What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Bachelor Apartment from 1931 with Lowell Sherman, Irene Dunn, Mae Murray, Charles Coleman, and Claudia Dell


Today the narrative of a woman marrying a man for his money to obtain a luxurious lifestyle is unacceptable to our culture. So even though it still goes on, we just ignore its existence. In the 1930s, however, one movie after another was made based on this premise alone.

Where it gets muddy, by 1930s values, is when the woman is willing to exchange s*x for lifestyle without a wedding ring. This was viewed as wrong by the older set, but the younger generation, especially many poor girls, often saw it as a way up and out of the Depression.

The ne plus ultra of this arrangement, which is also part of the plot of innumerable precodes, is for a young pretty woman to become a "girlfriend" of either a wealthy married man – or even a pl*yboy who isn't going to marry her – in return for a Park Avenue apartment, furs, jewels, etc.

It is in this moral swirl that Bachelor Apartment cavorts. Lowell Sherman plays – he also directed – a "love 'em and leave 'em" pl*yboy. Now in his forties and a successful businessman, he is getting tired of the game, but getting out isn't that easy.

His exit ticket appears in the form of Irene Dunn, playing a poor stenographer and the sensible older sister of an actress wannabe and flighty girl, played by Claudia Dell. The girls barely get by on Dunn's salary. Dunn accepts the struggle, while Dell is getting fed up with being poor.

A few silly coincidences bring these three together, which has Sherman helping Dell get a part in a Broadway show. He also talks Dunn, who sees him as a scoundrel, into working for him as an executive secretary, predicated on his promise of absolutely no hanky-panky on the side.

Things would work out well from here according to the Hallmark formula: working together, Sherman would fall in love with practical, pretty, and smart Dunn, who would slowly fall in love with Sherman once she saw he was a decent man ready to reform. But trouble lurks in an ex.

The "ex," played by Mae Murray, is a former "girlfriend" of Sherman’s who still wants to "see" him even though she married Sherman's best friend. Sherman wants no part of any of that, but – say what you will about men – this is a woman who won't take "no" for an answer regarding s*x.

The two thin threads of the story from here are Dunn's sister spiralling toward a "kept woman" setup, while Sherman's efforts to quietly woo Dunn are continually thwarted by Murray showing up inconveniently and not wearing underwear.

For fans, again, of Hallmark movies, both threads are regular storylines in those movies today, but without the racy precode edge. It's pretty funny to see that in 1930 they put the s*x into these stories in a way that Hallmark won't, which makes the 1930s movie much more realistic.

Often, in precodes, the woman owns the movie, but this one is Sherman's, despite being an odd leading man. He's handsome in a fin de siècle way that was already dated by the 1930s, but the guy has a screen presence that helps him pull it off.

His scenes with Dunn are good, but his best scenes are the witty banter he exchanges with his proper-on-the-surface, but full-of-the-dickens-underneath butler played with pitch-perfect placid mirth by Charles Coleman. They have a My Man Jeeves dynamic working between them.

Dunn, as always, is likable and professional, knowing exactly how to play the serious older sister and executive secretary who only comes around after being reliably shown Sherman's sincerity.

The moonshot in this one is Murray. She plays her ex-girlfriend-from-hell character as an unhinged woman: wanton and mildly psychotic. Her laugh is straight from crazy town. She cackles her way into somewhat owning all her scenes.

Bachelor Apartment, like most 1931 "talkies," feels stagey and clunky. Yet if you see through that, there's an honesty hidden amongst the trite plot. It's an honesty about men and women, where s*x and money can change hands in many ways, based on the norms of the times.

Dell considers partaking in the oldest version of the trade, just dressed up as a high-end "girlfriend." Murray turns the tables by offering it for free, but becomes unhinged if it isn't accepted. Dunn, though, says nyet to all that as she wants the real thing: love and marriage.

Today we don't like to talk about the first or second arrangements in our movies because they don't fit the political narratives of the moment, nor for the same reason, do we show the third one other than when it's broken.

So these tales have been shuffled off to cable TV movies, where they become simple stories stripped of the s*x and the deep, often gut-wrenching emotions that give them their verve. Or they are made as angry mainstream movies driven by an unforgiving political bias.

It's an odd outcome of our strident political times, but in this corner of life, and s*x, and love, 1930s precodes like Bachelor Apartment have more to say about real human relations and emotions than most of our modern movies.

 

[Mister Cairo]

I have been remiss in posting lately, duty calling and family matters including a recent funeral for a cousin for whom I was executor.

Cairo House of Hallowe'en Horror continues with:

Para-Norman, a sweet take on a boy who can see and speak with ghosts, who inherits a duty from an eccentric uncle to keep a Salem-esque witch from terrorizing the town. Stop-motion animation.

Sleepy Hallow, Tim Burton and Johnny Deppe.

The Terror: a Roger Corman film from 1963, early Jack Nicholson and his then wife. Boris Karloff stars in a role he filmed in two days.

The Amityville Horror. James Brolin and Morgot Kidder and lots of flies.

 

[Harp]

A periodically long time fave, Hard Times (1973), featuring Charles Bronson, James Coburn
and a real cast of ensemble characters; including Strother Martin as protagonist ring attendant
to itinerant pugalist Bronson. As with the decade earlier Cincinnati Kid, the film is staked down
Depression era New Orleans, however set lower tier fist fighting, not premier power poker played
astronomical tablestakes. The street fight commands lesser wage bets, but the human element
remains top-notch fever pitched constant must see filmmaking. A diamond in the rough,
Hard Times delivers a solid heartfelt punch leaving lasting impression.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Doorway to Hell (1930) with Lew Ayres, James Cagney, Dorothy Mathews, and Robert Elliott


"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

— Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part III (1990)


Almost nothing is completely new. In1930's The Doorway to Hell, Lew Ayres plays a crime boss who tries to get out at the top, but he, just like Michael Corleone would sixty years later, gets pulled back in. There is no retiring from the mob.

After uniting the Chicago gangs in a "it's good for business" plan – and after becoming quite rich, while still very young – Lew Ayres, playing the big boss, retires to Florida with his adulterous wife who's sleeping with Ayres' second in command, played by James Cagney.

Yes, it's another precode 1930s gangster picture from the premiere gangster-film studio, Warner Bros. During the five precode years of 1930 to 1934, a moviegoer could be forgiven for thinking that all Americans did was kill each other over who got to sell bootleg booze to the public.

Ayres, himself, is quite happy in retirement, but his wife, played by Dorothy Mathews, is itching to get back north to Cagney. Worse, the once united Chi-Town crime syndicate is falling apart without Ayres, so two of his former henchmen hatch a crazy scheme to draw Ayres back.

They kidnap Ayres' younger brother, an adolescent at a military school. When the kidnapping goes awry, Ayres comes back to Chicago for revenge. Once back, he's drawn into the same old underworld, especially with the police looking for any angle to finally catch him.

Being a Warner Bros. picture, it races through the third act, which includes arrests, prison, escapes, hideouts, sacrifices, and a few mano-a-mano reveals of the truth. It's a breathtaking compression of a crime story arc that would take modern cinema several movies to cover.

There's even a second foreshadowing of a Godfather scene when a plastic surgeon is asked to make a dead relative look handsome again for his funeral – like the Godfather asking the undertaker Bonasera to do for his son after he's g*nned down in a mob hit.

Ayres himself was a controversial choice for the lead here, as some thought he was too pretty to be a mob boss. Future real-life mobsters like Bugsy Siegel would prove the naysayers wrong.

It doesn't help in retrospect that Cagney was cast as Ayres' second when the next year Cagney would have a breakout hit in The Public Enemy (1931). Even here, Cagney is a force every time he's in a scene.

Ayres carries the movie well despite his good looks, as they help him come off as a bit above the mob riffraff, which fits the story arc of a man who wants out – a man who wants more out of life than being a mobster. It's why he's tucked his younger brother away in a military academy.

It's also why Ayres' scenes with his intellectual nemesis, the police chief, played by Robert Elliott, are so strong. Elliott regularly converses with Ayres in an "I know you're guilty even if I can't prove it" way that gives the movie a morality overlay.

No spoilers coming, but watch for the highly stylized Greek Tragedy ending where an off-the-screen hit and a Bible riff provide a thoughtful and artsy coda, showing that – even as far back as 1930 – commercially oriented Warners understood that cinema was an art form.

To this day, modern or historical mob stories are popular fodder for cinema because they are such strong morality tales. Impressively, so much of what would be explored in future movies was already present in the just eighty-four taut minutes of The Doorway to Hell.

 

[Harp]

^ Thought Dorothy Matthews was Joan Blondell. But a blonde bombshell is a blonde bombshell.

 

[Fading Fast]

^ Thought Dorothy Matthews was Joan Blondell. But a blonde bombshell is a blonde bombshell.

I love Blondell, but if she dropped twenty-five pounds, she'd still weigh more than Matthews.

 

[Harp]

I love Blondell, but if she dropped twenty-five pounds, she'd still weigh more than Matthews.

Joan's zenith occurrence as Ladyfingers in The Cincinnati Kid stands prominent display
her sensuous voluptuous beauty; mixed vivacity and deadly sense of purpose. In a tightly
focused milieu where she held equal presence with Edgar G Robinson and Steverino, she
gave an absolutely stunning performance as a caustic ****** card dealer.
I always thought Joan put Anne Margaret considerable distance as film's ostenstensible
femme fatale because, like a torch nightclub songstress, the blues require some life
apprentice.

 

[Edward]

Recently spent a pleasant hour-and-ten of a Eurostar journey with The Curse of the Cat People, 1944 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036733/ (courtesy of BBC iPlayer).

It's an interesting little picture, only really tangentially related to Cat People 1942. Val Lewton, who produced it for RKO, tried (and failed) to persuade the studio to change the title to Amy and Her Friend. Had that been done, only those familiar with the previous picture already would draw the link. The only scene in this one with a cat of any sort is a sequence in which some young boys are mean to a black cat. Certainly nods to the original film, but adds nothing to the plot. It was inserted (at the expense of other scenes, apparently, which made more sense of part of the actual plot) after a screening for studio executives who were disappointed with the picture. It's very much the story of man marries woman for whom he was going to leave first wife before first wife died, they have child, child is Odd and can't make friends, child comes into possession of wishing ring and wishes for friend, friend manifests as ghost of dead first wife. Somewhat put me in mind of an MR James story lifted and plopped into the mid-forties, albeit with a much softer, nicer ending than James tended to write. I would like to have seen more of the older lady (from whom the wishing ring comes) and her daughter. The former impliedly is suffering from dementia, insisting the daughter is an imposter and that her 'real' daughter died at the age of six (also the age of the Amy character here, explaining in part why she in entranced with this stranger, raising the ire of her adult daughter). I suspect the lost scenes may have explained a little more about that relationship - it has a feel of a loose thread in the picture, like there should have been a more direct linkage in to the main storyline. I wonder was the daughter herself intended to be a Cat Person? Or both of them?

All in ,though, I rather enjoyed it. Not my first choice for a Halloween night viewing, but a perfect one for a Winter Sunday afternoon when it's wet and cold outside, and warm and cosy in the house.

 

[Fading Fast]

Whistling in the Dark (1933) with Una Merkel, Ernest Trues, Edward Arnold, C. Henry Gordon, Nat Pendleton, and John Miljan


There are some interesting parts to MGM's Whistling in the Dark, but more for movie fans of the era and film historians, and less so for a casual fan looking for some modest entertainment or, worse, a modern fan trying to see if he or she likes old movies.

The plot is silliness, but that could be overcome with strong acting and a romance you deeply believe in. The acting is very good, but not so much the romance. Una Merkel and Ernest Truex play a couple who are eloping because her society parents don't want her to marry a mystery writer.

The challenge is not Ms. Merkel, who has a regular-girl cuteness, but Truex, who, at 5' 2", is such a milquetoast that you can't understand what appealing and wealthy Merkel sees in him. You're fully on her parents' side in this one – the opposite of where the writers want you to be.

At the outset, nonetheless, Merkel and Truex are eloping until their car breaks down. The house where they ask for help is owned by a mob boss, played by Edward Arnold. He quickly susses out that Truex, as a mystery writer, could help him plan a "perfect" murder.

Arnold tries a direct approach, and when that fails, he has Merkel and Truex held against their will at the house until Truex agrees to help him. When Truex does, Arnold still holds both of them as, well, he can't let them go, really, ever.

All of which leads to the main conflict: Merkel and Truex are being held at a remote house by several hoodlums. Good movies have been built on less, but here it feels like part of the story is missing or the stakes aren't high enough.

There is an entire side story about the man Arnold wants killed surreptitiously – which is why he needs Truex – but unbelievably, that is less engaging than the boring main plot thread of Merkel and Truex being held against their wills.

Eventually, there's a pretty fun gimmick involving a radio and telephone wires that Truex and Merkel use to try to escape, but it's too little, too late to save the movie. Instead, the picture just kind of peters out toward the end of its short runtime.

If you have to point your finger at someone or something, it's Truex. Fine as a character actor, asking him to be the romantic lead of a mystery/romcom is a bridge too far. It doesn't help that he plays it like another of his standard character-actor roles, which is all wrong.

He needed to show more fortitude and presence to get you to believe he could attract a woman like Merkel and, also, that he could stand up to the gangsters and find a way to save Merkel and himself.

The person they should have cast was another MGM player, Roland Young. Mainly a character actor, too, and known, like Truex, for getting run over by stronger characters, Young could show grit when called upon. Here, if any unexpected character shows grit, though, it's Merkel.

Time and again, she bucks up a wobbling Truex. It's fun in their scenes alone to see her play the strong role, often in exasperation. Even in the big climax, it's Merkel who keeps her wits, whereas Truex shows some pluck but also lucks into many of his good moves.

The supporting cast is excellent, starting with Arnold who can play just about anything from kindly father to corrupt politician to overbearing businessman to (here) ruthless gangster. But he doesn't have to carry the gangster ball alone.

C. Henry Gordon, Nat Pendleton, and John Miljan, all playing thugs, show that Warner Bros. didn't have a monopoly on mob character actors. Still, as a gangster picture, it lacks a real hero, unless a mystery writer trying to think and stumble his way to freedom gets you engaged.

You could see Merkel, who reads regular girl not society deb, and Arnold, who reads polished gangster not thug, being attracted to each other, which could have been a neat plot twist. But alas, the cast was chosen, parts assigned, and the lack of chemistry was a fait accompli.

Overall, Whistling in the Dark is still moderately entertaining, as there's just so much talent on screen. And the story, while contrived as all heck (like most movies), has its moments. It's just that few mystery/romcoms can survive a boring, miscast leading man.