Heading into the home stretch of this first Columbus Moving Picture Show, we saw…I believe the customary term is “the thrilling conclusion” with Chapters 9-12 of Adventures of Red Ryder. Justice triumphed, bad guys got what was coming to them (banker Drake met a particularly grisly end), and surviving good guys lived happily until the next adventure — which came in the funny papers, on radio, and in B-western features; there were to be no more serials.

Then we saw former child star Jackie Cooper in the first of 73 adult roles in his 61-year career: Stork Bites Man (1947). This was the second picture for which I contributed notes to The Picture Show program, and here they are:

In 1945 Mary Pickford, still dabbling in movies from her boozy retirement at Pickfair, formed a production company, Comet Pictures, with husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Ralph Cohn. Cohn was the son of Jack and nephew of Harry, the battling brothers who were always at each other’s throats over the running of Columbia Pictures, where Ralph had been a B-picture producer, turning out installments in the Crime Doctor, Lone Wolf, Boston Blackie and Ellery Queen series, along with other low-budget efforts.

The model for Comet Pictures was Hal Roach’s “Streamliners”, mid-length pictures longer than short subjects but less than an hour long and aimed at the bottom slot on double features. Comet productions came in right around 65 minutes, as does our specimen, Stork Bites Man.

The germ of Stork Bites Man was a slim book by Louis Pollock, subtitled “What the Expectant Father May Expect”. Pollock’s comic treatise, dedicated to the proposition that no man is ever ready for fatherhood, never made the bestseller lists. But being published in 1945 during the waning months of World War II, it fortuitously caught the leading edge of the Baby Boom, when millions of returning servicemen were poised to go through what Pollock wrote about.

In adapting Stork Bites Man to the screen in 1947, there was a catch: Most of what Pollock wrote about was frowned upon by the Production Code, if not downright forbidden. This included such things as morning sickness, food cravings, mood swings, a high-strung wife losing (temporarily) her figure — even the words “pregnant” and “pregnancy” themselves. Writer/director Cyril (“Cy”) Endfield and adapter Fred Freiberger met the challenge by changing the story’s focus: Instead of Lou Pollock coping with his wife Cleta’s nine expectant months, their theme was America’s post-war housing shortage.

And so it was that Lou and Cleta Pollock were renamed Ernie Brown (Jackie Cooper) and his wife Peg (Gene Roberts, later to change her name to Meg Randall), resident managers of an apartment house. The landlord (Emory Parnell) doesn’t allow families with children, and housing being a seller’s market after American industry’s four years of single-minded focus on wartime production, he’s able to get away with it. The first half of the picture chronicles Ernie’s efforts to keep Peg’s condition secret from the boss. Inevitably, once the cat is out of the bag (if you’ll pardon the expression), Ernie is fired, he and Peg are evicted, and Ernie decides to organize a strike among workers and tenants to force a change of policy.

Variety found Stork Bites Man a “lightweight comedy that’ll serve for dualers,” reserving special praise for Jackie Cooper and co-star Gus Schilling as a baby-supplies salesman. Still, amusing as it was, its theme of the little guy organizing against the hard-hearted plutocracy was the kind of candy-coated leftism that would in time draw the baleful attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cy Endfield’s time came in 1951; blacklisted for his Young Communist League activism at Yale in the 1930s, he relocated to the U.K., where he worked for a while under various aliases, finally resuming his real name in 1957. Depending on your point of view, his directing career peaked either with the 1961 Jules Verne fantasy The Mysterious Island (with visual effects by the great Ray Harryhausen) or with 1964’s Zulu, about the battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (starring Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, and the up-and-coming Michael Caine). Endfield lost interest in filmmaking in 1971, but he remained an author, inventor, and amateur magician for the rest of his life; he died in England in 1995, age 80.

Comet Pictures, alas, fizzled after only four releases; Stork Bites Man was probably its best, and certainly its last. Cy Endfield (as noted) moved to England. Ralph Cohn returned to Columbia to head Screen Gems, the studio’s TV distribution wing. Fred Freiberger went on to produce The Six Million Dollar Man, Space: 1999 and the original Star Trek, among other TV programs. Buddy Rogers and Mary Pickford, of course, retreated to Pickfair, where Buddy became Mary’s devoted caretaker for the rest of her long life, and custodian of her legend for the rest of his.

Wild Beauty (1927) was a vehicle for the equine star Rex, who was introduced to audiences in The King of the Wild Horses (1924, screened at Cinevent 50 in 2018). Rex was “discovered” by Hal Roach, who used Rex to get his feet wet in feature production. Rex has the distinction of being the only horse in history to become a genuine movie star without (literally) supporting some human cowboy star. With Rex it was the other way around: In his pictures, the humans (figuratively) supported him. In the course of his career, which lasted until 1938, he was variously billed as “Rex the Wonder Horse” or (echoing the title of his film debut) “King of the Wild Horses”. By the time of Wild Beauty, Hal Roach had decided to postpone his move into features a few years, so he sold Rex to Carl Laemmle over at Universal. The plot of this first Universal Rex picture had human hero Hugh Allen rescuing a mare he names “Valerie” from the battlefields of the Great War; he brings her home, where wild stallion Rex tries to lure her away from the ranch. Soon Rex is vying for Valerie’s attention with another stallion named Starbright. Meanwhile, there’s a parallel human romance between rancher Hugh Allen and June Marlowe — later, with blonde hair, to be beloved by generations of children as Miss Crabtree in the Our Gang shorts. But June Marlowe’s glory years were still in the future, and does anybody know or remember who Hugh Allen was? (Actually, his birth name was Allan Hughes; the spelling of his professional surname varied between “Allan” and “Allen”. He lived to be 93 but his film career ended at 27 without making the slightest impression.)

The humans hardly matter, though; Rex is pretty much the whole show. Now he makes an impression. Elinor Glyn, the British erotic novelist, famously tagged Clara Bow as having “It“, that elusive, hard-to-pinpoint magnetic power that attracts both sexes. According to Mme. Glyn, Rex had it too: “Rex has ‘it’ and if I could only find a leading man with the same look in his eye, my quest would be finished. He is not just a horse. He has personality and he exudes something beyond all this, and that is the spirit of romance.” I don’t know if Mme. Glyn’s words sounded as vaguely alarming in the 1920s as they do now, but there’s no denying that Rex had something, nor that the camera found it a joy to behold. And it wasn’t just the tricks he learned from a trainer. The buzz is that, like a number of human stars, Rex was notoriously difficult to work with — in Rex’s case, owing to some pretty brutal abuse in his early years. The difference, in Rex’s case, was that “difficult” could translate to “murderous” when you weigh approximately 1,400 pounds. Dangerous and unpredictable — maybe that’s what comes through on screen, and what gave Rex “It“.

Love Thy Neighbor (1940) provided the final highlight of the weekend. Expertly directed by the nimble Mark Sandrich, it capitalized on the p.r. “feud” between radio comedians Jack Benny at NBC and Fred Allen over at CBS, much the way 1937’s Wake Up and Live (Cinevent 51, Day 2) exploited the equally spurious clash between Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. Allen and Benny were both professional funny men, so it was generally understood that their feud was all in fun; no one ever seems to have taken it seriously, as some did Bernie and Winchell’s.

The plot of Love Thy Neighbor offered new-minted Broadway star Mary Martin as Fred Allen’s (fictitious) niece Mary Allen. Mary goes to Benny’s office in an effort to negotiate a truce between the two men, then in a case of mistaken identity, she auditions for and gets cast as the leading lady of Benny’s new stage show, under the name of Virginia Astor. In Miami for rehearsals and the out-of-town opening, Benny winds up in a hotel suite next to Allen, who is also in Miami under doctor’s orders to work off the stress of the feud. While they’re all in Miami, with Mary walking the tightrope between her uncle and her boss, the real Virginia Astor (Virginia Dale) shows up, and…well, imagine the possibilities.

Love Thy Neighbor came midway in the three or four years during which Mary Martin tried and failed to transfer her stage stardom to the screen. Like her great rival Ethel Merman, there was something in her star persona that simply didn’t photograph well. In Merman’s case, she tended to come off as too big and brassy for the screen, even in the early years when she was still rather petite (and even a bit of a “dish”). With Martin, it wasn’t “too big”, but “too chilly”; somehow the camera didn’t warm to her, and neither did audiences. (Not until the 1950s, with TV productions of Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun did Martin approach her Broadway success, and those performances — preserved, thank God — remain the best record we have of her.) Martin isn’t quite able to provide the musical spice to Love Thy Neighbor that Alice Faye did to Wake Up and Live, but she at least is allowed to perform her first signature song, Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, slightly bowdlerized but within two years of introducing it.

What musical spice Love Thy Neighbor contains is rather fleeting, and from a surprising source. This is a nifty blend of Shakespeare and jitterbug entitled “Dearest, Darest I” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Eddie Anderson as Benny’s valet Rochester and Theresa Harris as his girlfriend Josephine. Anderson was so famous for his role that he was often billed with “Rochester” as his middle name, and sometimes by that name alone. His gravelly voice (the result of ruptured vocal cords as a newsboy in his youth) meant that Dick Powell and Nelson Eddy’s jobs were safe, but Anderson could put a song over with personality, and that voice (plus the generosity of Jack Benny, who saw to it that he always got all the best lines) made him a star. 

Now a few words about Theresa Harris (1906-85). This woman is long overdue for some kind of recognition. Hollywood blogger Steve Cubine, in a 2019 post about Harris, said, “Hollywood just didn’t know what to do with the talented Miss Harris,” but that’s a crock. Hollywood knew damn well what to do with Theresa Harris, they just wouldn’t let her do it. She was beautiful, intelligent and sexy; she could act, she could sing, she could dance. And oh yes, she was African-American. So naturally, she played maids. In a little over 100 films in a little under 30 years, you could find her picking up after, dressing the hair of, or laying out clothes for more than half the leading ladies in Hollywood — Lilyan Tashman, Thelma Todd, Lupe Velez, Ginger Rogers (twice), Margaret Lindsay, Barbara Stanwyck (twice), Mae Clarke, Constance Cummings, Billie Burke, Helen Morgan, Gloria Stuart, Claire Trevor, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Frances Dee, Betty Grable, Lillian Gish, June Haver, Maureen O’Hara, Gloria Grahame, Maureen O’Sullivan, Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Arlene Dahl, Jane Russell — you name her, chances are at some time or other you’ll see Theresa Harris standing behind her in a black dress and white lace cap, hands demurely folded in front of her. If she seldom got to show what she could really do, at least she was never used for coarse comic relief, and so could invest her roles with a dignity that plays well today — see her especially as Chico to Stanwyck’s Lily in Baby Face (1933) and as the wise house servant Alma in I Walked with a Zombie (’43). She was released from domestic service at least twice: Here in Love Thy Neighbor and in a previous turn as Rochester’s Josephine in another Jack Benny vehicle, Buck Benny Rides Again earlier in 1940. In that outing she and Anderson got to sing and dance “My My” by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh. (It’s probably not a coincidence that Buck Benny was also directed by Mark Sandrich. Good for him.) There’s plenty of good work from Theresa Harris if you know where to look, but in those days of artistic apartheid, she is yet another example of a Great Star Who Never Was.

I was much looking forward to seeing The Student of Prague in Columbus this year, but I was laboring under a misunderstanding: I thought we were getting the 1926 silent with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss. Instead, it was The Student of Prague (1913), the earlier version. And considering how much cinema all over the world evolved between 1913 and 1926, it must be said that what we saw was a much earlier version. The picture tells the story of Balduin (Paul Wegener), a college student less interested in academics than in drinking, gambling, dueling, and — it is discreetly hinted — whoring (“The more things change…”). As Balduin fritters away his limited funds, he is approached by a whimsical old man named Scapinelli (John Gottowt). He offers Balduin a vast fortune (“100,000 pieces of gold”, “600,000 florins”, or other amounts, depending on which translation you watch) in exchange for any single item the old boy is able to find in Balduin’s lodging. Knowing he owns practically nothing, Balduin readily signs Scapinelli’s contract, and forthwith he is showered with a mountain of coins. He leads Scapinelli to his barely-furnished room, where the old man claims an item Balduin wouldn’t have thought was part of the deal: His reflection in the mirror. 

Only momentarily dismayed at his failure to cast a reflection, Balduin sallies forth with his newfound funds, becoming the life of every party. But his reflection dogs his every move, becoming in effect his evil twin, and working mischief in the lives of Balduin and everyone around him — the barmaid who loves him (Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s wife at the time), the countess whom he loves (Grete Berger), the countess’s fiancé (Fritz Weidemann). Things do not end well for anyone but Scapinelli.

The Student of Prague is widely regarded as “the first German art film”. But it’s an art film in comparison to what came before it, not to what came after. It wouldn’t be till after the Great War — to be precise, with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — that Germany vaulted to the front rank of world film. But Student has its points. The locations (it was actually shot in and around Prague) are attractive, the special effects surprisingly sophisticated — and most of all, there’s Paul Wegener. Wegener had a spectacular screen presence — in The Golem (1920) he gives one of the great performances of the silent era — and it comes through even in the blurriest versions of Student to be found on YouTube. Just take a gander at the lobby card above; notice how even with Lyda Salmonova flaunting her bare legs, your eye is drawn irresistibly to Wegener. 

There are several copies of The Student of Prague available on YouTube. The best one I could find is this one — but some of the intertitles come and go quickly, so be prepared to pause as needed. The best reason to see it remains Paul Wegener. The 1926 remake is there too, with an excellent image but, alas, no translations for the German titles. If you read German, here it is, with Conrad Veidt as Balduin and Werner Krauss (the original Dr. Caligari) as Scapinelli. The remake is still on my bucket list, but Conrad Veidt has some mighty big shoes to fill.

Cigarette Girl (1947) brought The Picture Show to a close, not with a bang — but to be fair, not really with a whimper either. For the benefit of Cinedrome readers who are not of a Certain Age, a cigarette girl was an employee of a restaurant or night club who, like a cocktail waitress, roamed among the customers’ tables with a tray slung around her neck (as in this poster) offering tobacco products for sale: “Cigars…cigarettes…pipe tobacco…” This was a viable line of work in the days when (1) indoor smoking was not only legal, but everyone without exception smoked, and (2) a cigar or a pack of cigarettes could be had for small change — say, ten cents for a pack of Luckies or Camels, or a White Owl or Dutch Masters cigar. The girl usually had to buy her own stock, but she could get it wholesale, and the tips could be pretty good: If a guy wanted to impress a date, or to hit on the cigarette girl herself, he might slip her a buck for a dime pack of cigarettes and tell her to keep the change. At that rate, with luck, she could earn her month’s rent of, say, $45.00 in a couple or three nights. 

End of history lesson. The cigarette girl of the title was played by Columbia contract player Leslie Brooks, the sort who played supports and bits in A-pictures and leads in B’s like this. Likewise leading man Jimmy Lloyd, and as a romantic team the two of them were blandly personable. They meet on neutral ground and launch a courtship under harmlessly false pretenses: She’s a “lowly” cigarette girl, but tells him she’s a popular night club singer; meanwhile he tells her he’s an oil company president (if memory serves, he’s really a gas station attendant). But lo and behold, their Little White Lies come true — by the final fadeout he’s a tycoon, she’s a Broadway star, and all’s right with the world. Russ Morgan and his Orchestra performed class arrangements to the songs by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts — I sat there tapping my toes as the movie unspooled, though I couldn’t have hummed a single tune ten minutes after the lights came up. All in all, a pleasant palate-cleanser to close out the day, and the weekend.

Thus did The Columbus Moving Picture Show take up the Cinevent torch, banner, baton — fill in the metaphor of your choice — for 2022. Memorial Day 2023 will be here before any of us know it, so take my advice and make your plans now; start by getting on their mailing list and Liking them on Facebook. I hope to see you in Columbus next year. Don’t forget to say hi.

Day 2 of The Columbus Moving Picture Show began — after Chapters 4-6 of Adventures of Red Ryder, of course — with another happy holdover from Cinevent, one which dates back at least to 2001: the Festival of Charley Chase Shorts.

Charley Chase: cheerful, dapper, handsome, doggedly normal, even ordinary, yet constantly put-upon and buffeted by events not of his making; for nearly 20 years it was a winning screen persona for the man born Charles Joseph Parrott in 1893. By now Charley needs no introduction to Cinevent/Picture Show regulars, but there may be Cinedrome readers who are still unfamiliar with him. Unlike every other great silent clown — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, even Roscoe Arbuckle before his murder trials scuttled his career — Charley Chase never moved up to features, other than the occasional supporting role for friends, as in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933). But he made hundreds of one- and two-reel shorts between 1914 and 1940, hitting his stride in the 1920s for Hal Roach. When Roach himself began concentrating on features and moving away from shorts, he dumped Chase in 1936, whereupon Charley moved over to Columbia, where he both acted in shorts and directed them, sometimes under his real name (more about that later today). Maybe Chase felt temperamentally unsuited to features, or maybe he was just behind the curve and would have made the leap eventually. We’ll never know because he drank himself to death in 1940 at 46, and his life and work, once quite popular, went down the memory hole.

Fortunately, interest in Charley Chase has been on the upswing since the 1990s (witness the Cinevent tributes appearing in 2001 and thereafter), and it’s much easier to find him than in the first decades after his death. There’s a Web site, The World of Charley Chase, with a lot of good information, although it appears not to have been updated since 2019. And anyone wishing to sample Charley’s work will find plenty to choose from on Amazon and YouTube. On Amazon I particularly recommend the series Charley Chase: At Hal Roach: The Talkies from The Sprocket Vault and Kit Parker Films — three volumes so far, with a fourth coming in October.

In recent years the Cinevent emphasis has been on Chase’s silent shorts, and so it was this year at The Picture Show. There were three in all:

Innocent Husbands (1925)  Faithful husband Charley flies into a panic when a drunk woman from a party next door passes out in his apartment — and jealous wifey (Katherine Grant) is due home any minute.

Dog Shy (1926)  Charley, who has a serious phobia about dogs, tries to help a female friend from college escape from an arranged marriage to a pompous duke. His efforts are frustrated by the presence of her family’s enormous dog — also, curiously, named Duke.

Limousine Love (1928)  Already late for his wedding, Charley is delayed even further when a naked lady takes refuge in the back seat of his limo (don’t ask). A passerby, hearing Charley’s predicament, offers to help — he doesn’t know, and neither does Charley, that Charley’s nude passenger is his wife.

The day’s first feature was Ramrod (1947), introduced by James D’Arc. James, in addition to being a film historian, is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and the author of When Hollywood Came to Utah, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve ever visited or driven through the Beehive State, you know the beauty of its scenery — there’s much more to it than just the Great Salt Desert. Hollywood has indeed come there to work. You might be surprised to learn how many movies have been shot there, many of them drawn to the terrible, majestic desolation of Monument Valley.

But not all. Ramrod was one that passed on Monument Valley in favor of Zion National Park and the ghost town of Grafton just south of the park. Wikipedia even claims that Ramrod‘s producer Harry Sherman actually purchased Grafton to use as a filming location, but I was able to find no confirmation of this in James D’Arc’s book, so…well, Wikipedia, you know. Still, no denying that Sherman, “a westerner at heart” in James’s words, was taken with Utah in general and Grafton in particular. 

Like Pursued (1947) at last year’s Cinevent, Ramrod is a western with overtones of film noir. If anything, in Ramrod the overtones are even more pronounced; among them being the inclusion of a femme fatale played by Veronica Lake, then-wife of director Andre de Toth (this was their first project together). Check out the slogan on this poster about men being so easy; other posters were even more provocative: “They called it God’s Country…until the Devil put this woman there!” Both catchphrases aptly summarize Connie Dickason, Lake’s character — although, seeing as how the movie takes place sometime in the 1880s, I don’t recall her ever showing as much leg or décolletage as she does on this poster. In fact, I don’t think we saw so much as an ankle.

But this femme was plenty fatale, make no mistake. Ruthless, duplicitous and manipulative, she plays all the men around her against each other to make a go of her cattle empire: her ranch foreman, or “ramrod” (Joel McCrea); her decent weakling of a father (Charlie Ruggles); a good-bad-man drifter (Don DeFore); a rival rancher and former suitor (Preston Foster); the local sheriff (Donald Crisp); and various bystanders who become collateral damage in her drive to prevail. Her conniving is so over the top that at the film’s dénouement (which I will not spoil here), more than a few satisfied chuckles rippled through The Picture Show screening room. This may well be Veronica Lake’s best performance. Her director husband de Toth deserves credit, too, for effectively disguising the fact that at 5 ft. 1 in., she’s at least a foot or more shorter than all the men she uses, bullies and domineers.

Moving on, to after the lunch break…

In 1936 Paramount released a picture entitled Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, in which Gladys George played a prostitute who reforms for the sake of two orphans and starts a successful laundry business, only to have heartache beset her and the orphans as the children grow to adulthood, with (to paraphrase Thelma Ritter in All About Eve) everything but the bloodhounds snapping at their rear ends. It was a shameless six-hanky tearjerker and a big hit; Gladys George was nominated for an Academy Award. That was then. Now, Valiant Is the Word for Carrie is as utterly forgotten as any major Hollywood A-picture of the sound era. Gladys George lost her Oscar bid to Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, and she’s mainly remembered now as Miles Archer’s cheating wife in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the woman who says, “He used to be a big shot” about James Cagney at the end of The Roaring ’20s (1939).

If you think I’m building up to telling you that Valiant Is the Word for Carrie was screened at this year’s Picture Show, I’m not. I’m setting up one of the most exquisitely hilarious jokes in movie history, one that everyone understood at the time, but which nobody gets anymore. It so happens that the following year, the Three Stooges came out with one of their best-remembered shorts. It’s still very popular, but its most brilliant joke, which goes over the head of every Stooges fan today, is its title: Violent Is the Word for Curly (1937).

And how’s this for a coincidence: This classic Stooges short was directed by none other than our good friend Charley Chase, returning to the Picture Show screening room with only lunch and Ramrod between his last appearance and this. The academic robes in this shot are because Moe, Larry and Curly play gas station attendants who — never mind why — find themselves mistaken for three distinguished professors newly hired at a women’s college. The company of so many beautiful young co-eds is all it takes for the three of them to decide to go along with the mistake, and their introduction to the student body (if you’ll pardon the expression) leads to one of the Stooges’ most famous bits, one they performed live at personal appearances for years afterwards. This is the song “Swingin’ the Alphabet”, interpolated here by Charley, who learned it from his family maid. Stewart McKissick’s program notes tell us that the song itself was the work of the 19th century songwriter Septimus Winner (“Listen to the Mockingbird”, “Ten Little Indians”). Maybe so, but as done by the Stooges it definitely has a 1930s swingtime rollick to it. The whole short can be seen on YouTube, and here’s just the song — rather nicely colorized.

The title of Is Everybody Happy? (1943) was the trademarked catchphrase of bandleader Ted Lewis, who was a household name second only to Paul Whiteman in the 1920s, well before the advent of what we know as the Big Band Era, and would remain so well into the ’60s. He was an indifferent musician (his instrument was the clarinet) and a vocalist with a range of approximately one note, but his schmaltzy personality struck a chord with ballroom and radio audiences and he was a popular front man, especially since the band he fronted was so very good (indifferent clarinetist or no, he knew talent when he hired it, and his band was an early stop for such future greats as Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Muggsy Spanier and Jack Teagarden). 

Lewis’s lilting, wistful refrain between songs of “Is EVVVV’rybody HAPPP…pyyyy…?” was so instantly recognizable and widely imitated that it had already served as the title for his first film musical in 1929. That had been a bit of a train wreck and was completely forgotten by the time Columbia used the title 14 years later for this B-picture, an early specimen of what would come to be known as the jukebox musical. That “18 terrific tunes!” on this poster was no exaggeration; the songs, all easily sing-along-able chestnuts for 1943 audiences, included “Am I Blue?”, “Cuddle Up a Little Closer”, “St. Louis Blues”, “When My Baby Smiles at Me”, and (as the saying goes) many more. With a running time of only 74 min., the music never stopped for long. A good thing, too.

The last feature before dinner was the earliest of the whole weekend: Happiness (1917). It was, as Variety pointed out in its review on May 4 of that year, essentially a “poor little rich girl” picture, with Enid Bennett as a super-wealthy and super-shy heiress who gets a reputation for snobbery thanks to a snarky profile in a newspaper magazine supplement. When she goes away to college, eager to make friends, she finds that her bogus “reputation” precedes her and everybody shuns her — except for one decent fellow (Charles Gunn) working his way through college by taking in laundry. It was a diverting little drama, but the most remarkable thing about it is its basic premise: A perfectly nice person who wouldn’t harm anybody finds her life (almost) ruined by some nasty reporter for no better reason than to sell newspapers. That this plot device could be employed without even raising an eyebrow more than a hundred years ago suggests that contempt and mistrust for a dishonest, yellow-journalism news media isn’t as recent a phenomenon as we might think. 

After the dinner break we leapt forward 98 years, from the earliest movie at The Picture Show to the most recent. This was Bride of Finklestein (2015) — not only the most recent film of the weekend, but “younger” than anything ever shows at Cinevent during it’s 52-year run. But while it may have come into being only seven years ago, in content, style and spirit it’s much older — say, somewhere between 1935 and 1940.

Let me explain. Bride of Finklestein is one of the extant comedy shorts of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster. Biffle and Shooster, in turn, are the creations of Nick Santa Maria (Biffle, left), Will Ryan (Shooster, right), and their producer-director Michael Schlesinger (not pictured, but a veteran contributor to past Cinevents). Together they made a number of Biffle and Shooster shorts between 2013 and 2015, faithfully duplicating the black-and-white style of such classic comedy teams as Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Wheeler and Woolsey, with titles like It’s a Frame-Up!, Imitation of Wife, and Schmo Boat (that last one a musical in a pretty faithful approximation of Cinecolor). On the strength of just Bride of Finklestein, I can testify that Biffle and Shooster can hold their own among those classic teams, and are much funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey (but then, root canals are funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey). There are two Biffle and Shooster collections available that I know of: The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster can be streamed on Amazon Prime. There is also a DVD, The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster; which has everything on the streaming Adventures, plus 28 minutes of other odds and ends; the DVD can be obtained from Amazon (curiously, the DVD is a Kino Lorber release, but the KL Web site offers only the shorter Adventures). Sadly, what we have now of Biffle and Shooster is all we’ll ever get: Will (“Sam Shooster”) Ryan passed away in November 2021; The Picture Show’s screening of Bride of Finklestein, introduced by Michael Schlesinger, was dedicated to his memory.

Bride of Finklestein also served as a kind of lead-in to the next feature, which was introduced by Nick (“Benny Biffle”) Santa Maria. This was Hold That Ghost (1941), Abbott and Costello’s third starring feature, and one of their best. It started out as a B-comedy, Oh, Charlie, produced before their previous vehicle, Buck Privates, was released. When Buck Privates became Universal’s biggest hit in years and Universal finally realized what they had in Bud and Lou, Oh, Charlie was held back while they rushed the team into another service comedy, In the Navy. Meanwhile, Oh, Charlie was pumped up to A-picture status by adding musical numbers with the Andrews Sisters (who supported Bud and Lou in both service pictures) and (once again!) Ted Lewis. Retitled Hold That Ghost, it was released on August 30, the third of their four pictures for 1941.

Personally, I still say the team’s masterpiece is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); after that, my own favorite is The Time of Their Lives (’46), with Lou and Marjorie Reynolds as ghosts from the American Revolution haunting modern-day Bud. Hold That Ghost, which has Bud and Lou treasure-hunting in a supposedly haunted old tavern they’ve inherited from a dead gangster, is right up there with them, funny enough to make the tacked-on musical numbers worth sitting through. Funniest scene: a levitating candle that scares the wits out of Lou but refuses to budge when Bud is looking. Pleasant surprise: Joan Davis as a radio actress who specializes in screams; she’s a scream herself, as funny as Lou. 

Next to the 1930s pastiche of Bride of Finklestein, the most recent picture at The Picture Show this year was Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), a lumpy, slipshod caper comedy that had Robert Wagner as the naïve nephew of a Boston scrap-metal dealer who tries to save a mothballed Liberty Ship from the scrap heap, only to see it, himself, and his long-suffering fiancée (Dolores Hart) fall into the hands of a gang with big plans and small I.Q.s. The gang plans to use the ship as their getaway vehicle after knocking over a Boston bank disguised as Pilgrims during a Thanksgiving festival. It was an inoffensive time-waster, interesting mainly as the last film of TV comedy genius Ernie Kovacs; it was released barely three weeks before he wrapped his Corvair station wagon around a lamppost on Santa Monica Blvd., dying instantly. His performance, indeed, was one of the picture’s assets, as was that of Frank Gorshin as the (relatively speaking) “brains” of the gang.

Not long after Sail a Crooked Ship, Dolores Hart gave up acting and became a nun. Coincidence? Maybe.

Day 2 wrapped up with Glen or Glenda (1953), the notorious first film by the notorious Edward D. Wood Jr. This poster notwithstanding, Glen or Glenda was not entirely about transgenderism — or, as it was more commonly known at the time, a “sex-change operation”. To be sure, that was what producer George Weiss had in mind when he hired Wood to write and direct a quickie picture exploiting the case of Christine Jorgensen (née George), whose series of gender-reassignment surgeries between 1951 and 1953 had focused public awareness on the issue; Weiss wanted to cash in.

Shooting in four days, Wood gave Weiss what he asked for — sort of. In fact, Glen or Glenda divides its time between two cases, both recounted by a doctor to a police detective (Lyle Talbot) investigating the suicide of a man who, repeatedly arrested for wearing women’s clothes, couldn’t face going through the ordeal again. As the doctor describes the two cases, one is Glen/Glenda, a “transvestite” — a heterosexual man who finds it pleasurable and comfortable to wear women’s clothes — while the other is Alan/Anne, a “transsexual” — a person who feels mentally and emotionally female but is trapped in a male body. Whether the movie’s approach to the issue would pass muster with 21st-century gender theory is beside the point; what matters is that it was surprisingly enlightened for 1953 (there were some pretty mean jokes going around about Christine Jorgensen at the time), and it offered an earnest plea for compassion and understanding. Note I said “earnest”, not “eloquent”. The fact is that, whatever its intentions, Glen or Glenda comes up against the invincible ineptitude of Edward D. Wood Jr.

What can we say about Ed Wood? The kindest thing is that you have to be in a certain frame of mind to sit through one of his movies. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood tried to portray him (in the person of Johnny Depp) as a wide-eyed naif with an irresistible urge to be part of the transformative art of the twentieth century, moving pictures. Burton’s movie got good reviews, and won an Oscar for Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi (whom Wood befriended and exploited in Lugosi’s last drug-riddled years), but it sank like a rock at the box office, earning less than a third of its modest $18 million cost. My own feeling was that if you wanted to make a movie celebrating some unsung artist of the motion picture industry, there were about 875 directors you might go through before you got down to Ed Wood.

Nevertheless, any Ed Wood movie is certainly something to have seen, and Glen or Glenda is less mind-bogglingly inept than his later movies like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space — probably because he wasn’t yet the incoherent, falling-down drunk he would later become. Even so, as a writer he could barely put one sentence after another; Glen or Glenda‘s narrative is interrupted at intervals by Bela Lugosi sitting in a laboratory among skeletons, skulls and test tubes, babbling about God knows what. As a director he lacked any sense of pace, composition or atmosphere. And as an actor — Wood, himself a heterosexual cross-dresser, plays Glen/Glenda, billed as “Daniel Davis” — as an actor he was…well, any junior high drama club in the country would have been glad to have him.

As I said, something to have seen, and you can see it here on YouTube. And with that, we called it a day in Columbus. More to come!

To be continued…

I’m back from Columbus, where Memorial Day Weekend was always Cinevent Weekend until 2019, when Cinevent Chair Michael Haynes announced that Cinevent 52 in 2020 would be the last — but that the tradition of a Memorial Day classic movie convention in Ohio’s capital would continue under a new name (to be determined) and new management (albeit with many familiar faces performing the same volunteer services as before).

Then, like so much else intended for 2020, Cinevent 52 didn’t happen — until Halloween Weekend 2021, 17 months late. By then, the TBD name for Cinevent’s successor had been chosen, The Columbus Moving Picture Show, and this above is their new logo. You’ll find it here on their Web site, and if you’re on Facebook (who isn’t?), on their FB page as well. You can also follow them on Twitter and Instagram if you’re of a mind.

Last October brought the final installment of Cinevent, presented in conjunction with the fledgling Columbus Moving Picture Show. Cinevent’s Michael Haynes passed the torch to Samantha Glasser (right), who stepped up from Dealers Coordinator to Chair, overseeing the activities of a cadre of dedicated Cinevent volunteers, who elected (unanimously, as far as I could tell) to continue under the new banner.

So for Memorial Day Weekend 2022, and moving forward, it’s The Columbus Moving Picture Show from now on. (Michael Haynes was there, however, as a dealer, seeking new homes for the extensive — nay, mind-boggling — collections of books, films and videos of his late father Steven, one of Cinevent’s original founders. I suspect Michael will be back next year too; he still has plenty of things to offer for sale.)

One thing more before I embark on my coverage of The Columbus Moving Picture Show 1; that is, to find a useful shorthand term to refer to the four-day event, whose full name, for all its stateliness and retro-nostalgic charm, can be a little cumbersome if used too frequently. In covering Cinevent 52 last October, I often referred to “CMPS”, but I found that to be a bit unsatisfactory; to me it sounded like the acronym of a non-governmental organization, or some disease requiring a rolling oxygen tank. Instead, in present and future posts, once the full name is established, I’ll just shorten it to “The Picture Show”; please take it as given that the location is Columbus and the Pictures are Moving.

Picture Show Eve at the Wexner

This year marked the return of a night-before tradition at Cinevent/The Picture Show: A double-feature screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University campus, in conjunction with the weekend’s events downtown. The theme for this year’s Wednesday evening was “Pre-Code at 20th Century Fox”.

Ahem. Did you catch the glaring blooper in that theme? That’s right: There’s no such thing as Pre-Code 20th Century Fox; 20th Century Fox didn’t exist during the Pre-Code Era, which ended a year before Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures merged with (read “gobbled up”) the moribund Fox Film Corporation. The theme should properly have been “Pre-Code at Fox”, and the folks at the Wexner Center should have known as much. (Then again, maybe they did. Maybe they were afraid they’d incur the wrath of angry leftists unable to grasp that the Fox Film Corp. — which ceased to exist in 1935 — has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel — which didn’t exist until 1996. That seems to be the motivation for the Disney Corporation, once they in turn gobbled up 20th Century Fox, changing the studio’s name back to 20th Century Pictures — which was a pity, because it banished the name of William Fox from the movie industry he did so much to create.)

Well, whether the Wexner Center admitted it or not, Pre-Code at Fox is what we got, starting with Me and My Gal (1932, not to be confused with For Me and My Gal, the Judy Garland/Gene Kelly MGM musical of ten years later). This one was an urban melo-dramedy directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett. The story wasn’t much. Tracy played Danny Dolan, a happy-go-lucky waterfront cop who takes a shine to Helen (Bennett), a waitress in a greasy spoon on his beat. Meanwhile, her sister Kate (Marion Burns), though married to an adoring nice-guy dork, can’t resist her gangster ex-boyfriend Duke (George Walsh), who has her wrapped around (phallic symbol alert!) his little finger. While hubby is away in the merchant marine, Duke breaks out of prison and Kate hides him in the attic of the apartment she shares with her father-in-law, who is mute and wheelchair-bound from a stroke.

Got that? Now you can forget it, because it’s all beside the point. Marion Burns was a bland presence whose career would be pretty much over in another three years, and no wonder; she can’t even carry a subplot. On the other hand, it is nice to see George Walsh (Raoul’s younger brother) in a substantial role; his career never recovered from getting canned from the silent Ben-Hur in 1924 before even walking onto the chaotic set (see here for details about George’s short-circuited career). Still, the real fun of Me and My Gal is the wise-crackling courtship between Tracy’s Danny and Bennett’s Helen. In a couple of decades, they would be the middle-aged, staid, almost stodgy Bankses in Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951), but what a difference 18 years makes: Here they are sassy, sexy, and full of piss and vinegar, sparring jauntily with slangy dialogue at a lively pace set by director Walsh. The image on the poster here is, for once, taken directly from the movie, as the two of them snuggle cozily on her living-room sofa. Danny tells Helen about a movie he saw last night, “Strange Inner Tube or something like that” — and suddenly the scene segues into a witty parody of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, the movie of which was just then in theaters. The scene is not only an amusing send-up, but also a clever moment of character exposition:

Helen: “I saw that. That’s the one where the actors say one thing, and then a minute later say out loud what they really think.”

Danny: “Yeah. Y’know, you remind me an awful lot of the leadin’ lady — good lookin’ and a swell figure.” (Voice-over: “That oughta hold you for a while, baby.”)

Helen: “Say, come to think of it, you remind me of the leading man — so big and strong.” (“Probably won’t be able to get into that derby now.”)

Danny: “Gee, what a squawk your old man’d put up if he come in and found us like this, huh?” (“If he does it’s every man for himself.”)

Helen: “Well, wouldn’t be anything to squawk about.” (“Not much! If he walked in here and saw me like this they’d have to put you under ether to extract his foot, that’s all.”)

. . .

Danny: “Y’know, I feel as though I’ve known you a long, long time.” (“I think I better slip this dame a little kiss before the old man gets here.”)

Helen: (“Oh! He kissed me. I’m so thrilled. But I’ll pretend I’m mad.”) “How dare you!”

That’s just a sample of the banter. The picture has other things going for it besides two stars in the peppery bloom of youth: reliable old J. Farrell MacDonald as Helen and Kate’s father; Henry B. Walthall, D.W. Griffith’s first leading man, as Kate’s disabled father-in-law, still conveying profound emotion without uttering a sound; Raoul Walsh’s feel for the unpretentiousness of working-class life. (On the other hand, there’s Bert Hanlon as a drunken fisherman hanging out in Helen’s diner, quickly wearing out his welcome with her — and even more quickly with us.)

Then — getting back to the movie’s assets — there’s this fellow here. He plays Al, Danny Dolan’s partner/sidekick, a good fellow but a little slow on the uptake, very much in Danny’s shadow. I spent the whole picture trying to figure out where I’d seen this guy before. Then, during the intermission before the next movie, it hit me. It wasn’t where I’d seen him before, but who he reminded me of: John Candy. He had the same look, the same voice, the same physical and vocal mannerisms. It was remarkable, even a little eerie.

Then again, delving further, I found out that I had seen him before, in a lot of famous movies, usually in small roles, often uncredited: ‘G’ Men (1935); The Petrified Forest (’36); Angels with Dirty Faces (’38); Union Pacific and Rose of Washington Square (both ’39); The Grapes of Wrath, Castle on the Hudson and Christmas in July (all ’40).

His name was Adrian Morris, scion of a distinguished showbiz family; his father was the William Morris (of the William Morris Agency), his older brother was the actor Chester Morris. In his 10-year career, he racked up 79 screen appearances — 15 in 1939 and 14 in 1940 alone. Here he is (at right, below) in one of his most instantly memorable bits, in Gone With the Wind as the sidewalk carpetbagger in postwar Atlanta, promising Freedmen 40 acres and a mule (“…because we’re your friends. And you’re gonna be voters. And you’re gonna vote the way your friends vote…”). He’s on screen for only 13 seconds of a four-hour movie, but everybody remembers him.

Still ahead for Adrian Morris were Penny Serenade, Blood and Sand, The Big Store and Belle Starr (all ’41). He might have continued in that vein for decades and hundreds more titles, but a cerebral hemorrhage carried him off in November 1941 at the obscenely young age of 34.

If you care to check out Me and My Gal — and I recommend it — it’s available to rent or buy on Amazon. Or you can watch it for free on YouTube (click on Settings to turn off the intrusive Portuguese subtitles). As The New Yorker’s blogger Richard Brody says, the point of Me and My Gal isn’t the drama; the point is the spice. 

The evening’s other feature, alas, isn’t so readily available. This was The Warrior’s Husband (1933), a title that sounded more of an oxymoron at the time than it does now. It’s too bad it’s not easy to get to see, because it is hands-down one of the great what-the-hell-is-this??? movies of the 1930s. The Wexner Center presented it in a sparkling brand-new 4K digital transfer, so there may be hope for a DVD or streaming option sometime in the future. If it does happen, you really want to take a gander at this thing.

The Warrior’s Husband began as a 1924 play by pharmaceutical executive and amateur playwright Julian F. Thompson. It opened and closed on May 6, 1924; even in those days of shorter Broadway runs, one performance counted as an unmistakable flop. A 1932 revival fared better, running a more respectable two months. This production showcased a newcomer named Katharine Hepburn as Antiope, sister to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The attention earned her a trip to Hollywood for her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement with John Barrymore.

Later that year, when Fox purchased the movie rights to the play, Hepburn was otherwise engaged, so her role went to Fox’s new contract discovery Elissa Landi. And no kidding, in the finished film Landi looks like nothing so much as — wait for it — Katharine Hepburn. This was understandable, since Hepburn was the current Big Thing, and Fox had plans to make Landi the next Big Thing. She had already made an impression on loan to Paramount and Cecil B. DeMille for The Sign of the Cross. Her timorous Christian damsel in that Roman spectacle pales beside her swaggering pagan Antiope; if The Warrior’s Husband were as widely available as The Sign of the Cross, this might be the picture she’s best remembered for today. Here are dueling Antiopes, Landi’s from the movie beside Hepburn’s from the stage; it’s not easy to tell them apart.

The conceit of Thompson’s play, and the screenplay that Sonya Levien, Ralph Spence and director Walter Lang made of it, was that in the land of the Amazons, women are the warriors and breadwinners while a man’s place is in the home, barefoot and — well, not pregnant, obviously, but confined to knitting, cooking, and running the house. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules in her capital city of Pontus by virtue of the power vested in the Sacred Girdle of Diana. There’s a subversive legend about a mythical race called “Greeks” where the gender roles are shockingly reversed, men in charge and women subservient, but this is widely dismissed as an old husbands’ tale to frighten girls. Then two actual Greeks show up at Hippolyta’s court, the handsome soldier Theseus (David Manners) and the poet Homer (Lionel Belmore), followed by Hercules (Stanley “Tiny” Sanford). Despite his terror of the mighty Amazons, Hercules is determined to fulfill the ninth of his twelve labors — to steal the Girdle of Diana from Hippolyta. (Quasi-historical note: In the ancient myth, Hercules kills Hippolyta to get it, but that detail is happily fudged here.) This not only removes the Amazons’ invincibility in battle, it makes them vulnerable to the masculine charms of the handsome Greek soldiers under Theseus’s command — and especially Antiope vis-à-vis Theseus himself.

It also gives Hippolyta’s spouse Sapiens (Ernest Truex) ideas above his station. Sapiens (or “Sap”) shares with Theseus the “warrior’s husband” designation of the title, and his newfound assertiveness makes him an ancient advocate of men’s liberation (I guess you’d call him an early “masculist”).

If you wanted to find an actor to make Marjorie Rambeau, Elissa Landi, and every other woman on the Fox lot look macho, you could hardly do better than Ernest Truex; his spit-curl hair and ringleted beard complete The Warrior’s Husband‘s plunge into deep “woo-woo” territory.

The picture has some pretty spectacular production values — massive sets, elaborate clashes of Amazons and Greeks that are half battle, half orgy, and a convincing simulation of a cast of thousands. This, mind you, at a time when Fox was reeling from years of financial losses and ripe for takeover (even as The Warrior’s Husband was hitting screens, there were rumors that Warner Bros. was about to buy the studio up; in time, of course, it would be 20th Century that did the deed). At the same time, there’s a subversive, transgressive approach to gender roles that’s pretty startling for a movie from the depths of the Great Depression. True, in the end the Amazons all yield to the invading Greek men and Theseus carries Antiope off to marriage with her enthusiastic consent, so things resolve themselves in a manner quite comfortable to mainstream audiences of 1933. But for much of its 75 minutes, The Warrior’s Husband pokes wicked fun at those gender-role conventions, as if to say, “How would you like it if…”

As the lights came up in the Wexner Center, a gentleman sitting near me turned to David Drazin (one of The Picture Show’s silent-movie accompanists) in the row behind us and said, “Well, that was just about the queerest movie I’ve ever seen.” This prompted a question in my mind, which I kept to myself: In what sense? Almost immediately, I had my answer: Take your pick. I kept that to myself too.

So much for The Picture Show’s night-before appetizer, appetizingly served by the Wexner Center. The main event would begin the next day.

To be continued…

Day 4 of Cinevent 52 landed on October 31, Halloween itself. In keeping with the spirit of the day, the weekend’s Halloween theme made one final appearance in the form of a kinescope (film transcription of a live TV broadcast) excerpt from The Red Skelton Show of June 17, 1954. The 20-minute sketch — titled “Dial ‘B’ for Brush”, a reference to Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder, then in release — offered Red’s dimwit character Clem Kadiddlehopper as a door-to-door brush salesman with just the kind of empty brain the local mad scientist is looking for to complete his latest sinister experiment. Guests on the episode, shown here with Red/Clem, were (left to right) TV horror-movie host and “glamour ghoul” Vampira (née Maila Elizabeth Niemi), Lon Chaney Jr., and the one and only Bela Lugosi. It was primitive fun; as would often be the case with Skelton’s long-running program, the flubs, mishaps, accidents and ad-libs were funnier than the script.

Besides the nod to Halloween, the sketch also served as an intro to Public Pigeon No. 1 (1957), Skelton’s last starring movie (his TV show would last until 1970, getting cancelled while still in the top ten, and he would make TV and big-screen guest shots until 1981). Even this had a TV origin, being a feature-length, Technicolor expansion of a comic episode of the live drama series Climax!, which Red had done in 1955. In both, he played a likable dope who gets duped by some con-men on a phony uranium stock deal (uranium was a popular plot device in those early days of the Atomic Age). When he winds up taking the fall for their swindle and going to prison, some G-men, knowing he’s only the patsy, arrange for him to break prison so he can lead them to the real crooks. The picture was okay, and Red was as good as ever (his prime was a long one) — but Public Pigeon No. 1 was, unfortunately, a product of RKO Radio Pictures in its last agonizing stage of being driven off a cliff and into the ground by Howard Hughes. It has the usual signs of cutting corners that can be seen in so many RKO pictures of the mid-’50s: the flimsy sets slapped together with a single coat of cheap paint, the lack of extras in the background (New York appears to have a population of about 45), the bare-bones soundtrack. Red, director Norman Z. McLeod, and the supporting cast (Vivian Blaine, Janet Blair, Jay C. Flippen, Allyn Joslyn, etc.) soldier gamely on, but there’s an unmistakable aura of sadness to the movie, like the last struggling store in a shopping mall slated for demolition. (Is that merely hindsight? Maybe so; at the time few people suspected that by the end of 1957 the studio would be sold and renamed Desilu.) Anyhow, pleasant as it is, Public Pigeon No. 1 is a definite step down from Red’s high-flying days at MGM.

The Mark of Zorro (1920) is, like Frankenstein, another one of those needs-no-introduction movies. It was the first of Douglas Fairbanks’s costume swashbucklers; his movies made before then are best described as “athletic comedies”, a genre of which he was, and would remain, the chief practitioner (with honorable mention, perhaps, to Buster Keaton — and, long decades later, Jackie Chan). It was also the first of three signature masterpieces he turned out between 1920 and ’25. The next would be Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood in 1922 (he added his name to the title to keep some fly-by-night ripoff from siphoning off his audience), followed by The Thief of Bagdad in 1924. In 1930, if you had asked moviegoers to name a Fairbanks picture, odds are they would have mentioned one of those, or even all three, before getting around to The Three Musketeers (’21), The Black Pirate (’26) or The Iron Mask (’28). 

When Douglas Fairbanks died in 1939, his reputation as a star rested firmly on those three pictures: they seemed to be his lasting legacy, and they all hold up quite well today. By 1940 all three would be remade; as each remake loomed, the Hollywood buzz was that it was a fool’s errand to take on Doug’s classic, doomed to suffer by comparison. That’s what the proverbial “they” said about all three remakes — The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone; The Mark of Zorro (’40) with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rathbone again; and The Thief of Bagdad (also ’40) with Sabu, Conrad Veidt and June Duprez. And yet each time, the remake not only stood up to Doug’s original, it absolutely blew it out of the water; Doug’s version would forever be overshadowed and made to look like just a primitive, halfway-decent first cut. Few silent stars have suffered that kind of comedown.

Tracey Goessel’s biography The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks provides an excellent corrective to this undeserved eclipse, reminding us of how he bestrode popular culture at the height of his career. Zorro is a case in point. Johnston McCulley may have created the character, but it was Fairbanks’s movie that added the detail of carving a “Z” with his sword (hence the title change, The Mark of Zorro). And Fairbanks dressed him in black. True, this poster suggests his shirt was dark blue and the sash and bandana were red, but they photographed black, and black-clad Zorro would remain. Without Douglas Fairbanks, Zorro would be as forgotten today as any of the pulp heroes of his day whose names no one living recalls. (Have you ever read Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano? I tried years ago; it’s awful.) We’d never have had the Tyrone Power remake, or the definitive 1950s Zorro of Guy Williams, or Frank Langella’s 1974 TV movie, or George Hamilton’s spoof Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981). (We wouldn’t have had those CGI-infested reboots with Antonio Banderas either, but the less said about those turkeys the better.) The Fairbanks/McCulley Zorro (nurturing the seed planted by Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel) also inspired generations of crime-fighting heroes (both human and super) hiding behind ineffectual, even foppish alter egos. Directly inspired, in the case of Bob Kane, creator of Batman: In Kane’s original story, young Bruce Wayne and his parents are returning from seeing The Mark of Zorro the night Bruce’s parents are killed, and the adult Bruce adopts Zorro-esque attire when he becomes “the Bat-Man”.

One last thing we can thank The Mark of Zorro for: In 1925 Fairbanks made Don Q Son of Zorro, the no-kidding, first-ever movie sequel. But let’s not be too hard on Doug; he didn’t live to see what a monster he created with that little innovation.

After the lunch break we got Chapters 10-12 of King of the Texas Rangers, with clean living triumphant and all villains getting their just deserts. Then came Dynamite Dan (1924), one of several pictures in which a Poverty Row indie producer named Anthony J. Xydias tried in vain to make a star out of one Kenneth MacDonald. I regret to say that nothing in Eric Grayson’s program notes made Dynamite Dan sound appealing, not even the prospect of an early performance by Boris Karloff (as “Tony Garcia”!), so I spent its 61-minute running time browsing the Dealers Room. However — again, if you’re curious — Dynamite Dan can be seen here on YouTube. Let me know if I missed anything.

The last movie of the day — of the whole weekend, and of Cinevent’s 52-year history — was On the Spot (1940), a likeable little B-murder mystery/comedy from Monogram Pictures starring Frankie Darro and Mantan Moreland. Darro and Moreland made a number of these pictures, playing co-workers who are forced to become amateur detectives to solve a murder or two at their workplace. This time they’re working in a small-town drugstore — Darro as a soda jerk, Moreland as the janitor — when a notorious gangster, riddled with bullets, stumbles in, places a call in their phone booth, and falls over dead before he can say much. It turns out he was on the run after knocking over a bank for $300,000, and everybody — reporters, lawmen, and the gangster’s cronies — thinks he told Darro and Moreland where he stashed the loot. This one was out of circulation for years, probably considered lost if anybody ever gave it any thought, but resurfaced “a few years back” (per Dave Domagala’s program notes). It’s also available on YouTube, and worth spending an hour or so to watch; Darro and Moreland make a good team, and the story is actually pretty well-plotted.

And that was that. Cinevent 52 was history, and so was Cinevent. Gone but not forgotten — and, in a real sense, not even gone. The Columbus Moving Picture Show takes it from here, so if you’ve grown accustomed to Cinevent (like me), or always meant to check it out, the CMPS is for you. Here are links to their Web site, their podcast, and their Facebook page. The schedule for May 26-29, 2022 is already taking shape, so hop on over, get on their mailing list, and I’ll look forward to seeing you in Columbus in five months. Be sure to say hi.

Cinevent Day 2 began with Chapters 4 – 6 of King of the Texas Rangers. Bob Bloom’s program notes tell us that this serial was filmed on location in the San Bernardino National Forest from June 17 to July 18, 1941 at a total cost of $139,701 (the production ran $1,165 over budget). Just for fun, let’s assume the standard six-day work week of the time, and let’s assume the company took no time off for the Fourth of July (though in fact they probably did). That means a shooting schedule of 28 days for a production running a total of 3 hours 35 minutes — in other words, on an average day directors Witney and English got about seven-and-a-half minutes of usable film in the can while spending $4,989.32. In Day 1’s notes I described Republic Pictures as an “economical” studio; giving credit where it’s due, it was also a pretty well-oiled operation, especially considering that it had been in existence for only six years.

The first feature of the day was the British film of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1939), in a beautiful IB Tech print showcasing that inimitable British Technicolor, so much more delicate than the American variety. And here I insert the notes I wrote for the Cinevent program book:

It wasn’t only Hollywood movies that had a good year in 1939. That was also a banner year for Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular comic opera. First — in September 1938, actually — came The Swing Mikado, produced by the Chicago branch of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project with an all-African-American cast, and with Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music given a jazzy jitterbug beat. After a five-month run in Chicago, it was transplanted to Broadway for another three months. Not to be outdone, Broadway showman Michael Todd mounted his own all-Black (and even jazzier) production, The Hot Mikado, featuring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the title role. After a Broadway run of 85 performances, the show was transplanted to the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, where it was a popular attraction during both seasons of the fair.

Coming close on the heels of both of these, even overlapping by a few days, was producer Geoffrey Toye and director Victor Schertzinger’s screen adaptation of The Mikado, a more traditional production, filmed in England but with American talent on both sides of the camera. The movie was the brainchild of first-time producer Toye. From 1919 to 1924, Toye had been musical director for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, custodians of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon while the works were still under copyright. In that capacity he had earned the trust and respect of Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of the company’s illustrious founder, even after the two had gone their separate professional ways.

And so it was, in the late 1930s, that Toye was able to obtain the film rights to all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works. His plan was to produce a series of film adaptations over the coming years, with his first production to be The Yeomen of the Guard.

Toye’s first move was to travel to Hollywood, as he said, “in search of technical experts.” It didn’t take him long to decide that The Mikado would be a more bankable title this first time out of the gate. At the same time, he decided his movie would have to be in Technicolor — a bold and prescient decision, since at that point only three British films had been made in Technicolor. Mikado would be the fourth.

It wasn’t only “technical experts” Toye was looking for over here. Once he decided on Mikado instead of Yeomen, the first item on his wish list was to get Deanna Durbin to play Yum-Yum. Alas for Toye and movie history, Universal wouldn’t allow it — yet another example, as if one were needed, of the short-sighted stupidity with which the studio mismanaged the career of its biggest star.  Ironically, Universal eventually wound up being The Mikado‘s U.S. distributor. I wonder: did the bright boys in the front office ever regret not letting Durbin appear in it?

So Toye was denied his first-choice star, but he didn’t go home empty-handed. By the time he sailed for England, he had secured the services of Victor Schertzinger to direct. It was another canny choice; Schertzinger was a trained musician and composer as well as director, and had been Oscar-nominated for directing Metropolitan Opera star Grace Moore in One Night of Love (1934). Also, to play Nanki-Poo, the incognito son of the emperor of Japan, Toye signed another American, radio and recording star Kenny Baker. It was a move to shore up the movie’s chances at the American box office, and despite some grumbling from G&S purists (British wags called him “Yankee-Poo”), Baker acquitted himself quite nicely.

For other roles, Toye turned to the D’Oyly Carte Company. Sydney Granville, a D’Oyly Carte star off and on since 1907, made his only film appearance as the officious Pooh-Bah, while Martyn Green, in his prime at 39 and midway through his 29-year tenure at D’Oyly Carte, played Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. Toye also enlisted the D’Oyly Carte chorus, filling out the larger ensemble for the film with alumni of the company. Non-company players Jean Colin (as Yum-Yum), Constance Willis (Katisha) and John Barclay (the Mikado) rounded out the cast.

During production, Schertzinger reportedly received as many as 3,000 letters a week threatening “dire consequences” if he tampered unduly with the show’s sacred text. The letter-writers need not have worried; while the show was somewhat rearranged and several songs were cut to get the running time down to 90 minutes, the result was quite faithful to Gilbert and Sullivan’s satiric spirit. (And by the way, it was understood then, as it had been in 1885, that the butt of The Mikado‘s satire was Great Britain, not Japan.) In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent called the movie “one of the most luscious productions of the operetta in history” (though he wondered if this purely theatrical piece was a good candidate for filming in the first place). Variety’s “Jolo” called it a “thoroughly ingratiating satire, carefully concocted.” The critics also praised the picture’s pastel Technicolor photography, which was justly nominated for an Academy Award (though of course this was 1939, and nothing was going to take that Oscar away from Gone With the Wind).

Geoffrey Toye’s plan to produce a series of Gilbert and Sullivan films, with the approval and participation of the D’Oyly Carte Company, was off to a good start, but there would be no further installments. The project was doomed first by the outbreak of World War II, then by Toye’s untimely death at 53 in 1942. It’s a pity we were denied a record of Sydney Granville and Martyn Green’s performances in, say, Yeomen of the Guard, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance – but let us count our blessings. After all, the Hot and Swing Mikados have survived only on scratchy phonograph records and in grainy silent home movies, while Victor Schertzinger and Geoffrey Toye’s rendition has come down to us exactly as audiences saw it in 1939.

After The Mikado came some comedy shorts from Hal Roach’s Lot of Fun bookending the lunch break. Before lunch it was We Faw Down (1928), a late silent with Laurel and Hardy — albeit one with a sound-on-disk Vitaphone musical score and sound effects. The long-lost disks were recently rediscovered, and Cinevent saw a print with the Vitaphone accompaniment restored on a conventional soundtrack. 

The short had quite a pedigree. It not only starred The Boys, but was directed by Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, Going My Way, An Affair to Remember) and photographed by future director George Stevens (Gunga Din, Shane, Giant).

And there was a special bonus for movie trivia buffs: Pictured here in the role of Mrs. Stanley Laurel was none other than the one and only Bess Flowers, surely the most prolific actor, male or female, in movie history. She sometimes had lines, but usually didn’t; was sometimes credited on screen, but usually wasn’t. Still, between 1923 and 1969 she ran up an unapproachable record of 966 movie and TV appearances. Bess had an extensive wardrobe and could dress for any occasion this side of a Stone Age cave-warming, so plugging her into a crowd scene was one less hassle for a casting director and costumer. Check out her filmography; you’ll see a lot of “Party Guest”, “Nightclub Patron”, “Ship’s Passenger”, “Audience Member”, “Secretary”, “Nurse”, “Maid”, and so on. Lines or no lines, seldom more than a few day’s work, but my lord, the lady kept busy: 28 movies in 1939, 35 in 1940, 48 in 1941. She was well-known and well-liked in the industry, obviously — you don’t amass nearly a thousand credits if you make people say, “Uh-oh, here comes trouble!” Bess Flowers retired after an episode of The Red Skelton Hour in 1969 and died in 1984 at the Motion Picture Country Home, age 85. 

In We Faw Down, Stan and Ollie tell their domineering wives (Stan and Ollie’s wives were always domineering) that they’re going to a vaudeville show with their boss, but they’re really going to a big poker game. Then on the way to the game they get sidetracked into a pied-à-terre with two good-time gals. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the wives learn that the vaudeville theater has burned down. Complications ensue. It all culminates in one of Laurel and Hardy’s all-time-greatest closing gags, involving the wives, a shotgun, and two adjacent apartment buildings. If you’ve seen We Faw Down, you don’t need more hint than that; if you haven’t, I won’t spoil the gag. 

After lunch the Hal Roach parade continued with three Charley Chase silent shorts: The Fraidy Cat (1924), A Ten-Minute Egg (also ’24), and A Treat for the Boys [a.k.a. The Sting of Stings] (’27). Charley was definitely in his prime in those days, still finalizing his persona in the first two and really hitting his stride in the third. Personally, I’ve always rather preferred his sound shorts of the 1930s, mainly for his tendency to break into song (he was a very appealing musical performer). There’s no denying, though, that in the silent ’20s Charley Chase was younger, more energetic, and further away from that early grave he would drink himself into at 46 in 1940.

Film musical historian and aficionado Richard Barrios hosted a “Vol. 2” session of Songs in the Dark and Dangerous Rhythms (continuing what he started at Cinevent 51 all those months ago), an assortment of musical numbers old and new(er). The title, of course, alludes to Richard’s books A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter (both of which belong in every movie buff’s library).

Next, Richard introduced Main Street to Broadway (1953), a broken-heart-for-every-light-on-Broadway drama distinguished by a roster of guest stars being trotted out for drive-by appearances. The stars were cajoled into appearing through a tie-in between independent producer Lester Cowan and the Council for the Living Theatre, a public relations group formed in 1947 by Pulitzer Prize playwright Robert E. Sherwood (who supplied Main Street to Broadway‘s story, such as it was) on the occasion of the bicentennial of the American (read “New York”) theater. In return for providing the big names, the Council stood to get a 25 percent share of the movie’s profits. Unfortunately, there weren’t any.

The picture’s central (stock) characters were played by two names in the fine print at the bottom of this list: Tom Morton as Angry Young Playwright With Chip on Shoulder and Mary Murphy as Small Town Girl Straight Out of High School Drama Club Taking Fling at Acting Career. Then as now, Main Street‘s chief interest was the parade of stars, most gamely playing themselves for a minute or two of screen time. (Exceptions: Tallulah Bankhead, in a major support, played a good-sport parody of herself; Agnes Moorehead camped it up as Morton’s drama-queen agent; and Gertrude Berg played her radio/TV sitcom character Molly Goldberg as if she existed in the real world.) Others not listed on this poster included director Joshua Logan, Henry Fonda, Vivian Blaine, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, Stuart Erwin, Jeffrey Lynn, society hostess Elsa Maxwell, and Broadway critics Brooks Atkinson, Ward Moorehouse and John Mason Brown.

Actually, there was one other point of interest beside this gaggle of celebs from the Golden Age of Broadway. As the movie’s nominal leads, Tom Morton and Mary Murphy played stereotypical opposites-who-attract: He disdains her bourgeois primness, she resents his snotty condescension, but (as the top picture on the poster suggests) they absolutely cannot keep their hands off each other. When Main Street to Broadway was released in October 1953, Morton, 27, was just beginning his six-year, seven-credit career, while Murphy, 22, was two months away from her best-remembered role as the police chief’s daughter playing with Marlon Brando’s fire in The Wild One. For most of Main Street, Morton and Murphy were blandly likeable, but when they went into the clinches (which was often), they hungrily devoured each other, fairly steaming up the camera lens and exuding a sexual chemistry far beyond anything Murphy would show with Brando. I couldn’t help wondering what was going on between these two when the cameras weren’t rolling. When I shared this thought with another audience member, she said, “From what I understand, there was quite a lot going on!” (Mind you, I don’t know who this person was, or what she knew or how she knew it. I pass her observation on as the rankest gossip, and meaning no offense to Ms. Murphy’s memory — she died in 2011 — or to Mr. Morton, who is evidently still with us at 95.)

When the lights came up after Main Street to Broadway, it was time for dinner. When we came back, it was to a presentation by biographer Alan K. Rode, author of Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film. In his excellent, well-researched book, Rode makes a persuasive case for Curtiz as one of the most prolific and versatile artists — yes, artists — ever to work in Hollywood. I rather suspect that he may have been preaching to the choir at Cinevent — at least I certainly hope that Cinevent-goers appreciate Curtiz’s body of work more than the average citizen. For that matter, I hope we appreciate him more than some film critics and theorists, who tend to look down on prolific filmmakers (Curtiz directed 178 movies) as somehow unserious. If nothing else, Alan Rode’s lecture was a timely reminder of what we already know — or should. (By the way, Rode’s biography tells us that Curtiz, who was born Manó Kaminer, pronounced his professional name “Cur-tezz“, not “Cur-teez“. And while we’re on the subject, Alan Rode’s own surname is pronounced “Roadie”.)

Then Mr. Rode introduced Private Detective 62 (1933), one of Curtiz’s lesser-known Warner Bros. Pre-Code pictures. William Powell played a U.S. diplomat stationed in Paris who, for reasons we needn’t go into, is forced to resign in disgrace. Back in the States and scrambling for work, he falls in with an unscrupulous detective agency running the old badger game, entrapping “marks” in compromising situations, then blackmailing them to keep things quiet. Powell’s life gets complicated when he finds himself falling for his latest victim (Margaret Lindsay). Paced by Curtiz at a breakneck 66 minutes, it was far-fetched but diverting. Powell and Lindsay were supported by Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Hohl, James Bell — and, as a gangland casino operator, the ill-fated Gordon Westcott. Westcott would go on to earn his own footnote in history in 1935 when, riding for MGM in a polo game against a team led by Walt Disney, his horse fell on him and crushed his skull. He lingered unconscious for three days in hospital, finally dying a week short of his thirty-second birthday. His death dampened Hollywood’s enthusiasm for polo; Lillian Disney put her foot down, and her husband had to find other diversions to occupy his spare time. Like model-railroading. And daydreaming about building an amusement park. All because of Gordon Westcott’s bad luck on the polo field.

Dr. Jack (1922) was Harold Lloyd’s second venture into feature-length comedy, and he was still getting the hang of it. Lloyd played a small-town doctor who takes on the case of a patient billed as “The Sick Little Well Girl” (Mildred Davis) when he suspects her family is being milked by a “specialist” who not only has no intention of “curing” her, but knows full well she’s not really sick in the first place. The picture feels like two or three of Lloyd’s shorts strung together, but it’s fun for all that, with some rewarding scenes (like a nifty poker game) that contribute more to the comedy than to the picture’s putative plot. The proceedings are added to by cameos from Mickey Daniels and Jackie Condon, two of the first round of producer Hal Roach’s Our Gang kids, plus an appealing canine who (Samantha Glasser speculates in her program notes) looks enough like Pete the Pup of the 1930s Our Gang to have been an ancestor.

As things turned out, Dr. Jack had two happy endings, one of them in real life. Just two months after the picture’s release, on February 3, 1923, Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis were married, and they stayed that way until death did them part in 1969. Generations of Lloyds rose up and called them blessed.

In keeping with Cinevent 52’s Halloween Weekend setting, Day 2 closed out with Frankenstein (1931). Do I really need to say much about this one? After ninety years, it’s still one of the most famous movies ever made. However, at the risk of being burned for heresy, I will venture to suggest that the picture shows its age rather badly, and has ever since I first saw it sixty years ago — admittedly, on TV, and in the expurgated form of its Post-Code reissues that held sway until the 1980s. Cinevent, of course, screened the uncut Pre-Code version.

What unarguably survives intact from 1931 is Boris Karloff’s performance, simultaneously menacing, repellent, heart-wrenching and pathetic, absolutely iconic in the purest sense of the word. His first appearance, with Arthur Edeson’s camera leaping ever closer to his undead face in wavering hand-held quick cuts, still has the power to take our breath away, and could raise gooseflesh on a marble statue.

But much of the movie, to me anyhow, feels slapdash and incomplete. I think its reputation owes much to its sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which was an exponential improvement — possibly the greatest ratio of improvement for a sequel to its original in movie history. If nothing else, Franz Waxman’s ominous musical score makes a huge difference; the lack of music in the original fairly screams its absence. There are other improvements: John Fulton’s photographic effects complement and enlarge the mechanical effects of Ken Strickfaden. The prissy epicureanism of Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius provides a foil for Colin Clive’s neurotic energy that he didn’t find in John Boles, Mae Clark, or that blustering old fart (Frederick Kerr) who played his father. There is simply no end to the ways The Bride is better than Frankenstein. Still, there’s no denying the obvious: Without the original, we wouldn’t have had the sequel. We can be thankful for that. And for Boris Karloff.

To be continued…