Mad Love, Greta Garbo, and the good Scarface - Reviews #196

PLUS: The Sex Pistols, Lubitsch falling off his mantle and me (sort of) hanging out with Michael Caine.



Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926) - This is a staggering silent melodrama, with a luminescent Garbo bewitching two formerly inseparable soldiers (John Gilbert and Lars Hanson) amidst the lamplight, mist and falling snow.

The story is short, slight and so fatalistic that it's largely predictable, but that's rather beside the point. The point? That this may well be the lyrical apogee of silent cinema, with a look, a feel and an arsenal of visual innovations that set it apart from - if not above - those other wordless hymns to jawdropping imagery that dominate the landscape of the late silent era: films like 7th Heaven, Sunrise and The Docks of New York.

In any other movie, the silhouetted duel - like one of Lotte Reiniger's animated shorts - or Garbo's sacreligious communion would be the sequence you couldn't wrench from your mind for a week afterwards, but Flesh and the Devil goes one better, with that heart-stopping moment when our hero spies his fatale across a ballroom floor: twice there, twice obscured, then back in sight, then in rapturous, seductive close-up. It's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on screen, and call me a hipster idiot, but I made a Vine of it: vine.co/v/OA5KpeM6XEY

As you might have guessed, it's a film that's at once entranced by and terrified of sexuality, a duplicitous relationship that rather works in its favour, as the story throbs with self-righteous fury, then gets periodically sidetracked (like Gilbert) by Garbo's ravishing sensuality.

She overplays a couple of moments near the end, mixing welcome realism and maniacal gesticulation, but is largely excellent, working with her favourite Hollywood director, Clarence Brown, and exhibiting most of the subtlety and all of the star quality that made her a legend within her lifetime. The much-maligned Gilbert is also pretty good in the top-billed part of a happy-go-lucky kid driven to distraction by love lost and lust, with Hanson faring the weaker of the two as his comrade-in-homoeroticism. Barbara Kent - who only departed this realm last year - rounds out the central foursome as Hanson's sister, who adores but doesn't idealise grumpy Gilbert, but can't keep pace with her more illustrious love rival.

It's narratively simplistic, then, erotically confused and perhaps a little erratically played, but it's a visual feast like little before or since, and a fitting showcase for one of cinema's most beguiling, singular performers. (4)

See also: I wrote a bit about Garbo's maligned swansong here.

***



Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) - I love it that this was made in 1932 and it's still a 15.

It's an undisputed, bullet-riddled classic of the crime genre, and certainly the most violent, unsentimental and realistic of the '30s gangster cycle - which also produced films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and The Roaring Twenties. It's also a hell of a lot better than De Palma's laughable '80s retread: an exercise in excess, especially in regard to how excessively long and boring it is.

The story has Italian immigrant Tony Camonte taking the Chicago underworld by force, whilst chatting up fickle peroxided floozie Karen Morley, but mostly just fancying his own sister (Ann Dvorak), who has her own eyes set on his right-hand hitman, coin-flipping heavy, Guino (George Raft).

Scarface was principally the brainchild of three men, and each brings something punchy and powerful to the table. Producer Howard Hughes was a rebel, an anti-authoritary figure who sided with the outsider, and had yet to permit his life-wrecking OCD to commandeer his films (his later works were damagingly in production for up to eight years).

Having apparently buried the hatchet after suing and counter-suing one another the previous decade, his director was Howard Hawks, the aristocratic filmmaker who made tough movies about tough men and women, with a style and economy that had made him one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. And writer Ben Hecht, an ex-crime reporter, contributed not only his street smarts, but an understanding of how gangsters spoke, behaved and ran their business.

Despite some heavy-handed moralising and a pussy-footed ending enforced by the censorship code, Scarface is a film that revels in wrongdoing, delivering a visceral excitement in those scenes where Camonte kicks the living shit out of the city. That excitement also comes from Hawks' consummate style and effortless ease: he kicks off with a mesmeric tracking shot, kills most of his victims off-camera in various imaginative ways, and - with cinematographer Lee Garmes - makes use of light and shadow in a way that would have impressed future noir pioneers Nicolas Musuraca and John Alton, particularly in the St Valentine's Day Massacre sequence, which is every bit as good as the one in Some Like It Hot - high praise indeed. There's also that first shot of Muni, his scarred face emerging from under a hot towel, and the amazing PoV in the First Ward Social Club, where you first see what Camonte is up against, then later how he intends to deal with that.

Finally, Hecht's dialogue is salty, earthy and entirely potent - there's little of the flowery, sardonic noir poetry here. Camonte is a thug who never got an education; he's not thick, he's smart in his own way, but he doesn't talk like a Hollywood screenwriter, he talks like he was raised on the streets, and intends to stay there - just in luxury.

This was former Yiddish theatre actor Muni's greatest year on screen - he would make the definitive social drama, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang right off the back of Scarface - and he's simply sensational, a brutish, bruising monument to obsession who flits from charm to malice in a flicker. Speaking with an accent every bit as contrived as Brando's in The Godfather, he nevertheless seems utterly real, immersed in the character from first frame to last.

Raft is more well-used than he is acting well, and Boris Karloff is oddly cast as a rival ganglord, but the two female leads both score big. Morley is suitably flighty, flirtatious and scurrilous as an actress turned on by power and bloodsheed, though it's only Dvorak who can really keep pace with Muni - and arguably surpass him. Her character, Tony's horny, repressed 18-year-old sister, could have come across as forced or spoilt or annoying, but Dvorak is absolutely dynamic: hitting every note flawlessly, whether playing frustrated or sexy or vengeful. Even, in fact, when doing an impossibly dated tap routine outside a nightclub at an uncomfortable George Raft.

Scarface is undeniably imperfect: it doubtless lost something (and gained some unwanted things) during its extended battle with the censorious Hays Office, and has a few more easily avoidable problems, including a saggy mid-section dragged down by Vince Barnett's pointless comic relief, an inclusion as incongruous as if Michael Corleone banged his balls on the door handle after the restaurant scene in The Godfather, and turned to the camera, going: "Ooooooof."

It's also, though, a landmark of the gangster genre, with an energy, a ferocity and a commitment to both reality and grown-up subject matter, as opposed to Hollywood convention, that's still exciting to behold today. If you are 15 or over. (3.5)

***



The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000) - In 1979, Julien Temple made The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle: a fictionalised retelling of the story of the Sex Pistols - the most important British rock band of the 1970s - which spouted the party line of manager and all-time bullshitter Malcolm McLaren, suggesting that he alone was responsible for conceiving of, sculpting and defining the group.

Twenty-one years later, the director kindly followed it up with this definitive documentary, which is funny, ferocious and ultimately extremely poignant, whilst telling the truth about where the band came from, what they stood for and why they fell apart. "Never mind the bollocks," you could almost say, "here's the Sex Pistols."

They weren't just about spit, vomit and saying "fuck", any more than the Beatles were about mop-top hair, Scouse accents and saying "oooooh" - that is to say, they did do those things, but they did a whole lot more besides. Paul Cook was a generic drummer, Steve Jones a horny kleptomaniac, Glen Matlock a competent if boring bassist and melody-writer, and Sid Vicious a posturing, talentless replacement who got hooked on smack and promptly fell to pieces.

But Johnny Rotten? He was something special.

A lot of rubbish is spoken about Rotten (aka John Lydon) today - that either he reneged on his punk principles or was never that great to begin with. Nonsense. He was a poet, a menace, a social pariah, an amateur working class historian and a rough-edged polemicist, who almost single-handedly invented the iconography of punk, whilst waging war on the entire British establishment. In two-and-a-half years. He is that important to British cultural history. But how do you follow that? And how is someone like that supposed to grow old - especially when left bankrupt, blacklisted and bereaved by their own 'success'.

He talks a bit of shit in the film - he always did - but who else would you want to guide you through the story - his story? Cook and Jones are good comic value (I love Cook's one-liner about his first encounter with Nancy Spungen), and the archive footage of Vicious is sort of fascinating, but it's Lydon who leaves the indelible impression - wise, legitimately bitter and ultimately broken-hearted, as he recalls Vicious's sad demise, and you realise that, in the shadows, he's crying. Amongst the wealth of archive footage, there's also a brilliant sequence in which the band hold a benefit for the children of striking firefighters in Huddersfield, doling out cake to the kids, most of which they throw at a delighted Rotten.

As a film it has a few flaws - its political contextualising is shaky, the editing is annoying, and, most damagingly, there's no live music to go with the live footage - but it's a movie with a great deal of personal significance to me, one I've watched a lot over the past 15 years, and as good a film as we'll ever get about the Pistols. (3)

***

Initial experiments with the Hollywood's Legends of Horror box-set:



Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935) - This highly-rated ensemble horror from Freaks director Tod Browning is occasionally sublime but more often silly, and hamstrung by some very obvious pre-release butchery.

When a prominent aristo is found dead and drained of blood, sceptical cop Lionel Atwill, vampire expert Lionel Barrymore and several people not called Lionel try to get to the bottom of the matter. Cue Bela Lugosi and the unearthly Carroll Borland stalking the environs, accompanied by mist, eerie soundscapes and a multitude of amusingly unrealistic bats. But cue also all manner of plot contrivances, draggy dialogue scenes and acting as wooden as a stake through the heart (excepting, of course, the kindly, twinkly-eyed and always excellent Jean Hersholt).

Perhaps the problem is that there’s no reason why this film should only run an hour, aside from commercial concerns, making the narrative seem quite absurdly choppy, as we scoot forward in time, fade out during significant moments, and get less Lugosi than anyone could possibly want.

There’s oodles of atmosphere, a handful of memorable images courtesy of James Wong Howe, and Elizabeth Allan's lovely English voice, but with a story this daft and unconvincing – and nominal star Barrymore barely bothering to vary his line readings before returning to his trailer – it just doesn’t really work. Regardless, Browning was a very talented filmmaker, and his movies still cast a long shadow – this one’s DNA is unmistakably present in the work of ‘40s horror pioneer Val Lewton, which really is as good as its reputation suggests. (2)



Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) - A top-notch little horror, with Peter Lorre in scintillating form as a bald, brilliant surgeon driven mad by his love for actress Frances Drake, who just doesn't see him as boyfriend material.

It doesn't always have time to explore its various competing story threads, and might have worked even better without the dated comic relief from May Beatty and Ted Healy, but it's imaginatively plotted - with a nod or two to Frankenstein, as that film's dodgy doctor (Colin Clive) is taken over by a criminal body part - nicely co-filmed by a young Gregg Toland, and quite exquisitely acted by the star, who's enjoyable when playing it big, and quietly devastating when turning those huge, uneven and expressive eyes on his inner tragedy.

He's helped by some unusually incisive writing for what is just a low-budget B-movie, as well as the inventive, intelligent handling of genre specialist Karl Freund, who shot films for Fritz Lang and Murnau, made Dracula with Tod Browning, and directed The Mummy. This was his last film as a director, with MGM instead putting him to work as a specialist cameraman on prestige productions, but it's one hell of a sign-off.

Mad Love has one of my favourite trailers ever too, with a lounging, charming and fully-haired Lorre cooing into his phone as a 'fan' waxes lyrical about the actor's recent starring part for Hitchcock.

I can never see Clive without thinking of Mae Clarke's comment that he was "the handsomest man I ever saw - and also the saddest". (3.5)



The Devil-Doll (Tod Browning, 1936) - This is the sort of film you might see as a kid and subsequently wonder if you'd imagined, with Lionel Barrymore as a vengeful banker (and prison escapee) who dresses as an old woman, shrinks dogs for fun, then enlists a pair of microscopic, voodoo minions to paralyse his old adversaries.

It's a baffling collision of Tod Browning horror and sentimental melodrama (Barrymore has a daughter who's disowned him, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, best known as Tarzan's Jane) that never gels, but is as difficult to forget as it is to fully embrace.

My favourite thing about it - and there are several good things, none of which are Barrymore's 'old woman voice' - is the enormous set that Lachna (Grace Ford) clambours over on her way to multitudinous wrongdoing - an ingenious bit of filmmaking far more special than the other effects on display.

The Devil-Doll is no classic, but it rarely bores, and is - for all its daft interludes and concessions to eye-rolling hamminess - quite unlike anything I've ever seen before. Very interesting ending too. (2.5)



Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932) - If you love film history, don't miss it. If you don't, don't watch it.

The story - about an unhinged medical professor stalking a Gothic house - is ludicrous, and the acting from a cast that includes Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and the incredible Lee Tracy is surprisingly dodgy, dogged by creakiness and plenty of fluffed lines, presumably because the two-strip Technicolor they were shooting on was so expensive.

But the eye-popping sets, the casting, the Max Factor make-up and that experimental black-and-white-and-red-and-green-and-sort-of-yellow palette still amaze. The film is notable too for its populist flourishes, like having the reigning Scream Queen, Wray, enter the film screaming for absolutely no reason. (2.5)

***


It's all downhill from here. Which is a pity.

Billion Dollar Brain (Ken Russell, 1967) - I sat in on a Newsnight interview with Michael Caine the other day, as he was doing a show at the concert venue where I work.

One of the fascinating things he talked about - which didn't make the edit - was this ludicrous idea that he just plays himself on screen. Rather, he said, he's a bit like Fred Astaire: "You see Gene Kelly running up the walls and you say, 'I couldn't do that', but then you watch Fred Astaire, and he makes it look so easy - and you think, 'I could do that'. Trust me, you couldn't. And that's the same with my acting. 'I could do that.' Trust me, you couldn't."

That's true of his effortless, offhand performance in Billion Dollar Brain - the third instalment in the Harry Palmer series, which began with The Ipcress File (partly filmed outside the Hall!) in 1965 - lending a wit and subtlety to a film that starts with an utterly sublime scene nodding to classic noir, before declaring open war on our good will.

Part of the problem is the script, which features some fine speeches and delightfully sardonic Palmer zingers, but frequently introduces characters by having Caine simply say their name, too often plays for laughs, and has absolutely no substance: just a shrill, endless merry-go-round of double, triple and possibly even quadruple-crosses.

The cacophonous, bombastic music score doesn't help, either, especially when contrasted with John Barry's magnificent work on Ipcress, and Ed Begley's massive performance as a psychotic religious zealot can be safely filed under 'shit'.

It's sort of interesting, though, for director Ken Russell's familiarly frenzied, sexualised and operatic visual sense, some astute verbiage, and Caine's agreeable underplaying. You couldn't do that. (2)

***



Nancy Goes to Rio (Robert Z. Leonard, 1950) - In this film, Jane Powell uses the word "jinkies" to express surprise.

It's a grindingly dull, often quite irritating retread of the Deanna Durbin film, It's a Date (Powell's mentor was producer Joe Pasternak, who had also discovered Durbin), with a poor screenplay, a weak performance from Barry Sullivan as the love interest, and some awful comedy from Louis Calhern, who I much prefer as a Pre-Code baddie.

Powell's songs are pleasant, though - if never the match of Durbin's - and the dress rehearsal scene, in which we discover just how talented her stagestruck kid really is, works very well. There's also fine support from Ann Sothern as her mother - who doubles as her professional and romantic rival - and Carmen Miranda turns up to sing a song, which is exactly the same as all her other ones, and thus boring.

That's doomed former child star Scotty Beckett as Powell's goofy suitor. (1.5)

***



Madame DuBarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) - Stodgy, sub-par Lubitsch: a plush but joyless, disappointingly straightforward melodrama about DuBarry (Pola Negri) and Louis XV (future Oscar winner and head of the Nazi film unit, Emil Jannings), with little of the director's famous "touch", and all of that confined to the first 20 minutes.

Negri does look quite cool masquerading as a soldier, as Lubitsch briefly explores his famous fondness for roleplay, but the master of the rom-com has little flair for action scenes, and surprisingly little chance to inject his sly sexual politics into this rigid, overblown film. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Greta Garbo, Sherlock, and down-and-out like Flynn - Reviews #180

Here's some stuff I watched and read over the past couple of weeks. Let me know if I'm overselling it.

FILMS



One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder, 1961) - Wilder's second-to-last masterpiece - and Jimmy Cagney's penultimate picture - is a rapid-fire Cold War comedy that ranks as one of the funniest films ever made.

Caggers is a veteran Coca Cola executive, marooned in West Berlin, who's forced to call on every ounce of his resources - and every trick in the book - after he lets the boss's daughter (Pamela Tiffin) marry a card-carrying communist (Horst Buchholz).

After a slow but steady 15-minute set-up, a little light on laughs, it's just non-stop entertainment: clever jokes, silly jokes, Nazi jokes, Stalin sight gags, cross-dressing, satire, in-jokes and innuendo, with Cagney a whirlwind of chicanery, juggling crooked commissars, suspicious journos and a bum-wiggling secretary with an "ümlaut".

Back in his element after a decade of mostly misfires, the star effortlessly recaptures the Cagney of old, of Blonde Crazy, Jimmy the Gent and Torrid Zone. It's a performance so full of manic energy that he then had to lie down for 20 years, only re-emerging for 1981's Ragtime. He's supported by a fun and perpetually shouting Buchholz, and a little-known but faultless ensemble, from his matchlessly acerbic wife (Arlene Francis) - whose every utterance is a gem - to the effusive, impressionable none-more-Southern Tiffin, and a sidekick who claims he was too far underground to know what Hitler was up to (Hanns Lothar).

Lots of later filmmakers have tried to recapture the zany spirit of '30s and early '40s comedies, but few have succeeded. Since Wilder wrote most of the best - from Midnight to Ball of Fire - he's not paying homage, merely remembering, and this one's the true spiritual successor to the immortal Ninotchka, co-written by him and directed by his hero Ernst Lubitsch, with the same culture-clash comedy, and the same well-lubricated, well horny Russian emissaries.

Incidentally, while Wilder gave both capitalism and communism what for in Ninotchka (and in 1933 Cagney described Stalin as "the greatest man in the world"), here he sides quite clearly with the West, while loading the script with acidic references to Germany's recent past - a beautiful, almost saintly way to deal with the events that had so impacted upon his own life, his nuclear family having largely perished at Auschwitz.

Many actors and directors never retained or reclaimed the carefree sensibility of the '30s after the horrors of the war. Bomber pilot Jimmy Stewart swore off mere entertainments, immersing himself in murky Westerns. Comedy specialist George Stevens never made another after filming the liberation of the death camps. But after getting some of his angst and anger out with his moody 1948 film, A Foreign Affair, shot on the ravaged streets of Berlin, Wilder merely dug in and kept pitching, the political gags still flying, a film still a place where anything went and everything was good for a laugh.

His last masterpiece came nine years after this one: a butchered but remarkable riff on the Sherlock Holmes legend that was up there with the Brett adaptations as my favourite treatment of Conan Doyle's legendary detective... until Moffat and Gatiss went to work. (4)

Trivia note: The movie in-jokes here alone are worth the price of admission, with Cagney doing his grapefruit bit from The Public Enemy, Cagney doing Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (more of which below) and, best of all, a guy doing a Cagney impression at Cagney...!

***



The Man in the Iron Mask (James Whale, 1939) - A glossy, successful version of Dumas' timeless tale, very different in focus and feel to Doug Fairbanks' take on the story, The Iron Mask, but with the same Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel de Brulier appearing briefly his fourth time out) and that same classic closing shot.

Away from the realm of the star vehicle, the emphasis here is not on the ageing D'Artagnan - putting his life on the line for perhaps the last time - but on the title character, with Louis Hayward excelling in a dual role as the effete, pampered and murderous king, and his brave, empathetic, hounded brother - a finer man than he will ever be.

Hayward was one of the most talented and underrated leading men of his era, memorably playing The Saint as a smirking, hard-edged vigilante in the greatest ever incarnation of Leslie Charteris' hero, and he creates two diverse, contrasting and perfectly rounded characters here. Almost as soon as the film begins, you simply forget this is the same man, aided by the clarity of the writing, perhaps, but largely due to Hayward ability to craft two so distinctive and memorable personas. He really is terrific.

Dog-faced Pre-Code lothario Warren William is strangely cast as D'Artagnan, struggling to embody the character's great virtues (a challenge which Fairbanks met effortlessly), and the action climax is a bit of a letdown - aside from one impressive fall under some horses - but it's a slick, handsome and fast-moving movie, with a very good performance at its centre and some lovely, lushly-scored romantic scenes between Hayward and Joan Bennett. There are also a few striking images courtesy of Frankenstein director Whale, almost all of them within the confines of that jail cell, spotlighting that brutal, hideous mask. And, alas, there is one concession to Code-era "morality", as one character is punished for promiscuity by being quite inexplicably shot.

I still prefer The Iron Mask, a flawed but frequently fantastic rendering of the story which served as Fairbanks' emotional farewell to the silent screen, but this entertaining film - from Hollywood at its height - does a lot right, and shouldn't disappoint anyone, except perhaps those seeking some exciting action to go with their impressively rendered period drama. Indeed, its changes to Dumas's original proved so popular and effective that later adaptations often based themselves on this version of the story, rather than the celebrated novel. (3)

***



Garbo (Kevin Brownlow, 2005) - An insightful, respectful Brownlow documentary on one of the greats, perhaps overly concerned with her reclusiveness, but also well-researched, with a few interesting talking heads (plus Snore Vidal) and a wealth of exceptional footage: not only from her films, but also from her private life, her fabled 1949 screentest for a comeback that never transpired, and, most extraordinarily, two adverts she shot as a chunky, generously-eyebrowed teenager. The typically beautiful original score from frequent Brownlow collaborator Carl Davis is a massive bonus, and the montage of kisses - presumably inspired by Cinema Paradiso - is a jolt of sensual old movie joy. (3)

***



It's All True (Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel and Bill Krohn, 1993) - In 1942, Orson Welles was asked by the American government to make a film in Brazil as part of its "Good Neighbour" policy, which was designed to warm up relations with South America and so prevent the countries there from siding with the Axis. For reasons of office politics and global politics - not to mention Welles' unpredictability, obsessiveness, perfectionism, erratic work ethic, quest for authenticity and desire to fill his magnum opus with socialism - It's All True was never finished.

Fifty-one years later, his assistant director Dick Wilson put together this crucial, often magical and sometimes quite frustrating documentary, bearing the same name and containing some of the recently rediscovered footage. It begins with a hagiographic history of the project - ironing out Welles' various shortcomings and mistakes - and catches up with many of the impoverished Brazilians who became the stars of It's All True, or would have done, had it ever been completed.

For some reason, and this is the biggest frustration, the documentary contains mere snippets of My Friend Bonito - the Mexican pastoral piece directed by Norman Foster under Welles' specific instruction - but, most significantly, it climaxes with a lengthy reconstruction of Orson's pet project, Four Men on a Raft, telling the story of four penniless "jangaderos" who sailed the unimaginable journey from Fortaleza to Rio to demand the same civil rights as those in the cities.

This piece of silent poetry, shot in Welles' distinctive style but also bearing the influence of Robert Flaherty, couldn't be presented as the director intended - he was long dead, and the footage emerged from the vaults simply as dailies - and comes with an unsuitable, overbearing and overly modern musical score, but it is a priceless piece of film history nonetheless, containing its share of longueurs and non-professional woodenness, but also much breathtaking imagery. The sequence in which a sobbing child tackles an obstacle course of daily life, as she runs to report the body she's just found, is simply magical filmmaking, especially when one considers the clunky cameras Welles was having to use by the time his team pitched up in Fortaleza. And there's plenty more where that came from: boats silhouetted against a tempestuous sea, working-class Brazilians preparing meticulously for the daily catch, or marching endlessly by as they bury their dead, an emotional charge beneath the sheer beauty of the pictures.

As a chronicle of Welles' doomed South American project, the film only really works in conjunction with Simon Callow's biography - which properly contextualises and explains the myriad problems surrounding the shoot - but it does fill in a major blank in one of the most important and fascinating of all cinematic careers, sharing the almost mythic footage collected during surely the boldest and most ridiculously managed venture ever attempted by a Hollywood director. (3)

***



Brother Orchid (Lloyd Bacon, 1940) - Edward G. Robinson seemed to spend more time riffing playfully on his gangster image than actually defining it, but I suppose the immortal Little Caesar was all it really took.

This 1940 "crime comedy", though, isn't really what you'd expect, especially when you hear that Eddie G will be playing an underworld kingpin who hides out in a monastery. Perhaps the comic possibilities of the premise couldn't be fully exploited because Code-era movies were banned from anything that might be seen to lampoon religion, or perhaps the writers were just looking to do something different from a culture clash comedy - because this is certainly different.

Robinson's uncouth mobster returns from five years abroad - searching in vain for "real class", as he had in The Little Giant - to discover that he's yesterday's news, and his malevolent, duplicitous old partner, Humphrey Bogart, is now running the show. Our hero's ditsy dame (Ann Sothern) tries to smooth things out, but instead sets him up for a gangland slaying, which he only just manages to avoid, collapsing fortuitously in front of a monastery run by wise, gentle Donald Crisp.

The first half is a mixed bag, with Lloyd Bacon showing his usual lack of panache behind the camera, but there are a few good jokes, including Robinson's line about a postcard from a psychiatric hospital and Frank Orth's bit with the phone, while the scene in which our hero thinks he's been betrayed by his girl is unexpectedly moving. There's also a first-rate cast: not just the commanding star, Bogart, Sothern and Crisp, but also the likes of Ralph Belllamy, Allen Jenkins and Richard Lane.

But nothing really prepares you for what follows: a strange, heartfelt and earnest diversion - perhaps not entirely different from the ones that followed in On Dangerous Ground and Looper - featuring a couple of sly, funny gangster-out-of-water gags concerning "chumps" and "rewards", but rather more concerned with showing Robinson the error of his ways. While it's not entirely successful, providing neither the crime that we were promised, nor the comedy, it is agreeably unusual, perhaps due to the input of maverick associate producer Mark Hellinger. In fact, it's so good that even Bacon perks up, his obviousness offset by the rather lovely presentation of the scenes at the monastery.

Sometimes studio films of this era turn into something else entirely, merely because the writers were under such time pressure that they wrapped things up any way they could think of. With this one, based on a Collier's Magazine story, you get the impression that the redemptive tale into which it develops is the whole point, the cliched crime and comedy trappings are mere dressing for what the talented, often left-leaning screenwriters Earl Baldwin (Wild Boys of the Road) and Richard Connell (Meet John Doe) were trying to say. As such, it doesn't really compare with Robinson vehicles like Larceny, Inc. and A Slight Case of Murder, precisely because it isn't supposed to. It's so shot through with flaws that they may as well have been coming out of a Tommy Gun, but this gentle movie is also more satisfying than many others of its era, because it has a proper message underlying its immediate story.

Bellamy's final scene should also astound anyone familiar with his '30s and '40s work... (3)

***



Forever Female (Irving Rapper, 1953) - A backstage comedy-drama, with a pinch of Dodsworth, centring on a vain, ageing actress still playing 29 (Ginger Rogers), her producer and ex-husband (Paul Douglas), the headstrong young man who wrote her latest play (William Holden) - and who makes her feel young - and the ambitious, pretentious newcomer (Pat Crowley) trying to nab her role, and her man.

The script by Casablanca scribes Julius and Philip Epstein is predictable and rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but also enjoyable and pretty witty, with a fair Broadway flavour and an approach to attraction, relationships and middle-age that's perhaps erratic but also unusually mature.

The three big-name leads are in good if not tip-top form. Rogers never delivered on the comic or dramatic potential of her performance in Stage Door, but she's more modulated than normal, and her closing scenes are good. Holden, ironically, is simply too old for his part, and has little chance to trade on either his seductive cynicism (Sunset Blvd., Stalag 17) or dynamic muscularity (Picnic), but he's solid enough, while Douglas - a heavy, jowly stage success - does his usual bit, as reliable as he is unexciting.

The long-forgotten Crowley gets a huge credit at the start and another siamese stand-alone one at the end, billing her as a "future Paramount star", going to prove William Goldman's acerbic adage that no-one in Hollywood knows anything. She holds her own in the prestigious company, offering a decent variation on Anne Baxter's All About Eve heroics, and won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer, but her energetic, charismatic performance is less nuanced than it should be, her sudden and not entirely convincing graduation from peppy youngster to wise young woman reminiscent of - and directly analogous to - Phoebe Nicholls' pleasant but mannered turn in the TV version of Brideshead Revisited. (3)

***



Black Legion (Archie Mayo and Michael Curtiz, 1937) - This bristling social drama is still shocking - and relevant - today, as an American everyman (Humphrey Bogart) loses a promotion to a second-generation immigrant, and joins the Klan. Or rather a Klan-like group called the Black Legion, though that rebranding appears to have had more to do with legal caution than moral cowardice, as the KKK is explicitly namechecked in the film.

It's a B-movie, really, with some convenient plotting, a lot of thick characters and a bit more romantic padding than is really welcome - as sweet as it is - but the central story retains a haunting power, much of it from the chilling imagery: masked figures swathed in black laying waste to farms and drug stores, whipping half-stripped immigrants, or conducting initiation ceremonies in the dead of night, at gunpoint, in which new recruits sign away their souls.

Scorsese must have had Bogart's revolver-based posing in mind, too, when Travis Bickle enquired as to whether anybody was talking to him. And there's something sublime about the movie calling into action bland, benign character players like Charles Halton and Harry Hayden (you'll probably know the faces, if not the names) to play its more banal, inconspicuous fascists. A shame, then, that the film's transparent contention that its higher-ranking Legionnaires are motivated more by money than proper racism does seem to be rather missing the point.

Warner Bros was more socially conscious, and spent more time and effort speaking to immigrant audiences, than any other studio, and this film goes where MGM and the rest would never have dreamt. It has its fair share of wooden acting, trite scripting and even silliness, while its attack is more on vigilantism than intolerance, but the boldness of the concept endures - along with a few unforgettable moments. (2.5)

***



Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941) - Three words: Garbo career apocalypse.

The ethereal Swedish sufferer works absolute wonders in this most unlikely of settings - a screwball comedy containing barely a trace of her established image - but the film around her is utterly dire, with a brainless, bad-tempered script, a supporting cast simply going through the motions, and the laziest direction Cukor ever gave. Stung by the (understandably) vitriolic critical reception, the great Garbo would never make another picture.

For what it's worth (and that really is very little), Garbo plays a Swedish ski instructor whose new husband (Melvyn Douglas) either wants to return to New York so that he can work incredibly hard editing his magazine, or just doss around chatting up women - the film is incredibly confused on this point. So she creates a twin sister for herself, who is apparently going to be such a handful that Douglas will return to the arms of his wife. Only he falls for her. But also finds out almost immediately that it's a ruse. So it's a battle-of-the-sexes comedy in which the male is entirely in charge the whole time, which also makes absolutely no sense, and which is bookended by some of the unfunniest slapstick ever misguidedly committed to film.

Douglas is so half-arsed it's little wonder that he soon took his considerable talents to the stage and the political arena - the scene in which he conceitedly smirks whilst hoodwinking her on the phone seems to sum up what he thought of the role - and the likes of Ruth Gordon, Roland Young and Constance Bennett look similarly embarrassed to be associated with something so abysmally conceived.

Somehow, despite all that, Garbo gives one of her most charming and delightful performances, following up her comic debut in Ninotchka with an altogether different characterisation: vivacious yet tormented, full of life, fun and flirtation, but with a heartbreakingly melancholy undercurrent. It would be the last time audiences would ever see her: Sweden's greatest cinematic export vanishing from sight for all time; well, except for to clomp around the streets of Manhattan in a huge hat and sunglasses for 50 years, the "hermit about town". (2)

***


These probably weren't that much use in the end.

*A FEW SPOILERS*
Tarzan Escapes (Richard Thorpe and John Farrow, 1936) - A film that's better known for what it doesn't contain than what it does, its notorious "vampire bats" sequence being excised after previews as it was deemed too frightening for audiences - and later lost (though some fans report seeing it in the '60s). As such, the characters climactically travel into a cave and emerge bloodied and beaten for no discernable reason, which I think we can file under "continuity error". Ironically, the whole film had already been completely repatterned by MGM after the 1935 cut, Tarzan Returns, was said to lack a central menace. Make your mind up, fellas.

As it exists today, Tarzan Escapes contains the usual mix of staggering racism, breathtaking colonial arrogance, incoherent philosophising and haplessly incorporated location footage, partially rescued - as ever - by some lively mythmaking and the megawatt charisma of Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan) and Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane).

Plummy Benita Hume idiotically provokes a lioness, who is then shot dead - nice work, moron - with the travelling party doing nothing to atone, while black characters plummet to their death only for their civilised overlords to remark: "That was a close one." Indeed, the tribal inhabitants of Tarzan's perilous paradise exist only to be slaughtered, so that we, the viewer, are aware some white guy might be in a spot of danger - which, of course, they never are.

The film cleverly keeps Tarz off screen - aside from a couple of aaaheehaaaeeeaaaahs - for a good 20 minutes, then introduces him unexpectedly with a pip of a reveal, the camera swooping backwards to show his imposing frame in the upper reaches of a jungle tree. There's also a killer PoV shot of Tarzan kissing a very horny Jane, cutting to a flower floating in an inky lake that's very artily done, but the film in its entirety is an almost plotless inconsequence, its small snippets of story merely rehashed from its two predecessors, and coming out as dull domestic drama.

Jane's jungle house is impossible to take seriously in light of the excoriating Me Cheeta, James Lever's "autobiography" of the simian performer, while, perhaps most damagingly, Herbert Mundin provides some of the unfunniest, most overbearing comic relief I've ever seen - aside from his final scene - even if surprisingly effective when asked to play it straight. Had the whole production hadn't been so appallingly tortuous - going through three directors, including O'Sullivan's husband, John Farrow - you could almost accuse the film of being very, very lazy. As it is, it's perhaps just notably lacking in inspiration.

Then with 15 minutes left, it finally finds a bit of rhythm: Tarzan's escape is good fun, the swampy, foggy cave into which he leads his gang is overloaded with proto-noirish atmosphere - as man-eating lizards skulk around, gobbling black people - and the punchline to the sequence is superbly conceived. What it's really crying out for, though, is a topper: something to erase the tedium of the preceding 70 minutes and make it all worthwhile. You know, like vampire bats. (2)

***

BOOKS



Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre (2007) - You may remember this as the book that everyone was buying for everyone else (and particularly their dads) six Christmases ago. I gave it to my brother, but only just got around to borrowing it. It's the superb, ridiculous true story of Eddie Chapman, the North Eastern safecracker, womaniser and all-round Jack-the-lad who managed to get out of a Jersey prison by offering to spy on Britain for the Nazi occupiers... then turned double-agent under the guidance of spymasters supreme Tar Robertson, John Masterson, and his handler, Ronnie Reed. Barely a paragraph passes without some remarkable or hilarious detail, from fervent Nazi Walter Praetorius's obsession with Morris dancing, to the German agent who blew his cover in Britain by paying £10 and six shillings for a train ticket costing "10 and six". Chapman emerges as a fascinating character, his life the stuff of fiction, whose motives were often murky but who was transformed by that most appalling of creations - war - into a man of conscience. Meticulously assembled and written with the lightest of touches, it's one of the most enjoyable factual books I've read in an age. Highly recommended. (4)

***



My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Errol Flynn and Earl Conrad (1959) - Flynn's epic, notorious (and ghost-written) final statement is a patchwork of lies, fantasy and perhaps even a few things that actually happened, underscored by an obsession with sex that borders on the hysterical. It's the heartbreaking climactic third, though, that shifts it from a rollicking good read to something timeless, shot through as it is with sadness and loneliness, the spectre of addiction dominating. In addition to countless tall tales about his death-defying escapades, a false murder confession and some troubling sexual politics - Flynn and his aide lurching from one topic to the next with little interest in structure but a killer turn of phrase - there's an extraordinary amount in the book about the meaning and purpose of existence, somewhat at odds with the image of its (purported) author as a brainless carouser. But, as he so forcefully argues, he is as contradictory as any man, or indeed, as all of them. (3.5)

***



See You at the Movies by Melvyn Douglas and Tom Arthur (1986) - A wise, intimate autobiography with a rather misleading title, since the suave leading man turned heavyweight character player is so much more enamoured of his stage work than the featherweight Hollywood efforts that made his name. There are a few extremely insightful pen portraits of stars like Joan Crawford and Cary Grant, but Douglas spends more time - and energy - on the art of acting, the politics of the period, and his relationship with his beloved wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas. He's self-critical, frequently self-effacing - undercutting seriousness with sarcasm in the most unexpected places - and occasionally self-satisfied. He's also a charming companion in this, his twilight, with an irredeemable fondness for stories in which he behaves arrogantly and then trips over: pride coming before a quite literal fall. (3.5)

***

TV



Sherlock (Season 3, 2013) - Still the best thing on TV, perfectly balancing humour, sentiment and suspense, and provoking one of the most tedious, unconvincing backlashes in living memory. There's nothing here to touch the Season 2 finale, but then there's little else I've ever seen to touch the Season 2 finale. The first episode perhaps missteps by reuniting John and Sherlock in a comic, rather than a heartfelt manner, a few of the one-off supporting characters (the train nerd, the women on the online forum) have a case of the woodens, and there isn't always that much detecting going on, but those are infinitesimal quibbles with a truly remarkable programme - one of those works of dramatic art that exalts you, then leaves you bereft as the credits roll. The season finale, His Last Vow, is simply gobsmacking. Face-licking too, at one point. (4)

***



Veep (Season 1, 2012) - Armando Iannucci and Simon Blackwell's attempt to transfer their profound, profanity-laced brand of political satire to the US is a complete and staggering success, the unmistakable feel of their work remaining gloriously untouched, albeit with a touch of Parks and Rec sweetness smuggled in. Cracking ensemble too. I loved it. (4)