brianina Reviews

Behind That Curtain (1929)

The sound premiers of Boris Karloff and Charlie Chan

[4/10 · 3 September 2001]

The first half of "Behind That Curtain" is a excellent example of the drawbacks of early talkies. Except for Warner Baxter, all the actors indulge in over-enunciation to the extent that they often sound as if English is not their first language. The camera is nailed down in one long interior scene after another with the occasional mike boom shadow crossing faces. The second half, however, is a strong improvement. The lead actress learns how to properly emote and there are a number of excellent exteriors in the desert and in downtown San Francisco of 1929. Also livening events in the last half are cameo appearances by Boris Karloff and the character Charlie Chan, both in their first talkie appearances. Chan is played for once by an actual Asian person and Karloff has a good scene where he has to pretend to be mute, giving a glimpse of his later masterful work as Frankenstein' monster. He is also given the horrible line, "the desert gives and the desert takes away" but imparts a wonderful sense of mystery to it.

The Key (1934)

Irish struggle ruined by love story

[3/10 · 19 June 2001]

"The Key" starts off promisingly with atmospheric photography as British troops track down a Sein Fein leader. Apparently Warner Bros thought this wasn't enough, so halfway through the film a love triangle is introduced between William Powell, Edna Best and Colin Clive. All it succeeds in doing is derailing the film into very familiar territory. Seeing Colin Clive making dead bodies with a gun rather than bringing them back to life in a lab sparks some interest but other than that he spends his time looking glum (did he ever smile?). William Powell begins the film with an accent and a "right-ho, pip, pip" clipped speech that vanishes by the third reel and he and Edna Best (in her first U.S. film) have absolutely no chemistry. Director Curtiz does well until the highpoint of the love story where he pulls the camera out the window into the fog and goes into a flashback that looks like it belongs on a 1890 stage. Add to this a criminally underused Donald Crisp and a hokey ending and you have one missed opportunity.

Ace of Aces (1933)

Dogfights only reason to watch

[2/10 · 29 May 2001]

First, you have to buy Richard Dix as an upper-crust sculptor and pacifist named "Rocky." Then you have to accept that after one dogfight he turns into a cold-blooded killing machine. There's no middle road with this guy! The aerial combat scenes are well done with an excellent use of miniatures, but they aren't in the same league as the ones in "Wings," "Hell's Angels" or "The Dawn Patrol." The squadron banter has a realistic feel to it unlike any of the other dialogue in the film. There's a particularly bad scene where the heroine is a warfront nurse and the wounded Private Exposition is brought in to fill her in on the story so far. Dix's rapid changes in personality are given no real reason and make hash of his character and anything profound the film is trying to say. Obviously modeled after "Journey's End" and all the other anti-war plays of the time, "Ace Of Aces" ends up making a travesty of both pacifism and soldiering.

Ladies of Leisure (1930)

Stanwyck wonderful in early talkie Capra

[8/10 · 29 May 2001]

It's the old hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story but Barbara Stanwyck and director Frank Capra make it shine. Not only is Stanwyck great but there isn't a bad performance by anyone in the film, even down to the minor characters. Capra attains a naturalness from his actors rare at this point in the talkies. The only complaint might by that Ralph Graves' accent is more convincing for a cowboy than a son of the upper crust, but that's a quibble. Other pluses are Jo Swerling's smart dialogue with hardly an unnecessary line and John Walker's cinematography, the best of its time (the night scene as Stanwyck spends the night on Graves' couch is a marvel of lighting, pacing and atmosphere).

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

A U.S. look at French horror through a German lens

[7/10 · 27 May 2001]

Much creepier than any mad scientist and his monkey movie has a right to be. Much of the credit must go to cinematographer Karl Freund (The Last Laugh, Metropolis) who gives the movie the feel of a German horror film. Charles D. Hall's distorted sets also help make this often resemble a sound remake of "The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari." The script has a very European flavor as well with lines that sometimes sound as if they were translated from another language. The ape is more convincing than all those later films because of quick cutting between an actual ape's snarling face and a man in a suit, the latter shown not enough to destroy the illusion. At one point stop motion is used to show the ape carrying a woman across the top of buildings a year before "King Kong!" There are three failings, however. Near the end is a long attempt at humor concerning French bureaucracy that hurts the build-up of tension. The other two failings come from the lab. They lay over one sequence a fog effect with the fog blowing at hurricane strength despite no apparent wind anywhere else in the shot. And at the end is a very obvious matte shot with lots of squiggly lines around the characters.

Strange Interlude (1932)

A can of condensed O'Neill

[3/10 · 24 May 2001]

Eugene O'Neill's 4 and a half hour 1927 play brought to the screen in less than two hours. The play's combination of symbolic dialogue and gothic melodrama hasn't aged very well and the cast has some difficulty with it, especially Norma Shearer's Nina and Ralph Morgan's Marsden. Clark Gable as Ned Darrell comes off better but mostly because his is a gruff character not given to the philosophical musings of the others which better fits Gable's range. Once the plot settles down to the love quadrangle and the audience adjusts to the voiceover asides the film does become more enjoyable. The technique used here for the asides is another problem. On stage the action froze while the actors spoke their thoughts to the audience. Here they're done as voiceovers. You'd think that would work better but since the action no longer freezes the actors are forced to pause speaking and grimace at the camera to match the emotions in their thoughts. Plus it's difficult for any movie buff to watch this film and not think of Groucho Marx's hilarious parody version in "Animal Crackers." Added to these drawbacks are some cuts made for censorship reasons (Nina's promiscuity is soft-peddled and there is no mention of her getting the abortion that is more central in the play) and a wretched score (uncredited) that sounds like background music to a turn-of-the-century weepie. O'Neill called this film "a dreadful hash of attempted condensation and idiotic censorship," and although "Strange Interlude" is nowhere near as great as his later "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," it certainly deserved better than this.

Hold Your Man (1933)

Grifters in love

[8/10 · 19 May 2001]

Clark Gable plays a con man who busts into the life of hard-boiled dame Jean Harlow. He tries to sucker her while she brushes him off with her tough-gal attitude. Despite their cynicism and cons they fall in love. When Gable accidentally kills a man during a sting he runs out leaving loyal Harlow to women's prison where she discovers she's pregnant. Anita Loos' and Howard Emmett Rogers' writing is excellent throughout with many well-drawn and surprising characters (including a Jewish socialist woman inmate and a black woman inmate and her preacher father played with hardly a trace of stereotype). Gable and Harlow show their mettle as actors adding telling nuances and quirks to their characters that send them beyond the typical Gable and Harlow roles. And the direction is much better than you'd expect from Sam Wood. One beautiful shot has Harlow being inducted into the prison, then led out into a surprisingly snowy courtyard as the camera tracks after her. This is one of the best of both the "criminals in love" and "women's prison" genres and has some of the best hard-boiled dialogue ever written.

Dancing Lady (1933)

MGM goes to 42nd Street, sort of

[6/10 · 15 May 2001]

Where else are you going to see Joan Crawford dancing to the accompaniment of The Three Stooges? Add to that Winnie Lightner with a Shirley Temple hairdo doing a striptease, Fred Astaire in his screen premiere and enough Art Deco to fill a warehouse.

However, for those used to the Warner Brothers musicals of that time, "Dancing Lady" does have its drawbacks. The pace is a good bit slower (over 90 minutes with only two complete musical numbers!) and the choreography has little of the saucy snap Berkeley was providing at the WB. Joan Crawford isn't as bad in the Terpsichore department as everyone has said, even holding her own against Astaire. The drawbacks are the songs which are putrid. The Astaire-Crawford number is "Let's Go Bavarian" as they sing about the glories of beer! One can only hope Hitler saw it and got indigestion. MGM does have one advantage over the more famous competition; Clark Gable, who brings a good bit more heat to the screen than Warner Baxter. One pre-code moment: in the last musical number historical figures march through an arch which turns them into modern characters. A knight in armor goes under and turns into a mincing handkerchief-waver!

She Had to Say Yes (1933)

Odd choice for Berkeley's first director's credit

[3/10 · 9 May 2001]

For his first director's credited film (shared with the film's editor) Berkeley got this strange, sleazy story. The direction is mostly pedestrian except for a few good shots: a nightclub introduced by a track through shaking maracas and our discovery that Tom is cheating on Flo when he is talking to her from a phone booth and a woman's gloved hand takes the cigarette from his mouth. These touches don't make up for a film that leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. Not only is the idea of the film offensive, if believable (using secretaries as call girls for clients) but all the men in the film are scum. This film ranks with "In The Company Of Men" for its portrait of the perfidy of men toward women. Throughout I found myself wondering how this film could ever wrap up satisfactorily and indeed it doesn't. A near-rape scene is shot in the look associated later with film noir. After that no quick Hollywood wrap-up would suffice.

Goodbye Again (1933)

Excellent screwball precursor

[9/10 · 8 May 2001]

Made a year before the film "Twentieth Century" that is supposed to have started the screwball comedy, "Goodbye Again" has almost all the ingredients that would feature in the screwball classics to come. On top of this is more bawdiness than any screwball until "Kiss Me Stupid" 31 years later. Warren Williams is a famous author on a book tour with his secretary/lover Joan Blondell. In Cleveland he is pursued by his old college flame Genevieve Tobin who believes she's the inspiration for one of his books, and both are pursued by her husband, her sister and her sister's stuffed-shirt husband (Wallace Ford in a great performance wearing "Harold Lloyd" glasses exactly like Cary Grant's in "Bringing Up Baby"). The author sleeps twice with the wife, once being forced to at the unknowing insistence of the family ("Did you sleep well Mr. Bixby?" "Yes...on and off.") All ends in exactly the sort of high-speed farce that Hawks, McCarey and Wilder would make famous in the next few decades.

The Office Wife (1930)

Joan Blondell steals movie from leads

[4/10 · 8 May 2001]

A somewhat interesting early talkie, more for the minor cast members than the major ones. Dale Fuller (Maria Macapa in "Greed") has a stand-out bit at the beginning as a lovestruck secretary and Blance Frederici plays an extremely mannish writer (a Gertrude Stein parody?). The best bit, stealing the limelight away from the female lead, is the movie debut of Joan Blondell as the lead's sister, spending the entire movie either getting into or out of lingerie. The lead, Dorothy Mackaill, seems wooden next to her. The direction has some odd gaffes usually associated with earlier talkies (fluffed lines, cameras failing to follow action properly) that speaks of a rushed production.

The Merry Frinks (1934)

The Anti-Hardy Family

[4/10 · 27 April 2001]

During this time only W.C. Fields was showing a typical American family as a bunch of good-for-nothing, ungrateful louts, but even Fields' worst can't match a tenth of the so-called Merry Frinks. Dad is a drunken newspaperman who can't hold a job, his mother is a crotchety whiner who demands breakfast in bed while trying to sneak booze away from her son, his oldest son is a Communist constantly spouting off about the evils of capitalism, the youngest son plays hooky from school to go to prizefights and his daughter is having an affair with a married man. The only decent person in the house is long-suffering Mama Frink who waits on them and cleans up the catastrophes the Frinks leave in their wake. Her job becomes even harder when her husband's windbag uncle shows up on the doorstep from New Zealand. The cast is populated with some of Warner Brothers' best character actors of the early 1930's but the result is more outrageous than funny and after a while you just want someone to kill the family and be done with it. Director Green does provide one great camera move as Papa Frink arrives home to be pursued by his nagging relatives while walking through the entire house twice in a continuous tracking shot that must have been difficult to stage. Plus Warner's lab must have been especially bored as this film uses every optical wipe of the time.

A Notorious Affair (1930)

Camp-fest early talkie

[2/10 · 19 April 2001]

An unintentionally hilarious early talkie melodrama with Kay Francis as the Countess Balakireff chasing everything in pants. At the beginning of the film she "throws back" the stableboy for being too young before setting off for the chauffeur! The high-toned English set she moves in is such a clichéd bunch of harummpf-ers that it's ridiculous. But the topper is Basil Rathbone as an Italian violinist with a Chico Marx accent! "My violeen! How weel I ever play eet again!" "Patreecia, my meelk is cold!" It's campy beyond belief.