GREENBRIAR SHORT SUBJECTS

Here’s another posting concept I’ll float over the next while that hopefully will work toward getting images up and ideas out that don’t necessarily merit a longer piece. I’ll use the Greenbriar Short Subjects format to recommend books and maybe a few DVD’s as well.

SHOW ALERT: Cinevent 2009 happens three weeks from today in Columbus, Ohio (May 22-25). It’s a four day collector and fan gathering that’s gone on since I was but a youth, and what a marathon this is for rare screenings and unique memorabilia. We used to drive ten hours over perpetually unfinished West Virginia highway to get there. Since ridding myself of that incubus named 16mm collecting, I can traverse the hotel’s exterior lot minus nagging compulsion to intercept dealer vans to see what they’ve brought. Film's been largely displaced by DVD, but there are still ghostly images projected upon walls in the selling area, and I’m nostalgic near to wistful tears for projectors grinding and Super 8 (yes, Super 8!) prints of Castle Films’ Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being unspooled by dealers I’ve known for nigh onto thirty years and then some. People in the movie life may die, but they never quit. Guys twenty years my senior buy up books and stills like teenagers just entering the hobby. Do we ever lose our childish enthusiasm for this stuff? I keep waiting for my interest to subside, an event concurrent with onset of much belated maturity and realization that all of it’s ephemeral and shouldn’t matter to grown-ups, but in the meantime, I buy up books and stills and wonder if twenty years from now I'll be doing the same (hope so!). They’ll be showing a Bill Hart feature new to me, and I’ll sure be there for that. Also a dye-transfer Technicolor print of Hello, Frisco, Hello which will remind us of what Alice Faye musicals looked like before Fox junked their three-strip negatives. Morris Everett has another of his poster auctions Saturday and Sunday. Program coordinator Steve Haynes sent an e-mail reporting that rooms at the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Conference Center are still available, but going fast. If you’re within a continent’s travel of Cinevent, by all means check it out.

I look at theatre ads like this and so many questions arise. What were the Three Stooges like on stage? This was 1942. Curly was still in pretty good performing shape, but how long before these live appearances became untenable for him? The recent Stooge DVD sets gave us opportunity to examine his decline from one short to the next until a stroke took him out. Bloggers have even posted frame grabs to pinpoint moments when you could see Curly giving it up. I’m open to Stooges now whereas I used to switch off whenever their theme came on, thus nearly all these are fresh viewing meat. One the other day had me levitating upon realization that its setup was lifted wholesale from The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case. Now the rest of you have been on to this for a lifetime, but here I exalted, What A Discovery! Obviously, I’ve got lots of Stooge catching up to do (and I’ve been helped in that regard by Stuart Galbraith IV's excellent DVD reviews). Next question ad wise: Would Jackie Cooper remember this gig with the Stooges? They’d have done at least five or six shows a day (doors opened at Ten AM). That’s a lot of backstage waiting, and I’m wondering how much conversation Jackie might have had with the boys. Did they send out for sandwiches? Things like that cross your mind when looking at these promotionals ... wishing to Heaven you could have been there primary among them, of course.

RADIO vs. MOVIES CIRCA March 29, 1928: The above group supplied an hour’s free entertainment on NBC radio that was like opening cannon fire at Fort Sumter, the first of many battles to come between theatres and media piped into homes. United Artists’ Joseph Schenck committed star talent for an hour sponsored by the car manufacturing Dodge Brothers for purposes of selling their Victory line of six-cylinder models (from left to right at top is A.K. Schoepf representing Dodge, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph Schenck, and Dolores Del Rio, with John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Norma Talmadge at bottom). Exhibitors hit roofs nationwide over movie people competing with theatres they proposed to support with then silent features. A public’s curiosity assured interest in hearing Chaplin, Fairbanks, Talmadge and the others speak for the first time. It was a coast-to-coast broadcast that neatly bifurcated show nights in the east (8 to 9 PM) and kept normally paying customers hearthside, a chilling portent of things to come. Theatre-men assailed Schenck and got his promise not to let it happen again. Exhibs more open-minded played the Dodge Brothers show with comedy shorts and trailers on screen as UA luminaries spoke and sang from recently installed Vitaphone speakers. There was clean reception or major static depending on location, commercial radio being still in its comparative infancy. Audiences stamped and hooted disapproval according to sound quality or their level of disappointment with speaking voices new to them. Chaplin’s was a particular letdown, and there was reason to believe pro orators stood in for Talmadge and Dolores Del Rio. The whole scheme was pretty much a train wreck and object lesson to discourage further such experimentation, but there was no denying sound’s penetration into theatres and the fact it was very much here to stay.

Back To The Bowery

But for a thing called High-Definition, I might never have gotten around to watching two that had so far slipped my radar, Dead End and The Young Savages. Turns out these are like buttons and bows for being an ideal tandem bill and barometers of juve delinquency as viewed by Hollywood. To have been a Bogart completist and skipped Dead End for this many years seems odd. Was it my antipathy towards The Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys/whatever? I’d ducked them growing up for being obnoxious in that threadbare way that made The Three Stooges anathema, having condescended but to a pair they’d done with Bela Lugosi that I watched purely for him. Maybe their shtick was too urban-based, Northern-centric if you please, for a child of such outer provinces as myself. Anyway, Dead End is distinctly something else, a class drama that doubtlessly made 1937 folk feel they were seeing real life and problems along mean streets as (presumably) existed then. It’s not canned theatre in spite of stage-derived origin, for William Wyler was too capable to betray that. You get a sensation here of sharing the experience with first-nighters for whom this was a shocking blast of social reality, even as we find it quaint and altogether removed from present circumstances. If "bad" kids were no worse than Dead Enders here, we’d have ourselves a modern utopia, for hope sprang eternal in both Dead End and The Young Savages that any boy can be reached given positive influence or kind offices of a big sister (or Mom) who cares. Was the opposing reality too harsh for moviegoers to contemplate? Hollywood’s depiction of thoroughly rotten teens would wait until the fifties, but even then it was limited to isolated bad apples among bushels otherwise salvageable. Dead End kids were mostly about street patter, batting each other around, and stirring mischief we could only wish were the extent of latter-day misbehavior on the part of wayward youngsters. They beat up a rich kid who impliedly has it coming simply for being privileged, an irksome device that rearranged my sympathies and left me hopeful they’d be brought to book for it. The idea of bad neighborhoods as cradles of crime excuses bad acts on the kid’s parts, so to buy into the drama, you’ll need to share the social attitudes behind it. Best perhaps to focus on elements more ancillary at the time, such as remarkable thesping by Humphrey Bogart in one of those isolated (really) good parts he had in an otherwise barren 1930’s when most of his screen gangsters were no more nuanced than budget western heavies. The business of Bogart’s Baby Face Martin as tutor in ways of crime was frowned upon by Code supervisors, and indeed was the ball Warners ran with the following year when they essentially took the best of Dead End and turned it into Angels With Dirty Faces. Bogart was here a variation on his previous year breakout of The Petrified Forest with further embellishment on sympathetic outlawry, which remained his stock-in (better roles) trade right through High Sierra. That one was long awaited reward and transition to (more or less) a right side of the law. Did producers spend those five or so initial Warner contract years thinking he could play nothing but bad men? Obviously so, as internal memos reveal efforts to widen Bogart’s range and disappointment over his seeming inability to manage same.

What’s a Dead End Kid as opposed to an East Side Kid alongside a Little Tough Guy? Post-graduate level fans know. I’ve spent near a lifetime floundering over permutations of a series that lasted seeming longest of any feature group with more or less ongoing cast members. Did I mention the Bowery Boys? They were later. We’ll assume Monogram (later Allied Artists) did about a thousand of these and leave it at that. Warners owns an indeterminate number and wants to release some on DVD, despite negatives long junked and even collectors (that last resort all studios must eventually plead to) unable to supply missing links (there may be more interest in Mr. Hex’s restoration than that of a complete Magnificent Ambersons!). Further digging into exhibition life makes me admire all the more sheer brilliance behind these programmers (and they were surely that --- playing low end on duallers and singly but in small bergs and action houses). Dead End/East Side/ Bowery Boys were inspired amalgams of comedy plus youth/action. Fists and quips flew for six reels with nary a demand upon viewers beyond showing up and dumbing down. They were sure money a debased Hollywood earned best, for so long as budgets stayed rigid, you could blow creative impulse to the wind and avoid penalty for serving lowest brows among patronage. Dead Enders (let’s call them that for simplicity) were ideal for serials. Those plus an Axis threat were Heaven sent. I’ve watched 1942’s Junior G-Men Of The Air over the last several weeks. No, it isn’t good and you’re better watching something (almost anything!) else, but such backwash draws me like honeysuckle to bees and what’s twelve chapters fed into a psyche benumbed by chapter-plays even worse? Junior G-Men Of The Air (there were several --- the first a mere Junior G-Men serial of two years before) was inspiration for kids everywhere to ferret out possible fifth columnists in their own backyards. Were such networks indeed operating on local street corners? There’s nary an eyebrow raised when Billy Halop and his gang (not a criminal or particularly anti-social one) discover Japanese spies acting at the behest of lightly slant-eyed Lionel Atwill, his crisp diction given over but tentatively to Oriental inflection. Dog heavies make glancing gestures toward Nippon appearance, as if instructions from chapter-to-chapter (and revolving co-directors) were random at best and received with indifference at most. Universal did serials like most people put out a cat. You want them gone before they smell up the house. I’ll risk coming off an utter imbecile and say Junior G-Men Of The Air actually insulted my intelligence, something Republic serials seldom did and reason enough why fans to a boy prefer them today.

I’d characterize Universal chapter-plays as indifferent. Also repetitive (grindingly so), unimaginative, and given to dulsatory special fx. Junior G-Men are constantly in and out of the same abandoned warehouse and hopping rides on back of (again the same) truck effecting escapes from endlessly duplicated scenes of perfunctory crime. Serial loyalty entailed sacrifice when they were Universal ones. Our Liberty and Allen Theatres had a product split and cliffhanger spoils were divided so that all Republic output went the former’s way, leaving a depreciated Allen the scraps of Universal, Columbia, and whatever independents were issuing (or reissuing). Junior G-Men Of The Air at the Allen went head-to-head on our Main Street against the likes of Spy Smasher and Perils Of Nyoka offered by the Liberty. I should think the victor would have been a foregone conclusion, but who really knows how preferences ran among serial fans in 1942? Immediacy and thus greater tension were advantages a Junior G-Men Of The Air had with a war just underway. Atwill and minions are in fact preparing throughout its twelve chapters for an invasion they’ll launch December 7, a plot device sufficiently compelling as to mitigate sloppy execution otherwise. The wing pin made of etched brass shown here was exhibition’s giveaway and an invitation for kids too young for enlistment to engage the enemy weekly and feel themselves part of a struggle unfolding on the greater world stage. That alone lent urgency to Junior G-Men Of The Air we’ll not know for missing 1942’s initial run, making it seem almost churlish to point up weaknesses so many years after. Maybe Universal understood the ephemeral nature of its serials too well by 1956 when it sold outright all those chapter-plays not reverting to comic publishers (such as Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon). Revenue realized after federal taxes at the long-term capital gain rate was just over a million, boosting reported studio earnings that helped disguise profits diminished from 1955. Universal serials had played television from the early fifties and were figured to have little if any value beyond that. Most fell into the public domain and became available on duped 16 and 8mm when Thunderbird Films began releasing them to collectors in the early seventies. VCI maintains said policy with DVD’s mastered from hardy 16mm survivors of early syndication days, and its release of Junior G-Men Of The Air is actually pretty good for a serial we’re never likely to see truly restored.

Internal friction and rivalries among Dead Enders could fill volumes if not provide content for its own series of melodramatic programmers. These boys did not pal around. Many (most?) graduated from Bowery mirth-making to plain mean drunkenness as careers skidded toward bits and forced retirement. They were funny/goofy/geeky in appearance and stayed pretty much that way to the last, coarsened by ravages of intemperance but otherwise unchanged and forever resistant to what life’s lessons taught others. Billy Halop admitted to lack of esprit de corps among Dead End membership, citing his own better billing and money as basis for smoldering on-set jealousies. Respective agents hustled favored positioning for individual boys much as stage mothers sought dominant turf for Our Gangers over at Roach and MGM. Dead End reunions would likely have ended in as many bar fights, old resentments being a match struck often in latter memoirs and interviews. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall ended up driving their Bowery jalopy the furthest. Monogram and successor Allied Artists ran its series to an astounding 1958, long after most "B" groups went off the chart. A man could go proud producing these. Ben Schwalb kicked around town thirty years before securing a Bowery berth, as sure a lock on steady income as an uncertain industry allowed. Schwalb called it a peculiar chemistry. I guess it’s that the public likes the boys and that the format has been continually changed so that the series is kept interesting and different. Schwalb and AA’s chemistry was indeed applied science, all exploitation angles … deliberate and planned, he said, not accidental. By the fifties, four Bowerys per year came surely as changing seasons even as Schwalb’s notion of comedy constructs remained unaltered: It seems like the physical things, like a man bumping a nose on a door, is the best yock getter. Ben preferred what he called hurt gags. So did the Bowery Boy’s public. They kept running beyond the series’ finish as small theatres continued booking oldies into the sixties. Dead End influence permeated even mainstream and presumed serious treatments of juvenile crime. 1961’s The Young Savages took cues from neighboring smash West Side Story, but prevailing examples for its street toughs were more Slip and Sach than authentic delinquents filling 60’s police blotters. D.A. Burt Lancaster’s suspect list amounts to vaudeville turns by varied ethnic youth parading eccentric if not comic "personalities" no different from ones that originated with Dead End’s cast back in 1937. In fact, the latter come off as more authentic than Method exertions of The Young Savages, whatever its ambitions toward hard-hitting realism. Veterans Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall were meanwhile game for an encore, but who’d have dreamed they’d turn up in a cornpone slopshoe like Second Fiddle To A Steel Guitar? This 1966 compilation of hillbilly music acts was manna to drive-inners here in Greenbriar country (and invariably the supporting feature would be something like Red River or Horror Of Dracula!). I’d venture Second Fiddle got more North Carolina dates than Doctor Zhivago. Leo and Huntz act as in-betweeners for solid performing talent, first as inept paperhangers (well, it was good enough for Bobby Ray and Babe Hardy back in the twenties), then back and forth/in and out of a mummy case, these routines seemingly improvised on the go by Gorcey and Hall. Attendees to Second Fiddle To A Steel Guitar probably wished the boys would get back to full-time foolery. Indeed, but for encroachments of age and market realities, The Bowery Boys might just have gone on forever.

Westerns Worthy and Lost Till Now

I always figured it was myth that Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott switched parts at the last minute for Sam Peckinpah’s Ride The High Country. How could anyone for a moment foresee McCrea in any role other than exemplifying moral leadership and unshakably right resolve? He had not the baggage Scott carried for Budd Boetticher and at no time would his westerners ride out vengeance seeking or set upon questionable trails … and there’s the rub insofar as McCrea finding wide acceptance among modernists seeking dark aspects of past cowboys. Another problem was Joel’s not having lucked into a run of now classic westerns like the Scott/Boetticher/Kennedy group that clinched Randy’s legacy for our generation (and hopefully future ones). Both stars otherwise followed paths near identical after the war insofar as shared resolution to do outdoor actioners and little else. Westerns paid and were risk free, the nearest to a sure thing in movies during the fifties. McCrea and Scott were the Coke and Pepsi of an industry that counted on them to bring home bacon and sure enough they never failed at just that. Independent producers preferred wading into an uncertain industry on horseback. Many of these rang Joel and Randy’s doorbells and cinched deals far safer than ones made for artier product. McCrea was approachable and not given to Hollywood airs. Luncheons out often ended with scripts rolled up and pushed into his coat pocket. Everyone wanted a flyer on his kind of boxoffice insurance. Stranger On Horseback was one that began as a gleam in an independent’s eye and thanks to Joel, saw completion and release through United Artists. It’s recently out on DVD from VCI. There is cult interest thanks to Jacques Tourneur having directed. His is a name worth noting for seldom if ever having directed a bad picture. Was it a practiced eye for performance and composition or did Tourneur (below on a set) take weak scripts home and transform them? Cat People, Out Of The Past, Stars In My Crown (an earlier great one with McCrea), and Curse Of The Demon were all his. I’ve got to think he was either the luckiest man in town or had a brilliant way with story telling. Having Tourneur on board your next Joel McCrea western put it immediately in a category beyond routine oaters the star was otherwise grinding at Universal-International, most of these under the rush-it-up baton of former Republic "B" maestro George Sherman, a well-intentioned workhorse not likely to be confused with Ford, Hawks … or Tourneur.

The challenge was to break free of the program western class. Discriminate viewers dredged for gold at drive-ins and grind theatres where cowboys drove filmic herds by dozens if not hundreds through a given year. Where was time or inclination to watch them all? You might safely ignore the Rod Camerons and Forrest Tuckers, but hope sprang eternal of another High Noon coming out of nowhere to seize mass approval and wide open profits. Gary Cooper was after all just Joel McCrea for a little more money and here was High Noon doing a smash $3.7 million in domestic rentals, more dollars than any western outside Red River and Shane had realized since the war. It was possible to grab the folks with a unique turn on frontier mythmaking, thus potential sleeper status conferred upon seemingly every feature trafficking in horseflesh. Even Republic promised High Noon grosses on Vera Ralston investments, but was it realistic to expect she and John Carroll to deliver such numbers? By the early fifties, westerns were all over television. Free ones … even if they weren’t much good to adults other than ones still loving Ken (Maynard) and old Hooter. You couldn’t run theatrical cowboys on cruise control with expectation of bookings (and rentals) beyond second-billed and flat. Trying harder enabled The Gunfighter, Winchester ’73, and higher-tier work from Andre DeToth, Samuel Fuller, and other directors who applied themselves to westerns worth paying to see. Joel McCrea in Stranger On Horseback was of that higher rung, its beckoning toward High Noon not hyperbole embarrassing in hindsight. A Great Western may have been putting it a little strong as in this trade ad, but Stranger On Horseback is an entirely worthy one, and at 66 minutes, deserving of applause for being less than half the length of bloated modern attempts to make westerns half so good. It tells a story old as hieroglyphs, admittedly dulled by less inspired retellings, but McCrea as lawman/judge seeking punk killer offspring (Kevin McCarthy) of town boss John McIntire sharpens the blade with terse dialogue and straight-ahead narrative. You believe in McCrea with a horse and gun, and that puts him in a top acting class for my time. Stranger On Horseback did a respectable $708,000 in domestic rentals and $427,000 in foreign. This wasn’t High Noon money, but for the little undoubtedly spent, why be piggish? Stranger's another of those family owned properties sitting dormant fifty years before being rescued for DVD (the producer was a Robert Goldstein). For all that time, you could about as easily have tracked down London After Midnight (Stranger was in no syndicated TV package I found). The camera negative is apparently lost (it’s no older than me after all, and I’m still here). VCI had to borrow a surviving 35mm print from the British Film Institute for the transfer. I’m imagining a Goldstein heir with no idea he’s got Stranger On Horseback possibly sitting among discarded rakes and lawn mowers in an untended LA garage.

Wichita’s negative did survive. We’ve evidence of that via Warner Archive’s just arrived DVD. You might figure it lost too for near-never runs on television and video invisibility these past fifty years. Wichita is yet another Cinemascope artifact looking now toward cult and critical rediscovery. If WB gives us Stars In My Crown, we’ll be equipped with a McCrea/Tourneur trilogy to maybe give Scott/Boetticher a run for their money. Wichita was released within months of Stranger On Horseback. Walter Mirisch tells the story of how he got the deal together in his recent memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (excellent and highly recommended). Allied Artists had recently shaken off its Monogram moniker and busily, if not obsessively, engaged at shedding "B" status to break into first-runs where their output could pull something other than drag. Steve Broidy was chairman. He barnstormed exchanges/exhib conventions in March 1955 putting showmen on notice of AA’s determination to supply pics for their houses. Small producers had long been frozen out of better theatres in deference to studio giants and their bully-boy distribution networks. Managers gave majors priority to avoid friction with salesmen liable to withdraw popular attractions should a theatre extend playing time to an Allied Artists release. Broidy declared he was tired of AA being a service station to which exhibitors come as a last resort when major company product is unavailable. Allied stalwarts Bomba and The Bowery Boys would morph into multi-million William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and John Huston projects, those directors having signed with AA for star-laden potential hits. Broidy promised twenty-five million to be spent on thirty-seven features over the next sixteen months, penetrating a so-called "Magic Circle" of playing time dominated by the majors. For an interim period waiting on these really major pictures, there would be first-time Cinemascope and Technicolor product coming out of AA, shows done yet on a budget but way more ambitious than cheapies formerly associated with the company. Castigated majors actually helped with a few. Paramount loaned John Derek for An Annapolis Story, while MGM supplied backlot facilities for same. The Warriors with a declining Errol Flynn was half-financed by Fox and used castle sets Metro constructed for Ivanhoe. Wichita enjoyed the sweep of scope and Prints By Technicolor at a bargain negative cost of $400,000 according to Mirisch --- and trade reviews were supportive. An ambitious effort, it shows that AA can compete successfully with the majors and, no doubt, when the returns are inked in the ledger, that little book will tell the same story, said The Independent Film Journal, reflecting hopes of all exhibitors that Allied could indeed crack that Magic Circle.

Wichita was another that took cues from High Noon. A major selling link was Tex Ritter’s theme song, a hopeful successor to Hit Parade smash Do Not Forsake Me … that accompanied Gary Cooper up lonesome streets in 1951’s hit. I checked several Ritter CD’s and couldn’t locate the Wichita number among these Best Of compilations, so hearing it over DVD credits was my first exposure. Guess even Tex couldn’t bat them out of the park every time, for this tune sounds strictly from hunger. Wichita did enjoy recognition benefit of real-life figures it depicted. McCrea was Wyatt Earp and most everybody knew Earp from history books and past westerns. Bat Masterson was there along fringes to pique interest among 1955 audiences for whom these were brand action names the equal of actors portraying them. The Wichita setting assured a splashy premiere for its namesake still thriving. That town’s opening was settled on the location when Dr. L.A. Darnell, Wichita's mayor, visited the stars and producer Walter Mirisch, shown here, to get it in writing. His endorsement was apropos for this frontier-era counterpart very much caught up in local politics and how self-interests among city fathers interfere with Earp’s law enforcing. Such old west reimagining was again a legacy of High Noon and its emphasis on venal (read modern) ways of local governing. Earp/McCrea’s opponents are less outlaws running loose than renegade city fathers engaged in quiet banditry and posing the greater threat to civic order. High Noon had taken raps for political content, but surely its (many) imitators, determined to go their model one better, suggested even more our ongoing miasma in a democracy needing overhaul. Joel McCrea’s reassuring Establishment presence, and his inevitable triumph at the finish (he won’t toss his badge into the dirt), kept Wichita out of harm’s way critically, its success leading to Allied Artists' and the Mirisch's commitment for several more westerns with the star, none of equal quality due largely to absence of essential Jacques Tourneur.