Big Brown Eyes

I was jolted by a scene of violence in “Big Brown Eyes” (1936). What starts out as a cute if somewhat formulaic comedy starring a sparring Cary Grant and Joan Bennett turns sour and casts a pall over the remainder of its 76-minute running time, a pall the film never quite recovers from.

Gangster/Jewel Thief Lloyd Nolan is having a discussion with fellow jewel robbers on a park bench when an argument erupts between the two parties. Two gangsters knock Nolan down and he responds by drawing a gun and firing at their fleeing selves. He misses but instead hits a baby carriage and kills the infant.

What was director and co-writer Raoul Walsh thinking?

Killing an infant seems unusually harsh to get a plot point across. Why make the victim an infant? I’m not trying to be facetious, but couldn’t an adult passerby have been killed instead?

Later on for a second or two, its fun seeing the nattily-dressed Nolan in court, casually trimming his fingernails and without a care in the world. Thanks to a fix he knows he’s going to be acquitted. But then we see the grieving mother, dressed in black, silently weeping and when the not guilty verdict is read she can barely stand and has to be helped out of the courtroom.

It just sucks all the joy out of the movie.

Cary Grant plays Detective Sergeant Danny Barr, who’s trying to crack a ring of jewel thieves. When not detecting, he’s getting a haircut and manicure at a gloriously Art Deco barber shop that reminds me of one featured in the wonderful Carole Lombard/Fred MacMurray film “Hands Across the Table” (1935).

Since both films come from Paramount, it would not surprise me if the same barber shop set was used. (While the film is a Walter Wanger production, if Wanger had a distribution arrangement with Paramount, its possible Paramount let him use some of their existing sets.)

Everyone seems to hang out in the barber shop, including members of the jewel thief ring, including Benny Battle (Douglas Fowley) and his seemingly respectable boss Richard Morey (Walter Pidgeon).

Danny and manicurist Eve Fallon (Joan Bennett) have an attraction for each other, but they seem to fight more than kiss. There’s one amusing scene where, with a door between them, Grant pretends to be romancing a woman in the hallway as Bennett listens in.

Benny Battle is attracted to Eve’s friend Bessie Blair (Isabell Jewell). (Alliteration will do that.) They meet in the park just before the shooting, so Bessie is able to I.D. Benny.

He won’t confess though, so (only in the movies) former manicurist turned crime beat reporter Eve concocts, very cleverly, a means to make Benny confess to the police and finger Lloyd Nolan.

In this movie, Cary Grant still isn’t THE Cary Grant, so he’s still in his learning stage. He does OK, I guess, but the seemingly effortless charm would come later. Still, he and Bennett work well together, though I enjoy more the other film they made together the same year, “The Wedding Present.”

Later in the movie, one of the gangsters who intimidates Bessie looks like a very young Morris Ankrum. IMDB does not list him as being in the cast, but it sure does look like him. You may not know the name, but you would surely recognize the face. Ankrum played generals in a slew of 1950s science fiction movies and played the judge in many a Perry Mason episode.

“Big Brown Eyes” is a trifle, and no more. The baby killing scene is very unpleasant and unfortunately it’s probably the most memorable thing in the movie. Not a very auspicious quality to be remembered for.

“Big Brown Eyes” is part of a very affordably-priced DVD collection titled “Cary Grant Screen Legend Collection). Other titles include “Thirty Day Princess” (1934) co-starring Sylvia Sidney”; “Kiss and Make Up” (1934) with Genevieve Tobin; “Wings in the Dark” (1935), an early pairing with Myrna Loy; and the aforementioned “Wedding Present.”

I haven’t seen most of these so I’m looking forward to watching the rest of these. It’s always interesting to see early appearances by future stars. These titles may not be essential Cary Grant, but as a bedrock to a great career, these efforts can’t be denied.

The Giant Claw

In honor of Thanksgiving I thought I would write about the biggest turkey of all - “The Giant Claw” (1957). I don’t mean that figuratively, but literally. The Giant Claw belongs to an extraterrestrial creature that looks like a giant turkey who flies around the world wrecking havoc. That is, those parts of the world where legendary cheap-o producer Sam Katzman could get matching stock footage from.

I know I will lose the respect of all who read this blog, but I thoroughly enjoyed “The Giant Claw.” After all, that giant bird is ridiculousness personified as it flies around doing battle with toy planes, chomping down on parachuting military men (yum!), picking up toy trains (twice!) and perching atop a plastic version of the United Nations building.

So why do I like this? I don’t know. I truly don’t know. It is a silly looking monster, I agree. But there are compensations. It moves fast (only 75 minutes), there are no wasted scenes, the romantic subplot is kept at a minimum, we get to see the bird munch on some teenage joyriders (always a good thing), and its just so gosh darn enjoyable.

Everyone in the cast is a veteran of this type of film. Leads are Jeff Morrow from “This Island Earth” (1955) and Mara Corday “Tarantula” (1955) and “The Black Scorpion” (1957). The military is represented by the ubiquitous Morris Ankrum, who played countless generals in 1950s giant monster movies.

Stock footage is familiar from numberless science fiction movies from the period, as are the music cues. It’s like a visit from an old friend.

Plus it includes one of my favorite pieces of stock footage of people running in panic – an old geezer wearing a hat barely keeping up with everyone else as they run away in panic.

I have a story about that footage. I first encountered that gentleman when, as a much younger lad, I saw the immortal giant grasshoppers attacking Chicago movie “Beginning of the End” (1957). Being young and naïve, I thought they had actually come to Chicago to film the movie. From behind the gentlemen looked like my grandfather who used to run like that. Maybe, just maybe, he was in the movie. They filmed the scenes at, say, Grant Park, and now he’s in a monster movie. How cool is that? Of course it wasn’t him, and dear old grandpa denied ever being in a movie with giant grasshoppers.

Little did I realize that it was stock footage, which I have since seen in lots of other 1950s science fiction movies. And there it is again, in “The Giant Claw.” I don’t know where that footage first came from, but if there were residual payments for stock footage, that old geezer must have bequeathed an estate equal to Bill Gates.

Rating for “The Giant Claw”: God forgive me, two and a half stars.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Zombies of Mora Tau

Despite a misspent youth watching every classic and not-so-classic horror and science fiction movie I could lay my little peepers on, I never managed to see “Zombies of Mora Tau” (1957), a Columbia “B” from cheapo producer Sam Katzman. In those pre-cable and home video days, the local stations in Chicago played an incredible assortment of horror pictures from Universal (Creature Features on Channel 9), Hammer (Channel 7), American International and Monogram (Channel 32 on Saturday afternoon and Screaming Yellow Theater on Friday evenings) and everything in between.

I saw a lot of them, but “Zombies of Mara Tau” never played on any of the stations. It probably wasn’t very good, but it was a black and white horror picture and it starred Allison Hayes from “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” (1958), the title intrigued me and I desperately wanted to see it.

I finally had the opportunity to watch it last night via a new DVD set devoted to Sam Katzman. The fact that such a set exists is mind-blowing to me, and one much appreciated (Thank you Sony).

It was pretty routine, and it was about what I expected, but I must say I enjoyed it. Running a trim 70 minutes, “Zombies of Mora Tau” deals with a group of characters looking for a treasure ship full of diamonds off the Africa coast. The ship is guarded by the deceased crewmen, zombies who protect the ship at all costs.

Actually the underwater scenes of the zombies walking on the ocean floor around the ship are quite eerie and have a nice dreamlike quality to them. The zombie attacks on land won’t make George Romero seek retirement, but they are par for the course for the era.

Most of all it’s a fun film. For young people raised on current horror films, the idea of a horror film being fun is probably anathema to them. But I think horror films can be fun, and I can imagine that 1957 matinee audiences felt they got their money’s worth.

In addition to Ms. Hayes, the cast includes Gregg Palmer, future John Wayne co-star and star of the immortal killer tree movie “From Hell It Came” (1957). (Boy, would I love to see that again. I haven’t seen that since a kid, I believe on Channel 32).

There’s also dependable Morris Ankrum (not playing a general this time, as he does in the other Katzman 1957 “classic” “The Giant Claw”.)

Who’s that in the opening scene, playing a chauffer who runs over a zombie in the middle of the road and doesn’t think anything of it, because “he’s one of them”? Why it’s frequent Three Stooges foil Gene Roth. A year later Gene would co-star in one of my favorite 1950s schlock B horror movies, “She Demons” (Nazi scientists experiment on beautiful South Seas native girls, turning them into hideous monsters until rescued by Irish McCalla, on leave from her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle television series. A splendid film.)

So far I’ve been enjoying the contents of the Sam Katzman collection. I thoroughly enjoyed “Creature with the Atom Brain” (1955). (Nazi scientists again, this time experimenting on dead gangsters, bringing them to life and giving them super-human strength. What’s not to like?)

I have yet to watch the aforementioned “The Giant Claw”, memorable for what is widely considered the worst looking monster – said to resemble a giant flying turkey. I saw it years and years ago and don’t remember it, but it can’t be worse than “Transformers” (2007).

The best film in the collection is considered “The Werewolf” (1956) and I’m saving that one for last.

All in all, a fine, fine set. I’m glad I have it and thrilled I finally got to see “Zombies of Mora Tau” after all these decades.

Rating for “Zombies of Mora Tau”: Two stars (but an enjoyable two stars, while recognizing the film’s limitations).