Monthly Archives: February 2010

Bette Davis Project #8: “Dark Horse” (1932)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the Bette Project, but that’s not for lack of watching movies. It’s because reality sucks and working a real job pays more than blogging. I know, I was surprised to find that out, too.

“The Dark Horse” (1932) was on TCM last November during their series of films about political elections, and that’s exactly what “Dark Horse” is about. The Progressive Party of an unnamed state finds themselves deadlocked between 2 candidates when nominating their gubernatorial candidate. The delegates who support one candidate get the brilliant idea to nominate a dark horse to split the vote, so they randomly select someone from the roster. The delegates who support the other candidate decide voting for the dark horse will help their candidate win — I confess I didn’t understand a bit of why either of their plans were supposed to work — and the inevitable happens: the dark horse candidate gets the nomination.

The dark horse candidate is Hicks (Guy Kibbee), a simple-minded goofball who doesn’t understand a thing about politics. Actually, the entire beginning of the film makes it clear that they have contempt for any “regular” people who are involved in the electoral process. Kibbee was portrayed as a hick, right down to giving him the name Hicks, and other delegates were shown in a short montage which specifically made fun of them being hicks and rubes as well. They were all stupid and all very intentionally meant to point out how bad our electoral system is when people like them can affect elections.

After the fiasco of nominating Hicks, the powers that be still want to win the election but fear it is hopeless. That’s when Kay Russell (Bette Davis) suggests a genius campaign manager she knows. Said campaign manager is Hal Blake (Warren William), who is currently in jail. They decide to bail him out and see what he can do to get Hicks elected.

Bette’s character Kay at first seems to be a campaign worker, then a secretary, then a low-level campaign manager. It’s very confusing, but this film is all over the place and never manages to settle down long enough to make sense. Bette, again, is put in a part that’s truly made for another actress. Her real personality is too confident and down to earth for a role that relegates her to little more than the pretty-faced, mandatory female interest. Further, in 1932 she made 9 movies; between being so early in her career and being spread so thin, it is very easy to see why she couldn’t give her all in every film. Since she does so well in so many others from that year — “Cabin in the Cotton”, “The Rich are Always With Us”, and “Three on the Match” in particular — I’m very willing to forgive her weak performances. Another uninspired performance and film from 1932 is “Hell’s House,” coming soon to a Bette Davis Project near you.

Hal has nothing but contempt for Hicks, who is the target of the only halfway decent line of dialogue in the film: “Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.” Again, this is funny but not fair, as Hicks is portrayed as more simple and silly than dangerously stupid.

Hal brings his own baggage into the political campaign by continuously dodging the law for not paying alimony to his ex-wife Maybelle (Vivienne Osborne). The ex-wife is, of course, a horrible shrew who doesn’t need the money and is harassing poor Hal who just doesn’t deserve this treatment. Except Hal spends a lot of time in jail, he rigs elections, he creates misleading news articles and publicity stunts for money. And, despite having this money and being legally obligated to pay alimony, no matter how “unfair” he thinks it is, he still won’t pay.

More evidence of Hal not being a nice guy is when he convinces Hicks to recite a speech written by a president (which one now escapes me) 100 years earlier and pass it off as his own at the big debate. Hal is only saved by the fact that the opponent Underwood (played by the ubiquitous Edison look-alike Berton Churchill) coincidentally reads the exact same speech first, and of course he humiliates Underwood about passing off another man’s speech as his own, as though it wasn’t what Hal himself was going to do.

Later, Hal finds out Maybelle is “seeing” Hicks on the side. He decides to trap Maybelle to get out of alimony, while at the same time rescuing Hicks from the inevitable scandal. Maybelle meets Hicks in a motel cabin across the state lines and the spend the night playing strip poker. Hicks, being dumb, loses every hand and is in his one-piece winter underwear when Hal arrives. Hal’s sidekick Joe (Frank McHugh) spirits Hicks out the back just as the police arrive. Hal tries to pass Maybelle off as his fiancee, but the cops aren’t pleased with him violating the Mann Act,so Hal marries Maybelle right then to keep from being jailed again for transporting a woman across state lines for sexual purposes.

You tell me how Maybelle is the whore in this situation, because that’s exactly how the movie plays it. The movie tells us Hal marrying a woman he doesn’t love just to protect the Progressive Party’s dimwitted candidate, to stay out of jail, and to ultimately get his paycheck from the Progressives is funny. A crabby woman who wants her legally-owed alimony and has sex with whomever she wants, well she’s a whore, darlin’. Riiight.
As Joe hurries Hicks away from the cabin, we get the obligatory pre-code naughtiness: Hicks’ underwear gets caught on a barbed wire fence and the crotch rips. He also has a sheet around him, and Joe quips that if he’s spotted wearing a sheet, at least he’ll get the “KKK vote.”

Anyway, Kay — who you haven’t heard about during this summary because she doesn’t freakin’ do anything in this film — is upset that Hal married Maybelle when he was supposed to marry her. You don’t say. But then Hicks wins the election, and the film ends with Hal running to Reno for a quickie divorce. Pleasant.

I think this film was supposed to be a spoof of the problems of the electoral system: A stupid, inexperienced man can be put into office by the actions of a dishonest felon. But early WB films have this strange insistence on making the star of their show glamorous, likable and good, despite the actions of the character. Hal Blake is an asshole but Warren William is debonair, suave and lovable, for example, and it just doesn’t work here. It’s the same principle behind having female leads who are supposed to be old, ugly, ill, or wounded still look fabulous, or poor characters wearing expensive clothes and living in nice houses. Bette, of course, was known for being very willing to make herself look bad if the character called for it, which may be why I’m judging “Dark Horse” so harshly.

“The Dark Horse” newspaper add from warren-william.com

 

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Camille (1921)

“Camille” is ridiculous, melodramatic, unbelievable, silly, amazing, wonderful, beautiful, and mesmerizing. This 1921 film is a thin version of the Dumas classic, mildly modified for a modern audience, used only as a means to showcase glamour, style, and expression. I first heard about “Camille” when shahn at sixmartinis mentioned it a couple of years ago. Recently, D for Doom of Cult Movie Reviews recommended it for its art deco sets, also mentioning the silent could be found on the DVD for the Garbo-Taylor version. It’s a very nice print, too, surprisingly good for the year. There is also a Grapevine Video version, and while I haven’t seen it, those of us who want to avoid the Garbo version would probably rather have their video. Ahem.


While I have seen Nazimova in two of her 1940s supporting roles, “Camille” was the first silent Nazimova movie I’ve watched. It was an absolute revelation; I have never seen the camera love someone with such wholehearted abandon as it loved Alla Nazimova. Valentino is adored by the camera as well. He spends the full length of the film either staring straight ahead or flaring his nostrils and looking disgustingly gorgeous while doing so.

Infamous Parisian courtesan Marguerite and naive, rich young man Armand fall in love. She is ill and unhappy in her opulent but decadent life.


Armand takes her away. After a blissful spring together in the countryside, Armand’s father arrives to tell Marguerite that she cannot stay with his son, her past will ruin Armand’s future. Marguerite realizes she must make Armand believe she has betrayed him so he will move on. When their paths cross in Paris months later, Armand is cruel to the woman he thinks cares nothing for him.


The cinematography may seem a little pedestrian, but compared to other films I’ve seen from the early 1920s, it was well done. They were not subtle about making parallels, as you can tell from the two screencaps above: The first is when Armand initially approaches Marguerite to declare his love, while the latter is Armand approaching her after her insincere betrayal.

I knew the ending — we all know the ending — and yet I cried my eyes out. There is something to be said about a movie that tells you directly that it is manipulating you, yet you still freely allow yourself to be manipulated.

And the sets. My gods, the sets. Marguerite’s Paris apartment is an art deco wonder. Those camellia flowers you see on the title card are used all over her apartment:


This is a large glass wall that separates the living area from the bedroom. I love how the lights look like bubbles floating about. In reality, the small circles are reflections from the hanging living room lights, and the big circles are the neon from her bedroom decorations showing through the curtain.


Stylized camellias everywhere. It’s beautiful but it’s also a reminder that she’s the lady of the camellias, the kept woman who has to maintain a certain aura about herself or the rich guys will lose interest.


The dining area is a large glass dome with flower-shaped lights around the archway. It’s snowing outside while they dine, and I couldn’t help but shiver while imagining the cold coming in through all that glass.

The club where Marguerite later runs into Armand again is pure early-20s European hedonism:


Natacha Rambova can be thanked for the amazing set design on “Camille.” Natacha is mostly known as a crazy woman, a rumored lesbian who was in a “lavender marriage” with Rudy and who nearly ruined his career. But experience has taught me that most of the women who “almost ruined” their famous male partners did no such thing, and that gossip about the sexuality of stars often trumps reality in the minds of fans, so I’m not inclined to blindly believe the hype about her. Maybe it’s 100% true, maybe it isn’t. All I know is that her art deco designs are vastly influential, iconic, and largely unknown nowadays.

“Camille” somehow ends up being entirely a Nazimova vehicle, which makes the ending very strange. The editing has Armand finding a part of Marguerite’s will stating that a book she was given by Armand should be returned to him after her death, yet she’s still alive and still holding the book. He never shows up to see her on her deathbed or after she’s passed. I suspect the part with the will was moved earlier so Nazimova could have the last scene of the film.

Dr. Macro’s page of “Camille” pictures and lobby cards. Not many, but they are all beautiful.

 

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Marie Prevost Project: The Racket (1928)


“The Racket” (1928) was shown recently on TCM in February, 2010. The screencaps I had in this post were from an old VHS copy, so I replaced them with better caps on March 25, 2010. For the most part, the text of this post has not changed, but in a few places I have added a few new thoughts to what I originally wrote.

This post contains spoilers for “The Racket”, so if you want to wait until you see the movie for yourself, don’t read any further!

Marie Prevost and Bette Davis are the objects of my two current movie projects, but unfortunately I’ve learned a tough lesson while trying to watch all of their films: Some of their films are remarkably, embarrassingly, teeth-grindingly bad. It was a tough lesson to learn but a good one, I think, as it’s forced me to work harder to find the gems amongst the rubble. When I pop a DVD into the player, I hope there will at least be some tiny bit of interest to find in the film. Maybe a young pre-fame actor will have a small part in the movie or the sets will be 10 lbs of art deco awesome in a 5 lbs bag, it doesn’t really matter as long as it makes the movie worthwhile. Nowadays, it’s all I expect.

It might sound bitter to have such low expectations of films before I even watch them, but I prefer to think it’s not so much cynical as realistic. It also means I appreciate the good films better when I stumble across them.

“The Racket” (1928) is one of those good films.

Well over a decade ago, when I was a newbie to silent films, I asked on alt.movies.silent if there were any silent film noirs or early precursors of the genre. No one had any concrete examples, although several people mentioned some crime dramas as being “proto” noir. In the past I’ve posted about early talkies “Alibi” (1929) and “The Locked Door” (1930), both of which fall into what I’d consider the proto noir category. “The Racket” is not only silent but a year earlier, making it the earliest proto noir I’ve seen thus far.

“The Racket” premiered on TCM back in 2004 as part of their Howard Hughes festival. The 2004 showing was the first time it had been seen in several decades, as the film was presumed lost until it was found in Hughes’ estate after he died. The film was restored in a joint project between TCM and UNLV, and the print is lovely. I’m not a fan of restoring intertitles by replacing all the frames with a single cleanest frame — you can tell the picture is static when they do that, and it’s very jarring — but that is my only (nitpicky) complaint about the restoration.

“The Racket” has shown on TCM at least twice since then, most recently in 2010, but also in the summer of 2008 when it showed on Silent Sunday Nights and I missed it, resulting in a bit of a temper tantrum on my part. I am not proud of this fact, but I shan’t apologize, either. I was so disappointed because I had seen the first few minutes of the movie back in 2004 but didn’t stick around for the rest. I was a naive waif who thought TCM reran every movie at least once a year. Hahaha.

So I settled in and started to watch the movie, excited to hear Bob Osborne talk about Marie Prevost for the first time. Except he barely mentioned her at all, and when he did, you know what? He pronounced her name “Provost.”

Provost. Really, Bob? Really? I wonder if he did the same thing in 2008. The next showing of “The Racket” won’t have an intro or outro, which I guess I should be thankful for.

The music for “The Racket” is by the esteemed Robert Israel, and anyone who has seen silent films has heard Israel’s scores. I recently re-watched “The Block-Heads” and his score was, as they almost always are, very good. So why the score for “The Racket” sucks so bad, I have no idea. Early in the film Nick Scarsi (Louis Wolheim) enters into a scene quietly and dramatically, appearing out of the shadows, but the music is a very lighthearted, reedy affair that mimics a jazz score. It’s completely inappropriate. Later at a police station, the music is a silly, undignified march.

At this point I was barely 5 minutes into the film and extremely disappointed by the work of 2 Bobs who weren’t even in the film. I was so distracted, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. I know, I sound fussy and temperamental, but when it comes to films I am fussy and temperamental. Yet I don’t ask for much. I just want film historians to pronounce Marie’s name properly and I want music that at least tries to fit the action on the screen. That’s all.

The cinematography and set design in “The Racket” is far more advanced than any other silent I’ve seen.

These complex, detailed sets of realistic industrial and urban scenes are common enough by the early 1930s but quite rare in silents. Originally I had placeholder screencaps here, but added better caps in March, 2010. You can see more detail in these. I love the optometrist’s bright eyeglasses sign and the geometric design on the machinery in Nick’s bootleg booze factory.

“The Racket” is about police Capt. James McQuigg, played by Thomas Meighan, ostensibly the star of the show. When I first saw the film, I felt Meighan’s performance was bland while his mannerisms were broad, which was a weird combination that simply didn’t work for me. The 3rd time I viewed the film, I really changed my mind about Meighan. There’s a subtlety to his facial expressions and his performance that I honestly think I couldn’t see because of the old, poor quality copy I had. That’s my story, anyway. The more I saw his eyes flicker in some moments, his teeth bared in others, I realized Meighan wasn’t really the weak link in this film at all.

McQuigg is on a quest to take down Nick Scarsi and his bootlegging racket. That night, Scarsi and his boys decide to start ‘legging in competitor Spike Corcoran’s territory. McQuigg knows that there will be trouble and plans to follow the bootleggers. Meanwhile, Scarsi tries to distract McQuigg by inviting him to brother Joe Scarsi’s party.

Nick’s delivery of illicit hooch into Corcoran’s territory goes awry and one of his men, Chick, is arrested. Later that night, McQuigg shows up at Joe’s party to gloat about the arrest of Chick, only to find he has already been bailed out.


Blonde torch singer Helen (Marie Prevost) sings to Joe at the party. Helen finds him cute but also knows that he’s Nick’s educated and rich younger brother. Nick chases her off as a no good “gold digger” and humiliates her in front of the audience, but Nick soon discovers Helen is stronger than she appears. His anger only strengthens her determination to land his brother Joe.


Sigh. Marie is so pretty in this film. I’m a big fan of the wild and puffy blonde ‘do favored by harlots and hussies in the late 1920s. (If you want to see what I mean about how the details of the film were lost in the old copy I first watched, compare the above screencap with the previous one I had.)

Spike Corcoran, the ‘legger who covers the territory Nick Scarsi just tried to infringe on, shows up at the party. He and his men are in the mood for revenge and quietly surround Nick’s table. Then the cops show up and surround Spike’s men. In the standoff, Nick shoots Spike while his boys do a great job of covering it up. McQuigg takes Nick in but Nick is bailed out quickly just like his man earlier that night. Before he leaves, McQuigg tells him it’s the last murder he’s going to get away with in his district, and he’s apparently right: Nick pulls strings and gets McQuigg transferred way out into the boonies.

The press wants the story about McQuigg’s transfer, so reporters Miller and Pratt (Skeets Gallagher and Lee Moran, respectively) camp out at his new sub-sub-suburban police station. McQuigg won’t talk, but they get some fun out of newbie reporter Ames, fresh from The Omaha Bee. If I owned a newspaper, I’d call it The Bee. No lie. Ames is so new the only coat he has is his college frat rat coat, and the older, drunken, veteran reporters give him a hard time. Eventually Miller and Pratt get the brilliant idea of tricking Nick Scarsi into telling them the story, so they head out to find the gangster.


Scarsi is at Spike’s funeral when Miller and Pratt set themselves nearby and stage whisper that McQuigg told them Scarsi had him transferred because he was scared. McQuigg said no such thing, but Nick thinks it’s true. He replies to the reporters that he just wants McQuigg gone until the elections are over, elections which Nick has apparently rigged.

That night, Scarsi’s brother Joe is on a date with Helen. He proposes to her, but it’s a “hey baby, let’s do it since we’re engaged” proposal and not a genuine one. When she won’t give it up, he kicks her out of the car. It’s a dark, near-deserted road, except for a cop who comes along and sees Helen ejected from the car. Immediately he knows what’s up and goes to bust Joe’s chops, but Joe speeds off in a panic, runs down a woman, and crashes into a guard rail. Way to not panic, Joe.

He’s arrested and taken to the police station which happens to be McQuigg’s new police station. McQuigg locks Joe up and moments later jails Helen, too, in his overzealousness. Joe is bailed out almost immediately. He tells Nick that Helen has agreed to testify against him about the hit-and-run, so Nick comes to the station to get Helen, and by “get” I mean “murder, shoot, and/or kill”. Another policeman is at the station and, in a terrific, tense scene, confronts Nick and stops him in his tracks by telling him just why he doesn’t like crooks:


Oh, slang, you are so fickle. Needless to say, Nick “bangs” the cop who has confronted him. Newbie reporter Ames, who befriended Helen while she sits in a cell, returns in time to see Nick shoot the policeman. He helps get Nick arrested, but again a bogus writ of habeas corpus arrives within minutes, courtesy of a huge bribe paid to the DA. McQuigg tells the DA that he can’t let Nick go without looking bad in the upcoming elections. The DA knows it’s true, but he’s too scared to do anything since the only witness was Ames, and he knows the mob is going to kill Ames to keep him from testifying. They’d kill the DA, too, if they had to.


Helen is worried about Ames for the exact same reason, so she talks her way into speaking with Scarsi before Ames has to officially sign a report. Helen quickly tricks Scarsi into confessing, saving both Ames and the DA from having to make potentially life-ending choices. The tough torch singer and the determined cop share a moment before she leaves, a moment where she reflects on just how “good” the good guys actually are. And on that note of moral ambiguity, the film fades out.

***

 

There is a wee bit of delicious decor to be found in “The Racket” (I added a new picture here on 3/25/10):

I often look for old product placement in movies, not for any historical reason or for research, but just because I like to look at old advertisements and product boxes. This is a bundle of items Ames brings Helen while she’s in prison. Even though the items appear upside down in the film, the fact that they appear in a slightly lingering shot with their brand names visible makes me think this is product placement. Product placement was certainly in use by 1928, as evidenced by the famous Hershey’s incident in “Wings” a year earlier.

Here you can see Mennen Borated Talcum, Squibb’s Dental Cream, and Prophylactic Toothbrush. The Mennen can went through many design changes over the years, but this auction seems to have had the exact can shown in the film. Despite what Modern Mechanix blog says, you can’t convince me that either “prophylactic” or “mouth to mouth” were deliberate sexual innuendo.

In all, I’ve only seen about 8 of Marie’s films, and this is by far the best one yet. You don’t have to be a fan of Marie to like the movie; if you’re a fan of Meigham, Louis Wolheim, or even Skeets Gallagher you will like this film. Like silents? Like crime dramas? Have 80-odd minutes to kill? Watch this movie. You will not be sorry.

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Recently Watched: The World Is Yours Edition

There are a lot of classic and must-see films I haven’t seen yet. Time and life has its limits, and that’s the excuse I’m going to stand by when I’m asked why it took me until 2010 to watch “Scarface” (1983).

I am quite chagrined by this fact, don’t get me wrong. As I was watching this movie, I discovered “Scarface” was influenced by the “Godfather” films and Hitchcock — this is DePalma, after all — but I also realized that the reverse was true, that dozens of films have been influenced by “Scarface,” especially Quentin Tarantino’s films. In the same way you cannot completely get “Jackie Brown” without having seen “Coffy” or “Foxy Brown,” you can’t fully understand “Pulp Fiction” without having seen “Scarface.” Huh. Who knew.

Is now a good time to mention I still haven’t seen the original 1932 version? I don’t know why, it was on TCM about 500 times in the last year and it has Boris Karloff. Again, the universe has seen fit to create limits to our time, and that’s my excuse.

There is nothing I can say about “Scarface” that hasn’t already been said. I was prepared for a lot more gore. Not that there isn’t plenty already, but like “Bonnie and Clyde” before it, while it was excessive for the time it has been far surpassed since. I was relatively comfortable with the gore, which was nice as I’ve recently been grossed the hell out by a season 4 “X-Files” episode and was in no mood to feel faint and nauseous again.


The film has some terrific points, mainly in how it captured the early 1980s culture so well. Most performances were terrific, from the top-billed stars to the smaller parts. But was anyone else irritated by all the Italian-Americans playing Cubans with iffy accents and overuse of the word “mang?”

Also, I loved the cinematography and set design. Modern films often don’t focus on these elements much, not like in older films where every set was fabulous. Frank Lopez’ apartment is a futuristic wonder:

While watching the final scene, I caught a glimpse of the statues mentioned in the article The Secret Life of Objects, which I’ve linked to before and recommend highly if you haven’t read it yet. So I capped this shot of the statue, shown on the right:

only to go back to the article and find that they capped the exact same moment. Other than the color saturation, it’s the same. Completely unintentional on my part, although I can’t vouch for the intentions of my unconscious.

***

 

“Beat the Devil” (1953 per IMDb, 1954 per TCMdb) was on TCM a million times recently and yet, somehow, I never caught all of it. I rented the DVD and discovered the film is the public domain, which meant the print the DVD was made from was poor quality. Lots of scenes were too dark, there were serious saturation and bleeding issues, and in a couple of spots there were tracking issues from the tapes the film was dubbed off of. I can’t recommend the Westlake DVD version; perhaps some others out there are better. If you want to see “Beat the Devil,” try to find a copy from TCM or wait until it’s on again.

This was a wonderful film, expertly manipulated by John Huston and almost too clever for its own good. If you’ve seen “Beat the Devil” you’ll know how funny the poster is. It presents the film as though it was “Duel in the Sun” or some such melodramatic action flick. Instead, “Beat the Devil” is a spoof of crime capers, quite honestly a spoof of films like Huston’s own “Maltese Falcon.”

My first reaction was surprise, though, because Bogart and Lorre — who had both been so beautiful in 1941′s “Falcon” — looked decades older in “Devil” despite the passing of only 12 years between the films. Jennifer Jones, too, looked 15 years older than she had a mere 4 years earlier in “Madame Bovary.” Plus she had a weird lip movement issue with her upper lip, so much so I kept thinking I was watching Gloria Grahame talk.

Speaking of mouth movements, I noticed Bogey having some issues with his mouth and teeth. The IMDb says he had been in a bad car accident during filming, injuring his face and mouth severely, and had to be dubbed by a mimic: Peter Sellers. However, other sites indicate that Bogart was simply unavailable for dubbing, and Sellers is reported in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers to have said he dubbed in Bogart plus 3 other voices during post-production, with no mention of Bogey needing specific help because of injuries.

Early in the film, there is a scene which is so similar to a scene in “The Maltese Falcon” with Sam Spade, Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer that I worried this was a case of a director rehashing his prior work, something that happens with alarming frequency. I was happy to find out my worries were unfounded as it became clear this was a satire. In the film, Huston carefully omits a few details and doesn’t let the audience know entirely what is going on, keeping us a little unsteady, a little on edge the entire time. There is a wonderful scene where Jennifer Jones and Gina Lollobrigida talk shop, as it were, and another scene where the principals are being questioned by officials in a Northern African detention center that I swear to you was directly mimicked in “Topkapi” (1964).

Both “Scarface” and “Beat the Devil” are considered cult films, but I have to say I don’t know why. They are both excellent films, influential and terrific, and plopping them into the “cult” category merely dilutes the idea of what “cult” really means.

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Recently Watched: The Civilization of Maxwell Bright (2005)

Spoilers, adult concepts, and bad language abound.

“The Civilization of Maxwell Bright” is a movie that tries hard to do the right thing, but it falls back on the old, lazy, entrenched bigotries so prevalent in Hollywood that, despite being an indie film, it might as well have been a $10M studio film for all the cultural “good” it does.

Maxwell Bright (Patrick Warburton) is a fucking asshole. He’s an entitled, white, well-off, misogynist electronics salesman who we first see running naked out of his house, chasing his girlfriend who has just hit him on the head. It wasn’t a debilitating blow, obviously, because he’s capable of violently screaming at her about how she wants to spend a selfish 45 minutes having sex. Also, she doesn’t give him enough blow jobs like he deserves. The police arrive and both officers think he’s the aggressor, which Max blames on them being female and irrational. The girlfriend then jams a garden implement into his chest.

A couple of weeks pass and Max is acting out and berating his employees. His lifelong friend and floor manager Arlis (Eric Roberts, one of my favorite actors) defends him. That night, Arlis and other friends join Max at his house for poker. They all slam women in extremely stereotypical, sexist ways, and then Max has an “epiphany”. I wish there was a better word for it, because he didn’t so much have an epiphany as come up with a stupid, paranoid theory that he thinks explains why his life sucks: Women in the U.S. are taught to be manipulative bitches in college, while Asian women are taught to please men and do anything for them. Therefore, he decides to get an Asian mail order bride.

This opening act is the perfect example of why the film fails. The encounter on the lawn with the police officers is an illustration of the failed post-sexist rhetoric that pervades allegedly progressive entertainment, media, and most especially Internet discussion. A discussion about domestic violence occurs and it takes 0.001 seconds before some guy shows up shouting “Women sometimes hit men too! Why aren’t women punished like men, huh?!” They relate individual anecdotal accounts of how a man was a victim This One Time ™ and insist that proves that men are victims of reverse sexism.


That’s how every scene is played in the film. I watched the entire movie thinking there would be payoff, that we’d see some acknowledgment that Max wasn’t a completely innocent victim, that any police officer regardless of gender would have worried about his girlfriend’s safety. I mean, there’s a 6’4″, 250 lbs man screaming at a woman half his size, telling her in a threatening manner that she doesn’t give him enough blow jobs. But no, we’re supposed to see Max as a victim and as a metaphor for the entire U.S. culture. Post-sexist rhetoric revels in grand, sweeping judgments about all American women based on anecdata selected for maximum male victimhood, and this film is a fictionalized version of said anecdata.

The film also fails because it indulges in the worst kind of tokenism, starting with the commercially artificial group of friends that include one black man, one Asian, and everyone else white. The guy who sells Max his wife is a stereotypical, urbane, effete British man. When Max digs up a graveyard, the cop lets him get away with it because he’s a good ol’ Southern boy who has dug graves himself [1]. Buddhism is misrepresented for comedic effect and is legitimized only when it gets the seal of approval from a Christian preacher in a small hole-in-the-wall church who dubs Mai Ling “the lamb of God”.

I get ahead of myself a bit. Max buys Mai Ling (Marie Matiko), 28-year-old Chinese woman, via slaver wife broker Wroth (Simon Callow). At first it seems Max shapes up a bit when Mai Ling arrives, but later that night as she meditates, he throws a pillow at her head and tells her he didn’t buy her just so she could meditate. The next day he hosts poker night and all the friends applaud Mai Ling’s service to them. Even the token Asian friend, who earlier had given Max the evil side-eye when he ranted about how Asian women were trained up real good, hoots and hollers at her like she’s a fucking parlor trick.

And that’s how this film goes. It revels in the basest kind of bigotry but has a few hints here and there that the story is going somewhere, only to let you down when you realize someone just edited in a meaningful look but forgot to follow up on it.


Mai Ling, who is nothing more than a caricature of the obedient Asian woman, puts up with everything Max does. Her purpose in the film is to rehabilitate Max because he “deserves” it, according to her ancient and mystical and super cool religion which has karma and shit. Seriously, you guys, this was awful. The lack of understanding of what Buddhism is really about makes “Maxwell Bright” look like a thread on the LiveJournal buddhism community. Both are examples of Westerners who think Buddhism seems really neat, who maybe read a book about meditation once, and who think tolerating abusive, sociopathic, violent behavior makes them tolerant just like Buddhists are. Then they pat themselves on the back for being so tolerant and just awesome Buddhists, you guys!

Mai Ling’s other purpose is to portray American women as having lost their way, with reasons galore for how buying and selling daughters and arranged marriages work better than women having free will. Not joking.

Max’s business fails so he very rationally holes himself up with a semi-automatic weapon and shoots the TVs to keep the repo men from getting them. His employees — all men — are saying “Don’t shoot him, he’s not going to hurt anyone, he just wants to shoot televisions!” and acting like the female police officers are the ones who are irrational. Max shouts at the policewomen that he won’t be arrested “by some bull dyke bitch cunts.” He’s then felled by a panic attack mimicking a heart attack, only to find out he’s riddled with cancer on multiple organs.

Mai Ling then has her third purpose: To rehabilitate Max before he dies. When Max comes to understand that he’s been cruel to a lot of women, he’s immediately excused by Lamb Of God Buddhist Nun Feng Shui Expert Mai Ling who says women have screwed him, which is why he’s the way he is.

There are good points to this film. I didn’t just stick with it because I thought there would be a decent resolution, although that was the main reason. The first and biggest positive point about this film is Patrick Warburton, who absolutely kills with his performance. He plays Max as the paranoid, ridiculous asshole he is, as a man without any redeemable qualities whatsoever. There’s really no other way to play Max, although director David Beaird obviously disagrees. In fact, Warburton’s performance undermines the labored metaphors Beaird was working for, and I consider that a good thing.

Eric Roberts is wonderful in the film, just spot on. His Arlis is the only guy who calls Max on his bigotries, and he is frequently the only one who knows lines have been crossed at all; the other characters apparently know nothing of boundaries. His niceness, acceptance, and tolerance are bashed constantly in the film, and again that’s something that could have been used so effectively in the film but was just ignored.

What I thought was interesting but obviously unintentional was how the women in this film acted. They put up with everything as though the abuse and insults were just how life was for them, and speaking from experience, that’s often the truth. Women in professional situations silently moved on when they were called “fucking cunts” by Max, although the oncologist does show a momentary flash of anger. She immediately follows with compassion and understanding, just ignoring Max’s outbursts, which again is what women are expected to do.

One woman, though, stands up to him. A police officer arrives when his furniture is being repo’ed. She saw Max on the news as he shot up televisions in his store and remembers his rant about how “those feminist dyke bitches are trying to ruin men”, and tells him so when he starts calling her sexist names. When his friends defend him saying he’s sick, she says, “Good. I hope he dies.” Then his friends yell at her for stepping over the line, but note that none of them yelled at Max during any of the dozen times he yelled variations on “bitch cunt dyke whore feminist twat” at women he didn’t like. Like the girlfriend at the beginning of the film, this was intended as an example of how women screwed Max over and caused him to be this way.

The film could have done well as a dark comedy if they had just stayed on that path and focused on the relationships between American males and the slow, ugly disintegration of our male-dominated culture (which my husband insists “The Venture Bros” is about… but I digress). Instead, someone felt a story about a horrible human being buying a woman so she could save him from American women who aren’t capable of compassion was the story to tell.

[1] My dad is buried in the Ozark, Missouri city cemetery. The cemetery has signs on the gates warning people that they can’t go digging up their relatives without a permit from City Hall. I am not making this up.