Reelin' In The Years -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Dust Bowl Blues", by Woody Guthrie

       Man, quite the eventful couple of months, huh? A lot of bad stuff going on, so bad that something like sitting down to write shitty little movie reviews seemed silly. Wasteful, even. Still I suppose we all need a distraction from time to time, a little levity to break one out of that depressive spiral, even if you have to force yourself a little. Our stop today is 1940; The world has been plunged back into war, it’s biggest yet in fact, and the U.S. has yet to officially throw its hat in the ring, perhaps because they were so flattered that Hitler named one of Germany’s then-biggest trains after it. Nazis were super into that whole Manifest Destiny thing you see, and Jim Crow? Don’t even get them started, they’d probably name their kids Crow if it didn’t remind them of something that wasn’t white. That being said, when it came time to pick the representative for 1940 the competition turned out to be pretty damn fierce. Charlie Chaplin’s antifascist masterpiece The Great Dictator immediately came to mind, but since I had already seen it years ago I ended up going with Modern Times. Hitchcock made his annual appearance with Rebecca, which earned him first Best Director nomination, but it’s still not his time yet. Disney dropped two movies that year, Pinocchio and the audio-visual spectacle Fantasia, but at the time I already had an animated film set up for a later year. The Thief of Baghdad was actually the representative for a while, but because I decided to take a break from genre film in this series it eventually got wiped away in one of the many list revisions. The Proud Valley, starring the great Paul Robeson was also in there for a hot minute, and His Girl Friday might have had a chance if It Happened One Night hadn’t fucked up the romcom for everybody. No, at a time like this, when there are people angry and suffering and miserable, it only makes sense to do a movie about people who are angry and suffering and miserable. Escapism? Never heard of it.

Released in 1940, screenplay by associate producer Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath was directed by John Ford, pillar of the Western genre, and of course was based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, oft-considered one of the great American novels. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, a sharecropper’s son that has finally returned to the family farm in Oklahoma after a stint in jail for homicide (in self-defense), only to find out there isn’t a family farm anymore. The Dust Bowl has run through the Midwest, devastating thousands of acres of farmland, which has led to government-enforced mass evictions of folk from their homes. With the local economy dead in the gutter and little other options, the Joad family (along with the disillusioned ex-preacher Casy) is forced to pack up and head west for California and the promise of work. It’s a long way from Oklahoma to California for just a promise though, and unfortunately the Joad’s are going to learn the hard way that hopes and dreams  don’t often translate to reality.

John Ford is a director that I known of for years, and yet up until watching this film I was reticent about checking out his work, because he was so often connected with those old-school Westerns (which always looked stodgy and uninteresting to me compared to the Italian stuff) and John ‘The Native Americans Deserved to Die’ Wayne. Did not appeal to me whatsoever. Yet for as much criticism as I could give Ford for his reputation as ‘America’s Filmmaker’ I have to give him credit for adapting a story that so thoroughly strips away the illusions of America. The myth of the American Dream? The myth of America being this land of opportunity, of moral uprightness, where good things happen to those who put their noses to the grindstone and work for it. Bunk. The reality is that if you’re poor then you have no opportunities. The reality is that if the people who control the jobs decide to not give you a job, then tough luck, I guess your children get to starve. The reality is if the pittance they give you isn’t enough to live on and you speak up about it, they have no problem bringing in a couple thugs with badges to cave your skull in under the pretense of you being an ‘agitator’. The reality is when you’re poor, when you can’t work or can’t find work, you cease being a human being; You’re an ‘Okie’, a ‘transient’, a ‘migrant’, an eyesore that the ‘normal’ god-fearing public would rather just disappear altogether. Steinbeck’s story is about the endurance of the human spirit in the face of hopelessness, of the righteous fury of the just when faced with injustice, and I think Ford captures those feelings in his adaptation. Pretty damn good for a first impression.

First impressions also tell me that Ford isn’t that adventurous of a filmmaker. There’s not much in the way of cinematography or shot composition, he’s not trying to impress, he’s telling the tale about as straightforward as you can get. That’s not necessarily a good thing, I think he glosses over some scenes that should be treated more dramatically for the sake of pushing the story forward, but at the same time I appreciate Ford’s simple approach. When you’ve got dozens of people, men, women and children, marching in order off to the fields to pick peaches for 7 cents a crate you don’t need much to convey what the audience should be feeling. About the only thing I’ll really dig him for in this regard is a scene near the beginning with Tom and Casy where it’s you can clearly tell it’s a soundstage, like you can hear John Carradine’s voice bouncing off the walls, but you can’t really fault a film for being made in a film studio, especially in the 40s. I do think the scene near the end with Tom and Ma Joad is framed rather well, and you do get some wide open scenery which I understand is a Ford staple, so don’t let it be said Ford is doing rote filmmaking stuff, but it’s definitely not a flashy film. .

The cast is quite good, not as star-laden as is Hollywood’s tendency, but effective all the same. Henry Fonda might be a little too Hollywood to pull off being the son of a destitute farmer, a bit too handsome to be really rugged and I don’t believe he has much of a vocal range, but it does look like he could beat your ass and work a field after so you could do worse for leading. John Carradine is great as the ex-preacher Jim Casy, cast adrift both physically and spiritually, and I wish we got to see more of him. Jane Darwell isn’t just Ma Joad, the emotional pillar upon which the Joad family rests, I think everyone can see a bit of their mom. The rest of the Joad family don’t get quite as much attention, arguably even underdeveloped (Rosie I’d say gets the worst of it) but Ford does devote enough time so that you know who these people are and by the end you’re invested in their pursuit of happiness. Or at least their pursuit of not starving to death.

One thing that I definitely wasn’t a fan of was in regards to the score. While I agree with the use of folksy, jug-band music, the type you’d expect poor Oklahoman sharecroppers to listen to, it’s too upbeat for the movie it’s in. I’d go as far to say that it’s tone-deaf to what Ford is trying to portray on screen. It’s not like folk music is devoid of morose songs, where the hell do you think the blues came from after all, and so one would think that if you’re making a movie dealing with such heavy topics you’d want music that matches the emotional context of the film, rather than something you’d hear in the background of your local hootenanny. Luckily the most powerful moments of the film are done without music at all, but I still don’t agree with the decision.

Also, while Ford captures the essence of the novel in his adaptation, it does feel like a lot of the novel was trimmed down for that adaptation. As I wrote earlier it looks like the movie is building up to something with Rosie, but abruptly ends before it can pay it off. Hell, from watching this movie you’d never know why the story is called The Grapes of Wrath, because I don’t think you ever see a single fruit at all, despite the driving force of the film revolving around it. Unfortunately I haven’t read the novel, but I do know that there are some things there that were not present in the film, for reasons of brevity or because they were risque for the movie audiences of the 40’s. Best to stick with travel montages instead.

The Grapes of Wrath is not a movie without flaws, but it’s still a good movie, with a message that is just as relevant now as it was back then, perhaps even more. Easily, and strongly, recommended. Don’t start packing up your bags yet though, because we’re going to be knee deep in the 1940’s for the time being. Coming up next time, a bonafide bucket list movie that you’ve probably seen referenced dozens of times, but perhaps have never actually seen.

Reelin' In The Years -- Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Angels With Dirty Faces", by Sham 69

       If the pop culture of the 1950s were built on aliens and rocket ships, then the pop culture of the 30s (and part of the 40s) were built on gangsters and Thompson submachine guns. Ever since Prohibition had made crime a lucrative business, and organized crime started to assert itself more and more into public affairs, so too did those who committed such crimes become public figures  Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, John Dillinger, names that sent thrills and chills through the hearts of the U.S., just as the stories of Billy the Kid and other outlaws had done years prior, only far more ubiquitous. From the way pop culture told it,you couldn’t walk two feet with bumping into the mob; The Shadow was bumping them off on the radio, Mike Hammer was running up against them in the pulps, Batman was facing off against them in the comics, and of course there were scores and scores of gangsters, mobsters, hitmen and other assorted goons in the theaters and film serials. So much gangster stuff that you might think that the U.S. government was funding it in order to have an easy scapegoat to blame the ills of society. Surely they wouldn’t do something that underhanded, right?

       As has been the case since we’ve moved into the sound era, there were plenty of potential films we could have covered for 1938. Of course there’s the obligatory Alfred Hitchcock with The Lady Vanishes, but Alfie’s gonna have to wait for a couple more years. Errol Flynn appeared in two vehicles that year, The Dawn Patrol and the much more famous The Adventures of Robin Hood, but I had seen a review of the latter recently and I like to keep my mind fresh. I might have done Bringing up Baby, Howard Hawks’ romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but that business with It Happened One Night left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I also gave serious consideration to Norman Taurog’s Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy and a young Mickey Rooney.  Yet in the end I decided I wanted to get to at least one gangster movie on this tour; not a mystery movie involving gangsters, which I’m sure we’ll get to once we hit film noir territory, and not movies that happened to feature gangsters like The Big House, but a straight up potboiler crime movie. Which I did.

       That film was Angels with Dirty Faces, released in 1938, written by John Wexley and Warren Duff, based on a story by writer-director Rowland Brown, and directed by the prolific Michael Curtiz, who also directed the aforementioned Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce and many other films. Back in the day there were no two greater friends than Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly, two rough ‘n’ tumble street kids who spent their days smoking cigs, teasing girls and doing crimes. One day however while attempting to steal some fountain pens for some easy profit the boys are set upon by the cops and Rocky is shipped off to reform school, thus altering the course of the two boy’s lives. 15 years later, Rocky (played by James Cagney) is now a free man and has returned to his old neighborhood in order to reconnect with his pal Jerry (Pat O’Brien), who is now a priest watching over the next generation of hooligans (played by the troupe of child actors known as The Dead End Boys). However Rocky is also one of the most notorious gangsters in the city, and part of the reason he’s there is to collect the 100,000 dollars he lent out to his lawyer James Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) as well as his cut of the action. Rocky is a charming guy, winning the hearts of not only the kids of the neighborhood, and yet his lust for power and riches sets him at odds with the morally righteous Jerry, leading them towards a conclusion that will once again affect the course of their lives forever.

       Gangster movies are often criticized for glorifying the criminals they center around. Just look at the explosive popularity of Brian de Palma’s remake of Scarface, whose main character is a murderous, drug-dealing psychopath. I don’t think that criticism is without reason, yet I think the opposite also tends to be quite prevalent; That criminals are subhuman creatures who exist only to be cannon fodder for our gun-toting protagonist. What I like about Angels with Dirty Faces, then, is that it’s a very human film. Rocky Sullivan is not a good guy; He has no problem with using intimidation and violence to get what he desires and so do the people around him, and he’s pretty damn good at it. Yet at the same time he’s not completely bad either; You can see the goodness in him and how he tries to help the people important to him in his own way. Similarly, although Jerry is in the right he’s not self-righteous about; He opposes Rocky’s actions but he doesn’t damn him or attack him for it, he understands how his friend became the way he is and wants to make sure that others don’t follow the same path. In that way Angels with Dirty Faces becomes less of an action-packed gangster film and more like a tragic drama where two friends and pushed against each other by forces beyond their control. Which I think is the way to go about it, rather than just ‘watch these people do bad stuff until they’re killed by some cops’.

       What really sells that idea, and the movie really, is the casting of James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan. These days Cagney is less known as an actor and more of a voice people pull out when they want to do an ‘old timey gangster’ voice, much like Edward G. Robinson, but seeing him here it’s easy to see why he became such an iconic figure. He’s got this chameleonic presence about him that allows him to shift between boyish charm and cold-blooded killer at the drop of a hat, encapsulating perfectly the ‘street kid forced to grow up too early and too hard’ nature of Rocky’s character. Quite exaggerated, especially when put up against more passive characters, but never to the point where it becomes buffoonish, like Pacino in Dick Tracy. The rest of the cast is good, obviously Bogart is putting in work, Pat O’Brien plays a good stoic, Ann Sheridan doesn’t get much but I liked what I saw, and I was also a bit surprised at how much I liked the Dead End Kids, (I’m a big fan of old New York street tough stereotypes I guess), pretty amazing that they managed to get a respectable film career off of one performance in a play years ago. Yet above all it’s Cagney that this film is built upon and Cagney that the audience’s eye is drawn towards, just as it was with Bogart in Casablanca a few years later.

       On a technical level, Angels is a well-constructed film but not an especially flashy one. I did like how several shots near the end were composed though, I thought they were blocked very well and I liked the use of shadows and darkness. The score provided by Max Steiner was much the same, good as well as unobtrusive to the story. I never really recognized Michael Curtiz as a director before, despite having seen Casablanca prior, but now having seen those films and reading up on his biography a bit it seems like he was a genuine craftsman of a filmmaker. You’re not going to see Lawrence of Arabia style flash & spectacle out of him it seems like, but he will give you just enough in order to tell the story. He’d have to be sparing too, since he was putting out six movies a year at one point. Makes all these modern directors look a bit lazy, don’t it?

       Ultimately, Angels with Dirty Faces gets the recommendation. I was hesitant to get to this film at first to be honest, expecting it to be the simplistic cops & robbers kind of movie I mentioned earlier and that I’d have to force myself to fill out the by-now standard 3 page, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was actually some meat on that bone. It’s not just a movie about violence and so on but about its effects, not just on an individual level but on one’s community. Glad I watched it. On the next stop of our tour we’ll be moving into the 1940’s, a decade of bloodshed and human misery, and we’ll be doing it with some of the biggest names of that era. As well as one of the biggest books. 

Reelin' In The Years -- A Day at the Races (1937), directed by Sam Wood

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "A Day At The Races", by Jurassic 5

       I’m not going to be one of those folks that says that comedy was so much better back in the day, as often times that seems to go hand-in-hand with ‘I want to make fun of minorities but I don’t want people to make me feel bad for doing it’, but I will say that it is distinctly different. I imagine much of that has to do with the fact that the comedy stars of the day came out of vaudeville, a style of theatrical variety show that had begun in the 1880s and had been phased out with the rise of cinema. Whereas many top comedic stars today got their start as stand-up comics before transitioning to the silver screen, those coming out of vaudeville were consummate performers: Acting, singing, dancing, musicianship, you needed to be well-rounded back in those days. That emphasis on stand-up also emphasizes the performer these days, whereas comedy then was based on the act. People didn’t turn on the Colgate Comedy Hour to see Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the people, they turned on to see the characters of Abbott & Costello, if that makes sense. At least they did until they were replaced by Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, and even then Jerry Lewis wasn’t the same guy as ‘Jerry Lewis’. Just ask the French.

       I was a big 3 Stooges fan when I was a kid, in large part because TCM or whoever loved to push marathons of their stuff back in the day, and it wasn’t until I was in late high school/early college that I first heard of the Rolling Stones to the Stooges’ Beatles, the Marx Bros. Where the crux of the 3 Stooges style lied in the fact that they were stooges and thus fucked up everything they attempted, the Marx Bros. (lascivious fast-talker Groucho, Italian con artist Chico, and prop-loving, anarchi mute Harpo, occasionally joined by their straight-man brother Zeppo or Gummo in the vaudeville days) made everyone else the stooges. As soon as they stepped into a room they were three steps ahead of everyone else there, and then it was a race to see how much they can fuck with those people before the scene ended. They were still good guys at heart, helping those in need, but they were totally fine with lying, cheating and stealing whenever the situation called for it (or because they felt like it at the time). Kinda like Eddie Guerrero when he was a babyface.

       A Day at the Races was the second Marx Bros. film to be released by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer after their move from Paramount (the home of their first five full-length films) and the second in a row to be directed by Sam Wood (who you might recall from Raffles) , following A Night at the Opera. Maureen O’Sullivan plays Judy, the young and beautiful owner of a sanitarium located near the Sparkling Springs Lake summer resort which has recently fallen on hard times. It’s looking like she might have to sell the place to shady businessman Morgan, and finding out that her lover Gill (Allan Jones) has spent all the money he’s saved up as a singer in order to buy a racehorse in order to pay her debts does nothing to lift her mood. Tony (Chico), the sanitarium employee, offers a suggestion: Get Ms. Upjohn (played by Marx Bros. regular Margaret Dumont), the resident rich lady and hypochondriac to pay off the debt! Well Miss Upjohn isn’t really in the mood to break open the pocketbook, convinced as she is that something is wrong despite all the doctors saying she’s fine. So if that’s the case, then they better call in Ms. Upjohn’s favorite doctor, Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho), physician and diagnostician, but mostly a veterinarian. Then you’ve got Stuffy the jockey (Harpo) who ends up meeting Gill at the race track while running from his own troubles, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a cinematic jambalaya.

       Of course you’re not going to a Marx Bros. movie for the plot, you’re there to see them do their schtick, and in that A Day at the Races fulfills that need. I find it hard to describe what makes the Marx Bros.entertaining, because so much of it is based on the dexterity of how they perform and how they use language (probably not a good choice for an ESL class movie night) that you really need to see it to get the full effect. This is clear whenever one of the Bros. are aimed at somebody, but Races also dedicates a decent chunk of time to longform skits involving the Bros. interacting with each other, which has a different sort of energy entirely. The only one who can match a Marx Brother is another Marx Brother after all, and seeing them play off each other is a treat all on its own. The first big skit of the film in fact, when Tony unknowingly meets Hackenbush for the first time and cons him into buying a tip on a horse, which is in a code you need to buy a code book to decipher, and so on and on, feels exactly like something they pulled out a hundred times back on the vaudeville circuit. Hell, you don’t even need the rest of the film for context, it works perfectly well on its own with a definitive beginning and end. 

       Marx Bros. films are often very musical ones as well, with most if not all of their films featuring a virtuoso solo performance by Chico on the piano and Harpo on the harp (natch). Races takes this a step further by sticking two lengthy musical numbers in the second half, including a reprise at the end. Allan Jones does his Zeppo impression here, by which I mean ‘generic old-timey Hollywood ballad’, but I do enjoy the second, jazzier number. Combined with those long skits it does throw off the pace of the film, so things end up coming across as a bit chaotic by the end. A bit of a ‘we’re running out of time so let’s wrap everything up now’ kind of thing. Not bad, just different.

       Really I’ve only got two gripes with this movie. One is an unfortunate case of blackface, when the Marx Bros. are trying to escape from the villains in a crowd of Black people, but not too much attention is drawn to it and no jokes are made at the expense of Black people during the scene so it’s not as bad as it could have been. The other issue is with Harpo, or rather how he’s utilized in this film. Not only does he seem less actively chaotic than he has in other films, but he also seems kind of...superfluous, I guess is the word? As if they struggled to find something for him to do except at the very end of the film. I also must admit that I hate his ‘whistling as talking’ gimmick, and when he breaks it out here it lasts just long enough to get me in a sour mood. They get back by the next scene, but that fucking whistling is not doing it for me dude.

       When talking about the best Marx Bros. movies, I imagine folk with more cinema experience than I do likely lean towards their output with Paramount (that Zeppo tho). Honestly I’d probably agree, although it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to watch their early stuff. However I think A Day at the Races (as well as A Night at the Opera) works as a good showcase of their stuff, and showed that they still had plenty left in the tank. At least until they reached A Night in Casablanca, by which time the wheels were definitely falling off the car. 1937 though? Still good, and so it gets the recommendation.

       This year’s potential inductions included Disney’s landmark animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Leo McCarey’s family drama Make Way For Tomorrow, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage. We’re heading closer and closer to some dark times on the timeline, so how about for our next stop we get into some heavier fare?

Reelin' In The Years -- Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Powerhouse" by The Raymond Scott Quintette

       A couple of reviews and 13 years ago, we talked a little about Buster Keaton and his enormous impact on comedy in film. Well now it’s time to talk about the other giant of the silent comedy era: Charlie Chaplin. While most folks might only know him today as that one guy who did that one speech in that old movie that one time, that fact is that Chaplin was one of the burgeoning film industry’s biggest stars, the Johnny Depp of his day. With a career that lasted from 1914 to the late 1960’s, Chaplin appeared in at least 82 films, many of which he directed and starred in himself. He survived a couple world wars, a great depression, a McCarthyist witch-hunt, several wives, and the transition from silent to sound cinema. If anyone could challenge Keaton as the most influential comedian in film history it would have to be Chaplin, and a good argument could be made that it’s actually the other way around. Simply put, if the conceit of this little tour we’re on is to expand our horizons a little bit, see the big picture (or screen as the case may be), then The Tramp needed to make an appearance. 1936 had a lot of contenders for possible entries, Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Hitchcock’s Sabotage, the legendary Reefer Madness, but since I’ve already seen The Great Dictator then die had already been cast. If we’re getting Chaplin, we’re getting him now.

       Released in 1936, written, directed, produced, starring and composed by Charles Chaplin, this was the sixth out of eight films that he put out through United Artists, a company that he had actually helped found in 1919. Chaplin plays an unnamed factory worker whose days consist of unscrewing nuts on tiny pieces of metal. After a particularly rough day involving an automatic feeding machine and a trip through some gears, our factory worker suffers a mental breakdown and is sent to the hospital. When he gets out, he finds that things have changed; The factory has closed down since he’s been away, and it’s dragged everything around it into the gutter. Poverty brings about societal unrest and from there violence, and it seems that our perpetually unlucky worker can’t help but stumble into trouble wherever he goes. Yet when he meets up with a crafty street urchin (played by his future wife and even more future ex-wife Paulette Goddard), it seems like his luck might just be changing for the better.

       Now if you’re getting into this era of film you might wonder what it is that really separates Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, given that they were both silent performers. While I have essentially watched only a single film from each of them, I’m fairly confident in saying that it is in how their characters arrive in these situations. Keaton is a very reactive character I think, he stumbles into bad situations and stumbles his way out. Chaplin on the other hand is very active; While he certainly has his share of bad luck, a lot of his misfortune comes down to feeding his id or just outright messing with people. Keaton was a put-upon gentleman, Chaplin was a big kid. If you’ve ever seen Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, that is very much a character in the Chaplin mold.

       Modern Times also shows us that Chaplin was very visually minded as an artist. Chaplin’s look has long since become iconic, the toothbrush mustache, floppy shoes and derby hat, and his movements are very expressive and physical, very much a ‘you can tell what he’s thinking from the back row’ style of pantomime. You’ve also got the intimidating, art deco machinery of the factory, and visual gags like a pocket watch getting caught in an industrial press and coming out flat like a pancake. It feels very cartoonish at times, which makes sense because Chaplin feels like a very cartoonish type of comedian in a way that Keaton could not match. At least not in Our Hospitality, his later films might be more farcical.

       Other than Chaplin himself, I also found myself quite taken with Paulette Goddard. Unlike other female characters of the time, coughcoughEllieAndrewscough, the street urchin (or ‘gamin’ as she’s titled in the film) has a sense of agency and intelligence that I found refreshing, and Paulette brings that out with a youthful exuberance. I know most folks will find it a bit skeevy that Chaplin’s character is hanging around a teenage girl, just as they were in real life when nearly the 50 year old Chaplin married the 26 year old Goddard, but what I appreciate is that their relationship is not really treated as a romantic one. Yes they literally shack up together (Chaplin sleeps in a chicken coop or something), and there’s a sequence where they imagine a life akin to the cliche suburban fantasy, but it feels more like children playing make-believe than anything serious. They never felt like lovers to me, basically, but two people who forged a close bond by enduring hardships together. Like Midnight Cowboy if it were written by an optimist, although maybe the guys in that movie were supposed to be fucking too, I don’t know. Just feels platonic to me.

       Jumping on to that point, I think what makes me really like Modern Times beyond the jokes is that feeling of optimism and camaraderie. The movie starts with this grandiloquent statement about individual enterprise and the pursuit of happiness, but we are quickly shown the truth: Working long grueling hours while the boss kicks back and reads Tarzan comics, and when they decide to close up shop your ‘pursuit of happiness’ becomes ‘hoping for a shorter wait at the bread line’. It’s easy to feel discouraged in such a world, that it's a cruel unforgiving place and there’s no hope to be found, but it’s important to remember that a lot of people are feeling that way as well. So if you really try and you put your hand out there, maybe someone will put their hand out too, and the weight of the world on your shoulders might start to feel a bit lighter. It might still be bad, but you won’t have to face those problems alone.

       The one thing I might categorize as a misstep is how Chaplin approaches the sound issue. We’re already several years into the sound era at this point, but it seems like Chaplin isn’t interested in letting go of his bread & butter quite. So you have sound sometimes, you have spoken dialogue sometimes, but the majority of the film is in standard silent format with cards and all that. Which I guess makes it feel a bit unique, and it leads to a fun bit near the end, but also a tad superfluous. As if Chaplin wanted a completely silent movie and he was pushed into adding sound, which might have been the case. Personally I wouldn’t have minded an all-silent movie, throw another one on the pile, but I also would have been fine if it had been a sound movie and Chaplin just didn’t talk. It works for silent protagonists in every JRPG, don’t see why it couldn’t work here.

        I’m a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed Modern Times. The comedy still held up, it had a message that’s all the more relevant these days, and it managed to perfectly capture that bittersweet feeling by the end that really wrenches on your heartstrings. Highly recommended, maybe do a double feature with The Great Dictator if you’ve got the time. So with all these good vibes in the air, how about for our next stop on the tour we take a look at one of the most popular comic groups in film history? 

Reelin' In The Years -- It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Let It Happen", by Tame Impala

       The word ‘Oscar’ doesn’t get bandied about all that often round these parts. My personal interest, and the focus of this blog, has always been that of the genre film, and the Academy Awards rarely deigns to look in that direction, unless it’s to offload a couple of special effects trophies. Yet this is our Reelin’ In the Years tour, a showcase of a century of film, and it just wouldn’t feel right if I just continuously scrounge around for the more obscure movies just to maintain some kind of street cred. So if I’m going to take a trip into the heart of Oscar territory, I might as well swing for the fences with one of the only films in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay in one sitting (the other two being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). Get them all out of the way now, you know?

       That film is It Happened One Night, based on the story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, written by Robert Riskin, and directed by Frank Capra. Claudette Colbert stars as Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has been locking horns with her father over her decision to marry handsome and totally on the level King Wesley against her father’s wishes. When Pops declares that he is going to force Ellie into an annulment, she literally jumps ship and swims to Miami, with the intent to take a bus up to New York and meet up with Wesley. Which sounds like a good idea, until you remember that she’s an heiress and thus totally incompetent. Enter down-on-his-luck journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable) who, sensing the story that’ll get him back in the good graces of his editor, decides to help her out along. But who could have guessed that during this long trip to the Big Apple that certain feelings would begin to develop?

       Certainly not the movie industry, as they were so impressed with the ‘person of privilege is left on their own and must rely on a worldly lower-class person, which of course leads to romance’ angle that we’ve seen recycled numerous times over the years. Not only that, but Clark Gable’s character would go on to be a huge influence on the characterization of Bugs Bunny, in particular his eating of carrots. Hell, that old gag where someone tries to hitch-hike and it fails until you show off a little leg? That’s from this film as well. This is really the movie equivalent of a primary source in history class, so much of films would be all have a common origin from this film here, and much like in the case of Frankenstein this film gets a recommendation purely from a historical perspective.

       Man alive, but this movie felt like a slog to watch though. The thing about romantic comedies to me, especially ones that are based on unequal levels of power as this film is, is that they have to reach an equilibrium. The loner appreciates the value of friends, the asshole learns to be more compassionate, and so on. None of which happens here. Ellie starts off as a dim bulb heiress and stays that way throughout the entirety of the film, and it’s the same with Peter as this abrasive, verbally aggressive guy. While there are certainly segments that build up the relationship, and in those segments I’d say Colbert and Gable do have a certain chemistry, it never felt to me like these characters had really changed over the course of the story. Beyond the fact that they wanted to fuck each other rather than someone else.

       Speaking of romance, it might just be my modern sensibilities talking, but the romance in It Happened One Night comes across as really...creepy? Like there’s several moments throughout the movie where it feels like they're infantilizing Ellie, and when it’s coupled with romantic tension it doesn’t sit right. Plus there’s the fact that most of Peter’s dialogue towards her is dedicated to insults and demoralizing statements, in a joking manner or otherwise. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if, and that’s a definitive if, Ellie gave it as good as she got, thus establishing the relationship to be on even footing. Which it doesn’t, and so comes across as less of a romantic comedy and more of some kind of BDSM jailbait roleplay scenario. Or a classic example of ‘negging’, as the kids call it.

       It doesn’t do the actors all that well either. Clark Gable comes out pretty well, it’s pretty easy to see why he was one of the big names of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, but Claudette Colbert...this film really doesn’t do her any favors in my opinion. Much as I described earlier she’s not especially shrewish at the beginning of the movie but she’s not especially down-to-earth by the end of the film either. She doesn’t sacrifice anything, she doesn’t suffer so she doesn’t grow as a character, maintaining this aura of vapidity through the entire course of the film. Which I admit is more an issue with the character of Ellie than Colbert as an actor, and Claudette Colbert had a storied career, but every time she was on screen I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed.

       As I said, as it regards film history It Happened One Night has a recommendation, but personally I just can’t give it the thumbs up. It’s one of those movies where I zoned out hard about a third of the way though and it never pulled me back in. Maybe if you’re in a relationship you’ll get something out of it, but I feel like if you can relate to a relationship where one partner is verbally abusive and the other is co-dependent then you might have bigger problems then what movie you're going to watch. Hopefully the next stop on our tour will be a bit more up-to-date.

Reelin' In The Years -- Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Right On, Frankenstein!", by Death From Above 1979

       Years ago, when in a fit of youthful arrogance I decided to give this whole ‘movie review’ thing a try, the film I decided to choose to kickstart the whole affair was James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein, released by Universal Pictures in the year 1935. Proper logic, or at least good etiquette, might have suggested that I start with the original film in the series first. If Star Wars has taught us anything, it was that starting the middle of a story and then going backwards doesn’t work out too well after all. I had seen Young Frankenstein though, I had read Mary Shelley’s novel and I had good ol’ cultural osmosis, so I figured that was good enough and went through with it. And the rest is history, really bad history.

       Years later, when I decided to revisit old movies and old monsters, my mind naturally turned to Frankenstein. Rather than covering the original though I went with another sequel, the under-appreciated Son of Frankenstein. I believe my thinking at the time was that because I had already seen Frankenstein outside of the review process, which I believe I had at some point, then it was no longer a first impression and thus less legitimate of a review. Whether that’s the right mindset is also something I’ve considered, but when I compiling the missing years for the Reelin’ in the Years tour and discovered 1931 was one of those years, it seemed like fate was telling me it was finally time to close the book on this case. Taking a look back 1931 wasn’t a bad time for the cinema; Not only did you have Dracula, but Fritz Lang’s landmark crime thriller M, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Robert Mamoulian’s City Streets, and on and on. Yet of all the films it could have been, it could only truly be Frankenstein.

        Released on November 21, 1931, Frankenstein was directed by Thunderblog alum James Whale, who would later work with Universal on Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. The screenplay was done by Francis Edward Farough and Garrett Fort, while the story was by John L. Balderston and Richard Schayer, obviously based on the novel by Mary Shelley as well as the stage play by Peggy Webling. I think by this point the plot goes without saying, but in case you’re going in blind, here it is: Dr. Frankenstein, a frustrated young genius in the field of medical science, decides the only way to prove his radical theories is to steal a bunch of body parts and organs, stitch ‘em all together and zap the whole thing till it comes to life. Which he does, and it works, only the brain he used was part the expiration date and the Monster ends up going nuts. Thus Frankenstein is moved to destroy his creation, questions are raised about mankind’s hubris, and it is finally determined that fire bad. Also if you live by a lake you should make sure your kids know how to swim.

       I don’t know if any adaptation of a work has proven so influential over a premise as Universal’s Frankenstein has been to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The whole idea of the Monster being created by stitching body parts together and zapping it to life with lightning comes from this film (although it’s technically not lightning that does it), as well as Karloff’s now iconic flat-top,bolt-necked appearance. There’s a few things that never really carried over; Frankenstein’s name being Henry rather than Victor (although there’s a character named Victor here just to make things confusing) for example, and ‘Henry’s’ hunch-backed assistant named Fritz would be largely be replaced by his hunch-backed assistant named Igor, but for the most part this film has informed 99% of everything Frankenstein going forward. Even films that try to look more period-appropriate or stick more closely take some measure of influence from this film, especially in regards to the creation of the Monster. So strictly from a historical perspective Universal’s Frankenstein has more than earned a recommendation, although that doesn’t necessarily say much about it as a movie beyond being the first past the post (aside from the one movie Edison did back in 1910). 

       As a movie then, Frankenstein feels a bit off. Rather than starting with ‘Henry’ Frankenstein’s origins and the building up to the act, we start in media res, with the Monster being brought to life almost immediately. Then immediately after that we jump into the Monster going crazy and all that, with characters and relationships just kind of happen. I assume that this is largely a result of the film being an adaptation of the stage play rather than the novel, but apparently this was in the days when adapting the theatre to the theater was still in its infancy. Lots of tell and not enough show, if you catch my drift.

       Of course Frankenstein is the role that introduced the world to Boris Karloff, in spite of the fact that his career started back in 1918, and seeing him here it’s easy why and how this version of the Monster became THE version of the Monster. Karloff would portray the Monster several times after this, but he’s never looked as good as he does here. The sunken cheeks, the lifeless eyes set in dark sockets, the way he stumbles and stomps about like his legs barely work, I don’t think even Night of the Living Dead captured the premise of a living corpse. He captures your eyes as soon as he gets on screen, and it’s surprising that such an iconic character doesn’t actually get all that much to do. Of course you’ve got the infamous scene with the girl at the lake, and a little bit of stuff when he’s introduced, but it’s not until Bride of Frankenstein that the Monster as a sympathetic character was fully established. For now he’s just a grunting weirdo in big shoes.

       We move on to Colin Clive then, whose inclusion in this film is also rather bittersweet in hindsight. Colin Clive’s portrayal of the titular Frankenstein is almost as iconic as that of Karloff’s, exuding an air of supreme arrogance and barely restrained mania, and his frantic shout of ‘It’s alive!” is easily one of the most famous lines in cinema. However, that Frankenstein only exists in the first third of the movie, the rest of the time he’s just Henry, the dude who’s just there. Even near the end of the film, the point which you’d think would be ‘Frankenstein is finally driven to destroy his creation’, and the film claims it as such, Frankenstein feels like an ancillary character through the whole thing. His entire climatic final showdown with the Monster amounts to him getting beat up and thrown off a balcony, and I’m not counting that as a spoiler because I covered the sequel almost a decade ago. At the very least you could say that they build the romance subplot between Henry and Elizabeth (played by Mae Clarke) better than we would see in The Invisible Man a few years later, even hinting at a love triangle with Victor. The very least is about the only way you could describe it too; Mae Clarke isn’t very good, she and Clive have zero chemistry, Victor is a plank of wood with a mustache drawn on it, and any hint of that triangle is dropped like a bag of rocks almost immediately. Frankenhooker was a more intriguing love story than Frankenstein.

       Let’s see, what else is Frankenstein remembered for...the German Expressionist inspired art design? Great, love the shot of Fritz walking down the dark and winding staircase, but again that only appears near the beginning and a bit towards the end. The laboratory? Same thing, and honestly done better by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein. The aforementioned infamous scene with the girl at the lake. Not in the beginning of the movie, but a scathing critique of mob violence if you felt like getting analytical. It’s kind of bizarre to think that so much of what makes this a defining film of the horror genre takes place before the first half hour. Like this is just as much about a wedding as it is about subverting the laws of nature.

       So I guess if you were really pressed for time, you could watch a clip or two and get the gist of it. In spite of my criticisms though, for its time Frankenstein is a fine film, and because of my history with the story and the history the film embodies it gets the recommendation. Of Universal’s Horror line it’s one of the better movies I’ve covered so far, if I were a grading kind of guy I’d probably place it below The Invisible Man but above The Mummy, and since it sets you up for Bride of Frankenstein (currently the best UH movie that I’ve covered) it’s a great deal. And once you’re done watching you can hop back on the Reelin’ In The Years tour bus, as we head for our next stop. It'll be a big step out of our comfort zone, but it’s a pretty big film too. 

Reelin' In The Years -- The Big House (1930), directed by George W. Hill

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "Lockdown Blues", by Iceage

       If there’s one thing that the United States of America loves more than endless warfare, it’s prisons. In the late 1800s, after the Civil War had thrown the entire concept of owning people as property into question, although not many of those questions involved the horrific nature of slavery, the bigwigs of the time stumbled upon what they considered an ingenious compromise. Slavery would thereafter be illegal, they declared in the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, except as punishment for a crime. Suddenly chattel slavery wasn’t just a luxury a some plantation owners in the South could enjoy, now every state could have their own little concrete box of people to play with, in as many counties as they could fit them. Nor was this centered solely around New Afrikan people (although they still make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population, because the U.S. is anything but subtle); No matter what your color or creed, if you were a member of the poor and undesirable segment of society then you too had a place in this brave new world of incarceration, and we’re still living it today. If you’re from another country and you’re wondering what it’s like living in the United States, picture a place that persistently demonizes countries like China, the Soviet Union or the DPRK for their supposedly hellish prison systems, yet at the same time makes self-aware jokes and even feature-length films about the fact that its own prisons are hotbeds of torture, rape, drug abuse and gang violence, and resists any and all attempts at addressing those problems, and then multiple it by 5. Also the healthcare sucks.

Today’s stop on our tour brings us to the year 1930, and unfortunately also marks the end of our exploration of silent film for the time being. We’ve broken the sound barrier baby. Of the potential films I could have covered from this year, the biggest name on the card was All Quiet on the Western Front, and indeed for a long time all signs were pointing towards that being the movie I watched. Given what has been going on these days with COVID-19 and everything surrounding it however, I figured that folks might relate to a story about being stuck somewhere for what feels like an eternity. Never let it be said that I can’t be timely and relevant when needed.

       Released in 1930, written by Frances Marion (with additional dialogue by Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin), The Big House was directed by George Hill, not to be confused The Warriors and Slaughterhouse Five director George Roy Hill. After accidentally killing someone while drunk-driving on New Year’s Eve, Kent Marlowe is sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Once he’s arrived, processed, and transformed from Kent into #48642, he meets his cell-mates, mercurial former hitman “Machine Gun” Butch (Wallace Beery) and charismatic former robber Morgan (Chester Morris), and is introduced to prison life: Harsh discipline, terrible food, no room to breathe, angry neighbors,the works. It’s the kind of environment that brings out a man’s nature, and so it does for Kent. The consequences of such a change, however, might be more far reaching than Kent, his sister Anne, Morgan, Butch, or anyone in prison could have expected.

       The Big House is a film caught between worlds. We were still a ways away from the for-profit, supermax model as it’s known today, so they’re still trying to frame prison as if it's about rehabilitation. Everyone in prison is in there because they deserve it, the Warden is an upstanding gentleman who cares about the prisoners, and all you have to do is put your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be released, free to go off to some faraway island and work a plantation, which has to be one of the most ironic story beats ever recorded to film. Yet at the same time the film is trying to praise the virtues of prison, it exposes the reality of prison as well. Prison guards aren’t just humble folk trying their best to help in The Big House, they are blatantly antagonistic figures who will engage in acts of torture (and just try to tell me locking a man up in a metal box for a month with nothing but bread and water isn’t a blatant act of torture) on little more than the rumours they get from their snitches and stoolpigeons. Likewise prisoners aren’t some inhuman damnable creatures, they are human beings with all the quirks and foibles that come with it, and as human beings ourselves we naturally sympathize with them as they are dehumanized. Which isn’t necessarily by design; As I said The Big House still works under the assumption that people in jail must deserve to be in there, and this is mainly done through conversational asides by Butch of acts of horrific violence. However, since the audience is only told those things and not shown them, because of the way the information is given to the audience, and because the audience is shown the injustices put upon them by the prison, it comes across as a bit of hyperbolic dark comedy more than anything else. It all builds up an atmosphere where you start to question, even just a little, whether they were being sincere or satirical, which I think actually gives it a greater appeal to a modern audience.

       Case in point, my description of the plot would lead you to believe that Kent would be the protagonist of the film. A victim of circumstance as they say, now thrust into this den of lions and forced to survive and in the end proving that he was a good person after all and didn’t deserve to be in that dirty old jail. In actuality though Kent almost immediately takes a backseat, basically becoming a walking plot device in favor of Morgan and Butch, which is for the best because they are far and away the most entertaining and the most (pretty much only) developed characters in the film. George Hill worked with Wallace Beery on several pictures aside from The Big House, and it’s easy to see why; He’s got this rough & tumble, bulldog quality about him that comes across as lovable or scary depending on the mood he’s in, which pairs quite naturally with Chester Morris, who has the good looks and easy charm of your textbook snake oil salesman. Put them together on screen and they’ve got great chemistry, and the arc of their relationship is the backbone of this film. There’s a tiny crumb of romance in there, or ‘friendship’ as they called in those days, but the only characters I was ever invested in, the only characters you’re really able to invest in, are Morgan and Butch.

       Couple more things I feel worth mentioning, the first being the opening shot, with the truck pulling up to the prison, which is this Brutalist concrete behemoth. Very effective, and adding to a point made earlier, slightly surreal. I also liked the look of the scene where Morgan is sent to solitary, there’s some playing around with shadows that looked nice. In many ways this movie is bare bones, a lot of the characters don’t even have last names, but it’s cool to see George Hill and crew put some work into it.

       The highlight of the film though is appropriately enough in the climax, as the prisoners stage a riot and engage in a shootout with the guards. By the year 1930 the U.S. was over a decade removed from World War I and was about a decade away from World War II, not to mention barely into the sound era, and yet filmmakers had already figured out how to translate the tension and claustrophobic terror of warfare to the silver screen. Much like the ending of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, there’s visceral feelings there, a catharsis as the prisoners finally stand up for themselves and a growing sense of desperation as their ultimate fate draws near. Unfortunately a lot of the emotional resonance is undercut by the ending, which felt equivalent to your dad buying you an ice cream after you watched him beat your mom. I don’t think it’s enough to write off the movie entirely, but given what came before it does leave a sour taste in one’s mouth.

       The Big House gets the recommendation. It’s a bit bare bones to be sure, but Butch and Morgan’s story was enough to keep me engaged the whole way through, and as I mentioned there’s a degree of schadenfreude to be had in seeing a movie struggling against its own message in such a way. Check it out if you’ve got the time, and at the moment you’ve probably got nothing but time. Next stop on our Reelin’ In The Years tour we’re going ahead about 365 days, to the not-that-much-better year of 1931. While the card is always subject to change, odds are I’ll be writing about a film that I probably should have covered years ago.