Twilight On The Praries: I sat through Aces Wild thinking Harry Carey was old as dirt by 1936, forever in westerns, a pre-dater to John Ford and seemingly everyone who'd saddled up on screen ... then come to find he was my age when AW got done on customary ten-day (if that) B schedule. Does passage of time weigh lighter for current generations? Carey struggled up, built a ranch on silent stardom, then saw it flooded. Constructed again using talkie funds, this time the place burns to the ground. Maybe he kept at westerns against probability of life's next disaster, final of which I'd long understood to be a black widow spider's bite that killed him. Turns out that's a dad-blasted myth, but who started it? Harry Carey cowboy'ed before Bill Hart and possibly had a longest western run of all, his string taut from Griffith and Biograph to Howard Hawks and Red River (stills here are from silent-era Careys). HC set/crews gathered during 1910's resemble gold-rushers from a century before. His gestures were famously copied by John Wayne, who'd gone to see Carey's alter-ego, Cheyenne Harry, as a boy. John Ford helmed a bucket of these starting out. Was the by-30's famed director aware of his friend still pulling Cheyenne duty for humble Commodore Pictures Corp? Aces Wild is Carey/Cheyenne past exertion of silent days. A 30's public mightn't have been so patient with cowboys this far along had not Dad told them Harry was real stuff. I'd in fact bet middle-agers brought offspring to Aces Wild for recapture of youth-going flicker magic. Did toiling-at-B's Duke Wayne consult HC's twilight rides for backward glance and maybe further pointers toward his own emerging persona? By the mid-thirties, just showing up was enough for Carey, accumulated stature did the rest. Almost never does HC skin his sidearm here ... that's left for less cool heads. He's even bested in fights with younger opponents. It's old man's wisdom and judgment that wins Aces Wild's hand. Harry might have made an even better role model in maturity for reasoning ways out of trouble, though admittedly that makes for leisurely pull over 63 minutes seemingly longer. Better-backed cowboys chased along desert and rock pleasing to look at. Ones like Aces Wild on short tether made do with flat roads and brush, cameras distant or skewed to avoid tire tracks and power poles. These I'd call Scrubby Westerns. Sometimes a plane will be overheard, or a motorized something-or-other headed unexpectedly for the location. Carey's Cheyenne Harry is here settling a score gone way back. You wonder if maybe Aces Wild was a sequel to one Ford directed long before, with Carey putting late-date coda to it. Being past romantic eligibility, HC volunteers as rancher daughter's protector and avenger of her father's death. Aces Wild is about getting even for old wrongs, believable when it's Carey and varmints he opposes look as saddle-sore. Republic did a service putting youth on horseback and stunt guys who'd speed things up. Much as I sympathize with valedictory turns like Harry's, it's clear his kind of western wasn't going to renew the brand for changing audiences.

Those Big Parades Of Comedy --- Part One

One advantage most GB readers had growing up was ancient comic faces being familiar thanks to largely black-and-white television. We may not have known Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan by name, but those pans bridged many an hour toward Deputy Dawg/ Mighty Mice-filled Saturday mornings. There was also relic clowning at YMCA day camps, birthday parties, and as “treats” at school. You could have spooled our galaxy in 16mm ribbon for what was trucked to places youngsters gathered. A friend told me in 1968 of seeing Laurel and Hardy during classroom hours at a county school he attended. Which one?, I asked. Oh, something where Stan marched in a trench and ate a mountain of canned beans. Blockheads running at school? Enroll me now! I was ready to transfer despite ten miles' commute. But this sort of thing wasn’t uncommon. A teacher not given to lesson planning invited me to run Blackhawk 8mm for our Democracy In Action class during junior year. I wound up twice unspooling my whole collection as remaining semester yielded to Stan/Oliver, Chaplin, Keaton, et al. Some might call that misuse of education facility, but how’s it different from teachers now putting DVD’s on a loop to anesthetize bored or troublesome students? ... only today they’re doing it with stuff not half so engaging.

Derby hats seemed not so eccentric to a past TV generation, even if few of our fathers wore them by then. Neither did ladies sport hair like Miss Crabtree, and certainly there weren’t open roadsters and Model T’s driven through my neighborhood. It was alternate reality via syndication, one that by weight of its ubiquity became nearly as comfortable as our own. A weekday morning show Channel 8 called Limbo’s Cartoon Circus was host to ninety-minute blends of Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and Our Gang, fact these went way back precisely what appealed most. When did wholesale rejection of old stuff take hold of us? (I mean them) Was it color’s final and absolute conquest of airwaves that hobbled distant era clowns? A last glorious stand was had in the seventies. Even as network affiliated stations dumped vintage for recent stock, there was independent UHF supplying berths for comedy we liked. Perhaps cable and satellite are to blame for what happened since. Too much choice, and who’s going to pause remotes on black-and-white? It must have been someone else’s lifetime that enabled dining at Shakey’s Pizza while double-duty cooks threaded Charlie Chaplin on a Bell and Howell. There’ll be no more such encounter (or visits to Shakey’s, for that matter), and any pizza I enjoy with Chaplin accompaniment will be mine alone but for a kindred spirit here or there who might remember.

I’m intrigued by efforts at silent movie revival back when that era was one from which Hollywood most wanted to distance itself. What 40’s-50’s presentations lacked was affection for their content. Silents, and by extension those who worked in them, became objects mostly shunned by industry said to have progressed a long way since. Warners celebrated twenty years of sound in 1946 with two-reelers clarifying viewpoint embraced by seemingly all. Out with what's old, and bring on the new. The ad above represents a Raleigh, NC theatre’s Journey Into The Romance and Gayety of Yesteryear. Such was novelty booking in 1945, a fun night out for the curious, and nostalgia perhaps for Grandpa, but in no way entertainment to stand on own merits. Anything so far back needed juicing up. Sight comedy got verbal overlay at expense of comics sped to frenzy in pursuit of laughs. Poor Larry Semon, long dead by the mid-forties when Warners cobbled shorts off his backlog, ran barely ahead of wiseacre narration putting unneeded (and sarcasm laced) exclamation on routines chiseled to bare-bone. So many great comedies meanwhile rotted in vaults. By time critic James Agee recognized gagging’s "Greatest Era" for LIFE magazine in 1948, much was past retrieval. Rich enough Chaplin and Harold Lloyd could afford protecting assets they owned from outset, distributing same at leisure. City Lights was back in 1950 to tune of $507K in domestic rentals, though Chaplin’s work was tabbed exception to prevailing rule that silent features were commercially moribund. Who would have spent to preserve Buster Keaton or Harry Langdon, one (perceived as) washed up and the other departed, their work spread among disparate owners? Deliverance for these and others came by way of archiving personalities Robert Youngson and Raymond Rohaeur, who would themselves achieve fame (or infamy) among a generation discovering comedy greats of the past.

Robert Youngson was heroic for rescuing slapstick out of rusting cans and would have made an ideal honored guest for Cinecon/Cinefest/Cinevent. He made Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, and others object of revival, but died (in 1974) just short of being himself focal point of buff adoration. Imagine questions we’d pose to a visionary whose work shaped lifelong enthusiasm for silent comedy. Was Youngson as jolly in person as photos suggest? Wish I’d met him to find out. Remember when RY frolics were all over television and theatre screens? I’d see When Comedy Was King at home one day, then head Liberty-ways for The Further Perils Of Laurel and Hardy a Saturday following. Narration he wrote made these schools for fun. Say whatever about cutting routines to quick or overindulging commentary, he put a mass audience before artists near-forgotten, rescued endangered negatives, and made many commercial again. Imagine being bug on a wall when Youngson negotiated with rights-rustler Raymond Rohauer for use of Seven Chances in 1970’s Four Clowns. There seemed nothing jolly about hellspawn Rohauer. History has tabbed him least likeable of those who dug for film before same was wider spread, even as records speak to his saving much (nearly all?) of Buster Keaton’s inventory and major segments of Harry Langdon (the First National features), plus others past calculation. Someone should write a book about Rohauer (Scott MacGillivray did a fine chapter on Youngson in Laurel and Hardy: From the Forties Forward), but I’d not envy the commission, for bio-Rohauer might be not unlike lives of Mussolini, Vlad The Impaler, or villains of similar stripe. Youngson and Rohauer were (maybe only) two silent-era rescuers that made something like commercial go of putting lost art before a new audience even as they went about it in starkly opposing ways, both deserving forevermore credit whatever the means for having done it.

Through Mann and Metro's Dark Devil's Doorway

Near as I can figure, Anthony Mann remained with Metro by dent of loans from Eagle-Lion to do Border Incident and Side Street. After these, it appears a switch was made to install him full-time at MGM, along with cinematographer John Alton (a buy-out of their E-L contracts?). Cost-cutting remained Metro policy heading into 1949. Recently installed production chief Dore Schary measured projects for thrift and whatever prep work could avoid time/resource waste once cameras began turning. Devil's Doorway was in works since before Mann's arrival. February 1949 even saw announcement of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn for leads. Part of Schary's clean-up was to keep talent busy. That put Mann to Robert Taylor's Ambush quick on heels of Side Street ... but jobs might shift from one day to next on this busier-than-ever lot, thus scratch Tracy/Hepburn, take Mann off Ambush, and proceed with Devil's Doorway for Fall '49 Durango shooting and on-lot completion at pared-to $1.3 million negative cost, way less than expense previously common to MGM star vehicles.

Devil's Doorway plays tougher than typical even of dark approached westerns after the war. Interiors are inky black, location days shot mostly for night, with a grim finish that surely didn't clear short of arguments among MGM sales folk who'd rather have substituted a happy or at least hopeful ending. Minus marquee insurance of Robert Taylor, this might have been third strike (and out?) for recent-to-the-lot Mann. Having Devil's Doorway at last on well-rendered DVD makes it for us a less hard-luck sit, grim proceedings eased by visual wealth John Alton's camera shares. DD's being pro-Indian lends PC cred as well, clearing way for modern scribes to "discover" its progressive stance. Maybe Dore Schary's in for image rehab in the bargain, what with Warner release of social-themed pics he green-lighted during exec tenure at MGM. Writers under thumb of prior regime took DS for his word that even genre yarns were open to liberal voicing, thus Border Incident, Stars In My Crown, Devil's Doorway, in addition to Intruder In The Dust, which plainer spelled out injustice they'd wish to expose. Dore Schary was frank in promising that MGM product will continue to have messages. We have to stop thinking in terms of old-fashioned and shopworn definitions of entertainment, said he to Metro's sales force as reported by Variety, we have to make our pictures modern and clear in their intent. We must have them reflect the world we live in. Even when we do period films, those films must be seen in terms of the modern observer.

Trades weren't necessarily receptive to Schary's not-so-hidden agenda. Picture about whites as a minority race is coming out, wrote Variety's Alta Durant, It's Metro's Devil's Doorway, in which Bob Taylor plays a heap big Injun. This kind of snark got traction as Schary's pet projects increasingly went down to boxoffice defeat. Better appreciated was Anthony Mann's choice of action over messaging, the first which he slammed over forcefully enough to tamp down preachments. A barroom hand-to-hand with bronzed Taylor beating tar out of town bullies was not unlike saloon combat Robert Mitchum engaged in RKO's then-recent Blood On The Moon. Back from real-warring stars found new credibility via directors like Mann done with pulling punches as in softer westerns of yore. Heap bigger problem for Metro sales was Too Many Cactus Films, as targeted by Variety just as Devil's Doorway prepped for release. The market was flooded with A westerns, four to seven a month looming for 1950's summer and into fall. Opening dates were juggled to avoid clash of too similar properties. Devil's Doorway had been completed and ready since year's beginning, but delayed now thanks to 20th Fox's Broken Arrow, which plowed much same ground and was in Technicolor besides.

Devil's Doorway started off in October with Midwest play and brought, said Variety, hefty totals. November New York opening at Loew's flagship, the Capital, was only fairly okay with $46K the first week, despite Tommy Dorsey and His Band, Jackie Gleason, Lita Baron, and Rory Calhoun on stage. The campaign needed a goose and got it thanks to newly prepared ads emphasizing a taboo love theme barely addressed in the film itself. What Power Kept These Two Apart? asked showmen indifferent to misleading nature of the blurb. Bare-chested Robert Taylor faces low-cut attired Paula Raymond, neither on pic view as anything such. White Girl ... and Indian! was at least something fresh to exploit, never mind Devil's Doorway failure to deliver on its promise. Standardized selling was otherwise in evidence. A suggested lobby display invited customers to enter a lobby-built "Devil's Doorway" (blindfolded!) with a no-doubt drafted from usher ranks Indian chief wearing "full war regalia" concealed within. So much for Dore Schary's enlightened depiction of Native Americans! What maybe helped was MGM's entry to TV-spot promotion, these 15-30-60 second bites a wave of future tub-thumping that began for Loews in late summer 1950 with Devil's Doorway, King Solomon's Mines, Right Cross, and A Life Of Her Own. Despite rival Broken Arrow's better rentals, $5.5 million worldwide to $2.3 for Devil's Doorway, the latter got over humps for being economically made and coming back with $188K profit. Bonus to this would be recognition of Doorway as preferred of the two by nowaday historians.