What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

An American Tragedy from 1931 with Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee


This uneven effort at bringing Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy to the screen has been eclipsed by the better-known 1951 movie version titled, A Place in the Sun. Still, for all its issues, there is something engaging about the rawness of the 1931 version.

The novel and the two movie efforts have the same core story, which starts with a poor boy, raised by religious zealots who run a mission. He grows into a troubled young man who hangs out with a bad crowd. He even flees the scene of a crime in which a young woman was killed.

His wealthy but distant uncle offers the boy a chance in his shirt factory, where, after an apprenticeship, the boy becomes a manager of the collar-stamping department. Despite company policy, he begins an affair with one of the young women working under him.

Through his uncle, the young man also meets a pretty and wealthy socialite who opens up "a place in the sun" for him, which is what he has always wanted. Just as the future is looking bright, the factory girl tells him she's pregnant and demands that he marry her.

So close, yet so far. He puts the factory girl off as much as he can, but she's rightfully persistent, so murder enters his heart, his head, or the penumbra of his thoughts. After an event similar to what happened in A Separate Peace, there's a body, a trial, and a verdict.

Phillips Holmes plays the boy, but the part exceeds his range, so he often has a dumbfounded look on his face, no matter what emotion the scene calls for. He's not talentless and is a nice-looking young man; he just doesn't have the acting range needed to carry the picture.

Sylvia Sidney, who plays the factory girl, does have the range. Her performance is movingly sweet, yet with backbone when the going gets tough. In the 1951 version, Shelley Winters plays the girl as a vicious harridan, while Sidney brings a more-rounded touch to her characterization.

Frances Dee, in the much smaller role playing the girl representing the place in the sun, also has a nice balance to her acting. In the 1951 version, the role was greatly expanded for Elizabeth Taylor, but in this earlier version, Dee is appealing as the just-out-of-reach dreamgirl.

The trial itself also stands out in the earlier version, with both the prosecuting and defense attorneys presenting their cases like bad actors in summer stock. Their performances are so obviously hammed up that one assumes they were directed to perform this way.

That direction would have come from Josef von Sternberg, who never focuses his picture on one theme, perhaps owing to the weakness of Holmes. The core, or centering, story is that of a boy reaching for the American Dream that proves to be just outside of his grasp.

The question is why is it outside of his grasp: his upbringing by religious zealots, his own limitations and demons, or an upper class that shuts the door to outsiders? The latter, as presented here, is the least likely, but the first two are never explored to the degree they should have been.

While the movie is often noted as showing the difficulty of achieving the American Dream for those of the lower classes, the movie's story shows a boy who got a girl pregnant and then didn't want to do the right thing by her (in that era) because he now had a better option.

That isn't a condemnation of the American Dream, it's a condemnation of one boy's moral failings. He had a respectable position in the company and a good future; the dream was in his grasp, but he wanted the rich not poor girl now.

Since we only have a sketchy outline of the boy's past – a poor upbringing, but heavy with Christian values – it's hard to say definitively, but if anything, his humble upbringing would have taught him that marrying the girl was the right thing to do and, of course, murder is mortal sin.

Maybe being poor instilled in him a blinding desire for wealth and status, but as presented here, he is only sympathetic in an abstract way. His actions, though, are not justifiable, so while you feel a little bit sorry for him, you still believe he, not "the system," is responsible for his behavior.

For modern audiences, much of this will seem foreign because contraception, abortion, and major shifts in societal norms have thankfully removed almost all the risks and stigma around premarital sex and pregnancy, but those events could destroy lives back in the 1930s.

What's left for viewers today is seeing that wreckage, and seeing the passions raised when the norms were broken. It's easy now to dismiss that as "ridiculous," but all societies, even ours today, has its deeply held, oh-so-important beliefs that will look silly in decades to come.

An American Tragedy is clunky, dated and needs a strong leading man, but it has such a passion for its ideas that it still holds your interest. You care about what happens to these tragic characters: You feel for the factory girl and the poor boy reaching for the brass ring.

 

[Fading Fast]

Bank Holiday from 1938 with Margaret Lockwood, Hugh Williams, John Lodge, Rene Ray, and Merle Tottenham


Despite its cheerful title and charming promotional poster, Bank Holiday is an intense and poignant slice-of-life movie that captures important turning points in several characters' lives over a long holiday weekend punctuated by crowded trains, piers, beaches, and hotels.

Margaret Lockwood plays a dedicated nurse about to go away on a "clandestine" weekend with her fiancé for their first round of premarital nooky, when that was a big deal. But before leaving, she's affected by a case where a woman dies in childbirth, leaving her husband bereaved.

The husband, played by John Lodge, immediately becomes a lost soul – which Lockwood senses. She wants to help him, but Lockwood's boyfriend, played by Hugh Williams, is anxious to start their weekend – one can only wonder why – so he pressures her to leave.

She goes away with her boyfriend but feels guilty for leaving Lodge, which annoys Williams, as he wants her focused on the, ahem, business at hand. At a high level – away from several smaller side stories marginally entwined with Lockwood and Williams – that is the plot.

Those side stories, though, include a Cockneyed family on vacation, two seemingly ditzy girls at the seashore because one is entering a holiday-weekend beauty contest, and finally the travails of a seaside follies troupe praying for rain to bring in customers.

The weekend, crowded from start to finish, doesn't go as planned for anyone. The Cockney family fight their way through the weekend as dad wants to drink and the wife wants to have a true vacation with maybe even a little glamour that her husband is incapable of giving her.

The ditzy girls are annoying until they get a bit drunk and reveal their sad backstories. Director Carol Reed shows a talent he'd perfect later in his career for making regular lives interesting, as he does in the touching and sad – and smartly filmed – bar scenes of the two girls just talking.

The main show, though, is Lockwood and Williams. She wants to get back to help Lodge while he tries to salvage his lost "romantic" weekend. No vacancies, rain, and her indifference turn it into a series of contretemps and fights that are often quite uncomfortable to watch, but real.

Set mainly at the seaside, Reed does intersperse scenes of Lodge aimlessly wandering around London thinking about his wife, played in flashbacks with warmth by Linden Travers. This personalizes his grief, while movingly juxtaposing it with the frivolous vacationers.

There's a forced climax involving hitchhiking, stolen box office receipts, the very British police, and even a suicide attempt. Movies demand exciting climaxes, so the writers give us one, but the value in this picture is in the telling, not the action.

It's also in Lockwood's outstanding performance as a strong woman comfortable with her decision to have sex, until she is emotionally pulled back to London by her concern for her patient. How it all got by the censors is a mystery, but she is girl-power 1930s style.

Her big, dark eyes, manly square jaw, unruly hair, translucent skin, and supple body compose an offbeat but beautiful woman whose looks match her character's strength – just as they did in her starring role in that same year's The Lady Vanishes. In both, Lockwood is a full-force woman.

She outshines the men here – in particular Williams, who comes off as selfish and even a bit creepy at times. Lodge is good, but you can only do so much playing a grieving man all movie. The surprise is Rene Ray, as one of the ditzy girls who shows unexpected emotional depth.

Ray and her friend, played by Merle Tottenham, appear frivolous and stupid, but after a few drinks, we see that sorrow – a jilting for Ray, no attention from men for Tottenham – created the "shell" of harmless idiocy they project. It's quietly heartbreaking, but excellent character building.

Reed shot all this in a studio, using background footage of London and the seaside for framing. Yet, by using that incredibly crisp black-and-white cinematography the UK seemed to have perfected then, his movie is visually engaging, even today, as it "feels alive."

While Reed would become famous for his later movies like The Third Man and Odd Man Out, his ability to create compelling narratives from "average" people is on display again in The Fallen Idol from 1948, where the life of a butler and young boy drive a gripping narrative.

Bank Holiday is a style of movie that is all but lost today: one that sets up a story, tells it in a straightforward manner – while developing and rounding out its characters – without any real gimmicks or "auteur" touches, and then finishes with mainly clear resolutions.

It lets the characters' predicaments and emotions draw you in as you follow along for the journey. It's refreshingly smart and uncomplicated storytelling, something that modern movie makers have all but forgotten how to do.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

In no particular order, recent filmic fun-times include

Kansas City Confidential (1952) directed by Phil Karlson, who was behind the camera for several well-directed Charlie Chan movies, here telling the story of John Payne's character who is wrongly accused of involvement in a bank robbery and, though cleared, can't get a job with a tarnished reputation. He sets out to find the gang that pulled the heist and so restore his good name. Preston Foster is the mastermind, who is slowly tracked down by Payne to an idyllic Mexican resort. Listen, any movie that has Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef, and Neville Brand all in it, playing the deeply troubled bad guys, you can ignore plot issues and watch the characters act all criminal-like. Colleen Gray is along for some romantic drama. Karlson uses the noir/hardboiled close-up scheme well, with screen-filling porous faces delivering tough hoodlum-ese: "You didn't have to burn your boss, he wasn't crossing you" and "Why you tossing my joint?" as Payne's motel room is being semi-ransacked. (I'm 99% positive I've posted about this in the past...)

Sabotage (1936), directed by Alfred Hitchcock prior to taking up life in the US; with Sylvia Sidney, who is married to Oscar Homolka, who is the titular character. John Loder is a Scotland Yard sergeant gone undercover to bust the saboteurs. Famous for the extended bomb on the bus sequence. Hitchcock sets up several two-shots as characters converse, and makes good use of high-contast lighting. Peter Bull, uncredited, has a short part, but he looks like Homolka's uncle. Vaguely Continental operatives are sabotaging parts of London: it's 1936 and we know things are getting bad fast on the mainland; who are the bad guys? You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The Key Witness (1947) a low-budget sort of thriller*, with John Beal, Trudy Marshall, and Jimmy Lloyd, directed by D. Ross Lederman, who had a substantial career in directing television programs. Beal accidentally gets connected to a murder, goes on the road, finds a corpse along the train tracks, swaps identities with the dead guy, and ends up faking his way as a millionaire's long-lost son. Through a series of Hollywood coincidences, Beal looks to be ID'ed as himself, not the real dead son. Things sort of work out, but I won't spoil it for you.

* It starts out promisingly enough, but the bulk of the story seems like Blondie and Dagwood Meet Crime, heavy on the Dagwood.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Big Shakedown from 1934 with Richard Cortez, Charles Farrell, Glenda Farrell, Bette Davis and Allen Jenkins


Judged on an "is this a good movie" scale, The Big Shakedown is a mess, but if you like a lot of Warner Bros. precode crazy jammed, truly jammed, into a one-hour "message" movie, it all but leaves you breathless. (Note: Warners released this one under its First National Pictures brand.)

The plot is very of the moment as the mob, with prohibition repealed, moves into the counterfeit drug business using both stolen patent formulas and inferior ingredients to undersell legitimate competitors. This was a ripped-from-the-headlines story in 1934.

It starts with a nice small-town drugstore, run by a young pharmacist, played by Charles Farrell, and his fiancée, played by one-second-away-from-stardom Bette Davis. The store hardly breaks even, but it is an important part of the neighborhood.

Davis has a small role here as the girl stuck playing the conscience of Farrell, but her talent shines through even in her brief scenes in the drug store. She's so good, you forget she's acting because she just seems like a girl who knows how to run a corner pharmacy.

Trouble for Farrell and Davis starts when the mob, headed up by a smooth gangster, played by Richard Cortez, convinces Farrell to make products like toothpaste for them, which the mob then illegally sells with counterfeit labels under trademarked names at cheaper prices.

This is bad, but Farrell convinces himself no one is getting hurt because the products he makes are of equal or better quality to the real stuff. Of course, that ignores the fact that he's stealing copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property – the kind of theft that can bankrupt a legitimate company and its shareholders.

While Farrell is being slow-walked into corruption by Cortez, Cortez is dealing with gun moll problems as his old moll, played by the insanely wonderful Glenda Farrell, has a hair-pulling catfight with his new moll. It's a reminder of the old "heaven has no rage..." maxim.

It's also a fun scene because, well, there's no need to explain why a catfight scene is fun. What makes this one extra special is G. Farrell firing off insults right in the middle of it. Warners Bros. had the fastest talking stars on earth back then, with G. Farrell near the top of the list.

Everything heats up as Cortez wants to grow the business by having C. Farrell make inferior versions of life-saving drugs. When C. Farrell declines, the slow-walking is over, as Cortez has his men "work over" C. Farrell until he agrees.

There's more story and action, including a lawsuit by a legitimate drug company trying to protect its patent. Cortez not only kills the key witness, but he places C. Farrell at the scene of the murder so he can hold the threat of arrest over his head.

Believe it or not, there's even more drama, comprising a suicide, a miscarriage related to the inferior drugs, a pre-Joker-from-Batman fall into a vat of acid, blackmail, and prisoners pounding rocks, which apparently was a thing.

All that is just in the main plot, as there's also some precode ethnicity thrown in with a Jewish teenager somewhat unpleasant stereotyped as being very focused on sales tax, but he's also kind of a likeable kid, so it's hard to say what the point was.

There's even a middle-aged woman buying cough syrup supposedly for her sick boy, but it's made clear she's really buying it for herself for the alcohol content, which was very much a thing back then.

Finally, when you're out of breath, there's a silly "the world will be alright" wrap-up that's unrealistic, but it gives the movie a feel-good ending. Eventually, consumer demand for less-expensive products, not the mob, would slowly doom the friendly neighborhood pharmacy.

This jam-packed, even by B movie standards, picture works because the story is crazy fun, and the talented Warners cast – Cortez played gangsters in his sleep back then, as did character actor par-excellence Allen Jenkins – knew how to handle warp-speed pacing and dialogue.

Today, The Big Shakedown is still fun in a kitschy way, plus the core premise of the mob moving in on drugstores and drug companies to sell counterfeit products is a peek at real history. Sadly, while not mainly mob driven, it's also a problem that's still with us today.