Pre-Code Parade: DOWN TO THEIR LAST YACHT (1934)

RKO promoted Paul Sloane's musical comedy as "from the creators of Flying Down to Rio," but modern viewers will find Down To Their Last Yacht missing two of Rio's core components: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Of course, Astaire and Rogers were still seen as mere ensemble players at the time, or at most a specialty act, but they're the main reasons Rio is remembered today, and their absence has a lot to do with why Yacht is forgotten. That the studio saw Yacht as a fitting follow-up to Rio indicates that it hadn't yet learned what Rio should have taught it: that the future of movie musicals lay with virtuoso performance. Instead, Yacht is in the cartoonish mode of RKO's earlier Melody Cruise. Songs are shared out among multiple performers, the camera cutting from one singer to another with every line. Yacht is a musical without musicians, unless you count Sterling Holloway's scheming saxophonist who discovers a method of making a roulette ball jump by playing certain amplified notes. If Astaire's ascendancy marked the advent of the classical, Code-Enforcement era musical, Yacht, which appeared in the summer of the transition year, is one of the last Pre-Code musicals. And if "screwball" is the comedy style of the next era, Yacht is just screwy.

The once wealthy Colt-Strattons open the picture literally down to their last yacht. They're living on it while eking out livings in menial jobs, until Nella Fitzgerald (Polly Moran) rents the ship for a Pacific cruise for the nouveau riche, with the Colt-Strattons -- father, mother and pretty daughter (Sidney Fox) as part of the crew -- "the social register serving the cash register." The passengers are a mix of crude businessmen, Italian gangsters, aging gold diggers and a late arrival, the gambler Barry Forbes (Sidney Blackmer), who falls for the younger Colt-Stratton. Yes, in this picture the actors playing the romantic leads share the same first name: not necessarily a good sign. A cynical spirit prevails on board, expressed in the collective performance of "Funny Little World:"

You have to take it or else.

That's the slogan of today.

That's the game you have to play.

Funny little world!

 

You have to like it or else.

It's the or-else stage for you.

It's the or-else age for you.

Funny little world!

It gets funnier when the ship's captain hired by Nella (the baleful Ned Sparks) appears to deliberately run the ship aground on the Polynesian island of Molakamokalu, where the handsome, scantily clad natives sing of the lack of anything to do but love. The passengers expect to encounter a "blackface Zulu" ruler, but this is no Skull Island. Its queen is a white woman (top-billed Mary Boland) of flighty malevolence, recalling a husband she'd poisoned as the one she loved best. She and Captain Jim have a racket where he brings victims to the island to be looted by the queen and her army of tommy gun-toting natives, but when he proposes taking all the passengers' money himself and leaving the queen with only their possessions, she has him hurled into a cage as future shark food. She has the same fate in mind for all the passengers, whom she forces to exchange clothes with the natives. Their only hope for salvation is the queen's sudden infatuation with Barry Forbes, who convinces her that the worst punishment she can inflict on her victims is expelling them from her island. That sounds like a good idea to her, but just to make a point she has bombs planted on the yacht to explode at sea while her loyal natives celebrate her latest nuptials with a big, quasi-Berkeleyan "South sea bolero" number, "Beach Boy," which skirts the border of surrealism and just plain camp.

Down to Their Last Yacht is a "nut comedy" of a sort that was already nearly obsolete by 1934. Even for nut comedies its ratio of obnoxious personalities to boring lovers is alarmingly high. Sidney and Sidney have zero chemistry, and you have little rooting interest in anyone else. There's something inhuman about Yacht's anarchic impulse, which comes across less as a yawp of freedom than as a refusal to give a damn about anything. For some, that may make Yacht one of the most authentically anarchic efforts from Pre-Code Hollywood, but even then the mentality to which it tailored itself was a minority taste. It's a comedy that probably looks more intriguingly subversive on paper than it is on the screen, and it's hard to say whether a better cast -- Sparks is always welcome but we don't get enough of him -- or better direction may have helped matters. In many ways the imposition of Code Enforcement thwarted Hollywood's creative evolution, but Down To Their Last Yacht is a Pre-Code product that is clearly an evolutionary dead end. As such it could prove fascinating for Pre-Code buffs, but people looking for plain entertainment will find little to see here.

Depression Fighters: THE PRIZEFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1933) and CARNERA THE WALKING MOUNTAIN (2008)

When I first saw Wilson Yip's martial arts biopic Ip Man (2008), the film's backdrop of economic deprivation during the 1930s immediately reminded me of Cinderella Man (2005), Ron Howard's Depression-set biopic of boxer James J. Braddock. If three films make a genre, then Renzo Martinelli's 2008 biopic consolidates a global "Depression fighter" genre and simultaneously achieves the genre's reductio ad absurdam. If, after watching Ip Man, I had concluded, "Any country can do this!" I would have balked at Italy's turn. That country's combat-sport hero of the era was Primo Carnera, a figure for whom the "print the legend" approach probably isn't an option. The legend of Primo Carnera, after all, is that he was a fake, a bum, a talentless lummox whose path to the heavyweight championship was paved with fixed fights and whose reign ended the moment he met a real fighter in a real fight. The legend was locked in place by the 1956 movie The Harder They Fall, which didn't fool Carnera by making its dumb-ox patsy a South American, yet casting Carnera's real-life nemesis Max Baer as the fighter who destroys Humphrey Bogart's hapless protege. Carnera reportedly sued the producers for defamation, but another half-century would pass before anyone attempted a cinematic rehabilitation of the fighter's reputation. In Martinelli's account, Carnera (Andrea Iaia)is a guileless giant who can and would fight for real and takes offense when his initial manager (F. Murray Abraham) pays his first foes to take dives in order to protect his novice prospect. That Carnera could do real damage is indisputable; at least one opponent died after fighting him. While some historians suspect that the fix was in when Carnera beat Jack Sharkey for the crown in 1933, The Walking Mountain (a mundane rendering of his more alliteratively lively nickname, "the Ambling Alp") portrays the fight as an honest triumph for its hero.

Walking Mountain stresses how Carnera inspired pride in Italians and Italian-Americans (and spared his children the poverty he suffered in childhood; an epilogue notes that two junior Carneras grew up to be doctors) but avoids engagement with the political implications of that fame. Martinelli doctors newsreel footage to show his Carnera alongside Mussolini and has the actor give the Fascist salute in the ring, but these are just matters of period detail for the director -- one wonders how the dreaded Uwe Boll handled the political angle in his 2010 Max Schmeling biopic, for comparison's sake. Carnera suffers, I think, from ignoring politics simply because there has to be a political context in the global boxing ring when Carnera, representing Fascist Italy, Schmeling, representing first Weimar and then Nazi Germany, and Max Baer, a Jewish-American who wore the Star of David on his trunks, all wore the championship belt. I'm not saying poor naive Primo has to answer for Mussolini's crimes, but I do feel that the political drama of the period would add to the drama of the fights, as it does when filmmakers contemplate the rivalry of Schmeling and Joe Louis. And Walking Mountain can use all the dramatic help it can get. Martinelli doesn't do a very good job with the fight scenes. His staging of the Carnera-Sharkey fight is less dramatic than the actual newsreel footage. In filming the climactic Carnera-Baer bout he falls between two stools, unable to decide, it seems, whether Rocky or Raging Bull should be his model. The beating Carnera takes at Baer's hands ought to be a moment of supreme comeuppance, like Jake LaMotta's last fight with Sugar Ray Robinson in the Scorsese film, but Martinelli is incapable of investing the action with anything like Raging Bull's thematic force, much less Scorsese's expressionistic exaggerations. In part that's because Martinelli wants to emphasize Carnera's courage and perseverance under extreme adversity as the champ struggles to fight with an injured ankle while Baer gets away with all manner of dirty tactics. Nor, despite some scenes when Carnera is mean to his wife, do we get the feeling that Primo has this beating coming, especially since we understand him to be innocent of all the chicanery that advanced him early. Overall, Martinelli seems more interested in making a period piece by artificially aging or decolorizing his footage than in making his story more than a collection of fight-film cliches. But he doesn't even get the period right all the time. One anachronistic scene shows the filming of a TV preview of the Carnera-Sharkey fight of 1933 -- a year when TV was still almost purely experimental.

One angle Martinelli might have worked was whether fame went to Carnera's head. It would have been interesting, given the importance of Carnera's rivalry with Baer, had Martinelli done something with the two fighters filming W. S. Van Dyke's The Prizefighter and the Lady in Hollywood before their title fight. In the M-G-M production, Carnera plays himself as the heavyweight champion, while Baer plays a toned-down (and anglicized?) version of himself as "Steve Morgan." Reportedly, Baer was so impressed with himself as an actor that he wore Steve Morgan's robe to the ring for his real fight with Carnera, months after they filmed a kind of pre-enactment of the battle for the movie. Baer was already considered the top contender after having KO'd Schmeling, and Prizefighter has to be considered a unique instance of using a fictional film to promote a real-life fight. In fact, the film plays out like a Bizarro-world version of the historic bout, with Baer's Morgan taking a massive beating at Carnera's hands as a kind of Scorsesean comeuppance for the fictional character's arrogance and his betrayals of a long-suffering wife played by Myrna Loy. But before it ends the fight becomes more Rocky than Raging Bull -- as is usual with fight films -- as Steve Morgan mounts a major comeback once his spurned, sometimes-sozzled manager (Walter Huston, here billed below Carnera and ex-champ Jack Dempsey) and his still-faithful wife give him their tactical and moral support. It's an original-style Rocky finish -- the fight is a draw and Carnera retains the title, but is treated as a victory for Morgan. It was really the only finish the film could have. I can't see either fighter agreeing to appear if the script had one of them losing.

The Max Baer biopic is an event waiting to happen. His reign as champion has been bracketed by two other pictures, Walking Mountain and Cinderella Man, both of which portray Baer as a boorish, brutish villain -- though the Carnera picture has the bad guy gain respect its hero in the approved Apollo Creed manner. You'd think someone would want to make a picture about a proud Jew who beat the crap out of a "Nazi" and a "Fascist," yet the consensus of filmmakers who've actually used Baer as a character is that he was a creep, a jerk, an asshole who could kill people with his gloved hands. For all I know, the Carnera-Baer fight was the only heavyweight title match pitting two fighters credited -- if that's the right word -- with killing opponents against each other. The filmed record shows that Baer was a dirty fighter and a supreme trash-talker and taunter. He does not seem to have been a nice man. Yet he was considered handsome for a fighter, especially by contrast with Carnera, and M-G-M thought they could make him a sex symbol. According to one contemporary report, Clark Gable was originally slated to star in Prizefighter until someone from the studio saw the Baer-Schmeling fight. The promotion for the picture heavily emphasized Baer's sex appeal, as did the fighter himself. He pitied the German women who were unable to see him on film after the Nazis banned the picture.

As an actor, Baer makes an honest try and isn't awful, but he lacks essential movie-star charisma. His face and voice simply aren't expressive enough, though his arrogant personality sometimes shines through. He isn't helped by a corny rise-fall-and-rise story and the hackneyed heart-interest elements. There's a weak subplot featuring Otto Kruger as history's least assertive gangster, the Loy character's erstwhile boyfriend and employer who supposedly has a hate on for Steve Morgan yet can't motivate himself to do anything about it. His idea of ultimate vengeance is to invest in the promotion of the Carnera-Morgan fight so that Loy will see her hubby humiliated and abandon him. But he's still an old softy, unwilling to take what he thinks is his, and where's the fun in that? Fortunately, Van Dyke milks the climactic fight for maximum drama, starting with a slow build-up, Madison Square Garden style, to establish authenticity. He films the entire ritual of the ring announcer introducing the judges, the timekeeper and the old-time fighters (including a professional wrestler, Strangler Lewis, clearly regarded as the boxers' peer) before the fighters arrive. The director makes Carnera look as powerful as the fighter probably ever did; taking deep breaths with a massive chest and with his arms stretched over the ropes between rounds, he looks like he should have broken Baer in half in real life. It goes to show that looks aren't everything.

Apart from the fight, the highlight of the picture is Max Baer's big musical number. Prizefighter is a semi-musical -- Loy gets to sing (or lip-synch?) two songs -- and part of Steve Morgan's decadence is his decision to go on a vaudeville tour. There's something surreal about the concept; this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about what a fighter shouldn't do, but by filming it over a period of weeks in Hollywood, Baer is doing in real life what the film says his fictional self shouldn't do. As for his big number, "Lucky Fella" isn't as blatantly lewd or as relentless a parade of flesh as many Pre-Code spectaculars, but it's rather suggestive in its energetic way. The star is supported by perhaps the most athletic cohort of chorines assembled in the era for a satire on the rigors of a training camp. Van Dyke takes an anti-Berkeley approach to the scene, emphasizing the stagy artifice for added amusement as Baer and his harem run frantically in place, the girls collapsing one by one as the landscape rotates past them, symbolizing the hero's sexual prowess until a final girl defies the odds -- but look at the damn thing yourselves. MaxiesGal uploaded this priceless clip to YouTube.



A Baer biopic would almost be worth it just to have someone recreate this scene. But we're more likely to see Spike Lee finally film his and Budd Schulberg's Joe Louis screenplay -- Schulberg wrote the story for The Harder They Fall, by the way -- before anyone tells Baer's side of the story. Maybe Max Jr., the erstwhile Jethro Bodine, has the rights tied up. But if there's an interest in the ways mighty men survived hard times by fighting, there should be a market for Max Baer, warts and all. I suppose we like these boxing (or martial arts) stories because, unlike the stories of stars of team sports, they're all about individual accomplishment. In a way, a fighter is the ultimate self-made man, even when surrounded by managers, trainers, family etc. As such, he may be a special symbol of hope in tough times. He inspires even as he loses, even when he loses badly, as long as he doesn't stop trying -- or so filmmakers always hope.

DVR Diary: TURN BACK THE CLOCK (1933)

The Great Depression must have left many people wondering what they would have done differently before the great crash, had they a chance. A fantasy story in which one man gets the chance, even if only in his dream, had natural potential in 1933. The comic potential is obvious, too, and that's why we have Lee Tracy starring in Edgar Selwyn's film, co-written by the director with ace scripter Ben Hecht. Selwyn counts as a singular Pre-Code fantasist for making this picture as well as the future-war prophecy film Men Must Fight, in which he visualizes the bombing of New York City. Tracy plays Joe Gimlett, who's struggling through the Depression running a cigar store and doing better than many. He and his wife have a few thousand dollars salted away, When an old buddy made good invites him to invest in a business proposition that could make him $20,000 in a year, Joe's wife vetoes the idea. Frustrated with his lack of progress in life, Joe dreams himself back into his past under anaesthesia after a car accident. Anticipating Peggy Sue Got Married, Tracy inhabits his younger self circa 1910, which makes for some cute initial confusion between Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Discovering that he seems to have a fresh chance, Joe accepts a business proposition he'd rejected in his past past and marries the vivacious girl who would have become his rich friend's wife, the friend marrying Joe's real-time wife instead. Joe is able to exploit his foreknowledge to some extent -- he strikes it rich by investing in trucking at the start of World War I -- but at other times his predictions and warnings only make him look crazy. Audiences in the last days of Prohibition would certainly laugh when Joe, noticing the open abundance of alcohol, talks about bootleggers and speakeasies to universal incomprehension. The fish-out-of-water angle becomes most bizarre, in retrospect, when Joe heckles some musicians performing at his wedding reception for singing old-fashioned songs. The singers are the unbilled Larry Fine and Moe and Jerry Howard -- the Three Stooges unaccompanied by Ted Healy, and the weird thing about their one scene in the picture is the way they play complete straight men for Tracy, baffled by his requests for songs as yet unwritten. Moe and Larry have tamed their signature hair into period styles, and none of the Stooges do anything characteristic -- no slapping or insults of any kind. This must have been the sort of work that made Columbia Pictures appealing to them.

Anyway, Turn Back the Clock acquires some bite whenever Joe gets to play a Cassandra, though you get the sense that Tracy could have attacked the material more strongly. A scene where he addresses recruits bound for the World War that he fought in his past/real life seems set up for an anti-war tirade, but Joe only offers a mild debunking of patriotic cliches, warning the troops to expect mud and cooties but also promising them their own private bonus from the local bank -- a telling promise when real veterans still hoped for early bonuses from the government. His ability to change history is thwarted by an often self-righteous and more often crazy-sounding foreknowledge; appointed head of war industries by President Wilson, he's fired shortly before the armistice for protesting too much against profiteering. Striking even closer to home for Depression audiences, Joe warns people against investing in the stock market, even though he doesn't remember the exact day of the Crash. The story seems to have come full circle when he simultaneously warns his dream wife against playing the market while making essentially the same invitation to his pal, who now has Joe's original place (and wife) in the cigar store, that was made to him. But the dream Depression is even worse than reality for our hero, whose wife had invested their entire savings in the market behind his back and whose bank board is setting him up to take the fall for their shady practices. He dreams all the way to the starting point of the picture -- the Bank Holiday of March 1933, immediately following FDR's inauguration -- and realizes to his horror that he can't predict the future anymore. Dream becomes nightmare at last as he tries to flee the country, is captured by police who form a firing squad and then a lynch mob -- but as you might have guessed, death is but a prelude to awakening and the summing up of lessons learned. In its eccentric fashion, Turn Back the Clock belongs to the same category of retrospective "what went wrong" films as William Wellman's Heroes For Sale and Midnight Mary. It's meant to be more lighthearted than either of those doomy films, and Tracy strives hard to milk humor from the fantastic situation, but the implicit message that foreknowledge could not prevent the economic disaster makes the picture somewhat less funny than the studio claimed. It may well have seemed less funny when it came out than it does now, but on the other hand Pre-Code audiences were a hard-boiled lot, we assume, so maybe they got some gallows humor out of it. Since we're more likely to think of this as a fantasy than as a comedy, we may judge it by a different standard that gives Selwyn credit for creativity, if his was as new an idea as the advertising claimed. Apart from its largely unacknowledged place in the history of fantasy cinema, Turn Back the Clock is an item of real historical interest for its commentary on the Depression and the generation before. It may have more historical than entertainment value, but for those who find this sort of history entertaining this picture is definitely worth a look.

Once again TCM comes through with the original trailer, including most of the Stooges' footage.

DVR Diary: FAITHLESS (1932)

Contemporary reviewers panned Harry Beaumont's M-G-M Depression romance, deeming it another defeat in star Tallulah Bankhead's attempted conquest of Hollywood. One of the main complaints was an overcomplicated plot. Though the picture is only 76 minutes long, critics complained of false endings as if impatient to go home. But it's that same ingenuity at finding ways to make things worse for the heroine and hero that makes Faithless a genuine if cliched Depression document. Tentatively titled "Tinfoil," (meaning what?) the picture pairs Bankhead as an heiress with Robert Montgomery as an ambitious and proud ad writer, both riding high by their respective status as the Depression deepens around them. The picture opens with a montage of newspaper predictions of the Depression ending in 1930, in 1931, and in 1932, scored with sardonic musical horselaughs. While this goes on, Bankhead and Montgomery bicker over whether she, like a good wife, should live on his $20,000 a year salary -- very good money back then but far below Bankhead's standard of living. The movie seems to set the female up for a fall, but its main point proves to be that both are too proud. The crisis finally comes when Bankhead learns that her trust fund has gone bust, moments after she's decided to make up with Montgomery after their latest fight. She goes to his office and tells her story straight, hoping he'll believe that she's not now after him for his money, only to learn that he's been laid off that same day. He promises to find work and support her, but she thinks she can live off her name and reputation and spends the next months mooching off her fellow socialites, finally selling herself, more or less, to arriviste families who still hope to gain prestige from getting mentioned as her hosts in the local society pages. This career ends in Chicago, where Peter Blainey offers her more money in return for, shall we say, more sociability. Blainey is played by Hugh Herbert, one of Warner Bros.'s comical rakes (he's the one who goes "woo woo"a lot) who just about steals the picture with a pretty much straight portrayal of a repellently vulgar predator. Ashamed of her lot after a random encounter with Montgomery, Bankhead abandons Herbert and, lacking practical skills, ends up on a breadline, finally selling her good shoes to a landlady to make her rent and have money left over to eat. Almost too sick to eat soup in a diner, she meets a forgiving Montgomery again and accepts his latest proposal, which comes with the income of a truck-driving job. The same day that they're married his employer goes out of business. He finds another job soon enough, but it means being a scab. The strikers explain that they're fighting to survive, but despite Montgomery's sympathies the job is the only way he and Bankhead can survive now. The strikers run his truck off the road and internal injuries confine him to bed. The only way Bankhead can raise money for his medical needs is ... well, this is a Pre-Code picture, so you figure it out. She touches bottom when she unwittingly propositions Montgomery's brother, who never liked her and now promises to denounce her to his brother, and then gets caught by a Catholic cop who threatens to throw her in jail for a month unless she kisses the Cross and swears not to walk the streets anymore. The cop proves compassionate, however, and blackmails a restaurant owner into giving Bankhead a waitressing job -- he'll cite the guy for violating an awning ordinance otherwise. Now all that's left is how to deal with hubby when his brother tracks him down with the terrible truth....

It is a pretty melodramatic and episodic story, and to a film critic it probably would seem like a cliched catalogue of misfortune. But don't you suppose the Depression was like that for a lot of people? I don't know if anyone in real life fell as far as Bankhead's heiress does here, but the point is that here M-G-M acknowledges the misery of the Great Depression in a manner more typical of Warner Bros. That probably looks like a retroactive virtue, since its relevance may have mattered less at the time than its unconvincing contrivances. But that relevance makes it worth seeing for Pre-Code buffs, as does the potentially camp spectacle of Tallulah Bankhead suffering through the crisis and Herbert's unexpectedly nasty turn. At the least it's another Hollywood film that addresses the Depression -- one reviewer even claimed it was the first to make the Depression the "villain" of the piece -- compared to how many studio films today that address the Great Recession? Faithless may have told its tale with cliches and melodrama, but it was trying to tell some truth as well, and for that history might add a star or a half to its rating.

Pre-Code Parade: HIGH PRESSURE (1932)

William Powell and Warren William arrived at Warner Bros. around the same time, late in 1931, and shared the lot for about two years until Powell signed with M-G-M in 1934. Watching their Warners work this month -- Powell is TCM's Star of the Month, while the movie channel did a birthday tribute to William on Dec. 2 -- you get the impression that they must have competed for a lot of roles, since they often seem to be playing the same basic type. Each did take a turn at playing the then-popular detective Philo Vance -- Powell had been playing the role at Paramount earlier -- but the snob sleuth wasn't typical of either man's work at Warners. More to the point, Warren W. biographer John Strangeland relates that W.W. at least once inherited a role from W. Powell. The Dark Horse, one of W.W.'s signature films, was originally meant for W.P., but Powell was pulled, Strangeland relates, because his presence made it all too obvious that Dark Horse was a thinly-veiled and apparently unauthorized remake, with a change of milieu, of Mervyn LeRoy's High Pressure, Powell's second film for the studio. Does that make Warren W. and W. Powell interchangeable parts? Not necessarily. Knowing the inside story, and having seen High Pressure, I can see how the Dark Horse role was more a W.P. than a W.W. part.

Powell had a sort of bipolar screen persona, embodying contradictions and swinging between extremes, especially during the pre-Code era. Even afterward, he could be typed as a detective and a master thief at the same time. He could also be the embodiment of suave sophistication and a bum. W.P could play the extremes more broadly than W.W., from the evidence I've seen. Look at The Dark Horse again. W.W.'s flunkies tout him as the master political promoter of the age, but have to bail the star out of jail before he can go to work. W.W.'s offense is non-payment of alimony, and even behind bars he's fully functional and alive with schemes, working the cons into a frenzy to make an impression on his likely new clients. Compare that introduction with High Pressure. In the earlier film Frank McHugh plays basically the same role he does in Dark Horse as the great promoter's stooge. High Pressure opens with McHugh hunting the speakeasies for his master with an uneasy Jewish businessman, Mr. Ginzburg (George Sidney) in tow. The search has already gone on a while; "Worse than a needle in a haystack is a goy in a gin-shop," Ginzburg laments. They finally find Gar Evans (Powell) in a back room, dead drunk -- I mean Weekend at Bernie's drunk. Rumpled and unshaven, Powell is an effigy of himself, something McHugh can drop on the floor when the bartender informs him that Gar has run up a tab of over $100 -- and that's in 1932 money. "We don't want to buy him," Ginzburg protests, "We just want to rent him." Powell can touch bottom in a way I haven't yet seen Warren William do. His abjection, which proves to have something to do with romantic troubles, is a kind of metaphor for the country's depressed entrepreneurial spirit. But do we want this spirit awakened?

Gar Evans is a master promoter. He whips up interest in a business venture by giving it the appearance of already-achieved success and surefire growth. Properly groomed and sharply dressed after a lengthy steambath, he becomes an embodiment of prestige. A similar function is served by his stooge Clifford Gray (Guy Kibbee, who was retained and built up for The Dark Horse), little better than a bum himself out of season but an inexplicably impressive presence in suit and toupee -- he looks presidential. With Gray as front man, with rented space in a skyscraper, a pretentious board of directors (only short a few bank presidents; they've "been committing suicide so often there's only a few of them left.") and aggressive promotion -- Evans makes ethnically-coded pitches to Italians, Jews, Greeks, etc. -- the team drives up the stock price of "Colonel" Ginzburg's Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company -- Evans dubs Ginzburg a colonel "because you don't look like a Southern gentleman." Gar's pitches are like revival meetings as he reminds his marks of the great men skeptics laughed at like Columbus and, indeed, the Warner Brothers. The whole purpose of it all, the reason Ginzburg pours a small fortune into Evans's coffers, is to drive up the stock before the company produces any rubber from sewage through Ginzburg's miracle process, for which he depends upon an eccentric professor with a degree in chemistry from the University of Northern Jefferson at Detroit. It's a name Gar knows well -- it is, in fact, a diploma mill he ran as a racket back in the Twenties. Suddenly under pressure from the Better Business Bureau to produce rubber, and with the established rubber interests (represented by Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton) eager to eliminate a challenger, Gar and Ginzburg's future, and perhaps their freedom, depends on a madman....or does it?

High Pressure certainly takes a conflicted view of entrepreneurship. Gar is our undoubted hero, but he's also an arch huckster, a promoter whose efforts are disproportionate to the worth of the products he promotes. He's a con man, but Mervyn LeRoy and his writers seem to be saying that the nation may well need some of the confidence hustlers like Evans can instill. Pushing Golden Gate Artificial Rubber may be "the rummiest thing you've done yet," as Gar's long-suffering girlfriend (Evelyn Brent) says, but the movie still gives him a bluffer's chance to save Ginzburg and cash out a winner. The bluffer (so the separately-filmed French version was called) may be the archetypal pre-Code hero, be he a high-pressure promoter like W. Powell or W. William or the Groucho Marx sort who can double-talk foes into submission. There's a clear-eyed cynicism behind the bluffer's canonization, a hard admiration not for the lie, but for the risk he takes. There's also a recognition that the con man has to con himself or else become a living corpse like Powell is at the start of this picture. Today's idolaters of entrepreneurship might not see High Pressure as a flattering picture, but in its peculiar winking way its as much a vindication of the entrepreneurial ethos, almost, as Atlas Shrugged. It probably helps to have William Powell as your hero, as much one here as when he plays the unstoppable bandit in Jewel Robbery. He keeps the picture hopping, and LeRoy puts him through his paces with punchy efficiency. It's another exemplary amoral romp from the days when all conventional moral bets seemed off -- and as for whether W. Powell or Warren W. could romp amorally with more gusto, the jury's still out, and I demand more evidence.

Pre-Code Parade: MARIE DRESSLER Double Feature

She is nobody's choice for Pre-Code poster girl, but Marie Dressler was one of the most popular actresses of the early-talkie era, and by virtue of dying in 1934, the year of Code enforcement, she is more a creature of that era than many of the more characteristic personalities who carried on under the Breen Office. Dressler arguably had the greatest "second act" in Hollywood history, having long ago starred in the first-ever American comedy feature, Mack Sennett's Tillie's Punctured Romance, for which Charlie Chaplin took second billing for the last time in his career. That was the peak of Dressler's first sojourn in moviedom, but the advent of talkies at the end of the 1920s demanded veteran stage actors with proven voices, and so she began a comeback around age sixty. She had high-profiled featured bits in films like The Girl Said No and nearly stole the "Garbo Talks" showcase Anna Christie from its star before hitting paydirt in George Hill's Min and Bill, which won her the Best Actress Oscar. From that point she was a top-billed star in her own right with an established persona as a lovable old battleaxe willing to go to extremes for her friends and loved ones. For all that Pre-Code emphasized sex, youth did not rule theaters unchallenged in those days; Dressler's peers among Hollywood's star elders included fiftysomething Will Rogers and fellow sexagenarian George Arliss. Age was accepted as a source of wisdom, and sometimes even wit, and also as an object of pathos. Dressler could serve up a double-dose of pathos when needed because she had not aged gracefully, and back then people still went to movies who could identify with her. Based on her movies that I've seen, these were folksier audiences with small-town values. There's little "Pre-Code" content in those movies, but they have something in common with the more sensational stuff, and that's a commitment to relevance, as the one-word titles of the following films make clear.

Charles Reisner's POLITICS (1931) makes Dressler a reluctant leader of a female-led reform movement and an unlikely candidate for mayor. Galvanized by the death of an innocent bystander in a gangland shootout outside a speakeasy, her Hattie Burns attends a mass meeting of women and steals the show by relentlessly questioning the condescending mayor about lax law enforcement until the beleaguered official finally flees the hall. She hadn't been as politically active as her more assertive pal Ivy Higgins, so it comes as a surprise to both women when the meeting spontaneously nominates Hattie, not Ivy, for mayor. Political and gender lines become one and the same as the men of the town, including Ivy's comedy-relief husband, try to compel their wives to quit politics and return to their housework. As it turns out, their most effective threat is to announce that they're all going out to get drunk. Doing that causes virtually all the women to abandon Hattie's first big rally, leaving her standing alone abjectly on the platform. She's not licked, though. Her counterattack is straight out of Aristophanes. She convinces the women to go on a household strike, refusing to perform any of their wifely duties until their husbands relent. Her strategy tips the balance of political power until some melodramatic complications kick in, most notably the fact that her own daughter is harboring a handsome, repentant and wounded young gangster under Hattie's very roof.

Politics goes against the Pre-Code grain by making heroines of women who demand more rigorous enforcement of Prohibition, but the gender angle makes it seem like anything but a reactionary film. In fact, the final drive for women's suffrage and the drive for Prohibition pretty much went hand-in-hand; suffragists sought the vote, in many cases, in order to play a greater role in defense of public morals. Politics is a reminder, at a time when Prohibition was on the ropes with many progressive-minded figures, of women's potential as political as well as moral leaders of society. As a film it's mildly amusing. Dressler could mug like any comic but she could also deliver dialogue in an understated, naturalistic fashion that makes her a likable actress most of the time, and films like this one make her appeal obvious. Compared with the next film, this is a modestly-scaled comedy-drama, but that's because the next film is somewhat berserk.

Sam Wood's sardonically titled PROSPERITY (1932) opens, just as sardonically, with an instrumental of "Happy Days Are Here Again," a tune certain to be recognized by the film's original initial audiences as Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign song. Prosperity was released in the month of FDR's election, so most people probably heard that song in a "perhaps, but not yet" frame of mind. In any event, Prosperity is about anything but, unless you count the opening segment set in 1925, "when money still talked." Politics apparently made Dressler credible as an authority figure, for here she plays a widowed bank president, Maggie Warren, who hands control of the family business to her son John (future director Norman Foster), who proves less savvy at finance. Of course, the Depression doesn't help things. The Warrens' troubles are compounded by their in-laws. John's wife (Anita Page) is pleasant enough, but her mother Lizzie is an abomination. And here we must discuss the strange career of Polly Moran.

M-G-M's big thinkers apparently believed that their star comics needed sidekicks. Fans of Buster Keaton recall this with rue, for it resulted in Keaton being teamed with Jimmy Durante, whose fast-talking aggression seemed to suck the air from the already-declining silent legend. In Dressler's case, the studio teamed her with Moran, starting with the presumed-lost 1930 film Caught Short. Moran played Ivy Higgins in Politics but was (in retrospect) relatively restrained, much of her comedy confined to Ivy's banter with her stuttering husband. For Prosperity, however, the writers unleashed a human nightmare. Lizzie Praskins is surely one of the most hateful creatures ever to be deemed comedy relief in a moving picture. A lifelong friend of Maggie Warren, Lizzie can't help feeling or saying that John Warren isn't good enough for her daughter. Her pathological sniping at John continues even after the Warrens are compelled to move in with Lizzie after a bank collapse that Lizzie helped instigate. Due to some asinine misunderstanding, she'd removed her savings from the Warren bank, creating the impression that the bank was unsound. That provoked a bank run played by Wood for all its slapstick potential, from pushing and shoving people to cars crashing into one another outside. Meanwhile, Lizzie and Maggie resolved their dispute and Lizzie re-deposited her money -- only to be told by another depositor that she'd been lucky to withdraw her money before the run started. It hadn't occurred to her that she'd caused the run, so she panicked and withdrew her money again, exacerbating the run to the point that Maggie had to sell all her property to meet the demand for money. With John reduced to being her boarder along with Maggie, who has to return to work as a grocery clerk to raise money toward re-opening the bank, Lizzie still berates him as a failure until he leaves the house and his young family, with Maggie not far behind. That's the character of Lizzie Praskins, and on top of that Polly Moran's sole purpose as an actress is to be obnoxious as possible, no matter what the circumstances. This imperative reaches its climax as Prosperity threatens to slide from comedy-drama into farce-tragedy.

Near the end of his rope, John gets involved in a shady bond deal in hopes of reopening the bank, only to chase down a train in his car to reclaim the bonds before they can be used to ruin him. Foster does a remarkable stunt here, driving alongside the track, then ditching his car while it's still running and dashing onto the accelerating train in one take. Meanwhile, at the end of her rope, Maggie contemplates suicide in the expectation of a $10,000 insurance payout to her son. John manages to recover the bonds, but since Maggie isn't picking up the phone in their apartment he has to call Lizzie and ask her to tell Maggie that he's saved the day. Somehow he convinces her, and Lizzie promptly shows up to tell Maggie the news. But if you're contemplating suicide, probably the last thing you want to see or hear is Polly Moran chattering away at you. Assuming that Lizzie can have nothing helpful to say, Maggie urges her to leave. Having noticed a gun in the room, any human being would drive it into Maggie's head by any means necessary that she doesn't have to kill herself. But Lizzie is so stupid that she can't convey the necessary information; the most she can do is drive Maggie with her hectoring into another room where she can take poison -- right at the point where movie audiences are urging Dressler to take that gun and annihilate Moran. But there's no need to worry! Lizzie has saved the day without even knowing it! Earlier in the picture, she'd taken offense at Maggie leaving a bottle of poison within reach of their grandchildren. Her solution was to dump the poison and put the "Poison" label on a jug of prune juice. In a payoff of a gag from half the picture ago, it's that juice that Maggie drinks in mortal despair. Needless to say, however, John reaches home with the good news, Maggie gets to play a death scene, Lizzie finally straightens her out about the jug, and the picture ends with a bathroom gag. And "Happy Days Are Here Again" reprises.

Prosperity leaves you reeling, and yet it probably is a better film than Politics, and more certainly a more entertaining one, precisely because of its roller-coaster mood swings and Moran's demonic performance. It may be no accident, though, that it was the last Dressler-Moran pairing. Dressler still had three pictures in her, including her now-best-known turn in Dinner At Eight, so it's not as if there was no opportunity for Moran to work with her. It may well be that audience hostility to Lizzie Praskins drove Moran's career into a decline that only accelerated after Dressler's death. Despite all I've said, Moran's work in Prosperity has a "it's horrible, but you can't look away" quality that makes the film an appallingly compelling artifact of its time -- but she still didn't steal the film from Dressler, though the star probably needed to milk the tragicomedy for all it was worth to stay ahead. It took her long enough to regain stardom, and she kept on earning it to the end.

EMPEROR OF THE NORTH (1973)

Back when I reviewed John Milius's Dillinger I assigned it to a "country bandit" genre that might trace its roots to Bonnie and Clyde. But if anything the country bandit films are a sub-category of a larger "Depression" genre that also encompassed films like They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Paper Moon, Hard Times, Bound For Glory and Robert Aldrich's hobo-geddon pitting Lee Marvin against Ernest Borgnine, with Keith Carradine jockeying for position as a young punk aiming for homeless celebrity. Did all these films reflect a nostalgia for hard times, or did the Depression years have some other symbolic significance during the late Sixties and early Seventies? Maybe Depression films were a more relevant substitute for Westerns, providing a setting where loners had to learn to survive and fend for themselves. It seems significant that the opening crawl for Emperor of the North identifies Depression hobos as outcasts. They may have been objects of identification for youth audiences who might have seen themselves as outcasts from conventional society. I don't know how good an analogy that is, however, since there's some difference between a hippie drop-out and someone who's homeless because he has no money and can't find work. On the other hand, Emperor isn't as much about poverty as, say, an actual 1930s hobo movie like Wild Boys of the Road. You might not call it a transposed western, but it has a pulp quality that obscures whatever social context remains in this retrospective account of life on the rails.

Neither of the principal hobos, Lee Marvin's "A-No. One" and Carradine's "Cigarette," seems motivated by necessity. Marvin seems to ride the rails to show that he can, especially when train bosses claim that he can't. Carradine seems intent on making a name for himself in hobo-dom, though he claims that he already has. Their ambitions put both men on a collision course with Ernest Borgnine's Shack, the boss of the No. 19 train, who claims that no man has ever rode his train for free. He, too, has something to prove after an incident in which Marvin and Carradine, trapped in one of Shack's cars and fearing a beating, burn their way out, creating an impression that they've already beaten Shack. That'd be a major event among the train men, many of whom hate Shack as a harsh taskmaster. He and A-No. One are celebrities in their own shared subculture of trains and hobos, and A-No. One's public announcement that he'll ride the No. 19 to the end of the line, both to spite Shack and to prove his superiority to the suddenly lionized Cigarette, sparks a betting frenzy up and down the line. So in a way they are like gunslingers, but they're also like the celebrity athletes who had begun to emerge by this point in history. Riding the rails, or driving men off them, is more a matter of mythic prowess than survival.

Emperor has very little social consciousness for a Depression film. It may not be fair to compare it with Wild Boys of the Road, which has a different agenda, but the stakes for Cigarette, the youngster of the story, never seem as high as they are for the teenagers forced onto the rails in William Wellman's film. The train bosses in the earlier movie are mostly no more merciful than Shack is in Emperor, but in Wild Boys they're pretty much faceless cogs in an unjust system, while Shack (why am I tempted to spell that with a q?) is the indisputable villain of the Aldrich film. There's no sense that Shack is just doing his job, albeit overzealously and with too much relish, and there's never a moment that reveals any special motive for his meanness. The trailer simply calls him "evil," though "sadistic" may be the better term. For Borgnine, this kind of part is a throwback to the brute villain roles that first made his name in the 1950s, and he plays the part with the necessary gusto. But the limitations of Shack's character, no fault of Borgnine's, show the limits of the film's ambitions.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy Emperor for the oldschool he-man action film it is. The climactic fight between Borgnine and Marvin may not live up to the hype that dubbed it "the most sensational fight ever filmed" (and this was the year of Enter the Dragon) but it's an impressive piece of direction and acting. It looks like it was all done by the two actors on a moving train, with no process shots that I could recognize. Axes, chains, hammers and two-by-fours all come into play and the middle-aged stars wield them with vigor. If anything, it goes on for too long. Each actor gets the upper hand at one point, only to spare his foe so the fight can continue for fighting's sake. These should have been more ruthless men, but the pulp nature of the story requires the fight to last longer.

Keith Carradine takes a hammer to the head (above). He could have done worse (below).

The film itself might have been shorter if shorn of some pointless digressions into ham-handed comedy. One bit I could do without is when cop Simon Oakland chases Carradine into a hobo jungle and gets forced to call a turkey a dog and bark like a dog in friendship. Slightly less obnoxiousness is a scene that could have gone into O Brother Where Art Thou? in which Marvin submits to baptism and gets to ogle a bra-less convert while Carradine steals clothes from the other believers. But the most pointless part of the picture is the prologue, which is basically a music video for the theme song, "A Man and a Train," in which Marty Robbins reveals the gnostic truth that "a man is not a train and a train is not a man." Hal David did the dubious lyrics, but the music, like that of the whole film, is by the dreadful Frank DeVol, whose interchangeable stylings marred many a Seventies film. DeVol is incapable of establishing mood and his music makes Emperor more of a chore to sit through than it should be. But fans of Marvin and Borgnine should definitely make the effort.

Here's the trailer, uploaded by unseentrailers, whose vocation belies his name: