Doctor X (1932)

Dr. X, posing in the shadows to look creepy.

Ingredients: Cannibalism. Lunar madness. Synthetic flesh. A somber, isolated mansion on the craggy cliffs of Long Island. A flat-footed reporter with a penchant for practical jokes. Not one, but five deranged mad scientists with severe psychological trauma, one of which is likely a new serial killer just hitting his stride. Fay Wray in a negligee, screaming bloody murder. Such are the appeals of Michael Curtiz's delightfully creepy pre-code horror Doctor X, all filmed in painterly two-strip Technicolor.

In investigating a series of cannibalistic murders, police have a strong hunch that the killer must come from Dr. Jerry Xavier's Academy of Surgical Research. "If you're just looking for someone to hang suspicion on," Dr. X (Lionel Atwill) says to the police investigating the murder, "there's not a man in my faculty that wouldn't come under that heading." Ain't that the truth. The Academy's faculty is a veritable rogue's gallery of psychopaths in the making. We have the one-handed Dr. Wells (Preston Foster), who has recently returned from an expedition to Africa to study cannibalism and keeps a living heart in a jar on his desk. Dr. Haines (John Wray, no relation), who is studying "brain grafting", and the one-eyed Dr. Rowitz (Arthur Edmund Carewe), were shipwrecked together off the coast of Tahita and are suspected of having eaten one of their companions through necessity (did they develop a taste for it?). Rounding out the set we have the crotchety paralytic Dr. Duke (Harry Beresford), who studies the effect of "moon rays" on the mind along with Dr. Haines. Dr. Duke may appear to be the least neurotic of group, but he couples this normalcy with such ill manners that merely to say hello is a personal affront.

Under the guidance of the most accommodating police force in New York history, Dr. X takes his staff to his house on Long Island to conduct his own investigation. As a scientist, he conducts this search exactly as one might expect--through a series of experiments. Actually, his experiment works something like a cross between a polygraph test and Hamlet's play "The Mouse Trap."  The suspects are strapped down and hooked up to a device that measures their "blood reaction" while scenes of the murders are acted out in front of them. Naturally, the retelling gets far too real for anyone's taste and threatens to entangle a pair of innocents: Dr. X's daughter Joanne (Fay Wray) and a stowaway reporter (Lee Tracy) looking for a scoop (he'll settle for either a good story or the delicious Joanne).

Sssynnthetic flessshhh...!!

The acting is really fine all around. Preston Foster's gleeful chant of "Synthetic flesh!" as he grabs handfuls of goo from a smoking vat and smears it on his face is the best portrayal of a scientist's love affair with his own work since Colin Clive shrieked, "It's alive!" the year before. Lee Tracy as the bumbling reporter who jumps at shadows even while surrounded by actual monsters enhances the tension in the rest of the film by juxtaposing his silliness with its seriousness. I find myself wanting to cheer him on when he walks past a table without knocking it over. The scene of him hiding in a closet with a gang of skeletons, much of which was ad-libbed, is particularly well-conceived. The ever-lovely Fay Wray is wonderful as the doctor's devoted daughter. As Joanne she resists the "damsel in distress" role as long as humanly possible, braving every danger with stoic calm until the scream positively bursts out of her, the intensity of her fear wildly amplified by her demonstrated strength of character.

Is this the hand of a killer, or of an actor pretending to be a killer? You decide.

The biggest appeal in Doctor X, though, is not its story or acting, although both are solid throughout. No, art director Anton Grot gets the blue ribbon here for his dense, expressionistic set design and masterful use of early color. The Technicolor print was long believed to have been lost, but was discovered in the personal collection of Jack Warner after his death in 1978. UCLA has done a fine restoration, and the film looks fresh and new. The images are murky and strange, engendering in the viewer a sense of malaise long before the plot justifies the fear already created. The sets themselves are many and varied, including a New York waterfront, a brothel, Dr. X's academy, and his Long Island home. Two full sets of "mad scientist" labs are used, one at the academy and one at the mansion, each of which is full of all the bubbling, oversized beakers, big mysterious dials, billowing smoke and buzzing electricity that we know and love. 

Something is rotten in the state of New York.

Curtiz made good use of his pre-code freedoms, seasoning the story with adult themes that wouldn't have passed muster a few years later: cannibalism, rape, and prostitution are all essential to the plot, and seem far more shocking than they would in a modern film by the novelty of their context. All told, Curtiz really brought everything together with Doctor X, combining the solid acting of this ensemble cast with gorgeous set design and good, old-fashioned story-telling to create one of the most powerful and frightening horror films of early Hollywood.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

Much of the film uses stylish matte paintings like this one.

Max Reinhardt's lavish production has so much to recommend it that it seems almost inevitable that the end result be something less than the sum of its parts. Far, far less, as it turns out. Unfortunately, even the film's inspired music and design choices can't quite save it from its own wordiness. The quagmires of verbal sludge come with the territory--the halls of IMDB are filled with poorly directed Shakespeare adaptations in which Hollywood's finest can't quite get their tongues around the dialogue. The poetry may be the best in the world, but a naturalistic portrayal of language so intrinsically unnatural is an understandably tall order. I'm assuming it also helps if the director--unlike European theater titan Max Reinhardt--actually speaks English. James Cagney later reported cast members standing around off set whispering to each other, "Somebody ought to tell him." Well, they didn't. In spite of its strong production values and star-studded cast, a couple of poor casting choices and unimpressive dialogue direction throughout weighs down an otherwise excellent film.

Highest marks certainly go to the film's artistic team. Reinhardt's ethereal vision was brought to life by art director Anton Grot (whose work in Doctor X first made me stop and take note) and cinematographer Hal Mohr (who won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for this film as a write-in). A wide array of devices are used to create the striking visual effects that separate the reality of the forest from the magical world of fairies that is superimposed on top of it. In this case that's a literal truth--simple double exposure tricks allow the fairies to flit through the air and in the trees, and pop in and out of sight. The film uses a soft focus throughout, and combines this with an array of unusual filters to make the fairy world sparkle and shimmer.

These two dancers deliver the finest performances in the film.

Erich Wolfgang Kornhold adapted Mendelssohn's incidental music for the film's score, which adds even more to the film's class and integrity. Many of the wordier passages are sung instead of spoken, as indeed they probably were when the play was first staged. Fortunately, many of the cast members--particularly Dick Powell and James Cagney--are talented singers, so the musical adaptation of the dialogue works well. Even more impressive are the expressionistic ballet sequences that accompany the score. The depiction of the fairies' exit from the forest, in which the dancer's waving hands become the flapping wings of the fairies fluttering away into darkness, is easily my favorite moment in the film.

This was the film debut of Olivia de Havilland.

If Reinhardt is credited with only one contribution to Hollywood filmmaking, surely it must be his discovery of eighteen-year-old Olivia de Havilland in her college production of Midsummer. He snatched her up for his extravagant stage production of the play at the Hollywood  Bowl in 1934, which was the basis for this film version a year later. She is fresh and young and lovely, and her breezy portrayal of Hermia is enough to make you forget that it is actually Helena that is usually considered the plum role. Another inspired casting choice is James Cagney as Bottom the Weaver. Cagney was never in a Shakespeare play before or since, but his commanding screen presence and comedic timing are flawless. Comedian Joe E. Brown, then at the peak of his rather extraordinary popularity, gives a stellar performance opposite Cagney as Flute, the Bellows-Mender.

James Cagney and Joe E. Brown make an unlikely yet highly entertaining couple.

Other performances in the film are much less impressive. For instance, I know for a fact that Dick Powell can actually act, and does not look like a Conrad Veidt-inspired Botox victim. If Dream were all I had to go on, however, that would probably be the extent of my estimation of him. He said himself he felt he was miscast as Lysander, and went through filming feeling a little lost, and so he wears the same goofy grin from start to finish. The only saving grace of his performance is that he almost never appears without Olivia de Havilland opposite him, so there's never much reason to actually look at him on screen.

Alas, Dick Powell is not the worst casting choice in the film. I never thought I would say this, but I find myself wishing that George Lucas could oversee this movie's next DVD release. Surely it would occur to him, as it did me, that the only logical approach would be to edit out the lead performer and replace him with a CGI creation. Anything ILM could come up with would have to be better than fourteen-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck. He shrieks and cackles his way through his lines without ever delivering a single line that is not actually painful to hear. As if that weren't enough, he fills all his remaining screen time with utterly unnecessary howling, hooting, and laughter. I'm sure it was meant to be "impish," but it comes across only as "obnoxious." I've never understood Rooney's popularity and have more than once wanted to find a way to remove him from some of his films (Girl Crazy, Breakfast at Tiffany's), but this is probably the worst.

Unfortunately, Dream demands a strong ensemble cast, and a few good performances won't outweigh the remaining mediocrity, even aside from the train wrecks of Powell and Rooney. The remaining cast all look well enough for the parts, but deliver their lines with ludicrously exaggerated intonations that mask any real emotion and leave the speakers looking only ridiculous. Even de Havilland is sometimes guilty of this, although she proves elsewhere in the film that she does possess the subtlety necessary to do the thing properly. This is not your standard Shakespearean bombast. Rather than emphasizing the elegance in the words at the expense of their sense, everyone in Dream favors emotion, and the words are often lost in inappropriate squeals and laughter.

Artistically, the film is stunning, and the use of ballet sequences and composite images makes it daring and innovative as well. Unfortunately, the lackluster performances by most of the cast on top of Mickey Rooney's incessant cackling makes it all but unwatchable in spite of its beauties.

Swing Your Lady (1938)

Penny Singleton and Humphrey Bogart.

Oh my, oh my. I knew I would like this one from the first painful twang of the opening credits, which in addition to Bogie include such luminaries as "The Weaver Brothers and Elviry," all displayed against a background of crude line drawings of hillbillies. If this doesn't promise to deliver a ho-down and somebody named Pappy, I thought to myself, then my name's Mud.

Now and Forever (1934)

Gary Cooper, Shirley Temple, and Carole Lombard make an uncomfortable family, at best.

In spite of my better judgment, I find myself braving insulin shock by watching a Shirley Temple movie for the second time this year. As a great lover of musicals, I had to take a look at one of the most successful song and dance teams in movie history, Shirley and Bojangles, which accounts for my watching The Little Colonel a few months ago. I ended that experience by confirming that Shirley, much like high fructose corn syrup, is probably better left on the shelf. Yet here I am again, in spite of my resolve. The problem is, that unlike the Olsen twins a few years ago, Shirley's movies were never peopled with low-calibre character actors who had nothing better to do. Since Shirley was the hottest ticket around, her films are chock full of some of the biggest names of the day. Robert Young, Alice Faye, Lionel Barrymore, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Spencer Tracy, Buddy Ebsen, and Joel McCrea all served time aboard the Good Ship Lollipop, as did Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard, both of whom co-starred with Shirley in Now and Forever.

It's an odd sort of film, darker and shadier than I would have expected from Shirley or Cooper either one. I never expected to watch a Shirley Temple movie that must be stretched out of shape to fit into the Hays Code box, and Cooper's portrayal of con man Jerry Day is a far cry from his usual wholesome image. There are a few predictable plot elements on both sides--as usual, Shirley has several family members and friends fighting for custody of her, and the film's ending has Cooper stoically battling a gunshot wound without bothering to seek medical attention. The film does present a fairly simple moral dilemma and then test the characters' reactions to the challenge, and Shirley overwhelms everyone in her path with near toxic levels of cuteness, as she giggles and dances her victims into submission. But Shirley is not in every scene, which helps to keep the radiation levels in check, and the story itself is both interesting and original.

Cooper plays American con man Jerry Day, who spends his life ducking in and out of some of the best hotels in the world with his partner Toni (Carole Lombard). Although a few specific references identify her as his wife, this seems to be a mere technicality, and surely only for the benefit of the Hays office. The two seem at times barely to know each other, and never have any clear vision of their future together, or even if they will stay together at all from one caper to the next.

Partners in crime.

One of the early scenes in the film has Jerry posing as a hotel auditor to collect past due rent from other guests in order to pay his own bill, and I can't help but think that any other Cooper character would punch Jerry in the face if he got wind of such a stunt. As if that weren't enough, soon after he excitedly explains to Toni that his next project involves a visit to his former in-laws to "sell" them custody of his daughter for $75,000. Maybe this was the dark past Cooper shuddered to remember in Man of the West. At any rate, these early shenanigans are more than enough to make Jerry Day about the most nefarious Cooper character I've seen yet, and that's before he turns jewelry thief later in the film and then (horror of horrors!) lies to his daughter Penny (Temple) about the stolen necklace even after swearing "honor bright" to tell the truth.

The real saving grace in this film is that the characterizations of all three leads and their relationships with each other are sympathetic and believable. Jerry falls for Penny in spite of his best intentions (it seems no one is immune), and turns down the $75,000 in favor of taking Penny to Paris with him to rejoin his "wife" Toni. He hasn't really changed--"I don't like life any better than I ever did," he tells Toni, "and nothing can make me settle down,"--but the more attached he becomes to Penny the more he realizes that there is more to life than just having fun, and even manages to develop a little responsibility. Or, at least he tries.

Okay, so they do look cute together...

Toni is torn between her love for Jerry and her mistrust of his intentions towards her and towards Penny, and the frostiness this creates in her makes even Penny wary of letting her too close, and it takes a while for them to warm up to each other at all. The three of them move through life without any clear idea what they're doing, and it quickly emerges that Penny, at the ripe old age of five, is the wisest and most mature of the group. There's a lot of love here, though, and it's not all saccharine.

Although Penny is the catalyst that makes Jerry want to change and be a better man, he doesn't really do it for her. It is Toni that he really loves, but bringing Penny into their lives lets him see Toni's pain and vulnerability for the first time. It is for her, and not for Penny, that he agrees to stop "chasing trains" and go get a job. These are two broken, desperate people, lonely even when they're together and unable to commit to each other in any traditional way yet each physically incapable of living without the other. A handful of catch phrases and inside jokes make the characterization of these two beautifully three dimensional, and create, almost in the background, a genuinely touching love story.

... but then, so do they.

I'm not about to rush out and complete my "Little Darling" collection, but it was a pleasant surprise to find I could watch one of Temple's movies all the way through without wanting to throw up in my mouth. Shirley is far more sickeningly sweet than I'd like, but she was also a very capable actress even as a very young girl, which is itself certainly worthy of respect. As a whole, the film was sincere and unpredictable, a worthwhile showcase for the exceptional talent of all three leads. Shirley comes on a little strong for many people, including myself, but if you're willing to look past this, Now and Forever is a rewarding film nonetheless.

Honolulu (1939)

Eleanor Powell and Robert Young

Believe me, the last thing I want to do is say a harsh word about any of the paltry handful of films left to us by the great Eleanor Powell. When she retired in her prime in 1944 to get married, a terrible blow was dealt to the world of movie musicals, and I'm not sure MGM ever really recovered (although signing Ann Miller in 1948 was a solid step in the right direction). She matched an endearing girl next door charm with just a touch of Hollywood glamor and the fastest damned footwork you've ever seen. She starred in only nine films, plus a couple of supporting roles, far too few for a woman of her tremendous talent. While several of these films, such as Born to Dance and all three Broadway Melody titles, rank among the finest musicals ever made, others just don't make the cut.

Shanghai Express (1932)

The Shanghai Express, a three day rail journey down the coast of dark, forbidding China, carrying passengers as remote and distant from each other as they are from their faraway homelands in Europe and America. Their loves and hates and desires for one another, based on snatches of conversation overhead moments or a lifetime ago, make each of them as incomprehensible as the constant barrage of the Chinese language, which is always shouting questions no one wants to know the answer to. The Shanghai Express is caught in the middle of a mysterious civil war, and though the train's passengers are by and large not political, they are nevertheless embroiled in a conflict they don't understand, though they know it could kill them at any moment. Or worse. The Shanghai Express. Hell.

The Big Trail (1930)

70mm Fox Grandeur was a beautiful thing

Watching Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, I am troubled by two persistent questions for which, I fear, there can be no satisfactory answer. If they could make movies that looked and sounded like that back in 1930, why didn't they make more of them? And of course, why did it take Hollywood nearly ten years to realize what a powerhouse they had in John Wayne?

The Mummy (1932)

The Mummy is the third great Universal horror film of the 1930's, after Dracula and Frankenstein, and the only one that does not have a literary source. It was conceived as a sort of collage of successful elements from other films--Boris Karloff's charismatic Frankenstein pasted on top of most of the plot of Dracula, with an Egyptian setting to capitalize on the world-wide craze for all things Egyptian that followed the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Although the elements of the plot were thrown together purely based on what the producers thought would sell tickets, the end result is something much greater than the sum of its parts. In particular, the resemblance to Dracula, though remarkable on the surface, does not touch the story's substance. While in Dracula triumph is found through human ingenuity, The Mummy is a fatalistic passion play in which the humans are merely spectators in the world of the gods.

Reaching for the Moon (1930)

Douglas Fairbanks as Larry Day in Reaching for the Moon

"The microphone is ruthlessly unkind to [Fairbanks]," wrote a New York Times critic in 1934, "Neither in voice nor theatrical skill is he gifted to read lines." Unfortunately, writer/director Edmund Goulding also didn't do him any favors, as this second Fairbanks talkie, Reaching for the Moon, thoroughly demonstrates. (Fairbanks himself wrote his next film, Mr. Robinson Crusoe. Sadly, it is even worse). On top of this, DVD distribution companies like his voice even less; the production quality of the Passport Video release of this film makes it all but unwatchable. Having sat through a 74 minute mess of blurry, jumpy picture and and audio that sounds like it was recorded in a railway tunnel, I find that while Fairbanks does nothing to save this shoddy script, neither do Bing Crosby or Bebe Daniels. The only truly memorable performance is given by Edward Everett Horton, a year or two before he found his true calling as Fred Astaire's perennial valet at RKO. I've heard a rumor that the art deco sets used for this film are magnificent, but I wouldn't know, as I've never seen them. Yes, the DVD is that bad.

The Cat's Paw (1934)

Harold Lloyd as Ezekial Cobb and Una Merkal as Pet

The Cat's Paw is a remarkably watchable early talkie from veteran silent star Harold Lloyd, but Lloyd has little to do with what makes it special. After reviewing the initial script, Lloyd decided that his standard array of gags and pitfalls would be out of place, and so left them out. He was right--turning The Cat's Paw into a slapstick would have ruined it--but as a straight actor, even a comic one, Lloyd has little to add to a well thought out and clever script like this one, and his performance comes across as a bit lackluster. Fortunately, he's not the only one in the film: the exquisite Una Merkel is on hand to save the day, and easily overshadows him. "Say, why don't you get a new line?" Merkel advises Lloyd in one of their first meetings, "Or better still, don't try to be funny."

Design for Living (1933)

Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins

With the list of names on board for Design for Living, it had better be incredible, and thankfully it does not disappoint. Ernst Lubitsch directs a Noel Coward play, starring Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Frederic March, and Edward Evertt Horton, and every one of them has got their game face on, and how. The dialog sparkles with impossible wit. Nobody speaks like this, but we don't watch movies to see real life; we have real life for that. As is often the case with Lubitsch's films, Design is interested in how human beings, with their own agendas for their sex lives, fit into a society, which frequently imposes on them a radically different agenda. Design approaches this question in the context of the clash of the worlds of advertising and art, of the difference between the things that really matter to people, and the things that someone has a vested interest in making them think matter.

The Films of Douglas Fairbanks: Introduction

Douglas Fairbanks

In the 1920's, Douglas Fairbanks was the biggest action star the world had ever known, but he got there in a round about sort of way. He started out in comedy, making simple “boy-meets-girl-but-then-something-gets-in-the-way-so-he-has-to-get-chased-all-over-town-and-perform-outlandish-stunts-before-he-can-marry-her” films, not unlike the Harold Lloyd thrill-seekers of the 1920's. Fairbanks’ comedies are all but forgotten today in favor of his better-known adventure films, but it was in comedy that he first established himself as one of the three most successful stars in Hollywood, along with Charlie Chaplin and Fairbanks’ own future wife, Mary Pickford. For several years, Fairbanks had become increasingly involved in the practical side of filmmaking, leading up to his co-founding of United Artists with Chaplin, Pickford, and director D.W. Griffith in 1919. When he made his first foray into serious action films with 1920’s The Mark of Zorro, Fairbanks was a well-established star of thirty-seven, and a full career reboot was the last thing anyone could have expected, particularly when this meant taking on projects of a scale and complexity that made them phenomenally more expensive than his earlier works. The Mark of Zorro was a hit, however, and Fairbanks never looked back. Over the next nine years he made a total of eight more costumed adventure films, cementing his reputation as cinema’s first (and arguably greatest) swashbuckler.