Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

I love that this movie opens with a frame in which Elsa Lanchester, who will eventually appear as the eponymous bride, plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It's delightful. Also, this movie is better than the original. It has some lovely moments – especially the long sequence with the blind man in the hut who teaches the monster to speak. The end, too, is quite moving. As for the "bride" herself, the poster pretends as if she is going to be somehow scary. She is not.

Gold Diggers of 1935

Now obviously Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935 is a musical, but when Dick Powell's first song arrived at the twenty-five minute mark, I was genuinely surprised. Powell has a couple of very good songs in this musical, and "The Lullaby of Broadway" (not his song) is really excellent. This movie is standard nonsensical 1930s fare, but it's funny, and the songs are good. If I'm honest, I found the Berkeley dance numbers a little lacking in this movie, but Alice Brady is an utter delight and is able to showcase her considerable comic abilities here.

I watched this on HBOmax. It's leaving the channel at the end of the month.

Also, I keep wondering if Busby Berkeley's name is pronounced the same as Berkeley Square in London or if it's the same as the University of California at Berkeley. I really don't know the answer to this.

Hands across the Table

Another Mitchell Leisen gem. Perhaps it's because I've just seen a terrible 1935 "romantic comedy" by George Cukor, but Hands across the Table is completely delightful, very funny, and totally charming. I enjoyed every moment of this, and Carole Lombard is just perfection. I was in love with her and Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy by the end of this one.

I want to say, too, that Mitchell Leisen was and remains terribly underappreciated. I am especially fond of his moral sense of things. He has an approach that I find very appealing and totally at odds with what I'm used to seeing under the PCA.

Oh one more thing: I don't really think this is a "screwball" comedy, as every description seems to say. I know Carole Lombard was known for screwball, but this is a true romantic comedy – good jokes, real feelings, smart thinking, clever script, witty repartee. It's much more about language than physical hijinks, and the kinds of mistaken identities we're used to seeing in the screwball genre don't really appear here. It's MacMurray who is the screwball comic here, not Lombard.

This was part of a series of Leisen films on the Criterion Channel, and I'm grateful to them for bringing so many of his wonderful films to my attention.

Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

Much has been said about Katharine Hepburn's triumphant return to stardom in 1940's The Philadelphia Story – her great bounce back from being "box office poison". This story has been repeated so frequently that one begins to believe that she never was box office poison in the first place and that everyone had been wrong.

Well Sylvia Scarlett is one of the reasons Hepburn was given that moniker, and I'm here to tell you, she earned it. This movie is absolutely ridiculous; it jumps from character to character without any focus; and it stars an absurd-looking Katharine Hepburn as a boy called Sylvester who couldn't have fooled a ten-year-old child, much less a world-wise hustler and a Russian socialite.

Why Miss Sylvia Scarlett is dressed like a boy in the first place is completely unclear, and let me just say that it doesn't matter a bit, and it is totally unnecessary.

I watched Sylvia Scarlett as part of a series of early queer films that was playing on the Criterion Channel. Tales of this film's queerness have been wildly exaggerated. Hepburn does kiss a woman – or rather, the woman kisses her – a couple of times, but this is a film deeply invested in the character's "correct" gender performance, to which she duly returns by act three.

I did like Cary Grant in this, I must confess, and though his accent is abysmal, he is charming and his character has real depth.

But this movie is terrible.

$1000 a Minute (1935)

$1000 a Minute, a film directed by Aubrey Scotto (who?) is awful. It's 70 minutes long and not one of those minutes has a joke that lands, even though it's filled with situations that are supposed to be funny. Roger Pryor and Leila Hyams are both attractive folks, and I pity them for having to do $1000 a Minute. This is awful. God, even the premise makes no damn sense. The main guy in this movie doesn't even have to spend $1,000 a minute. He has to spend $720,000 in twelve hours, which, if you ask me, seems considerably easier. The stakes here are pretty fuckin' low.

The Big Broadcast of 1936 (except that it came out in 1935)

Not to be confused with The Broadway Melody of 1936, which was also released in 1935, The Big Broadcast of 1936 is really asinine but surprisingly turns out to be quite funny. There are a lot of great bits in it, and the Nicholas Brothers, who are very young in 1935 and don't make the poster, are in it a lot. The film is decidedly harmed by the presence of Amos 'n Andy doing a completely unfunny blackface bit (it is so weird to me that white audiences thought nothing of watching African American performers sing numbers right before watching white performers in blackface do other numbers). But Ethel Merman sings "The Animal in Me", Norman Taurog directs the whole thing quite ably, and Gracie Allen is a delight.

David Copperfield (1935)

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger has a great cast, especially Freddie Bartholomew as young David. Edna May Oliver is her perfect self, as well.

But... well... this movie is a respectful series of events more than it is a meaningful adaptation of anything interesting. It has that standard saccharine 1930s Hollywood sensibility about it. I didn't hate it, of course, but this movie isn't serious about its Dickens except for a few sequences early on. Instead it's jokey and rather silly.

Also... that wife of David's. Woof. I had forgotten how awful she is. It really makes one question one's love for Copperfield in the first place. Like, bro, what are you doing chasing after this ninny?

I watched this because I thought I read that there would be a new Copperfield adaptation out in theatres this year. I am not sure if that is still true or not. I might have made it up.

All the King's Horses (1935)

This could have been really fun, and I think it was probably an amusing script, but All the King;s Horses is very oddly directed. Carl Brisson and Mary Ellis are both in excellent voice, but Edward Everett Horton is given nothing to do - and he doesn't even interact onscreen with Eugene Pallette. Clearly the director didn't have good musical comedy as a priority. As for the title of this film, I have no idea why it is called this. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again, right? There are no horses in this film. Is something not able to be put back together? I don't get it.

The Scoundrel (1935)

The Scoundrel is an old movie, so I suppose it deserves a little mercy, but I'm not feeling very forgiving of this Ben Hecht–Charled MacArthur film. The thing is, The Scoundrel just doesn't work. Noel Coward, who should be perfectly right for this part, doesn't make the role zip the way it ought to. The script clearly sparkles, but Coward's delivery is all misery all the time. One can't understand why anyone would ever be charmed by him, and the whole point is that this scoundrel is supposed to be charming!

And then there is the premise, which is promising but turns out to be moralistic and strange. A scoundrel, cad, what have you, is a jerk to a woman who loves him, is almost killed, but is saved by a god and required to return to earth to find someone who will shed tears for him? 

 So it's Der Fliegende Holländer set in 1930s New York, but The Scoundrel takes a moral tone that can't help but ring hollow. Furthermore, the whole thing would have been more enjoyable if the scoundrel's actual bad behavior contained any fun. Unfortunately even the scoundrel's scandals are joyless in this movie.

Escape Me Never (1935)

Escape Me Never is not at all what I expected, although I suppose the title ought to have tipped me off that I was watching a melodrama and not a comedy. But Paul Czinner directed the first act of this like a comedy, and so I was lulled into believing this would be a light, fun film. It turns out to be one about co-dependence and, incidentally, much more interesting than I thought. Elisabeth Bergner, who made a sensation with this film, deserved every accolade she got.

The Dark Angel

The Dark Angel was sentimental but I found it rather touching. I love Fredric March so much. I know he was a huge movie star and that I probably should have admitted his long ago, but he's just so wonderful. I don't know why I was so resistant.

Broadway Melody II

Usually these kinds of revues are fairly boring, but not Broadway Melody of 1936. The plot is clever, the performances are solid, the costumes are queerly interesting, and Eleanor Powell's tap dancing is spectacular. I loved it.

The Queen of Tap

Private Worlds

Private Worlds is absurd. This was just, like, a regular old love story, but it's gussied up as some sort of women-can-be-doctors-too, faux-feminist bit of nonsense. Joel McRea is suitably cute, Charles Boyer is smoldering and intense as usual, and Colbert makes sense in the part. But the film is no good.

Private Worlds is based on a novel by Phyllis Bottome (what is this name?!), who wrote the screenplay with Lynn Starling and Gregory La Cava (who directed), but if the novel is at all feminist, that has been bleached from this film adaptation.

If you're going to end your "feminist" film by having your female protagonist decide that nothing matters if you really have found love? Keep it to yourself.

American Fascism and the Mid-1930s

So I watched this Howard Hawks movie called Barbary Coast this morning. It is from 1935 and starred the great Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins was a big star by 1935 and was nominated as Best Actress in that year for a different film, an adaptation of Thackeray's Vanity Fair called Becky Sharp.

In any case, Barbary Coast is about a young woman who comes to San Francisco during the gold rush and finds her fiancé murdered when she gets off of the boat. But because the only reason she's come to California is for gold, she very quickly hooks herself up with her fiancé's murderer, the man who stole her man's gold in the first place. This evil gangster is Edward G. Robinson, of course, and he swaggers around town taking lives and insulting women and doing his best to make everyone simultaneously uncomfortable and obedient. (He is also earringed, pomaded, and given an Italian surname so that we clearly read him as a foreigner.)

Miriam Hopkins accidentally falls in love with a naive forty-niner played by Joel McCrea who quotes Shelley to her and talks about riding ponies in Grammercy Park.

Robinson is angry, of course, and tries to have him killed, but by this time the town has rebelled. Furious with the giant thumb under which the townsfolk have been living, they lynch one of Robinson's henchmen (Brian Donlevy) and then come after Robinson himself, rifles cocked at the ready. I am sure you can guess who wins out in the end. This is old-school melodrama, and everything works out as you'd expect.

This being Howard Hawks, this is very well made old-school melodrama, and the photography in particular is gorgeous. But what has sort of stuck in craw after having seen Barbary Coast is this group of townsfolk who wind up killing Donlevy (who is, after all, a murderer). They call themselves vigilantes, and a little note on this word will, perhaps, make sense of my discomfort. Vigilante comes from the Spanish, which makes perfect sense for a movie set in the 1840s in California, but the real rise in the use of this word in Anglophone literature happens at precisely the time when Barbary Coast is released – in 1935. Run your cursor over the graph below and you'll see what I mean.



It was the lawlessness with which law and order was restored to San Francisco in the film that bothered me so much. The men with the rifles were doing the right thing, of course. They were getting revenge for their murdered friends, and they were punishing a man who was hubristically killing anyone he pleased, and they were putting power back in the hands of the people, wresting it from a lawless, greedy gangster who had only his own interests at heart. But... if the film's title is supposed to be a reference to lawless barbarianism and the rule of the gun, I don't think this group of vigilantes restores law and order in any appreciable way. Rather, they simply underline the rule of the gun and maintain the lawlessness of the land, merely transferring the power of the gun to the "good guys" and wresting that power from the "gangster".

Ms. Hopkins Making the Most of It

What troubled me was that Barbary Coast seemed designed to incite this kind of violence, to ask USAmericans to take justice into their own hands. After all, if the law won't do it, who will? Why, we vigilantes, that's who! This wouldn't be so scary if this weren't 1935, a year not so far removed from the 1931-1932 trials of the Scottsboro defendants. 1935 – a year in which 2 white men and 18 black men were lynched (the last double-digit year for lynchings in the U.S.) and a year in which anticommunism had become rampant, as the the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities met in the House of Representatives under the leadership of John William McCormack and Samuel Dickstein. This decade would see a few men in the U.S. government all but completely shut down the progressive movement that comprised the Old Left.

Robinson Looks Up at the Lynched Donlevy

These vigilantes aren't a lynch-mob; far from it. They're a group of men who have a legitimate grievance, who feel slighted by the men in charge, who feel marginalized by a ruling class who are telling them what to do and stealing their money. And so they get a bunch of guns and they go kill a man. They do this dispassionately and deliberately, and they do it without any ethical quandary. Barbary Coast, too, attaches no ethical dilemma to the lynching of Donlevy. It is simply justice.

I would like to return briefly to the title. Barbary Coast is not a phrase historically used to describe California or San Francisco. The phrase was generally used in reference to the Amazighen or Berber people from the north coast of Africa – modern Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. (The Romans used the term barbar to describe foreigners, whose language all sounded like "bar-bar" to them.) And if Barbary Coast's lynching on the west coast of North America in the 1840s seems far removed from ancient North Africa, perhaps the unmentioned but – it seems to me – clearly disavowed possibility of lynching in the African Diaspora of the American South in the 1930s allows for the title's evocation of Africa to make a bit more sense. In a land of barbarians (Barbary was best known for its pirates and its slave-traders), in a land where the government cannot be counted on to mete out justice, red-blooded Americans (Barbary Coast seemed to me to say) need to take the law into their own hands: the precise opposite, in other words, of law and order.