John Ford vs. the Microphone

 I've discussed the appeal of the twenties talkies before, a surprisingly brief period where Hollywood on its own tried to feed the monster it had unleashed by adding sound to movies, faced by the derision of critics and celebrity directors like Chaplin and René Clair. By the time other countries got into the act - silents were still the norm in Russia and Asia into the thirties - all the mistakes that could be made had been made and were there to be learned from.  

You can suspect that the first American sound films were rapidly shelved as much to avoid embarrassment as for marketability problems. For nearly a Century John Ford's 1930 Men Without Women (no relation to the Ernest Hemingway stories) has been unavailable, missing from a couple of retrospectives I worked through in Europe. The mute copy included in the fifties vanished. Now (and I'm sure there is a story here) an excellent first generation Movietone copy has appeared without fanfare on YouTube, easily the best of Ford’s first efforts in sound. The foul-ups and miscalculations make it if anything more fascinating and once it settles into its sunken submarine material, atmosphere and suspense assert over the clunky technique.

Give this team the same subject two years later and we would have had a title that would not have been allowed to vanish as this one has. Unfortunately shooting with early sound has stretched them to - and beyond- their limits. The erratic score disturbs with unmotivated bursts of music and inappropriate choices - “A Life on the Ocean Wave”, “Popeye the Sailorman” for the opening! After beginning with music and effects, we get to some recorded dialogue. Second thoughts have been added in inset titles, which sometimes interrupt or finish speech recorded on the spot. For the ending, the track is largely unintelligible and the same information is repeated in titles. This is disconcerting and audiences of 1930 must have found it that way too. 

The film opens quite ham-fisted, though even here interesting touches keep on intruding. Yankee sailors on leave in Shanghai are bellying up to the longest bar in the world quite convincingly staged, complete with Chinese vice girls in a cage that the older men try to set the kid up with, and a raddled woman singer doing her number. Familiar Ford (or is it Fox Company) face J. Farrel Mc Donald is prominent with shore radio operator John Wayne to follow.

In the glass paneled-off officers’ area,  Charles K. Gerrard & Warner Richmond are filling us in on a dumb Beau Geste back story about the vanished officer who accepted disgrace rather than let it incriminate the women he loved. After rather too long, they join the shore patrol in rounding up the crew of Submarine S-13 for a surprise mission. New Ensign Frank Albertson is told on the pier they are “The best bunch of fighting me you’ll ever see” and cautioned that he should ignore drunkenness as the M.P.s smash liquor bottles returning sailors have hidden on their persons - puddle of booze spreading round the feet.

Without further delay, they set out to sea and (terrible model work for a film that has all that effective full size surface shooting) They have a collision in a storm (“We’re struck aft right”) and go ninety feet to the bottom. The crew in the tower are wiped out leaving Albertson the senior officer. Radio man Stewart Erwin is desperately trying to make contact, as the survivors, gleaming with sweat, consider their worsening circumstances. Religious fanatic George le Guere freaks out and menaces them with a detonator. We’ll see this again with Boris Karloff in Ford’s The Lost Patrol. Here Albertson has the pistol.

 Erwin. Albertson, Walter McGrail, Warren Hymer, Le Guere, McDonald, McKenna.

This section is remarkable, the best thing in Ford’s first sound films and something that holds its own with later submarine dramas like Operation Tokyo, Morning Departure or Grey Lady Down. Water rising in the compartment adds to the tension here but since then we’ve been familiarised with the dangers of the bends, while all the attention survivors get here is a cup of brandy. Suitable military finale with men saluting as Taps is blown.

Dudley Nichols

This is writer Dudley Nichols’ first film and he’s determinedly packed it with naval detail - limited oxygen in cylinders,  closing the valves on the torpedo tubes, helmet divers cutting away obstacles with acetylene torches, water reaching the batteries releasing chlorine gas. Trying to accommodate the archaic honor plot with top-billed Chief Torpedoman Kenneth MacKenna (about to be a Fox Bulldog Drummond and husband of Kay Francis) is a bit of a stretch but Albertson’s last line is a resonant solution. Nichols will become the most respected writer in Hollywood, largely through his collaboration with Ford, and go on to adapt Mourning Becomes Electra and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The other notable member of the Ford team, cameraman Joseph August, who shot William S. Hart westerns, emerges with distinction - convincing confined-interior lighting, capturing smoke blowing across the line of static surface vessels, star filters on the gleaming valves of the radio room.

The foul-ups and miscalculations make Men Without Women, if anything more fascinating and, once it settles into the sunken submarine material, the atmosphere and suspense assert over the clunky technique. It is rare to see such an excellent copy on one of these, possibly the result of the film being stored away undisturbed for all these years. 

Over at Paramount, Willam Wellman’s 1929 Chinatown Nights was, in its nature, one of the first sound films. Like Blackmail or Michael Curtiz’ now-lost Tenderloin (“the first film to have a substantial amount of spoken dialogue”) it was begun as silent and, when The Jazz Singer started coining it, was rapidly put back into production of added scenes to cash in on the demand for talkies - a “goat gland” production. Traces of this remain in shots from the original shooting, which are obviously running too fast, and dialogue post-synched inexactly. The elegant Florence Vidor was so ticked off with the whole thing that she didn’t report back to do her lines, which were re-voiced by Nella Walker.

Chinatown Nights' arresting mobile camera opening picks up a tourist coach driving through Chinatown streets, where a line marks the division between Tong Territories. Disgusted with her snotty society escorts’s dismissal of fakery, socialite Vidor leaves the bus only to find that the “rubber Chinaman for the rubbernecks” body is a real victim of the Tong War shoot-out which is breaking out around her.

In genuine peril, she lets Irish (!) Tong Boss Wally Beery usher her off the street and (more moving camera) into his steel shuttered building (cf. Scarface) where the radio-telegraph room, with a giant wall map of America, is an indicator of Wally’s plan to place all the country’s Chinatowns, under his control.  She has to be locked away all night for her own protection. Finding his college Shakespeare text, Flo matches Wally in quotations. Meeting a real man, unlike the effect society types she knows, Florence can’t get enough of him.

Writer Julian Johnson had titled Wings, the mega-hit and first Oscar winner Wellman has just completed. One scene here opens with his text on black dissolving into the scene. The film’s four credited authors insert a couple of uncomfortable subplots - Jack McHugh as a cloth cap Jackie Coogan youth character and yellow-pressman Jack Oakie, who provokes a riot with Tong rival Warner Oland’s Boston Charley, at the Chinese Theatre. The reporter enters on the cops’ coattails. This scene, with the on-street violence continuing on, visible behind the characters, gives a hint of the imposing production the makers envisaged before the complication of sound.

Beery & Vidor

Vidor settles in. (“head up town – body Barbary Coast”)  Chinatown women wait inside for their men and she’s indignant when forbidden (“Boss say missee no go out”) to join the dangerous funeral motorcade. She’d challenged Beery on the lack of government intervention in the mayhem and learned the secret use of illegal aliens which sustains the Tongs. Wanting Wally to break with the rackets, she rats him out to the cops. At this point the piece loses traction, with our stocky hero turning her out ( “I can’t go back up town!”) soon pacing irresolutely towards the door she had used. Even the bottle is denied her.  “You ain’t gonna get no more liquor” mean Bartender Richard Cramer snarls. The sniper in the opposite building takes his toll.  

The film does get away from the makers. Beery, speaking for an audience for the first time, is clearly ill at ease but still an extraordinary presence, his bulky, virile lead registering opposite Vidor’s elegant socialite. Place this pair against the Chinatown background - a play that started last Tuesday, the calligraphy Tong War declaration posters, that the beat cop can’t read, setting up the police raid where a menacing wall of uniform silhouette officers chase fugitives through the cellar tunnels under the floor, in the best Underworld tradition, while Wally brandishes dead Asians' immigration papers that are being re-cycled by his operatives - because Chinamen all look the same. 

What we end up with here is a fascinating oddity, carrying the shadow of what might have been a major achievement. 

Beery, in an uncharacteristically serious role, had already scored in Wellman’s savage Beggars of Life but Paramount, unimpressed with him here, let him go, only for him to have a hit at MGM in The Big House and become one of their major stars, working with Wellman again in the 1940 This Man’s Navy. Swedish Oland continued as Hollywood’s resident Asian. Long time Wellman associate Charles Barton (appearing in his 1939 Beau Geste) was assistant director among non-celebrity technicians who frequently did their best work on this film.

Also 1929 was Universal’s super production Broadway, which was an attempt to match the success of Warner’s Jazz Singer and MGM’s new Oscar winner The Broadway Melody (of 1928) with an adaptation of a Jed Harris - George Abbott stage hit, complete with song, dance, gangsters and what passed for snappy dialogue. Finding this on YouTube fulfilled an ambition dating from the time I saw  Paris Cinémathque's beautiful original sepia print of the silent version  - where the lengthy numbers and dialogues played mute with a few titles cut in.

This one has ambition stamped all over it. A gleaming transparent giant stalks through a model of the Great White Way, spilling his chalice of liquor, and we go to one of the film's stylish montages of revelers staged in Charles D. Hall’s enormous Paradise Club decor, where the squad of dancing girls keeps on sweeping through the three storey, expressionist pattern curtains with Hal Mohr’s specially designed camera.   Rge film repeats the combination of director Paul Fejos and star Glenn Tryon from the studio’s admired Lonesome of the previous year, where Tryon had been acceptable because, unless you  cracked it for the version extended with sound sequences, you didn’t have to hear him doing his wise guy voice, snarling “Sez you” and bragging “I got personality”, like a road show William Haines.  A plausible song and dance man, Tryon is trapped in tempo-destroying one-take dialogues with Merna Kennedy, fresh from Chaplin’s The Circus. 

Specter of Times Square

They get no help from direction. The handling is clueless with the leads on one side of the backstage area cross cut with a chorine on the significant pay phone, ignoring sound perspective. Kennedy pays no attention to her partner in a scene where he’s speaking right next to her and there’s only a feeble attempt to convince that the inset of a dancing Evelyn Brent is part of the big finale.

They are backed by Robert Ellis and Otis Harlan with the stage production’s Paul Porcasi and  Thomas Jackson in the first of the cop/reporter characters which will make him a familiar face over the next decades and who is the only one here who can deliver his lines plausibly.

The plot is the now familiar one of bootlegger Ellis simultaneously moving on Kennedy and offing his racketeer rival Leslie Fenton. Still carrying the incriminating gun, Ellis bluffs it out. (“Should I sew up my pocket just because there’s a bull outside?”) and stages a backstage party with the chorus girls and mobsters (“some of them two time men”) which breaks out through the screen-height doors of manager Porcasi’s party room, where Kennedy has to field off advances. (“I’m not that kind of girl”) A near miss shatters the window of Ellis’ car and his nerve breaks, with the cad planning to exit taking innocent Merna for a ride. Cop Jackson is on about a Sullivan rap and trim but over-age chorus cutie Evelyn Brent is vengeance bent.

Attention is caught by the knowledge that we are seeing many of the clichés of the gangster and musical films to come getting a first airing - except nice people don’t pay for their crimes here. (“A gang killing’s no novelty in this burg”)  By the time we get to a short, dupey Technicolor final number, the film has made you realise just how long a hundred and forty-four minutes can be.(https://www.youtube.com/watch(v=ra0RCb ya9Y&list=PL8Nn95jd6kYXBY62xgDciyBqoh9IEXIal&index=64)

Broadway - Mohr's camera, Hall's decor.

YouTube has put up substantial sections on 1929 movies - not as imposing as it seems, with titles appearing multiple times and a few ring-ins like Werner Hochnaum's Brothers. It is still the best access we've had to this material since it first appeared. The copies vary but for anyone who has lost interest in endlessly re-cycling The Wizard of Oz and Gilda, this provides an invaluable insight into vintage  Hollywood and film itself. I found relating to this trio a challenge but genuinely rewarding.

Men Without Women - McGrail, Mc Donald & McKenna

Barrie Pattison 2023

Kinuya Tanaka Director

Kinuyo Tanaka had one of the most extraordinary careers in film, Starting at the age of fourteen she became a star in over two hundred and fifty productions spread from silents into the seventies. She was the lead in the first Japanese sound film.  She was associated with Hiroshi Shimizu for a period and speculation centered on her long-running partnership with Kenji Mizoguchi (she claimed they were just good friends) Like her contemporaries Jean Gabin and Gary Cooper,  she managed to have the lead in the best films of their industry's best directors including Shimazu's Kanzashi/The Ornamental Hairpin, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho Dayu/ The Bailif, Heinosuke Gosho's Madamu to nyōbō/The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu & Entotsu no mieru basho/ Four Chimneys, Keisuke Kinoshita's Rikugun/ Army and Narayama Bushiko/Ballad of the Narayama, Kurosawa's Akahige/Red Beard, along with films by Ozu and Naruse. After her visit to America and meetings with Joan Crawford and Silvia Sidney was not well received at home, Tanaka chose to make her 1953 debut as director, becoming the only Japanese woman then in the profession,  supported by Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita but opposed by Mizoguchi creating a rift after their fifteen film collaboration.  

  A welcome break in the lack of archival screenings here came when the Art Gallery of New South Wales put up a season of the six films directed by Tanaka, starting with 1953's Koibumi/Love Letter starring Masayuki Mori, who had played the Lord in Rashomon, opposite Machika Kyo and Toshiro Mifune. The script was in part by Kinoshita. Tanaka appears in the minor role of the landlady.

This one was a contemporary-set shomingeki film, having more in common with Kinoshita's 24 Eyes or Shinoda's Children of Hiroshima than the Samurai adventures which were attracting international attention. Showing a society debilitated by the war and the U.S. Occupation shares attention with the film's narrative.      

Love Letters - Kuga & Mori

Love Lettter starts with returned naval officer Mori joining his brother in the room they share in the crowded wooden Tokyo apartment block, in a street where the pedestrian crowd includes a Chaplin imitator billboard man. Mori has been drained both by the war and by his loss of childhood sweetheart Yoshiko Kuga, forced to marry in his absence and now untraceable. Mori haunts Shibuya station believing he glimpsed her there. He is supported by his hustling sibling who has developed a business peddling second-hand books and magazines. We see him persuade a street food stall's owners to rent him their fence to hang his products.  

Jukichi Uno, an old school friend, plies a similarly marginal trade, writing pitiful letters in English to U.S. servicemen who have abandoned Japanese women.  He's doing well enough at this to farm out some of the work to Mori. Sure enough (it's that kind of film) Mori is in the back room when Kuga comes in to commission a letter to the American she had lived with during the grim occupation period.  Facing his lost love in a sunny park, Mori is unable to reconcile with the notion that she had associated with an American, like the coarse whores who greet her as one of their group. The sustained long shot of Kuga walking away after their park meeting works better than the ending of The Third Man,  which must have been its model.

Reconciliation comes with the exchange where Mori accepts the notion that the Japanese all carry the responsibility for starting the war.  Film like this and Shûe Matsubayashi's 1960 Taiheiyo no arashi/I Bombed Pearl Harbor are big on Japanese war guilt. The film's qualities are its detailed, surprisingly bleak picture of post-war Japan and a chance to see Masayuki Mori in a dominating, thoughtful characterisation.                                                                                                                                                                           

Two years later The Director's Guild of Japan was trying to resurrect the Nikkatsu Company, drawing opposition from established production houses concerned that their talent would be poached by a new rival. Yasujiro Ozu no less intervened, reviving one of his old scripts for the proposed Tsuki Wa Noborinu/ The Moon Has Risen with touches associated with his style visible in the finished production - include the camera placed like someone seated on a tatami mat and the spacing "pillow shot" scenics separating sequences. Tanaka's first film having been well received, she was accepted as the director.

The new try at directing became a polished, unconvincing romcom. Everyone sees a different literary equivalent - “Little Women” or how about Shakespearean comedy with parallel couples going through their paces during a night where the moonlight drives their romantic impulses. This one even runs to a befuddled maidservant, a comic turn which is the best of Tanaka’s guest shots in her films and also anticipates the touching role of Mieko Takamine as the devoted follower in Tanaka's final film

The Moon Has Risen -  Hisako Yamane, Yoko Sugi and Mie Kitahara.

Head of a relocated post WW2 Japanese family Chishû Ryû, of whom we don’t get to see all that much, leads performing the sutras in his Buddhist chapel. Turns out that he heads a family of three daughters, passive widow Hisako Yamane, middle sister Yoko Sugi and the youngest Mie Kitahara, shortly to star in teen exploitation hit Kurutta kajitsu/Crazed Fruit where, as here, she's again not all that comfortable displaying youthful enthusiasm. 

Kitahara provides the film’s dynamic, trying to get sister Sugi paired off with city visitor Ko Mishima, calling on the aid of mutual friend Shoji Yasui. Turns out that the prospective couple only need to be placed together in the moonlight for the plan to work out. The pair communicating in the code of telegrams with verse numbers of classic Japanese poetry is lost on a foreign audience and I suspect didn’t do all that much for its intended public. Then we go into the romance of Kitahara and Yasui with an ending swinging back to Ryo and the oldest daughter rehearsing.  Over the horizon, we get the attraction of bustling Tokyo against peaceful rural Nara, whose temple buildings figure in the false appointment episode.

There's another drear Western score and once again it's the detail of fifties Japan which is the major asset rather than any dramatic content, though it makes a curious addition to an international gallery of moonlight romances including the Swedish Smiles of a Summer's Night, Hollywood's Moonstruck or the Spanish The Goalkeeper.  

In 1955 Nkkastsu produced Tanaka's 3rd movie Chibusayo Eien Nare/The Eternal Breasts/Forever a Woman,  a determinedly female affair. More serious than her previous directorial choices, The Eternal Breasts deals with real-life poet Fumiko Shimojô, played by Yumeji Tsukioka, an actress who is not widely know in Western distribution, though she did leads for Shinoda and Gosho.  

We see her Shimojô in a bad marriage from which the only relief is her participation in the Regional Poet's Circle, where she is encouraged by married couple Masayuki Mori & Yôko Sugi. After Mori’s efforts her poetry is published but his health is failing, though the pair are attracted. After his death, Tsukioka is sustained through the divorce from her cheating husband by Sugi’s friendship.  The poet is stricken with breast cancer and has a mastectomy which shocks her friend. Tsukioka refuses to see a city reporter come to create a story about her dying writer, expecting a sensational piece of journalism but the pair connect and he puts aside his other interests to see her through her last days.

  Tsukioka & Sugi

The most memorable passage is Tsukioka alone at night in Sapporo hospital, following a trolley to the barred area which she recognises as the morgue, where her own remains will shortly be transported in the presence of her distressed children.

The film’s subject requires bold and sensitive handling of the kind Fred Zinneman might have brought to it but Tanaka chooses tasteful and comes out closer to Ross Hunter. That just registers as as morbid and the film’s claim to fame is that it may be the first and possibly only movie to have a mastectomy as its central event.                                                                                                                                                 

Following in 1960. Tanaka’s next direction Ruten no ôhi / Wandering Princess was a departure,  her first costume drama and filmed in ‘scope & colour. It is a more ambitious undertaking than her previous films, fielding screens full of dress extras in a succession of designed decors. By the standard by which we measure these, this is not a super production but it did demonstrate Tanaka's willingness to move beyond realist contemporary subjects.

The subject matter was the nineteen thirties Empire of Manchuku where the Japanese Army  imposed Fuketsu, their own "Puppet" ruler of Manchuria, on the resentful Chinese population. The film is derived from the then recently published autobiography of Hiro Aishinkakura,  daughter to an aristocratic family who became the arranged wife who joined the Chinese Emperor's younger brother, played by Eiji Funakoshi (Fires on the Plain).  Heading the cast is Machika Kyo, then Japanese superstar of Rashomon, Ugestsu, Gate of Hell and her one venture into English language production, the Hollywood Tea House of the August Moon.

The setting, a fallen  state subjugated by an aggressive empire, creating an elaborate but ultimately 

Wandering Princess - Kyo & Funakoshi 

pernicious illusion of restored glory, is a  natural, full of intrigue, passion, conflict, spectacle and flawed but sympathetic characters — the stuff of a dozen books of the month rolled into one.  Usually dominating and sensual, Kyô gives a surprisinly staid performance, striving to present her character as concientiously working in the interest of her uneasy subjects and facing the indignities of Japanese Army Control and capture and deportation by the equally vicious Chinese conquerors from the People's Liberation Army escort. Modestly staged official occasions alternate with more intimate material like Kyo winning over the playground children, who warn her of attacks on Japanese or the hardships of caring for her family on the punishing retreat in captivity.

The film does however contain the most striking sequence in Tanaka's work as director, set up by scenes of her easel painting's scarlet sky. The same colour scheme is used in the studio filmed scene where Kyo sees, distant on the horizon, a silhouette procession taking the condemned woman to her crucifixion, a single close up included.

With only minor alterations (character names etc.) to the facts, this one has detail which will be lost on an outside viewer - the Japanese woman with unbound feet unlike the Chinese around her, the range of Asian languages the cast are asked to perform, historical events familiar to its target audience. An audience for the sub-titled copy is likely see it as a footnote to the later cycle of Pu Yi films - Bertolucci's Last Emperor of China or the biographies made by Li Han-hsiang for Hong Kong and Mainland studios. Those who have put in a bit of serious movie-going will recall similar material done better in Warners'  Juarez or Feng Zaogang’s  YiJiuSiEr/Back to 1941. 

Onna bakari no yoru /Girls in  Dark, Tanaka's next film as director was made in 1961, three years after prostitution was made illegal in Japan, followed by a series of police raids and arrests, mostly concentrating on women sex workers to be sorted into two categories, those classified incurable sent to jail and the remainder placed for six months in rehabilitation centers aimed at returning them to everyday life.

Girls of Dark

Tanaka's film starts in one of these centers, the Shiragiku Protective Facility. The all-female management, headed by Chikage Awashima, see Hisako Hara as their most promising charge and we watch her selected among more hardened inmates for an outside position as clerk in a neighborhood grocery. This proves not to be a smooth transition, with low pay, the male hangers-on eyeing her as a prospect and the store owner's wife's suspicions about her proving justified, when her husband the owner moves on Hara during the wife's absence. 

Returning to the Facility, Hara finds toughened detainees getting into fights with women they knew on the street - compare the street women associates in Love Letter. The organisers try again, placing Hara with sympathetic management of a nursery where she will not have to deal with the public. Her horticulturist mentor is attracted to her and finally proposes marriage but even the well-intentioned owners support his rural aristocrat family in forbidding the match, asserting "Country people are different." At this point, Hara's former pimp shows up recruiting her for a new whore house.

Female director Tanaka reduces the nudity here to a couple of glimpses of nylon bras which is tame stuff for any thrill-seeking movie public and the production values are undistinguished - competent black and white 'scope studio interior filming, which only occasionally breaks out into location footage like the liberating bike ride crossing the railway bridge from the Center into the town. The performances are mainly ordinary and the score again drab. 

Its admirers offer this one as a serious try for sympathy with the victims of the vice industry but it is a poor relative to the exploitation films of the day, which often had more energy than Tanaka can muster. It joined the European hooker films which had preceded it in metropolitan double feature showings. Ralph Habib's 1953 Compagnes de la nuit has plot elements in common with this one but the crime melo content there provided much livelier viewing.

Tanaka's last film as director Ogin Sama/Love Under the Crucifix was made in 1962.  This was again a costume piece, telling the story of celebrated Sixteenth Century Tea Master Sen no Riku but Tanaka worked with a different imagery. We don't get the shots of sandal wearing peasants and rickshaw-riding notables framed by the tiled roof of alleyways, trademark of the jidaigeki. Instead we follow shaven headed Ganjiro Nakamura (from Ichikawa's Kagi/Odd Obsession and Enjo/Conflagration)  through his daughter, played by Ineko Arima, against a background of the persecution of Catholics, who were seen as a point of access for foreign influence, undermining Feudal society. Films about Japanese Catholics tend towards the grim - Children of Nagasaki, Silence. 

Here Arima has studied the tea ceremony under her father, in the company of Christian Lord Tatsue Nakadai (regularly defeated by Mifune in the sword duels climaxing their films) Nakadai's spooky, wide-eyed quality worked nicely for his aristocrat character.  She falls for Tatsue but he tells her that his Christian notion of piety means that she should become a nun - while treasuing the crucifix he gives her. However wealthy merchant Hisaya Itô desires her and arranges a marriage, only to find her unresponsive and worse, the object of the passion of Osamu Takizawa, the local Taiko Governor, who plans to have her moved to the castle so he can satisfy his lust. A bad lot that one. He negotiates the construction of an ostentatious gold-painted chamber for his personal tea ceremonies. 

Meanwhile, Nakadai's wife having died, he permits himself to give in to his own passion for Arima. We know from his Mifure movies that Nakadai is a dab hand at slicing up riff-raff and he assures Arima about despatching the ruffians set on their trail but it's not that kind of picture. There's no blood here. Disgrace all round with Nakamura having no option beyond sepuku. I did warn you about Japanese Catholic pictures.

In a gallery of Sen Riku movies, two by Kei Kumai alone, Tanaka shows individuality and growing technique but the film remains undistinguished. We can't help feeling that Tanaka was wise not to give up her day job. Having become the Japanese Bette Davis she would have been making a bad switch  to the status of of one of the Dorothys (Arzner and Davenport) directing in America. Tanaka did sustain a decade-long run as director. In a similar position, Lillian Gish gave up after one movie - embarrassed at having to instruct important players - like Ricardo Cortez! No way of telling what input Tanaka's turn as the only working  Japanese female director had on creating opportunities for women who followed her but you can be sure it was mentioned in their discussions.

The Japan Film Foundation's input to the event was impressive. In a city where attempts at serious archival screenings continue to flounder, they delivered on schedule impeccable sub-titled copies shown as originally intended and accompanied by an attractive, informative booklet. Compare the Sir Isaac Julian exhibit running down the road at the MCA which was inaudible and with the multiple images rigged so that the light from one would wash out the one opposite, using shine-through screen material which meant that half the viewers saw lettering flipped over. You had to consult Julian's website to work out what this was all about. Watching the trailer on line was frustrating -  revealing what we were missing.

The comparison made you appreciate the Tanaka event, even knowing how much more rewarding a season of her work as performer would have been  - with maybe one of these dropped in. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in. Ideology trumps quality every time and female directors are what we are buying this year.

 Among the usually murky Tanaka film copies available on YouTube, many with English sub-titles, you might enjoy the agreeable Kinuyo no hatsukoi /Kinuyo’s First Love at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30PDj20GnUA&t=96s. There's also an excellent copy of the Tsuki Wa Noborinu/The Moon Has Risen original trailer.

My thanks to Richard Wong for his work on original Japanese texts.

Kinuyo Tanaka in Keisuke Kinoshita's great 1958 Narayama bushikô/Ballad of the Narayama.

Barrie Patison 2025

BOB HOPE & ARTHUR FREED.

  J. Stuart Blackton’s creaky 1933 March of the Movies, Cavalcanti’s mamoth 1942 Film & Realism and Boris Sagal’s 1953 De Mille film, The World’s Greatest Showman were once events in our film going. We dozed through Cinesound review’s ship launchings so we could see the Robert Youngston shorts in the News Theatre programs. Now material which is more polished and thoughtful is available at the touch of a keyboard. New participants don’t realise how lucky they are. In the Public Broadcasting - YouTube age we are spoiled for these. Part of Sheldon Epps' 1996 “Great Performances” series,  Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM is a cheer-worthy attempt to highlight the success of MGM’s Freed Unit working from the thirties to the sixties. 

Singing in the Rain - Kelly, Mitchell, O'Connor

Director David M. Thompson's film acknowledges that other producers were on the lot. Jack Cummings did Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Viennese-leaning Joe Pasternak, whose idea of classical music they note with some derision, did The Great Caruso. Not all of the films used-to-be songwriter Freed produced were musicals - The Clock, Richard Brooks’ debut, Crisis, The Subterraneans - and not all of them were brilliant. I recall squirming through Little Nelly Kelly, Till The Clouds Roll By and Show Boat with only a packet of Jaffas as compensation. However from 1943’s Cabin in the Sky onwards, Freed’s policy of recruiting Broadway’s brightest increasingly paid off, particularly in deploying the talents of Vincente Minelli, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.  From Take Me Out to the Ball Game to Gigi, the MGM musical bloomed, defining the high entertainment scene of the day. Poor Busby Berkely was lost in the rush.

The documentary explains that, while other units were shunted around the bungalows, Freed occupied a wing of the Admin. Building with his office butted onto his associate’s, complete, with permanent piano disgorging the tunes that we still recall with such delight. This  comes spaced with survivor interviews -  Cyd Charisse, Biographer Hugh Fordin, Stanley Donen barely recognisable as the lithe young man in the off-set stills, André Previn, Comden & Green, Michael Kidd, Mickey Rooney, and with welcome extracts well reproduced. Collaborators like arranger Conrad Salinger are not ignored

Arthur Freed

In all this, Freed himself remains shadowy. Associates recall his avoiding the decisions he would leave to them, with the Millard Mitchell character in Singing in the Rain unable to visualise the Mickey Spillane ballet, a thinly disguised portrait - though they swear he is not. The Shirley Temple exploit is not mentioned.

Thompson’s film struggles to document the circumstances that produced the Freed musicals and pretty much gives up on explaining their disappearance in the wide screen era. It’s still a great pleasure to find so many participants sharing recollections that we also cherish. Possibly its most telling moment is Donen, whose break with Gene Kelly became acrimonious, saying that to produce such extraordinary results, extraordinary stresses were inevitable. We could have done a lot worse for a record of one of the high points in film production. Weeks after watching Musicals Great Musicals, I've got those long familiar numbers running round in my head again.

This one is accessible on the Singing in the Rain double disk.

 John Scheinfeld’s 2017 This Is Bob Hope is a top of the range two hour TV special in PBS’ American Masters series. I find it particularly rewarding because this one revives the enthusiasm I'd had for its subject, which had been eroded by slack observers and a notion of political correctness that sees Hope as part of a detested Right-Wing Establishment.

 Hope was one of the first movie personalities whose work I followed. I’ve been on his case for seven decades but this film told me things I didn’t know and explained some that had puzzled me - notably his declining popularity, by comparison with say Jerry Lewis - Jerry Lewis!

Hope arrives endorsed by people who know their subject firsthand. Associates and observers include Dick Cavett, Margaret Cho, Leonard Maltin, Conan O'Brien, Robert L. Mills, Brooke Shields, Richard Zoglin and Kermit the Frog. Woody Allen affirms his allegiance to a mentor who created the craven comic character Woody would develop and Allen generously shows that, where he needs dialogue, Hope got laughs with body language,  And in case you are about to interject, let me repeat Bill Maher's spontaneous observation  “Woody Allen isn’t guilty of anything.  Two trials found him innocent.  This is a country of laws!"

The film offers brief childhood material (“Bob hated his Youth”) that includes his being a “Movie Teller”, describing pictures he'd seen as in the Béatrice Bejo film.  Early on-stage photos (including his double act with George Burns) go with film of his first performances. Billy Crystal’s adept narration over mute footage describes Hope’s injecting topical material into Burlesque, making him, they claim, the originator of stand-up comedy.

With John Banks and Ralph Sanford

 There's coverage of his Broadway period (“Ballyhoo of 1932”) five shows in five years, moving to radio where instead of doing a script for six months he would do five scripts a week, recruiting one of the first writers’ rooms.  The Chesterfield Show set him up as a number one Radio star through the forties. It was this, rather than his two-reel comedies, that created a place for him in movies. The analysis of his signature “Thanks for the Memory” duet with Shirley Ross is touching. The film excerpts are generally impeccably chosen and reproduced. The films were and are the things that I was drawn to.

However parallel with these, Came Pearl Harbour and the continuing USO tours which have a resonance that doesn’t always come down the years. ”It wasn’t clear that D-Day was going to be a success.”  Hope went on with these into the Vietnam era where we see Richard Nixon telling him “We can’t lose South East Asia” and it was uncertain how his inspirational speaker material would play with that era's forces. “I’ve been in both combat zones - Vietnam and Berkley” The story of him turning to Connie Stevens and asking her to sing to the hostile audience, where she broke out in “Silent Night” and at the back a few voices joined in till the thousands of troops were singing, is irresistible - like the soldier at Hope's Life Time Award Presentation saying that he’d been one of the wheelchair cases that Hope had cleared officers out of the front of his show to place for a performance.

Rather as I did,  the film loses interest in his film career about there. They do include the touching Sorrowful Jones dialogue with young Mary Jane Saunders, a set piece in serious acting which I’d forgotten (well it has been seventy years!) and the routine with Jimmy Cagney in Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, where Hope matches the veteran dancer step for step. I wouldn’t have minded a nod to the nice I’ll Take Sweden.

Seven Little Foys.

There’s as much as we need of Hope's sixty-year “model marriage” adopting four  children, where his wife came to terms with his philandering, and a TV career, successful while a lot of his contemporaries burned out in the Saturday Night Live era. We could have heard about the 1963-5 Bob Hope presents the Chrystler Theatre with episodes developed into the Eddy Foy Film and one by Sidney Pollack anticipating Von Richtofen & Brown or his superior turn as narrator on Project 20:Comedy in America.

Let's be grateful however. This Is Bob Hope does return Hope to the center of American Culture, prominent in a line between Mark Twain and John Stewart.  The program has a special resonance for me because it endorses a judgment I’d made unconsciously, way back at the point when I started to value this material. It’s really nice when that happens.

Reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDSbQo2KMhg

Nothing But the Truth. Bob Hope in his element, with Paulette Goddard

Barrie Pattison - 2024