Reviews

Surprisingly entertaining B-movie about intertwined lives during a typical day in a downtown office tower. The cast is attractive, and there's a suitably despicable villain who gets what he deserves. Starts out looking like it's going to be a Grand Hotel knock-off but only one story is covered. Later a hint of the bank run of American Madness is thrown in sketchily. Like other such contemporary lower case pictures with similar styles & themes (such as Hotel Continental from the same year, which really IS a Grand Hotel knock-off), it has no street exteriors --saving money -- and moves satisfyingly fast with second-tier actors showing their stuff. But this one is distinguished by a really unusual scene-changing device making use of the skyscraper's vertical architecture really well. Made by a no-name company with a Gower Gulch list of techs and creative talent behind the camera.

I had no idea this type of production could be so good.

Solid little Monogram drama with very original story and denouement. Lyle Talbot, who would appear in anything, even a notorious Edward Wood picture, stars with considerable intelligence and sincerity. Hard-working Thelma Todd has a serious role and both leads are appealing together. Henry B. Walthall (another veteran who didn't know how to retire) supports, as does Gabby Hayes and Jason Robards Sr.

The start is a little shaky, with some awkward staging, but after it gets into its stride I can say that this has much to recommend it. The attitude of Klondike's cast, and its out-of-the-rut story, is what makes it all work.

A terrible, lavish, early talkie from Cecil B. DeMille, that I couldn't make heads or tails of until I saw his 1925 melodrama The Golden Bed. Madame Satan in reality was DeMille's last foray into domestic comedy-drama among the very rich, a theme he had been doing pretty consistently since 1918. Film buffs tend to overlook that genre—speaking for myself, it all seems too gauche and mediocre to take time evaluating—and look at the big epics. But there they are: gobs of money made titillating naïve Jazz Age audiences with supposed glimpses into the foibles and follies of spoiled wives, their mogul husbands, frivolous friends and treacherous roué-hangers-on. There is the fixation on overbuilt, ludicrous, luxury bathrooms and wild parties. Very hard to swallow for a contemporary viewer; this throwing onto the screen of high-living and consumer greed, redeemed by unctuous moralistic retribution, was a creature strictly of 1920s America.

Madame Satan was DeMille's attempt to extend this theme into the talkie period, but the extreme artificiality of this type of film only became intensified with the addition of sound. Normally I would say, as others have, to sit through the build-up, such as described above, to the thrilling disaster movie climax aboard the stricken party dirigible. But don't. If you can see the climax in a compilation film or fast forward to it at home, okay, but do not bother with any other part of Madame Satan at all. The talents of Denny, Johnson and Young, and the great MGM sets notwithstanding: it's just not worth it. You won't be able to get away from the silly, plodding, unfunny thud the first part of this movie makes as it shuffles through your mind.

There's no doubting its monumental power and ambition; Gone with the Wind is all that. It was David Selznick's testament—no movie before in the sound era had been so technically advanced and sweeping in its dramatic intention and scope (especially in its groundbreaking use of color to set mood and atmosphere). Among many, two things in particular stood out after several viewings. First, it foresaw the elongated structure of movies of three decades hence, where very long running times became typical. In the process it opened up extended running time as an option in the editing of lesser epics. The second, which I suddenly realized after the 4th viewing (and a departure from the normal convention up to that time), is that it declined to focus on the more virtuous figures, instead placing a couple of disreputable and flawed characters—a vain Southern belle and a shady alpha male gunrunner—at the center of the narrative.

As for the first innovation noted, I am ambivalent. As a former film editor for a UHF TV station, assigned to re-format Hollywood movies for airing and as a result required to evaluate cinematic storytelling closely, I often found the extensive length of many pictures made after 1955 to be self-indulgent; 'Scope and color invited plenty of scenic mood-setting. As a film-goer I often found them a test to take in during one sitting.

The second was a revelation; the characters are there in plain sight, and I should've taken them as a given, but for those of us growing up in the '60s, even film buffs, GWTW carries so much baggage that it remains hard for me to take merely on its filmic merits, which are those of timeless, romantic, and melodramatic skill. The problem is that it unabashedly glamorizes and pretties up the Antebellum South and the Confederacy. For a modern African-American, this is somewhat analogous to offering an idealized portrait of the Fourth Reich, with its high-living Albert Speers, their wives, mistresses and servants; enjoying their Alpine adventures and tooling around in their big Mercedes cars until war comes and it all falls apart. If you saw such a film would you applaud it? Would you find it of nostalgic value? If not, you see what I'm getting at.

It has been years now. I am familiar with the reputations of all involved here: they were film industry titans. The casting was inspired. There were many scenes which scream their epic pretensions. But I remain unmoved. In short, I know GWTW is a great movie but to me, because of the story at its very center, the entire exercise still seems hollow and morally suspect. Finally--I may be sounding overly picky, but the famous Atlanta-burning scene has a minor flaw too. It's the railroad cars. The fire inferno is impressive as all get out, but better miniature work was needed for the exploding freight cars. William Cameron Menzies was the best designer ever, but I don't think model work was his niche; other specialts like Fred Jackman, Fred Sersen, Dev Jennings or the Lydecker brothers were needed. Attributing the minor flaw to the distant era isn't a good enough excuse. Just look at the model work in Hell's Angels, Suez, In Old Chicago and The Dawn Patrol, among other films, and you'd see what I mean. In a way it points up a curious problem with Selznick's epics: they lack satisfactory action sequences (Viva Villa excluded). Selznick was interested in character, personality; he was right to be, of course, but such long pictures as this and Duel In The Sun need something other than stylistic posturing. They need real excitement. GWTW is a Civil War epic without a single battle scene. Something is wrong about that.

Soon after this effort, Lionel Barrymore went back to acting full-time. I wouldn't blame him. Although Stanwyck is excellent as usual, this is a slight tale, typical of the time, that she alone makes worth watching—one time only. There's something frustrating, moreover, about how her character remains faithfully committed to the lout played by Monroe Owsley for so long. I suppose we have to accept that behavior which in our day would seem masochistic was the cultural norm in 1931 for most women. On the Pre-Code front, there's a gum-chewing scene stealer, foxy Sally Blane as Molly, a newbie who can't wait to dive into the sleazy dance hall world, although Stanwyck tries to advise her (and immediately says she knows that Molly is underage).

What brings everything down is the low budget. Columbia could mount a good-looking feature from time to time, but in 1931, I suppose they weren't doing it very much. The art director does suggest the opulence of Ricardo Cortez's apartment effectively without showing its interior; we get the idea from the lobby, hallway leading up to his door and vestibule, with its snazzy Spanish California motif. But the rest of the picture is pretty threadbare, and Barrymore's direction seems perfunctory and hurried, as if pressured by budget and schedule constraints (I hasten to add that budget is not necessarily everything; take a look at the excellent, absorbing Five Star Final, which basically takes place in two newspaper offices and an apartment living room, to see how resourcefully such conditions can be handled).

As for the story itself, it looks like it was dreamed up by somebody and sketched out on the back of an envelope all in the space of one afternoon. If Barrymore felt dispirited, he sure showed 'em, going into "A Free Soul" this very year, where his performance blew everybody's minds and won him a lifetime MGM contract. The song of the title is pretty good; we hear but do not see it performed by a torchy vocalist.

One of the underlying themes is slavery —- mostly as satire, but a disturbingly poignant scene at the climax of the slave bazaar number has a girl throwing herself to her death to escape from bondage. This was at a time when Busby Berkeley, the choreographer, was sometimes inserting serious byplay into his numbers (a la "42nd Street"). Boy, is this example a beaut! The Ruth Etting blues solo "No More Love" directly plays on the same theme. Both songs have undercurrents I've never seen suggested in a comedy before or since. These, along with the nutty, racially integrated "Keep Young & Beautiful" routine, add a curiously (yet fascinating) unsavory aspect to the proceedings that is not really easy to characterize.

Oh yeah, what about that lively beer garden drinking song near the beginning and Cantor in black-face! Offensive, absolutely —- but somehow, with Cantor, what's not to love? Politically incorrect? You betcha —- but this is not cruel or demeaning stuff. It's mostly just out-and-out dream-like crazy.

Others have noted the fine production values, and of course the great comic chariot race at the end. Add it all up and what you've got is a nice, unique, big 'ol pastry of a movie musical. If you wanted something to take your mind of things for 93 minutes in 1933, this was just the ticket. If you want something to take your mind off things for 93 minutes in 2007,this is still just the ticket

It has been noted elsewhere that the slavery prologue had not been seen for many years after the release of this film. However, this assertion may be somewhat misleading, as it is incomplete. In the introduction to a 1972 PBS broadcast of "Abraham Lincoln" the narrator noted, over some very compelling slavery footage, that the footage never made it to release prints AT ALL due to objections by studio executives. That means, probably, that UA bigwig Joseph Schenck, possibly abetted by John Considine, torpedoed a very important moral dimension Griffith was trying to insert.

Too bad. With Griffith's reputation forever stained due to "Birth Of A Nation", it would be helpful if more could see how he vigorously owned up to the full horror of slavery with this sequence, however late it came in his career. Moreover, he really needed it dramatically, because "Abraham Lincoln" is otherwise a very static and disappointing piece of prestige movie-making.

With knowledge of this director's earlier triumphs, one views this exercise with sadness and longing over what might have been. You can see the effort and high level of historical detail at work here. But almost everywhere Griffith's technique is muffled and sometimes nullified by the technology of talking pictures, and we suppose, by his own creative exhaustion. It did not have to be this way. It would have been better if this master did not allow himself to be snuffed out so early but that is a subject for Griffith biographers to pursue, not this writer.

However, for those of you able to seek out this picture, here are some stand-out scenes to look for. After being informed of a battle's losses, a general (after ensuring himself privacy) collapses in utter despair, weeping on his bed. Griffith's actor does this in silent movie style—the actor literally crumples without a word. Here, we sense the universal horror and depression of leadership in war, knowing that this is really the strain felt by most generals, not the vainglorious image of General Patton but the anguished self-questioning of the Lees and the Grants of the modern world.

Also, in two places, Grifffith suggests a feeling of the immediacy of modern communications so passé and remote to today's viewers that we have to stop and project ourselves into the memory of the generation Griffith came from—-he shows us at documentary-style remove Lincoln pacing back and forth in the telegraph room of the White House as battlefield reports come in; also, and most startlingly, a series of close-ups of a famous Civil War document with the our view skipping and skuddering down to signatures of high authority silently, blankly and suddenly; cuts handled as if we're momentarily in cinema verite editing territory. Never has the intensity and import of written, official text been expressed with as much immediacy. It is also quite ahead of its time.

So "Abraham Lincoln" is to be viewed as a historical artifact, primarily, from the period when silent film directors were trying to transition to talkies. For any of you turned off by its artificial, stilted and manneristic qualities, don't stop screening--there are a number of more successful examples then this one.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT.

Saw this at a Library of Congress screening in the Spring of 2003; it was a pleasing, if minor, Depression-era diversion. By this I mean it was (and is) a perfect way for any put-upon person to lose 73 minutes. "Cocktail Hour" has almost no edgy, precode vibes, a la Warner Bros. Instead there're attractive well-dressed people in chic apartments (better art direction then I expected from Columbia) doing moderately interesting, but non-taxing things, and a shipboard romance capped by Bebe Daniels warbling a cute song. Randolph Scott had just come from doing a batch of memorable Paramount B-Westerns. This was one of his only loan-outs during this period, and the chemistry between the two leads is just fine.

Melodrama intrudes into "Cocktail Hour" once the cast reaches Paris, including a threatening character getting shoved through a window, but rather then jar this works to keep things lively. Budgetary constraints mean no exteriors, either in the early "Manhattan" sequences or in "Paris"—you have to use your imagination—but it's OK; whatever you do see is slick enough to get by. Being a second tier studio, Columbia couldn't or wouldn't bring a first-rate supporting cast together for every production, and as a result "Cocktail Hour" had to settle for, along with a lot of other people I didn't recognize, the obscure Muriel Kirkland as an amusing fake countess (Dennis O'Keefe was listed in the IMDb credits doing a bit, but I didn't notice him). All in all, good escapism.

My view of "Bad Company" is very split—I have never seen an old movie so split between outstanding and lousy elements. All and all it's worth watching, but in order to explain why, I have to ALERT YOU TO UPCOMING SPOILERS.

Saw this almost 20 years ago on AMC, so it's not going to be a very incisive description, but basically it's an early underworld drama with 2 young people (Helen Twelvetrees and John Garrick) trying to get untangled from a gangster (Ricardo Cortez).

Let's get the bad things out of the way, first. There's a mad scene late in the film where Twelvetrees realizes that Cortez, muttering & walking back and forth near a bust, I think of Napoleon (or himself, I don't remember), has lost his marbles. The shots alternate between Cortez, chewing the scenery, to Twelvetrees' increasingly horrified expressions. With each succeeding cut these expressions become more and more ridiculously overdrawn. In these moments, film acting seemed to move back to early Vitagraph days.

Then there's a plot angle that no one would be able to swallow. Harry Carey, playing a law enforcement officer, wants to trap Cortez and assassinate him. He's supposed to arrive at a bootlegging vessel, and when he comes downstairs on the ship, Carey will be waiting for him, with a……30 caliber mounted machine gun!! But Cortez gets wise and has Garrick go instead. We see the young fellow walking downstairs into the hold, Carey's grip on the trigger tightening, then there's an artful fade to black. Fade up on Garrick, not in unidentifiable pieces in the morgue, but waking up in the hospital with a slight leg wound. He's well enough to jump up to go out to save Twelvetrees! While going there, the taxicab he's a passenger in is struck by a trolley and almost cut in half. But Garrick just jumps out and starts running!! And now the good stuff. Arthur Miller's camera-work is excellent; one marvels at what he had to do to get an early scene where bootlegging ships rendezvous at night. No process screens, day-for-night or miniatures were used. Tay Garnett's direction is often exceedingly graceful, especially his use of dissolves during a lavish gangland wedding, which even has a dirigible dropping balloons (or maybe it was flowers). Also this is the one of the more action-packed early crime pictures I have seen—unlike "Public Enemy" or "Little Caesar", in which the shoot-outs either were clumsily or perfunctorily staged, or done off-screen.

Worth watching, if you just ignore those little problems I noted above.

The film suffers from being part of the prettified world MGM wanted to present the movie-going world, at least in this period. On the other hand, "Young Guns" probably got it about right, for those who want to compare. According to Western historical scholars, Billy Bonner could've been well-described as a psychotic teenage killer. Not the noble--though driven--much older figure figure depicted by Robert Taylor. Also, the settings are a little too built up. Anyone who's spent time in the more remote parts of New Mexico knows what I mean. The rancher who's his mentor has a nice ranch house with grass! Finally, the movie is short on action. The photography is fine, but if you want real 1941 Technicolor splendor, drop this one and check out "Blood and Sand".