Hanging Again Off Mascot's Cliff

A wilderness serial produced by Mascot Pictures seems entirely appropriate. Any of us as kids might have shot something comparable given rudimentary cameras and equipment. That’s not to say Last Of The Mohicans is amateurish. It only seems so in that lovable way primitive chapterplays have of taking us to a rugged outdoors where anything might happen, and in event it did, no retaking to cover blown lines or stunts gone wrong. Nat Levine set out for the woods and rushed twelve installments of action crude as it gets filled with dialogue seemingly delivered off the fly. I kept wondering what his crew did for lunch over twenty-eight days they spent making this serial. Bet ones with guns shot rabbits and skinned them right there. There’s no pioneer spirit in movies like that applied to making Mascot serials. Last Of The Mohicans really gets down to basics I’m betting real frontiersmen knew. No flowing maned GQ Daniel Day-Lewis stuff here, nor pyroteched Michael Mann set-pieces to remind us it’s big Hollywood on the job. Nat Levine was lifelong opposite number of all such contrivance. Instead of dressing rooms, he’d give actors a barrel to change in. The man was perfect to translate early American myth. Nat himself was catch-penny Hollywood’s own mythic figure, a strictly fringes sort that brought exposed film out of God-awfulest places others didn’t venture near. Levine seems to have picked locations especially for drab. Last Of The Mohicans departs from that with background at least as captivating as woods behind my house. Given extraordinary circumstance of a Nat Levine reincarnated to make another serial, I’d gladly extend permission for him to shoot there …

Fans more knowledgeable assure me that Last Of The Mohicans is something of an educational serial, a real Classics Illustrated of the chapter dramas. Seems Nat really based his story pretty close on James Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel. I’d confirm that but for lifelong aversion to reading other than non-fiction. A lot of youngsters likely wangled parental dimes in 1932 by assuring Mom that this was no mere cliffhanger, but a faithful adaptation of a Great Book. Sort of like the time I got our sixth grade teacher to give extra credit for going to see Steve Reeves in The Trojan Horse. Jon Tuska wrote that Cooper’s novel actually lent itself to episodic play. Could we argue that Nat Levine’s serial is indeed the most effective of all that story’s renderings? I’d sure give it an A for splendid effort, and agree with Tuska that Last Of The Mohicans may be the best of all Mascot serials. As with most twelve to fifteen week affairs, LOTM does the ying-yang of capture and rescue throughout. Often it’s treasure maps or cyclotrodes. This time velvet-clad sisters are the prize sought by warring factions. Veteran heavy Bob Kortman plays Magua and he’s one bad indian. I still wonder how Wally Beery and Fredric March got the Oscar away from him that year. Kortman had a gap between his front teeth that looked like a window at the Automat. Spend twelve chapters with actors and you really get to know them. Lead Harry Carey received $10,000 to play Hawkeye. He wears authority like a King’s robe and was probably what sold/sustained this serial over three months it took 1932 patrons to finish it.

The curse borne by orphaned cliffhangers has been abuse visited upon them by exploiteers intent on seizing coin out of decrepit prints in circulation. Unless I’m mistaken, all the Mascot serials are Public Domain. That means you or I can get rich selling them! … except for the fact precious few care anymore about Mascot serials, and haven’t for quite a long time, which is how and why they went PD to start with. I’ve been mulish in my support for these things, having celebrated The Vanishing Legion and The Miracle Rider on previous Greenbriar occasions. Consider this fair warning that I will address other Mascots as they become available. VCI’s recently released Last Of The Mohicans DVD is realization of dwindling fanbase dreams (when we die, who will be left to watch?). There used to be a horrid VHS wherein philistines grafted a classical score over much of the otherwise mute (and better for that) action. Add music and you rob Mascots of their starkest gift --- quiet austerity. All carry banners of anti-slickness and are ongoing rebuke to shiny models Republic later did. Rarity of Mascots only enhance their cache. I wonder if 35mm exists on any of them, let alone camera negatives. VCI quality on Last Of The Mohicans is surprisingly good, however. Digital’s greatest gift has been ongoing rescue and availability of so many discarded subjects we’d have never seen again otherwise. Toward that end, VCI has been one of our best providers.

A Half-Dozen Ways We Forgot The War

Let the record show that Universal made six Maria Montez/Jon Hall adventure romances between 1942 and 1945 (Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, White Savage, Cobra Woman, Gypsy Wildcat, and Sudan). They were embraced by a wartime public that we’ve since been informed was starved for such escapist exotica. I guess all of us will eventually be sized up as neatly for whatever films we’re currently making popular. The six were escapist and as nearly exotic as 40’s restriction made possible. Youngsters liked them for swordfights and snake pits, plus their playing often in tandem with Sherlock Holmes or comedy/musicals Universal released by peck loads. What really distinguished Montez/Halls was Technicolor. The first of them, Arabian Nights, was also the company’s initial run at three-strip lensing, setting a pace for class bookings in theatres not otherwise hospitable to Universal output. If you want to know what this half-dozen meant to a generation coming up in the forties, read Alan Barbour’s first chapter of A Thousand and One Delights, his paean to moviegoing during what I’d call an absolute peak era. He saw them first-run and later chased Realart revivals playing Montez/Halls into the fifties. These were evergreens for being actionful and unbound to years they were made. Color sold them to theatres insisting on that edge over television, with showmen going back and forth to Realart wells throughout ten-years that company leased oldies from Universal. After that, it was anybody’s luck just finding the six. I’ve tried and have so far seen only half. Universal released two so far on DVD, Arabian Nights and Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves. Now having teamed with TCM for disc projects, I’d hope they’ll do the rest. Word is that three-strip elements survive on the group and prints maintain much of Technicolor's original luster (but were some lost in Universal’s disastrous vault fire of last year?).

France sells a DVD of Cobra Woman, likely a result of Robert Siodmak having directed it. There used to be revivals of that one, sometimes on nitrate 35mm, at revival houses catering to audiences in search of laughs over its retro silliness. They anointed Maria Montez as camp icon for that generation removed from Alan Barbour’s matinee congregation. Now camp is as dated as its followers proposed Montez and Cobra Woman to be. Everyone back to original writers and crew knew all six M/H's to be outlandish. Celebrated director/scribe Richard Brooks got his start on Cobra Woman. To he and others, the Montez/Halls were initiations not unlike fraternity Hell week, a future rich source of anecdotes about fat-cat producers slapping out "tits and sand" rubbish (their appellation) from which genuine talent struggled to graduate. One needed healthy cynicism to work on these. None got respect, but cash reward flowed aplenty. Arabian Nights cost just under a million and brought back several times that. Producer Walter Wanger made a personal killing for having produced it at Universal. Once he’d laid the blueprint, staff hands pushed forward to replicate the mold. They all recognized camp without benefit of introduction to the term. For such profits earned, you could label these molasses and still drive a Cadillac home.

It really comes down to one’s own exotica threshold. Do you draw the line at Sabu dashing about in harem pants? To have enjoyed 1940’s The Thief Of Bagdad helps, for the Montez/Halls are largely economy versions of that. Maria Montez was among those Hollywood celebrated as most fabulous of beauties. For temperament minus notable talent, there was no chance she’d play a Mrs. Miniver, but Montez was equal to displaying as much (which is to say not much) flesh as censors would allow, being a type reincarnated in the sixties as Ursula Andress and various Hammer Glamour practitioners. Montez also forged ahead of her time posing in see-through attire for photographers (as here), anticipating Playboy pictorials successors would engage. There were reports she stood before mirrors to declare, When I look at myself, I am so beautiful, I scream with joy. That was likelier a Universal plant to prevent Montez aspiring beyond status as a costumed joke. By the time the actress tried variation, it was too late. Some have attached Hollywood Babylonian significance to Montez’s 1951 heart attack in a bathtub (filled with too hot water?), although that death at age 34 probably amounted to nothing more than it appeared.

Jon Hall was a big side of beef way this end of magnetic, his screen companions (even besides Montez) forever more colorful and engaging. Aforementioned Sabu was like Beanie Babies for the brief time he swooned a public fascinated by his boy-toy allure. Sexual currents were afoot in these shows beyond bare midriffs Montez displayed. Robert Stack remembered girls lined up at Sabu’s dressing room for a go at his offscreen exotica, and frequent supporting Turhan Bey cut a hooded eyed swath through boudoirs not limited to consort Lana Turner’s. Both these guys put Jon Hall in the shade for manly technique their foreign origins suggested. Bey would in fact replace Hall as romantic lead in the final entry, Sudan, with the latter now relegated to support. What's best overall about the series are its background players. Never did comic relief strive so mightily to soften starch out of endlessly told tales (one writer alerted Walter Wanger that Arabian Nights was just a western with camels, to which the producer essentially replied, Yeah, and your point?). Even allowing for viewer disdain with turbans and slippers with bells, there are joys of Shemp Howard, Billy Gilbert, Andy Devine … a casting department’s joke bag emptied in service of brisk shows (all under 90 minutes, most less than 80) that really benefit from oft-doses of slapstick. For those that enjoy giddy days of Universal manufacture, the six Montez/Halls are gem fields worth mining. I’ve had fun watching ones available. They’ve kind of grown on me like mosquito bites that feel good when you scratch them. The DVD’s of Arabian Nights and Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves (plus the Region 2 Cobra Woman) are some of the prettiest modern renderings of vintage Technicolor around, and reason beyond the film’s entertainment values to invest.

Warners Keeps On Battle Crying

When did Warner’s TV tail begin wagging their theatrical dogs? I’d submit not long after James Garner hit as Maverick. His launch as a feature star was Darby’s Rangers, also the last feature directed by William A. Wellman (Lafayette Escadrille was released later, but completed before, Darby’s Rangers). Bill’s being wild is better remembered than most films he made, thanks to anecdote-laden profiles done since he was active. Wellman made an unholy bargain with Jack Warner to guide routine shows in exchange for dream project Lafayette Escadrille, the latter recut and ruined by WB so as to neutralize a downer ending Wellman preferred. The routine assignment said to have barely engaged him was Darby’s Rangers. Warners has released that on an Archive DVD, at last in widescreen and looking very nice. Based on real-life wartime exploits, Darby's is less hard-hitting combat than opportunity for WB to audition television players on a larger canvas. A few of said youngsters click. Most evaporate. It was actually a smart idea to spin low-paid tube faces into longer forms. Jim Garner in a modestly budgeted feature drew teens that missed him over Maverick’s summer hiatus, and what 77 Sunset Strip fan could resist "Kookie" Byrnes on local theatre screens? Darby’s Rangers wasn’t cheap (negative cost: $1.6 million) and did return a half-million profit. We forget for a half-century’s distance how adroitly such pictures were sold and considerable interest home viewers had in seeing them. Warners salted ABC with spots for full-length butterflies emerged from series cocoons, and there were plenty once Darby's paid out. Viewers cared more then about Fort Dobbs, Up Periscope, and Yellowstone Kelly than do now, yet no product from the era better represents successful fusion of free and paying audiences. WB was first to draw patrons to ticket windows with personalities off television. We look at bonafide classic Rio Bravo today for reasons very different from those that separated 1959 customers from their coin. They cared barely a whit for Howard Hawks’ possessory credit, but Walter (Grandpa McCoy) Brennan, John (Lawman) Russell, Ward (Major Adams), and Ricky Nelson were something else again. For all our latter-day Rio Bravo analysis, we can never know what excitement a cast like that generated for first-runners, and how much television contributed to their enjoyment of Rio Bravo, Darby’s Rangers, and others that supped from video reservoirs.

Darby’s Rangers began as something more ambitious. Charlton Heston had agreed to star for a percentage of the gross. He wrote at the time of excitement over that deal, which for him amounted to membership in a very exclusive club. Jack Warner not unexpectedly reneged on the sharing and Heston withdrew, his lawsuit to follow. James Garner was then bumped to the lead. It’s likely the project was downgraded for lowered expectation now that untried-in-features talent was aboard. Most of Darby's was shot indoors, possibly reflecting Wellman’s age (well-worn early 60’s) and fatigue, plus Warner economizing. The director’s body was an arthritic roadmap of injuries sustained in daring youth as a WWI pilot, that service having propelled his since career as ruggedest of helmsmen. Edd Byrnes wrote in "Kookie" No More (engaging memoir) of Wellman rants and his discharging firearms on the set to discourage producer visits. Interesting how this sort of old Hollywood craziness was still tolerated on efficiency driven 1958 stages. Maybe Bill got a pass because studio veterans felt a little sorry for him, seeing aspects of their own uncertain futures in a noted director burning out. Wellman’s indifference to Darby’s Rangers seems odd for previous excellence handling similar The Story Of G.I. Joe and Battleground. Artificiality of his combatants firing on studio floors dressed as outdoor terrain had peculiar appeal, for Wellman gets effects he wants from such controlled environments (low-hanging fog almost like a horror set) that for me at least, convey more atmosphere than if Darby's had gone all-location.

I suspect Warners dictated Battle Cry as guiding template for Darby's Rangers with less emphasis on war than sex, befitting crowd excitement over Here to Eternity bed-hopping by then standard issue in WWII subjects. Raoul Walsh’s 1955 brawler had seen five and a half million profit, reason enough to sell Darby’s Rangers along Battle Cry lines (note ad similarities here). WB wasn’t alone for shifting prominence from battlefield to boudoir. Robert Mitchum would spend less time fighter piloting than seducing officer’s wives in 1958's The Hunters for 20th Fox, while same year The Young Lions dealt far more with love action off front lines than combat thereon. Code restrictions being somewhat relaxed, Warners put uniforms on carnal Darby’s youth as lure for randy audience teens, with starlet discoveries sporting exotic names marquees barely got right. For these warriors, dodging Germans would be incidental to sampling French/Italian pastries that never said No. Wellman surely found all this insultingly childish, especially as he’d known real war and realized Darby's was prurient fantasy, but 50’s soldiering minus sex was nowheres-ville from a marketing standpoint. Vibrant youth idols weren’t to be wasted going stag into battle. Judging by sparse enemy presence in Darby’s Rangers, 1958 kids might have overlooked just who we were fighting, as there’s nary a close glimpse of adversaries in the field, let alone ones planning counter-offensive. Darby’s Rangers ended up being a war movie for audiences that didn’t much want to be bothered about whys and wherefores of war.