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

So…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Holidays!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(NOTE: Apologies for the longer-than-intended hiatus in my coverage of the Columbus Moving Picture Show 2023. Some issues arose with Cinedrome, something about the renewal of my SSL certificate; the site was knocked out for a while and I wasn’t even able to access the site to work on it. After three times contacting tech support at GoDaddy.com, my Web host, the issue seems to be resolved and I can resume coverage. I won’t go into detail about what the issue was — partly because it’s boring, and partly because I never did understand exactly what the problem was, and still don’t. Anyhow, the matter seems to be behind us — at least until my SSL certificate comes up for renewal again in August 2024. I’ll keep my fingers crossed about that.)

Day 2 of the Picture Show began with Chapters 4-7 of The Purple Monster Strikes, with Sheila and Craig — along with various bystanders, some of them ill-fated — being subjected at regular intervals to all the cliffhanger menaces six writers can concoct: an acid pit, an “Annihilator Beam”, a house booby-trapped with TNT, a truck laden with volatile rocket fuel. I think my favorite was Sheila’s peril at the end of Chapter 6, when she drops through a trapdoor in front of a scientist’s desk into a small pit that quickly fills up with water as the trapdoor closes again — an amenity presumably installed on the chance that the scientist might someday want to drown some visitors to his lab.

Bob Bloom’s notes tell us that Purple Monster was shot at a cost of $183,803, having run 14.8 percent over its budget of $160,057. Considering that the serial’s 15 chapters run a total of 201 minutes, that means Republic Pictures shelled out $914.44 per minute of screen time. (Never let it be said that Republic didn’t know how to get bang for their buck — literally.) Consider also that, correcting for inflation, Purple Monster‘s price tag in 1945 is the equivalent of $3,105,525.28 in 2023 dollars. By contrast, the latest adventure of Indiana Jones (the spiritual offspring of these Republic serials) cost $294.7 million, and it’s 47 minutes shorter. That comes to just a bit over $1.9 million per minute. Of course, there’s really no comparison. Although I guess I just made one.

This was followed by a program of three Charley Chase silent shorts, a Columbus tradition going back a goodly number of years. Charley Chase’s shorts, silent and sound both, are always funny, but with this particular trio the moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity seemed to me particularly plentiful:

Be Your Age (1926) Bank clerk Charley gets a letter from home pleading for money (“My dear Charley – You must get $10,000 for us at once. Father broke his leg trying to put out the fire … The cook started the fire after she had shot Uncle Wilbur for choking Aunt Mollie … Aunt Mollie had gone mad from a dog bite and was trying to poison the children …”). Charley’s boss may have the solution: A multi-millionaire widow is looking to remarry, and the boss wants Charley to wed the old girl and persuade her to keep her fortune with the bank. Complicating things is that the widow’s son (a pre-Laurel Oliver Hardy) has a suspicious eye for fortune hunters — plus, Charley’s heart isn’t really in it, he being more attracted to the widow’s saucy young secretary. The timeworn phrase is “hilarity ensues”, and it does.

Fluttering Hearts (1927) Wealthy papa William Burgess wants daughter Martha Sleeper to marry a rich self-made man rather than the fortune-hunting “lounge lizards” who pursue her. Charley is just the kind of go-getter Papa wants for her, but she doesn’t know that when they meet and take a shine to each other, so she wangles him a job as the family chauffeur. Like many two-reelers, the action divides neatly into halves. Part One features Charley, Martha and cop Eugene Pallette doing battle with a mob of female shoppers at a linen sale. Then Papa is blackmailed over a compromising letter he once wrote to a showgirl, and Part Two follows Charley into a speakeasy with a mannequin (men can’t enter unless accompanied by a lady and that’s the best he can do), where he tries to retrieve the incriminating missive from the blackmailer (Oliver Hardy again). A highlight of this one is Charley’s long dalliance with the mannequin, a very funny riff that might have inspired Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain if he’d seen it (he probably didn’t; he was only two in 1927).

Movie Night (1929) The title says it all, as Charley and his family (wife Eugenia Gilbert, daughter Edith Fellows and brother-in-law Spec O’Donnell) encounter comic obstacles that moviegoers from any era can recognize — at least until the manager brings up the lights for the evening’s prize drawing, a staple of movie houses that vanished decades ago. The prizes, what we see of them, are an odd lot (“A ham for Mrs. Ginsberg!”), culminating in a live duck for Charley. When Charley and his wife and daughter are ejected for disrupting the show (a glimpse of a poster tells us they missed A Woman of Affairs with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; brother-in-law Spec is apparently allowed to stay), the duck provides them with an egg to pelt the manager with. Five-year-old Edith Fellows, making her film debut as Charley’s hiccuping daughter, went on to a surprisingly durable career spanning movies, TV and Broadway and extending into the 1990s, including movies with Jackie Coogan, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, Edna May Oliver, Lionel Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Paul Muni, Claudette Colbert, Melvyn Douglas, Mary Astor, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew series at Columbia, and guest shots on Simon & Simon, St. Elsewhere, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Cagney & Lacey, and ER. She died in 2011 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Calif., age 88. Did anybody interview this woman before it was too late?

Film musical authority and historian Richard Barrios (A Song in the Dark, Dangerous Rhythm, Must-See Musicals, etc.) introduced Ladies of the Chorus (1948), a likeable, unpretentious B-musical from Columbia. Likeable, unpretentious B-musicals have been stock-in-trade at Cinevent and The Picture Show for decades; this one is particularly memorable because, like The Heart of Texas Ryan on Day 1, it had the good fortune to include a future superstar in the cast: in this case, Marilyn Monroe, second-billed to Adele Jergens and pretty clearly going places. Also like Texas Ryan, Ladies would be reissued a few years later with Marilyn promoted to the name above (and larger than) the title. I picked up a DVD in the dealers’ room from one of those reissues, bellowing “MARILYN MONROE in…” before the main title, but the print in the screening room was from 1948, where the credits ran as they do on this poster. The plot was a wispy thing: Adele and Marilyn are mother-and-daughter chorus girls in the most wholesome burlesque show in America, where not so much as a glove is ever taken off (though at one point Marilyn does toss a bracelet into the audience). Marilyn falls for rich scion Rand Brooks, which alarms Mama Adele, who remembers her own failed marriage to a wealthy Bostonian, when his horrified family drove her away and annulled the marriage before she learned she was pregnant. (Why she didn’t sue for child support, or at least hush money, is never explored; after all, we’ve only got 61 minutes and have to move on.)

Everything works out for Marilyn and Rand, naturally, and Rand’s mother (Nana Bryant) shows she’s a good sight more salt-of-the-earth than those Boston snobs who high-hatted Adele. In the meantime, director Phil Karlson keeps things moving at a moderate gallop, and the musical numbers are fun. The songs by Alan Roberts and Lester Lee may not boast any deathless standards, but they’re catchy and clever; frankly, there have been Oscars handed out (and, truth to tell, Tonys and Pulitzer Prizes) for worse songs than these. As if Roberts, Lee, and Columbia could see the future, Marilyn gets two of the best and sells them well: “Anyone Can See I Love You”, in which she urges Rand Brooks to take a chorus, and he proves he literally can’t sing a note; and “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy”, a sassy blend of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “Put the Blame on Mame” (which Alan Roberts wrote with Doris Fisher for Gilda two years earlier). Adele Jergens has a solo too, in a flashback to her ill-fated courtship, presciently titled “Crazy for You”. Richard Barrios’s notes tell us her vocal was dubbed by Virginia Rees, and while she gamely prances her way through the dance break, it seems clear that her taps were dubbed as well as her voice. For the rest, it’s ensemble numbers by the eponymous ladies of the chorus, veteran matron Nana Bryant proving her salt-of-the-earth-ness by warbling “You’re Never Too Old to Do What You Did”, and an indescribable specialty, “The Ubangi Love Song”, by something called The Bobby True Trio.

A novelty on the day’s program was a brace of Information Please shorts from 1941. Information Please (1938-51) was a radio quiz show with a twist: The contestants didn’t answer questions, they asked them. Listeners would mail in questions, often in two, three, or four parts, to be put to a panel of four experts. If their question was used on the air they would get a small cash prize, a larger one if they managed to stump the panel. Over the years the prizes varied as the show acquired different sponsors with different levels of generosity, eventually including an Encyclopædia Britannica and a $50 savings bond. The show was moderated by editor, writer and intellectual Clifton Fadiman, and the regular panelists were newspaper columnists John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams and composer/pianist Oscar Levant. (All were famous at the time for their expertise in what would one day be called “Trivia”; Kieran and Adams are largely forgotten today, while Levant remains fairly well-known thanks to his film career in such classics as Rhapsody in Blue, Romance on the High Seas, The Barkleys of Broadway, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon.) The fourth seat on the panel was taken by a different celebrity guest each week.

So popular was the show that RKO Radio filmed a number of broadcasts and released edited versions to theaters between 1939 and ’43, and a program of those was what followed after the Friday lunch break. The celebrity guests on display were the sociopolitical journalist John Gunther, and Howard Lindsay, the co-author and star of the long-running Broadway hit Life With Father. The Picture Show program book promised a third specimen with Guest Expert Boris Karloff, but that one, regrettably, was a no-show (it would have been fun to hear Karloff answer some questions about cricket, his spare-time passion). Still, the two we did get were fun, an authentic glimpse of radio-era programming that put me in mind of the quiz show Dianne Wiest wins in Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987).

Gary Cooper and Mary Brian headlined Only the Brave (1930), following up on their teaming in Paramount’s big hit The Virginian from the year before. Reading reviews in Variety (Mar. 12, ’30) and the New York Times (Mar. 6, ’30) you’d hardly guess it, but John McElwee’s program notes and director Frank Tuttle’s posthumously-published autobiography make it clear that Only the Brave is a comedy, a deadpan parody of Secret Service by the 19th century actor-manager William Gillette. (Gillette, considered a national treasure in his day, is best remembered today as the first Sherlock Holmes of stage [1899] and film [1916]. His 1916 film was believed lost for over 90 years, until a print surfaced in 2014. That print, restored and enhanced, is available in a superb Blu-ray/DVD combo from Amazon, and well worth it. Gillette’s subtle, low-key style of acting was ideal for film; a pity this was his only one.)

But back to Only the Brave. Don’t get your hopes up because of this exquisitely colored production photo; like almost every 1930 movie, it’s in black and white — and even the best 1930 Technicolor couldn’t duplicate this. Gary Cooper plays Capt. James Braydon, a Union officer during the Civil War who, home on surprise leave, finds his sweetheart (Virginia Bruce, incredibly young, almost unrecognizable) in the arms of another man. Heartbroken, he volunteers for an undercover suicide mission: He’s to infiltrate the South disguised as a Confederate officer, then be unmasked as a spy carrying papers about Union troop deployments — false papers, in a disinformation action to lure the Rebels into a trap. He’ll be condemned to hanging or a firing squad, but he no longer cares. That is, until he meets southern belle Mary Brian, daughter of his Confederate general host. She falls in love with him and, every time he tries to get himself exposed and arrested, she contrives to save and protect him. Finally he manages to foil her interference and get himself sent to a firing squad — but all ends well when the Yankees ride to the rescue, Lee surrenders at Appomattox, and our hero goes not to the firing squad but to the altar with the heroine.

Reviewers at the time remarked on how moth-eaten the story of Only the Brave was, the spoof evidently going right over their heads. Well, that’s the chance you take when your comedy is too subtle. They even compared it to Gillette’s old melodrama Secret Service, wherein (as well) a Union spy becomes romantically involved with an unsuspecting Confederate belle. But that’s the beauty of Only the Brave: You can take it as straight melodrama or as a wry send-up; either way, at 71 minutes it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and Cooper and Brian really do make a beautiful pair. (A year later, RKO would manage to wring a little more mileage out of Secret Service, with Richard Dix and Shirley Grey as the war-torn lovers, playing it straight.)

In 1969 the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition, “Stills from Lost Films” curated by Gary Carey, drawing on the museum’s vast photo archive, contemporary reviews, and archival publicity materials to try to capture the essence of movies that no longer existed. In 1970 Carey turned the exhibition into a book encompassing 30 titles — most from the exhibition, with a few substituted “for personal reasons”, and at least one, Benjamin Christensen’s The Devil’s Circus (1928), being dropped because a print had turned up.

In the 53 years since Carey’s Lost Films was published, there has been more good news. Of the 30 titles Carey described, ten are no longer entirely lost. Three have surfaced here and there, albeit missing a reel or so; the other seven are all reasonably intact. One of the latter is Man,Woman and Sin (1927). This was a picture MGM produced to please their top star John Gilbert. Gilbert, who had ambitions beyond being a matinee-idol heartthrob, had brought the studio John Masefield’s long poem The Widow in the Bye Street and asked them to buy it for him.

Among the British, John Masefield (1878-1967) is noted for being second only to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the United Kingdom’s longest-serving Poet Laureate (37 years, to Tennyson’s 42). Among Americans, however — at least those who went to high school when they still taught about poets — Masefield is most famous for “Sea Fever”, one of his shortest poems (“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,/And all I ask is tall ship and a star to steer her by…”). The Widow in the Bye Street, published in 1912 near the beginning of his writing career, tells of the widow Gurney, working day and night at menial jobs to raise her son Jimmy. Her sacrifice and protectiveness lead her to shelter her son from any contact with the female sex, with the unintended result that upon reaching the age of physical maturity he is emotionally immature and particularly susceptible to feminine charms. He falls for Anna, oblivious to the fact (though Mother tries to warn him) that she’s a local hooker being kept by Ern, a village shepherd and married man. When Ern exerts his right of “ownership” and sends the humiliated Jimmy packing, Jimmy’s life spirals off into drinking and dissipation. He loses his job, drinks more and more, until finally in a jealous drunken rage he seizes a farmer’s hand tool and attacks Ern, literally beating his brains out. From there, alas, it’s but a short trip to the gallows, leaving his mother to grieve and Anna to find another sugar daddy.

As Samantha Glasser points out in her program notes, Masefield’s poem was seriously sanitized on the way to the screen. The English village setting would never do, so the action was shifted to a Washington, DC newspaper. Factory worker Jimmy Gurney became cub reporter Albert Whitlock. The whore Anna morphed into the paper’s society editor Vera Worth (Jeanne Eagels), who was being kept not by some country shepherd but by the paper’s editor Bancroft (Marc McDermott). Anna/Vera was now more flirt than floozie, coming on to Albert to make Bancroft jealous. Albert still killed Bancroft, but exactly how wasn’t clear. (Whether this is due to poor staging and editing by director Monta Bell, or to the picture’s incomplete survival, is hard to tell at this distance in time.) In any case, Vera’s testimony at trial sends Albert to Death Row. Then, in response to the pleading of Albert’s mother (Gladys Brockwell), she recants her testimony, revealing that Bancroft’s death was a matter of self-defense. Albert is freed, to mosey home with his loving mother while Vera watches them leave the prison gates from the back seat of her chauffeured limousine.

Any lost film that turns up is cause for rejoicing, and so it is with Man, Woman and Sin. But all the “sanitizing” The Widow in the Bye Street underwent in its journey from verse to screen only served to homogenize it from a rough-hewn British working-class tragedy to a standard John Gilbert romantic melodrama, right down to the generic title change focusing on the lovers and shoving Mother aside. So much for Gilbert getting beyond the matinee-idol heartthrob label. In 1927 Man, Woman and Sin was dismissed as run-of-the-mill stuff, and it’s not hard to see why. Gilbert lays on the wide-eyed-gee-whiz routine pretty thick, and the Oedipal undertones to the story are borderline-alarming today, exacerbated by the fact (which age makeup can’t quite conceal) that Gladys Brockwell was less than three years older than her “son”. The picture’s main interest now is as an early glimpse of Jeanne Eagels, whose star quality comes across even in silence. Gilbert, Eagels and Brockwell, sadly, would all die before they were 40. In fact, after Man, Woman and Sin, Eagels and Brockwell had less than two years to live.

After the dinner break writer/director Michael Schlesinger gave a short presentation on his forthcoming comedy Rock and Doris (Try to) Write a Movie, an adaptation-cum-spoof of the old George M. Cohan chestnut Seven Keys to Baldpate (which was already a bit of a spoof, filmed at least seven times between 1916 and 1947). Schlesinger, a Cinevent/Picture Show regular already noted for his Biffle and Shooster shorts, looks to be putting his unique stamp on this new material. This was followed by a 25-minute program of Soundies. Soundies, introduced in 1941, were two-to-three-minute musical performances printed on 16mm and projected on translucent screens in refrigerator-size “Panoram” jukeboxes. James S. Petrillo’s American Federation of Musicians decreed that members could not perform live for these micro-musicals; they had to pantomime to pre-recorded playback tracks. This actually freed the makers of soundies to think outside the box and take their camera anywhere they pleased, which in turn made soundies sort of forerunners of the music videos of a later generation. The idea never really caught on for several reasons. For one thing, playing a single soundie cost ten cents, for which you could play two records on a regular jukebox. For another, you couldn’t choose what your dime would play; each machine had only eight soundies on an endless loop (changed weekly), and when you dropped your coin you just got whatever came up next. Finally (and perhaps most important), people didn’t play a jukebox so they could stand there staring at it; they wanted to dance — or at least get a little background music while they enjoyed their burger or ham-and-eggs at the diner. On top of all that, when the U.S. entered World War II the metal, wood and rubber used to build the Panoram machines became restricted to use for the war effort, and additional machines couldn’t be built. Fortunately, the various concerns involved in soundie production didn’t give up until 1946 or so,  and hundreds of the films survive. The Picture Show presented an assortment of eight or ten, including one by a youthful Lawrence Welk and his orchestra, and another featuring a young pianist with a wide toothy grin billed as “Walter Liberace”.

After that it was Let’s Go Native (1930), a choppy, haphazard, truly bizarre early musical from Paramount. The basic premise: A struggling musical revue takes the show on the road, setting sail for Buenos Aires less to entertain Argentine audiences than to elude American bill collectors. Jeanette MacDonald, in her third picture, plays the show’s harried costume designer, romanced by rivals James Hall and David Newell, two actors so indistinguishable that if they weren’t in scenes together it’d be hard to believe they were two different men. Newell is the ship’s Chief Officer, Hall a poor little rich boy trying to untangle himself from fiancée Kay Francis. So Jeanette MacDonald is torn between Newell and Hall, Hall is torn between Jeanette and Kay Francis, and Kay is torn between Hall and Jack Oakie, as a cab driver who (never mind how) comes aboard first to stoke coal in the engine room, then to wait tables in the dining salon, accompanied by a silly-ass sidekick played by William Austin. Throw in a shipwreck that strands the company (and their costumes) on a tropic isle of nubile maidens ruled by Skeets Gallagher as their Brooklyn-born king (“I told you to bring us some ersters without poils!”). Then top it all off with an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, and the whole island sinking into the sea, and you’ll find yourself wondering if there’s anything this movie won’t toss in. (A good thing the atom bomb hadn’t been developed yet, or who knows how the picture would have wound up?)

Let’s Go Native is a mess, right enough — director Leo McCarey hasn’t yet got the hang of talking pictures, and he resorts often to bits remembered from his days at Hal Roach directing Charley Chase and Laurel and Hardy — but it’s rather fun in spite of itself. The songs by Richard Whiting and George Marion Jr. aren’t their best, but they’re not bad, and Oakie, MacDonald and two platoons of leggy Pre-Code chorines make the most of them. Jeanette MacDonald appears to have had few fond memories of the picture: In her autobiography (unpublished until 2004) she mentions it only twice, along the lines of “Then I did Let’s Go Native…” and “After Let’s Go Native I made…” Truth to tell, it was too many movies like this and not enough like The Love Parade, Jeanette’s first picture (or even Clara Bow’s Love Among the Millionaires from Paramount a month earlier) that killed musicals the first time around. Four years later, Paramount (having learned their lesson) would do much better with a similar plot (and a better cast: Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, Ethel Merman, Burns and Allen, Leon Errol) in We’re Not Dressing. Still, Let’s Go Native has its pleasant surprises — among them hearing Kay Francis sing, and quite nicely, too.

The day wrapped up with Guilty Bystander (1950), a really nifty little noir thriller directed by Joseph Lerner for Laurel Films, a fly-by-night operation that, for a while, made movies on microscopic budgets wherever they could set up a camera without the cops chasing them away. Top-billed were Zachary Scott and Faye Emerson, occasional co-stars at Warner Bros., and both now on the down-slope of their careers. Scott, who had carved a niche for himself as Hollywood’s favorite pencil-neck lounge lizard, was ideally cast and gave one of his best performances — perhaps, indeed, his very best. He plays Max Thursday, a drunken ex-cop kicked off the force and reduced to working as house detective at a fleabag hotel in exchange for a room and drinking money. Suddenly his ex-wife Georgia (Emerson) barges into his shabby digs in a panic and drags him out of his alcohol haze — their son Jeff and her own ne’er-do-well brother have disappeared. Georgia has been warned not to go to the police, but she doesn’t know why they were taken, how she can get them back, or even if they’re still alive.

Like all low-budget mysteries, Guilty Bystander suffers from the fact that there aren’t enough suspects on the producers’ payroll for the ending to be much of a surprise. Still, the movie is well-plotted, and the Big Reveal, when it comes, is satisfying. Performances are excellent all around; not only Scott and Emerson, but Mary Boland (one of Hollywood’s go-to ditzy matrons in the 1930s and ’40s) cast against type in, essentially, the Marie Dressler role as the boozy proprietor of Scott’s grubby hotel; Sam Levene as a friendly-for-old-times’-sake police captain; and J. Edward Bromberg as a small-time gang lord. Plus there were surprise early appearances by such future familiar faces as Dennis Patrick, Jesse White, John Marley and Maurice Gosfield (later Pvt. Doberman on Phil Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko TV series). All this, plus the brisk pace set by director Lerner and the seedy authenticity of the mean-street locations, added up to a compact, impressive little near-classic noir.

For Boland and Bromberg, Guilty Bystander proved the end of their worthy movie careers. Boland, 68 during shooting, retired to New York, where she died at 83 in 1965. Bromberg’s end came sooner and was more turbulent. A Group Theatre Communist during the 1930s, around the time Guilty Bystander was in production he took the Fifth in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, hectoring them about their witch hunt. His defiance got him blacklisted and he decamped to England to work on the London stage. But it was too late; the stress had taken its toll and a heart attack took him off in December 1951, 19 days short of his 48th birthday.

And with the final resolution to Guilty Bystander‘s mystery, that was it for Day 2 of 2023’s Picture Show. Days 3 and 4 won’t be quite so long in coming.

To be continued…