Film review: Scarface (1932)

Of course this is famous, but I think its star, Paul Muni, is largely forgotten these days (something Criterion Channel is trying to correct with a little collection of his films) but was sort of the Marlon Brando of his day (fact: they acted together in a 1946 pro-Zionist play - Muni returned to the stage after getting disillusioned with Hollywood - and Brando later said that Muni was the greatest actor he ever saw). (Does that make James Cagney the James Dean?)  He was actually born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what is now Ukraine, Jewish, and really called Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, but he did grow up in Chicago, where this is set, of course, so perhaps he knew whereof he acted, even if the thick Italian schtick (think Chico Marx) was all fake.  Anyway, this film is definitely pre-code, with mucho violence and strong hints of incest between Muni's Tony Camonte and his sister Francesca ('Cesca), played by Ann Dvorak.  But to back up: the film begins with a couple of announcements.  The first is that the incidents in this film, while sensational, are all based on actual events (so blame reality, not our diseased imaginations!)  The second is that it's a national disgrace that congress hasn't done something about crime gangs running rampant!  It was a bit like a little flash of Fox News before our movie.  But, as the screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Howard Hawks were anything but reactionaries, more likely this is a gimmick to distract censors.  Then the film opens on a corpulent Italian, who is obviously a big shot, finishing a meal with some other grandees.  They are in an otherwise deserted Italian restaurant, and the others soon get up and leave, and our main man goes over into a corner to make a phone call.  The camera pans right and we see a sinister shadow fall on the wall.  It is somebody the man knows, because he greets him by name - before gunning him down.  Cut next to a barbershop where two men are in the chairs, and the police are coming, sirens blaring.  The barber, hearing this, hides the men's guns in a pile of linens.  The men are Muni's Tony 

and George Raft's Guino Rinaldo, Tony's right-hand man.  They are pulled in on suspicion of being the killers, but soon sprung by their gang's lawyer, who gets them out on a habeus corpus (which Tony later refers to as a "hocus pocus"), to Tony's delight.  They then hurry to meet Johnny Lovo, who was second in command to the murdered man (for whom, ironically, Tony was bodyguard) to see how the lay of the land is now.  Essentially the old fatso was knocked off because he wasn't ambitious enough: he preserved a peace among many rival gangs which had Lovo chafing to expand his territory, which he then proceeds to do, with Tony's gleeful help: he goes to speakeasies that were controlled by the other gangs (which appear to be of ethnic groups other than Italian, for example, Meehan is the Irish crew) and informs them that they will not only be buying booze from a new supplier, but they will be buying a lot more than they had been.  This leads to all kind of gunplay.  Eventually Meehan gets knocked off, but his replacement (played by Boris Karloff with a very poor attempt at either an Irish or American accent) brings a new weapon to the fight: machine guns!  Tony (who has all this time been pursuing Johnny's girl Poppy, since meeting her at Tony's house when he comes there straight from being sprung the first time) 

is in a a restaurant when it is riddled with bullet, but is only exhilarated at this technical innovation, and rushes off to demonstrate his new toy (that Guino managed to acquire by shooting one of the Irish attackers) to Johnny. 

Karloff is put on the run when only being accidentally delayed stops him being among those gunned down brutally by "cops" in an obvious recreation of the Valentine's Day Massacre.  Alas, he cannot hide for long, and is undone by his insatiable appetite for... bowling.

It's always been clear that Tony was just suffering Johnny temporarily, but Johnny becomes more and more distraught at Tony's reckless antics.  Johnny specifically forbids encroaching on the North Side, but Tony forges ahead.  MEANWHILE, Cesca, about whom Tony is psychotically possessive, has taken a shine to Guino and the insouciant way he tosses a coin (yes, George Raft invented that now clichéd gangster tic).  

But she is just a "kid" and he knows what Tony's like, so...

Eventually Tony's actions, including blatant moving in on Poppy, 

push Johnny to trying to have him offed.  But the hit fails (after a pretty amazing car chase and crash) and so Johnny has to go, with Tony signalling this with the same whistling we heard from the shadowy killer of the fat kingpin at the start.  

Now Tony has made it to the top, and has his office fully armored, with steel doors and steel shutters over the windows.  So... he decides to go off for a month to Florida!  (Is this what was happening in Some Like It Hot?)  This gives Cesca a chance to really work on Guino, 

and he finds his resistance crumbling.  But Tony is not happy when he comes back from Florida to find out what's been happening while he was away... Really not happy.  But Cesca and Guino are married!  Tony is guilt-ridden!  The cops move in!  He and Cesca hole up in his steel fortress - but he doesn't close the shutters in time...  You just knew he wouldn't be allowed to get out of this with his dignity or life intact, especially given the preachy introduction.

Is it a classic?  Well, yes.  The action is brutal, and while Muni initially seems over-the-top, his performance is so committed, and so alive that you can't take your eyes off him (and you forgive the "itsa Mario!" cod Italian).  You can see the inspiration for Al Pacino's equally over-the-top performance in the remake.  And now I want to watch more Paul Muni!  (And am impressed at the range of Howard Hawks's film oeuvre.)

Film review: Murder at the Vanities (1934)

An odd little pre-code number, probably most notorious for having a Busby Berkeley-esque little number all about Marijuana (that isn't as much fun as it seems - as far as I could tell it seemed to imply that it's a hallucinogen).  The plot is that murders are committed and solved(!) in the course of the show (which is one of those ornate song-and-dance numbers that early 30's movies are always showing).  

The film begins with Jack Ellery, the person running the show for the night (normally he's the assistant, but the boss is away for some reason, so this is his big break) arguing with a big dumb cop (Bill Murdock) who wants tickets to the show to impress his girl, but Jack kicks him out and he ends up back at the station, sulking, having lost the girl as a result.  Jack is frantic because his two leads are late.  Cut to the leading man, Eric Lander (who has an accent, because the actor is Danish, and, like all of the cast, is nobody famous - although he was in early Hitchcock The Manxman), and the leading lady (Ann Ware) practicing a number in his apartment, giddy with the knowledge that they will get married that night (in New Jersey, for some reason). They head to the show 

and Jack meets them at the curb and gets the news of the impending nuptials.  That news spreads like wildfire and enrages Rita Ross, who is obviously bad news given how awfully she treats the theater dogsbody Norma, a frail, harmless (and apparently a bit simple) girl, who is besotted with Eric but not in a way that makes her jealous of Ann, and in fact she thinks the marriage is wonderful.  Rita, on the other hand, has clearly had designs on Eric, but has also been stealing things from his apartment.  Eric is on to her, though, and hired Sadie Evans, female gumshoe, to check up on her.  Sadie meets with him and reveals that Rita has written to the Vienna police who have forwarded a picture of a famous actress of years before who is wanted for murder.  This turns out to be the company seamstress, Mrs. Smith, 

who is also Eric's mother!  Who is in the room, and knows that Sadie knows who she is!  Then Eric confronts Rita, who says that the wedding better be off.  But the show must go on!  Only thing is, during the next performance, once of the dancing girls (there is a sign above the stage door that says "the most beautiful girls in the world pass through this door," and in an early joke, the door opens and a particularly hatchet-faced old charwoman comes out) feels something land on her shoulder, and it's blood!  And Sadie is found high up in the ceiling of the theater, up with all the ropes for the scenery.  Oddly, she's drunk acid, so it looks like a suicide, but then when the doctor examines her, he finds a hatpin shoved through her heart - a hatpin that both Mrs. Smith and Rita had access to, 

as Bill Murdock discovers, because now he's been called in by Jack.  Meanwhile someone is terrorizing Ann by breaking the mirror in her door and dropping sandbags down on her.  And the show goes on!  And look - there's DUKE ELLINGTON!  

In a number that ends when a guy (Homer Boothby (played by the original Ming the Merciless!), who is an ally of Mrs. Smith, sworn to protect her secret) sprays the whole company with a machine gun.  But he's firing blanks, right?  But then, why does Rita drop dead with a bullet in her?  Murdock thinks he knows - it's Lander or Mrs. Smith, for sure.  But what does poor, simple Norma have to say about it?

This is part of the Mitchell Leisen Collection on the Criterion Channel, and let's just say it's not a patch on Easy Living or Remember the Night, or even Hands Across the Table.  But some of the numbers are pretty catchy.  Oh, and the running gag of the squeaky-giggle blonde chorus girl who keeps trying to tell Jack something pays off at the end.

Film review: Phffft! (1954)

Another Holliday-Lemmon collaboration, after It Should Happen to You, and while this one is less generically-named, it is on the whole inferior.  That's not to say it's not worth watching, because anything with those two would have to struggle hard not to be a good time, but ISHtY is easily our second fave Holliday after the incomparable Born Yesterday.  This one's interesting, though, in that Holliday is playing someone a lot more similar to the actual Judy Holliday than her usual untutored working girl-made-good.  In this one, she plays the writer of successful NBC soap operas, married at the start of the film to Jack Lemmon's tax lawyer.  I say "at the start," because almost the first event of the film is Holliday's Nina asking Lemmon's Bob for a divorce.  

This immediately leads to an argument about who thought of it first, as Bob insists he's been talking about it with his friend Charlie for some time.  The "Phffft!" of the title is how their divorce is referred to in the newspaper (apparently this came from Walter Winchell's habit).  We see Nina leaving the court in a bit of a daze, as her portly Southern lawyer waxes lyrical about how he always cries at divorces and this was a particularly good one.  Meanwhile, Bob moves in with the aforementioned Charlie (Jack Carson), 

a writer whom Bob has had to defend against plagiarism charges in the past, and who has all kinds of theories about romantic relationships and the correct ways to pursue them that he shares at various points in the proceedings.  He also introduces Bob to the system he has for each apartment-mate to communicate to the other that he does not wish to be disturbed: there is a light switch built into the wooden idol statue in the window that turns on the lightbulbs in its eyes, and then you swivel it so that it faces the street.  Bob doesn't think he'll need that, as he's sworn off the dames for the time being, and is happy to lie on the couch and take up the pulp novel he was reading at the start of the film 

that seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back for Nina, but Charlie is insistent that he get back out there, and calls up Janis, a great gal that he knows, who turns out to be Kim Novak in one of her very first film roles.  Janis is truly the quintessential dumb blonde, who is happy to do a cheerleader act at the bar she takes Bob to (where she is clearly very well-known).  

It's interesting to see Novak, who is better known as the icy cool object of Jimmy Stewart's obsessions in Vertigo throw herself so enthusiastically into a kind of less sympathetic Marilyn Monroe-in-Seven Year Itch performance, but she is not without comedic chops.  She seems inordinately hot-to-trot, even with the much older and unenthusiastic Bob (who is dumbfounded to find that she was once offered a scholarship to her small local university, until she reveals it was for being a majorette), and persuades him to take her back to the apartment.  "Aha," you think, "this is where we get to see the idol statue at work," and kudos, you're right, but it is Janis who immediately makes a beeline to it, turns it on and swivels it to face out the window.  As you can imagine, Bob's eyes bug out a little at this (a Jack Lemmon specialty).  Still, Bob can't go through with it, and Janis leaves, albeit fairly phlegmatically.  Meanwhile, when Nina arrives back on the set of her soap for the first time as a divorcée, her main actor immediately asks her out.  After a meal and an occasion to dance which she declines (because she and Bob had meant to learn the Rumba but never got round to it) he invites her back to his apartment.  She is nervous and he gives every impression of making a move... 

only to start talking about how she needs to re-write her scripts to focus more on him and have his "wife" (who is the title character) have an accident for a while.  As he's warming to his theme, he has his back to her on the bed and is gazing out of the window... only to see her escaping down his front steps.  "What'd I do?" he yells.  "You goofed!"

But neither Bob nor Nina is prepared to give up on love and throw themselves into self-improvement (which, of course, includes Rumba lessons).  Bob grows a mustache (one of Charlie's theories) and gets a sports car.  Nina's interfering interior decorating mother replaces her bed with a circular one (a move Bob had resisted in happier times because of the difficulty of getting round sheets and blankets), and after Bob's attempt to win Nina back (after they bump into each other putting their new rumba skills into action) 

by recreating the event that (as we saw in flashback) initially drew them together - his doing her taxes -

 fails (despite Nina's keenness for it to succeed) because he can't stop being judgmental of her expenses, Bob tries again with Janis and Nina is prepared to give Charlie a try.  (It is while this is happening that we hear Charlie explain about the two main camps of male approaches to win over women - the criers and the laughers ("there are of course subgroups - the whiners and the gigglers").  Is this the final end for Nina and Bob, despite the fact that they clearly still love each other?  Well, watch it and find out.

Film review: Born Yesterday (1950)

This is the film that Judy Holliday beat out Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard - also featuring William Holden, of course) and Bette Davis (All About Eve) to win the Oscar for, and it was the "Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny" of its day.  But Holliday is peerless in this film, which is occasionally clunky (particularly towards the end) but otherwise a very refreshing re-working of Pygmalion.  Holliday is Billie Dawn, fiancée of the brutish junk king Harry Brock (played flawlessly by Broderick Crawford - he doesn't look like he's acting at any moment).  They (along with Brock's entourage, chiefly his cousin Eddie, who is his general dogsbody, and Jim Devery, the brains of the outfit, his disillusioned lawyer (Howard St. John, who manages to play perpetually slightly tipsy without any of the usual actorly tics)) arrive at a fancy Washington DC hotel as the film opens to take over an entire wing for the duration while Harry tries to acquire political influence.  Brock's first task, presented him by Jim, is to grant an interview to a reporter who is a bit of a king-maker, according to Jim, viz., William Holden's Paul Verrall.  Verrall tags along while Brock heads upstairs in his suite for a shave and a shoeshine (harder, because he always takes off his shoes first thing when he comes into his suite, 

a fact Billie comments on later), and we and Paul witness Brock at his most obnoxious: bossing around everyone, boasting about his rags-to-riches story while openly admitting the thievery it took.  Paul is very quickly sickened and makes his exit, but not before he's seen Billie waft through the room.  Brock's next task is to chat up "his" congressman, Norval Hedges, and his wife.  

He insists Billie be there for this, but she is sulky and reveals that she doesn't know what the Supreme Court is.  (Holliday is great here - slipping out of the room to sing along in her fractured helium voice to the radio.)  Even Brock knows she has embarrassed herself, and mutters about cutting her loose.  But there are two problems with that: first, he has made her a co-owner of his businesses (for whatever nefarious reasons, I wasn't quite clear), which is why Jim keeps bringing her stacks of papers for her signature, and second, "I'm crazy about the broad".  So his solution is to call Paul back and give him the task of improving Billie.  So here's the Pygmalion angle.  

But there are important differences.  First, Billie is perfectly comfortable - she's not doing this in search of a better life.  And second, pretty much instantly she hits on Paul and makes it clear she's A-OK with a roll in the hay, and it won't be the first time.  (What with the Hayes code, you'd think this wouldn't be make so evident, but it's pretty crystal clear.)  Paul politely declines, and the education begins.  The point of her education is so that she "fits in" in Washington, so most of it involves visiting things like the Capitol 

and reading people like Thomas Paine.  And this is where the film seems quaintly old-fashioned (along with a speech later about how rare and hard it is to buy off United States Congressmen) or perhaps a bit naïve, but Holliday is just so gifted and natural a performer that it never once grates.  Somewhere in here (I think after the first meeting between Billie and Paul) is perhaps the best scene in the whole movie: a Gin Rummy game between Billie and Brock.  Brock boasted to the congressman and his wife that he taught Billie and now she beats the pants of him, and we witness this in action.  It's just pure physical comedy, from Holliday's shuffling, to her counting while moving her lips, to her singing tunelessly to herself, with Crawford steadily getting more and more irate, as she quickly and easily demolishes him.  Apparently, in Rummy, when one player finishes, the other has to count up the score of his remaining cards and add that to his total, so that, like golf, the higher score is the loser.  And it's obvious both to us and Billie that Brock is undercounting.  Anyway, do yourself a favor and just watch it. Actually, the scene could be touching.  This is obviously a regular event - Billie walks in from her room in the suite knowing that Brock will be coming from his, and they sit down and start without having to say a word - and Brock clearly wants to be here with Billie rather than out on the town.  But Brock just can't get over his massive self-regard.  This scene reveals that Billie has keen natural intelligence, and as her knowledge grows, 

she becomes more dissatisfied with her lot.  Meanwhile Jim keeps pestering Brock to marry Billy so that if their shenanigans becomes public Billie can't be made to testify against him.  Also meanwhile, Paul bends her ear with egalitarian manifestos.  (Although this is not developed, there's also a nice scene where Paul is cut down to size a bit: he asks Billie if she's read his column and she says she did, and while she loved it, she didn't understand a word of it.  And as we go through it, we see it really is purple-prosed, and when he explains what it means, she says "well why didn't you say that?" and he is taken aback.  As the film goes on, Brock becomes more and more restless as it becomes clear that his one congressman isn't enough to get laws passed that he wants and things come to a head such that Billie refuses to sign some papers, and Brock hits her.  You can see this coming, but it's still a shocking moment, particularly as both people involved act it so perfectly.  From then on, it's a race to the finish as Billie and Paul conspire to bring down Brock and make good Billie's escape.  So in conclusion: while the plot verges on Capra-esque corn in places, this is still damn close to a perfectly done movie, and Holliday is sublime. 

But for God's sake steer clear of the remake.

Film review: At The Circus (1939)

 The Marx Brothers' movies are leaving the Criterion Channel on June 30th (hey, that's today) so we watched the one that we hadn't seen that was highest rated, and it was pretty good!  The boys are a decade on from their film debut, and have bounced around various studios, but they've got a formula and by god they're going to stick to it.  It's got a Chico piano-sequence!  It's got a Harpo harp sequence (which, following the lead of Day at the Races has him interacting with an all-black musical ensemble who suddenly appear as if from nowhere just for this sequence and then vanish again.  This time, instead of calling him "Gabriel" they call him "Svengali" - the reason for both escapes me).  But best of all, it has Groucho (as lawyer J. Cheever Loophole, and in this film wearing a rather distracting wig) singing one of the best Marx Bros. songs ever, "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady" (which, coincidentally, also features in the next year's The Philadelphia Story)  As I said, the plot is familiar.  In a lot of their movies, somebody (not one of the brothers) is in charge of something that they're in danger of losing, nefarious outsiders try to ensure that they do lose it, and the brothers conspire to save them.  In this case, it's Jeff Wilson, a scion of a rich family who has renounced his wealth to run the circus.  He's borrowed $10,000 from John Carter, who is obviously a bad 'un, in league with Peerless Pauline (Eve Arden) the acrobat.  

Their motives are unclear, but Carter calls in the debt early, expecting Jeff not to be able to pay it, in which case he gets to take over the circus, but is surprised to hear Jeff say he can pay it that night, on the train taking the circus from town to town.  Meanwhile, Chico, who in this movie is "Antonio," a general dogsbody for the circus, who contacts Groucho for help, knowing that Jeff is in trouble.  Harpo is "Punchy," 

an assistant to the strongman ("Goliath") 

who is also in league with the bad guys, and who, besides being mean to Punchy (presumably because he accidentally hits in in the ass with a cannonball), along with the tiny "Little Professor Atom," he clonks Jeff on the head and steals the $10,000.  It's now up to the boys to get it back.  Key scenes involve Groucho walking on the ceiling in special shoes with Peerless Pauline, 

whom he knows has his wallet stuffed in her cleavage (he looks straight at the camera and wonders if there's a way to retrieve it without violating the Hayes code).  As is his plan, the wallet falls out when she's on the ceiling, but he's stuck there (until Harpo comes and unlaces his shoes) while she escapes; all three brothers visiting Professor Atom in his tiny home and trying to discover if the cigar found at the scene of Jeff's mugging is Atom's (an attempt repeated foiled by Chico - every time Groucho says to Atom "do you have a cigar?" Chico jumps in and offers his; and Harpo and Chico trying to search Goliath's room without waking him up.  Finally, Margaret Dumont, who plays Jeff's rich aunt, appears.  Groucho hits on the idea of getting the $10,000 from her, and arrives at her mansion to seduce her, as is his wont.  She has asked the French conductor Jardinet to bring his orchestra over to play for her and has promised him $7,500.  Harpo raises it to $10,000 and tries to divert Jardinet so that Jeff's circus will replace him as the entertainment at the aunt's big soirée.  The climax features a wild chase featuring a "gorilla" and just about everyone, Dumont included, swinging from the trapeze.  Very satisfying.  Except for Groucho's wig.

 

Film review: Shaft (1971)

 

We've been watching the Rockford Files' first couple of seasons ('75-6) recently and it struck me that Shaft would've made a good TV series of that era.  There are a lot of parallels - both are private eyes (or private "dicks," to quote the immortal Isaac Hayes (who, by strange coincidence, guest starred in a Rockford episode) theme song, which so far transcends the rest of the movie it's not fair) and both have a love-hate relationship with a cop (Dennis Becker for Rockford and Vic Androzzi for Shaft), and both have friends of all kinds at all levels of society scattered here and there.  But it has to be said that the production values of most Rockford episodes, along with the level of acting, not to mention the star power (we've seen episodes that had Joseph Cotton and Jackie Cooper in them), far exceeds Shaft.  And add to that the writing.  But you can't beat the gritty winter-in-New-York-in-the-early-70s setting of Shaft, 

even if (as with Rockford, actually - was this a problem with the film stock?) it's sometimes hard to see it in the night scenes.  And, even though the dialogue, including in-your-face racial jibes can be a bit cringeworthy at times, the movie is undeniably hip, baby.  The basic plot is standard hard-boiled stuff: the private eye is a loner, distrusted by all the factions in town, which include not just the cops but the local black mob (led by "Bumpy" Jones) and the young Black Power activists (led by Ben Buford), and that's before the actual Mafia moves in to the picture.  But, distrusted as he is by all, he is also the only guy who knows and can work with all factions.  Shaft himself is, to be honest, a bit of a jerk.  He's got nothing but insults for Androzzi, despite the fact that Androzzi protects him from the higher-ups who want his license pulled, and while he has a girl who loves him (to whose profession that she loves him he replies "I know") it doesn't stop him banging the white chick with "titillating boobs" who hits on him in a bar (who later complains that, while he's "great in the sack," he's "shitty afterwards").  

But on the flipside, he is shown being nice to all of society's early-70s downtrodden, from the blind newspaper vendor, 

to the flagrantly gay bartender (who used the phrase "titillating boobs"), to the nice young mother who provides a place for Ben to hide out at a key point in the proceedings.  He doesn't care that the Black Mob and the young Pathers think of him as "being in whitey's pocket," but he doesn't back down from anybody, including Bumpy's thugs.  The basic outline of the plot is that Bumpy hires him ostensibly to find his daughter, who has sympathies for the black radicals, but when Shaft tracks down Ben, his building is surrounded and everyone at the meeting he was having is shot, except for Ben, whom Shaft helps escape (hence the need to have Ben hide out at his friend's place).  But then Shaft takes Ben to Bumpy to clear the air, 

and Bumpy asks for Ben's people's help in fighting the Mafia who are the real people who have Bumpy's daughter.  Meanwhile, Vic is left cleaning up all the bodies that pile up (starting with one of Bumpy's men that gets thrown through Shaft's office window (it's on at least the third floor) before Bumpy even gets to meet Shaft the first time).  It all ends in a very satisfying raid on the hotel that the Mafia have the daughter holed up in, which features the scene on the poster, which is Shaft swinging through the hotel window, blazing away.  

A period piece, let's say, but a not un-entertaining one.

Frederick the fish

 Taken last week with my underwater camera:

Here he is today.  It's been rainy all week so we haven't been swimming, but today it was ungodly hot as well, so we went to Metamora-Hadley.  There is a shallow spot in the middle of the lake which we discovered: