Low Life.

 William Wellman's 1931 Night Nurse is recognised as a racy Warner movie where the studio's Depression Era production values back strong contemporary melodrama, one of the best examples of it’s day and intriguing to see its emerging stars.

The film starts and ends with a view through a wind shield lettered “Ambulance” and a siren on the track.  We get to Barbara Stanwyck right in her element, as the on her uppers girl who didn’t make it through high school, rejected by Chief Nurse Vera Lewis despite her “I’m sure I can make good” entreaty. Easy to recognise the year and the studio.

When Babs (literally)  bumps into respected doctor Charles Winninger on her way out, she is taken on for nurse training, sharing a room with gum chewing fellow trainee Blondell . “It’s the only job where they pay you while you learn.” The pair get down to their scanties to change into uniform at every possibility and don’t show any self consciousness.

They have to deal with grabby Interns Edward J. Nugent and Alan Lane pranking her with an anatomy class skeleton (weak scene), fierce curfews, a patient dying on Dr. Winniger’s table and dodgy situations like not putting walk-in bootlegger Ben  Lyon’s bullet wound on the record after we've seen Cop Jim Farley guarding patient James Bradbury Jr. who has to be sent to the prison ward.

Night Nurse - Lyon, Blondell & Stanwyck

On-ward visitor Lucille Ward asks why her son can’t have a screen like the patient next to them and is told that the screened one is dying. Willy Fung's wife is in one bed and the naked baby we see being washed (Stanwyck carefully framed out of shot tight on hands) is black. Blondell explains that doctors don’t date nurses and the interns see them as cut price receptionists. We recognise a try for Warner documentation.

The girls get to graduate, taking the nurses' oath in a chapel where Lyon’s floral display dwarfs the others.

Then we move to the Night Nurse plot proper where Stanwyck is put in to look after bottle blonde mother Charlotte Merriam’s two little girls Betty Jane Graham and Marcia Mae Jones in the charge of severe house keeper Blanche Friderici and dodgy doctor Ralf Harolde. Babs detects severe malnutrition. There’s an on going party with drunken Walter McGrail having to be punched out when be moves on her and Merriam (“I’m a dypsomaniac”) out of things.

Babs' objections are met by Nick the chaufeur (“a horrid man”) who shows up in the person of an imposing, clean shaven Clark Gable in shiny knee boots and drops Barbara - punch framed out of shot. Her approach to Harrold is met by threats of being thrown out of the profession and Winninger is reluctant to interfere, so she eats humble pie and waits for her opportunity.

Stanwyck with a horrid man.

The situation deteriorates (“These babies won’t last”) with Babs seeing a Trust Fund as  motivation. Ben turns out to be the non stop  party’s supplier. Friderici cracks, setting her hopes on a probably useless milk bath.  Winninger comes to the rescue and evil Clark
decks the old man but when he moves on Ben, our hero taps the hand in his coat pocket against the wall, to give a suitable hard contact thud (we've seen him use a pistol to smash a store window) and the day is saved.

No doubt about the attack and energy Wellman gives this one - characteristic low angle groups and sometimes awkward close two shot dialogues. The sleazy content is occasionally uncomfortable viewing nearly a Century later but it is one of the main things that makes this one enduring “Pre Code”.

We know about these American respectability baiting movies but there is a counterpart in Weimar Germany.

Margin information showing on title.

Werner Hochbaum’s 1932 Razzia in St. Pauli / Raid in St. Pauli is unexpected. It slots in between Ernö Metzner's1928 Polizeibericht Überfall and Helmut Kaütner’s 1944 Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7, alll studies of low life activity in films forbidden by the German censors. 

 

Razzia in St. Pauli is the film the Nazis banned the month before they supressed Testament of Mabuse, sending Fritz Lang off to Paris and Hollywood and changing the course of movie history.

Mixing documentary coverage and scenes of underclass life, like director Hochbaum's 1929 S.D.R. sponsored  Brüder, his Razzia in St. Pauli starts with an OK montage of Hamburg Port activity, mixing nicely to dancing feet and carrying on through a ferry emptying passengers to fill the streets, we get to the port area with it’s bar girls and chop suey restaurants. There’s a disturbing cut to what looks like a small studio-interior guest house room where factory girl Gina Falckenberg has taken to her bed arguing with departing lover, balding Wolfgang Zilzer, while a street band disturbs the peace.

Razzia - Falkenberg

A police chase drives well known burglar Karl the Sailor/ Friedrich Gnaß across the roofs and into the building where his way is barred by the land lady but he still gets into Falckenberg’s room and, after some banter with the rough trade new arrival, she hides him in her bed while the armed cops search the room. 

Deciding the new comer is a more suitable partner, she takes him to Max Zilzer’s  busy Reeperbahn corner bar. When her live-in boy friend shows up to play piano with the small band, there’s a confrontation between the two men which looks like it will turn ugly but ends as a drunken threesome.

Razzia - Zilzer, Falkenberg & Gnaß

We get Falkenberg narrating her background in a rich family, played over scenes of her real  poverty stricken childhood and drinker Charly Wittong  is persuaded to do a song to general applause.

Meanwhile at Police Station 13 (small interior decors with cuts to a wall clock), Inspector Friedrich Rittmeyer mobilises the force to apprehend Gnaß. A suspicious stranger appears the the bar and  is  taken to be a police nark with the customers clearing away the furniture for a fight - clearly a familiar maneuver - but Gnaß recognises the man’s tattoo and hails him as a fellow underworld figure.       

The cops do raid, headed by a bowler hat officer who looks like his counterpart in contemporary films like Blackmail or Spione with the customers dispersed and police wagons with lights blazing racing to the scene. Falkenberg finds herself left to fall back on the company of her old lover for the new day.

Busch in Die Dreigroschenoper.

The film's song by Ernst Die Dreigroschenoper Busch made the piece even more suspect.

It is a symphony of a city montage movie like Walter Ruttman’s then recent Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, mixed in with elements of the Krimmi films (think German Edgar Wallace & Sherlock Holmes), shot largely in real surroundings and using genuine locals as extras (bad teeth seemed to be universal) giving a realistic account of Hamburg’s urban underbelly which immediately shows usual fiction film representations as fake.

This got up the nose of the new Nazi censorship and the film was forbidden as degenerate after a small number of showings, setting the scene for the prohibition of the more ambitious Dr. Mabuse film. It was also seen as a leftist preachment with Hochbaum’s background in the Volksverband für Filmkunst and Social Democratic party. Ernst Bush having been the street singer in the Brecht-Weil Die Dreigroschenoper stoked the fire.

The score is of particular interest. Dr. Giuseppe Becce had been head of music at UFA in the silent period and films of Lang, Murnau and Luis Trenker were first seen accompanied by his music. One of his pieces turns up in the intro to the Karloff Frankenstein. The music on Razzi in St. Pauli, which includes live filmed piano playing must be considered authentic. It sounds nothing like the imitation Kurt Weil, heavy on saxophones, which is usually played with scenes of thirties German low life.

Hamburg’s pleasure quarter seems to have been be a sore spot with the authorities. Grosse Freiheit Nr . 7 was also banned. St. Pauli would go on to become the subject of a whole cycle of  movies like Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s 1954 Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins,  Ákos Ráthonyi’s 1965 St. Pauli Herbertstraße,  Jürgen Roland’s 1969 Die Engel von St. Pauli, Sönke Wortmann’s 1999 St. Pauli Nacht and Timo Rose’s 2016 Reeperbahn. The area was doing a great trade in the seventies when I saw Kon Ichikawa’s Enjô in a run down art cinema on the Grosse Freiheit.

Despite the fate of  his first feature film, Werner Hochbaum had a sustained career during the thirties. Attractive & slim Gina Falckenberg was a departure from the stocky female leads then favored by German films, reflecting a diet high on dumplings and potatoes. She continued in secondary roles and rounded out her career writing movies scripts for twenty years. Husky Friedrich Gnaß might have been expected to have build a substantial tough guy filmography along the lines of Bogart and Charles Bronson but he was confined to support parts. The film did have some influence, notably on Ingrid Bergman’s first film Munkbrogreven.

Razzia in St. Pauli is not a great film. It has self conscious touches (a champagne cork pop butted onto a pistol shot, insets of the teddy bear falling on the doll to take the place of explicit footage)  These conflict with the startling realism. Integrating the documentary material into its slight fiction plot undermines any narrative drive. It’s daring doesn’t run to nudity and violence. We have to do with drunkenness and promiscuity. However it is the most convincing account of thirties Weimar low life that movies achieved and that does make it startling and notable.

The Berlin Archive copy is sharp and tinted, with excellent English sub-titles. It has been reproduced with an open gate, admirably trying to accommodate the full frame height aperture but this means that the edge of the sound track and perforations appear distractingly on You Tube.

A murky  copy of Hochbaum's 1936 Der Favorit der Kaiserin without sub-titles is also there. Like a number of German film makers, his career appears to have come to a halt in 1939.

As with Night Nurse, these two films reflect the same impulse towards an unsantised representation of contemporary reality and both contributed to waves of indignation from conservatives in their society and to more aggressive censorship. It's curious to spot the same phenomenon on opposite sides of the world.

 

 

 

Scritpt Nathan Zarkhi
Peter Martin Lampel     ...     (play "Giftgas uber Berlin")

Music by Werner Schmidt-Boelcke    

Cinematography by Akos Farkas    

Art Direction by August Rinaldi

Paul Michael Bünger     ...     production manager
Adolf Rosen     ...     unit manager

Walter Lichtenstein     ...     still photographer

87 min     Filmproduktion Loew & Co.    Germany 1929

WITH Hans Stüwe     ...     Arnold Horn, ein Erfinder
Lissy Arna     ...     Ellen
Alfred Abel     ...     Direktor Hansen
Fritz Kortner     ...     Konzernpräsident Straaten
Gerhard Dammann     ...     Arbeiter Pieter
Vera Baranovskaya     ...     Pieters Frau
Bobby Burns     ...     Pieters Sohn
Nico Turoff    
Paul Rehkopf        
Carl Goetz    

This one is an oddity, a Late German silent free of all the "Expressionist" cinema
trappings and being played in Rinaldi’s (seven films that year) rectangular would-be
realistic factory and home decors, (Contrast Algol) this one brings a remarkable A
feature cast to a regretably predictable plot.

Idealistic chemist Stüwe's delights in completing his formula for a revolutionary
fertilizer and is congratulated by supervisor Abel. However Alfred’s report to the
board of Kortner’s Ten Straaten Corporation alerts them to the possibility of using the
formula as Vita, a weapon of mass destruction - “only a small amount would be
enough to destroy a whole city.”  While plotting mass human killings one director
reprimands an associate for not considering the director’s poodle.

The immediate results are encouraging. The stock goes up 160 points and the workers
are delighted with a fifteen percent rise. Stüwe is rewarded but outraged at the use of
his invention and Abel dismisses him and appoints a bald successor.

Facing penury while raising their small child, Hans’ wife Arna (Dämon des Meeres,
The Squeaker) goes to see the board members trying to make them relent - scene of
the Buddha on the table resembling its owner and being filmed from behind when he
refuses. She is reduced to selling the flowers the factory sends her to win back Hans
on the street. He is outraged.

Kortner smiling while smoking and Abel repeating his head stroking or hand raising
gestures from Metropolis do showy bits of business which contrast with
Baranovskaya, star of Pudovkin's Mat/Mother’s naturalness. Her scenes are the best in
the film.

An accident in the “perfume” section of the chemical works kills worker Gerhard
Dammann and his angry wife Baranovskaya holds Hans guilty. She takes her dead
husband’s straight razor and sets out for his home but there finds Arna tending their
child grief striken, reduced to seling her clothes. The razor drops from Baranovskaya’s
hand.

The workers are in revolt and Kortner’s answer is to hire new employees. Hans can
take no more and heads out for the factory with Lissy in pursuit “My husband is
planning a disaster.” With the toxic gas released from the laboratory after a fight with
Abel there’s a track along the workers lining up for protective masks which run out.
One desperate worker moves on Lissy to get her mask (good scene) and the heavies
perish. The end of This Gun For Hire is in there as well as overtones of Metropolis
and the 1915 William Wauer Der Tunnel.


At which stage there is an abrupt change to a mix of montage and the Gance J’accuse
with train passengers with a pet parrot and the driver overcome by the fumes and a
mix of indignant citizens and streaming city lights to represent the effect of poison gas
“We accuse!” This is not bad.

An unsophisticated message piece handled, by a director who would serve out his
time in Russia, fields established figures of the German entertainment scene along
with Baranovskaya in unfamiliar settings .

Still an intriguing record of major talents trying for significance.


U-Tube 2021 (Poor - soft, goes out of rack, dupey.  OK Eng S/T)           C:24

 

 

Recalling Warners.

The Warner Brothers back catalog has been providing satisfactions pretty much as far as I can remember - and it’s not done yet. A couple of their less well known items have just come my way.

Jean Negulesco proved one of the more approachable Hollywood celebrities. When Alen Eyles and I did an interview, he had just made a film for Zanuck as both their careers were winding down and he noted with some amusement that his producer told him he was a play boy rather than a serious film maker. Negulesco  brandished one of Charles Higham’s books which had been dedicated to him, giving him bragging rights when he showed it to Billy Wilder. 

 

Alen admired the scene in his Humoresque dissolving from brandy swirling in the balloon glass to breaking waves. Negulesco came back “I apologise. That was the most terrible thing I ever did in my life.” I didn’t fare much better, mentioning the nice The Voice That Shook the World short about the arrival of sound and being told that wasn’t one of his. Ever tactful, I said “Your name is on it.” Some time later I ran into him again and he spotted me and said “Hm, you told me 'Your name is on it!'.”

Jean Negulesco

Romanian Negulesco had been an accomplished painter in Europe and gained a spot running second units in Hollywood, Captain Blood and notably the semi abstract retreat from Caporetto in the 1933  Farewell to Arms. Warners put him to directing the shorts used with their features on first runs until he launched with the 1944 Mask of Demetrios where old friend John Huston had drawn to his attention to the studio rights to the story after Huston beat him to The Maltese Falcon. It  came as a surprise to find Negulesco had done an earlier feature, the 1941 Singapore Woman.

That one was doomed from the start. We all warmed to Brenda Marshall being stalwart in Whispering Smith but a do over on the part that Bette Davis got an Oscar for in Dangerous - fair crack of the whip Cobber!

The Steiner fanfare still ringing in our ears, we get mustached David Bruce come from up country to prepare for the arrival of fiancée Virginia Field and partying with associate Jerome Cowan, who comes closest to salvaging something from this wreckage.  In Harry Cording’s seedy waterfront Crows Nest bar, Bruce spots bedraggled Marshall, a regular cause of trouble - flashback to him witnessing her rejected lover shooting himself in the home of her dad Gilbert Emery. Remembering Emory’s assistance (Bruce says) he scoops her up and carries her off to his rubber plantation where she gives ethnic maid Connie Leon a hard time and gets to smash her mirror reflection with a liquor bottle.

Hurrel Portrait of Brenda Marshall

The art department wheel out that tropical foliage they are used to rigging and the verandah set from The Letter. Sorting rubber plants, Bruce tells foreman Abner Biberman “in a few years these will be tires rolling down 5th Avenue.” We get a couple of topical references about the war effort.  However, despite occasional bursts of production value like the long opening tracking of dockside activity, a lively brawl or a dozen extras tin mining, most of the film is Miss Marshall grotesque in awful Damon Giffard outfits and emoting about the jinx that makes her destroy the lives of the men in the support cast.

Featured players are mainly a drab lot with the few good people only making fleeting appearances - Tony Warde, Ian Wolfe and you have to be quick to spot Alexis Smith. Dialogue of the standard of “Gerald’s such a child.” or “You men and your code!”  There are some pieces of badly matched lighting. Negulesco, on his first feature, is trying hard and he’s got the great Ted McCord on camera and an Adoph Deutsch score to prop him up. The comic Crow’s Nest bar brawl accompanied by Eva Puig doing her accelerating rendition of “Dark Eyes” gives hope but the director had a long way to go to the superiority of Johnny Belinda and Humoresque.

Warde, Marshall & Bruce.

The little commented 1929 Broadway Babies gets our attention as an early example of what we will recognise with some enthusiasm as the the studio's city movie, full of Warner’s (First National actually) bustling urban activity.  The opening has a  New York montage backed by “Give my regards to Brodway”,  the iron railed footways back stage fill with chorines in skimpy costumes, the streets are a place of danger. It combines the gangster and musical films that Director Mervyn Le Roy and Warners would shortly make notable. Think Little Caesar or Gold Diggers of 1933.

Show girls Include Marrion Byron, Sally Eilers, Jocelyn Lee & Alice White.

 

Cut to a familiar setting, the theatrical boarding house with three bedrooms to every bath and land lady Aggie Herring distributing towels. This introduces room mates Alice White, Marion Byron and Sally Eilers and dialogue about a Broadway girl getting by without a sugar daddy (very Sally Irene & Mary). They’ve been profiled in the paper as "The Three Musketeers".

Their dresser Bodil Rosing is skeptical about glamor (“The biggest Johns on Broadway used to drink champagne out of my slipper") but chirpy blonde Alice has dance director Charles Delaney’s ring (close up). Meanwhile crooked card players Maurice Black, Louis Natheaux and Lew Harvey have a pigeon lined up in “Detroit Bohunk” Fred Kohler, possibly his best role. Their window overlooks the chorus rehearsal room and they lure on Fred with the prospect of an introduction to Alice. They pitch her about Delaney’s meager prospects “too many fat bankers crazy about you to worry about a thin dime.”

 

The Three Musketeers go off to the Blue Moon night club with the gamblers and Kohler puts
forward the prospect of Alice heading up the late show there. She proves (surprise!) a hit - “The little girl who has danced her way into the hearts of Broadway.” The the nasties close in on Fred who somehow starts winning in the fixed  game and has managed to scoop off Alice. The theatricals (“hoofers and acrobats”) are waiting at the engagement party but the bad hats plan on shooting Fred.

White - Broadway Babies.

Attention does start to wander towards the end, the writing is not exactly Shakespearean stuff and director Mervyn Le Roy and Alice White were not the great talents of the cycle. Still, her bubbly flapper character is super appealing - even if she can’t sing, dance (she manages a few high kicks) or go dramatic. It's agreeable to find that she had such a long career, turning up in Korda's silent The Private Lives of Helen of Troy or in Mildred Pearce. Touches like comedian Tom Dugan’s stutter should have been reigned in and the interchangeable numbers ( "Jig, Jig, Jigaloo", "Wishing and Waiting for Love" included) didn’t make it into popular memory, with the final "Broadway Baby Dolls" performance expendable.

Broadway Babies is particularly interesting to anyone following movie history. To start with, it shows the makers already pushing the still new sound film form to it’s limits. Inset titles persist. There’s one over a dissolve from the stage show to the crooked gamblers but music already plays under dialogue. A Xylophone in a room above becomes an element of the plot. Post synch. is occasionally a bit shaky and the first stage number is obviously shot on long lenses from several angles in the stalls, while the wide angle of the theater shows the process roof and chandelier wobbling above the lower portion of the frame. Running to a cab in the dark street is seriously under-cranked and under exposed. However the pacing is excellent. Editor Frank Ware died young after cutting 42nd St.

The flaws make watching the film more interesting if anything, highlighting the rapid progress Hollywood was making with the virtual monopoly.

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Korea Nineteen Sixties.

When it showed up in the Cinema Reborn schedule, my attention focussed on Hyun-mok Yoo's 1961 Obaltan / Aimless Bullet / The Stray Bullet which had the advantages of being unfamiliar and coming from South Korea in the sixties. 

Beongeoli Sam-ryong /Samyong the Mute.

Such films are scarce but not unknown. Sang-ok Shin's 1964 Beongeoli Sam-ryong / Samyong the Mute turned up in the Sydney film festival of it's year and there is a line of them on You Tube, some nice transfers most unsubtitled, but they still fall pretty much outside our usual movie experience. We know more about the recent dim witted  North Korean cinema after some stunt showings here.

Aimless Bullet was made eight years after the end of the Korean War and in the brief period of relaxed censorship between two military dictatorships, compare Czech films from the Post WW2 Pre-Communist era. Admired on its home turf, it has been recently restored and circulated.

Ridiculously grim, this one  kicks off with a bunch of unemployed former soldiers slacking in a seedy Seoul bar where they drink more than barley tea from the kettle. They profess allegiance to their former commander but this also will prove hollow. The crippled officer rejects former love interest Seo Ae-ja who he feels unable to fullfill, leaving her to go with the U.S. soldiers whose Jeeps patrol the streets.

Attention irritatingly shifts among the characters. Her brothers share the crowded shanty town home with their crazy mother Jin Kyu Kim who keeps on waking up and demanding they all flee. One is her son Jin Kyu Kim, an accountant whose salary barely supports the family and won’t cover treatment for the bad teeth which make his life even more miserable, along with Jeong-suk Moon  his pregnant wife, a rebellious young son who sells papers on the street rather than go to school, and Mu-ryong Choi the other brother, a drunk and depressed wounded veteran who keeps on promising daughter Hye-ok a new pair of shoes, without delivering.

Aimless Bullet - Hye-ok & Mu-ryong Choi.

He moves to the center of attention when an old flame who works with a movie company gets him an acting job offer which he indignantly rejects after discovering his qualification is the war wounds they want him to show them. He, of course, smashes a glass door and spends the next scenes with a bandaged hand. 

 

 A new development is his surprise discovery of the officer nurse, who cared for him in military hospital, waiting at the other side of a level crossing as the train passes. She’s not doing too badly living in a flat at the top of iron stairs, keeping  a pistol to ward off a would-be poet admirer who moons about. Our hero and the ex nurse slide off the bed together.

This resolves over night with suicide and murder, as described by the elderly cage bird keeping caretaker. Mu-ryong Choi reads the love letter left him and takes the pistol, recruiting his would be actor former sergeant to drive a Jeep in the bank job he’s been obsessively planning.

Shots ring out. The driver takes off and our hero is pursued through a building site, exchanging bullets with the cops and dragging a sack full of bank notes, a handful of which his movie actress old flame ends clutching.

But no, there’s more - Jin Kyu Kim’s life threatening dentistry, complete with low angle spitting, a taxi ride from the University Hospital to the morgue and the police station with his anesthetized monologue about being an aimless bullet. Throw in one kid blowing bubbles and the son’s newspaper seller chums spreading the story in the morning edition.

Director and one time editor Hyun Mok Yoo’s film finally intrigues for it’s mix of styles and themes. It’s a companion piece to 'thirties Lost Generation movies like the Richard Barthlemess Last Flight and Heroes for Sale, along with the rubble settings of the forties  Irgendwo in Berlin and Hue and Cry. It has the languid defeatism (they called it alienation) of the then contemporary Antonioni, whose sharp exterior photography the film also emulates, all presenting a picture of post peninsular war Koreans caught in a hopeless spiral of poverty and depression - unemployment, bombed buildings, a hill of squatter shanties, construction sites and the presence of whore chasing U.S. troops.

The film was promptly banned by the incoming General Park Chung-hee government but in it's current restoration it is enjoying a  burst of high trendiness. We can see a fuzzy first version of more notable films - the gift promised the little girl in Hun Jang's 2017 Taeksi woonjunsa / A Taxi Driver  or the the poverty stricken family sharing their home in Bong jun-ho's better known 2019 Gisaengchung / Parasite.

The copy on You Tube is quite good and well sub-titled.

For context, I considered  Dae-jin Kang's Mabu / The Coachman, another Korean film from the same year with an outlook as gloomy as Aimless Bullet. It has status in its home market but proves much more routine.

Mabu / The Coachman

Titles superimposed on the turning wheel introduce Seung- Ho Kim  as  Mabu the horse cart driver facing multiple misfortunes. 

We kick off with his bike riding son chased through the streets as a thief. His mute daughter is beaten by her unfaithful husband. The older son has failed his law exams three times and his other daughter is being groomed to pick up businessmen.

The owner boss keeps on threatening to sell the horse that provides the family income. However his sympathetic housekeeper slips Mabu rice wine when the other drivers go off to drink from the tap. She fancies him.

Things (of course) get worse. The mute daughter commits suicide. The young son is brought back by the cops and triggers a self criticism to grandma’s picture in the yard. Then dad is involved in a traffic accident and gets no help from the boss.

Fortunately, his sympa son earns some money, beats up the daughter’s low life boy friend for slapping her and gets her a factory job. The house keeper buys the repossessed horse with her savings and gives it to them anonymously.

With his young brother back in school, the son takes over the horse cart and (best scene) the family gathers in the square to celebrate him finally passing the exam, complete with a track-in on dad and a crane shot of the family going down the street in the snow together.

The lab work is good and the handling routine-assured but the film making is otherwise undistinguished (one fuzzy white transition) and the writing and performance are from stock. Glimpses of Korean life are minimal - the society of the cab drivers gets very marginal treatment and the attachment to the horse is token.

That one could have come from any of the less developed Asian industries of its day. It offers maudlin sentimentality in place of Aimless Bullet's focused anguish.

Barrie Pattison 2021

Bucket List Movie

That slight movement of the earth you just felt may be accounted for by the fact that this is SPROCKETED SOURCES 100TH ENTRY - Well actually 105 but I've knocked out some that were no longer relevant.  - B.P.

I'm getting on for having exhausted my inventory of important works of cinema left to see but then again I must be on the way to exhausting the time I have to get through them - and of course there are all the ones I have yet to hear about, to start with a vast range of Hispanic and Arab films which are never considered in English language writing. 

One title which has always eluded me, though I made a serious effort to track it down on visits to Italy, was Mario Camerini’s 1929 Rotaie / Rails celebrated as the major Italian film of  the last years of their silents. Well, there it is on You Tube at the press of a button. Another one off the bucket list.

Rotaie opens with a most Germanic sequence, the camera tracking down the dark street following shabby couple Käthe von Nagy and Maurizio D’Ancora, obviously experiencing hard times. They take a room in the cheap hotel, planning a suicide pact - close up of an effervescent tablet in a glass - but buoyed up by their mutual affection, they leave and face the glittering lights of the nighttime city. The pair find themselves in front of the rail station (montage of travel posters). In the buffet, a man, rushing to catch the train that's leaving, drops his wallet. He is seen, pulling away, as they pick it up and look for him. The wallet is full of banknotes.

On impulse (“Dove andiamo”) D'Ancora buys them tickets on the train at the platform, its giant locomotive bellowing steam, and they find themselves in a compartment headed for Monte Carlo. In the breakfast car, diner Daniele Crespi changes his seat so they can be together. He has a thin mustache, so is obviously a hand-kissing foreigner of loose morals, the kind normally played by Warwick Ward at the time.

 Rotaie - Von Nagy & D'Ancora

They arrive as the speed boats are racing on the bay, like the scene in the l933 Gloria Swanson - Laurence Olivier Perfect Understanding. Crespi is following the action from the hotel terrace and, seeing Nagy struggling with her new purchases, he sends the uniformed page to help her. Taking the young couple in hand, Crespi introduces the husband to the gaming room where he soon is captivated by roulette, winning big only to see (best sequence) his new found wealth raked back away from him by the croupier. In desperation, he tries to steal chips from the next gambler but is spotted by the floor manager and only saved from calamity by the intervention of  Crespi, who gives him another handful of notes which he is sure to lose.

Planning to collect on his investment, Crespi sends Nagy flowers and an invitation and, outraged by her husband’s irresponsibility, she accepts only to find herself in a situation she can’t control. After a dramatic confrontation, the leads flee the luxury hotel and buy a third class rail ticket home, sharing the compartment with the breast feeding mother, her son who gives them an apple and the father who accepts a cigarette. A couple more montages - one of those familiar geometric shots of tracks filmed from the moving train and one of giant factory machinery pumping away and D’Ancora is finishing his shift with Nagy bringing his meal in a basket, now happily part of the industrial working class.

Finally Rotaie emerges is a scaled down Sunrise, (simple couple lost in the big city) trading actual settings for the exuberant theatricality of the American film. The plotting in Rotaie is too familiar and too simple minded to impress, like its "stay with your own kind" message, which seems to have been in step with the Italian populism of the day. The craftsmanship is not sufficiently stylish to redeem it. 

However Rotaie is an interesting enough item coming from a place and time whose films we don’t know.  The film’s odd mix of twenties gloomy expressionist streets and Soviet editing with society drama from the thirties and forties' location shooting, does make it a revealing bookmark in movie history.

Von Nagy.

Appealing Fraulein von Nagy’s performance outclasses the others. She would have a strong career in the thirties, playing leads for most of the major German directors of the decade in films that it appears nobody bothered to sub-title. She does get second billing in Gustav Ucicky’s splendid Fluchtlige but that one is all Hans Albers’ film. D’Ancora, only seventeen when he made this film, continued headlining till after WW2. Crespi does double duty here also working as designer. Cameraman Ubaldo Arata went on to film Open City. Director Mario Camerini, whose agreeable comedy films (including Darò un milione) would shortly launch the star career of Vittorio De Sica, can be glimpsed at the gaming tables.

The copy on YouTube is the 1931 "sonorised" re-issue running marginally too fast with a so-so added music and effects track. It was lifted off Italia Tre and the quality is just passable. The sparse intertitles are not translated but it doesn’t take fluent Italian to follow what’s going on.

Barrie Pattison 2021

Sorry Cantinflas

Career movie comedians are generally considered beneath the dignity of serious critics world wide - so it's twice the fun when you come across the accomplished work of film makers like Italian Adriano Celantano,  Egyptian Mohamed Henedi or Hong Kong's Chow Ching chi - lots on You Tube, mostly unsubtitled. 

Mexico's national legend, Cantinflas seemed a likely candidate and I was was delighted to get my hands on his El Mago directed by Miguel M. Delgado in 1949, in Columbia Classic's beautiful transfer with excellent English sub-titles.

Unfortunately you can drop this one in another basket with contemporary Abbott & Costello, Louis de Funés or Ismael Yassin comedies, technically competent but totally unfunny. It may be that Cantinflas' work became more bland and uninvolving in the 1950s, the process we can see with Bob Hope, Toto or Fernandel.

In mythical Eastern country Hariche, that bears a distinct resemblance to Maria Montez’ Bagdad, the ruler dies and his evil brother plots to take over the throne and dispose of the legitimate heir who for some reason is telling fortunes in Mexico.

Meanwhile Cantinflas is answering the ‘phone at the Su Suotro Yo agency which supplies lookalikes to replace people who want to take a break. Mago José Baviera (El ángel exterminador) is kitted out with a double (split screen) who manages his crystal ball readings while he goes on vacation, leaving file cards with his client predictions and  secrets that must not be revealed to them, on the back. We expect merry japes in vain.

A series of misunderstandings has Cantinflas take the double’s place and he’s transported by a turban wearing delegation headed by an agent secretly in the power of the Uncle. Set up in a luxury hotel (jokes about fish eggs being smaller than chickens’ eggs) he becomes the subject of interest to glamorous Leonora Amar (with Richard Greene in Captain Scarlet), the agent’s two blow pipe assassins and a local gangster who wants him to predict the outcome of robberies.  Lackluster developments ensue as the assassins kill off the wrong dignitaries and the gangsters kidnap our hero and Amar.

After a Katzman-esque brawl, Cantinflas hitches back to base in a coal truck and is flown to Hariche where they talk about elephants we never see. He is set up as the ruler and bankrupts the country lazing about in a harem to the strains of Rimsky Korsakov’s "Scheherazade." He imports new bikini recruits, introduced in the manner of bulls at a corrida. (that will go down well in the present climate) The punch line is the arrival of a fat girl!

El Mago - Cantinflas & friends.

Baviera shows up and sorts things out (we still don’t know why he was in Mexico) and our hero has one request. Cut to him back home spruiking a tent show with (is that?) Olga Chaviano from the harem leading her hoochy coochy  dancers.

A succession of dumb routines have no dramatic impact and don’t get laughs. Bits of would- be comic business - Cantinflas’ tortilla lunch getting cold as the boss instructs him, swatting a bug on the hotel bed where he’s putting pillows under the sheets so he can visit Amar in the next suite, suggest being added by the lead - to no effect.

It's of interest to anyone curious about the star’s career but Sharp B&W and mundane scoring go with unremarkable support performances. The competent camerawork is not well deployed. An off-center composition telegraphs the fact that the lookalike will arrive through the door that occupies screen left etc. 

Finally if you want to investigate the prolific Mexican trash movie output of the day you're better off with Santo the Man in the Mask of Silver and his wrestler chums.

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Get Me to the Church on Time.

 This one has been a movie legend since before I was born, a Dutch version of "Pygmalion" that so incensed George Bernard Shaw that he refused permission to film any of more his work, until Gabriel Pascal, once the third member of the Hungarian Alexander Korda, Michel Curtiz trio, sweet talked him into the deal that produced the Lesley Howard Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.

Well now the Nederlands film has bubbled up from obscurity on You Tube in the Eye film archive copy complete, with good integrated English sub-titles. This one’s a bit rough around the reel changes but by and large we get an excellent transfer. It’s curious and off putting to see the familiar material playing out not in Covent Garden and Mayfair but in Amsterdam and Haarlem, with characters speaking  Dutch and paying in Guilders.

We kick off with Lily Bouwmeester, made up grubby, selling her flowers in the pouring rain. In the crowd Johan De Meester’s Prof. Higgins is taking down her dialogue phonetically and the familiar plot develops. There are minor variations like an attempt to get laughs out of the “not bloody likely” routine by extending the scene as hip current speech for the socialites.  Freddy, now George, is a silly ass comic who is likely to get cut out when a distributor wants a shorter version. Matthieu van Eysden’s “Doeluttel” is similarly expendable. Lilly and her accordion get a few musical numbers - that must have gone down a treat with G.B.S. - and there is of course the “happy” ending which the author objected to, though it follows, here  pretty clumsily, a line used in most adaptations.

Pygmalion - De Meesters & Bouwmeester.

The Dutch unit’s production values are a try for polished with small, busily decorated studio decors, but the piece is non stop talk. The few attempts at cinematic material, working with the kids gang, the shopping expedition and particularly the ball, are chopped off before they get a chance to work up any steam. Of the cast only Higgins’ mother, one Emma Morel who made just one other movie, seems to be at ease in front of the camera. De Meesters’ bombastic Svengali character totally lacks the charm balancing his arrogance, which Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison traded in.

However Lily Bouwmeester, here in her initial sound film role, scored a hit. She jams in a few moments - her delayed reaction to the first experience of chocolate - and nearly makes us forget she was going forty when she made the film, which became a personal triumph for her repeating Eliza Doolittle in stage productions during the rest of her career.

Director Ludwig Berger, then interdicted by Josef Goebbels, moved in exalted circles, making Ein Walzertraum for Erich Pommer at UFA in 1925, directing Emil Jannings in Hollywood, reworking Max Linder’s Le Petit Café for Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, presenting the then stellar Pierre Fresnay - Yvonne Printemps duo in Trois valses and filming on The Thief of Bagdad for Korda. He became a musicals specialist. You would have expected him to be totally within his element here but he fails miserably to make the piece build to dramatic peaks or present the characters as sympathetic. His command of the Dutch language is suspect.

It would have been a better story if this one had turned out to be a suppressed masterwork but sadly what we get is a rather draggy oddity. Still, how many pre-Bert Haanstra  Dutch movies have you seen?

Barrie Pattison 2021

Into the Archive.

Lockdown and what better time to look at hundred year old movies? I just jammed in two.

In 1920 Humoresque was Frank Borzage’s first major film, the foundation of his great Hollywood career. The opening (“New York a sample of all the civilisations of history”)  is frequently considered it’s major asset, with “stolen” actuality of the Albert St. Ghetto market and Jewish stall holders and customers, prefiguring hundreds of films like Frank Capra's 1929 The Younger Generation or The Jazz Singer.

A crowded tenement flat holds the Kantor family including the first appearance of mother, stage star Vera Gordon, along with dad Dore Davidson, who is in the business of "turning new brass into Russian antiquities", and  retarded son Sidney Carlyle, a mind that never developed after an incident fleeing the Tsar. 

Humoresque - Connelly & Gordon

On his birthday, then child star Bobby Connelly in his freakish new suit, is duffed up by the street kids but he comes to the aid of young Miriam Battista, getting all the endearing camera work when she cradles a dead cat on which she lays the potted flower’s blossom - nice bright light circle close up of young Connelly.

Dad Davidson offers Bobby a Harmonica toy gift but his heart is set on the shop’s violin. Mother Gordon is elated, her prayers for a musician in the family answered, but Davidson scoffs. “Couldn’t you have prayed for a businessman.” Archivist Robert Gitt thought he was onto something when he found this one but disillusion set in about this point.

 We dissolve from Connoly to Gaston Glass as his grown self, the concert star. Davidson is impressed by the medal they have given his son which he could sell for a tidy sum. Our hero gives a concert for the poor people of the ghetto in the huge theatre. “The Kol Nider played as if his very blood were weeping” one of Frances Marion’s flowery titles announces and Glass is offered a four figure contract by a celebrity producer. However he eyes the recruiter’s stand in the street below.  Remembering the injury inflicted on his brother, he has to take a stand against autocracy and with freedom. “Father I’ve just signed a contract with Uncle Sam.”

About now top billed Alma Rubens shows up as the neighbor girl Battista grown to be his
sweetheart. She is appealing before her tragic addictions took hold. The protracted family farewell is the film’s big tear-jerker scene.

We never see any combat footage but a cable announces Glass’ return and a car pulls up only to deliver his army comrade come to say he’s in hospital, injured. Glass’ recovery is hindered by his fear, which makes it impossible for him to play, but when he has to reach out to stop Alma from falling, he overcomes this and finds his skill (immediately) restored. Gordon has been praying again. This wind up is rapid and unconvincing.

Today Borzage’s film  hasn’t lasted well into the era of concern over race stereotypes and  “getting an operation so I can play the violin again” jokes  Dramatically unremarkable, the weak ending pretty much does in any conviction but in its day Humoresque was a whopping success for producer William Randolph Hearst and it’s WW1 and concert hall subject matter indicate directions Borzage will take in his more mature work. 

Humoresque - Ann Wallack, Vera Gordon, Alma Rubens, Gaston Glass, Sidney Carlyle.

The film is the root of two major Hollywood ventures - Borzage’s Seventh Heaven with it’s lovers divided by WW1 and the forties supposed re-make to which Clifford Oddets added elements of his “Golden Boy” in his adaptation for Joan Crawford and John Garfield. 

William S. Hart in 1920's The Cradle of Courage seemed a better prospect. Not without interest, this turned out to be one of the lesser Hart films.  Take Hart out of his westerner character and turn him into into a cloth cap workman, an Aztec Indian or a city cop, and he loses his legendary status.

Doughboys, “men who had faced Boche steel” are  disembarking at San Francisco after WW1 and among them we spot Hart as Sgt. Square Kelly of the 91st, one time burglar, and his officer friend who happens to be the son of the Police Lieutenant who had encountered our hero in his professional capacity. Bill hurries back to his white haired mother. She (switch)  happens to be a cop hating Irish criminal matriarch. She’s saved his burglar tools for his return. He puts them with the Luger he captured grenading a German dug out in a flashback.

While he’s celebrating with his old gang, including his brother, at Tom Santschi’s Tierney’s Bar, Bill gets a call from his war buddy inviting him to diner with the folks. Soon our hero is faced with a choice - go back to crime or joining the force now that the Policeman father has made him an offer on the strength of his distinguished military service. “As a Bull?” “As a police officer!” Santschi’s ward Anne Little (co-star of Broncho Billy Anderson and the second De Mille Squaw Man) slips him a note saying the stripes on his sleeve are better than the ones he’ll get from a judge.

Sgt. Hart with captured Luger.

A convincing punch out with Santschi (also duking it out in the 1914 Colin Campbell The Spoilers) resolves the matter and mum throws Bill out of the family home.

The gang has their eye on a mansion in his patrolman beat and Little goes there to alert him but he thinks she’s casing the joint for them and their kiss in the bar's family entrance was an idle gesture.

He interrupts the robbery and in the exchange of gun fire his brother is killed with Hart’s old pistol. Bill prizes the name of the heavy his mum sold it to out of her, though told “A Kelly never squeals to a cop.” Out of uniform, he confronts the dastard. Getting shot with the under the counter pistol lands our hero in hospital and, sunning himself on the roof,  he resolves his romance and family dilemmas which is kind of a lame ending.

When the tension between Hart’s up bringing and his new righteous way of life has been settled, Cradle of Courage is less involving. Instead of an Old Testament God, it’s the hallowed US Army that stirs his reverence here. The San Francisco setting, also featured in Hart’s The Narrow Trail, is an effective background, an intriguing comparison to the same locales used a quarter century later in Dark Passage.

I hate to say it, because his B films made up a slice of my movie education, but Hart’s old associate Lambert Hillyer was never a major talent and his script and direction don’t make this one of his star’s best efforts. Cameraman Joe August (later to shoot The Informer and  the Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame), on the other hand, covers himself with glory, capturing Hart in the Bay City panoramas and filming the shoot-out in the dark room illuminated by muzzle flashes - is this the first time? We get that again in George Bancroft’s  superior The Mighty ten years later, which this film intriguingly anticipates and - among many others - the Hopalong Cassidy Mystery Man eg.

Hart - Cradle of Courage

 

 

Barbara Bedford, Cora of the Tourneur-Brown Last of the Mohicans, debuts briefly as the officer’s sister.

There’s some bad matching on the cuts closer to medium shots of the leads, almost certainly not the fault of  Mr. Le Roy Stone who gets an editor credit, still unusual at this period. The Grapevine disk is passable. 

This pair of movies confirm my view that, while some outstanding films were made before the twenties, it took a couple more years before presentable entertainment became the norm.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2021