Pilgrimage: NOW PLAYING, 1933

Three Cornered Moon plays Milwaukee this week. Paramount has a pretty extensive ad campaign for this proto-screwball comedy.

 

 

 

The comparison to the Marx Bros. (whose Duck Soup is coming soon) is weird. I mean, the Marxes were real-life performers, so yes, they're "paid to be goofy," but it's not as if the Rimplegar family is real. Colbert, Arlen, et al were being paid to be goofy just as much as the Marxes were. But maybe we have here a hint at the difference between screwball comedy and the Marx Bros. style. With the Marxes, it's impossible to suspend disbelief; regardless of what the brothers are called in any given picture, they're their standard selves every time and we all know it. But with screwball, perhaps, we're encouraged to believe in and empathize with the characters, even if we know they're played by familiar stars. That's not the whole picture, but it's part of it. Discuss it amongst yourselves.

At the Warner, William Powell is snooping around.

 

Based on my short study of the advertising for John Gilbert's talkies, I take it as a warning sign whenever movie ads talk about the sort of role that made the star famous. You can probably infer that the star isn't quite as famous as he was. Fortunately for Powell, his greatest popularity was yet to come, but it would take a different studio to set him right.

However it fits in Powell's career, this Michael Curtiz picture looks like prime Pre-Code material. Here's the original trailer from TCM.com



The Veterans of Foreign Wars were in Milwaukee for a convention this week, and some of the big theaters programmed accordingly.

Here's a weird way of promoting your picture while barely saying a word about it.

John Ford's Pilgrimage had been sitting in my DVR queue for nearly a year before this week's article gave me reason to give it a look. I wonder what an audience of veterans made of it. Indeed, I wonder what Ford fans today make of it, since here the old sentimentalist gives us one of cinema's most hateful mothers. Henrietta Crosman gives an alarming performance as a crabby old lady who at first won't let her son fight in the Great War, then practically pushes him into it rather than have him marry a girlfriend she considers trash. The boy suffers a brutally ignominious death while the girl gives birth to his son, condemned to be a bastard because they didn't have time to marry. After the fact, the old lady still shuns the girl, and her own grandson, as if blaming them for her son's death. Then the picture becomes a fish-out-of-water comedy as Crosman reluctantly joins a delegation of Gold Star Mothers on the title trip to France to see their sons' graves. An ominous tone hangs over the comedy as the mother remains crabby while we suspect that a terrible catharsis is coming. Even though Ford predictably softens in the second half, having Crosman save a young Frenchman from suicide so she can see the error of her ways by learning his story, a mirror of her son's, and setting things right, the first hour of Pilgrimage probably struck many 1933 viewers, even those grown cynical about the war, like a punch in the face. I can imagine how Milwaukee audiences might have felt if that goofy ad drew them to the picture. But maybe I should give them more credit. Problematic as it is, Pilgrimage is an admirably ambitious picture, the first half especially showing Ford in his High Art mode, and Crosman's is a convincing, compelling performance. It's certainly a unique way of addressing people's ambivalence about World War I, and it's hard to imagine Ford or anyone else updating it for World War II. Vietnam, maybe.

Pre-Code Parade: THREE-CORNERED MOON (1933)

Here's a screwball comedy from 1933. Hollywood historians usually tell you that screwball first manifested in 1934, though they'll debate which film was actually first, and I've portrayed screwball as a comedy style suitable (for various reasons) for the era of Code Enforcement. If you believe all that, then what we have here is a premature screwball comedy. If you ever wondered how screwball characters would fare in a Pre-Code film, here you are. It is almost predictably schizoid, incapable of maintaining the blithe tone typical of true screwball, often lapsing into melodramatic hysteria. The pivotal figure here is Claudette Colbert. A key player in the emergence of screwball as the leading lady of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, she seems here to be performing in Pre-Code and screwball simultaneously. She's the sole daughter of the flighty Widow Rimplegar (Mary Boland), who doubled down on her dubious stock investments after the 1929 Crash only to have it all catch up to her as the film opens. Responding to a margin call from her broker, she finds that she's down to $1.65 in the family bank account. That leaves the Rimplegars -- Colbert has three brothers, including Wallace Ford -- wiped out except for their mansion and its furnishings, none of which are likely to find a buyer at the trough of the Depression. None of the kids work, but now they'll have to. Ford had abandoned his law studies, but now takes them up with new urgency. The youngest son becomes a lifeguard for a dollar a day. The middle son gets an acting job (he uses Rouben Mamoulian as a reference) with one line. Claudette bluffs her way into a shoe-factory job with help from a newfound friend who appears in only two scenes. She quickly falls behind her production quotas, but her supervisor will let her keep the job if she satisfies him in other ways. Like I say, Pre-Code can dress up as screwball but something will always show through a hole in the garment.

The Rimplegars are the kind of zany family of overgrown children that would become more typical after 1934, but the stakes seem higher in 1933. For Claudette, the challenge beyond making money and getting food on the table is choosing between two potential husbands. The choice should be obvious between the pretentious writer Ronald (Hardie Albright) and the prosperous doctor Alan (Richard Arlen). Both live with the Rimplegars, but the rent-paying Alan is the family's main lifeline while Ronald is a complete parasite who scoffs at a job offer from one of Alan's patients until our heroine shames him into interviewing for the position. Ronald suffers from writer's block and fantasizes about romantic double suicide, provoking Colbert's comment that she last considered suicide after failing an algebra test at age 14. Despite his shiftlessness Ronald represents the kind of life Colbert still dreams of, the world she imagines still living in yet needs to leave behind. She feels the shocks of downhill poverty harder than her mother or siblings, exacerbated by Ronald's several betrayals, and Nugent does an effective job at making us appreciate the absurd crisis that results when Mama Rimplegar ruins a dinner made with the family's last stock of food, as well as the critical absurdity of the family squabbling childishly over who'll ask Alan for the rent money. When the youngest son faints from hunger and Colbert starts screaming that he's dead, it's hard in an interesting way to tell whether this is a dramatic highlight or if we're supposed to find her hysteria funny. With one foot in Pre-Code and another in screwball, the tone of Three-Cornered Moon is hard to gauge at times, and the film may ultimately seem neither fish nor fowl. The ad above calls the Rimplegars "sappy" and "nitwits" yet promises that you'll love them. I wouldn't go that far; the male Rimplegars are nearly insufferable, and Lyda Roberti is wasted as their imbecilic Polish maid. In the end, there may be just enough suffering for them to satisfy a Pre-Code sense of poetic justice, yet not so much to make the film other than a comedy. Any label beyond that may be giving it too much credit.

THE CAT'S-PAW (1934)

"The blind man, lest he stumble in darkness, welcomes the guiding footsteps even of an ass"

--LING PO.--

Watching the talking picture career of Harold Lloyd is rather like watching the German army retreat across Europe. Here is a still-powerful force, often displaying incredible skill, professionalism and innovation, yet utterly doomed. The films running from Welcome Danger (1929) through Professor Beware (1938) are Lloyd's war against obsolescence. Like Chaplin, he had the resources to wage such a war, and his efforts were often brilliant, perhaps no more so than here, where he breaks with his familiar screen persona. While critics and biographers often rank his previous film, Movie Crazy (1932) or his next one, The Milky Way (1936) as his best talkies, I find The Cat's-Paw his most fascinating sound film. In many ways it's a product of a very specific moment in movie history, and in others it seems decades ahead of its time.

Lloyd seems safe in his ranking as the "third genius" of American silent comedy, while Chaplin and Keaton still vie for the top spot in posterity. He seemed to have made a safe transition to sound with Welcome Danger, which he post-synched and reshot on the fly, but stumbled with his next films, Feet First (in part a do-over of his definitive climbing act from Safety Last) and Movie Crazy. History's verdict is that Depression audiences repudiated Lloyd's brash but naive go-getter persona, and the man himself seemed to agree. As his own producer, he decided to do a more detailed script than usual, based on a magazine story he'd purchased. For the first time in ages, he would not be "Harold" on screen.

Instead, he is Ezekiel Cobb, the son of China-based American missionaries. While his parents spread the gospel in the Middle Kingdom, Ezekiel immersed himself in Chinese culture. When he is sent to America to find a bride, he is, in manner, more Chinese than American, polite to a fault and prone to quote his favorite poet, Ling Po. He is also out of touch with modern society. He doesn't know how to use a telephone, doesn't understand slang (even the meaning of "two bucks") and is confused when he hears his name being broadcast from a car radio.

Ezekiel goes to Stockport, where he's supposed to stay with Rev. Junius P. Withers, who dies before Ezekiel can introduce himself. Withers was the perennial mayoral candidate of the city's Good Government League. As one leader puts it, "he was the best candidate we ever had. He never had a chance." To clarify: he was the best because he never had a chance. The GGL is a kind of dummy organization secretly patronized by Mayor Ed Morgan, the corrupt political boss of Stockport. It exists to present the semblance of a competitive election, lending legitimacy to Morgan's regime, which has presumably shut out real competition. When GGL leader Jake Mayo discovers Ezekiel and learns that he's a protege of Withers, the League decides that young Cobb is an ideal losing candidate. Mayo explains Cobb's background to a skeptical colleague:

"Say, what is this missionary racket?"

Mayo: "Sort of cleaning up a joint, you know."

"Oh, the old reform gag, eh?"

Lloyd has made a perfectly modern film for 1934, embracing the decade's irreverent, hard-boiled sensibility. As this is the last "pre-Code" year, he allows himself to cavort clumsily on a nightclub stage with a stripper and a band of scantily-clad chorines. This actually wins over a crowd inclined to despise a reformer. Better yet, he gets into a fight with the drunken mayor after the chief executive knocks down a newsboy. All this impresses his fellow boarder Pet Pratt (Una Merkel), who runs a hotel cigar and newsstand. Pet's not her real name, but "They call me Pet because they know I'd slap 'em down if they used my right name." So I'm not telling. She's the one who first warns Ezekiel that he's being used as a "cat's paw" by Mayo and Morgan. But as with Mayo, Pet's initial contempt for the guileless Cobb is tempered by an instinctual respect for his inherent honesty.

Publicity over the incidents at the nightclub leads to an upset victory for Ezekiel, who didn't want to win. Assured initially that he had no chance to win, he didn't understand why he wasn't supposed to until everyone's anger clues him in. He never expected to serve, but he's shamed by Pet into accepting the victory. Once he does this, he can't help but be his own man. He eventually makes a real ally of Mayo (who has the virtue of being honest about his own dishonesty), but has the rest of the Stockport political establishment against him. Undeterred, he vetoes pork-barrel spending, cuts salaries and fires corrupt officials. He's fearless in the face of threats from Morgan's goon Strozzi (Nat Pendleton), who's scared off by the coincidental display of an ancient Chinese sword. Ezekiel makes a mental note of this.

Morgan uses the stripper and a corrupt district attorney to manipulate Ezekiel into a career-killing scandal that guarantees his removal from office by the governor. Notified that he has 24 hours left as mayor, Cobb resolves to take drastic action to ensure that "the rulership of this city [will] not revert to these gangsters and racketeers." Repudiated by the GGL, Ezekiel declares himself "my own political organization, a party of one." Conceding that "I'm destroyed," he vows to destroy his enemies in return. With Mayo's help, he pulls off one part coup d'etat, one part coup de theatre in a last-ditch effort to terrorize the Morgan machine into submission.

The Cat's-Paw blends two popular motifs of early 1930s cinema. Ezekiel Cobb is a kind of "cinderella man" of the kind introduced in Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde and perfected in Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The cinderella man is an ordinary (albeit usually mildly eccentric) person elevated into prominence by a media establishment that seeks to exploit him, first by making a fool of him, then by ruining him through scandal if he starts to rock the boat in any way. Cinderella men and wisecracking women are also prominent features of screwball comedy, which was on the way to defining itself in 1934 with films like Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night.

In its political aspect, Lloyd's film (directed by Sam Taylor) is part or parody of the "fascist" tendency in films like the messianic Gabriel Over the White House and Cecil B. DeMille's elusive This Day and Age. Ezekiel Cobb comes to think of himself as a dictator and instructs his police chief to disregard the law while rounding up the criminal element. When told that habeus corpus writs will spring the arrested men from jail, he orders them confined in Chinatown instead, where the courts presumably can't reach and Cobb will be able to deal with his enemies with maximum ruthlessness. It probably goes too far to call The Cat's-Paw itself a fascist movie. It is a comedy, and as such is probably self-consciously aping the extreme measures of other films without necessarily endorsing them for real-world use.

More than a "cinderella man," however, Ezekiel Cobb will strike modern viewers as a character type better known as a "fish out of water," the stranger who is always underestimated for lacking proper sophistication, yet prevails over the slickers because of some native virtue. Given the popularity of this kind of character and story in the 1980s, it's not unreasonable to say that The Cat's-Paw was as much as fifty years ahead of its time. Its portrayal of Chinese culture may seem backward, and its overuse of American actors in Chinese roles definitely is, but the presentation of that culture is always respectful, as if Lloyd were atoning for his awful portrayal of Chinatown crime in Welcome Danger. As 1934 was around the peak of Charlie Chan's popularity, it probably isn't surprising to see a China-bred American portrayed as a pillar of unshakable virtue. Arguably, were a comedian to remake The Cat's-Paw today, the depiction of Chinese culture might be more offensive. If the film were remade, Ezekiel would almost certainly know kung fu. This might have seemed like a natural direction for a physical comedian to take in Lloyd's time, but from all I've seen martial arts were identified almost exclusively with Japan (judo, ju-jitsu) in those days.

The film benefits from a snappy screenplay full of hard-boiled wisecracking, vintage romantic cynicism and possibly record usage of the word "chink." It has an adorable romantic lead in Una Merkel, whose southern accent makes her seem almost as alien in Stockport as Cobb.

Best of all, Lloyd gives a thoroughly focused performance, rendering Ezekiel Cobb a real character rather than a thin mask for Lloyd's usual clowning. With help from his writers, Lloyd conveys that Cobb is an essentially alien personality, as much prejudiced in his own way as he is naive. His sexism may not have seemed so offensive then, but given Una Merkel's sympathetic performance as a wise woman, Ezekiel's attitude is clearly meant to look stupid. "Why is it that all American girls are so lacking in individuality?" he asks Pet tactlessly, "They all look alike: big eyed, pasty faced and, well, one exactly like the other....They seem to lack that sense of inferiority that woman should have in the presence of a man." This is just before he makes an ass of himself with the stripper. Likewise, his lurch toward dictatorship is meant to be distressing. It terrifies Mayo, at least, and the suspense of the last act is based on whether or not he follows through on his threats. Ezekiel Cobb is neither simply laughable or simply lovable. In his effort to overcome his own outdated image, Harold Lloyd puts something authentically strange on screen. But it didn't stop his decline, perhaps because it was too strange. So it was on to the next battlefield, and then another, and then it was exile until Howard Hughes and Preston Sturges summoned him to his Waterloo. But The Cat's-Paw was a victory of a kind that's worth remembering.

The Original O.J.

A stormy moment in the reconciliation of Oscar "O.J." Jaffe

and Mildred "Lily Garland" Plotka aboard the Twentieth Century limited.

Oscar Jaffe is involved in a mutually self-destructive romantic relationship with a blonde. Despite theatrical threats of suicide, the woman leaves him. He thinks he can do without her, but in time he grows desperate. When chance throws them together, he becomes maniacally manipulative, again using the threat of his own death to get her to rejoin him. She has succeeded without him, but despite her protests they are a perfect match. Both are self-dramatizingly hysterical, capable of tantrums that can be turned on and off at the drop of a hat. Although she treats her eventual return to him as a defeat, each is really the other's best audience. They are arguing furiously at the end, but it is really a happy ending.





The film is Twentieth Century (1934), starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Howard Hawks directed it. Historians treat it as an early specimen of the "screwball comedy." That's always been one of the more vague genre labels. It usually seems to mean that characters act crazy, but characters frequently acted crazy in movies before the turning-point year of 1934, which also saw It Happened One Night emerge as a kind of founding film. I guess two things really distinguish screwball from the movies of the Marx Bros. or other zany comedians. First, the vaudevillian tendency to break the fourth wall and address the audience is gone. Second, the romantic leads rather than outright comedians carry the burden of the comedy. You could almost think of screwball as the second stage of a contagion that the Marxes and other acts spread from the advent of talkies to a point when it spread to the general population. Hawks' 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, with Katherine Hepburn as a screwball heiress, is usually considered the peak of the genre.

Barrymore gives a self-parodying performance, as he was a "Master Thespian" of his day before booze destroyed him. It's self-parody on another level thanks to all the references to Svengali, since Barrymore had made a rather good movie of that story back in 1931. I don't know how deep in drink he was at this point, but he's camouflaged by actors Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns who do more blatant drunk acts at different points in the picture. I found Carole Lombard to be rather shrill, but it's okay for her to be obnoxious since this isn't one of those stories where you're necessarily rooting for the likable lovers to get back together.

The mentality of the film is more like that of a Coen Bros. film in its overall hard-boiled attitude. That attitude is often equated with cynicism, but I think it can be described more subtly as fatalism plus perseverance. It's the attitude of people who are not optimists, yet do what they've got to do. It contrasts strongly with the introverted self-pity that characterizes most acting in our time. It's probably a Depression attitude, though it can't be called "depressed." It involves an understanding that if you're going to try to survive in hard times, you can't waste time bemoaning everything. It's an attitude that may make a comeback soon if Americans apply themselves. It's one of the qualities that makes Twentieth Century a fairly funny film. Another, from my personal perspective, is the use of a religious fanatic (and all-round lunatic) as comedy relief that ultimately adds an element of farce to the plot. The film is definitely worth a look the next time it turns up on Turner Classic Movies, where I saw it this morning.