Black Moon

It’s always a treat to see a previously unscreened horror film from the 1930s-1950s.

TCM recently showed the rare “Black Moon” (1934), from Columbia Studios, a tale of voodoo and human sacrifice. The fact that it starred 1930s scream queen Fay Wray was another plus. I was really looking forward to this.

Sadly, “Black Moon” proved a disappointment in the horror movie sense, but I was still glad to have seen it. Like so many 1930s movies, it packs an amazing amount of incident in its short 68-minute running time. I may have been disappointed, but I wasn’t bored.

“Black Moon” starts out very promisingly. There’s a close-up of a woman looking unsettled as drums are heard steadily beating in the background. The camera pulls back and we see that the woman herself is beating on the drums, looking as if she’s in a trance while sitting in a very lavish apartment.

The woman turns out to be Juanita Perez (Dorothy Burgess) who grew up on an unnamed island in the Caribbean and is returning for a visit with her husband Stephen (Jack Holt) and young daughter Nancy (Cora Sue Collins). Stephen’s secretary Gail (Fay Wray) is in love with her boss and declines the opportunity to accompany the family on a working vacation, but agrees at Stephen’s urging.

Once on the island, the lure of voodoo overcomes Juanita and the nightly ceremonies cause her to revert to her days as a young woman on the island, where she was a voodoo priestess. She becomes so immersed in her voodoo lifestyle that in a trance she attempts to sacrifice her own daughter.

I really liked Holt’s interplay with his child. This is a very devoted, affectionate father, but not on a high saccharine level. The script shortchanges the Juanita character a bit. She’s a bit off throughout the whole movie, so when the voodoo overtakes her, it’s not too surprising. More contrast to her character would have been welcome.

The horror element is very slight. There’s no attempt to make the voodoo a supernatural entity, apart from some voodoo dolls on display. But there’s an undeniable mood to the story, courtesy cinematographer Joseph August. There’s real menace to the voodoo ceremonies on display here, with the writing bodies silhouetted against torches and fires. August provided the gorgeous black and white cinematography for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1941) and “Portrait of Jennie” (1948), which are two of the most striking-looking black and white features from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Director Roy William Neill remains one of the great unsung stylists of the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to all but one of the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, he also directed one of Boris Karloff’s best vehicles, “The Black Room” (1935), a fairy-tale horror film that looks much more expensive than it likely was. (Despite Frank Capra and the Oscar sweep for “It Happened One Night” (1934), Columbia was considered somewhat of a Poverty Row studio at the time).

But Fay Wray is lovelier than ever, which is always a plus. Like I said, while it’s never entirely satisfying, it was a real treat to see this one.

The wonderful folks at TCM have been showing quite a lot of these Columbia B’s of late and I’m having a blast watching them. Some of these haven’t been on TV for decades. I still have quite a few to watch on the piles of tapes to get through. There’s another Fay Wray starrer called “Ann Carver’s Profession” (1933), Thelma Todd in “Air Hostess” (1932), Ann Sothern and Neil Hamilton in “Blind Date” (1934) and a Budd Boetticher-directed mystery called “The Missing Corpse” (1944), which is supposed to be quite good. Long live TCM, the greatest television channel of all time.

Zeppelins in the Antarctic

Zeppelins are cool. I love seeing photos and films of these graceful vehicles floating over a cityscape. Even cooler (pun intended) are zeppelins in the Antarctic.

Before the Hindenburg blew up, zeppelins were reckoned to be the next big thing in air transportation.

Two movies in the early days of talkies celebrate zeppelins and the men who fly them. Of course, this being Hollywood, both movies shoehorn in the old standby, the love triangle – two men in love with the same woman. It’s too bad there aren’t enough women around. Without all that fighting over the same women, they might get more work accomplished. Of course, the movies would be a lot shorter.

In 1929, an independent production company called Tiffany-Stahl Productions gave us “The Lost Zeppelin” an ambitious look at a zeppelin’s attempt to reach the South Pole. Thanks to a terrific storm, the zeppelin crashes in the icy wilderness and a search party is formed to rescue them. The special effects are quite good here, as the zeppelin crashes into the mountains and tumbles to the ground, killing many of the crew. Even better is a sequence showing the zeppelin flying over the Caribbean through a storm, its massive shape silhouetted against the dark clouds and the massive, jagged lightning streaks.

Alas, the first 30 minutes or so of this 70-minute movie is taken up by the aforementioned love triangle, with stalwart Conway Searle married to Virginia Valli and supposed best friend Ricardo Cortez trying to win her affections for himself. None of the three leads are very appealing, and Valli is kind of annoying. Her high-pitched voice isn’t helped by the early crude, sound recording. If I was Cortez, I would have let his buddy Conway keep her and go out and find another woman.

The film’s sound effects are very crude and obvious. While watching it, it’s easy to joke about the wind machine sounding like something the Tiffany-Stahl sound engineer found at the local five and dime. But one must remember that sound movies were just a year old, so there was not a huge library of sounds effects tracks to choose from. Yet in its own satisfying way, it adds to the primitiveness of the film’s Antarctic locale.

I don’t know how successful the film was at the box office, but two years later fledgling Columbia Studios produced its most ambitious project to date, “Dirigible” with a very similar story of two men (Ralph Graves and Jack Holt), who fly dirigibles for the Army. Graves is forever flying off on a new assignment, leaving wife Fay Wray to wish he was more like his friend, dependable (and older) Jack Holt, who would love to comfort Fay on a more permanent basis.

Graves gets the assignment to fly to the South Pole in his bi-plane, where he crashes. Holt leads a rescue mission in the title vehicle in a race against time before Forbes is lost forever in the Antarctic wilderness.

The special effects are quite good here, and probably better than “The Lost Zeppelin.” The story is strictly formula, but the cast is quite likeable, thanks to director Frank Capra.
Formula is the key word here, as Graves Holt and Capra had previously made two service films very similar: “Submarine” (1929) and “Flight” (1930). I taped “Flight’ off TCM, but haven’t watched it yet, though I hope to soon.

Supposedly, exterior scenes of “Dirigible” were filmed at Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg later crashed and burned. These scenes of the dirigibles floating through the air with bi-planes buzzing around them look like something out of a pulp fiction fantasy, except that they’re real. Wonderful stuff here. I almost found myself looking for The Rocketeer flying around up there.

Rating for “The Lost Zeppelin”: Two stars.
Rating for “Dirigible”: Three stars

Below the Sea

What movie was released in 1933 and featured Fay Wray threatened by a giant, monstrous creature? If you guessed “King Kong” you would be correct.

But if you guessed “Below the Sea” you would also be correct.

Produced by Columbia Pictures, “Below the Sea” is one of those long-forgotten gems that TCM has been showing of late, thanks to their acquisition of rights to air Columbia titles.

I had never heard of “Below the Sea” before, but thanks to TCM I got to see it. It was a lot of fun.

“Below the Sea” tells of an expedition to search for a sunken, gold-laden World War I German submarine seven years after the war. Ralph Bellamy, in rare leading man status, heads the expedition, quickly butting heads with the expedition’s financial backer, the delectable Ms. Wray. Of course, they take an instant dislike to each other, but we know that won’t last long.

The first eight minutes or so of the movie are very interesting, being set during World War I on the submarine. All the dialogue is in German and there are no sub-titles. That struck me as a pretty modern touch for a 1933 movie.

The submarine’s commander is also along for the expedition, to show them where the submarine sank, but you just know he’s up to no good.

The film’s climax is pretty darn exciting as Fay and a crewmember are trapped in a diving bell that is attacked by a giant octopus. Good special effects are on display here as one of the giant tentacles snaps the diving bell line, causing the diving bell to sink to the ocean floor. Not only that, but the diving bell’s oxygen supply is slowly running out. Bellamy puts on a diving suit to dive down and re-hook the bell line; hard to do when he’s also fighting the octopus with an acetylene torch. The big drawback to the scene is lack of music. Composer Max Steiner demonstrated in “King Kong” how effective music can be to make fight scenes more exciting, but no matter. It’s still a marvelous sequence, and I was pretty amazed to watch it unfold.

It left me to wonder how many other B movie gems are out there that haven’t been shown in decades. Thanks to TCM, we’re able to see some of these jewels.

“Below the Sea” won’t re-write the history of movies, but it’s a very pleasant way to spend 75 minutes.

Rating for “Below the Sea”: Two and a half stars.