilling to pay. She makes Walker a special Deluxe chicken sandwich but he’s dismissive, saying “She ain’t got It.”

So This Is Love - Mason, Jean Laverty & Walker

William Buster Collier Jr., whose career would shortly hit a peak with parts in Little Caesar, Street Scene and playing the Cherokee Kid in the 1930 Cimarron, plays Local dress maker William H. Strauss’s assistant. He has eyes for Shirley but is too timid to move, so Strauss gives him a discount on the ball tickets he was forced to buy, and our hero works up his courage. Shirley thinks she is too mousy for the ball but he gets her up in the shop’s best regalia and the pair make an attractive couple. Now glamorous, Shirley catches Walker’s eye and he cuts in on their dance, with Buster unable to reclaim her as the bruiser moves her into the back room.

Buster’s pal, familiar face Ernie Adams, alerts him to the situation and the kid bursts in to find Walker molesting the girl. This is surprisingly explicit.  Buster’s intervention just gets him thrown into the street derisively and when Shirley follows appalled, she finds his flat full of his drawings of her (compare Brigitte Helm in Pabst’s Abwege of the same year) and Walker flattens Buster for messing with “his” girl. Addams tells Buster he’s yellow for not reclaiming Shirley from the obnoxious bully and starts training him but the kid, dismissed as "a hemstitcher", is humiliated again. This is the best passage of the film.

  So This Is Love - Mason & Collier.

Comes the night of Walker’s big fight and some stretched plausibility gets young Buster into the ring with him, after Shirley has done her best to sabotage the tough. There’s the hint of a better film in the way the leads use their everyday skills to get them through. Think Steve Martin in The Three Amigos, telling the Mexican villagers “Sew like the wind!”

The stars are appealing and Columbia’s modest budget is enough to put together a convincing studio representation of a working class Jewish (they don’t use the word) community. Capra moves it along nicely, even with some misjudgments, like the comic dress fitting for the fat woman or the repeated entrances of the towel wrapped fighter. It echoes Capra’s great The Strong Man.

Collier and Walker had also appeared in the fringes of King Vidor's now all but forgotten 1924 The Wine of Youth, which turns out to be a significant jumping off point for the main-line Metro product to come. The film registers the input of author Rachel Crothers, the most important woman playwright of the day.  It looks like the prototype shaping MGM's deluge of A feature women’s pictures, not just Crothers adaptations like this film, When Ladies Meet or the two versions of her No More Ladies.  One of those was by George Cukor, who also did her Susan & God for them. Stand these with all those Greer Garson, Joan Crawford, Roz Russell weepies engineered to showcase their female stars in no sex romances.

Wine of Youth shows three generations of women, all named Mary, sharing the same home in the Roaring Twenties. The film works at filling in their characters with flash backs to the courting of both Gran Gertrude Claire and Mom Eulalie Jensen. This pair are uneasy with the fast life style of flapper daughter star Eleanor Boardman, then Mrs. Vidor, who features at the extended party sequence, where suitors Ben Lyon and William Haines are putting moves on Eleanor, while the jazz babies indulge in cigarettes, the contents of a bottle labeled Ginger Ale and riding in fast cars with boys.

Wine of Youth - Haines, Boardman & Lyon.

 In their best evening clothes, the leads come into the party with its jazz band and women’s bare knees visible. The film's young stars, at the beginning of their careers, live it up. 

Boardman worries about her predecessors, questioning the role models they present. She determines on the social experiment of going off camping with her two suitors, her comic brother Robert Agnew and his squeeze the animated Pauline Garon. This would scandalise the olds -  and sure enough Billy Haines starts undoing the ties on Boardman’s tent flap.

So far we could be watching one of William A. Seiter’s social comedies, taken with a bit more seriousness. The pay-off comes when mum and particularly dad, the little known E.J. Ratcliffe who was in the silent Four Feathers, discover that their kids have overstepped the norms of their polite society. Back at the house, the parents decide that their relationship has been a disaster and prepare to separate in the presence of the youngsters. This scene has an intensity which marks it off from the work being done around it and may make the film the then most substantial work celebrity director Vidor had done.  

Wine of Youth - Boardman & Haines.

 

Wine of Youth is dominated by elegant Boardman’s presence. Completely the star, she is presented in a succession of glamor outfits, including shape defining one piece bathers which she fills impressively. Co-stars, later prominent Billy Haines, Ben Lyon and William Collier, are little more than interchangeable elements in her surroundings.

 

 Production is ambitious with the design of pre-Gibbons Metro, in the hands of now forgotten Charles L. Cadwallader - large scale but unremarkable. Director Vidor was already established but this appears to be the most accomplished film he had then made. His collaboration with producer Louis B. Mayer would go on to be one of the most important in American film and include The Big Parade, The Crowd, Lillian Gish's La Bohème, Hallelujah and Arthur Knight's favorite movie North West Passage. Around the edges we find items like their less prominent but in many ways more appealing The Stranger's Return or H.M. Pulham Esq. - a filmography that neither Mayer or Vidor was able to sustain on the same scale by themselves.

The film’s portrait of flapper world and high society is as manufactured as its morality but the artificiality, which would continue to be taken for realism by a large sector of its audience, still intrigues. As in its successors, the outcome is determined not by character and circumstances but by the need to endorse the believed values of its family audience, with a little bit of titillation and high life thrown in - the Metro formula. 

The on-going dominance of the Hollywood film meant this value system would be visited on Inuit seal hunters and Darjeeling Muslims, sometimes generating resentment which has never fully subsided. Add to this, dissatisfaction with its Andy Hardy mash up of concepts like the only game in town and  father knows best, creating an environment where much of its industry's best product features a reaction against it - White Heat, A Place in the Sun, The Hustler, The Manchurian Candidate, American Beauty and the a whole lot more.

Frank Capra and King Vidor would both go on to erect their own recognisable visions of  America - different, questionable but impossible to ignore.  These early films help bring those into focus. Even if they weren't so involving in themselves, it would make them essential viewing.

Barrie Pattison 2023