Chapters 7-9 of Adventures of Red Ryder led off Day 3 of The Columbus Moving Picture Show. The evil machinations of banker Drake (Harry Worth) and his henchman Ace Hanlon (Noah Beery) grew ever more desperate and menacing as Red, Beth and Little Beaver drew closer to uncovering their conspiracy.

Then it was the welcome return of another longstanding Cinevent tradition: the Saturday Morning Animation Program, curated by the estimable Stewart McKissick. This year’s program (with YouTube links where available):

Bosko the Doughboy (1931). (Top row left) Bosko was the first Looney Tunes star, produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, the most perfectly named partnership in movie history (“Harman-Ising”). They started out creating the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies lines at Warner Bros., then when they got fed up with executive producer Leon Schlesinger they decamped to MGM and started the cartoon program there. Bosko the Doughboy came early in the Warner years, set in the trenches of the Great War. The Bosko cartoons hit TV in the mid-1950s when I was a kid, and frankly, I never liked them — partly because (as this picture shows) he was always eating, chomping with jaws gaping wide, the food bouncing around in his mouth. Even at age seven, I was disgusted. (I suspect that animators Rollin Hamilton and Max Maxwell simply couldn’t draw someone chewing with his mouth closed.) Now I’m able to watch these cartoons with more appreciation. Stewart McKissick says this one is often considered the best of the Boskos, and I believe it; there’s a startling strain of dark humor in the way it makes gags out of the bombs, machine guns and artillery shells of the Western Front — only 13 years after the war decimated a generation of European manhood. 

Radio Girl (1932) was a Terrytoon with a succession of standard Depression-era gags draped on the premise of a radio exercise program. Like the YouTube video at the link, The Picture Show’s print was a 1950s TV syndicated version with new opening titles, but the rest was pure 1932.

Also from 1932 was Max and Dave Fleischer’s You Try Somebody Else (top row right), about a (literal) cat burglar newly released from prison. In short order he breaks into a house and raids the icebox filled with talking food. Caught by the homeowner, none other than a shotgun-toting Betty Boop, he goes back to the slammer, where he picks up a newspaper with a photo of Ethel Merman — and that’s all the excuse Max and Dave need to segue to Ethel in live-action for a follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong. The number is the title tune, one of the lesser-known works of the legendary songwriting trio of De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (“Good News”, “Birth of the Blues”, “Button Up Your Overcoat”, “Sunny Side Up” etc.). There was more dark humor at the end of this one.

Two-Gun Mickey (1934) (second row left) was Mickey Mouse from late in his black-and-white period, when he still had the comic spunk that would soon depart, leaving Mickey to play straight-man to Donald Duck and Pluto. As Stewart observes in his notes, at this point the Disney animation is smoother and more textured, but Walt’s drive for realism hasn’t yet banished the playful rubber-hose style of the early shorts. Dynamic and great fun.

The Headless Horseman (1934) (second row right) was a real revelation, and as such, just about my favorite entry on the program. One of Ub Iwerks’s ComiColor cartoons (produced during the six years he was lured away from Walt Disney by the Machiavellian Pat Powers), it’s an adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that beat Disney’s to the screen by 15 years. It’s quite a good one too: compact, witty, musical, with a pretty design that nicely conceals the limitations of Cinecolor. Spoiler alert!: The cartoon also makes explicit something that I didn’t see as a kid watching Disney’s version, and which was subtle enough to go over my head even when I read Irving’s story as a teenager: that Ichabod Crane’s run-in with the Headless Horseman is a prank played by Brom Bones to scare the superstitious schoolteacher out of the county and clear Brom’s path to Katrina Van Tassel. (Duh!) Iwerks’s cartoon lets that completely out of the bag, though it also ends with a nifty touch of the last laugh. 

Bridge Ahoy (1936) (third row left) was one of the Fleischer brothers’ black-and-white Popeye cartoons. In this one Popeye and Olive Oyl are offended by the high-handed treatment they and Wimpy receive as they cross a river on Bluto’s ferryboat, so they decide to build their own bridge and put him out of business. One moment in this one that I’ve always loved: As the ferry pulls away from the riverbank, Wimpy says to Bluto, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a ferry ride today.” Bluto, furious, throws him overboard. As the indignant Popeye prepares to dive in and rescue him, we see Wimpy receding in the background, going down once, twice, three times, and each time he surfaces, he cries, “Assistance! Assistance!”

The Tangled Angler (1941) made a nice companion piece to Day 1’s Marry Me Again, since it was written and directed by Frank Tashlin before giving up cartoons for live action. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), it tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land. UPDATE 7/21/23: I’m embarrassed to admit it, but The Tangled Angler wasn’t on the program after all; the supplier sent the wrong print, and by the time it arrived the program book had already gone to press. It was the book I relied on in writing up my coverage, and by then I’d forgotten about the change (these cartoons do tend to blur together if you’re not careful). What screened this year in Columbus was Tangled Travels (1944), also from Columbia, directed by Dave Fleischer, on the rebound from being bounced, along with his brother Max, from their animation studio at Paramount. Tangled Travels was a comic travelogue of the kind made during the 1940s over at Warner Bros., a series of punny “blackout” gags on geographical names and features (“We crossed a babbling brook…and a group of weeping willows…”). The Tangled Angler would have to wait another year, until Picture Show 2023, to join the Saturday morning cartoon program.

Rabbit Every Monday (1951) (bottom left) pitted Bugs Bunny against Yosemite Sam for the eighth of his 31 confrontations with the pugnacious little outlaw. I’ve always rather preferred Bugs’s duels with Sam over the ones with Elmer Fudd; Sam puts up more of a fight and is a worthier opponent than the hapless Elmer, who never seems to have a chance from the start. Besides, Sam is such an obnoxious blowhard that whatever he gets from Bugs, he’s got it coming. This was one of their few teamings where Sam is actually rabbit-hunting, almost as if he’s stepped in at the last minute because Elmer broke an ankle during rehearsals.

Rock-A-Bye Bear (1952) (bottom right) was prime Tex Avery screwball from his MGM years, with a dog named Spike hired to mind the house of a hibernating bear — but Spike has a spiteful rival who tries to get him fired by constantly making noise to wake up the sound-sensitive bear, hoping to replace Spike in the job. The picture here, also prime Tex Avery, gives a good idea of how the gags go in this one.

Barnyard Actor (1955) was a cleverer-than-usual Terrytoon starring Gandy Goose. Gandy receives a mail-order acting course, and immediately he is able to do impersonations of Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, James Cagney, Gary Cooper, and Charles Boyer (which isn’t the same as “acting”, but never mind). One very funny line, referencing Cooper’s role in High Noon (’52): “I’m the sheriff in these parts and I’ve got my duty to perform. I’m not deserting my post; I’d rather desert my wife.” The plot kicks in when Gandy’s pal Rudy Rooster asks him to impersonate a fox so he (Rudy) can chase him off and win the local hens back from the new rooster in the barnyard. Gandy agrees — but then a real fox shows up…

The cartoons were followed by The Little Cafe (1919) starring Max Linder. Linder (born Gabriel Leuvielle in 1883) was an early French film comedian, one of the first to establish a consistent screen persona, and by some accounts the first international movie star. He was certainly a recognized influence on Charlie Chaplin (whose fame quite eclipsed his, though they became and remained good friends), Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and (yes) Charley Chase, among others. Alas, his heyday was not long. His career peaked around 1912-14, when the outbreak of World War I, and his experiences at the front as a dispatch driver and entertaining the troops, led to issues with his physical and mental health, including recurring bouts of depression. The Little Cafe was part of his efforts to regain his comic mojo after the war, and while a great success in Europe, it did not do well in the U.S. Based on a 1912 play by Tristan Bernard, and directed by the playwright’s son Raymond, it starred Linder as a waiter who suddenly inherits great wealth, but whose boss won’t let him out of his contract, hoping to extort a huge payment to let the fellow go. The screening was introduced by Linder biographer Lisa Stein Haven, author of The Rise and Fall of Max Linder: The First Cinema Celebrity. As for the “fall” of that title, I may write about it someday but I won’t spill the beans now, but rather refer you to Ms. Stein Haven’s book. Suffice it for now to say that in late October 1925 the 41-year-old Linder and his 19-year-old wife died together, and not of natural causes.

Before we move on, a parenthetical aside about Tristan Bernard and his son Raymond. The elder Bernard (1866-1947), a novelist, playwright, humorist and screenwriter, was the author of one of the most breathtaking insights in the history of art. “Audiences want to be surprised,” he once said, “but by something they expect.” His son Raymond (1891-1977) started out acting in his father’s plays with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt; in 1916 he embarked on a career that would, if anything, completely eclipse that of Bernard père and mark the son as one of the greatest of all French film directors. One film alone is enough to make him immortal; this is his 1934 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Of all the 40-plus movies made from Hugo’s book, Raymond Bernard’s three-part, 281-minute version is by far the best; there’s not even a close second. For once — if not indeed for the only time — a movie is as great as the great novel it’s based on. 

Okay, back to Columbus. Alan K. Rode, author of biographies of Michael Curtiz and Charles McGraw, gave a summary of the short history of Eagle-Lion Productions, an independent company set up by Britain’s J. Arthur Rank to distribute British movies in the States and produced low-budget American pictures for double bills. Then he introduced one of Eagle-Lion’s pictures, Canon City (1948), about a notorious prison break at the end of 1947 at the state prison in that Colorado town. (Incidentally, it’s “Cañon City”, pronounced “canyon”, not “cannon”. The movie gets the pronunciation right, but not the spelling.)

Like Glen or Glenda, Canon City was rushed into production to cash in on a hot news story, albeit to considerably better effect. The jailbreak took place on December 30, 1947; the picture was shooting by March ’48 on the prison grounds (with appropriate security, one hopes) and in post-production by April; its world premiere was held on July 2 in Canon City’s own Rex Theatre (which makes a cameo appearance in an early scene). Haste did not make waste, however; written and directed by Crane Wilbur, the picture is swift, efficient, and as tight as a snare drum, with a cast of solid character actors: Scott Brady, Jeff Corey, Whit Bissell, Stanley Clements, DeForest Kelly, Henry Brandon. The omniscient narration by Reed Hadley marks it as not film noir, but solidly in the semi-documentary tradition then being pioneered over at 20th Century Fox by producer Louis de Rochemont and director Henry Hathaway (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, etc.); Warden Roy Best even plays himself. Canon City is available complete here on YouTube. (Spoiler alert: Within a week of the break, all 12 escapees had been killed or recaptured — but audiences would all have known that in 1948.)

From hard-boiled prison drama to wholesome family fare, next came Two Thoroughbreds (1939). Here I interpolate the notes I wrote for The Picture Show’s program:

Everybody loves “a boy and his horse” movies, don’t they? Our offering here, an RKO B-picture called Two Thoroughbreds, is one that even the most dogged film buff has probably never heard of, but it’s a real charmer, and even a cursory glance at the cast list may lead you to wonder, “Why haven’t I known about this?”

Our story opens in the dead of night, as horse thieves hijack a valuable brood mare from a breeding ranch. As the thieves drive off, the mare’s recent foal gallops after them, whinnying plaintively, but is soon left in the dust. Exhausted and dispirited, the young animal wanders onto a nearby hardscrabble farm, where another orphan, a human one named David Carey (Jimmy Lydon), lives at the mercy of his abusive Uncle Thaddeus and Aunt Hildegarde (Arthur Hohl, Marjorie Main). David prevails upon Uncle Thad to let him keep the horse until they can find the owner; surely there’s a reward for such a handsome piece of horseflesh. But by the time David learns where the colt belongs, the two have bonded and David can’t bring himself to let go. Then Uncle Thad, tired of waiting for some pie-in-the-sky reward, decides he’ll either sell the colt or work it to death. What is poor David to do?

Two Thoroughbreds was filmed in the Lake Sherwood area of California’s Santa Monica Mountains, a location familiar to moviegoers from dozens, maybe hundreds of productions, from Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922), which gave the lake its name, through Tarzan and His Mate and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, right down to Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Bridesmaids (2011). Sixteen-year-old Jimmy Lydon plays his first real role here — 1939 was his debut year in pictures, and so far he’d appeared only in Back Door to Heaven, an indie-B released through Paramount; The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair, a promo film for the fair’s Westinghouse exhibit; and a Robert Benchley short, Home Early — and he carries the 65-minute Thoroughbreds with ease. Stardom for young Jimmy was just around the corner, of course: In 1941 he would take on the role of Henry Aldrich in Paramount’s highly successful answer to MGM’s Andy Hardy series, then he’d become an early TV pioneer as “Biff” Cardoza on Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954), before settling in to a long and worthy career as a reliable character actor.

Stardom was in the cards for the perky, 14-year-old Joan Brodel, too — though not until Warner Bros. changed her name to Joan Leslie. Playing Wendy, the daughter of the colt’s rightful owner, she looks almost shockingly young here; it’s astounding to think that within three years she’ll be playing on-screen wives to Gary Cooper (in Sergeant York) and James Cagney (in Yankee Doodle Dandy).

And then there’s Marjorie Main. Her screen persona was still taking shape in 1939, the year of her breakthrough comic role in The Women, and the nasty old crone she plays here is a far cry from the Marjorie Main we know in Meet Me in St. Louis and The Harvey Girls. I wonder: Seven years later, when director Jack Hively was second-unit director on The Egg and I, did he and Marjorie ever reminisce about the difference between The Egg‘s Ma Kettle and the farm wife she played for him back in 1939? (Hively would remain a reliable journeyman director in movies and TV, often specializing in kids and animals, including 71 episodes of the long-running Lassie TV series during its Jon Provost/June Lockhart years and after, plus several TV movies with the canine star alone.)

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice one more familiar element in Two Thoroughbreds, and I’ll point it out now so you don’t miss any of the story trying to figure out where you’ve seen it before. This is the interior of the ranch house where the girl Wendy lives — that set also served as Katharine Hepburn’s Connecticut country house in RKO’s Bringing Up Baby the year before.

There’s an unhappy postscript to these notes. Almost the very day I turned them in to the program book’s editor, on March 9, 2022, veteran actor James “Jimmy” Lydon passed away at his home in San Diego, Calif. The Monday after The Picture Show, May 30, would have been his 99th birthday. (His wife of 59 years, Betty Lou, preceded him in death on January 1. I wonder if that bereavement perhaps hastened his own end.) The Columbus screening of Two Thoroughbreds was dedicated to his memory.

Silent movie historian Tim Lussier presented a program of Silent Fragments that was at once entertaining, tantalizing and frustrating. Frustrating because with each of the three titles he presented, the footage seemed to run out just as things were getting interesting. What we saw constituted fragments of fragments, actually, sort of teasers for the incomplete footage that survives. They were, in the order they’re presented in The Picture Show program:

A Kiss in the Dark (1925)  This was (judging from what we could see) a surprisingly risqué romantic comedy about a serial seducer (Adolphe Menjou at his most dapper) who gets into hot water over a perfectly innocent misunderstanding with a married woman (Lillian Rich) — for once, a woman he was not trying to seduce. Supposedly based on Aren’t We All? by Frederick Lonsdale, the picture by all accounts had nothing whatever to do with the play except one character surname: in the play, Lord Grenham, an avuncular old nobleman, in the movie Walter Grenham, the young Lothario played by Menjou. Variety’s reviewer “Fred” ventured to wonder why Paramount bothered to buy Lonsdale’s play rather than just come up with this original and save the money. Maybe it was for the publicity value; Lonsdale’s name was highly admired in those days. Location shooting was done in Havana to take advantage of both the Cuban scenery and the fact that Prohibition didn’t extend down there.

The Wanderer (1925)  A dramatization of the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, filling in a lot of story details that Jesus neglected to mention when He told the tale to His disciples. Longtime Cinedrome readers will recall that I reported acquiring a souvenir program for this picture in “Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2” in 2013. I had never heard of The Wanderer, but it was clearly a major Paramount production, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Walter Collier Jr., Greta Nissen, Ernest Torrence, Wallace Beery and Tyrone Power Sr. Back in 2013 I reported that a print of the picture survived in the UCLA Film Archive. Not exactly; evidently what survives is a Kodascope six-reel condensation of the full nine-reel feature (see Day 1 notes on Flesh and Blood [1922] for more about Kodascope). We didn’t see all six reels in Columbus, of course, but there was enough to show that The Wanderer was a pretty lavish production, including scenes of the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style destruction of the sinful city where the Prodigal squanders his inheritance.

The Forbidden Woman (1927)  Set in French Colonial Algeria, Jetta Goudal played the half-caste daughter of an Arab mother and a French father. Charged by her sheik grandfather with spying on the conquering French, she first marries a French commander, then complicates things by falling in love with his brother (Joseph Schildkraut). Variety’s “Rush” predicted it would be a hit with “the femmes”, adding that “a little of this heavy Oriental romance goes a long way with men”. However, he did allow that “Miss Goudal…is outstanding in her clinging gowns and picturesque headdresses”, as the poster above attests. I found this the most frustrating of the excerpts Mr. Lussier presented, because it offered the fewest hints as to how the plot resolved itself. Unless I missed something.

The second and final Laurel and Hardy short of the weekend was Going Bye-Bye (1934), with killer Walter Long vowing vengeance against The Boys for testifying against him, swearing to…well, never mind what he swears to do; suffice it to say he does it.

After that it was another highlight of the weekend, also from 1934, the genre-blending musical mystery Murder at the Vanities. The lobby cards for the picture, especially this one, are enough to make you wish it had been shot in Technicolor. But that would have meant postponing production until after the Production Code crackdown, in which case all those Most Beautiful Girls in the World would have had a lot more clothes on, instead of being as close to stark naked as state and federal obscenity laws would allow. Besides, the movie’s second-most-famous song would never have been included, and probably not even written; this was the remarkable “Sweet Marahuana [sic]”, a melancholy ode to cannabis sung by Gertrude Michael that made the movie a camp favorite among 1960s hippies after the demise of the Production Code.

Camp isn’t the only thing this jewel of Pre-Code Hollywood has going for it. The mix of musical and murder mystery is perfectly balanced by Producer E. Lloyd Sheldon and director Mitchell Leisen. The solution to the backstage crimes during opening night of Earl Carroll’s Vanities on Broadway, while not entirely unexpected, is smartly plotted and worked out. Leading man Carl Brisson was a touch too smarmy to be the Next Maurice Chevalier (which was obviously what Paramount had in mind for him), but he does no harm; besides, the real leading men are Jack Oakie as the show’s house manager and Victor McLaglen as an investigating cop, and they could carry anybody over the finish line. Musically, the songs are okay (with one legendary highlight), the production numbers lavish (with Ann Sheridan, Lucille Ball and Alan Ladd visible among the chorus if you look fast enough), and Duke Ellington and his Band are on hand to give Franz Liszt a swingtime treatment with “Ebony Rhapsody”.

That “legendary highlight” is the movie’s first-most-famous song, “Cocktails for Two”, one of the best and most popular songs of the decade — arguably better and more lasting than any of the three nominees that year for the first Best Song Oscar (“The Carioca”, “Love in Bloom”, and the winner, “The Continental”). “Cocktails” is introduced by Carl Brisson in rehearsal, then reprised later in a big production number and at the show’s finale, plus turning up frequently in the background all along — showing that the boys at Paramount really knew what they had. By the end of the decade, countless couples had designated it “their song”, and it had become enshrined as The Lounge Lizards’ National Anthem. (Ten years later, Spike Jones’s hilarious send-up infuriated songwriters Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow, but it made them rich all over again.)

Day 3 wrapped up with Top Banana (1954), the screen translation of the 1951 Broadway musical comedy that won Phil Silvers the first of his two Tony Awards. I call it a “screen translation” because “adaptation” would be a misnomer. The show ran from November 1951 to October ’52 on Broadway, then Silvers toured with it for two years. It was while the tour was in Los Angeles that the sets were carted over to an empty sound stage and the show was transferred to film in a dizzying five days. No effort was made to “open it up” or conceal its stage origins; quite the contrary, the movie aspires to look exactly like a filmed stage production, complete with curtains, flimsy sets flown and rolled in, and stage lighting, including footlights. (It was also filmed in 3-D, but never released that way.)

There have certainly been better movies made of Broadway shows, but Top Banana has a value uniquely its own to the show’s posterity: it is the closest thing we have to a precise record of what a show looked like during the Golden Age of the Broadway Musical. It’s also a specimen of the star-driven musical on the cusp of oblivion, before it was swept away by the irresistible wave of the integrated (and later the “concept”) musical, and of burlesque comedy before it got shouldered aside by striptease and more vulgar entertainments.

And talk about star-driven, the star here is firmly in the driver’s seat, and one of those newfangled hydrogen bombs couldn’t blow him out of it. Tony Awards in 1952 were announced without preliminary nominees, and it’s hard to imagine who could have been nominated against Phil Silvers. His only possible competition was Yul Brynner in The King and I, and under Tony rules Brynner wasn’t an above-the-title star so they weren’t in the same category. (Brynner won that year for outstanding “featured” — i.e., “supporting” — actor.) Bosley Crowther in the New York Times noted that, as he had been on Broadway, Phil Silvers was “ninety-nine one-hundredths” of the movie, and Silvers is practically a force of nature. The supporting cast includes some other burlesque veterans — Joey Faye, Herbie Faye (no relation), and Jack Albertson, still years away from his own stardom — but they are little more than Crowther’s other one-hundredth; Phil Silvers is the whole show.

(Rose Marie co-starred with Silvers on Broadway, and the show was almost as big a triumph for her, with four strong Johnny Mercer songs to leaven Silvers’s nonstop clowning. The movie was another story. In both her autobiography Hold the Roses and in Wait for Your Laugh, Jason Wise’s documentary about her career, she tells a story of being propositioned by the picture’s producer in front of the whole cast, and of her rebuffing him just as publicly. Her husband told her that her four songs in the show would be cut out of the movie, and he was right. Rose Marie doesn’t name the producer, but it’s pretty clear she’s talking about Albert Zugsmith. The story is not hard to believe.)

One misstep in the movie, I think, was not filming it before a live audience, or at least dubbing in a laugh track. Director Alfred E. Green inserts shots of a theater audience from time to time, and there’s applause on the soundtrack every now and then. But there’s no reaction to any of the comedy, much of which follows the Muppet Show principle that a joke that’s not good enough to use once may be bad enough to use six times. That kind of comedy needs the contagion of laughter, otherwise the jokes — bellowed at the top of the actors’ lungs, like verbal artillery barrages — tend to fall flat. For all that, though, and despite Rose Marie having been reduced to little more than a walk on, Top Banana is a valuable relic; it’s like finding a videotape of Weber and Fields or Smith and Dale in their prime.

And finally, there was one terrific bonus in Columbus this year. The DVD of Top Banana available from the Warner Archive, and even the version that pops up now and then on Turner Classic Movies, is missing a full 18 minutes, with several glaring holes where actors, sets, and costumes suddenly change in the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word. The Picture Show screened a complete 100-minute print struck in 1954. I can only imagine where they found it, but we all counted our blessings.

To be concluded…

A feature of the last few Cinevents that The Picture Show wisely chose to continue this year is the 12-chapter serial, screening three chapters at the beginning of each of the convention’s four days. As in prior years, this year’s serial was from Republic — naturally enough, since Republic was, well, if not the Tiffany’s, at least the Zale’s of chapter-play production. And after the relatively exotic serials of the last few years — with heroes taking on a Japanese spy ring during World War II (The Masked Marvel, Cinevent 50), lost-world savages on a volcanic island above the Arctic Circle (Hawk of the Wilderness, C-51), and Teutonic saboteurs before America’s entry into the war (King of the Texas Rangers, C-52) — this one, for a refreshing change of pace, was a standard, good old-fashioned cowboy shoot-’em-up, Adventures of Red Ryder (1940). As anybody who ever read a comic book or the funny-pages in a newspaper between 1938 and 1964 can tell you, Red Ryder was the tall, square-jawed, white-hatted, red-haired hero of the Painted Valley Ranch in the Blanco Basin of the San Juan Mountains, noted for never killing the bad guys but simply shooting the guns out of their hands. His gal was Beth Wilder, his youthful Native American sidekick was Little Beaver, and his archenemy was the dastardly Ace Hanlon. Red made his debut in newspapers in 1938, then expanded to comic books in 1939, this Republic serial in 1940, radio in 1942, B-movie features in 1944, and even a couple of unsold pilots for TV series in the 1950s and ’60s.

In addition to being the avatar of clean living and upright law and order, Red Ryder was also a pioneer of tie-in merchandising. Millions who weren’t even born when the Red Ryder strip ended in 1964 are nevertheless aware, thanks to 1983’s A Christmas Story, of the Daisy Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle With a Compass in the Stock and This Thing Which Tells Time, first marketed in 1940 and — believe it or not! — still available from the Daisy Manufacturing Company of Rogers, Arkansas (not that exact model, now discontinued, but plenty of others).

But back to that 1940 Republic serial. The story was the old western trope about the crooked banker in cahoots with outlaws to terrorize local ranchers into selling their property dirt cheap so the banker can make a handsome profit by selling to the railroad that only he knows is coming through. Red was the son of one such rancher, swinging into action when his father is murdered after getting too close to discovering the banker’s plot.

The serial was directed by William Witney and John English (the same team responsible for Hawk of the Wilderness and King of the Texas Rangers), and Red was played by Don “Red” Barry. Neither Witney nor English thought Barry was right for the part, and Barry himself later admitted he was miscast — at 5 ft. 4, he was a full foot shorter than the lanky Red Ryder of the comics. But Republic president Herbert Yates insisted (he compared Barry to James Cagney), and that was that. Evidently, Barry suffered from a short-man pugnacity complex, because both directors came to detest him, as did most of the cast and crew — leading lady Vivian Coe, as Red’s girl (renamed Beth Andrews), remembered, “I don’t like saying negative things about the departed, but he wasn’t a very nice fellow,” and Barry himself, years later, admitted he had been “a brash, smart ass young punk.” Still, it must be said that Barry does okay in the part, playing Red Ryder as a bantam rooster rather than the tall-in-the-saddle type — though it does take some suspension of disbelief when Red goes into fistfights with baddies who have several inches and 20-30 pounds on him (Noah Beery Sr., the serial’s Ace Hanlon, was 6 ft. 1 in.)

Little Beaver was played by nine-year-old Tommy Cook, who is not only still with us at 91 (the last survivor of this or any other Republic serial), but was an honored guest in Columbus; here he is shown with Picture Show Chair Samantha Glasser in the Dealers Room. (And by the way, do you see what’s hanging on the easel under the poster for the serial? Yep, it’s a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. They raffled one off during the weekend — albeit with no compass or sundial in the stock — and I admit I was tempted for a second or two. But [1] I’d never have gotten it on the plane; and [2] even if I had it shipped to my home, what could I do with it then? I’d probably just shoot my eye out.)

My only regret of the weekend is that I didn’t get a chance to meet and chat with Mr. Cook; for one thing, I’d have liked to hear what he had to say about working with Red Barry. Somehow I even managed to miss his interview with Caroline Breder-Watts on Saturday morning. But The Picture Show’s Facebook page has a video excerpt of that interview in which Mr. Cook tells an amusing anecdote about doing a whisky commercial with Orson Welles; he (Mr. Cook) could easily pass for 25 years younger than he is. Click here.

The first feature of the weekend, Behind the News, was also from Republic, and also from 1940. Lloyd Nolan played a once-great reporter for a major newspaper in “State City” (probably a pseudonym for San Diego, Calif., since the plot later reveals it to be within driving distance of Calexico). Now jaded and cynical, he gets an annoying kick in the conscience when his latest padded expense account enrages his harried managing editor (reliable old Robert Armstrong). To get back at the reporter, the editor saddles him with an idealistic gee-whiz cub reporter straight out of journalism school (the prolific Frank Albertson, best remembered now as Sam “Hee-haw!” Wainwright in It’s a Wonderful Life). When the youngster’s gung-ho admiration for his past work shows Nolan up for the bitter, burned-out failure he has become, he arranges a series of humiliations that ruin Albertson’s standing at the paper. Then Albertson uncovers a case of an innocent Mexican-American being railroaded on a trumped-up murder charge, but nobody will believe him, so Nolan’s long-suffering girlfriend (the earnest, likable Doris Davenport) prods him into taking the boy’s part. It was a solid little newspaper melodrama, well-plotted and snappily directed by Joseph Santley. 

Behind the News was also the swan song of Doris Davenport after six years and nine pictures, four of them with no screen credit. At the beginning and end of those six years she did seem to be going places. Her first picture was in 1934, playing Eddie Cantor’s girlfriend in Kid Millions. Other bits followed, interspersed with fashion modeling to make ends meet. In 1938, under the name Doris Jordan, she tested for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and, according to Dave Domagala’s program notes, “was actually one of the finalists.” (Well, actually, “one of the semi-finalists” is  more like it. On November 18, 1938, David Selznick listed his Scarlett front-runners as Paulette Goddard, Doris Jordan, Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, and Loretta Young, adding that “Jordan is a complete amateur”. By December 12, Selznick was writing, “it’s narrowed down to Paulette, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett, and Vivien Leigh” — with Leigh having the inside track.) Doris Jordan/Davenport’s test for Scarlett impressed producer Samuel Goldwyn enough to get her cast in The Westerner (1940) opposite Gary Cooper for director William Wyler. Wyler wasn’t impressed (he wanted her part for his wife, Margaret Tallichet), but Goldwyn thought she had real star potential. After that came Behind the News — then nothing. Some sources say she simply got no further offers, though it seems likely that if nothing else, Republic at least could have found something for her to do. One dramatic story, attributed to David Ragan’s Who’s Who in Hollywood but unconfirmed anywhere else, claims that an auto accident after shooting The Westerner crushed her legs and forced her to use a cane for the rest of her days. Grain of salt on that one, I think; if that’s true, then how did she make Beyond the News? Whatever the reason, Doris Davenport lived on until 1980 but never made another picture.

Next came three silent Our Gang shorts from Hal Roach, The Champeen (1923) featuring Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Jackson, Roach’s first African-American child star, then Barnum & Ringling, Inc. and The Spanking Age (both 1928).

The last feature before the dinner break was a highlight of the whole weekend, at least as far as I was concerned: Love Among the Millionaires (1930) starring Clara Bow. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, and I’ll repeat it as often as I feel it’s necessary: There was never a more charming and delightful movie star than Clara Bow. As charming and as delightful, granted, but more so? None. Ever. 

That said, I must concede that if somebody asked me what was the big deal about Clara Bow, Love Among the Millionaires isn’t necessarily the first movie I’d point them to. (Where would I point them, you ask? Well…to Mantrap [1926], Wings and It [both ’27] — pretty much in that order.)

With Millionaires, the story sets Clara up as a diner waitress being romanced by the son of a railroad tycoon, then playing the low-class hussy to drive him away and spare him being disowned by his father. It was too familiar by half, as old as La Dame aux Camélias and as recent as Mary Pickford in My Best Girl (1927). Worse, it didn’t play to Clara’s strengths, as critics at the time were quick to point out. As Richard Barrios suggests in his insightful history A Song in the Dark, it’s almost as if Paramount were trying to turn Clara into Janet Gaynor — a wasted effort, you’d think, considering that she was already Clara Bow. (Richard, by the way, also wrote Love Among the Millionaires’ notes for The Picture Show program.)

Today, with hindsight, we know that Clara’s career was deep into twilight; her off-screen emotional problems were catching up, and while her supposed mike-fright didn’t show as much as later legend has it, the fun was going out of the work for her, and public scandals were belying the Janet Gaynor act. There was an unspoken sense that her career wasn’t on the right track; fan magazines were speculating on who would be “the next Clara Bow” — the implication being that the present one wouldn’t be on top much longer.

Still, Love Among the Millionaires was a hit — the true measure of Clara’s stardom, as with all stars past, present and future, was that she was expected and able to carry material like this. To be fair, she didn’t bear the burden alone. She got good support from 9-year-old Mitzi Green (shown here) as her brassy sister, Charles Sellon as their father, and Stanley Smith as Clara’s boyish sweetheart. Comic relief was provided by Stuart Erwin and Skeets Gallagher as two would-be suitors for Clara’s hand — although frankly, they come off more as a bickering couple than as romantic rivals.

I’ve always enjoyed Love Among the Millionaires, and I was happy for the chance to see it again in Columbus. It was Clara’s only real musical — her ability to sell a song had surprised everyone, not least herself, in Paramount on Parade earlier in 1930 — and while her untrained voice was no threat to Jeanette MacDonald, she could carry a tune. The L. Wolfe Gilbert/Abel Baer songs may not be classics, but they’re catchy enough, and she puts them across — singing live on the set, mind you — with confidence and infectious gusto. As Richard Barrios says in his program notes, if musicals hadn’t fallen out of favor and her own demons hadn’t overwhelmed her, Clara might have reinvented herself for the sound era. But by the time musicals came back in style, she was out of the biz for good.

After dinner came the first of the weekend’s Laurel and Hardy shorts, Our Wife (1931). Stan and Ollie try to pull off an elopement, spiriting Oliver’s intended Dulcy (Babe London) out from under the disapproving nose of her daddy James Finlayson. Ollie entrusts Stan with the task of finding a getaway car, and the disasters pile up from there. When the wedding party finally arrives before the justice of the peace, he turns out to be Ben Turpin — who, thanks to his famously crossed eyes, marries Dulcy to the wrong guy.

Next it was Flesh and Blood (1922), with Lon Chaney as a man unjustly convicted and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. After 15 years in the joint, he makes an escape to see his wife and daughter, and to find the ex-law-partner who framed him (Ralph Lewis) and force a confession that will clear his name. He is aided in this by a friend in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Noah Beery again, welcome as ever but a little hard to swallow as a Chinese tong lord). Disguised as a wheelchair-bound invalid to elude police, he learns that his wife has died and his daughter, now a beautiful young woman (Edith Roberts), is working in a skid row mission. She believes her father is dead, so he doesn’t disabuse her, but he keeps a watchful eye on her as he plots his revenge. Things get complicated when he learns that his daughter is in love with and engaged to marry the son of his old nemesis (Jack Mulhall).

Lon Chaney is widely regarded today as a horror movie actor, mainly on the strength of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (’25). In fact, in most of his pictures, including those two, lugubrious melodrama was his actual stock in trade. (It took the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of Phantom to re-assert the fact that Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel is a romantic melodrama, not a horror story.) Flesh and Blood is a good specimen of that uniquely Lon Chaney brand; it echoed elements in his earlier movies even as it foreshadowed elements of pictures he had yet to make.

There’s some question as to whether the picture survives intact. IMDb gives the running time as 74 min.; in the Exhibitor’s Herald of August 26, 1922 it’s listed at five reels, about the same (in the silent days a picture’s length was expressed in reels, not minutes, due to variations in projector speeds; one reel was roughly 15 minutes). The Picture Show’s print ran 61 min., which was the length of the trimmed-down version offered for rent by Eastman House’s Kodascope Library in the 1920s and ’30s. Quite a few silent movies appear to have survived only in these Kodascope versions (Eastman House having been pioneers in film preservation), and this seems to be one of them. In any case, there are no gaping holes in the picture as it stands; the gang at Eastman Kodak were pretty careful in editing films down for home use, for which we can be grateful.

Flesh and Blood is also noteworthy as an early feature by actor-turned-producer-turned director Irving Cummings; on this one he served in the last two capacities. Cummings would go on to be a hard-working and reliable director, especially at 20th Century Fox. He specialized in musicals, turning out some of the best examples starring Shirley Temple (Curly Top, Poor Little Rich Girl, Little Miss Broadway), Alice Faye (Hollywood Cavalcade, Lillian Russell, That Night in Rio) and Betty Grable (Down Argentine Way, Springtime in the Rockies, The Dolly Sisters), as well as In Old Arizona (taking over for the injured Raoul Walsh) and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.

Marry Me Again (1953) was lightweight, a bit dated, but pretty dang funny for all that. It starred Robert Cummings and Marie Wilson, both movie veterans just then getting a taste of television success. Wilson had just transferred her hit radio show My Friend Irma to TV (after two movies, in 1949 and ’50) and was America’s favorite lovably ditzy blonde. Cummings was halfway through his first sitcom, the one-season My Hero; his biggest TV success, Love That Bob, was still two years away (which explains why Marie Wilson gets top billing on this poster).

In Marry Me Again the two play a couple whose wedding is interrupted just short of “I now pronounce you…” when Cummings gets word that he’s been called up for the Korean War. So the wedding goes on a back burner while he jets off to do his bit as a fighter pilot. He comes home a war hero, eager to pick up where he and Wilson left off at the altar. At his welcome-home party, he declares that he intends to be the breadwinner in the family, with his wife staying home where women belong (that sort of thing played better in 1953 than it does now). The problem is, unbeknownst to him, his bride-to-be has inherited a million bucks while he was away. She tries to keep it secret, but the beans get spilled before the wedding. She’s rich, he can’t find a job, so the wedding is off until things get back the way God intended.

Like I say, a bit dated. Still, it was very funny, once you tune in to the fact that the groom-to-be isn’t supposed to be an obnoxious patriarchal jerk. Wilson and Cummings’s comedy chops are considerable, and so are those of writer/director Frank Tashlin. Tashlin was a successful director of cartoon shorts at Warner Bros. who managed the unique feat of transitioning into equal success directing live-action comedies (Son of Paleface, Hollywood or Bust, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?). Tashlin never lost that Looney Tunes wackiness, and both his cartoons and his movies profited from it.

The first day wrapped up with a diverting low-camp thriller from Monogram, Invisible Ghost (1941). Bela Lugosi played an upstanding citizen living on his country estate with his daughter (Polly Ann Young) and various servants. His one peculiarity is an obsession with the wife who deserted him years ago; now every year on their anniversary he has dinner with her, requiring the butler (Clarence Muse) to serve her empty chair, and talking to her as if she is really there. What he doesn’t know is she is there, wandering the grounds of the estate, brain-damaged, for reasons too complicated to explain. He sees her every once in a while, and when he does he goes into a murderous trance and strangles the first person he sees. His killings have all gone unsolved, and even he doesn’t remember them, but when he murders his maid, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend of his daughter’s fiancé (John McGuire), the fiancé is convicted and executed for the crime. Then the fiancé’s twin (McGuire again) shows up from South America to investigate his brother’s death.

It’s all a crock, but somehow director Joseph H. Lewis manages to make something out of this sow’s ear of a script; he draws straight-faced performances from everyone; he (aided by cinematographers Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould) enhances the modest sets with atmospheric and expressive (even expressionist) lighting; and he delivers some surprisingly effective chills along the way. Invisible Ghost, all 63 min. of it, is available here on YouTube, if you’re curious. Nine years after giving this Monogram potboiler what conviction it has, Lewis would go on to direct the noir cult classic Gun Crazy (1950).

To be continued…

It’s that time of year again, and I depart once more from my focus on Golden Age Hollywood to share my story “The Sensible Christmas Wish”, first published here in 2016 about this time. 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 older person I once knew. As ever, I hope it brings you some of the magic and joy of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Happy Holidays!

Apologies for the delay in getting to Day 3. This year is a unique situation: For the first and only time, my coverage of Cinevent has conflicted with the Thanksgiving Holiday Season. What with taking down Halloween decorations, preparing for (and eating) the Big Feast, and beginning decking the halls with Yuletide trimmings, Cinevent just got elbowed aside. This will of course not be an issue when The Columbus Moving Picture Show (CMPS) takes over next Memorial Day. For now, where was I? Oh yeah…

Saturday morning at Cinevent, of course, is Cartoon Time. This year, animation curator Stewart McKissick took advantage of the scheduling anomaly to establish a Halloween theme for the program; most of the cartoons had at least a tenuous connection to something eerie, ghostly, creepy or monstrous; all that was missing was the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia. Some highlights (I include YouTube links where available):

One of my favorites this year was the first one, I Heard (1933), with Betty Boop (any Betty Boop is likely to be one of my favorites). The Halloween connection was a baseball game among ghosts at the bottom of a coal mine (the “Never Mine”) in the last minute. For the rest, it was Betty in her sex-kitten prime, with the patented Fleischer surrealist funk, set to a jazz score provided by the unjustly forgotten Don Redman and His Orchestra. I couldn’t make room for an I Heard image in this collage, so let’s move on now to the others.

Soda Squirt (1933) (top row left) had Ub Iwerks’s Flip the Frog welcoming a succession of movie stars to the Hollywood-premiere-style grand opening of his new soda fountain. These celebrity-caricature cartoons are a sub-genre in their own right (I’m always a sucker for them myself); maybe one of these years (assuming CMPS retains the Saturday animation program) Stewart will schedule a whole program just of these. He’d have plenty to choose from.

In Pluto’s Judgement Day (1935) (top row right), Mickey’s dog’s penchant for tormenting cats comes back to bite him (if you’ll pardon the expression) when he dreams himself into Kitty Hell, where he is put on trial for crimes against the feline species.

Like Duck Dodgers in the 24½^th Century (see below), Rocket to Mars (1946) (second row left) was Halloween-by-way-of-science-fiction, with Olive Oyl accidentally launching Popeye and herself into outer space, where they have a close encounter with a Bluto-like alien tyrant bent on interplanetary conquest. Curiously enough, this one was directed by Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, who created the memorable images in the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence mentioned above.

Frankenstein’s Cat (1942) (second row right) began life as one of producer Paul Terry’s Super Mouse cartoon — but very early in the series’ life, Terry got wind of a Supermouse comic-book, so to prevent confusion (and to avoid free publicity for somebody else’s product) he changed the name to Mighty Mouse. Most extant prints (including the one Cinevent saw and the one at the YouTube link) are from TV prints where “Super” is overdubbed with “Mighty”. Having originated as a Super Mouse, this one is a straight narrative, rather than one of the mini-operas the Mighty Mouse cartoons would later become. Super/Mighty is differently proportioned, too, with a bigger chest and scrawnier limbs than the character we all remember singing, “He-e-e-e-e-e-re I come to save the da-a-a-a-a-a-ay!”

The program culminated in a triple-peak of great pictures from Chuck Jones and Warner Bros., one Looney Toon and two Merrie Melodies. First was Hair-Raising Hare (1946) (third row right), featuring the first appearance of that hulking orange monster who remained unnamed on screen but was later referred to as either Rudolph or Gossamer (“Gossamer”??? I guess that’s like calling a seven-foot basketball player “Stubby”).

Duck Dodgers in the 24½^th Century (1953) (bottom row right), besides being Halloween-by-way-of-science-fiction like Rocket to Mars, is simply one of the all-time great cartoons; Stewart could screen it every year until the print disintegrated and I wouldn’t squawk. Like Hair-Raising Hare, there’s no YouTube link for this gem; you’ll just have to spring for Looney Toons Golden Collection (the first volume, hence no number) to get this and a ton of other greats. However, YouTube does have the cartoon with an amusing commentary by two gents (heretofore unknown to me) named Trevor Thompson and Sean McBee. You can access that here.

The only cartoon in this collage that gets two images (bottom left) was (1) the final one on the program and (2) one of my all-time favorites: Claws for Alarm (1954). Motoring through the Southwest, Porky and Sylvester stop for the night in a desert ghost town where Porky, not noticing the lack of inhabitants, blithely signs the cobwebby register at the hotel. The town is inhabited after all, but not by ghosts — instead, the locals are mice posing as ghosts to try to scare off the interlopers. It works on Sylvester, but Porky remains oblivious and refuses to leave. The images here show Sylvester shivering in the night (below), and (above) the departure next morning with Porky singing his hilarious broken-record rendition of “Home on the Range” (you’ll have to see it to get the joke). This one is available whole on YouTube, albeit with — I kid you not — Greek subtitles. But those are easy enough to disregard, so click on over and enjoy. (And by the way, if you’ve ever wondered what “Sylvester” looks like in Greek, it’s “ΣΙλβεστερ”. Never let it be said that Cinedrome neglects a classical education.)

After the animation program, the Saturday kiddie matinee vibe continued, as it has most years — this time with a trio of silent Our Gang shorts from Hal Roach: Dogs of War (1923), Big Business (1924; not to be confused with the 1928 Laurel and Hardy classic), and The Sun Down Limited (1924). All three were directed by the all-but-unsung Robert F. McGowan. If Hal Roach was the Our Gang series’ commanding general, McGowan was his executive officer; he directed or co-directed 102 of the shorts between 1922 and 1936 and played a major role in shaping their comic style while getting natural, unself-conscious performances from the kids. Film history owes Robert McGowan a lot. 

That said, I must confess I’m never entirely satisfied with the silent Our Gangs. Delightful as they are, I miss the voices, having first encountered and grown up with the talkie shorts on TV in their Little Rascals phase. Darla warbling “I’m in the Mood for Love”, Alfalfa screeching “The Barber of Seville”, Tommy Bond’s Butch muttering “C’mon, Woim”, the wise banter between Spanky McFarland and Scotty Beckett at their cutest — all that is a major component of the shorts’ charm for me. Still, the silent shorts are worth seeing, and not just as historical artifacts.

Then the Kiddie Matinee section of the day wound up with Chapters 7-9 of King of the Texas Rangers, and it was time for lunch.

Back from lunch break, we saw Stella (1950). The lobby card reproduced here is a trifle misleading, as can be seen by perusing my notes for the Cinevent program book:

You won’t find Claude Binyon’s name in any of the high-end film encyclopedias, and maybe that’s as it should be. Still, his career was nothing to sneeze at. Like so many screenwriters of the era, he started out as a newspaperman, working for the Chicago Examiner — then later, as city editor for Variety. Legend has it that in that capacity he concocted the immortal 1929 headline WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG — though it’s only right to mention that other legends credit Sime Silverman and Abel Green.

Whatever Binyon’s experience at the showbiz Bible, by 1932 he had segued from writing about movies to writing for them, with his first job being one of 16 writers on the omnibus comedy If I Had a Million (1932). That was one time when too many cooks didn’t spoil the soup, though it would be nice to know how much of which episode Binyon worked on.

As a contract writer at Paramount throughout the 1930s and into the ’40s, Binyon kept busy; he made uncredited contributions to such pictures as The Old Fashioned Way and It’s a Gift (both 1934), The Princess Comes Across (’37) and Dixie (’43), and he was the writer of record on a whopping 14 pictures for director Wesley Ruggles, including the Bing Crosby/Fred MacMurray/Donald O’Connor vehicle Sing, You Sinners (’38). Later, Binyon gave Der Bingle and Fred Astaire a 24-karat setting in Holiday Inn (’42) — with a major assist, of course, from Irving Berlin’s songs. Then again, Berlin also wrote the songs for the Crosby/Astaire follow-up vehicle Blue Skies (’46), with distinctly inferior results. True, director Mark Sandrich didn’t live to complete Blue Skies as he had Holiday Inn – but Binyon didn’t write Blue Skies either. Coincidence? Maybe.

Anyhow, let’s say it again: A career not to be sneezed at.

Binyon never abandoned writing for other directors, right up through Henry Hathaway’s hilarious North to Alaska (1960) and Leo McCarey’s last two pictures, 1958’s Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and Satan Never Sleeps in 1962. But he started directing his own scripts with The Saxon Charm in 1948, and continued the practice off and on through 1956, with generally happy results. Cinevent50 viewers got a delicious helping of Binyon the auteur with Dreamboat (’52), his delightful satire of Hollywood, academia and TV starring Clifton Webb and Ginger Rogers.

Dreamboat was probably the peak of Binyon’s career as writer-director, but he had come close to it two years earlier with Stella, based on Doris Miles Disney’s novel Family Skeleton. Ms. Disney’s book told the story of the Bevans family, a rather dimwitted clan whose cantankerous Uncle Joe dies accidentally during a family outing. Fearing that nobody will believe they didn’t kill the old reprobate on purpose, his surviving relatives decide to give him a hasty burial in an unmarked grave and pretend he’s just off on one of his benders. The only one not in on this birdbrained scheme is Stella, the family breadwinner and the only one with the sense God gave a goose. By the time she learns what’s happened, it seems there’s nothing to be done but ride the thing out. Then the plot thickens when it comes to light that Uncle Joe was insured for $20,000, and Stella’s layabout brothers-in-law begin conniving to cash in — and thicker still, Stella works as a secretary for Uncle Joe’s insurance agent.

The New York Times appraised Family Skeleton as “half humorous…not a mystery, hardly even a murder novel, and certainly not the light farce suggested by the publisher’s grinning skull symbol.” Which sounds odd now in light of the movie 20th Century Fox and Binyon made of the book, because a light farce is exactly what Binyon delivered, with a mix of black comedy and a New England setting that foreshadowed Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955).

The central role of Stella was reportedly first assigned to Fox contract star Susan Hayward. When she turned it down — wisely, since comedy was never Hayward’s strength — the role went to Ann Sheridan, whose droll delivery was certainly better suited to the material. Sheridan also exerted a lightening influence on co-star Victor Mature (who too seldom got to deploy his flair for comedy) as an insurance investigator who smells something fishy. But good as those two are, the movie gets stolen right out from under them by David Wayne and Frank Fontaine (still ten years from his most famous turn as Crazy Guggenheim on The Jackie Gleason Show) as the venal brothers-in-law, and by Evelyn Varden as the family’s whimpering matriarch.

In reviewing Stella for The New York Times, Thomas M. Pryor noted: “Out of an essentially macaber [sic] situation, Claude Binyon…has drawn some of the most unusual comedy of the season.” Variety’s “Brog” concurred that “a missing corpse takes on a comedic flavor with quick pacing and sharp dialog.”

As a side note, Stella marked the final (posthumous) appearance of the prolific character actor Hobart Cavanaugh as the local undertaker. This fact prompted columnist Jimmy Fidler — a week after Cavanaugh’s passing and three months before the movie’s release — to write: “Hobart Cavanaugh, who died the other day, had specialized for years in ‘Mr. Milquetoast’ roles, but I think the cast and crew of ‘Stella,’ his last picture, will always remember him as a man of extraordinary courage. Cavanaugh, who had already submitted to one operation for intestinal cancer, came to work on that picture in a dying condition, well aware of the fact that he didn’t have more than one chance in a million to live another month. He hadn’t been able to eat a bite of food for five days, and he was unable to eat during the several days it took him to complete his role. Twice he collapsed on the set, but he insisted on finishing the job. And when he had done so he said his goodbyes with a wisecrack thrown in for seasoning. ‘I play an undertaker in this picture but it’s poor casting,’ he laughed. ‘I look more like the corpse.’ It takes fortitude for a man to make remarks like that while facing another operation that is almost sure to be fatal.” This blurb has all the earmarks of an item planted by the Fox publicity department to wring some publicity out of Cavanaugh’s death. And if that sounds a little ghoulish…well, it’s not out of keeping with the spirit of the picture as a whole. 

After Stella came a conversation between ace historian/biographers Scott Eyman and Alan K. Rode. Scott was at the convention — well, he’s at Cinevent most years, but this year in particular he was there to promote (and sign copies of) his latest book, 20th Century Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio, published under the aegis of Turner Classic Movies. There have been other histories of that studio (notably Michael Troyan’s Twentieth Century Fox: A Century of Entertainment), but Scott’s has a unique advantage — besides, that is, Scott’s trenchant historical analysis and eye for the telling detail. His is the first history of 20th Century Fox to encompass the moment when the studio ceased to exist — that is, its 2018 acquisition by the Disney Company, like a once-mighty Mesoamerican empire being absorbed and obliterated by the encroaching jungle. When Disney changed the name of its new subsidiary to Twentieth Century Pictures — ironically, returning to the name Darryl Zanuck and Joseph Schenck came up with 85 years earlier — for the first time in over a hundred years the name of William Fox was missing from the motion picture business (Fox himself was ousted in 1930). Scott’s book is both a chronicle and an elegy.

I mentioned back on Day 2 Alan K. Rode’s Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, but another mention isn’t out of order. Back in the 1960s, when the Auteur Theory was reaching its maximum influence with people who indulged in such things, I remember a semi-serious joke that went around to the effect that Michael Curtiz was one director who “single-handedly disproves the Auteur Theory.” Well, to the contrary, Alan Rode’s biography makes a convincing case that Curtiz may have been more of an auteur than he usually gets credit for. In addition, Alan gives long-overdue credit to Curtiz’s wife, the writer Bess Meredyth, whose advice and script-doctoring efforts buttressed Curtiz’s career in much the same way Lady Alma Hitchcock did Sir Alfred’s. And if nothing else, we finish the book having been reminded how much Curtiz contributed to the Warner Bros. house style during the studio’s halcyon years — and continued to do so long after other creators of that style had decamped to greener pastures: Darryl Zanuck to create 20th Century Pictures and merge with Fox, Mervyn LeRoy to MGM, Hal Wallis to Paramount. If nothing else, Curtiz seems to have been able to work with Jack L. Warner longer than almost anyone. 

After Scott and Alan’s colloquy (moderated by Caroline Breder-Watts) Alan introduced another Michael Curtiz Pre-Code, The Cabin in the Cotton (1932). Richard Barthelmess played the son of a family of sharecroppers who is hungry for education to better himself, but is forced back to grueling farm work when his father suddenly dies. When his planter-landlord’s daughter (Bette Davis) goes to bat for him, he’s allowed to complete his education and winds up graduating from the fields to the office of the plantation. There he is torn in his loyalties between the boss and his roots among the hardscrabble workers, just as he is between his new rich girlfriend and his lifelong sweetheart (Dorothy Jordan). It was the kind of role Barthelmess had been playing since the late 1910s for D.W. Griffith, and truth to tell by 1932 he was getting too old really to pull it off. But audiences then looked at him and saw the youthful lad they remembered from Way Down East and Tol’able David, while we today look and see a middle-aged actor trying to pass for nineteen. Fortunately for Barthelmess’s legacy, we also see the dogged, unshowy conviction that kept his career alive through the Pre-Code era. The Cabin in the Cotton also still plays — better than it did in 1932, if Michael Haynes’s citing of contemporary critics is any indication — thanks to Curtiz’s unpretentious direction, the irresistibly fetching Dorothy Jordan, and (last but not least) Bette Davis near the beginning of her career, coyly drawling the first of her signature lines: “Ah’d like t’kiss ya, but Ah jus’ washed my hair [‘hay-ah’].” Late in life, Bette was quoted as saying that was her all-time favorite line. 

After the dinner break, it was Laurel and Hardy time again, this time Their First Mistake (1932). Ollie, nagged by his wife (“the ever-popular Mae Busch”) for spending too much time with Stanley, gets the bright idea to adopt a baby to occupy the Missus while he gallivants with Stan. Coming home with the baby, he learns that his wife has left him, so The Boys must parent the child themselves. You can imagine how that works out; by the time the short has run its 20-minute course, it’s a toss-up as to which of the three is the most helpless infant.

Then came The Haunted Castle (1921), an early — and minor — F.W. Murnau, made before even his breakthrough with Nosferatu (1922). Any Murnau is worth seeing at least once — after all, he is one of the masters, he only directed 22 pictures, and seven of those are lost — but this one was frankly pretty tough sledding. (The English subtitles on the German intertitles didn’t help.) Despite the English title, there was nothing “haunted” about it; it wasn’t a ghost or horror story, but a straightforward (and pretty rudimentary) murder mystery. In fact, the original German title was Schloss Vogelöd (“Vogelöd Castle”), a simple identification of the setting. The scenario was adapted by Carl Mayer (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Last Laugh, Sunrise) from a novel by one Rudolf Stratz. Besides Murnau and Mayer, there are no names connected with The Haunted Castle worth mentioning. The cast was a gaggle of second-string actors whose names were unknown outside Germany then and are utterly forgotten today.

Parole Fixer (1940) was a sprightly B-picture from Paramount about a conspiracy among gangsters and shyster lawyers to wangle undeserved paroles and fast-track criminals back to their nefarious ways. Supposedly based on J. Edgar Hoover’s book Persons in Hiding, the script was by the journeyman writer Horace McCoy (who did not live to see his 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? hailed as a 20th century classic), with crisp direction by Robert Florey. Top-billed William Henry, Virginia Dale, Robert Paige and Richard Denning were pretty lackluster, but the supporting cast included Lyle Talbot, Anthony Quinn, Marjory Gateson, Jack Carson and Louise Beavers.

The day finished up with…oh jeez, how shall I put this?…one of the most indelible screenings of the whole weekend. This was Sabaka (1954), a ghastly Technicolor train wreck that makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The plot concerned a young mahout (elephant wrangler) in India, Gunga Ram (Nino Marcel), seeking vengeance on the cult of Sabaka, the “fire goddess”, led by a charlatan priestess named Marku Ponjoy (prolific voice artist June Foray in a rare on-camera performance).

The provenance of Sabaka may not interest most readers, but it’s vastly more interesting than the movie itself, so here goes. The adventures of young Gunga Ram were a segment of a network-hopping kiddie show of early TV called Smilin’ Ed’s Gang, which Baby Boomers of a Certain Age may dimly remember. (Personally, I have no recollection of Gunga Ram, but I clearly remember the show, hosted by former kids’ radio personality Smilin’ Ed McConnell. I likewise remember his gang, including the puppets Midnight the Cat and Froggy the Gremlin, and his catchphrase “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”) Series producer/director Frank Ferrin expanded one of these Gunga Ram segments into feature length, dispatched a second unit to India for local color, and shot the main body of the picture in and around Los Angeles, hiring a smattering of reputable actors (Boris Karloff, Reginald Denny, Victor Jory, Jay Novello, Vito Scotti) for fly-by cameos that could be filmed in a day or two and spliced in as needed. As for that location footage — you’d think a color picture shot in India would at least have pretty scenery, but no. The credited cinematographers were Jack McCoskey and Alan Stensvold, and whichever one Ferrin sent to India had trouble even focusing the camera (which must have had the Cinevent projectionists tearing their hair). Sabaka is available complete on YouTube if you’re curious. I’ll be interested to know how long you’re able to stick it out. 

Just as Sabaka was going into release in 1954 — and in a possibly unrelated development — Smilin’ Ed McConnell dropped dead unexpectedly of a heart attack at 62. He was replaced by Andy Devine, and the show became Andy’s Gang until it finally ran its course at the end of 1960. Baby Boomers of a Slightly Younger Age may remember that incarnation of Froggy, Midnight, Gunga Ram and the rest of the gang.

And so it was, at slightly before 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning, that those of us who stayed with Sabaka to the end repaired at last to our hotel rooms, secure in the knowledge that the final day of the final Cinevent would have nothing worse in store for us.

To be concluded…

Cinevent, the venerable classic film convention that was a longtime fixture on Memorial Day Weekend in Columbus, Ohio, convened belatedly for the 52nd time October 28-31 this year. It was doubly belated, in fact — postponed from 2020 to 2021 by the COVID lockdown, then from May to October just to be on the safe side. Then this damned Delta Variant came along and seemed to threaten even that — but with vaccinations strongly encouraged and masks mandatory, the convention proceed as (re)scheduled. 

So where are the masks in this picture, you ask? Those are still in the future; the pic is from Cinevent 51 in 2019, when Cinevent chair Michael Haynes (left) and Dealers’ Room coordinator Samantha Glasser announced that Cinevent 52 (expected, naturally, to be in 2020) would be the last. Cinevent’s founders were all gone. John Baker, much the oldest of the three, was the first to go, after a long retirement in Florida; then John Stingley died in 2007 at 59; Michael’s father Steven, the last survivor, passed away in April 2015 as Cinevent 47 was gearing up. Now, in 2019, Michael and his mother Barbara decided it was time to step down from active participation, retire the Cinevent name, and pass the torch if anyone cared to carry it forward.

Fortunately, Samantha did, along with a significant cadre of Cinevent’s dedicated staff. In 2019 they were seeking suggestions for a new name; now they have one: The Columbus Moving Picture Show (CMPS). And so it is that The Classic Film Convention Formerly Known as Cinevent will go forward under that name, and will return to Memorial Day Weekend — only seven months away.

In the meantime, CMPS served as co-presenter of Cinevent 52, so let’s have a look at the program for this final year.

One feature of this and the two previous Cinevents that I hope CMPS will continue is the practice of scheduling a 12-chapter serial throughout the weekend, screening three chapters on each of the four mornings. This tradition-in-the-making began at Cinevent 50 with The Masked Marvel (1943), a spirited Republic actioner about fighting home-front saboteurs during World War II. In its day it was upstaged by “the Masked Marvel murder“, the bizarre unsolved killing of one of its leading players weeks before the first chapter hit theaters; today the murder is a forgotten footnote, while the serial remains good fun. In 2019 Cinevent presented Hawk of the Wilderness, a bizarre mash-up of Tarzan of the Apes, The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island and The Last Days of Pompeii that I’m told has a good rep among serial aficionados, but which I could never get behind.

This year brought King of the Texas Rangers (1941) (like its predecessors, from the…er, “economical” Republic Pictures factory). The star was pro football’s Sammy Baugh (dubbed “Slingin’ Sammy” by sportswriters and Republic publicists; Baugh himself preferred plain “Sam”) as “Smashin’ Tom” King, likewise a pro footballer (the kind who boldly goes for a first down on fourth-and-eight — and makes it). When Tom’s Texas Ranger father is killed while investigating sinister foreign sabotage in Texas, Tom puts his gridiron career on hold while he enlists in the Rangers and picks up where Dad left off. (America not yet being involved in World War II, the culprits are not specifically identified as they cruise around in their zeppelin plotting mischief, but their stiff-arm salutes and Teutonic accents leave no doubt about what nationality they’re supposed to be.)

Sammy Baugh’s own pro career didn’t have to wait; King of the Texas Rangers was filmed during his off-season (he played for the Washington Redskins from 1937 to ’52). As an actor, Baugh was no threat to Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, but he was up to the modest demands of a Republic serial hero right enough, and having been raised on a Texas farm, he was as good a horseman as any stuntman on the lot.

Besides, he was buoyed by a good supporting cast. Neil Hamilton, playing a quisling saboteur, had started in the 1920s as a leading man for D.W. Griffith; by 1941 his star had dimmed somewhat (he was best remembered as the luckless wimp who lost Maureen O’Sullivan to Johnny Weismuller in MGM’s first two Tarzan pictures), but he was still soldiering on in the trenches, as he would continue to do through the end of the 1960s; later generations would know him as Commissioner Gordon to Adam West’s Batman. Duncan Renaldo (still ten years from his signature gig as TV’s Cisco Kid) played a Mexican federale on assignment north of the border, serving as Baugh’s cheerful sidekick. And Pauline Moore, as a plucky Lois Lane-style newspaper reporter, contributed as much as mere “girls” were allowed to do in Republic serials. Toss in the usual contingent of two-fisted gun-toting henchmen from the studio’s stable of stuntmen, and breakneck direction from William Witney and John English, and the recipe was complete.

After the first three chapters of King, it was time to bring on the features. The Great Hotel Murder  (1935) was the sixth re-teaming of Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen as dueling frenemies, after their 1926 hit What Price Glory as Marine Corps Sgt. Quirt (Lowe) and Captain Flagg (McLaglen). Some of those re-teamings were straight Quirt/Flagg sequels, with the boys battling over some female or other; others, like this one, varied the formula a bit. Here Lowe played a famous mystery novelist horning in on house detective McLaglen’s investigation of a murder at a medical convention meeting in the hotel where McLaglen works and Lowe lives. This time it’s not a woman they’re fighting over, but bragging rights for solving the murder. It was a fun banter-fest and a pretty clever mystery, albeit with an abrupt and confusing climax (Dave Domagala’s program notes alluded to some maladroit pre-release editing that mucked things up).

The weekend’s first silent was 1928’s The Michigan Kid, from a novel by Rex Beach. Conrad Nagel played a gambling-house owner in the Alaska Gold Rush of the 1890s, with Renee Adoree as the childhood sweetheart he hopes to marry. Beautiful scenery and an impressive forest fire climax bolstered the film. Then it was Welcome Home (1935), a complicated sting operation (and who isn’t a sucker for those?) with con-artist James Dunn returning to his home town for a chamber of commerce reunion, then discovering that one of his partners in crime (Raymond Walburn) has swindled the town fathers in a stock scam. Getting the money back before the game is discovered, plus inducing a New York tycoon to invest in the local economy, made up the bulk of the picture’s 73 minutes. Arline Judge, Rosina Lawrence, William Frawley and Charles Sellon rounded out the cast. 

After the dinner break came the highlight of the day and one of the highlights of the whole weekend. This was Pursued (1947), a moody, genre-bending melodrama from Warner Bros., director Raoul Walsh and writer Niven Busch. On the surface Pursued is a western, but with enough elements of film noir to bolster those who maintain that noir is less a genre than a style. On top of the western/noir mix, there’s a soupçon of Wuthering Heights‘s Cathy/Heathcliff/Hindley triangle of sexual obsession and sibling rivalry, and even a few threads of Moby Dick in the obsessive, vendetta-driven character played by Dean Jagger.

The story opens in the New Mexico Territory in the 1880s. Eleven-year-old Jeb Rand survives the massacre of his family by cowering in the cellar of their cabin, seeing only confusing glimpses of the slaughter that will haunt his nightmares well into adulthood. He is discovered in the aftermath by the widow Callum (Judith Anderson), a neighboring rancher who takes him home and raises him as a foster son. Years later, he has grown into Robert Mitchum, in love with his foster sister Thor Callum (Teresa Wright), loathed and resented by her brother Adam (John Rodney), and still haunted by those nightmares. Lurking on the edges of his life is Widow Callum’s brother Grant (Dean Jagger), waiting impatiently for the day he can bring about Jeb’s death, either personally or by manipulating the resentments of others. In service to Grant’s malignant hatred a number of bystanders, even an innocent pony, are made to bite the dust.

The torrid, borderline-incestuous passion between Jeb and Thor is the fraught focus of Pursued. Writer Niven Busch was no stranger to sexual ferment, whether in a western (Duel in the Sun) or a film noir (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), and if Pursued doesn’t quite have the lurid, panting carnality of those challenges to the Production Code, it still has an adult-content edge that makes it something more than a family-feud shoot-’em-up. By the time just deserts got meted out, the Cinevent audience was keyed up enough to burst into applause well before the final credits.

After that, we all unwound with Helpmates (1932), one of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts, in which The Boys frantically try to straighten up Ollie’s house after a wild party and before the shrewish Mrs. Hardy (Blanche Payson) gets home from her visit to Mother. Then came The Clinging Vine (1926), a silent romantic comedy in which Leatrice Joy (with her gender-bending signature male haircut) plays a career-driven business executive who takes lessons in femininity from her prospective grandmother-in-law to help her win the boss’s son (Tom Moore) by making him think he’s the brainy one.

Then, just like that, it was back to melodrama for Black Tuesday (1954), with Edward G. Robinson leading a daring prison break — from Death Row, no less — along with girlfriend Jean Parker and fellow condemned killer Peter Graves; before they can make a clean getaway with Graves’s $200,000 in stashed loot, the exploit degenerates into a hostage situation on the top floor of a warehouse. The lobby card here promises “The most ruthless Robinson of all time!” — and by golly, that’s not far off the truth. His Vincent Canelli makes Little Caesar and Key Largo‘s Johnny Rocco look like Southern Baptist deacons. “Some people have youth, some have beauty,” Robinson once famously said, “I have menace.” In Black Tuesday Robinson is at his menacing-est. Sidney Boehm’s script is peppered with indictments of capital punishment, but Robinson’s Canelli undercuts them: Nothing but cyanide pellets, a bullet in the head, or 25,000 volts will do for this vicious beast. Screenings of Black Tuesday are evidently rare, due (it is said) to a complicated copyright arrangement that’s more trouble to work out than it’s worth. Too bad; it’s a tight, grueling 80 minutes (thanks to director Hugo Fregonese), with Robinson at his late-career best heading a cast that includes Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, James Bell, Russell Johnson and Frank Ferguson.

And that closed out the first day of the last Cinevent. More was to come.

To be continued…