The Leatherneck (1929)

1929’s The Leatherneck must have been perfect matinee fare for depression era boys looking to escape for an hour or so into the far-flung adventures of the United States Marine Corps. The film is brief, straightforward, and uncomplicated—with a healthy dose of buddy humor, fisticuffs, and male bonding. It was clearly intended for the raucous appetites of young men with a developing sense of bravado, and hints at the military camaraderie of later films such as Gunga Din and The Lost Patrol.

Through a series of flashbacks, The Leatherneck tells the story of the court martial of a wrongly accused Marine. It stars William “Bill” Boyd as Tex, who in the days immediately following the armistice has been saddled with the unenviable task of guard duty. (As Hopalong Cassidy, Boyd would go on to be a pop culture icon of the 1930s and the 1940s, and a TV icon of the 1950s) He strikes up a fast friendship with one of the stockaded Germans, Otto “Fuzzy” Schmidt (Alan Hale), with whom he shares a love of beer and brawling. Moments after the film’s beginning the duo becomes a trio as Private Hanlon (Robert Armstrong, Carl Denham from King Kong) joins their ranks. Owing to these newfound friendships, Fuzzy decides to become an American citizen — as well as a Marine — and is soon reunited with his pals when their unit is transferred to politically tumultuous Russia. There Tex falls in love with and quickly marries Tanya (Diane Ellis), a local girl whose aristocratic father owns a Manchurian potassium mine. However “Captain” Heckla, an American opportunist (war profiteer, if you like), steals the mine by arranging for Tanya’s father and brother to be murdered by the Bolsheviks. Heckla then kidnaps Tanya and absconds with her to the mine, leaving the marines to think Tanya shared the same fate as her family. But when Fuzzy and Hanlon learn that Heckla is running the potassium mine, they suspect that Tanya is still alive and abandon their posts in order to investigate. Tex follows, and when he arrives at the mine he discovers that Hanlon has been shot, Fuzzy has been tortured, and Tanya is nowhere to be found. They attempt to return to their unit, but Hanlon dies en route, and Fuzzy is barely functional after days and days of torture. Tex is charged not only with desertion, but also with Hanlon’s murder, and is placed on trial for his life. While Tex’s life hangs in the balance, the audience asks: Where is Tanya?

This is an entertaining light adventure film, though it works better as a buddy picture than it does as an exposé of life in the Corps. Beyond the firing line sequence described below, there are no spectacular set pieces or long action scenes, but the performances more than make up for any deficiencies. Boyd, Hale, and Armstrong have great chemistry, using broad physical acting to compensate for the film’s lack of dialogue. Diane Ellis offers little as the picture’s sole female, but she gives Boyd the chance to wax romantic and makes the show worthwhile for the young ladies that may have found their way into the theater. In addition to the three leads, Fred Kohler stands out as a sufficiently dastardly Heckla. (He should be recognizable to crime film buffs for supporting roles in two of the period’s groundbreaking films: Underworld and Thunderbolt.)

The Leatherneck’s best scene, in which Tanya’s father and brother are executed, is out of character with the rest of the film: it was likely inserted to give wide-eyed audiences a sense of the violence of the Soviet revolution, and is striking in its expressionism: rather than seeing the men themselves riddled with bullets, the camera goes shot-reverse shot between the victims and the sneering machine gun crew as it pans across a wall of shadows, starkly rendering each shadow as it spasms and crumbles to the ground. This is quite a rare film, even considering its Academy Award nomination in the Writing category. While it doesn’t rise to the same level as another of Bill Boyd’s military silents, Two Arabian Knights, it’s still worth seeking out.

~~~ 

Before I close, a few words about The Leatherneck’s director, Howard Higgin, who died too young at age 47. In spite of his brief career Higgin was an important filmmaker during the transition years at the end of the silent era. He got his start working as a production manager in the late teens and early twenties for Cecil B. DeMille, shadowing the great director on his light comedies and dramas starring Gloria Swanson — a few also featured a young William Boyd. Higgin was directing by 1923, and would helm more than twenty films before his death in 1938 — he’d serve as screenwriter on another twenty more. If nothing else he was a Welles-ian trouper, employing the same actors over and over again. Boyd starred in five of his directorial efforts, including Clark Gable’s breakout film The Painted Desert, High Voltage with Carol Lombard (they too worked together often), and Skyscraper with Leatherneck cast member Alan Hale. Hale also worked with Higgin and Fred Kohler on the delightful and utterly unseen Sal of Singapore, which I look at in depth at Where Danger Lives.

Higgin’s films did well at the box office, and were well thought of by critics and the academy. Three of his features (The Leatherneck, Sal of Singapore, and Skyscraper), each written by Elliot J. Clawson, were nominated in the 1930 Best Writing category. Clawson was also nominated for a fourth film in the same category that year, The Cop, which although not directed by Higgin, amazingly starred William Boyd, Alan Hale, and Robert Armstrong! Truly, Hollywood was a small town.

Final note: Many of these films, including The Painted Desert, High Voltage, The Racketeer, and others are available to watch for free at the Internet Archive. Simply connect via IMDb.

The Leatherneck (1929)

Directed by Howard Higgin

Starring William “Bill” Boyd, Alan Hale, and Robert Armstrong

Released by Pathé Exchange

Running time: 65 min. (IMDb), 56 min. (my copy)

Grade: B

8.0.3

The Baby Maker (1970)

Like many others I’m a Roger Ebert fan. The great thing about him isn’t that he can dig deeper into a film than other critics or film buffs — it’s that he never fails to properly position a movie within the grand scheme of things. The truth he sees seems to resonate with me. I appreciate that he sees movies for what they are, and situates them within the right context — horizontally within the cultural mores of their own time, and vertically from one era to the next. And his greatest gift is that he usually does so without grinding an ax. Ebert’s review of The Baby Maker (read it here), written in 1970 during the film’s theatrical run, has it pegged. Surprisingly, he spends much of his essay writing about another review of the film, one penned by a critic in a free paper who attacks the film for everything about it she believes to ring false, dismissing the film as just another failed and ultimately shallow attempt by Hollywood to make a movie with counter culture street credibility. While Ebert recognizes the validity of the argument, and is winkingly careful to compliment her prose, he nevertheless feels compelled to champion the film’s good qualities, especially the performance of the startlingly Barbara Hershey.

I just got a copy of The Baby Maker (via Warner Archive DVD), which tells a deceptively simple story, though one in which we can clearly see the potential landmines: Suzanne and Jay Wilcox (Sam Groom and Collin Wilcox-Paxton), a middle class couple unable to have a child of their own, hire free spirit Tish (Barbara Hershey) to have their baby. With artificial insemination was still a decade away, the husband and the girl are compelled to a sexual relationship in order to facilitate the pregnancy. However Tish has a boyfriend of her own, Tad (a nearly unrecognizable Scott Glenn), whose own misgivings parallel the neurotic uncertainties of Mrs. Wilcox. The film follows its four main characters from their first meeting through the birth of the child, and on to what happens afterwards. It bills itself as comedy, though it’s the variety that asks you to smile knowingly a great deal more than it wants you to laugh-out-loud.

The Baby Maker is the sort of movie that you can talk about for five minutes or five years. It asks many more questions than it could possibly hope to answer, and does so by juxtaposing (in your face at times, and at others, quite subtly) numerous cultural antagonists of the day: husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends (or simply men and women, if you like), the young and the not-quite-so-young (particularly at a time like the late sixties when the differences between generations were quite pronounced), and especially the uptight and neurotic bourgeois versus the free thinkers of the counter-culture movement. The script has enough sense to not take sides, though there are moments (like the toy store scene) when it almost strays across the line. Watching the film today, we run the risk of simply dismissing it as dated, it’s subject of surrogate pregnancy no longer the hot-button that it was in the seventies. The medical insight it offers regarding pregnancy is positively archaic, and it suffers throughout from cultural attitudes and cinematic tendencies (the song-score) that the world has long since left behind. It favors a broad brush rather than a fine one, touching on a checklist of issues and not digging deeply into any. For example, there’s a tense moment between Tish and Mrs. Wilcox concerning breastfeeding that the film brings up and then decides to simply leave alone. In such moments I wished the script had more guts.  

Ebert knowingly points out that “It could have been awful, but it’s actually pretty good,” and in saying so he’s recognizing the pitfalls of the subject matter, and of poor acting. The Baby Maker really owes whatever degree of success you’re willing to allow it to its actors, who could have ruined this, but instead do quite well. I first saw the young Barbara Hershey in 1969’s Last Summer, so she wasn’t a revelation to me, but she undoubtedly carries this film and will be a surprise to those who are only familiar with her work of the last two decades. She’s innocent, vulnerable, honest, and ultimately unknowable. She gives Tish a sense of self that seems fragile at times and character-defining at others. The supporting cast is certainly able, but this is Hershey’s film from start to finish.

The whole thing builds up to the birth scene, and it’s a winner. For the duration of the sequence we set aside all of the underlying stress the film works so hard to create and just focus our attention on Barbara. The baby is delivered via natural childbirth per Mrs. Wilcox’s wishes — or at least as close as one could get n a 1970 hospital. Hershey is quite literally strapped into the stirrups and covered from head to toes with an unending supply of heavy white blankets, while the doctors, nurses, and Wilcox’s are practically invisible behind white surgical scrubs and masks. All we get to look at is Hershey’s face as she pushes through her contractions, and she delivers a winning scene. Ebert tells us that audiences cried and applauded the climactic moment, and it isn’t difficult to believe. After all, such a documentary presentation of childbirth was relatively uncharted territory for a major studio picture of the day, and the actress is up to the challenge. Having personally been right there through a few births myself, I can confide that my wife’s experiences were a great deal louder and somewhat more messy — but that can be forgiven. I’m sure the filmmakers would rather have joyful audiences rather than those covering their eyes or marching out.

The Baby Maker (1970)

Directed by James Bridges

Starring Barbara Hershey and Scott Glenn

Released by National General Pictures 

Running time: 109 minutes

Availability: Warner Archive DVD

Grade: B

The House of the Seven Gables (1940)

It’s Vincent Price versus George Sanders in Universal’s seldom-seen 1940 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early American gothic, The House of the Seven Gables. The two actors play bickering brothers who grapple over the fate of the family’s ancestral home. The titular house, located in that literary haven of ill-fortune: Salem, Massachusetts, comes with plenty of baggage though, including creditors and a centuries-old curse — not to mention a curmudgeonly father who isn’t quite ready for the grave.

Hang on a second, “what’s a gable?” you say? A gable is the triangular end of a building. Look below for a small illustration of a home with three gables. Got it? Back to the film.

Price’s Clifford Pyncheon is the good guy here, while Sanders barely stretches to bring snide older brother Jaffrey to life. Margaret Lindsay, who you’ll likely remember as Amy from Bette Davis’s Jezebel, is along for the ride in a featured role as cousin Hepzibah, Clifford’s devoted fiancé. The story sets up like this, I promise not to give anything away: The lion’s share of the action stems from a boisterous confrontation between Clifford and his father regarding the fate of the house. At the peak of his ire, the old fellow suffers from some sort of bizarre throat contraction and topples to the floor dead. For good measure bangs his head on the corner of a desk on the way down, drawing a bead of fresh blood and causing an exotic paperweight to fall and settle conveniently beside his fresh corpse. It seems that the whole town is listening to the fray out on the street, and Jaffrey rushes into the room just in time to accuse the innocent Clifford of murder by bludgeoning. In Hawthorne’s world, where women are either gossips or saints and men saints or rascals, it doesn’t take long to pack Clifford off to the state prison for a life sentence. Jaffrey triumph is short-lived though, he fails to inherit the coveted house after all — the elder Pyncheon has surprisingly bequeathed it to Hepzibah, who tosses Jaffrey onto the street and in short order becomes the town spinster, patiently waiting two decades on a pardon for Clifford. In the meantime, Jaffrey becomes a powerful judge — also engaged in some very shady ‘shipping’ deals — while Clifford languishes in his cell, determinedly going gray and studying his Alexandre Dumas — revenge is in the works…along with a little karma.

Even at 89 minutes this is a short film, and if my tone seems a bit glib it’s because Universal cuts enough corners with the source material that it becomes difficult to take The House of the Seven Gables entirely seriously. Certainly a film can score at that rather standard running time, but this one spans more than twenty years in narrative time and a mere five or ten additional minutes of film would have gone a long way towards pushing this into classic adaptation territory. Though coming from Universal in 1940, when it was all about Deanna and Dracula, corner-cutting should be expected. Make no mistake though, this is entertaining movie in spite of its deficiencies — with these two stars, how could it not be? Price wins the battle of screen time, with Sanders, the superior actor, doing more with his moments. When Sanders committed suicide in 1972, he famously did so by telling us all that he was bored with life. It is to his credit though that as an actor he was always able to bring some verve to his performances, even though the studios constantly cast him as an urbane heel. Given his incredible gifts and perpetual typecasting, it isn’t surprising that after a lifetime of such parts Sanders would have grown weary.

If this suffers at all it’s because of Lindsay, who actually has the largest role but nonetheless gets crowded out of the screen by two charismatic male leads. Grinning Dick Foran, Nan Grey, and Cecil Kellaway round out the cast, but all three of them could have given some way in order to strengthen the central narrative. It isn’t that the secondary characters aren’t important, it’s just that in such a brief film their roles seem rather puffed-up — often at the expense of some inexplicable narrative moments that would have benefitted from a tad more fleshing-out. In the end though this is a modest thriller — competently produced, satisfyingly suspenseful, and very-well performed. Oh, and with an Oscar nominated original score. 

The House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Directed by Joe May

Starring Vincent Price and George Sanders

Released by Universal

Running time: 89 minutes

Grade: B

The Valiant (1929)

Thanks to TCM’s daylong celebration of the preservation efforts of the George Eastman House, I was able to view Paul Muni’s first film effort, The Valiant, directed by William K. Howard and released by Fox in 1929. The film would earn the Austrian born, New York bred Muni the first of his six Academy Award nominations, each and every one in the Best Actor category. He’d lose the second-ever Best Actor statuette to colossal movie star Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona), but Muni’s time in the sun was coming: he would be nominated four times between 1934 and 1938, winning the award in 1937 for his portrayal of Louis Pasteur. (Muni bookended nicely: his last nomination came in 1960, in his final film, The Last Angry Man.) Along with his rival at Warner Brothers, Edward G. Robinson, Muni dominated screens in the thirties — his star exploding after title roles in a pair of 1932 films, Scarface, and the astonishing I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. All but forgotten by contemporary audiences, Muni was an actor’s actor and one of the biggest stars in the world. He was a chameleon, able to transform himself into whatever his role called for, whether it was suave gentility or brute physicality, regardless of age or nationality, and he could do any accent required — though he famously told Irving Thalberg that he was “about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover” when the boy wonder cast him in The Good Earth.

The Valiant opens auspiciously: Muni shoots an unseen man in some drab big city flat and wanders out onto the street, and eventually into the local precinct, where he confesses. In short order he’s thrown behind bars, tried, and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing — a rapid-fire chain of events that Muni takes in stride. He seems resigned to his fate in moralistic, Old Testament sort of way. He tells his captors his victim deserved to die, and that he realizes that he too must be punished in accordance with the law.

The dramatic thrust of the film lies not in the identity of the victim or the motive for the crime, but in the real name of the killer himself, which Muni stubbornly refuses to divulge. Instead, he assembles the moniker “James Dyke” from a police station wall calendar. (The earliest instance of this particular film cliché I’m aware of.) Cut to the prison, where we learn that not only is Dyke a model inmate, but that his sensational case has even provided him the opportunity to write moralizing newspaper editorials, making his story and face known to a fascinated nation. In Ohio, the elderly Mrs. Douglas sees the condemned man in the paper and wonders if he could be her son Joe, gone without a trace these fifteen years. Her daughter Mary and Mary’s fiancé Robert (the popular Johnny Mack Brown) make the trip to New York in an effort to learn the truth, but although the film makes it abundantly clear to the audience that James Dyke certainly is Joe Douglas, Joe is able to convince the desperate young woman that he is not the loving older brother who used to read Romeo and Juliet to her when she was a little girl. Instead, in the sort of turn that could only happen in an early Hollywood tearjerker, “Dyke” claims to have known a man named Joe Douglas during the war, and to have seen the youth die heroically in the trenches. I’ll call it quits after this in order to spare as much of the ending as possible — Mary is then able to leave the prison with her chin up, believing that her brother died a hero and now able to return home to marry free and clear of any potential scandal.

This is an engaging movie, and thankfully it’s short enough (only 66 minutes) that one can get through it without ever feeling taxed. First is Muni: the abilities that would see him become the preeminent dramatic actor of the thirties are evident; he’s simply light years ahead of everyone else in the film in terms of ability and intuiting the medium. More than that though, Muni has that intangible something, the charisma, the screen presence, the “it” that has characterized actors such as Cagney, Dean, and De Niro throughout film history. The Valiant is a rudimentary early talkie, but Muni owns the thing.

Speaking of which, the film is notable for its technical accomplishment. While the cameras are static (there are a few close-ups), and the sets are theatrical, there are some fine “special effects” shots that appear during various flashback sequences, when a young Muni is superimposed over a medium shot of the character (usually his Whistler’s Mother-like ma) doing the remembering. And although it boasts no musical score, the sound in the Eastman print is crisp and clean, with all of the spoken dialogue easily understood. Part of that owes to the simplicity of the Oscar-nominated writing itself: a great many of the Fox theaters chains were rural (compared to those of Paramount and MGM), and consequently numerous Fox features were targeted at the uneducated or the unsophisticated, who nevertheless frequented American movie houses in droves. All of the characters deliver their lines deliberately, and with no small amount of silent-era pantomime, but it’s also apparent that the writing itself was been simplified in order to facilitate easy understanding. The narrative moral of the movie — and even its title — speak directly to rural audiences about the corruption of city life. A good mid-western boy was called to the war, and at its end was lured to the city instead of back to his home — and there he was obliged to do murder. Audiences are warned that even a young man worthy of the film’s title, The Valiant can still be ruined by the perils of the city, and that in forsaking his home and his family, he has sufficiently challenged the fates to destroy him.  

The Valiant (1929)
Directed by William K. Howard
Starring Paul Muni
Released by Fox Film Corporation (20th Century Fox) 
Running time: 66 minutes
Availability: Just aired on TCM, previously quite rare. Poor quality copies on ioffer.com. 
Grade: B, historically significant. 

A Majority of One (1961)

My DVR recorded the hard to find 1961 film A Majority of One tonight on TCM, and I’m glad I won’t have to watch it — I was able to get a Warner Archive DVD copy via interlibrary loan earlier in the week and view it that way instead. This was my first experience with an “on demand” disc, and I found myself in agreement with the vast majority of people who champion the service. The transfer was crystal clear and the disc was pleasantly void of the innumerable obstacle screens that ruin most commercial DVDs. If free interlibrary loan wasn’t a perk of my teaching position I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase discs from this line.

There are two sticking points regarding A Majority of One that will dominate most discussions of the film and need to be gotten out of the way before any worthwhile assessment of the picture can happen. First is the casting of a Caucasian in the male lead. That master of disguises, Alec Guinness, plays Mr. Asano, a Japanese business magnate whose business dealings have attracted the attention of the US government. Realize going in that on a superficial level this is a romantic comedy about a widow and a widower from different cultures finding love in their golden years, but more importantly it’s about the healing of Japanese and American cultures in the wake of the war, interracial marriage and subsequent bigotry, with a little generational friction thrown in for good measure. My take on the casting of Guinness is this: Hollywood has always been in the money-making business, and I’m choosing to applaud them for broaching the subject in an A-list feature film, even if the producers elected not to cast an Asian performer in the male lead. If the film doesn’t get made without Guinness in the featured role, then I’m happy to accept it under those circumstances rather than not at all, knowing that Hollywood would eventually come around, one baby step at a time — though there’s really no reason why a Japanese actor couldn’t have been cast, other than the argument that Guinness’s star power would sell more tickets. One could argue that since the earlier Broadway production of the play (a big hit at 556 performances and multiple Tony nominations) starred Cedric Hardwicke in the role of Asano the precedent was already in place, but on the other hand James Shigeta and a primarily Asian cast was starring in Flower Drum Song at the same time over at Universal. And while I wince at Guinness’s performance a little (his idea of playing Japanese translates to a tilted back head and squinty eyes. He never once looks right.), the attempt at Japanese never strays into caricature — a flaw that greatly mars 1961’s most well-remembered film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The second sticking point is A Majority of One’s rather gaudy running time of two-and-a-half hours. Considering the film is essentially comedic, with a sprinkling of dramatic moments that anticipate the flavor of many films from the 1980s, it’s difficult to stay engaged and light in heart for 150 minutes of movie. Although this is understandable when we realize the director / producer was Mervyn LeRoy, who could make a long picture as well as a short one, the exhibition cut of A Majority of One could have easily gone back to the cutting room and lost fifteen minutes of unnecessary footage. Nevertheless, there’s enough good stuff here that anyone considering the viewing film should plow ahead without reservation.

At the top of the heap of all that good stuff is the extraordinary Rosalind Russell, who stars as Mrs. Jacoby, the Jewish mother from Brooklyn who comes to adore her new Japanese friend, despite having lost her only son in the Pacific war. Russell, one of the most extraordinary — and despite the great deal of acclaim she enjoyed, underrated — actresses of her era, simply shines here. She’s the glue that holds this long picture together. Her chemistry and interactions with her each and every one of her fellow performers is different in character yet perfect in tone. Her performance is nuanced by confidence, timing, and restraint — and her accent would make Meryl Streep proud. Despite the fact that Russell, even at 54, was busy juggling film, TV, and theatrical projects, it’s clear that she gave herself away to this one. It’s as good a performance as you’ll find in any film from the period, yet one that despite its brilliance was snubbed by Oscar — A Majority of One’s sole nomination came in the Color Cinematography category. Regardless of Oscar’s mild drubbing of Russell (four nominations, zero wins. Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1973, three years before her death.), the Globes simply adored her. She would win Best Actress Musical/Comedy for this film, and then again the next year for her work in LeRoy’s next project, Gypsy. She had previously won in the Musical/Comedy category in 1958 for her signature performance in Auntie Mame, and in the Best Motion Picture Actress category (the Academy equivalent) in 1947 and 1948 for Sister Kenny and Mourning Becomes Electra, respectively. If you can catch Roz as a nurse in Kenny on TCM do so, but I’m on the record with Electra as one of the strangest classic period films out there — it isn’t for everyone and it isn’t the Roz most people know and love. There are many victims of Oscar snubbings, but with five Golden Globes and no Oscars, Russell has to be at the top of the list.

Performances aside, the film’s themes of forgiveness in the wake of the war and of interracial love may date it with younger viewers, but the script is rich enough to remain interesting and the dialog certainly entertains. Granted the film is overlong, there’s enough here to warrant a viewing. My one qualm: Mrs. Jacoby warms to Mr. Asano far too quickly — through just a single scene early in the picture — and LeRoy misses the opportunity for dramatic fireworks between his two stars, especially when both were as adept with drama as they were with comedy. The scene in which the pair meet on the deck of an ocean liner deftly blends dramatic tension with physical comedy — the movie sells out for affability when a great deal more character development was possible.

A Majority of One (1961)

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Starring Rosalind Russell, Alec Guinness, and Ray Danton

Released by Warner Brothers

Running time: 150 minutes

Availability: Warner Brothers Archive DVD, TCM.

Golden Girl (1951) and Les Girls (1957)

Mitzi Gaynor is a recent re-discovery for me, having never been a fan of South Pacific, which I saw once eons ago and promptly moved on from. I just watched a much younger Mitzi in 1951’s Golden Girl, and found something in her first featured performance quite endearing. The forgotten film casts Mitzi as Gold Rush honey Lotta Crabtree, making her name as a performer in the mining camps throughout California during the Civil War period. There’s not much to speak for Golden Girl beyond Gaynor — the songs aren’t memorable and the romance with a dashing southern spy / officer (TV Western star Dale Robertson) who robs Union payrolls feels dated and a little uncomfortable. The climax finds Gaynor bleating a tearful rendition of Dixie in a high-falootin’ San Francisco auditorium just as news of the surrender at Appomattox has made its way west. Golden Girl has never been released on DVD (or VHS?), and the print showing on Turner Classic Movies is so poor as to not bode well for its future. On a side note, the poster for Golden Girl is simply one of the most awful I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Les Girls. If it were not for Mitzi, whose part is too small for my tastes, I would have liked it a great deal less. If you are a fan of MGM musicals however, Les Girls is available everywhere and is a film that you simply have to see, even if I say that in a somewhat weary, obligatory tone of voice (being a completist has its downside). The production values are as sumptuous and as artistic as anything else Metro did during the period — particularly in Mitzi’s big number towards the end of the film. (The film was an Oscar winner for its costumes.) The narrative gets a little tedious though: the story is centers around a London courtroom libel suit that finds two of Gene Kelly’s former troupers — Les Girls — at each others throats over a tell-all book one has just written. The same set of events are related three times, each time through the eyes of a different character, and before long we see way in which all the strings are going to tie neatly together.

In addition to Gaynor and Gene Kelly, the film casts lanky Brit Kay Kendall as the author of the tell-all, and sexy Finn Taina Elg as the libeled lady. Elg was certainly a stunner, but she never really caught on with American audiences, while Kendall had all the talent in the world yet never had a fighting chance to use it — she would succumb to leukemia two short years later, in 1959. While each of the girls brings something worthwhile to the film, they never quite gel on screen together in the way they do with their male costars, and the movie suffers a little for it.

The biggest drawback for me is that this is yet another late-cycle musical that fails to properly integrate the musical numbers into the story. As so often became the case as the fifties grew tired, the musical interludes show up like television commercial breaks — here in the form of the Les Girls nightclub acts, each one a little more artsy-fartsy and self indulgent than the last. (And don’t get me wrong either, I think An American in Paris is great stuff!) This is not a bad film by any means, but it is rather soul-less and clearly shows that the musical was running on fumes in 1957, and desperately needed the shot in the arm that West Side Story was stirring up on Broadway at the time, and would in a few years give the motion picture musical.

At almost 80, Mitzi is still out there somewhere, though her motion picture career was too damn short: eighteen credits, and no big screen work after 1963. She did a number of TV specials in the seventies, but they are nowhere to be found. It’s too bad, Gaynor had a look, style, and screen presence that doesn’t translate to photography — you’ve gotta see her in films.

Golden Girl (1951)

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Dale Robertson, and Una Merkel

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 108 minutes.

Availability: Has aired on TCM

Les Girls (1957)

Directed by George Cukor

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, and Taina Elg

Released by MGM

Running time: 114 minutes.

Availability: Widely on DVD, airs on TCM

The Patent Leather Kid (1927) & The 1st Academy Awards

How can we discuss The Patent Leather Kid, and not dedicate a few paragraphs to the very first iteration of the Academy Awards? We can’t, so hang in there and we’ll get to the film shortly — err … eventually.


The brainchild of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was originally formed to nullify (or mollify, if you prefer) the labor unions that were threatening to wreak havoc on industry production. As things turned out, Mayer’s cadre of power players didn’t have that kind of juice, but ever the pragmatist, he recognized that the Academy might still have some value as a PR mechanism. Concerned citizens all over the country were editorializing about the evils of the motion picture business, so Mayer imagined that the Academy could intervene with the Hays office and effectively self-police the business. The idea for the Academy Awards came a little later, after Mayer, his attorneys, and president Douglas Fairbanks managed to push $100 Academy memberships off on almost 250 more actors, writers, directors, producers, and technicians. The idea of an annual awards banquet is a natural outgrowth of such organizations, and the Academy Awards of Merit became Hollywood’s ingenious way of glamorizing itself and promoting its product to the world.

Nobody knew what to expect that first year, except for a good meal. The 270 attendees at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel that May evening were absolutely unconcerned about winning and losing — the results had been announced ninety days before the actual banquet was held — on the back page of the Academy Bulletin. (It wasn’t until the following year that Mayer realized the tremendous upside in keeping the results a secret until the big night.) The nomination and voting process had been painful to all involved — such things are hard to get right the first time around. Ballots actually had to be administered twice: many members failed to follow directions and nominated films from earlier years like Stella Dallas and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, both from all the way back in 1925. Then the whole affair was almost ruined by Al Jolson and  The Jazz Singer — committee members decided it was unfair to put the landmark talkie up against silent fare, so they ruled it ineligible and instead recognized the Warners with the Academy’s first special prize. Likewise for the cinematic juggernaut known as Charles Chaplin. He was eligible in multiple categories, but the committee decided to remove his name from consideration and give him an honorary award as well — killing four separate birds with one stone by recognizing his “versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.” Chaplin was the inarguably the most famous man in the world at the time; he would have certainly swept the awards. Some authors have suggested his name was removed from ballots due to his abrasive reputation in industry circles, but this is rubbish — had Chaplin and The Circus swept the very first awards, other industry players may have lost interest and the whole enterprise could have died. It is also important to remember the depth of friendship that existed between Chaplin and Fairbanks. Regardless, for the sake of the awards themselves it proved a wise decision.

The first banquet was also a private affair — the only one not broadcast in some way to the public. For the five-dollar ticket price, guests danced and enjoyed a sumptuous meal, all hosted by master of ceremonies Fairbanks. When it was time to recognize the evening’s winners, Mayer took only five minutes to call each of them to the head table to collect their statuettes. Best Actor Emil Jannings missed the ceremony — he had already received his award and was on a steamer bound for Germany, making him officially the first winner in the awards history.* At the time performers were nominated for their body of work over the course of the eligibility period; Jannings was up for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, while his only fellow nominee was the much younger Richard Barthelmess, nominated for The Noose and the other subject of this essay, The Patent Leather Kid.

Twenty-one year old Janet Gaynor was named Best Actress for her work in a trio of features: Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise; besting Louise Dresser and Gloria Swanson, each nominated for a single performance. The practice of nominating actors and directors for multiple films would only last through the first three ceremonies, as it skewed votes towards the nominee with the most work under consideration, making an apples to apples comparison impossible. All in all, fifteen statuettes were awarded that evening in twelve categories, including Chaplin’s special award and one for the Warner Bros., for bringing The Jazz Singer to the screen. (Both cameramen recognized in the Cinematography category for Sunrise received a statuette.)

Wings was named Outstanding Picture on the strength of its commercial success, while Sunrise was given the prize for Unique and Artistic Picture. In one intriguing legend about those first awards it is said that the Board of Judges (comprised of one delegate from each of the five branches, plus Mayer) had originally selected King Vidor’s The Crowd as the winner over Sunrise, but Mayer was the lone holdout, arguing that Vidor’s depressing study of New York city life was not the credit to the industry that Sunrise was. After an all-night debate, the other judges finally gave in. Ironically, though Mayer is remembered as being rough around the edges and a something of a tyrant, he got that one right. Although The Crowd is a truly extraordinary film, Sunrise is … astonishing. What’s even more noteworthy is that The Crowd was an MGM product while Sunrise came from Fox. The shrewd foresight displayed by Mayer in arguing against his own film for one of the Academy’s most prestigious awards ruled out any possible suggestions of collusion, legitimizing the awards before they even got off the ground. The rest is history.

{* And it couldn’t have gone to a more rotten guy. In the wake of talking pictures Jannings’s thick accent made a career as a Hollywood unlikely, so the Swiss-born actor decided to head for Germany. He wrote to the Academy, asking to be given the award in advance of his ship sailing, “I therefore ask you to kindly hand me now already the statuette award to me. I want to take this opportunity to extend to you my heartfelt thanks for the honor bestowed upon me, which fills me with pride and joy which I shall cherish all my life as a kind remembrance in recognition of my artistic activities in U.S.A.” After he returned to Germany, Jannings continued to make films, most notably The Blue Angel (1930) with Marlene Dietrich. He would also sympathize with the National Socialists. Throughout the thirties he appeared in one Nazi propaganda film after another; in 1941 Goebbels bestowed upon him the title of “Artist of the State.” Jannings tried to reconnect with Hollywood after the war, but this was obviously impossible. He relocated to Austria and became a citizen of that country in 1947. He died of liver cancer three years later. His Academy statuette remains in Berlin.}

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Richard Barthelmess’s Hollywood story began in 1916, when stage star Alla Nazimova cast him in the screen adaptation of her hit play War Brides. Barthelmess’s matinee idol looks and effortless screen presence ensured not only more roles, but stardom: he made eleven films the following year, and signed a contract with D.W. Griffith in 1919 and immediately appeared opposite Lillian Gish is a pair of films: Broken Blossoms and Way Down East, cementing his stardom. Gish would gush, “He has the most beautiful face of any man who ever went before a camera.” Barthelmess would continue as one of the biggest names in the industry, even becoming one of the original 36 founders of the Academy.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Barthelmess discovered he wasn’t nearly as well suited for the talkies, though he held on to his career a great deal longer than many: appearing in twenty sound pictures — though never in a notable performance. Barthelmess retired from acting in the mid-thirties, but returned to perform in the 1939 Howard Hawks classic Only Angels Have Wings. All in all, Barthelmess enjoyed a Hollywood career that lasted 25 years, with his greatest role coming in The Patent Leather Kid, a First national blockbuster released in 1927.

It’s a long movie, coming in at well over two hours, and it takes the acquired taste of a silent film enthusiast to get through it in a single sitting. Barthelmess plays the unnamed title character (if he’s got a real name, we never learn it), a Hell’s Kitchen prizefighter eyeing a shot at the title. Everyone in New York is rooting against him though — he’s an arrogant pug who fancies himself a dandy and insists on having his hair combed between rounds. Barthelmess looks the part: he’s an attractive and statuesque man who moves around the ring like he’s had some training. Had the movie been made a decade later, Barthelmess’s part undoubtedly would have gone to James Cagney, though the two actors are dissimilar. All of the fight scenes come over as authentic, with large crowds and believable atmosphere. It’s at one of his fights that the Kid meets Curley (Molly O’Day), a dance-hall girl who like everyone else in the arena came in hopes of seeing him knocked on his ass. Their eyes meet between, and just before putting his opponent down for the count, the Kid shouts at Curley to hang around after the fight. Intrigued, she ditches her date and lolls by the locker room door. A romance is born.

The US entry into the war is announced in one of the film’s best scenes. The Kid hears a commotion in the streets below and shouts down to the newsboy for a copy of the Times. As he scans the cover and begins to search for the sports page, we see the headline: “War Declared!” Curley enters the room and asks he’s heard the big news, but the Kid thinks she’s talking about the latest prediction of his defeat in the fight columns. The extent to which director Al Santell is able to milk the Kid’s reluctance to join the war effort is surprising, particularly given the film’s extensive running time and how abruptly it transitions from the New York fight game to the trenches of the western front. At first we think the Kid is simply disinterested in the world outside the ring — a fighter who only thinks about the fight game. Before long, as his friends enlist or are drafted, we realize he’s just scared. More than scared — he’s a coward, terrified of “guns n gas n bayonets.” After he refuses to doff his cap as the flag marches by on the street below Curley finally gives up on him, writing in a note: “I’m only a girl and can’t fight but I can dance and sing so I’m goin’ to France to cheer up the boys till I learn to be a nurse.”

Eventually the Kid is drafted, right alongside his stuttering trainer Puffy. The pair head for France as newly minted doughboys, the Kid constantly on the lookout for ways to avoid the front lines. When joining the assault becomes inevitable, he hangs back during the charge, hiding behind a tank as the men around him are chopped down. When Puffy gets hit, he implores his protégé to “give ‘em Hell!” and at the expense of the older man’s life the youth finally discovers his courage. He rises from his foxhole, grabs a satchel of grenades, and charges…

The film’s final sequence is patriotic, sentimental and a little corny, but you don’t mind so much. O’Day chews every piece of scenery in sight, frantic to score dramatic points before time runs out. Barthelmess’s final scenes are characterized by restraint, an actor understanding that the second half of the film is a great deal less about his ego than the first. This sort of redemption narrative would become the worst kind of dead horse in the years to come, beaten again and again by Hollywood as the decades, and the wars, accumulated. Big male star after big male star would make like Barthelmess in a Tinseltown rite of passage, playing arrogant, self-centered kids who go to war and learn what really matters.

The Patent Leather Kid (1927)

Directed by Alfred Santell

Starring Richard Barthelmess and Molly O’Day

Released by First National Pictures

Running time: IMDb: 130 – 150 minutes, my copy: 130 minutes.

Availability: Very Rare, though experienced film foragers can find it.