Monthly Archives: January 2010

Recently Watched: The Blackbird (1926)

Lon Chaney and Tod Browning collaborated 10 times in their too-brief careers, beginning with “The Wicked Darling” in 1919 and ending in 1929 with “Where East is East.” Lon Chaney died in 1930, and Tod Browning’s career effectively died just 2 years later with his film “Freaks.”

Two of my favorite films are Chaney-Browning collaborations: “The Unknown” (1927) and “West of Zanzibar” (1928). The first time I saw “The Unknown” was on TCM in a sepia tone print. I’m not sure anyone believes me, but my husband saw it too so I know that it’s not my faulty memory. That particular print was shown a few times, then when I finally got around to recording the film off TCM, they’d changed to the black & white print. I miss the inauthentic sepia toned version! But hey, were not here to talk about “The Unknown”, but about “The Blackbird”.

For a very long time, Chaney was my favorite actor. In retrospect, I’ve discovered that was mainly because silents were new to me, as were the edgier horror films Chaney starred in. It’s not that I dislike Chaney, it’s just that he had a gimmick which wore thin after a while. By the time I sat down to watch “The Blackbird” a couple of months ago — the 15th Chaney film I’ve seen — I was at a point where I could have gone my whole life without seeing Chaney yet again play a criminal and/or disfigured guy who does insane stuff for a beautiful, unobtainable woman.

So guess what “The Blackbird” was about?

But first, the obligatory Robert Osborne screencap. You can tell this was recorded a while ago. “The Blackbird” was shown in October, 2008, and I didn’t get around to watching it until September of 2009. I have a bit of a backlog of films to watch, and since we’re well into 2010, you can tell I have a backlog of posts to complete as well.

“The Blackbird” is about a criminal named, er, The Blackbird, a robber who also pretends to be his saintly, disfigured brother known as The Bishop. No, not that bishop. Blackbird’s ex-wife Polly (is it a bird theme? we may never know) arrives back in town to perform in the seedy bar she used to headline in. She still holds a torch for Blackbird, but he is indifferent to her. Now he wants beautiful Fifi (Renee Adoree), also a performer at the bar, but she’s not interested. Everyone knows Blackbird is dangerous and no good, and he cements that reputation with Fifi by giving her a gun as a romantic gift.

A rich top-hatted dude comes slumming to the bar one night with a group of chippies and friends. He sets his eye on Fifi, who is interested… in the diamonds on his chippies’ neck. The rich guy goes home that night with the jewels worn by everyone in his party, and Blackbird is there to greet him. He knows the rich guy is West End Bertie, a thief, who has had his own men steal his friends’ jewels. Blackbird gets half the haul to keep quiet about it, and he gets the choker Fifi wanted so much.

But it doesn’t matter, because the next day Fifi clearly favors Bertie over Blackbird. What crazy stuff will Blackbird do to win her over? Will Polly keep helping Blackbird out when he doesn’t care about her? Will Fifi find out Bertie is a thief?

Sigh. We all know how this film ends, there’s no need to pretend otherwise.

Chaney is a good actor, and “Unknown” and “Zanzibar” remain favorites no matter how tired I get of this particular trope. But I’m really starting to wonder about this alleged amazing range Chaney had. He plays the same character so frequently that he twice appears in films as a Pagliacci character. His characters are often carried more by makeup, contortions, and scowls than actual acting. It’s as though Chaney has a set of 4 main types he can play — criminal, evil, saintly, or disfigured — and every character he plays is made up of one or more of these components. Even characters that at first don’t seem to fit into this description ultimately do. In “Mr Wu”, being Asian is seen as basically disfigured, the terribly disturbing dialogue in the film makes that clear. In “London After Midnight” he pretends to be ~~Groucho Marx~~ a vampire, and even though he is ostensibly a detective he still apparently spent most of the film being freaky in tons of makeup.

“Tell it to the Marines” is the only film of his I’ve seen where he hasn’t been criminal, evil, saintly, and/or disfigured. He still is the bittersweet dude who doesn’t get the girl, though, another cliche in Chaney films.

Now, I admit that this may be unfair, as there are films of his where he portrayed a character that doesn’t rely on physical or mental freakishness, but these are lost. “Thunder” is the one I specifically wish still existed, although I’d like to see his 1920 “Treasure Island”, too. Also, I understand Chaney plays straight in “While the City Sleeps”, but I have yet to see that film. What I’m saying is that my perceptions may be skewed by the 15 films of his I’ve seen, or by the films of his that were lucky enough to survive.

“The Blackbird” isn’t bad. There is a solid 15 minutes towards the climax of the film that is really exciting. The material is interesting, and Doris Lloyd absolutely slams home a pivotal scene towards the end with her, Chaney, and Adoree. It’s one of her earliest films and you can see why it launched her career, although she did spend most of her time in Hollywood in the background, in bits, or even on the cutting room floor.

Like so many movies, though, the film fails in some basic levels. There are unbelievable scenes played to make it seem like Blackbird/Bishop is fooling everyone. The sets and costumes are uninspired; everything looks like a set and never like an actual bar or apartment. Owen Moore is truly awful in this, and Renee Adoree’s character Fifi is barely fleshed out, she’s just a pretty face used as a plot device. Might as well have used a lovely fern for all the difference it would have made.

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. I settled down and watched, heard Bob Osborne say how great the film was and how successful it had been, then was bored out of my gourd within 20 minutes.

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Marie Prevost Project: Sporting Blood (1931)

Brief note before I move on to the movie: The SBBN About the Blog entry has been updated. Nothing exciting has been added, I just updated it.

“Sporting Blood” is about a horse named Tommy Boy, his breeder Jim Rellence (Ernest Torrence), the flighty dame who wants him as a toy (Marie Prevost), and a bunch of vague mobsters. According to some promo material and archive info, this was originally called “Horseflesh”, which is all kinds of weird. After race horse breeder Rellence regretfully sells Tommy Boy to a client, the horse wins a race that rich brat Angie Ludeking (Prevost) has bet on. She decides she wants the horse and, being rich and spoiled, she gets the horse. But the horse loses its next race because of a fix rigged by mobster Tip Scanlon (Lew Cody). Later that night Tip wins the horse in a rigged poker game and begins to use Tommy Boy in more fixed races.

At 43 minutes into the movie, we finally see the headlining stars: Clark Gable as Rid, a dealer in Tip’s casino, and Madge Evans as Ruby, a girl who works the floor and is kept by Tip. Rid and Ruby are in love but can’t get away from the dangerous Tip. They both oppose Tommy Boy being abused for the sake of fixed races, too, but the abuse ends when Tip guarantees Tommy Boy will win a race that he ends up losing. Tip is killed by his mobster friends while Ruby escapes to Jim’s ranch with Tommy Boy. She cleans up and goes straight while Tommy Boy recuperates from the abuse. Problems arise when Ruby enters Tommy Boy into the derby only to find her jockey — and possibly Rid — are in on a fix to keep Tommy Boy from winning.

Most of this film will bore the socks off you unless you really like horses. It’s also terribly racist, the worst being when a young kid is threatened with brutal whipping for doing nothing wrong except being a “colored black” that breeder Jim felt he “had” to hire. It really is a kid, too, it’s Eugene Jackson who was maybe 15 years old when this was filmed. Also, I suspect horses were harmed in the making of this film. Actors were probably hurt, too, especially young Jackson who is clearly riding a horse that is bucking and thrashing dangerously. He really got shafted in this movie.

Marie doesn’t have a very big role, yet she has one of the best roles. In a film where much of the cast can’t act, Marie stands out despite an uneven, sometimes sloppy performance. Gable hasn’t gotten the hang of this acting thing yet, Evans is beautiful but relies on the same quavering overdramatic voice that Norma Shearer does, and Hallam Cooley as Prevost’s husband is truly, truly awful.

Marie’s character is your standard ditzy dame, a spoiled rich girl who always gets what she wants. She’s cute as a button but, in an era where you rarely see large women except as maids or as older society matrons, her chubbiness is noticeable. Probably more so because effort has obviously gone to try to hide it. At the same time, an older, much larger woman in the casino scene is given a sleeveless gown with absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever. Every film in the late 20s and early 30s had at least one larger society dame in a beautiful sleeveless gown.

Another problem is that Marie’s character has a pivotal scene where she’s drinking heavily out of the trophy Tommy Boy has just won. She’s clearly made fun of, as she is in many of her later roles, but the obvious acknowledgment of her drinking makes her role in this film a little too depressing.

What’s amazing to me is how suddenly her looks changed in her career. In 1929, she is beautiful in “The Godless Girl” and looks to be in her late 20s at the most. A year later in “Party Girl” she looks to be 35 if she’s a day, and by this film in 1931 she looks 40 years old, puffy and tired. It’s impossible to watch Marie in her later roles without thinking about how it all ended.

Recently Watched: The Light Touch (1952) & The Whole Truth (1958)

“You can’t smell a rose through somebody else’s nose.”

As you can tell from the above quote, uttered by Stewart Granger in “The Light Touch” (1952), all the best lines went to George Sanders. Which is as it should be.

“The Light Touch” is a nice little film but not very original. Set mostly in Sicily and Tunis, it’s a crime caper that’s one part “Casablanca” and one part “Maltese Falcon”. Sam Conride (Stewart Granger) is an art thief who steals a small religious painting from a museum, a painting on loan from the provincial Sicilian church it usually hangs in. He steals it for his partner Felix (George Sanders) but schemes to make it seem that the painting burned when his boat to Tunis caught fire. Felix is never quite sure Sam is telling the truth, and Felix’s henchmen Anton and Charles (epic character actors Norman Lloyd and Mike Mazurki, respectively) spend a lot of time searching for the picture.

Meanwhile, Sam plots to have the painting copied by young local artist Anna (played by a very young looking Pier Angeli.) He tricks the naive girl into painting a copy, meanwhile convincing Felix that they will go in on selling the fake painting together. While he scams Anna and Felix, he secretly plans to sell the original to another buyer. Eventually Felix talks Sam into marrying Anna to keep her quiet about selling a fake of the painting, but she discovers the plan within minutes of getting married, of course. Just as their honeymoon ship sails, Felix finds out that Sam had the original painting all along, and gives chase to the newly-married couple.

Apparently the law knows Sam has the painting, too. Things get too hot and the buyer won’t buy the painting, so another buyer named Aramescu (Kurt Kaznar) agrees to it. Meanwhile Anna schemes to try to save Sam from the law while Felix and his thugs try to get the painting before it’s sold to Aramescu.

Again, this isn’t a horrible film, but it could have been so much better. Aramescu is a painfully obvious ripoff of Caspar Gutman, while Pier Angeli is far too young and far too weak of an actress to carry the role she is given. But there are some great actors in this film, definitely wasted on a thin project such as this one. Stewart Granger didn’t have a lot of range, but he had far more ability than this film afforded him. Joseph Calleia sends in a cool, controlled performance, while the heavies of Norman Lloyd and Mike Mazurki really elevate their smallish roles. George Sanders is always amazing as the cultured cad and this film is no exception, but the recurring theme in the film of Felix’s disdain of faith and religion is so thinly written that it’s easily missed.

There are some technical issues as well. Angeli’s hair very noticeably changes length in a few scenes. The apartment we first see Aramescu in — slightly dark screencap above — is poorly redressed to look like Sam’s hotel room just a few minutes later. There is some distinctive tile on the walls and lattice above the windows that no one bothered to cover well enough, and it was so confusing I had to go back and forth to make sure that these were indeed supposed to be two different sets.

One interesting note: I often complain that I’m no good at the Movie Star Mystery Photo over at the Daily Mirror. One of the “I almost guessed that” entries a few months ago was Renzo Cesana, who is in “The Light Touch” as a priest.

***

“The Whole Truth” (1958) starts out terrific but loses energy quickly and ends with a whimper. Max Poulton (Stewart Granger) is a high-powered movie producer working in Italy on a film. The female lead Gina (Gianna Maria Canale) is an actress Max had an affair with in the semi-recent past. Gina doesn’t want to let him go, but Max has gone back to his wife. The affair happened when he and his wife Carol (Donna Reed) were separated, but he never told his wife about it. Gina blackmails Max, threatening to tell Carol about the affair if he won’t continue meeting with her on the side.

A visibly flustered Max returns home after the blackmail threat — where we aren’t shown what happened — when an inspector from Scotland Yard shows up at his home. Corliss (George Sanders) says he is there on behalf of the Italian police chief to ask a few questions about Gina. It seems Gina was murdered only a couple of hours earlier, and the police know Max was at her hotel. Corliss also mentions that Gina was married, a fact Max hadn’t known. When Corliss leaves, Max runs to Gina’s villa to retrieve some of his things left behind during the affair. He comes back home, by this time alerting almost everyone at the huge party at his house that he’s been gone for quite a long time.

He hides the things he’s retrieved, goes back into the party and starts to mingle when he turns to see… Gina! She’s not dead at all, but she is drunk and she is about to announce her affair with Max to the entire party. He gets her out of there just in time. While he drives her back to her villa he scolds her for sending Corliss there to scare him. She insists she didn’t send Corliss, but when Max describes him you can see worry in her eyes. She’s still scared when they reach her villa, so Max shoos off a scary dog, opens the villa for her, and turns on the lights. When he goes back to the car to get her, he finds her murdered.

So starts what should be a tense affair with lies exposed and secret identities revealed. Except the liar almost immediately comes clean and the crazy twists and turns are explained very early in the film. The last half of the movie is just a bland by-the-numbers attempt at a thriller. There was so much that could have been done with this film! But even at the very end, the director felt it necessary to do a bad dubbing in of a line to explain everything, as though the audience was going to leave the theater confused without a point blank explanation. Not hardly.

George Sanders again co-stars, and again he gives a really solid performance at the beginning of the film, only to be undermined when the story goes completely lifeless. It’s a much more professional production than “The Light Touch” but with less acting power. Granger had a few good moments but mostly phoned in this performance. Donna Reed is so bland that it might just make you angry. I know it made me angry. And who the hell gave her that hair and those eyebrows?

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The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

This is the movie that made me a Jack Benny fan. My path to being a Benny fan was a weird one, and for years I honestly loathed the man. Actually, there was nothing honest about it, as all I knew about Benny came from my parents. As a kid, my friends’ parents would reminisce about the Beatles and “Gilligan’s Island” and other pop culture from the 60s. My own parents, a generation older, thought back fondly to radio shows and early television where advertisements were worked into the plot of the show. They preferred a show where the Carnation spokesman would walk into Gracie Allen’s kitchen and start telling everyone about contented cows; they groused about show-stopping commercial breaks louder than Alfred Hitchcock ever did.

And they loved Jack Benny. Adored him. Oh god, I don’t think a week went by without one of my parents shouting “Rochester!” or threatening to start telling people they were 39 years old for the rest of their lives. Every few weeks one would ask out loud, “What was that film that ruined Jack Benny’s career?” and the other would answer, “The Horn Blows at Midnight!” I exaggerate a bit, but I’m pretty sure I hated Benny and HBaM by the time I was a wee 10-year-old. I was in my 20s before I stopped rebelling against my parents and paying attention to Benny’s actual performances. But if you knew my parents’ taste in entertainment, you’d understand that my “hate everything my parents like” rule kept me in good stead for many years.

In the first moments of “The Horn Blows at Midnight”, we’re treated to a host of terrific character actors: Margaret Dumont, Guy Kibbee, Franklin Pangborn, Mike Mazurki, Dolores Moran, and John Alexander. Oh, and Allyn Joslyn, a character actor who, like Burton Churchhill, shows up in so many films that I have half a mind to start an Allyn Joslyn Watch. Stars Jack Benny and Alexis Smith head the cast, directed by Raoul Walsh.

Whew, what a list! Common wisdom tells us that you can’t go wrong with this much talent, and to that I have only one word to say: “Skidoo.” Thankfully, HBaM is no “Skidoo”, but Jack Benny made so many jokes about this film ruining his career that most people, if they’ve heard of the film at all, are convinced it’s a rotten movie.

Benny plays Athanael, a trumpet player in a radio orchestra. During a Paradise Coffee commercial — “Paradise Coffee: It’s Heavenly!” — Athanael falls asleep and dreams he is an angel in Heaven. As you’d expect in a comedy fantasy, everyone and everything you see in the opening segment returns in another role during Athanael’s dream.

In Heaven as on Earth, Athanael is a lovable loser. He is an angel but only Junior Grade, of the 3rd Phalanx, 15th Cohort. Playing 2nd trumpet in Heaven’s orchestra, he is anxious for a promotion and a chance to play solos. His girlfriend Elizabeth (Alexis Smith) is the secretary to the Deputy Chief of Operations in charge of the Department of Small Planet Management. Not only is Heaven portrayed as a large business office full of bureaucratic red tape, but it’s also stated that Earth is just planet #339001 out of several hundred thousand other planets. I’m a little surprised that contemporary audiences didn’t have a fit about that, but perhaps 1945 society didn’t get riled by the same things 2010 society does.

“The Horn Blows at Midnight” is starting to shake off its decades-old bad reputation thanks to VHS and TCM, although it hasn’t yet been released on DVD. Granted, this ain’t no “Citizen Kane”, but it’s not supposed to be. The comedy is mostly one-liners and slapstick, all of which is very Looney Tunes, so much so that even the song “The Merry Go Round Broke Down” appears more than once. There are technical issues such as dubbing speech for a character when their mouth is closed and the unhappily obvious use of stunt doubles. In the interest of happy fun times entertainment, though, you should ignore all those problems and just let the movie make you laugh.

Elizabeth convinces the Deputy Chief (Guy Kibbee) to use Athanael for an important job. Earth is scheduled for demolition and the usual guy is busy demolishing a particularly big planet, so the Chief sends Athanael down instead. The Chief isn’t keen to send someone else for the job, but there are staff shortages in Heaven and problems with middle management. To straighten out the bureaucratic mess, “they better start letting in a few big businessmen up here,” complains the Chief.

It seems Earth is “full of persecution and hate” and, even though the front office has warned the planet with all sorts of earthquakes and floods, nobody is listening. Athanael must blow the horn exactly at midnight to signal the end times and the destruction of Earth. The Chief adds that he’ll get a promotion if he comes back, but plenty doubt his ability to do the job. Besides, he was only sent down because he was judged to be the “angel least likely to be missed.”

A clueless and mild-mannered Athanael takes a cosmic elevator down to the Hotel Universe, whose special elevator to the roofs and upper suites is hijacked as a Heaven-to-Earth travel express. Of course, the guests are angry that their elevator has gone missing. One elderly guest, Lady Stover (played by Ethel Griffies, best known as the retired ornithologist in “The Birds”), is beside herself with indignation. The house detective (Franklin Pangborn) is told to investigate another guest of the hotel, notorious criminal Archie Dexter, for possibly stealing the elevator. Because everyone knows you can just slip an elevator car into your knapsack and stroll off with it. Archie had nothing to do with it, but he cheerfully goes to help the house detective, and by “help” I mean “get closer to Lady Stover’s jewels.”

Athanael arrives at 11:15 PM. New York time, I’m assuming, but this is a light comedy and the logic of time zones simply doesn’t enter into discussion. Thus begin the one-liners, and while usually this kind of weak set up just to throw out a dozen one-liners irritates me, in this case it’s pulled off well.

One of the first things Athanael does on Earth is accidentally thwart Archie’s plot to steal Lady Stover’s pearls. Archie blames the failure on his beautiful young cohort Fran (Dolores Moran, Miriam “Histrionics” Hopkins’ daughter in “Old Acquaintance”). Fran is devastated that Archie, whom she loves, immediately discarded her when he didn’t get Lady Stover’s pearls.

Eventually Athanael is spotted by Osidro and Doremus, two fallen angels who had been sent to Earth a long time ago and who never returned to Heaven, instead choosing to stay on Earth to revel in its copious delights. Fallen angels can never be let back into Heaven, so they are desperate to stop Athanael from blowing his horn, knowing the destruction of Earth means they’ll be sent to Hell. Stopping him is complicated by the fact that touching an angel in anger also results in eternal damnation, so they set out to convince him to stay on Earth for the wine, women, and girdles. Yes, girdles. Really. I’m not making that up.

Athanael makes it to the roof with minutes to spare before midnight comes around. Osidro and Doremus fail to sway him away from his job, but Fran is also up on the roof, sobbing and despondent. Fran misunderstands Athanael’s cryptic comments about the end of the world as encouragement to jump, and of course Athanael tries to stop her from committing a mortal sin. They both fall off the roof but manage to hang on to a ledge. Actually, people hanging off the ledge of the roof is kind of a running gag in HBaM, one that Variety at the time said provided the “biggest howls.”

So, Athanael misses midnight just like everyone but Elizabeth said he would, and the Chief is hopping mad. While Elizabeth tries to convince the Chief to let her go down and fix things, Osidro and Doremus convince Athanael he’s now fallen. He really isn’t, but Athanael is nothing if not unbelievably naive. They talk up Earth and its pleasures, but there is just one minor problem: Fallen angels suffer tremors every hour at half past, “just like a radio commercial.” You see what they did there? Clever!

Athanael would rather play trumpet than get into Osidro and Doremus’ business of bootleg girdles (“Not that I have anything against girdles,” he assures them) and is given a job playing at a jitterbug contest with Slippy Tompkins and his Twelve Tom-Cats. HA! I love that name. Athanael isn’t exactly down with the hep jive, and the loud swing band literally blows him away with their jazzy rendition of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. His solo falls flat and he’s tossed out onto the street.

Athanael is an angel, and by that I assumed he had once been a living person on one of the several hundred thousand planets under Heaven’s domain. Yet Athanael has never had food (among other things) before, and it appears that the fallen angels hadn’t experienced food (and other) delights either. I am fully aware I am overthinking things, but where did these angels come from if they weren’t formerly living things who went to Heaven after kicking the cosmic bucket?

Athanael discovers food and partakes of a disgusting meal of herring, onions, oyster stew, ice cream, and a huge dill pickle. He can’t pay because he doesn’t know what “dollahs” are, so the restaurant holds his trumpet in lieu of payment. Meanwhile in Heaven, the Chief allows Elizabeth to go to Earth to help Athanael. When Osidro and Doremus find out he’s got another chance, they ask master criminal Archie to steal his trumpet, unaware that the trumpet is still at the restaurant. When Archie finds out that Athanael prevented Fran from jumping off the building, he realizes Fran has an in with Athanael and enlists her help to get the trumpet.

Elizabeth wins some money and they manage to pay the restaurant those “dollahs” Athanael owed, but the waiter has given the trumpet to his kid, Junior (a young Robert Blake). Athanael finds Junior at the carnival and, after wacky carnival hijinks, gets the trumpet back. While he’s being shot out of cannons (true story), Elizabeth is back at the hotel being swindled by Archie as he pretends to be a famous orchestra conductor. Athanael returns and quickly realizes Elizabeth has a crush on Archie, so when Fran arrives dressed to the nines, he uses the opportunity to try to make Elizabeth jealous in return.

Check out that dress on Fran. My stars.

Athanael doesn’t know what to do with girdles, let alone women, so when Fran tries to distract him she’s forced to physically throw herself at him to get him away from the trumpet. She’s as lewd as she can be in 1945 (“Athanael, can’t you see what my eyes are saying?” “Yes, and you ought to watch your language!”) and it takes forever, but she finally liberates the trumpet from Athanael. Elizabeth again has to come to the rescue, which she does when she realizes Osidro and Doremus are also at the same hotel and must be the culprits.

Whether Benny is daintily sniffing a rose, deliberately making his wrist go limp, or biting into a giant juicy pickle, he is never less than 100% heterosexual! Seriously, though, Benny’s effeminate mannerisms were part of his shtick, and he makes the most of this particular trademark in HBaM. I’ve been watching a lot of Jack Benny movies lately and I am loving his performances, which might sound odd since he played himself in half the movies he was in, but it’s the truth and I’ll stand by it. One of the films I watched was Benny’s first movie “Chasing Rainbows” (1929), a film where he hadn’t yet developed the stingy, bad violinist, or effete loser guy shticks. I’d estimate that approximately 0.01% of us care whether Benny was gay or not, but I do think that those who insist he was gay do so because they saw his later work — especially the TV show — and assumed his screen antics were true to life.

Back at the film, the Chief arrives via heavenly elevator to help just as Athanael steals the trumpet back. Athanael, of course, falls off the roof again, grasping defeat from the jaws of victory. Eventually, almost everybody falls off the roof. Only Arthur, Fran, and Elizabeth are left up top to keep the dangling human thread of idiots from plunging to the street below. Through more slapstick antics, Athanael ends up in the enormous mechanical Paradise Coffee ad just outside the building. The coffee pours in, then cream, then sugar, then it all drains out and happens again. He gets swished around, beat up by the sugar spoon, and eventually knocked off the cup to his assumed demise… but he wakes up in reality to the soothing announcer’s voice narrating the energetic awakening of a good morning, courtesy Paradise Coffee.

“If you ever saw it in the movies, you’d never believe it.”

The supporting cast is solid, reliable, and funny. I know Groucho Marx once said that Margaret Dumont never got any of the jokes in the Marx Brothers films she was in, but this performance makes it clear that she obviously had a sense of humor. Alexis Smith seems a bit out of place and bored with everything around her; I expect her to start scolding everyone a la Graham Chapman and insist that the movie should be shut down due to silliness.

While the sets in HBaM are occasionally uninspired, there is still enough art deco fabulousness to keep me happy:

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Bette Davis Project #7: “The Man Who Played God” (1932)

Let’s just get this out of the way: George Arliss is damned creepy. His face looks like a naked skull, and the over-dark lipstick, eyeliner, and what I think is makeup around his nostrils freak me the hell out.

In “The Man Who Played God” (1932), Arliss — who was the lead in the 1920s stage play, the 1922 film version, and the 1932 version here — plays the improbably named Montgomery Royale, internationally famous pianist. Women want him so badly that they accost him constantly as he tries to walk back to his hotel room.

Yeah. Look at this face and tell me if you think women of all ages would accost this man because of his sex appeal:

That’s straight up Phantom of the Fucking Opera right there, my friends. UGH. If he didn’t rely on such grotesque faces for emotion and if he wasn’t made up so ridiculously, he probably wouldn’t look as hideous. As he appears in most films, though, he just looks like a freakier John D. Rockefeller.

Okay, so ~~137 year old freakshow~~ 64 year old Montgomery Royale is touring Europe with his sister-slash-secretary and his butler. He is currently in Paris. American friends Grace Blair (Bette Davis) and Mildred Miller (Violet Heming) are also in the city to watch him perform. Grace, over 40 years younger than Monty, is in love with him. Mildred, not yet in her 40s, is also in love with him, but she deliberately waits for him to approach her while he, essentially, gets Grace out of his system.

Stage actress Violet Heming is a strikingly lovely woman, very glamorous and graceful. I could stare at her all day. But she’s not the best actress in the world, and her frozen smile seems to be her only emotion.

During a performance for the King of France, a would-be assassin strikes. No one is hurt but Monty loses his hearing from the loud concussion. This means he suddenly can no longer play the piano, which was a little unbelievable, but whatever.

Monty’s hearing loss is the beginning of some of the most tedious 60-odd minutes I’ve ever sat through in a movie. First, we watch as everyone slowly writes notes to Monty to communicate with him. Then we watch as the doctor, who says Monty will be deaf the rest of his life, talks to him about lip reading. After a few months when Monty has learned the skill, we get to watch him blah blah blah on about lip reading to everyone who approaches him. It’s not the first time I’ve watched an early talkie adapted from a stage play where the dialogue feels like it’s right out of a text book, as though the whole purpose of the play was to be educational.

By the way, Arliss never looks at anyone’s lips while “lip reading.” He looks right at their eyes, never at the lips, and apparently no one involved in the film corrected him. His delivery is so awful it’s almost indescribable; he stops to pause every 2-3 words no matter how inappropriate. Earlier in the film when he could hear he would joke around quite a bit, but his jokes were so unfunny I honestly was never sure they were jokes. The only reason I think they were is that Arliss often looked straight at the camera as though he was playing a Vaudeville crowd. Was Arliss supposed to be a comedian?

Basically, I’m going to blame everything wrong in this film on Arliss. From everything I’ve read about this film it appears that he had a ton of creative control, and this does indeed feel like a vanity ego wank of a film. Arliss thought he was a lot more handsome, funny, and talented than he really was, at least in this film.

Grace takes care of a now-bitter and angry Monty for a while, but then goes on her annual vacation to Santa Barbara. In her circle of friends is Harold (Donald Cook), an old boyfriend still in love with Grace, who encourages her to move on from Monty because he’s too old and too bitter for her. She feels obligated to stay with Monty, though, until she realizes she still loves Harold.

Meanwhile, Monty half-heartedly tries to jump out of a window but is stopped, then picks up the habit of looking at people in a nearby park with his binoculars. He reads their lips and, in the case of a young couple that hopes God helps them with their health and money problems, he snidely helps them himself to prove there is no God. Ironically (snort!) he ends up doing a lot of charity for people and regains his faith.

In the park after returning from Santa Barbara, Grace tells Harold she has to go back to George out of what basically amounts to obligation and pity, but George reads her lips from a distance and realizes what’s going on. He lets her go back to Harold who she really loves, and it’s implied Mildred is his new love.

There, I just saved you 80 long boring minutes.

There’s not much to say about this film. It’s Bette’s first film with Warner Bros after she left Paramount, and while she’s clearly a much better actress than she was a year earlier in “The Bad Sister”, she’s so underused and miscast that it’s pathetic. Maybe “miscast” isn’t the right word, but she most certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who would fall in love with a freakishly hideous man 42 years her senior who turns homicidally bitter the moment something bad happens.

There were no decent sets to gawk over, and while Bette’s outfits were worthwhile, they put her in hats throughout most of the movie. That’s not a fashion move I agree with. Ray Milland is in an early uncredited role as Eddie, one of the people helped by Monty once he starts spying on them and invading their privacy for their own good. Harry Stubbs from “The Locked Door” and “Alibi” has a very small role, as does Hedda Hopper.

Aaaaand that’s about it for any possible interest one might have in this film.

But, I did notice something while watching this movie. Movie Geek Alert! Watch! As I prove something no one cares about! Thrill! As I astound you with my nerdiness!

The photo on the left is all over the ‘net and always attributed to “The Rich Are Always With Us”, but I am almost positive that’s not the right movie. That leopard print number is the coat Bette wears in “The Man Who Played God.” You can tell it’s the same coat because the leopard pattern is exactly the same. It’s very distinctive and I have nerdily marked it in red to illustrate my point. So there you go, this promo photo is from “The Man Who Played God.” Use this trivial knowledge for good, not for evil.

And now to end this post, here is a gallery of a few photos I found online:

Courtesy Dr Macro’s collection