Once again the Picture Show opened with a serial, with its once-weekly episodes (twelve of them this time) parceled out among the four days of the convention. So it was that Day 1 opened with Episodes 1-3 of Spy Smasher (1942). Based on a caped hero introduced in the February 1940 issue of Whiz Comics, a sort of Batman-like vigilante battling sinister spies and saboteurs on American soil, the serial went into production at Republic Pictures on December 22, 1941, two weeks after America’s entry into World War II. This meant that unlike 1941’s King of the Texas Rangers (screened at the last Cinevent in October 2021), Republic didn’t have to pussyfoot around the bad guys, having villains speaking in pronounced Teutonic accents while coyly declining to state exactly which country they’re working for. Nope, here the spies being smashed are Germans, no doubt about it, led by a U-boat commander known only as The Mask (Hans Schumm), who dons and doffs his mask apparently at random. Episode 1 opens with Spy Smasher (aka Alan Armstrong, played by square-jawed Kane Richmond) being rescued from a firing squad in Nazi-occupied France and smuggled back to the States to try to thwart The Mask’s scheme to flood the American economy with counterfeit money. Oddly, while the comic-book Spy Smasher had a fiancée, Eve Corby, whose father Admiral Corby is high up in U.S. Navy Intelligence, the serial gives Alan Armstrong a twin brother Jack (also Kane Richmond) who is the one engaged to Eve. This change suggests that Spy Smasher having an identical twin will figure in the plot later on (spoiler alert: It does). Meanwhile, it leads to confusion early in Episode 1 when the Corbys mistake Alan for Jack, with Eve (a fetching Marguerite Chapman) running to his arms and planting a nice big kiss on his astonished lips. Understandably, he decides not to disabuse her of her error — although five minutes later the Admiral (Sam Flint) is calling him “Spy Smasher”, apparently forgetting that he ever mistook him for Jack.

Such lapses are frequent in Spy Smasher, but only the churlish will quibble when the thrills and suspenseful cliffhangers come this fast and frequently. William Witney (directing his first serial alone after co-directing 16 with John English and two with Alan James), after a somewhat leisurely set-up in Episode 1, keeps the actions barreling along like one of the cars, trucks, motorcycles and speedboats that the heroes and villains regularly resort to. Much of the action is staged with the back projections that were common at the time, but a surprising number of the stunts are the real McCoy, and excellently staged and executed (particular kudos here to David Sharpe, doubling Kane Richmond).

The first feature of the weekend was Moon Over Her Shoulder (1941), though at a modest 68 minutes it just qualified. Lynn Bari plays a woman whose husband (the ever-bland John Sutton) is a celebrity marriage counselor who, in his office, on his radio program, and in his bestselling book, advises couples — especially women — on how to keep their marriages alive and engaging. Meanwhile, this clueless dolt, in a textbook case of physician-heal-thyself, fails to notice that his own wife is bored out of her skull. He suggests that she find herself a hobby — painting, for example, which she dabbled in before they were married. Unbeknownst to him, what she finds is Dan Dailey (still sporting a “Jr.” in his billing), a sport-fishing yachtsman who shanghais her aboard his boat, thinking she’s despondent and he’s saving her from suicide. His romantic but chaste attentions stroke her lonely ego until even blind hubby sees the improvement in her (and in her paintings) but is still too blind to suspect the reason. As everyone in the audience can see coming, things get out of hand when the skipper falls for her and proposes. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther dissed Moon Over Her Shoulder as a “flimsy bit of nothing”, but Variety’s “Char” was kinder, commending a “workmanlike” script and the “steady direction of Alfred Werker”. This hit closer to the truth, and “Char” displayed a gift for prophecy by saying Dan Dailey did “a swell job and appears to be destined for further importance.” Well, when you’re right you’re right.

Next was Lady and Gent (1932), a Paramount Pre-Code with George Bancroft, Wynne Gibson and, five steps down the cast list, a fledgling John Wayne. Here I insert the notes I wrote for the Picture Show program booklet:

The 1932 Pre-Code Lady and Gent caught George Bancroft midway in his transition from burly leading man to stalwart character support. Behind him were his days starring for Josef von Sternberg in Underworld (1927), Docks of New York (1928) and Thunderbolt (1929), snagging an Oscar nomination for the latter. Still ahead lay such roles as Jean Arthur’s editor in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the father to Mickey Rooney’s Young Tom Edison (1940) and — arguably his best performance of the sound era — Marshal Curley Wilcox in Stagecoach (1939).

If Stagecoach was Bancroft’s best performance, though, his work in Lady and Gent ran it a good second. He was still being billed above the title, even if it was in a Paramount B-picture. Here he plays “Slag” Bailey, a prizefighter not yet aware that he’s over the hill — though he gets that rude awakening early in the picture’s 86 minutes. When we first see him, he’s still cruising the speakeasies and womanizing enough to exasperate his girlfriend Puff Rogers (Wynne Gibson): “If dames was a dime a dozen and you were a billionaire, you’d be broke in one week.”

The high-flying Slag is brought down to earth — or more accurately, down to the canvas — when he’s knocked out by the young up-and-comer Buzz Kinney (John Wayne). The loss throws his manager Pin Streaver (James Gleason) into a financial panic, and a desperate attempted burglary gets Pin shot dead by a night watchman. Feeling responsible, especially after he learns the reason Pin needed the money, Slag tries to set things right, dragging the protesting Puff along with him. From there, as it covers the next 15 years, Lady and Gent becomes an illustration of the old saw about life being what happens while you’re making other plans.

Bancroft is matched in Lady and Gent by Wynne Gibson, who is a bit of a revelation here. Granted, Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt’s script gave Puff Rogers most of the best lines, but they also wrote a character that would test the resources of any actress: querulous, sharp-tongued, impatient, yet for all that, rather soft-boiled. As Slag says of her early on, “She’s a little screwy at times but she’s a good gal, and you can always depend on her to be in on the showdown,” — and it’s true, when the chips are down, Puff always manages (albeit grudgingly) to do the right thing. We meet her onstage at the speakeasy she bought with Slag’s winnings, warbling the Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow song “Everyone Knows It But You” (a tune that will return to Puff years later with a very different and rueful meaning). Gibson would go on to a steady career through 1956, hopping around the B-units of various studios (plus what passed for A-pictures at Republic), and later on television, without quite breaking into the top ranks of Hollywood players. Later in 1932 she would re-team with director Stephen Roberts for another career highlight in the Paramount omnibus If I Had a Million, playing a streetwalker who uses her windfall to check into a deluxe hotel for a good night’s sleep, for once having the bed all to herself.

In 1932, director Roberts had finally broken into features (Lady and Gent was his second) after an apprenticeship directing one- and two-reel shorts all over town, 97 since 1923. He would go on to such varied fare as the notorious The Story of Temple Drake (’33) with Miriam Hopkins, which would do as much as any one picture to provoke the crackdown that ended the Pre-Code Era; One Sunday Afternoon (also ’33) with Gary Cooper and Fay Wray, later remade as The Strawberry Blonde with Cagney and de Havilland; The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo (’34) with Ronald Colman (screened at Cinevent in 2017); and Star of Midnight (’35) with William Powell and Ginger Rogers. Alas, his early promise — he might have become another Raoul Walsh or William Wellman — was cut short by a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 40.

Also fated to meet an untimely end was writer Grover Jones. He and co-writer McNutt would hit their stride in 1935, adapting The Lives of a Bengal Lancer for director Henry Hathaway. Jones’s work with Hathaway at Paramount would eventually result in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (’36), Souls at Sea (’37) and The Shepherd of the Hills (’41). The latter was a posthumous release for Jones; an infection set in after kidney surgery and carried him off in September 1940 at the age of 46.  

Lady and Gent was well-received. Variety’s “Rush” called it “so well played that minor flaws…fade into insignificance beside the human pull of the narrative.” And at the New York Times, “L.N.” called the picture “a good one along — well, sentimentally tough lines.” And Jones and McNutt were Oscar-nominated for their original story (they lost to Frances Marion for The Champ).

Paramount recycled Jones and McNutt’s story seven years later in a nearly-shot-for-shot remake (right down to the inclusion of “Everyone Knows It But You”) called Unmarried (’39). Helen Twelvetrees, making her last picture, played Puff Rogers (renamed “Pat”); cowboy star Buck Jones was cast against type as the ham-and-egger Slag. Robert Armstrong and Larry “Buster” Crabbe took over for James Gleason and John Wayne, respectively, and 13-year-old Donald O’Connor took the role played by Billy Butts in the original. Who know? Maybe one day a print of that one will become available, and Columbus Moving Picture Show-goers will have a chance to compare the two.

The first silent picture of the weekend was East Side — West Side (1923), a title so utterly obscure that I couldn’t find a review in Variety or The New York Times, or even an authentic image online — all there was was this composite, superimposing stars Kenneth Harlan and Eileen Percy over a New York cityscape obviously from several decades after the year the picture was made. To be honest, calling them stars is a bit of an overstatement; Harlan and Percy were definite B-listers. Still, they were both good here. Percy, the erstwhile leading lady of Douglas Fairbanks before he swashbuckled into costume pictures (Wild and Woolly, Down to Earth, The Man from Painted Post and Reaching for the Moon, all from 1917), played Lory, a young woman from the East (i.e., “Poor”) Side of New York, living in a one-room flat with two roommates. One of them is a tubercular invalid (Maxine Elliott Hicks) who brings out her motherly side; the other (Lucille Hutton) disappears early in the action when she runs off to be kept by her stockbroker sugar daddy in a Central Park West apartment — exactly the sort of moral compromise Lory is determined to avoid. The desertion puts the remaining roomies into financial straits, so a kindly doctor (Charles Hill Mailes) arranges for Lory to do some typing for a well-to-do writer. This takes us to Duncan Van Norman (Harlan) of the West (“Rich”) Side. He’s a writer, supposedly, but he’s also a high-society dilettante and stuffed shirt who writes (in the doctor’s words) “a lot of high-sounding, unadulterated bunk.” Lory’s typing gig evolves into a full-time job as Duncan’s secretary, in which position she humanizes him and urges him to write “a thrillin’ story that somebody can understand”. The course of true love runs smooth — until snooty society tongues start wagging about Duncan and “that girl he calls his secretary” — prompting Duncan’s mother (Lucille Ward) to intervene. All ends well, of course. The action did seem a bit truncated, probably because East Side — West Side survives only in one of those five-reel Kodascope condensations that George Eastman House made for the home market. So we have what we have, and if we feel like important scenes are missing, it’s not necessarily because they weren’t there in the first place, and what remains is enjoyable and well-acted. Eileen Percy in particular is charming enough to make us want to revisit some of her pictures with Doug Fairbanks to see if she held her own better than we recall. Meanwhile, East Side — West Side, obscure as it may be, is available on YouTube, albeit in a somewhat shorter and considerably more battered version than what screened in Columbus. Curious Cinedrome readers can check it out here.

Also, I see on IMDb that Kenneth Harlan, who amassed some 200 credits (mostly in supporting roles) between 1917 and his last picture in 1943, died in Sacramento, Calif. in 1967, age 71. This puts me in mind of an actor acquaintance of mine here in Sacramento, Dan Harlan, who was born in 1935, when Kenneth would have been 40. I do imagine I can see some resemblance between the two; I wonder if Dan (who I believe is still with us) or one of our mutual acquaintances can confirm or deny any connection?

Last on the program before the dinner break was More Songs in the Dark, More Dangerous Rhythms, another of the Picture Show’s (and Cinevent’s before it) welcome compilations of musical clips curated and introduced by historian Richard Barrios. The title refers to two of Richard’s books, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter (both are among the indispensable books on movie history; if you don’t have them, get them). As always, Richard’s compilation was an embarrassment of riches (where does he find these clips? I don’t mean the numbers, I mean the actual strips of film.) A complete list of the hour-long program would be exhaustive (besides, I neglected to take adequate notes), so I’ll just mention a few favorites. A genuine oddity — and not really a “musical selection” — was a Vitaphone trailer for The Jazz Singer, with silent-screen heartthrob John Miljan (about to embark on a long, graceful decline into supporting roles and old-times’-sake cameos through 1957) stepping out from behind a heavy curtain to nervously regale the audience about the imminent arrival in their theater of Warner Bros.’ latest sensation. Curiously, Jazz Singer‘s main selling point, hearing Al Jolson sing, is not demonstrated; instead, Miljan natters on over newsreel footage of celebrities at the New York premiere, then introduces a couple of silent scenes from the movie. (You can see it here on YouTube, in a darker and higher-contrast print than the Picture Show screened.) The delightfully piquant Lillian Roth teased her way through “Come Up and See Me Sometime” from Take a Chance (1933), giving a foretaste of the complete picture, to be screened on Saturday night (more on that when I cover Day 3). Then there were the two clips pictured here. TOP: A scene from Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) in which the title character (Alice White) shoots a production number for the film-within-the-film. The song, “I’ve Got My Eye on You” by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green, is catchy, but what makes the scene great today is its glimpse at the nuts and bolts of shooting a musical at the dawn of sound — the three cameras in their soundproof booths shooting simultaneously, the fourth booth recording the sound on 16-inch discs, the off-camera orchestra. It’s practically a documentary, and the sort of thing Hollywood usually (at that time) didn’t like to publicize for fear of undermining the magic. (And it’s easy to see the need for the booths: Those clattering cameras sound like wringer washing machines.) This one can also be seen here on YouTube. BOTTOM: “People Have More Fun Than Anyone” by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts, featuring a spirited pas de trois by Rita Hayworth (singing dubbed by Anita Ellis), Marc Platt and Dorothy Hart, choreographed by Jack Cole. This elaborate number is also on YouTube here; what we saw in Columbus runs roughly between the three- and six-minute marks.)

After dinner came Malice in the Palace (1949), a Three Stooges short from the days after Shemp replaced Curly. (When I was a kid in the 1950s, Columbia was still producing theatrical shorts with the Stooges — Moe, Larry and Shemp — and I saw many of them first-run on my own hometown screen. Years later, when their earlier work began turning up on TV, I was nonplussed: “Where’s Shemp??? And who the heck is this Curly??!!??“) This one had the boys running a restaurant in some vaguely Arabic-looking desert emirate, then getting embroiled in a plot to steal a priceless jewel from the tomb of King Rootintootin. The short is a favorite among Stooge aficionados; myself, I took a pass in favor of spending more time in the Dealers’ Room.

Any true film buff knows that Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) would be a highlight of any weekend of movie-viewing, and so it was here. However, the time has come, as I mentioned in my previous post, for my vacation travels to take me away, before I can properly get into a discussion of Keaton’s last masterpiece — which, incidentally, was filmed barely six miles from where I sit typing this. More about that later. I’ll stop for now, and pick up where I’m leaving off as soon as I can. Please stand by, and thank you for your patience.

To be continued…

We’re undergoing some major home renovations here at Cinedrome, so my creation and development of new posts has been on a back burner for a while. But today is December 25, and I didn’t want to let the holiday pass unobserved. So here are a couple of reruns, one that has become traditional and another that was new last January, but which I’d like to remind readers about.

So…

First, I depart once again from my focus on Golden Age Hollywood to share my story “The Sensible Christmas Wish”, first published here in 2016. That first year’s introduction can be found by clicking here if you’re interested in knowing what I said then — or, if you’d rather, just click on the title and you’ll be taken directly to the story, which came to me from a wise and wonderful senior citizen I once knew. As ever, I hope it brings you some of the joy and magic of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Like everything else here at Cinedrome, “The Sensible Christmas Wish” is under copyright, and all rights are reserved.

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Next is my tribute — originally published last New Year’s Eve as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ‘Star'” — to one of the very best (and easily the shortest) of all classic Christmas movies. It was produced by Warner Bros. in 1945, in an era when Hollywood was turning out holiday classics almost every year, sometimes two or three at a time. It made a big splash at the time, then languished long in obscurity before returning to the limelight courtesy of Turner Classic Movies and Warner Home Video. Read on: 

As we all decompress from the Holiday Season, I want to pause and pay tribute to a particular Christmas movie, one of the least known and one of the best. It distills the spirit of Christmas as well as — sometimes better than — more familiar titles, worthy as they are. Without being preachy or even overtly religious, it presents that spirit in the form of a parable — the form, in fact, favored by Jesus himself in the Gospels. And it’s only 22 minutes long.

It’s called Star in the Night, released by Warner Bros. on October 13, 1945. It opens on a cold night (Christmas Eve, as we later learn) somewhere in the desert of the American Southwest — Arizona, perhaps, or Nevada or New Mexico. Three cowboys are ambling along on horseback. Their arms and saddles are laden with toys, Yuletide decorations and other “doodads” which, in a spasm of holiday cheer, they have bought from a general store in the town they left back a ways, though they haven’t the slightest idea what to do with them or whom they might give them to. 

Suddenly, off in the distance, they see a star, incredibly bright and unnaturally low to the horizon, blinking on and off at random intervals. “Never did see a star as big and bright as that,” says one of them. “Let’s mosey over and see what it’s doin’ there.”

The camera takes us there long before the cowboys have time to arrive. It turns out the star the cowboys see is no astronomical phenomenon; it’s an advertising sign, illuminated by 102 light bulbs. Recently purchased from a defunct movie theater (“Star Picture Palace”), it’s been newly installed over a roadside inn, the Star Auto Court. As a lone vagabond approaches from the road, the Star’s proprietor, Nick Catapoli (J. Carroll Naish) struggles to keep the star lit, hoping its brilliant light will catch the eye of highway travelers for miles around.

The nameless vagabond (Donald Woods) is a hitchhiker weary of trying to thumb a ride in the cold dead of night and hoping the Christmas Spirit will move Nick to let him come in from the cold for a while, maybe even have a hot cup of coffee. But Nick is unmoved by the season. “This no flop joint,” he says in his pronounced Italian-American accent, “I got no business for the free lunch.” He claims — indeed, boasts — that he hates Christmas. All year, he says, people are stingy and mean, then at Christmas they smile, put on the false face. “Not Nick, I’m-a no phony.” For Nick, Christmas is a time of deceit and hypocrisy, not peace, love and brotherhood. The hitchhiker tries to coax Nick out of his cynicism: “Nick, you know better than that. Why, the good in people will be lighting the world a thousand years from now, Nick. Ten thousand years from now.”

Not that Nick doesn’t have his reasons for taking a dim view of humanity. His guests at the Star Auto Court, from what we can see, are a pretty querulous and ill-tempered lot. There’s Miss Roberts (Virginia Sale), driven to distraction by a caroling party in the cabin next to hers. The carolers, never seen, provide a melodic accompaniment to the night’s goings-on, but Miss Roberts hears only an annoying racket — “I’m getting up at five in the morning and I’ve got to get some sleep, you understand?” Adding to her short temper is the detritus of the caroling party — bottles, fast-food sacks, paper cups, etc. — which she hurls at Nick’s feet with an angry, “See how you like it!”

Meanwhile, inside the motel’s combination office and cafe, Nick’s wife Rosa (Rosina Galli) is confronted by another guest/resident, Mr. Dilson (Irving Bacon). His bone of contention is the shirts that just came back from the laundry where Nick and Rosa sent them. Brand-new five-dollar shirts, each of them, he barks, none of them properly cleaned and pressed, and one of them torn at the collar. Rosa promises him the shirts will be sent back and redone, but Mr. Dilson is unmollified. “Maybe if you did business with a better laundry — oh, you might not get as much commission, but you’d have more satisfied customers!”

Then two travelers (Dick Elliott, Claire Du Brey) arrive to check into the Star Auto Court’s last remaining cabin. They show signs of being just as persnickety and hard to please as Nick and Rosa’s other guests. “Better make sure about the hot water, dear,” the wife says; “remember how you couldn’t shave at that place we stopped at?” And, “These places are never warm; we’ll want some extra blankets.” Nick tries to reassure her, she insists, he takes umbrage: “Look, Mrs., if everybody’s like you I’m gonna need a million blankets.” Ever the peacemaker, Rosa steps in, offering the couple her own blankets, “just come back from the laundry”, and she leads them out to escort them to their cabin. “You see,” the woman sniffs to her husband, “you have to insist on what you want in a place like this.”

With each confrontation, Nick turns a jaded, I-told-you-so eye to the wandering hitchhiker. “That’s-a peace, brotherhood, love. Shame on you for bein’ such a fool!”

Things begin to change with the arrival of Jose Santos and his wife Maria (Anthony Caruso, Lynn Baggett), who pull up in a rattletrap old Model-A Ford that looks about to break down. For that matter, so does Maria, weary, distressed and on the verge of some medical emergency. She and Jose need shelter for the night — but alas, there is no room at the inn. Once again, though, Rosa offers a solution.

From that point, before Nick’s astonished eyes, everyone — Miss Roberts, Mr. Dilson, the traveler and his imperious wife — forgets their petty concerns and complaints to pitch in and help the young couple. Finally, with the arrival of the three cowboys and all those gifts they don’t know what to do with, this splendid little parable is complete.

Star in the Night began as a play by Robert Finch (1909-59) entitled The Desert Shall Rejoice (“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” — Isaiah 35:1), published on June 1, 1940 by Samuel French Inc. It’s listed on Amazon as a play in one act. In 2018 the 188-year-old Samuel French Inc. was acquired by Concord Music as part of its Concord Theatricals branch; their Web page lists The Desert Shall Rejoice as a “full-length play” with a royalty of $90 per performance, rather more than one would expect for most one-act plays. Neither Amazon nor Concord offers a perusal script of The Desert Shall Rejoice, so I am unable to resolve this apparent discrepancy.

There was an early television production of The Desert Shall Rejoice as half of a Kraft Theatre episode on Christmas Eve 1947; the episode does not appear to have survived, nor does any information about its cast or crew. What has survived is a half-hour radio adaptation broadcast as an episode of Hallmark Playhouse (a forerunner of TV’s Hallmark Hall of Fame) on December 16, 1948. The program was hosted by novelist James Hilton and starred John Hodiak as Nick. Unlike J. Carroll Naish, Hodiak’s worthy talents did not extend to an Italian accent, and he didn’t even try, opting instead for an angry middle-American snarl. There are other striking differences between this rather ham-handed Desert and Star in the Night, so many that it would be nice to know which version is closer to Robert Finch’s original play. The movie’s credits read “Original Story by Robert Finch/Screen Play by Saul Elkins”, suggesting that Elkins (a veteran writer and director of shorts and producer of B-features at Warner Bros.) may have considerably shaped and altered Finch’s “original story”. In any case, the finished product is a well-polished gem.

Star in the Night marked the directorial debut of Don Siegel, after a hectic six years at Warner Bros. doing montages (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, The Roaring ’20s, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc.) and second-unit direction, often uncredited (Sergeant York, Mission to Moscow, Northern Pursuit, To Have and Have Not). It was a busy apprenticeship, bristling with classics, and Siegel’s distinguished directorial career was off to an excellent start. In later years (he died in 1991), Siegel was known to dismiss Star in the Night as “overly sentimental” — understandable, perhaps, coming from a man whose later work included Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz, and the original versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Beguiled. But there is a difference between honest sentiment and sentimentality, and Star in the Night never slides from one to the other. It’s certainly no more sentimental than The Shootist (1976), one of Siegel’s (and star John Wayne’s) best late-career features. And right off the bat, Siegel gave us one of his most assured pieces of direction.

He had plenty of help. Besides the vaunted Warner Bros. production facilities, he had an ace cinematographer in Robert Burks (later an Oscar nominee for Hitchcock’s Rear Window and a winner for To Catch a Thief). Not to mention a cast of veteran familiar faces who, today, have a combined total of 2,217 movie and TV credits on the IMDb — nearly a quarter of them for the ubiquitous Irving Bacon alone (if you’ve seen any hundred movies from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Irving Bacon at least 35 times). But all those expert editors, art directors and actors also had the support of Siegel’s unerring eye for composition (which can be seen in these frame captures) and his correct-to-the-exact-millimeter instinct for camera movement (you’ll have to see the movie itself for that).

My late uncle remembered seeing Star in the Night as a 15-year-old and being deeply impressed. He wasn’t alone; at the Academy Awards Ceremony in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on March 7, 1946, Star‘s producer Gordon Hollingshead took home the Oscar for the best two-reel short subject of 1945. After that, Star in the Night simply dropped off the face of the earth and was as utterly forgotten as any film of the sound era has ever been. Myself, I had never heard of it before I stumbled across a 16mm print up for auction on eBay in 2008. The listing piqued my interest, and a follow-up check of the IMDb was an eye-opener: J. Carroll Naish?? Irving Bacon?? Dick Elliott?? Richard Erdman?? Don Siegel??? Academy Award?!? How do I not know about this??!??

I snagged that print, and it became a permanent part of the program at our annual Holiday Season screenings of The Polar Express (2004) for friends and family. One year, after I’d screened it eight or ten years running, as we broke for cookies and hot chocolate before the main feature, my brother gestured toward Star in the Night and said, “That never gets old.”

Indeed it doesn’t. It’s not only one of the best of all Christmas movies, it’s one of the best short subjects — period — ever to come out of Hollywood, in an era when even Poverty Row studios were turning out dozens of shorts (or serial chapters) a year. And fortunately (hooray!), it’s not nearly as unknown as it used to be, thanks to seasonal showings as a December “extra” on Turner Classic Movies. Thanks also to the fact that it’s a supplement on the DVD of Warners’ Christmas in Connecticut (also 1945). That Barbara Stanwyck/Dennis Morgan picture is an entertaining holiday romcom, but Star in the Night alone is worth the price of the disc. Do yourself a favor and pick it up; it’ll come in handy any time you want a quick 22-minute Christmas Spirit fix but don’t have time to watch a whole feature.

Happy Holidays!

The final day of Columbus Moving Picture Show 2023 opened, naturally enough, with the final four chapters of The Purple Monster Strikes. Our slow-on-the-uptake hero, slugging-and-shooting attorney Craig Foster (Dennis Moore) finally begins to catch on that something’s not right with “Dr. Layton” (who is in fact the Purple Monster, having murdered Dr. Layton and taken over his body). Back in Chapter 11 the Emperor of Mars sent a female underling to assist the Purple Monster by killing one of the secretaries at the “jet plane” factory and taking over her body. By the way, oddly enough, when the Purple Monster arrives on Earth, he tells his hired Earthling thug, “My name would mean nothing to you; you can call me the Purple Monster.” But the female sent to aid him is named Marcia before she takes over the body of Helen. Do only women on Mars have simple names? Or is “Marcia the Martian” an alias? If so, why didn’t the Purple Monster just call himself “Martin”, like Ray Walston on 1960s TV? Then again, Martin Strikes wouldn’t have been a very dramatic title. Well, anyhow, Marcia was a little sloppy while vacating Helen’s body, and the late Dr. Layton’s niece Sheila (Linda Stirling), feigning unconsciousness, observed her in the act. This enabled Foster finally to put two and two together and plant a camera in “Dr. Layton’s” office to see if he’s doing the same thing. But even before the film is developed, the Purple Monster makes his move, absconding with the prototype “jet plane” to be reverse-engineered back on Mars. Fortunately, Foster turns the “annihilator ray” on the escaping Purple Monster and blows him out of the sky (another nifty miniature by the Lydecker Brothers). And Chapter 15 ends with the unspoken hope that future extraterrestrial invaders will be no smarter than this one was. There would in fact be three more such invasions courtesy of Republic Pictures in the next seven years, all of them outsourcing groundwork of the invasion to local muscle: Flying Disc Man from Mars (1951), Radar Men from the Moon and Zombies of the Stratosphere (both ’52), all three featuring stock footage from Purple Monster and other Republic serials. Maybe we’ll see one or more of those at future Picture Shows.

The Unknown Soldier (1926) was one of the rash of movies about the World War (they didn’t know yet that they’d have to give them numbers) that came out during the second half of the 1920s, and which would culminate in Universal’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930. It was independently produced by Charles R. Rogers for Producers Distributing Corp. (PDC — not to be confused with PRC, the rock-bottom Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corp.) PDC was a short-lived concern that would be merged with and absorbed by other little fish, eventually to coalesce into RKO Radio Pictures. In the meantime, PDC turned out a hundred or so pictures between 1923 and ’27, their most significant asset being Cecil B. DeMille during his brief estrangement from Paramount Pictures (though only one of DeMille’s PDC pictures, 1927’s The King of Kings, actually turned a profit).

The Unknown Soldier told the story of a romance between Fred, a young worker (Charles Emmett Mack) and Mary, the boss’s daughter (Marguerite de la Motte) in defiance of her disapproving father (Henry B. Walthall, expressively stoic as ever). When America enters the Great War, they both enlist, he in the army, she in a troupe providing entertainment for the boys at the front. Reunited in France, they are married by a military chaplain before Fred’s unit moves up to the trenches. Simultaneously with learning she is pregnant, Mary also learns that the “chaplain” who married them was a deserter in disguise, and they’re not married after all. Hoping to set things right, Fred volunteers for a dangerous mission to find a lost patrol and escort them back to the town where he knows Mary and their child are recuperating from the baby’s birth. The patrol makes it to safety, but Fred goes MIA. Back home in the States, papa Walthall tells Mary she is welcome, but not her “illegitimate” child; she in turn tells him — in decorous silent-movie-intertitle euphemism — to go to hell.

Years pass. The remains of America’s first Unknown Soldier have been returned from France and are being conveyed in solemn procession to a resting place at Arlington (“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God”). In the crowd silently lining the route of the procession, father, daughter and grandchild (brought together by Mary’s aunt) are finally reconciled (their reunion cleverly intercut with newsreel footage of the actual 1921 procession). At this point, the implication is that the Unknown Soldier is in fact the missing Fred, killed on his mission to rescue the lost patrol, and now, in a strange twist of fate “known but to God”, bringing Mary, their child, and her father back together at last. This poignant dénouement appears to have been the original intent of director Renaud Hoffman and writers E. Richard Schayer and James J. Tynan. However, the producers hedged their bets by shooting an alternate ending in which Fred survives, albeit blinded and suffering from amnesia, until he regains his memory (though not his sight) in time for a tearful family reunion. PDC then offered exhibitors their choice as to which resolution they preferred. Sources differ as to which ending was more popular, but it was the “happy” ending that screened in Columbus. Obviously, this pretty much blows the whole point of calling the picture The Unknown Soldier in the first place. Without that original poignancy, the picture is basically warmed-over The Big Parade — not bad, some good moments, but nothing special, and redolent of its betters: Big Parade, What Price Glory?, Wings, Lilac Time, All Quiet, etc.

At this point — in the home stretch, as it were, and within sight of the finish line — The Picture Show was hit by a one-two punch of bad luck: The next two features on the program had to be replaced by unscheduled substitutes. First to go was I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby (1940), a Universal B-musical starring Broderick Crawford as a gangster with songwriting ambitions who kidnaps a young composer to collaborate with. I have a soft spot for Classic Era B-musicals, and for Broderick Crawford in the days when he still looked like his mother Helen Broderick, but the print arrived with an advanced case of vinegar syndrome (a “disease” that can reduce an acetate-based print to a pile of warped, brittle substance reeking of salad dressing) and had been rendered unusable. I was disappointed, but then again Clive Hirschhorn’s The Hollywood Musical dismisses the picture as “61 ludicrous minutes of non-entertainment”, so maybe we dodged a bullet. In any case, the substitute was Twelve Crowded Hours (1939), and no complaints there.

Twelve Crowded Hours — to use a line I can’t believe some reviewer didn’t use at the time — was 64 very crowded minutes. With beefy Richard Dix stuffed into a fast-talking-reporter role written for Lee Tracy, trying to clear his girlfriend Lucille Ball’s hapless brother (Allan Lane) of a murder rap, while nailing a numbers-racket kingpin (Cyrus W. Kendall) who keeps a truck-driver hit-man on retainer (he dispatches his marks by ramming their cars with his truck, which seems pretty inefficient, but we’re not given time to think about it) — anyhow, with all that, plus Donald MacBride playing one of his signature exasperated police detectives, director Lew Landers had a pretty busy juggling act on his hands, but he was up to it.

The other movie we were supposed to see but didn’t was Junior Miss (1945), from 20th Century Fox, adapted from the 1941 Broadway hit which was, in turn, based on a collection of New Yorker short stories by Sally (Meet Me in St. Louis) Benson. The picture starred the remarkable Peggy Ann Garner in a role as old as Jane Austen’s Emma and as recent as any movie starring Deanna Durbin: the mischievous teenage girl playing cupid for those around her. The movie looked promising, and Peggy Ann is always welcome, but it was not to be. Like I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, the Picture Show’s print of Junior Miss (whether due to vinegar syndrome or some other cause) was not eligible for running through a projector.

Instead we got Banjo (1947), a girl-and-her-dog B-movie starring ten-year-old Sharyn Moffett. Young Ms. Moffett was an appealing child actress who might have developed into the kind of juvenile star who justified the above-the-title billing she receives here. Unfortunately, at RKO (where the precarious studio administration always seemed to have more important things on their minds than grooming contract talent), she never had the kind of infrastructure that had served Peggy Ann Garner (and before her Shirley Temple) so well at 20th Century Fox. Today Sharyn Moffett is best remembered as the wheelchair-bound child who sets the plot in motion in Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher (1945), and as Cary Grant and Myrna Loy’s younger daughter in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48).

In Banjo young Sharyn plays Pat, a girl happily living with her widowed father and her dog Banjo on their prosperous Georgia farm. When her father is killed in a horseback riding accident, Pat is sent to live with her only relative, her wealthy aunt Elizabeth (Jacqueline White), who is living a carefree, self-centered life in Boston. There’s scarcely room in her life for a child (she’s not pleased that her trip to Bermuda must be canceled because of the girl’s arrival), and none at all for a dog. Banjo is banished to a pen in the backyard, but the pen can’t contain him, despite the ever-rising fence around it. Pat tries to please her aunt and keep Banjo with her, in which effort her only ally is a local doctor (Walter Reed), who happens also to be Aunt Elizabeth’s discarded fiancé — which prompts Pat also to try bringing her aunt and the doctor back together. Things at last come to a head: Banjo is banished again, this time all the way back to Georgia; Pat runs away to be with him, and…well, you can probably guess the rest.

Banjo is a pleasant specimen of heartwarming family entertainment, interesting not only for Sharyn Moffett, who shows she can carry a whole movie on her own small shoulders, but as only the second feature from prolific director Richard Fleischer (whose first, Child of Divorce, had also starred Sharyn Moffett). Another asset is Jacqueline White, whose innate appeal makes her likable even when Aunt Elizabeth is being most selfish and unreasonable. She is remembered today for another Richard Fleischer picture, the 1952 film noir classic The Narrow Margin, in which she played a train passenger with a secret. (And by the way, I’m pleased to report that at this writing, Ms. White is happily still with us. If her long life continues — and we should all hope it does — she will turn 101 on November 23, 2023.)

The day and the weekend wound up with Down to Earth (1917), one of Douglas Fairbanks’s pre-swashbuckling athletic/romantic comedies. O.M. Samuel’s review in Variety (Oct. 10, 1917) hailed it as Doug’s best picture to date (for a little perspective, Down to Earth was the star’s 18th feature; there would be 28 more, four of them talkies, before his screen career ended in 1937). Wherever the picture belongs in Doug’s filmography (my experience of his pre-Mark of Zorro work is not exhaustive), it’s certainly a pip. Doug plays an outgoing, hail-fellow-well-met type whose lifelong sweetheart Eileen (Ethel Forsythe) turns him down for a high-society cad (Charles K. Gerrard). But that fellow’s fast living brings on a nervous breakdown in Eileen, landing her in a sanitarium for wealthy hypochondriacs. That’s when Doug swings into action. Using a bogus smallpox scare, he spirits Eileen and her fellow inmates away to what he says is a desert island, where he sets about curing them all of their largely psychosomatic ailments while teaching them the benefits of exercise, a healthy diet, and good clean living. The story was Fairbanks’s own, worked into a scenario by him, Anita Loos, and Loos’s husband John Emerson (who also directed at the kind of pace Fairbanks loved to set). The cinematographer was the great Victor Fleming, who would go on to a stellar directing career himself, modeling his own manly persona on the star who gave him his start in pictures, and whom he so greatly admired.

And with that, 2023’s edition of The Columbus Moving Picture Show rolled to a close. As always, I urge my readers to visit The Picture Show’s site at the link, get on their mailing list if you’re not there already, and give serious thought to joining us next Memorial Day. If you do, don’t forget to say hi.