Nazis and Parallel Worlds.

I’ve wanted to see the l932 F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer  through the five decades since I caught a half reel  clip with Conrad Veidt at a back yard 35 millimeter show in North London, where they kept the inflammable nitrate film in uncomfortable proximity to an open fire. The production was obviously an early example of the esthetic of The Shape of Things to Come, a cosmopolitan, high art sensibility brought to movie science fiction - wow, yes! Well unexpectedly, the film has shown up, for a short time only we are told, on You Tube, as Secrets of F.P.1, that same English language edition. 

In the brief period between the nineteen twenties arrival of film sound and the mid thirties
development of dubbing and sub-titling, it became common practice to produce parallel versions of movies. In Hollywood, film makers like Claude Autant Lara, José López Rubio and Jacques Feyder no less, would troop onto sets vacated by American directors, after the English speaking cast had gone home, and make their own versions with casts doing dialogue in French, German or Spanish. In the era of DVD extras, a few of these re-surfaced giving substance to the legend that Feyder’s version of Anna Christie with Greta Garbo again or George Medford doing the 1931 Dracula were superior to the ones we’d always watched.

 In Europe, the same thing was happening, producing a flock of lookalike, sound-different movies for their separate markets. A few notable productions were scooped up in this process - Congress Dances or the first sound films of Fritz Lang. Hitchcock did Mary, a German Murder, with Alfred Abel in the Herbert Marshall role. These consumed the early career of the then immensely popular Jan Kiepura but their big star was Conrad Veidt - two out of three Congress Dances and the English version of  Kurt/Curtis Siodmark’s “F.P.1 Does Not Answer.” Siodmark, brother of Robert, was, like Veidt, a specialist in fantasy and terror.

F.P.1. -  Albers, Veidt and Boyer.

Some of these alternates were made-later re-workings, rather than simultaneous, using as much footage as they could where original support players players weren’t recognisable - Kiepura in My Song for You and the Korda remake of Alex Ganovski’s Taras Boulba - but the F.P.1s  were genuine siblings with a photo taken of Veidt, Hans Albers and Charles Boyer, the fly boy heroes of the three versions, standing side by side on the decor to prove it.

They each recorded a version of the film’s theme song, with Albers’ becoming a hit still performed today.

As if just finding F.P.1 was not enough, the copy Is dazzling, looking like it came off the original negative correctly shown through the early sound aperture and impeccably graded. The brief, under cranked and forced processed night time exterior of the shipping offices, with fire engines rushing to the scene, is the best clue to the otherwise polished film's age.

Secrets of F.P.1. - Esmond & Veidt.

Secrets of F.P.1 opens at a black tie gathering in Hamburg, with Veidt’s Major Ellissen, who 'phones his press photographer associate Donald Calthrop (“an odd looking gentleman”) to get coverage for the bogus fire alarm he will send from the Lennartz Ship Yard, using the confusion to break into the file room and shift, to the owner’s office, plans on Floating Platform Number One -  “an artificial island in the middle of the Atlantic - made of steel and glass.” This creates interest in the neglected scheme designed by his friend, Leslie Fenton’s Capt. Droste.  

Veidt’s call was overheard by the glamorously turned out Jill Esmond, who proves to be part  owner of the Lennartz company.  The romantic leads that played opposite Veidt in his sound films always looked like his daughters and Esmond, then married to Laurence Olivier and fresh from a successful movie debut in Hitchcock’s version of The Skin Game, manages elegant nicely. She actually was the daughter of Eva  Moore from Whale's  The Old Dark House.

Smitten, the Veidt character moves on her but his life style is a stumbling block. “A man can’t always live in hotels. There are other things than hunting elephants and beating records” (Ever wonder why most English cinema failed to connect with a popular audience?) The offer of a revolutionary new plane is too tempting and Conrad signs on to pilot a marathon flight and disappears in Australia, while like Things to Come a superimposed machinery and flight material montage covers the remarkably swift Lennartz Company construction that gets F.P.1 up to the point where sailors gather on it’s deck and do the song about “The Lighthouse Across the Bay”.

Jill and Leslie have have become an item, upsetting our world weary traveler hero when he re-appears hair appropriately greyed, to explain to her “I didn’t want to come home a failure”.  Un-named nasties, who presumably have connections in surface transport (“There are spies in industry as there are in war”), have planted a saboteur on the Platform. We can spot Calthrop and Francis L. Sullivan among the jolly tars who fish off that imposing pylon in the studio tank - one of the nice pieces of staging that makes us forgive the unconvincing, un-populated model shots which provide the distant views of the platform.

Filling the sea water ballast tanks gives the bad hats’ agent a chance to sink the platform and a shoot-out with Fenton ensues - one of the movies' least exciting action scenes. Back in the Hamburg office, Jill hears this break out before the two way radio goes silent and she wants to use her plane to investigate the fact that F.P. One doesn’t answer but (surprise!) the only pilot available is Conrad, while the crew of the sinking construction have been gassed into immobility, with ballast controls jammed open and it’s planes out of commission.

Heroic intervention includes the later familiar shot of the plane take off, dropping off the lip of the deck only to soar skywards again!

What was intended as a ripping adventure yarn, (think Korda’s Clouds Over Europe/ Q Planes or Robert Stevenson’s King Solomon’s Mines) here emerges ninety years later as an antique, more revealing of its day than the makers intended and not in a good way. Well, be careful what you wish for.

   Montage image.

The French companion piece F.P.1 ne réspond plus with Charles Boyer as Ellison appears only to survive now as an inaccessible 9.5 sound edit. However, also on You Tube with excellent sub-titles, we can find the German copy, F.P:1 antwortet nicht again directed by Karl Hartl. Versions of the multi language productions, provided foreign partners, often omitted production values offered home audiences. This one was more than a reel longer than the English language film. Montages using  prismatic and superimposed images at the opening and during the rescue flight, tracked with Walter Reisch's "Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne," have been omitted in the English copy where the  credits have been abbreviated, possibly to disguise the foreign origins. Contributing writer Reisch had a long career, becoming part of the thirties exodus to Hollywood where he settled at 20th Century Fox for many years.

 

As I watched the German version, I first noticed how closely the British  followed it, with Veidt and Esmond performing the same movements and bits of business Hans Albers and Sybylle Schmidz do - not unlike Feyder’s cast repeating Clarence Brown’s angles in his Anna Christie. However as it rolled on, I also realised how much more I was enjoying it. The tempo matched the content more effectively, even before we get to the finale where Ellison’s discovery of the immobilised crew is extended and made more a matter of shocked realisation and his change of heart is slowly unrolled, moving from a feeling of betrayal to resolution. 

F.P.1 antwortet nicht - Schmidtz & Albers.

Albers is far more at ease in the Ellison part, given complexity as a prankster whose levity he is outgrowing while we watch. Veidt is one of the most authoritative performers of all time. His dismissing the angry mob with a sweep of his arm is something Albers can’t match but all his tormented screen apparitions haunt Veidt's attempts at being dashing in this one, as they do in Walter Forde’s 1935 King of the Damned or Victor Sjöstrom's enjoyable 1937 Under the Red Robe. Albers, given one of his best outings, is more plausible and involving here. Sybille Schmitz is not a conventionally pretty girl. Her career had been given a great launch with Ernö Metzner's realist two reel Polizeibericht Überfall /Police Report! Assault and the famous Carl Dreyer Vampyr, making her a German cinema A Lister, and here she plays with more shading than the better groomed Jill Esmond. (the striking shot of Esmond in her opera cloak, framed by the two caped bobbies, is actually better in the English version) Peter Lorre, frequently Albers’ side kick in German films of the day, takes the photographer part, though surprisingly Donald Calthrop (the blackmailer in Blackmail) is notably more effective. It is with his chess game, omitted in the English version, that the character’s function in the films emerges. Only Paul Hartman (later in Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope) is eclipsed by Leslie Fenton, fresh from his appearance in The Public Enemy. Fenton would go on to direct the exceptional Tomorrow the World and Alan Ladd Whispering Smith, among his more routine product.

Secrets - Fenton & Ward.

Rather sadly, we spot Warwick Ward, imposing-lecherous villain in Variety and the Bigitte Helm Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna / The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, here almost invisible as Fenton’s first officer, like Lang regular George John, his King of the Nibelungens and the blind man in M, in this one glimpsed as the aggro sailor leading the mutiny. Friedrich Gnaß from Razzia in St. Pauli & M is Lennartz' watchman. 

 

The Composer Alan Gray would also score the early films of Powell and Pressberger and Gunter Rittau (Metropolis, Blue Angel) is among the camera credits. Director Karl Hartl, formerly editor on films by Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda, promoted with the arrival of sound, would also handle the Albers vehicle Gold and the excellent 1935 Zigeunerbaron. He was one of the most talented film makers of the Third Reich.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. Albers, Hartl and several more would achieve their greatest successes in the Nazi years.  Assume that is why their work is so little commented, as English language critics had little access to it, though Secrets of F.P.1 had a Marble Arch first run in London. Even if writers were familiar with 3rd Reich product it would have been an act of some daring to express admiration for it. From this distance, it would seem that Hans Albers was foremost among what have been described as “Deserter” film makers, people who neither endorsed or opposed the German government. Albers’ enormous popularity among German speaking audiences would have made him a formidable opponent and he never played a Nazi in any of the films I've seen, though he did do a Merchant Marine in Helmut Käutner’s WW2  Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 only to see the film banned by Dr. Goebbels.

A closer examination of Albers’ films shows him receiving unexpected vindication from a British Court in Unter heißem Himmel (1936) and as agent of the American Police, Sergeant Berry, der gangster schrek aus Chicago (1938). I like to think of those as indications where his sympathies lay, though they are just as likely to be part of the German attempt to enlist sympathy for a forthcoming war with the Bolsheviks.

 

The F.P.I films can be seen as clearly a highlight in the European proto-science fiction cycle that goes back at least to William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel and  Emil Jannings in the 1920 Algol, through Metropolis and Maurice Elvey’s 1929  High Treason and the Tunnel sound movies to Korda’s Things to Come - short on monsters from outer space but full of the abuse of technology. Add F.P.1. to the then-contemporary product, packed with unruly mobs roused by (presumably Bolshevik) agitators - include Metropolis, Giftgas and Michael Powell’s Red Ensign of a couple of years later, which the FP1s frequently resemble.

It is frustrating that such a classy entertainment and key piece of film history are virtually never mentioned in literature devoted to the subject. Though he had been a leading man since the early twenties, F.P.1 is the first of the major Hans Albers adventure films which appear to be the mother lode in 3rd Reich Cinema - include Gustav Ucicky’s Flüchtlinge (1933), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938),  Hartl’s Gold (1939) and Selpin’s Wasser für Canitoga (1939).

Even more significant is the fact that the F.P.1s were Erich Pommer’s last pre-WW2 German productions, ending a list that includes Caligari, Metropolis, Variety and The Congress Dances. The combined pull of Hollywood and push from the Nazis emptied Berlin of possibly the greatest concentration of film making talent then in the world. Pommer’s departure alone changed the nature of German film visibly, ending the stream of master pieces he had nurtured. Selpin had been a writer, Hartl an editor and Ucicky a cameraman. They achieved films of this standard following their association with masters. It is a perverse tribute to Pommer's talent and that of his peers that their second rank could take the big step forward and emerge from largely mediocre work being done around them.

It was worth waiting fifty years. With all its flaws, F. P.1 antwortet nicht stands among the most enjoyable work of its day from any source. The film shows some of the most talented people then working pushing themselves to their limits in a tradition of great imagination. Having the parallel version is extraordinarily revealing. These are examples of the kind of film that mandate the existence of the Cinémathèques - which we do not have.

 

Conrad Veidt - heroic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022.

MORE SPANISH FF.

Mediterráneo - Castillo, Rovira & Fernandez.

The 2022 Spanish Film Festival did provide notable movies - Maxibel (covered on Film Alert) is likely to be the best thing I see this year and Competencia oficial / Official Opening is one great in-joke. I did miss the new Santiago Segura and more - cost and time. However defying past experience, the popular material has been outclassed by purposeful movies this year. The also-rans have been dispiriting. Are El lodo /Wetland, Mamá o papá /You Keep the Kids and the dire La piel en llamas /Skin in Flames really the best efforts from the Hispanic world for twelve months?

There was however one other find in the schedule.

Mediterráneo - the Law of the Sea kicks off panning along the sunny Spanish surf beach picking up a man on a surboard and the plastic caught in the wire fence (like Cette musique ne joue pour personne) to get to a now grizzled Eduard Fernández (Hormigas en la boca 2005) with binoculars. He’s a pro life guard, arguing with boss Sergi López on the cost of jet skis to expand the business. However a picture of the child drowned in the surf at Lesbos Island gets to him. “We’re turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave.”

The law of the sea declares that no one is to be left in the water, so Eduard decides he’s off to help and asks for volunteers to join him but the only taker is the irresistible Anna Castillo (lead in Iciar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree) who turns out to be his daughter and who Fernandez doesn’t rate ready to go in the water. Nevertheless, Eduard drives off with his regular side kick Dani Rovira,  in the battered red car that will become a motif.

When they get to Lesbos, they find the beach where drownings are a regular event un-patrolled and roads choked with refugees. Taking a couple of them in the car, has the derisive local police threaten to arrest Eduard for people trafficking. The only sympathy comes from the beach-side hotel owner, who was a Turkish refugee herself years back, and cuts them a cheap deal for accommodation. They find a slashed raft on the shore and orange jackets with empty plastic water bottles in the pockets being used used as flotation.

The newcomers start operating with a salvaged dinghy. The Greek locals, whose livelihoods and living conditions are suffering, are unsympathetic. After the red car is graffiti'd, the garage owner quotes them fifteen hundred Euros for a paint job and the same sum when Eduard wants to buy spray cans and do the job himself.

Lopez and the daughter arrive with Jet Skis that the customs impound and there’s dialogue about ruining their Spanish business through neglect. The E.U., where no one turns up for meetings, gets stick for the inactivity of their own border maintenance force.

A Russian refugee woman doctor waits alone by the lighthouse tower, having promised her daughter that she would be there, when they were separated. Using this unlicensed medico gets the team thrown in the two segregated cells of the small jail but the film’s picture of the Greeks is shifting and the local sergeant refuses the bribe Eduard offers for her release and turns them all loose.

Father and daughter Castillo reconnect. It transpires that Eduard does know about her Major in journalism.  She brings photographer Àlex Monner to dinner and he proposes a TV interview of which Fernandez is scornful, until they point out that it was a photo that brought him there. The actual recording is telling. “The push factor is the E.U. selling arms to Syria.”

The highlight rescues give the piece grip - drowning people pulled up by their hair “Circle them twice. Give the children to their mothers. They won’t let go.” When Fernandez reaches one packed Zodiac, a passenger slashes it. (if they are in the water, the fugitives become refugees) When the refugees on shore find a young smuggler, he has to be rescued from the ugly mob they form. Along with showing Fernandez’ aggro nature, this redeems the sentimental edge. He says that the arrivals are not his responsibility after they land or pours out the now-sympathetic cops’ liquor, when they offer him a drink, and gets beaten up for it.

Mediterraneo - Barrena, Rovira, Castillo, Fernandez, Lopez & Monner.

The climax is the ferry sinking, where all resources are rushed to the the ocean full of floating people and orange jackets and there’s the buzz of seeing the hostile garage man leading the fishermen throwing out their nets to join the rescue. The girl they take for a boy, who is the one to thank them, already provides a grabber moment before her revelation - damp eyed finale.

Writer-Director Marcel Barrena specialises in issues subjects and his TV Movie Cuatro estaciones is admired. Film craft and performances are more than adequate. The photos of the real life characters shown with the end credits intrigue. That their activities led to the formation of the Open Arms Movement, with an impressive rescue record,  is an affirmation.

Add this one to the current misstep-free refugee cycle that already includes Terraferma, Soy Nero, Welcome and  La Pirogue.

Since the success of his 1993 Belle Epoque Fernando Trueba has been one of Spain’s most conspicuous movie directors. His films like La Niña De Tus Ojos (1993) and El embrujo de Shanghai (2000) have fielded name stars in ambitious productions. His new El olvido que seremos / Forgotten We'll Be / Memories of My Father ticks a lot of boxes - elaborate period recreation, a real life subject, an acount of doctor become politician Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, played by name star Javier Cámara, whose refusal to endorse the Colombian government’s aggressive military treatment of progressives had him branded as a Communist and dismissed from his university post. Despite declaring “soy medico, non politico” he runs for office when fellow liberals are being assassinated.

  El olvido que seremos - Urrego, Cámara,

The three decade story starts mono- chrome for writer-son Juan Pablo Urrego’s 1971 studies in Turin with a flashback in colour to show warm Medellin extended family life. Add a digression into simulated 8 mm. for home movies of  life threatening illness. The craft aspects and performance are irreproachable.  Whit Stillman is in there as a fellow doctor.

Cámara is a great support actor (Truman 2015 and The Young Pope 2016) but he unfortunately registers as amiable rather than authoritive in his leading role. The support become indistict around him. 

This one is a companion piece to Quo Vadis Aida, showing over familiar events that we must presume were devastating to those involved but to which the makers are unable to bring conviction.

Poliamor para principiantes /Polyamory for Dummies is one of those irritating sex comedies, with (practically) no sex and few jokes, that were prominent in the swinging sixties - What’s New Pussycat, Extraconiugale, Prudence and the Pill.

Fernando Colomo (El efecto mariposa / The Butterfly Effect 1995)  fields veteran comedian Karra Elejalde (Even the Rain) in what someone must have thought was a racy, cutting edge romp, after all it features Elejalde’s son 28 year old Quim Àvila still living at home and failing to establish his masked Red Ranger character as a You Tube sensation. He gets punched out by suited up Toad Man at a Comicon and rushed to hospital where Àvila is smitten with nurse María Pedraza - who is rather fetching.

She however proves to be in a Polyamorous relationship with another young woman and we start picking up the practices and terminology (unicorns, cowboys etc.) of their community, which Àvila fails to master. Back home however, mum Toni Acosta adopts the notion of three-some with some enthusiasm. Similar lame frolics follow, attempting to show the participants as naive and fun loving.

Àvila further antagonises all when he appears as his Red Ranger character on Susi Caramelo’s TV show, denouncing Polyamory.

The optical effects commenting the disasterous relationships are mildly amusing for a while. Whatever hopes the Madrid settings and smooth handling have raised rapidly evaporate.

Dani de la Orden’s  Mamá o papá / You Keep the Kids descended from the 2015 French
movie Papa ou maman (2015), its sequel, the 2017 Italian Feature film Mamma o papà?
and a 2018 French Mini Series. It has been back to the well too often.

In attempt at a bright coloured sitcom, Dad Paco León (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) and mum Miren Ibarguren are separating when they both get the offer of dream jobs, so they want the other partner to look after their children in their absence and, in what the makers hope is a whimsical inversion, they start playing the kids with bribes like a bicycle claimed as the other partner’s gift and menacing fictions.

The makers want this one to register as edgy, with references to nipple shields and an aggressively inclusive school teacher but, outside of a nice scene of the family gathering  on stage to join in a song to protect the youngest from embarrassment, it just emerges as mean.

In the early stages of director Iñaki Sánchez' 2nd feature El lodo / Wetland, hopes are set up for a tense crime piece on the model of La isla mínima / Marshland whose star Raúl Arévalo is the lead again. However elements like the ecology material and remote canal-rutted landscape navigated by the long tiller boats, give way to familiar melodrama - Paz Vega’s pill popping wife still haunted by the death of her son and swarthy, menacing locals who stand about cursing “Fijo da puta.”  We wait for them to mutter "We don't like strangers here!"

Fresh from saving a wetland in Brazil, bearded agronomist Arévalo arrives at the Spanish La Laguna Blanco which is menaced by water levels which are dropping each year. Local matriarch Susi Sanchez tells him her farmers are good people - always ominous. We know that nice dog, that we don't see enough of, is a goner and Arévalo's distrust of the shot guns he won’t let in the house will prove justified. When things turns nasty Juan Gea, the local Police Jefe, alerts them to the fate of Arévalo’s dead predecessor.

El lodo / Wetland - Vega & Arévalo

Shaven headed Park Ranger Joaquín Climent, who is disturbingly tolerant of poachers, carries off the acting honors, though spooky home help Susana Merino, from de Iglesia’s El Bar and As Luck Would Have It, registers firmly enough to liven up the ending. The accomplished Roberto Alamo is wasted and Vega, making her transition from glamorous to serious, just comes over as grating.

 Drone shots of the terrain with driving its marshes by Satnav or glimpses of flying V formations of the endangered herons circling at dusk help but they'd be more effective if they were less murky.

    

Barrie Pattison 2022

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

These events are regularly highlights of the Australian movie going year.  A lot of the heavy hitters were absent this year - Álex de la Iglesia’s Veniciafrenia or Ricardo Darin in Argentina 1985, still in post. It will be interesting to see how this lot compare.

Writer-directors’ Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s Competencia oficial comes from the prestige end of Hispanic production. Their most prominent leads, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz are partnered with  Argentinian Oscar Martínez, star of  the maker team’s exceptional El ciudadano ilustre and in Kóblic / Captain Koblic with Darin.

Cohn and Duprat are putting together a unique body of work, busily dismembering the notion of celebrity. Following El Artista and El ciudadano ilustre, they’ve moved on from painting and literature to the art cinema.

Ageing industrialist José Luis Gómez feels that his success has not brought the fame he requires to conclude his life. He ponders financing a bridge (promising) or a highway that could be named after him - or a movie.

The screen wins out, so he pays too much for a best seller novel and hires hot art movie director of the moment Penélope Cruz. Now our Penny has made a career out of being gorgeous but that’s not going to cut it here, so they make her gorgeous and grotesque at the same time - and fashionably lesbian. To charge up the project she recruits heart throb Banderas and Serious Actor Martinez - kind of like teaming Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Their conflict in approaches is supposed to energise the production.

The rehearsal period, which is the heart of the film, is a series of grotesque exercises in an empty apartment complex - running their lines with a giant bolder suspended over their heads, rendered sticky taped mummies while Cruz menaces their treasured awards. This throws attention on the performers and they take full advantage. Antonio makes a shattering confession while his features are spread across the video projection screen. Martinez responds in kind - nice to see him going toe to toe with the celebrities after all this time. Surounded by a barrage of microphones, Banderas kissing their juvenile, for which they’ve recruited the backer’s daughter Irene Escolar, doesn’t meet Cruz’ demands and she steps in to demonstrate.

Competencia oficial - Banderas, Cruz & Martinez, between a rock...

All this has been nudged a little bit past the stories that circulate about Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Luis Buñel. It’s nice to find the pretentious end of the art cinema getting a licking for once or you could see this one as a Twenty First Century All About Eve, though Margo Channing’s entourage was a lot more sympathetic than the monsters the Spanish film offers us.

While quite modest in scale, Competencia oficial gives the impression of being no expense spared and suggests the leads have absolute confidence in the makers, a daring which pays off. It will be interesting to see if there is a public for something so far from the norm.

Also on show, Martín Cuervo’s Con quién viajas / Carpoolers is less commanding and probably cost a fraction of the big film but it also offers novelty. It just about gets away with being largely filmed in a moving car - ingeniously simulated with green screen on a sound stage, as they reveal under the run out titles.

After the set up meeting on Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, where scruffy driver Salva Reina collects his three passengers recruited off a Tinder car pooling app,  they set out on their lengthy drive and  the camera moves inside his battered Jeep wagon - going through a closed window a couple of times.

Passengers Ana Polvorosa, Andrea Duro and Pol Monen start to feel there’s something odd about the owner. Just to complicate things, it turns out Polvorosa and Monen have a history and they start texting one another in the car, which gives the sub-titler quite an exercise.

As the light outside fails, incriminating observations make the passengers more nervous. The outcome gets by but, as often happens, it’s less involving that the ones the audience are constructing for themselves while the film runs.

The concept is given a good work out and the unfamiliar cast all register as people we can expect to see again.

And just to break the run I saw  David Martín Porras’ La piel en llamas / Skin in Flames, the first film I’ve watched, for quite some time, that I actively disliked. This one is is pretension at the movies run amok. You can tell what you're in for when early on we get the image of the naked black female Christ-figure . 

Set in the Presidential Suite of the best hotel in an un-named 3rd world country, where recently bombed buildings can be heard collapsing in the background, we kick off with celebrity photographer Óscar Jaenada outraged at finding a set of panties in the un-made bed there. Housekeeping is is soon to be the least of his problems.

The piece then develops through parallel (or are they) dialogues between Jaenada and Ella Kweku, journalist for the country's one surviving newspaper and between Lidia Nené and U. N. pervert Doctor Fernando Tejero, which, for no particular reason, end with them all in the same space. This might have worked better in the stage original that this one never escapes, despite attempts to go visual.

The film is big on perverse detail - returning spotless the silver dress stripped off the black mistress, a school loo, the panties, close ups of scar tissue. I’m still trying to work out the significance of Jaenada’s rubber gloves but I’ve long since concluded that anything that unclear is wobbly thinking of the kind this film flourishes.

Skin in Flames’ key image is the low rise mud colour Loyola School exploding as Jaenada presses the button that takes the photo of a girl student engulfed in the blast of an air raid bomb. They show the famous image of the napalm-scarred naked Vietnamese girl in a montage projected over the performers just in case we haven’t got the idea.

The film is full of irritating changes of character, possibly not the fault of the cast - Jaenada’s goes from arrogant to grovelling to assertive and Kweku switches from owning her character to disavowing it. Production values are passably studiofied.

Journalists from wealthy countries, using their colonial subjects, got a much better innings in a number of eighties movies - Salvador (1986), Under Fire (1983), Die Fälschung / Circle of Deceit (1981), Deadline / Witness in the War Zone (1987), Cry Freedom (1987), The Killing Fields (1984) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). This one is a belated and unnecessary addition - nasty, exploitative and awkward.

So far so so for Spanish Film Fest.

Barrie Pattison 2022

 





    

The Man in the Mask of Silver strikes back.

 You can think of some movies as neglected primitives and some as expressions of misunderstood cultures but there's now doubt about Mexico's Santo, the Man in the Mask of Silver. His vehicles are trash made by people of basic competence but no imagination for the audience looking for juvenilia - or pornography or both.

Despite this, I keep on finding find myself watching them across a range of situations - researching their monster content for "The Seal of Dracula" my exploitation movie book, seeing them in European Fantastic Film Festivals or in the New York Hispanic cinemas and Paris Art Houses where they are equally at home. I once baled up Oliver Stone, who said he'd concealed the Mexican location shooting of Salvador, by pointing out a prominently displayed Santo poster. I got a much better interview after that. 

Even with an inherited swag of Santo movies on DVD I keep on coming back for more, this week in the Spanish Film Festival where Santo & Blue Demon Contra el Dr. Frankenstein was served up with some good natured live local masked luchadores as a warm up act - at standard prices.

Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta was born in 1917 and took an interest in sports as he grew, settling on Luche Libre, the Mexican version of wrestling which was brought across the American border in the mid thirties. Like all pro-wrestling this was more theatre than athletics, despite the fitness required of participants. Jules Dassin's 1950 English Night & the City has this at its center.

Rudolfo became possibly the most famous participant, always appearing in his silver mask in the Santo character, variously rendered as Superman, Samson and The Saint, in the dubbed versions that would circulate through late night US TV and in Spanish diaspora screening. His popularity was enhanced when comic book artist Jose Guadalupe Cruz circulated his exploits  over a thirty five year period and, after an initial resistance, Santo went into the movies in the early sixties, filming in pre-Castro Cuba with phenomenal and enduring success which critics, particularly English language ones, never chose to recognise.

The man in the mask of silver Santo contra el doctor Muerte 

The tone and  style of the Santo movies varied and became more conservative when moving to Eastman color pushed the budgets up. Our hero was to be seen in the company of mad scientists, Martians, little boys, vampires, the Wolf Man, naked women and the descendants of Frankenstein along with fellow luchadores including Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras and other and lesser mat masters.

Though other wrestlers rushed to the Mexican screen, Santo remained their star performer. Blue Demon was put out when, after having done such a good job overcoming the Mummies of Guanajuato, the characters and their writers felt it necessary to summon the Silver Masked Hero for the big finale.

In the festival show was Miguel M. Delgado's Santo y Blue Demon contra el doctor Muerte, a quite sedate Santo adventure with strip 'toon exploits delivered straight faced with routine competence by Delgado and his team but with a minimum of the dotty flamboyance that enlivens the best of these.

The plot was derived from Rene Cardona’s 1964 Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino / Rock  'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape. The later version opens with Lina Michel fresh from wardobe & make up (everyone looks like they come from the same department store catalogue as the furniture) being followed down the foggy street by kidnappers (close up of a black man’s eyes) who deliver her to Dr. Jorge Russek (in a couple of Peckinpah movies) the hundred year old grandson of the original Dr. Frankenstein. He seems to have taken on board Yeux sans visages or maybe Abbot & Costello Meet the Ghosts, switching the brains of the girl victims (“trepidation”) to perfect the operation which will restore his wife now in suspended animation and who we promptly forget about. The failed subjects of his operation go home and murder their intimates, who have reported them missing to the police commissioner, who in turn calls in Blue Demon and Santo, flat-sharing when not tag wrestling.

The staged matches with their stunt throws and an energetic commentary are the only part of this film that are clever.

The doctor has a master plan. His black strong man Golem already has the power of twenty and is controlled by a transistor inserted in his brain, but he lacks Santo’s intelligence, agility and skill, so what more logical than to steal the brain of the man in the mask of silver? His associate has recruited a couple of brain surgeons who Russeck rejuvenates to assist him. This is getting very La piel que habito / The Skin I Live In.

His ruffians make off with Santo's squeeze Sasha Montenegro. She goes on double dates where the Man in the Mask of Silver and Blue wear their masks and two piece suits to the up market restaurant surrounded by unsurprised diners.

With a match where Blue discovers Russek in a red mask, directing Golem via a microphone from the sidelines, our heroes pursue them using their lock picks to enter the doctor’s secret lab which looks like a TV quiz show set set doing double duty. They sort out the henchmen, Golem and medicos already in their scrubs and Russeck reverts to his true age - one dissolve to a made-up close up. Happy end. 

Outside the lucha libre, the only fun is to see the leads going about their business among locals un-fazed by their masks. It’s good for a laugh but no fair trade for the monsters and space men that enliven these.

We’re told it is a classic of Mexican cinema and has accordingly been subject to the OK restoration we are seeing.

    The Mummies of Guanajuato

 

Barrie Pattison - 2022

Cinémathèque, Serial and Victor Jasset.

Le cinémathèque Française' Henri site has reorganised so that you can see everything they are offering. It's only a sheet of thumbnails, a minute fraction of their huge holdings, but there's enough there to keep a serious enthusiast busy for a month - include the entire Ivan Mozjoukine serial of which a one complete hour episode is a punch-up between him and Charles Vanel that demolishes the room, Michael Curtiz' first surviving film, titles by Ukraine's leading director, a couple of Alan Dwan westerns, Jacques Feyder's remarkable Les nouveaux monsieurs and Protéa, a 1913 film by Victor Jasset.

Victor Jasset

The Eclair company's Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s name is one that only seems to occur in the early sections of books about film history, the bits you skip over to get to Film Noir and Ingmar Bergman, but it turns out that, in the nineteen tens when he was a major player, Jasset was bridging the gap between Georges Meliés and Louis Feuillade, still using the stage magician devices of the former but an accomplished exponent of the episode thriller material of the latter in items like Jasset's Zigomar serials. 

Jasset’s 1913 Protéa even fields lead Josette Andriot in black tights, making her an early entry in the cycle that runs though Musidora in Feuillade’s Les Vampyrs, Judith Magré in  Franju’s Judex and Maggie Chen in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vip. As an added bonus the film is a surprisingly entertaining hour’s viewing for it's day and age. Though largely staged in one take one scene wide shots it features several of the innovations which were shaping cinema to come. 

The plot has fictional European country Messine sign a secret treaty which threatens the interests of equally non-existent Celtie, so their Chief of Police phones the country’s number one secret agent Protéa / Andriot. In silence the image cuts between the two sides of the call and gives us a good look at the chief’s imposing candle stick ‘phone set up.

Andriot agrees on condition that her wing man The Eel / Lucien Bataille be released from prison and, once they get the cuffs off him he escapes the police guard, showing up like Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, where they think they’ve lost him. From this point, the film offers non-stop action melodrama.

 Going into business, the pair get diplomat Viscount Osthansen, who holds the document, arrested by planting contraband in his valise. They emerge from the furniture in the Messine Foreign Office, and are only thwarted by the night watchman (already parallel action). Further exploits offer Protéa concealed in the pillar present from the Viceroy of Numidia. She chloroforms the minister, replaces him with a lookalike dummy and goes on to present herself as the leader of an all-girl gypsy orchestra at a Messine Foreign office ball. Though the Viscount recognises her, the intrepid duo still manage to set the place on fire making their escape.

 

Now ace detective Inspector Max heads up the chase, raiding their apartment, where the pair use the disguises ready in their bed/wardrobe, and flee through a secret trap door to acquire a traveling zoo, with the Eel taking on the man-monkey character. (Don't ask!) At a stop-over at an inn near the border, Inn Keeper Mévisto sees through their new identities. Protéa assures the safety of the stolen treaty by placing it in the cage of lioness Sadie and pulls a convenient lever dropping the pursuers through the floor. Action continues with an early car chase and the equally destructive police set fire to the one timber bridge across the border (there can’t be much traffic) to thwart the couple’s escape but the leads go on in peasant disguises using stolen bicycles and as mounted soldiers, finally delivering the incriminating treaty to Celtie authorities.

The non stop scheming and switching identities holds attention, even when plausibility suffers. The piece is quite elaborately staged with plenty of costumed extras and constant changes of setting. The circus material is particularly striking, with the stars themselves working a small caged lion. 

Mlle Andriot is kind of chunky for modern taste but she carries the part with authority. Playing is reasonably restrained, though they do slap papers they hold and point to them in anger. No one presses the back of their hand to their forehead. 

We can spot Jacques Feyder and Joseph Von Sternberg's mentor Emile Chautard in the support cast. The technical work was state of the art and then some. Even the opening titles, where they vignette the lead in her different characters spaced by repeating the image of a mask, were already quite a big ask for 1913 technology meaning a dozen passes through the camera for the negative. 

 

Title art.

Photographer Lucien N. Andriot even attempts to follow the action with the camera at one stage. He would have a long and occasionally distinguished career, shifting to Hollywood and Lewis Milestone’s Halleluya I’m a Bum along with a couple of René Clair's American films, in with a stream of B pictures. However note some of the effects, like shedding the Eel’s first disguise, were done with simple jump cuts and substitution in the style of Meliés.

 Protéa is more fun than its similar Italian contemporary Il Giglio Nero / The Sign of the Black Lilly which has surfaced and we've got to wonder what else the pre-WW1 fantastic action film had to offer. You must remember this is all happening before Fantômas, before The Perils of Pauline, before Dr. Mabuse. The adventure serials for which Louis Feuillade is conventionally given originator credit were already a vigorous line in film making. Me, I want to see Victor Jasset's Zigomar vs. Nick Carter. 

 The Henri copy of Protéa is sharp and detailed, if marginally dupey. It has been attractively tinted and missing sections are represented by new title cards. The captions are in French.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022.

Tarantino & Corbucci

 Currently tucked away on Netflix is one of the largest pieces of the movie history jigsaw, Italian TV documentary maker Luca Rea’s 2022 Django & Django - Sergio Corbucci Unchained. It is basically a monologue by Quentin Tarantino about his idol, Italian director Corbucci.

The way it’s presented is pretty scattered. There’s the nice opening, where Tarantino sits in an auditorium and we go to his voice-over on drawings with limited animation, showing a characteristically never happened meeting between Corbucci and Rick Dalton, the fictional fading cowboy TV star lead of Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's taking place in an Italian restaurant where the yank visitor keeps on putting his foot in it, confusing the host with Sergio Leone and knocking his Navajo Joe. (“Burt Reynolds in a black wig that makes him look like Natalie Wood”) Cartoon Corbucci saves the day by rejecting that one’s English dubbed version himself.

The European (Italian-Spanish-Yugoslav) action films, that followed the success of Steve Reeves as Hercules and invaded the world's Drive-Ins and grind houses from the fifties, were polyglot, European, American or Israeli actors speaking their own language in the same scene. The French version of Corbucci's 1966 Django, which was filmed in Italian, has a play-out song in English. Corbucci never shot direct sound, meaning the final tracks were in the hands of dubbing crews of varying talent though, when the director became more prominent and the American market more important, his cast was likely to all speak English, a language in which Franco Nero, his Italian star was fluent.

Apart from being slyly entertaining and providing several savers, this opening to Django & Django sets out the agenda establishing Corbucci as an ignored pacesetter of the European popular cinema of the day. The convincingly faked Italian Rick Dalton movie promotion material shown in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, gets another airing here. Rea’s movie then settles in for the extended Tarantino monologue with well-reproduced clips, on-set 16mm. shooting with frame lines visible and archival footage of the real Corbucci, along with new interviews with Franco Nero. He's now eighty years old and has fifteen films listed as in production, also Ruggero Deodato, assistant on thirteen Corbucci films, who claims to have come up with the distinctive red hoods the  KKK modeled heavies wear in Django. Rea's work assembles great material efficiently.

Though I felt like standing up and cheering for Tarantino bringing attention to my long-time hero, I found myself at odds with his assessment. He correctly places the westerns and particularly “the Mexican Revolution trilogy” Django, Il Mercenario (“He sells death to the highest bidder. Buy or die”) and Compañeros as the centre piece of Corbucci’s career but enthuses over his flat footed Massacre at Grand Canyon, Minnesota Clay and The Specialist and appears to be unaware of the flamboyant Il Bianco, il giallo, il nero and Johnny Oro / Ringo & His Golden Pistol. He deals with Corbucci’s gladiator movies but ignores his later collaboration with Adriano Celantano, which produced among others Er più: storia d'amore e di coltello, one of his best films. I’m also guiltily attached to Il figli del Leopardo a Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia burlesque of the Visconti film, where Corbucci’s familiar split screen has Cicc. playing both the Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale characters simultaneously.

Indeed I’m not happy with Tarantino’s assessment of Corbucci as inferior to the ponderous Sergio Leone. (“It's not a dogfight in Italy. Number two is fucking Corbucci.”) This echoes the interview that Burt Reynolds gave after Navajo Joe, about working with “the wrong Sergio.”

However I come at this, it remains fascinating. I’d homed in on Corbucci’s 1966 Ringo & His Golden Pistol when it showed up at the Sydney Capitol in one of those polished English language versions (“Smile at me Ringo, for I am death!”) MGM produced at that stage. I did a screening here on a copy that was specially made for the event and, when I got back to Europe, Django was one of the nine films banned in Australia that I saw in my first week. It rocked me back on my heels. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I'd plugged into what would become a dominant movie tradition.

The movies that Tarantino grooved on in his video store days are the ones I used to schedule trips to Europe to catch on their first runs there, knowing they weren’t going to surface in Britain (or Australia) where they were despised or banned for their violence, an aspect Django & Django lovingly annotates, complete with the hapless Northerner’s ear being cut off in Django. The 1968 Il grande silenzio / The Great Silence followed a particularly revealing arc getting a Paris first release two weeks of wide showing and disappearing to re-surface in one art theater where it ran for months, after star Jean Louis Trintignant got his Cannes Grand Prix. Trintignant outmaneuvered dodgy dubbing by playing his character as a mute and Django & Django has a nice clip of a press conference where he mimes his responses.

Compañeros - Thomas Milian & Corbucci

A whole feature documentary devoted to the film maker who riveted my attention half a century back is going to be like Xmas under any circumstances but this one has the added attraction of prompting me that what I noticed was not just a run of ferociously entertaining movies but also the birth of what is now a shift in the dominant mind set. The clue is in the film’s clip where Corbucci explains that his inspiration was in the comic books of the day, in which he found his man with the coffin, who he even smuggled into his Toto movies.

Corbucci was not the only one to absorb this. Glauber Rocha and Antonio des Mortes and George Miller and Mad Max, with its Heavy Metal comix imagery, were coming out of the same door.  The bandes dessinés, the graphic novels which blossomed in the sixties, are a major input into these but the films also belonged to the era of May ‘68 and European “political” cinema.

Django & Django goes into Corbucci’s background, growing up during WW2 in a fascist home, even singing in a choir that welcomed Hitler to Rome.  As an adult, not only did he reject the Right but he had minimal sympathy with the New Left. Il Mercenario was originally to have been made by the highly politicised Gillo Pontecorvo and Corbucci turned its content into a comic confrontation between the two outlooks. Compare this to the then contemporary issues films of Elio Petri (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Invesitigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) or Damio Damiani (L'istruttoria è chiusa: dimentichi / We Are All on Provisional Release), key contributors to the Italian cinema. Damiani also did a handsome spaghetti western.

Being handled by the same international distributors, the Seventies Hong Kong cinema absorbed the Italian model. For starters, Giulio Petroni's Da uomo a uomo / Death Rides a horse of 1967 is a martial arts sensei and student-fighter piece with John Philip Law and Lee Van Cleef acting out the plot we will see ten years later with Jackie Chan and Siu-Tin Yuen in the prototypical Zui quan / Drunken Master.

All this totally baffled the critical establishment, partly because the materials never reached the festivals and press shows which were their frame of reference. The Euro Westerns found their home in exploitation outlets, if they weren’t just banned outright for their violent content. Some of them are still prohibited on paper, never having been re-submitted, though that proved a permeable barrier with alternative titles and VHS and DVD distribution, often furtive - not to mention the foreign language circuits of happy memory. The European writers I discussed the cycle with wouldn’t have a bar of them, clinging to the John Ford western model with its nineteenth-century origins in Bret Harte, Peter B. Kyne and Frederick Remington. I remember arguing about this with Bertrand Tavernier who had decided Sergio Leone was an auteur, which made him all right.

Tarantino - Sukiyaki Western Django

Tarantino on the other hand was fascinated with the Django phenomenon, though (like me!) he never got round to his planned book on Corbucci.  Vincent Jourdan’s “Voyage Dans le Cinema de Sergio Corbucci” now fills that gap. Tarantino appeared in Takashi Miike’s 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django and made his own Django Unchained with a sequel, Django / Zorro now in the pipeline, and placed Corbucci as an (off screen) character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The Django character appears to arrive copyright free and the name was even post-produced onto the leads in Euro westerns which were shot with a different protagonist. He doesn't come on with a dog like Hondo or The Westerner's Dave Blassingame. Nero doesn't even have a horse when we first see him dragging the coffin by foot. It is difficult to give individual traits to the character when it contaminated so many other spaghetti western heroes though, as with Sartana, it does still conger up certain expectations -  solemnity, ultra-violence, not much of a sex life and an ability to mow down squads of extras. 

Corbucci had settled into burlesques and rip offs - a 1961 Toto La dolce vita, Toto and Vittorio de Sica in I due marescialli (also 1961) from La traversée de Paris, the all star Il giorno più corto (1963) from The Longest Day and the later Er più from Fellini Roma. By 1966 he'd already done those few early Euro westerns and even scripted Mario Mattoli's Per qualche dollaro in meno / For a Few Dollars Less that year, so it was logical to wheel him in to counterfeit A Fistful of Dollars. Young Franco Nero had a support role in Corbucci's Gli uomini dal passo pesante /The Tramplers and scored his first lead in Django. The result, while it had zero impact on English language commentators, was huge in the world of Spaghetti cowboys.

Rather than reduce Corbucci's status, Django's origins in the dollars films places him in the company of celebrity directors who did their best work improving on established material - Rouben Mamoulian channeling Ernst Lubitsch with Love Me Tonight and his Tyrone Power versions of The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand or John Sturges spinning The Walking Hills off The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bad Day at Black Rock off High Noon and Magnificent Seven off the Kurosawa original.

Now in the wake of Tarantino's efforts, sixty years after his triumphs and thirty years after Corbucci's death, the Paris Cinémathèque has done a major retrospective and people who heaped scorn on his work when he was alive now lecture about it. Along with the Vincent Jourdan book and Django & Django, there’s Gioia Magrini & Roberto Meddi’s 2015 one hour documentary Sergio Corbucci: L'uomo che ride.

Films trading in sixties art cinema's jump cuts, improvisations, available light photography and montages of wall paper have receded, shrunk into badly attended day time sessions at film festivals, while the Mighty Marching Marvel Super Heroes, Mad Max, The Batman and Tarantino’s films are filling auditoria in what may be the twilight of theatrical exhibition. Like it or not, it is Sergio Corbucci's strip cartoon aesthetic that has flourished. That's not the first wrong guess from the critical consensus.

It's worth thinking about that.

Django - Franco Nero, the man with the coffin.

Barrie Pattison 2022
    

Raoul Walsh and Joan Bennett.

Raoul Walsh was a hot ticket there for a while. He was canonized for directing The Roaring Twenties and White Heat  along with the silent What Price Glory or The Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad, to which you could add his early Regeneration - without undue consideration for the films that spaced these. His musicals didn't seem to exist - Artists and Models or Glory Alley anyone? There were attempts to fill the gaps. I remember a piece explaining the thought content of Jane Russell's The Revolt of Mamie Stover, complete with explanatory diagram - which struck me as desperation. 

 In the seventies, I caught retrospectives at Edinburgh and Marly-le-Roi outside Paris, where the U.N. conference stagiaires sharing the accommodation were invited to be guests at  the evening movies as a treat for all their serious work. I talked to one of them who was puzzled. He could see why Ida Lupino in The Man I Love and Robert Mitchum in Pursued were crowd pleasers but Band of Angels!  It was nice to get my own reaction reflected back from an uncontaminated source.

More recently, I managed to find disks on a couple of pacey programmers with Joan Bennett that are buried in Walsh's occasionally dispiriting filmography.

1932's Me and My Gal is a crude but still agreeable early-sound Walsh comedy-melodrama. Spencer Tracy and particularly a gum chewing, blonde Bennett manage to be endearing and the support is good, complete with Birth of  Nation's Little Colonel, Henry B. Walthall, doing a paralyzed ex-navy man who can only communicate by blinking in Morse code, like Herbert Marshall in Jack Smight's The Third Day.

 The film starts with a close up of Spence on the pier he’s patrolling, brushing his policeman hat. A destitute man is about to drown the dog Spence adopts. Soon our hero’s sassing cafe cashier Bennet “It’s very beautiful hair. Where did you get it?” Turns out that, though Bennett’s sister Marion Burns is marrying George Chandler, she is the old flame of gangster George Walsh. Mob leader Noel Madison wants her to provide the list of strong box numbers from her job at the bank.

At the wedding, dad J. Farrell McDonald is drunk enough to throw the radiogram out the second story window but, when Spence is called, he gets on with chatting Joan on the landing outside the beery celebration, where groom Chandler has passed out. 

Spence starts calling on Joan (“I hear flat feet”) and we even get a “Strange Interlude” voice over scene on the couch -  dissolves from the leads sparking to the gang working on Burns  or from the apartment stairs to those in the Prison Walsh escapes from strapped under a car, a nice piece of Gordon Wiles decor, with the sliding wire mesh gates.

The heavies intimidate the upstairs immigrant family with “a revolver” (actually an automatic) and cut through their floor into the safe deposit box vault. The dog signals the intruder hidden upstairs and Walthall has spotted Burns in the mirror, smuggling in the fugitive, but can only communicate by blinking. Spence figures the Morse Code angle but has to get Joan to transcribe the message on her order pad, this coming after he's been given the dead or alive briefing by Capt. Emmet Corrigan. 

Nice shoot out in the attic. Wedding happy ending, Spence in a top hat.

Walsh, Bennett & Tracy.

 Walsh's  weak comedy routines, inserted at regular intervals don’t get laughs & slow things down -  the hat jokes, the repeating of Tracy’s words by the sidekick detective told to model himself on Spence, the comics arguing about what kind of fish drunk Will Stanton hit them with. Rather better is the street language “I never knew how much I liked you till the other night when you gave me the air.” and the the grim Depression humor. “Bank robbery - who did they rob this time?”  Phillip Dunne and Charles Vidor are among those credited on the script.

The spitting bar fly is a recognisable Walsh character. McDonald stepping into close up to speak to the camera anticipates the opening of Gentleman Jim. There’s even a Bronx cheer.

George Lipschultz'  score is OK. Timing is generally good for the day and there are striking shots like the radio crashing to the  path, the mobster’s pistol edge of frame as Tracy comes up the attic stairs or the gang seen looking up through the hole they have cut in the bank ceiling. Wiles' studio built decors are particularly an asset - the working class tenement flats and the busy pier recalling Regeneration. 

Raoul Walsh was in his element with these undemanding street-smart pieces and it's a pity that Zanuck-era Fox let them go out of circulation, changing our perception of star and director. 

 

Separated from his long standing association with Fox, artificiality is creeping into the director's work by the time we get to Paramount's 1936 Big Brown Eyes. It's quite zippy for him at this period, working with his own script and having old Fox associate Bennett along, still a blonde. It's not clear who has the Big Brown Eyes referred to in the original story by Hondo's James Edward Grant.

The piece is framed by sessions in the crowded hotel barbershop where Bennett is a popular manicurist and mobsters come in for a spruce up or a pineapple soda, which Snowflake Tunes is quite willing to finish, when they get taken away to the station house. The chatter in the salon is about the jewel robberies where the gems seem to always end up back with owners like hotel resident Marjorie Gateson. She has eyes for both recovery specialist Walter Pidgeon and investigating cop Gary Grant, who is sparking Bennett. Joan takes a dim view of finding him coat removed (Gateson poodle’s spilled tea on it) in Gateson’s apartment. So much for the exposition.

Grant, Jewell & Bennett.

Joan, with an ear for the gossip, is hired on by Joe Sawyer (what happens to him?) as a news reporter and Walter proves to be the criminal mastermind who cleans up on the insurance pay-offs for jewellery recovery. While he’s negotiating with nasties Alan Baxter and Henry Brandon, Walter’s henchman Lloyd Nolan manages to shoot a baby in a pram. Hired-in gunman Francis McDonald, drawing attention to the pistol in his overcoat, intimidates witness Isabel Jewell, who goes to jelly at the line up. However reporter Joan uses a fake headline and a few rounds from Cary’s piece to psych hood Douglas Fowley, clean shaven here, into ratting out the mob - nice piece of acted jitters. The film is more focused on Nolan’s delight in getting off than bereaved mother Helen Brown’s grief.

Outraged, Cary quits the force. The film’s one style coup is a shift from knockabout to serious as it looks like Cary’s vigilante tactics have gone wrong.

It’s nice to see the leads together. Nearly all of their scenes are played in two shots so we can watch them react to one another. Grant has already found his character, though it's not an exact match for a police hero. His unfunny ventriloquist act is clearly dubbed. The film’s attempt at innovation in carrying the exposition in close-ups of the gossip in the barber shop doesn’t really play and the wise cracks in the script aren’t as clever as they clearly think “Somebody’s likely to find their hat floating in the river.” “He doesn’t deserve a chair. They should fry him standing up.”

Producer Walter Wanger has given this one a distracting, expensive finish to make it a vehicle for his wife Bennett. The film curiously anticipates more substantial work - Baxter and Brandon’s re-appearance foreshadows the one given Charles McGraw and William Conrad in The Killers and there’s a bit of Dirty Harry Callaghan in Grant’s disillusioned cop. However you have only to compare this one with His Girl Friday, which Big Brown Eyes intermittently resembles, to see the difference between serious film and schedule filling.

Barrie Pattison 2022