DVR Diary: LOVE ON THE RUN (1936)

This W.S. Van Dyke comedy is a midpoint between It Happened One Night and Too Hot to Handle in Clark Gable's evolution into a lovably amoral hero. As in the other films, Gable plays a reporter, and as in Too Hot he has a rival, here played by Franchot Tone. Gable draws the short end and has to cover the wedding of an American heiress (Joan Crawford, then Mrs. Tone) and some petty prince only to witness the bride bolting the ceremony. He latches on to her, keeping his vocation a secret as long as possible, as reporters must in such stories, while sending dispatches at every opportunity during their flight from London, which begins literally in an airplane Gable barely knows how to pilot. The pair quickly realize that the plane, belonging to an aristocratic aviator Tone is interviewing, actually is a vehicle for espionage. Thus begins a would-be merry chase across the continent, with Tone and the spies constantly butting in. The problem is that the mutual attraction of Gable and Crawford is taken for granted rather than plausibly developed, while their adventures are almost childishly silly, particularly their unlikely night in the Fontainebleau palace and their romp with a pixilated caretaker who takes them for ghostly royalty. Meanwhile, the film pauses every so often to showcase William Demarest's repetitive conniption fits as Gable's editor, while Tone, who must have found the whole experience humiliating, is made to look like a complete idiot throughout compared to the more worthy rival to Gable played by Walter Pidgeon in Too Hot to Handle. Where that film rises to a truly entertaining cartoonishness, Love on the Run seems merely as blandly corny as the worst you might expect from the era of Code Enforcement.  The sad part is that this made a profit,and the later film didn't.

Pre-Code Parade: THE FINGER POINTS (1931)

John Francis Dillon's film is typical of the first round of the Warner Bros. gangster cycle in that it ends with the protagonist dead. The gruesome twosome of W. R. Burnett, author of Little Caesar, and John Monk Saunders, the ace of doomed-aviator pictures, joined forces to craft a story ripped from the headlines. Their inspiration was the career and death of Jake Lingle, a mobbed-up reporter for the Chicago Tribune who'd been whacked the year before. Lingle was a Chicago native, but Warners' substitute Lingle would be played by Richard Barthelmess and thus comes to the big city from the South. Breckinridge Lee lands a job at the "world's greatest newspaper" on the strength of a letter of introduction from his previous editor, but he hardly seems like a seasoned reporter. Lee's mild demeanor seems to hide considerable cunning, however. He manages to get into a soon-to-open mob-owned gambling den and questions the proprietor and his chief flunky -- the latter played by Clark Gable during his brief time as a Warners heavy. Lee manages to slip out while the head men debate what to do with him and publishes a front-page expose of the new casino. For this he gets beaten up by mob goons, and it is only when the world's greatest newspaper fails to help out with his hospital bills by giving him a raise or an advance on his salary that Breckinridge Lee becomes corrupt.

While he suffered for reporting on the illegal casino, Lee realizes that the mob suffered more from the publicity. Louis Blanco (Gable) generously explains to him that he can parlay this journalistic coup into a long-term racket. Powerful people will pay him to keep damaging news out of the newspaper. Actually they'll pay Louis Blanco, but Lee's cut will make him rich compared to his chicken-feed newspaper salary. Those who don't play ball will get exposed, reinforcing Lee's rep as an anti-crime crusader. He justifies his position to his girlfriend (Fay Wray) by portraying himself as preying on society's predators -- who actually suffers from that?

Inevitably power goes to Lee's head. He starts to go over Blanco's head to make deals and threats. Finally he's summoned into the presence of "Number One," the unnamed underworld overlord who warns him against reporting on another casino opening. Number One gets the old presidential treatment; we never see his face, and this deliberate omission can only mean that he's meant to be Al Capone, then still ruling Chicago crime. Unintimidated, Lee negotiates a $100,000 bribe but is warned that he'll be held responsible if anyone publishes a story about the Casino in his paper. To justify the title of the picture, Number One says that the finger will be pointing at Lee, and Dillon gives us a close-up of the gangster's finger to drive the point home. So of course Lee's co-worker Breezy (Regis Toomey), a rival both for stories and for Fay Wray, manages to crack the casino story on his own and gets a front-page story while Lee is making love to his girl. From this point the film doesn't even pretend to maintain suspense. Our hero is just plain doomed, and finally gets riddled with bullets in broad daylight on a busy street. With only Fay and the gangsters knowing the truth, Breckinridge Lee gets a hero's funeral to end the film on a grimly ironic note.

The Finger Points is another reminder of how dependent the Warners gangster genre was on the charismatic authenticity of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. By comparison, Clark Gable, while persuasive as a thuggish chauffeur in Warners' Night Nurse, hardly makes an impression as this film's primary gangster. He just doesn't seem like a "Louis Blanco," and in any event he has to take a back seat to the problematic Richard Barthelmess. Warners struggled with the silent idol they inherited from First National for several years of sound. His lilting accent seems, however unfairly, to have undermined his he-man pretensions. A southern drawl made Una Merkel cute but that may have been Barthelmess's weakness -- maybe his southern accent made him too cute for his own good. Voice aside, Barthelmess lacks the aggression that defined Warner Bros., as embodied not only by Cagney and Robinson but a small army of gold diggers in the studio stock company. The studio knew better, it seems, than to cast him as an actual gangster, but he isn't even very convincing as a corrupt reporter. The actor seems more out of his depth than the character he's playing is supposed to be. It may be telling that his best performance for Warners in the sound era, in William Wellman's Heroes For Sale, is one in which he plays an epic victim. Barthelmess and Gable's awkwardness in their roles keeps Finger Points out of the gangster-cinema canon despite a story that deserved better.

DVR Diary: STRANGE CARGO (1940)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released this adaptation of a novel by pulp headliner Richard Sale -- later to have his own Hollywood career as a writer and director -- during the era of Code Enforcement. The film was condemned by the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization, and banned in Detroit, Providence, and probably other places. The studio cut the film and the Legion modified its rating. I don't know if the version available today through Time Warner and Turner Classic Movies is the cutdown or a restoration. Either way, it illustrates how alien a time like 1940 is to us in some ways. The Legion condemned Strange Cargo in part for "A naturalistic conception of religion contrary to the teaching of Christ," but most modern viewers will miss whatever nuances disturbed the Legion and see Frank Borzage's picture as unabashed Christian propaganda. The alienation goes deeper than that; there are moments when the characters in the story behave in ways that probably were easily comprehensible to the original audience, yet may be hard to understand today. The whole motive of the story will seem strange to a lot of people. Think of it as a fantasy film, however, and it has something going for it.

The setting is a prison camp in French Guiana, where we first see Clark Gable released from the darkness of solitary confinement. He's an unrepentant criminal in a world apparently without hope of repentance or even reform. His fellow convicts are a rogues' gallery of heavies. Eduardo (Kali guru from Gunga Din) Ciannelli is a bitter Bible-reader, the wrong kind of Christian, as we'll learn. Albert (Dr. Cyclops) Dekker is a British con with a plan to escape and a reluctance to let Gable in on it. On the outside looking in is Peter (needs no introduction) Lorre as "M'sieu Pig," a professional informant, and Joan Crawford, a drifter of dubious occupation who risks expulsion from the island merely by talking to Gable, who strays from his work detail to hit on her, despite ratting him out when he goes AWOL to visit her room. The guards didn't notice him missing at first because another man, Cambreau (Ian Hunter) actually infiltrates the prison at the right moment to keep the count right.  None of the other cons know him but they don't question his presence or his willingness to aid the escape.

Gable misses the breakout because Dekker had knocked him out with his boot in the middle of the night, but takes advantage of the confusion to make his own escape from the infirmary. Cambreau has helpfully left him a map showing the rendezvous point, where a boat will take the fugitives off the island. Along the way he re-encounters Crawford, while Ciannelli is beaten and left for dead by two fellow escapees who resent his hoarding food. They all make it to the beach, however, where Gable beats down Dekker and declares himself in charge. Ciannelli doesn't make it to the boat, however; he dies in an epiphany after Cambreau sets him straight about the word of God. Cambreau has an odd effect on people. His gentle manner at first disturbs, then inspires people. The weird thing it that he inspires some people to die. In a paranoid fit, one con throws the gang's only keg of fresh water overboard because he thinks they're out to steal it from him. After a few gentle words from Cambreau, he jumps into the sea to retrieve the keg and gets eaten by sharks. Feeling bad over the death of his protege (the Sale novel apparently hints at more to the relationship), Dekker, under Cambreau's influence, volunteers to taste-test the recovered keg for leaked sea-salt. One swig proves a death sentence. Of the escapees, only a smug Bluebeard type (Paul Lukas) seems immune to Cambreau's spirituality, though Gable and Crawford struggle hard against it, as they do with their attraction to each other.

The film builds to a climax that modern viewers might agree would have seemed blasphemous in 1940. The boat has reached safety, and after Lukas has gone his way and Gable has left Crawford behind, our protagonist and Cambreau sail out again into a powerful storm. Throughout the picture, Gable has been a mocker of Christianity, the kind that knows the Bible and can pick out its weak points, who scoffs at the idea that man was made in God's image, who uses the Song of Solomon's description of the human body as a "temple of God" as a come-on line to Crawford. On this new boat, he's finally had enough of Cambreau, and during a struggle Cambreau falls overboard. A triumphant Gable has a Colin Clive moment. As Cambreau bobs helplessly in the waves, his arms symbolically draped behind him, cruciform, across a piece of driftwood, Gable mocks him with possibly the most over-the-top acting of his career. "I'm your God, now!" he roars at Cambreau. In a pantheistic fit, he points to the boat captain -- "He's God!" -- and to himself -- "I'm God!" But when he takes the obvious next step, telling Cambreau, "You're --" he suddenly stops as if he's suddenly realized something. He gets it! -- whatever it is -- and dives into the raging sea to save Cambreau. From there, a final reconciliation with Crawford (and a final rebuke to Lorre, who's been lusting after Crawford throughout) is inevitable, if its consummation will be deferred until Gable serves out his prison term, as the Code required.

One of the old-time conventions of cinematic Christianity is the idea that there's something about the mere presence of a true Christian (and let's face it, Cambreau is something more than a mere Christian believer) that affects people whether they like it or not. The Christian's implacable serenity has a compelling power -- or repelling for exceptions like the Lukas character, who jokingly identifies himself as a son of Satan -- like that of Dracula when he gets into his pitch about the strange twilight world. The Christian exists in a state of peace that is implicitly available to anyone and desirable for nearly everyone. Unless you understand this concept a lot of the action of Strange Cargo will make no sense. To be fair, it's not so much Christian propaganda as it is a story that takes a lot of Christian mythos or sensibility for granted in a way we don't expect from Hollywood movies now. Reviews of the novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, suggest that Sale sustains suspense for a while over whether Cambreau himself is angel or devil, but in the movie his affiliation is unmistakable from the start, despite the sometimes-fatal consequences of his ministrations. Borzage, an arch-romanticist of the screen, no doubt intended Strange Cargo as an uplifting experience, but something that seems old-timey now struck certain powerful people as unacceptably unorthodox in 1940. The film retains some interest today despite its questionable theology as a showcase for Gable, who plays as unlikable version of his usual rogue character as he could get away with for much of the picture, and a jamboree of character actors, even if most of them go soft along the way. One thing's for certain: they don't make 'em like that anymore.

DVR Diary: TOO HOT TO HANDLE (1938)

Half screwball comedy, half pulp fiction, Jack Conway's film for M-G-M is a work of swaggering cynicism featuring Clark Gable in prime romantic-rogue mode. Advertising touted it as a reunion of Gable and Myrna Loy, the stars of the smash hit Test Pilot from earlier that year, a kind of comeback vehicle for Gable after the legendary failure of the Irish biopic Parnell. This time he's a globetrotting newsreel cameraman who isn't above faking footage to score a scoop over his rivals, the most prominent of those being Walter Pidgeon. The show starts in China, where the rivals hope in vain for a Japanese bombing raid and Gable films some artificial atrocity footage in the meantime. Pidgeon tries to top this by having his aviatrix pal (Loy) fly a plane into the airport pretending to carry emergency medical supplies. Gable meets cute with Loy when he blunders into the scene and forces her to crash land. The resulting film is a sensation and the newsreel company turns Loy into a flying correspondent.

Loy's movie name is Alma Harding, slightly evocative of Amelia Earhart as is her later mission to rescue her brother, an aviator lost in the Amazon jungle. Loy is glib and courageous but ultimately soft-hearted, as the role and the film require. She breaks down narrating the footage she shot of sailors evacuating a damaged navy vessel before it explodes. The sequence when she and Gable shoot that footage is a technical triumph, one of the best uses of old-fashioned process photography I've seen from the classic era. Too often such scenes are dead on arrival, static side shots of immobile cockpits designed only to show us the stars' faces as they fake flying. For Too Hot to Handle Conway and his effects team film on a much larger scale, placing Gable and Loy in a full-scale model plane and filming it at the distance necessary 9and from multiple angles) to establish its realism. The camera zooms in and out as it needs to and, better still, the plane moves, banking left or right as Loy angles in toward the crippled ship or Gable climbs out onto a wing to get a better shot. The extra effort makes the illusion more effective, and if it still isn't convincing by modern standards, movie buffs should certainly appreciate the effort and craftsmanship.

Eventually the counterfeit origin of the Chinese crash footage comes out and Gable, Loy and Pidgeon are all disgraced. Loy seeks redemption by finding her lost brother, financed without her knowledge by the two men, who've sold their movie gear for her sake. Lest you think Gable's gone selfless, he's playing the game several steps ahead of Pidgeon, with the help of his able lackey Leo Carrillo, using his knowledge of Loy's plans to get his job back and constantly scheming to get scoops out of her trek. Gable and Carrillo manage to find the lost Harding ahead of Alma, among black skinned, voodoo-worshiping natives who worship the injured man as a bird god. The film's final act is hilariously politically incorrect as Gable must first prove his magic stronger than that of the tribe's witch doctor, and then take over as witch doctor, spending much of the last reel in an outlandish, all-concealing birdman costume to stage-manage and surreptitiously film the arrival of Loy and Pidgeon and the official rescue of hapless Brother Harding. Carrillo knows a little of the native lingo but for Gable the power-word ungaawa suffices. Gable somehow beats Pidgeon back to America despite being left to paddle for his life as Loy's plane departs, and the film ends with Gable utterly unrepentant, still up to his old tricks, and Loy unable to resist. "Ain't I a stinker?" Gable might say, but it's the kind of stink the people loved.

Keeping with the theme, here's a mock-newsreel trailer from TCM.com

PRE-CODE PARADE: Gables of 1931

"T here is hidden brutality in Clark Gable," a reporter wrote for The New Movie Magazine in the fall of 1931. The profile goes on to describe the rising star as a cross between Rudolph Valentino and Jack Dempsey.

There is this difference between Valentino and the man now being groomed as his successor. While women adored the Italian, men were prejudiced against him. With Gable it is far different. He is equally popular with men as with women. It is felt by no less an authority than Irving Thalberg that within a year Gable will be the most popular film player in the period, if not in screen history.

Not long afterward, Gable was dubbed the "King" of Hollywood and carried that royal title as a nickname for the rest of his life. He embodied a new masculinity, not just in contrast to those qualities that prejudiced male audiences against Valentino and his peers, but in contrast to an older Hollywood idea of a rugged he-man. While Gable played the villain in a Hopalong Cassidy picture for Pathe in 1930, M-G-M was trying to put Charles Bickford over as a virile leading man. Bickford certainly was virile, but was perhaps too much a man's man in his burly frame and manner and not enough a lady's man. The silent era seemed to draw a line separating sexiness from manliness, depending on your vantage point. In the sound era, Gable erased the dividing line. But whatever Thalberg was saying as 1931 neared its close, M-G-M seemed less certain of what to do with Gable after signing him early in the year. Producers saw something vicious in him and cast him as villains; Warner Bros. followed suit in the two pictures he made for them (Night Nurse being the better known) that year. It's almost as if Gable was too powerful and too sexy to be safe.

Gable was the Star of the Day on Turner Classic Movies on August 25, and TCM started the day with three films from his apprentice year of 1931. All three happen to be Joan Crawford star vehicles, with Gable rising from pure menace to humble underdog to powerful exploiter. Harry Beaumont's Dance, Fools, Dance, released in Feburary, was Gable's second M-G-M film and his first with a really prominent role. The story is like Three-Cornered Moon taken seriously. Crawford is a frivolous heiress forced to find work after the Great Crash wipes out her father's fortune and leaves him (the original William Holden) dead on the floor of the stock exchange. Before this, the film opens with a sequence often shown in Pre-Code highlight reels in which young partygoers strip to their underclothes to go swimming. Afterward, Crawford becomes an intrepid girl reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper while her shiftless brother (William Bakewell) falls in with bootleggers, providing them an in with his old society buddies. Gable as the head bootlegger gets an ominous introduction. His moll plays the Moonlight Sonata as a door opens to reveal the arrogant villain, who later blows smoke in her worshipful face to show his contempt for all decency. The hapless brother ends up the getaway driver for a St. Valentine's-style massacre of rival gangsters, and is later forced to pull the trigger himself on a tricky reporter (Cliff Edwards), Crawford's mentor, to whom he'd blabbed about his role in the earlier slaughter. Crawford gets the idea to infiltrate Gable's gang for the paper, though she initially proposed a more discreet role than the one she lands as dancing star of the floorshow at Gable's nightclub. Ever since her silent hit Our Dancing Daughters Crawford was expected to dance in her pictures, and here's her chance. She has an eccentric style that would have made her an interesting partner for James Cagney. Anyway, her looks get her an in with Gable, and in his office she learns through an indiscreet phone call of her brother's role in the massacre. That complicates things, but it's nothing a little gunplay can't resolve.



Gable has no redeeming qualities in Dance, Fools, Dance, and Beaumont clearly saw him then as no more than a thug type. A few months later, in the May release Laughing Sinners, Beaumont thinks better of him. In between these pictures, Gable had played a gangster in The Finger Points, the first of his Warner Bros. pictures, but more importantly M-G-M had cast him as a heroic reporter in The Secret Six, his first chance to court popularity. In Laughing Sinners he's not just a good guy, he's arguably a Goody Two-Shoes of the worst sort, a Salvation Army man. The film is careful to let us know, however, that he's an ex-con who turned to religion after two years in prison for an undisclosed offense. No softy, he. Gable's soul-saver befriends an initially-hostile Crawford after preventing her suicide. A nightclub dancer -- she performs with a fake nose and an Old MacDonald beard before stripping for Pre-Code action -- she's been jilted by her salesman boyfriend (Neil "Commissioner Gordon" Hamilton) so he can marry the boss's daughter. Eventually, Crawford warms to Gable and to the charitable work of the Army, which the film portrays less as a religion than as selfless friends of the poor in a time of need. Her idyll is interrupted when Hamilton reappears, sick of his job and sick of his wife and looking to strike some old sparks. He and Guy Kibbee (almost too convincing as a cynical drunk) manage to loosen her up, with help from Kibbee's dangerous "White Mule" hooch, until she's dancing on tables. While Gable's indignant at the way the men have degraded her, giving Hamilton a well-earned sock, he's the soul of forgiveness toward Crawford herself, wanting only her happiness whichever path she chooses. Poised between Gable and Neil Hamilton, you can guess how she chooses.

Clarence Brown's Possessed was Gable's last film of the year, a November release. By then, he had caught fire as the romantic villain of Brown's A Free Soul, a part star Lionel Barrymore reportedly recommended Gable for. After his turn as the evil chauffeur of Night Nurse, M-G-M cast him as Greta Garbo's leading man in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. Having worked alongside another queen of the lot, Norma Shearer (i.e. Mrs. Thalberg) in Free Soul, Gable was reunited with Crawford as if he had just now completed a trifecta of the studio's leading ladies -- almost as if he was really teaming up with Crawford for the first time.

Possessed is a more ambitious picture than the other Crawford vehicles; the proof may be that she doesn't dance in this one. She's a factory-town girl (the early scenes are shot on location) and the girlfriend of dull, bourgeois Wallace Ford. Living literally on the other side of the tracks, she watches the trains go by like a panoramic fantasy of affluence. More fantastic still, one of the passengers talks to her and gives her his card. She blows her burg and heads to the big city, only to get blown off by her new friend. She hangs around long enough to find a new friend. Gable has a role fit for a star: a rich and powerful lawyer with political ambitions. Once divorced, he's determined to love Crawford at a distance, setting her up in a fancy apartment while she tells the folks at home that she married well but ended up an early widow. Gable's philosophy is that losing a mistress is a private embarrassment, but losing a wife is a public scandal. Crawford's OK with that up to a point, resenting the subtle and not-so-subtle slights from Gable's peers. When Ford shows up in the big town, successful and ambitious for more success, Crawford is tempted to go back with him. When she learns that Gable is willing to give up his gubernatorial ambitions to risk scandal by marrying her, she goes into renunciation mode, nobly giving him up (by telling him she's cheating) with confidence that she'll hook up with Ford. But Ford proves himself a heel by repudiating her when she tells the truth about her relationship with Gable, only to beg forgiveness when he realizes the menage could endanger the highway contract he'd hoped Gable would fix for him. She dumps him on the spot. The drama climaxes with a scene that may have influenced Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, in which Gable's political rally is disrupted by hecklers and a rain of leaflets hinting at his scandalous relations with Crawford. She just happens to be in the audience and stops the scandal by telling the truth, including the fact that she gave Gable up to the people, so he could be their worthy servant. In a close that may have influenced Singin' in the Rain, Gable chases her down as she flees tearfully from the arena to profess his love. With this, his apprenticeship is just about done. Possessed is the best film of these three, though all suffer from the contrivances of romantic melodrama. In it, Gable is almost too much an establishment man, just as he's almost too much of a goody-good in Laughing Sinners and definitely too much of a fiend in Dance, Fools, Dance. He couldn't really be his fully formed star self while he was still squiring the likes of Crawford; once teamed with a junior starlet, Jean Harlow, he really hit his stride. His charisma is obvious in all these pictures, however, which together provide an illuminating lesson in the trial-and-error process of making a star in the classic studio system.

Pre-Code Parade: HOLD YOUR MAN (1933)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer may not have made the grittiest Pre-Code pictures, but theirs are some of the earthiest. In Clark Gable and Jean Harlow they had two of the most unapologetically sexy performers of the period. There's a carnality to them that sometimes makes the Warner Bros. crew of gangsters and gold diggers look merely cartoonish by comparison. After Victor Fleming's Red Dust Metro knew they had a combination that clicked. Sam Wood reunited them, with Harlow billed on top, for Hold Your Man, a grifters' love story. Gable's a clean-shaven con man fleeing the cops; he seeks refuge in Harlow's apartment, walking in on her bath as he searches the place. She screams but adapts quickly, like sympathizing with like. When the cops arrive and she answers the door Gable has settled into her tub and lathered his face so they won't recognize him. He only had time to take his shirt off and his pants are soaked. She has men's pants to spare and a photo of Stuart Erwin on her bureau. For those unfamiliar with Erwin, just read "schlub" or "loser." Harlow's out to drain him of everything she can get; we see her with him on a dinner date dumping her handbag in the ladies' room and whining that she must have lost it on the street -- with her rent money inside. Erwin hands the same amount over just as a washroom attendant returns the handbag. Erwin's a forgiving soul and a good guy at heart -- too good for her, Harlow will eventually decide. He's simply no competition for Gable. Harlow and Gable are soon working a con together, she enticing men to the apartment, he bursting in, in the role of her brother, to shake the mark down. Except that Gable starts jumping the gun and getting too rough with the marks. He can't stand to see them laying hands or lips on Harlow for even a moment. After punching the last mark through a doorway, he storms out with Harlow to get a marriage license. They leave the man laying and he stays laying.

In fact, Gable has killed the man, the mark having bashed his brains against a corner wall. By the time our lovebirds come back home there's a crowd outside and cops crawling through it. Once they figure out what's up they flee and are separated. Harlow is caught, tried and sentenced to a reformatory without ratting out Gable. There are all kinds of interesting people at a reformatory. It's a politically and ethnically diverse environment. There's a house socialist expounding on the class struggle to anyone who'll listen; Harlow makes the mistake of asking what the difference is between socialism and communism and comes to regret it. Theresa Harris (Barbara Stanwyck's maid and sidekick in Baby Face) plays Lilly Mae, a preachers' daughter gone bad whose race is no barrier to mingling freely with the white cons. There's also Gypsy, Gable's ex-girlfriend and Harlow's enemy. They've tangled before and they tangle now. Gypsy's a slapper and Harlow's a puncher; that's how you tell the real women of Pre-Code Hollywood. Harlow may be able to wipe the floor with all of them, but somehow she isn't happy. She misses her man at the worst possible time; as the picture takes its time saying outright, but makes clear early enough, she's carrying Gable's child. Erwin shows up for a visit, learns of the trouble, and offers to do the stand-up thing, but Harlow drives him away, only to break down and cry. Gypsy finally gets to gloat when her time is up first. She threatens to take Gable back and when she learns of Harlow's plight she gives her the horselaugh. But something happens offscreen to get a happy ending started. Somehow Gypsy returns as a visitor to facilitate a meeting between Gable, still a fugitive, and Harlow. It so happens that Lilly Mae's father is coming to visit that same day, and it also so happens that Gable still has that marriage license. It's all very tearjerking at the close, if not also transgressive in true Pre-Code style for the lovers to be united in the sacred bonds of wedlock by a black man. Too weepy in the end, perhaps, with Gable and Harlow promising to reform, but I guess that's the price you pay for the good stuff in the first hour. It's a fun film overall, a star vehicle carried along by the lead couple's charisma and some nice touches from the director. It has more honest erotic energy than most contemporary films and certainly helped cinch Gable's claim to the Hollywood He-Man throne. He wouldn't be second-billed for much longer, and he had Harlow, among others, to thank for that.

THE TALL MEN (1955)

When Hollywood adopted widescreen processes starting in 1953, Raoul Walsh had a head start on other directors adapting to the new aspect ratios. He'd directed his first widescreen western way back in 1930, using the short-lived Grandeur format to shoot The Big Trail. Best known as John Wayne's first starring role, that film has an archaic grandeur (no pun intended) that's only enhanced by the stilted performances by Wayne and the other actors, while Walsh's widescreen location work makes the movie resemble a window on the authentic Old West. Walsh's next widescreen western, released 25 years later, doesn't have quite the same primitive power, but it has much of the same pictorial sweep -- and the acting is somewhat better.

Adapted from a 1954 novel by the many-named Clay Fisher, now back in print under the author's more familiar Will Henry tag, The Tall Men follows the fortunes of the Allison brothers, Ben and Clint, former raiders with Quantrill now down on their luck in a Montana winter. Reduced (some might say reverting) to outlawry, they propose to ambush a man with a moneybag, but the man, Nathaniel Stark (Robert Ryan) convinces the Allisons that they can make more money if they follow him down to Texas and bring back a herd of cattle for beef-starved Montanans. While hothead younger brother Clint (Cameron Mitchell) would just as soon shoot Stark or any "jasper," levelheaded elder brother Ben (Clark Gable) sees an opportunity to earn his way to owning his own ranch. Early on the way south the trio encounter a group of stranded pioneers, including one woman, Nella (Jane Russell) who seems made of sterner stuff. After dining on "Missouri elk" (mule to you), Stark and the Allisons are on their way again, but Ben insists on turning back to help the pioneers when it looks like Indians are attacking. He finds the pioneers scattered and dead, Nella alone having kept her cool and stood her ground to survive. Ben and Nella find more stable shelter and get it on for a night, but find themselves incompatible. The orphaned daughter of failed ranchers, Nella has contempt for Ben's ambition, while he sees her as a gold-digger. She confirms that impression by attaching herself to Stark once everyone's reunited.

All four main characters end up making the trip back north with Stark's herd, accompanied by a gang of cowboys loyal to Stark and a band of vaqueros loyal to Ben. Along with the perils of the journey -- Indians, jayhawkers and natural obstacles -- there's tension on all sides of the triangle linking Ben, Nella and Stark, while Clint grows more unstable and dangerous the more he drinks. Even if everyone makes it to Montana, there's no guarantee that everyone will leave the territory alive....

The Tall Men belongs to the subgenre of "superwestern" rather than the "adult western" category, though Walsh's film is by no means childish. While lower-budgeted westerns like those of Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher make the most of imposing locations, for Walsh the vastness of the landscape is just an appropriate backdrop for even more impressive masses of men, horses and cattle. This is a big film, as the title tells you in a manner typical of the era that also gave us The Tall Texan and The Tall T, not to mention Abraham Lincoln as The Tall Target. There's an obsessiveness about tallness in the advertising that makes male height a kind of counterpart to female breast size, as if Gable and Ryan must be giants to share the screen with Jane Russell. Oddly, Walsh seems more interested in Russell's feet than in her more famous attributes, giving her every opportunity to kick off her too-tight boots and have someone massage her naked tootsies. Tarantino probably loves this film. On the other hand, probably because Russell's recent hits had been musicals, she's given songs to sing that I could have done without. Overall, though, she gives a strong, hard-boiled performance that suits her role, while Cameron Mitchell probably could already do a drunken hothead in his sleep -- and maybe he did.

The most interesting thing about The Tall Men is the rivalry between Gable and Ryan's characters. Ben Allison and Nathan Stark are both cool calculators, Stark noticeably the cooler of the two. You'll never take him seriously as a real romantic rival to Ben for Nella's affections, but he retains a dangerous potential in other respects. He proves he can handle himself with a gun, which keeps him fresh in your mind as a threat to Ben and Clint. But the arguable virtue of Walsh's film is its ultimate refusal to make Stark a villain. He's an antagonist, certainly, but he never becomes the bad guy. Remember, after all, that he starts the film as an innocent victim of the Allisons -- a fact the film might have reminded us of more often to maintain more suspense as the drive nears Montana. But his calculating nature is precisely what keeps him from becoming a foolhardy villain. He and Ben are more alike than either think, but Ben has a certain something extra that makes him popular and earns him loyalty that Stark can never claim. At the end, Stark himself realizes this, describing Ben as the kind of man kids dream of being when they grow up and old men wish they had been. Clark Gable embodies that ideal admirably, occupying the middle ground between Mitchell's hothead and Ryan's reserve. He's not the driven obsessive we see in so many Fifties westerns, despite the opening his guerrilla past provides. Ben Allison is just a simple man who can be depended on to do the right thing.

To get a sense of the kind of film The Tall Men is, consider the ending. It's an anticlimax after the huge cattle stampede/Indian battle during the last stage of the drive, but its the climax of the rivalry between Allison and Stark. If this were a Seventies western if would end quite differently, with one or both men dead. Walsh's film has a happy ending, however, as the ultimate proof that, while both Ben and Stark can kill if necessary, neither man is a killer by nature and neither needs to kill on this occasion. That resolution may seem anticlimactic by action-movie standards, but maybe it means that The Tall Men is an adult western after all.