Picture Show No. 3 — Prelude

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First, before I launch into my annual recap of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show, a heads-up and an apology. I’ve got quite a bit of vacation traveling to do in the next few weeks, and that will probably prolong the time it takes me to prepare and post my coverage. I ask Cinedrome readers to please bear with me; I’ll get as much posted as I can before I have to leave, and get the rest up as soon as possible after I get back.

Al rightie, then, that said, here we go:

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As has become traditional, the long weekend kicked off on the evening of Wednesday, May 22 with a screening, in conjunction with the Picture Show, at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of Ohio State University. This year the main attraction was a digital restoration of Bwana Devil, the 1952 surprise hit that launched the original 3D craze. Produced, written and directed by the eccentric Arch Oboler, Bwana Devil was loosely based on the man-eaters of Tsavo, a pair of rogue lions who went on a killing spree in 1898, slaughtering enough native African and Indian workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway to bring construction to a standstill for months (the story was filmed again, with slightly more fidelity to the facts, as The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996). Coming when it did, with Hollywood reeling from the onslaught of television and desperate to lure audiences back into theaters, Bwana Devil made 3D look like just what the faltering movie business needed.

For a while, anyhow. There was a flurry of 3D movies throughout 1953, and quite a few good ones: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space from Universal; House of Wax (Vincent Price’s first foray into horror), Hondo (starring John Wayne in one of his many signature roles) and The Charge at Feather River from Warner Bros.; the survival melodrama Inferno with Robert Ryan as a husband left for dead in the desert by his scheming wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan); Kiss Me Kate from MGM (with House of Wax, probably the best of the lot); Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth from Columbia, and so on.

Plagued by quality-control issues, though, 3D proved to be a flash in the pan that first time around. The technology was cumbersome; the two projectors in a theater’s projection booth, normally used for changeovers from one reel to the next every 12 or 13 minutes, had to both run simultaneously to project the left- and right-eye images — meaning that even with the largest reels available, theaters couldn’t show more than about 50 minutes at a time, requiring an intermission in even the shortest movies. If one of the two films broke, the other reel would have to mutilated to match it. If the projectors weren’t perfectly synchronized, the 3D illusion would be lost and might never be set right. The glasses, while not nearly the inconvenience that legend has it, depended on everything running perfectly, and if it didn’t, the glasses themselves could take the blame when things went wrong. By the end of 1953 and the beginning of ’54, the fad had petered out.  There would be the occasional one-off in subsequent decades, usually from fly-by-night outfits, but it would take another 50 years, and the advent of digital projection and computerized systems, for 3D to make a comeback with various superhero and adventure movies, plus such truly great movies as Hugo (2011) and Life of Pi (2012).

But those days were far in the future when Bwana Devil hit screens and caused such a sensation. So how about it? Well, unlike Hugo and Life of Pi, Bwana Devil isn’t a truly great movie. Unlike Kiss Me Kate and House of Wax, it isn’t excellent. Unlike Inferno and The Charge at Feather River, it isn’t even good. Indeed, Bwana Devil is arguably the worst historically important movie since Fred Ott’s Sneeze.

Nevertheless, it is historically important, and the new 2K restoration they screened at the Wexner Center gives us Bwana Devil looking better than it has since…well, probably ever. I’ve only seen the picture once before, in 2013 at a 60th Anniversary 3D Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. That was a film screening, and considering the picture’s age the print was in very good condition. But nothing like this. Kudos are due to the 3D Film Archive and its founder Bob Furmanek (who spoke at the screening) for spearheading the restoration.

Also on the program were two 3D cartoons from 1953: Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker, and Boo Moon featuring (who else?) Casper the Friendly Ghost. Both were good, with some effective stereoscopic moments, especially in Boo Moon. In addition, there was A Beany Story, a five-minute short that ran as a prologue to Bwana Devil, in which actor Lloyd Nolan, and an attractive starlet, Nancy Somebody, whose last name I didn’t catch, introduced us to the Natural Vision 3D process, aided by Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent of the Time for Beany TV show. This, by the way, was the original 1949-54 incarnation of Beany and Cecil, as hand puppets manipulated and voiced by Daws Butler (Beany) and Stan Freberg (Cecil). This short is even available on YouTube. You can access it here, and if you happen to have a pair of anaglyphic (i.e., red/blue lens) glasses lying around the house you can even see it in 3D. (The screening at the Wexner, however, was Polaroid, not anaglyphic).

 

Before we move on, I want to share this photo with you. Maybe you’ve already seen it; it’s pretty famous. It’s a shot of the audience at the world premiere of Bwana Devil at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, taken by J.R. Eyerman and published in the December 15, 1952 issue of Life Magazine. I reproduce it here because, in one of those odd little coincidences that the universe throws at us every once in a while, this photo is the wallpaper in the bathroom of every room in the Columbus Renaissance Downtown Hotel, where Cinevent and the Columbus Moving Picture Show have been held since 2015. When you step into the shower at the Renaissance Downtown, depending on which way your room is facing, these 1952 moviegoers are either gazing off to your left or staring right at you. That can be pretty unsettling, and in nine years I’ve never quite gotten used to it.

Anyhow, with Bwana Devil looking brand-spanking-new the night before, and with this first-nighter Hollywood audience dressed to the nines the morning after (for some reason I find my eye drawn to those teenagers in the third row near the bottom corner; a first date, I imagine), there was a sort of continuity over the decades.

And with that we were off to the first day of the Picture Show proper. But we’ll get into that next time.

To be continued…

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS from Cinedrome!

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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 Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

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Introduction

At the moment, I’m in rehearsals for a stage production of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s 1813 romantic comedy of manners chronicling the romantic vicissitudes of five English sisters. The youngest and silliest of these sisters is named Lydia — which naturally put me in mind of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”. I say naturally, because once anyone has heard that song — especially as done by the Marx Brothers cavorting in a railroad car in At the Circus (1939) — it’s impossible not to think of it whenever the name “Lydia” is mentioned. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the Iron Age kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor;  Lydia Pinkham, the 19th century American purveyor of ladies’ patent medicines; St. Lydia of Thyatira; Lydia Becker, the British suffragette; Kenneth Roberts’s novel Lydia Bailey; or the youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice. No matter what, if you hear or read the name “Lydia”, you automatically fill in with “…the Tattooed Lady”. 

But not everyone has heard the song. One night during a lull in rehearsal I sang the opening lines within earshot of the actress playing the part, and her eyes went wide: “What is that song?” she marveled. So I found the song on YouTube on my phone and played it for her. Now this young lady is by no means as silly or foolish as the role she’s playing, and she even chuckled at “Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-pidia”, but halfway through the song I realized that most of the references in the song — which would have been perfectly familiar to a reasonably alert ten-year-old in 1939 — were two or three generations before her time. Aside from the fact that it’s in English, she could hardly be expected to understand a word of it. She confirmed this when we talked about it the next evening: “Social Security Number, I got that. And I know what a rhumba is…”

And that’s a pity, because “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” is one of the funniest and cleverest songs ever sung in English (interesting that it was written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg the same year they turned out “Over the Rainbow”). The song is endlessly inventive. Compare it with another amusing song — more recent, but still an oldie — “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein and a top-ten hit for Johnny Cash in 1969. Or another Silverstein song, “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone'”, which put Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in the top ten in 1972. They’re both clever, and fondly remembered, but they’re essentially one-joke songs. In “Lydia” the jokes come so thick and fast that you’re liable to miss one while you’re laughing at the one before it. Something must be done, I thought, to keep this treasure of popular culture from being banished to the darker reaches of Does-Anybody-Here-Understand-This? Land. Somebody (I further thought) should come out with The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.

Well, “somebody” turned out to be me, and here it is. Enjoy:

“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

From the MGM Picture At the Circus (1939)

Music by Harold Arlen; Lyric by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg

 

She was the most glo-o-o-rious creature under the sun,

Thaïs1, du Barry2, Garbo3 rolled into one…

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Lydia oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady!

She has eyes that folks adore so

And a torso even more so.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.

On her back is the Battle of Waterloo4,

Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus5 too,

And proudly above waves the Red, White and Blue6 .

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world

If you step up and tell her where.

For a dime you can see Kankakee7 or Paree8

Or Washington crossing the Delaware9 .

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

When her muscles start relaxin’

Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson10.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the queen of them all;

For two bits11 she will do a mazurka12 in jazz

With a view of Niag’ra13 that nobody has,

And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz14 ;

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Come along and see Buff’lo Bill15 with his lasso,

Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso16.

Here is Captain Spaulding17 exploring the Amazon18 ;

Here’s Godiva19 but with her pajamas on.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Here is Grover Whalen20 unveilin’ the Trylon21.

Over on the West Coast we have Treasure “I-lon”22.

Here’s Nijinsky23 a-doin’ the rhumba24.

Here’s her Social Security Numba25.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the champ of them all!

She once swept an admiral clear off his feet;

The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat,

And now the old boy’s in command of the fleet26

For he went and married Lydia!

I said Lydia! (He said Lydia!)

They said Lydia! (We said Lydia!)

La la!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Well, friends, there you have it, my modest effort to ensure that Arlen and Harburg’s funniest song — whose jokes, puns, and plays on words constitute an embarrassment of riches almost without precedent this side of Cole Porter and Gilbert and Sullivan — does not vanish in the benign oblivion of esoteric pop culture. Now that you’ve had a chance to explore it, I invite you to hop over to YouTube and glory in a song that fits the antic anarchy of Groucho Marx as perfectly as “Over the Rainbow” does Judy Garland, or “If I Were King of the Forest”, Bert Lahr.

Picture Show 02 — Day 4

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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.

Picture Show 02 — Day 3

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Day 3 of The Picture Show began with Chapters 8-11 of The Purple Monster Strikes. Things are getting a little repetitive — sometimes literally, as the two directors (Spencer Bennett, Fred C. Brannon) and six writers (do you really care?) begin stretching things by recapping earlier plot points and cliffhanger thrills. Thus does Republic turn 12 chapters into 15. Bob Bloom’s program notes, quoting movie-serial blogger Jerry Blake, tell us that (1) Purple Monster boasts a plethora of fine cliffhangers, many of them supplied by those ingeniously resourceful special-effects artists, brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker; and (2) this was one of the last Republic serials to make extensive use of the brothers’ original effects; henceforth, for the ten years or so left to Republic serials, the studio would rely more on stock footage of their earlier work.

Then it was time for The Picture Show’s annual Saturday morning animation program, curated and annotated by the worthy Stewart McKissick. And here I’m forced to make a confession that I’ve been dreading. It seems that at last year’s animation program, the schedule included Frank Tashlin’s The Tangled Angler (Columbia, 1941), and the program book reflected that. However, the supplier sent the wrong print: Tangled Travels (also Columbia, 1944) arrived instead of The Tangled Angler. The substitution came too late to change the book, and the book was what I relied on in my post. (Those cartoons do tend to blur together if you’re not careful.) In writing my post last year, I refreshed my memory (which, as it happened, was faulty) with The Tangled Angler on YouTube. Fortunately, Tangled Travels is also on YouTube, so I’ve been able to update my post from last year (I had hoped to make the change quietly with nobody the wiser, but I included an image from Angler in my cartoon collage — there it is again below, third row center — and it couldn’t be removed). Anyhow, The Tangled Angler made its belated appearance this year, and I’ve transferred my remarks from last year’s post to this one.

As for this year’s cartoons (with links to YouTube where available):

Joint Wipers (1932) (top row, left) was an example of the other Tom and Jerry, the ones — humans, not cat and mouse — produced by Van Beuren Studios between 1931 and ’33. In this one the boys are plumbers, summoned to fix some leaky pipes and only making matters worse, with an amusing song-and-dance interlude in the midst of all the water damage. The YouTube link above has a rather blurry image; the image is better at this link, albeit with a rambling commentary by one Justin Leal.

Also from 1932, Hollywood Diet was a Terrytoon about “Dr. Fathead’s House of Painless Fat Removing” — in later terms, a weight-loss clinic. The fat jokes came thick and heavy (if you’ll pardon the expression), with clients — mainly lazy, spoiled and obese Hollywood housewives — carted around on hand-trucks by sweating attendants and shoveled into moving vans for transport. Fat-shaming was alive and well in 1932, and this one is not for the sensitive. So be warned before you hop over to YouTube. 

With Down Among the Sugar Cane (top row, right) we continued to linger in 1932, for a bouncing-ball singalong from Max and Dave Fleischer. After their customary surrealistic imagery, the singing was led by winsome Lillian Roth (whose troubles with alcohol, documented in the book and movie I’ll Cry Tomorrow, were not yet generally known). Like last year’s You Try Somebody Else, the song was an unfamiliar one, but the Picture Show audience gamely warbled along. (The Fleischers were always good about planting the tune firmly in the audience’s head before asking anyone to sing.)

We left 1932 behind with Ham and Eggs (1933) (second row, right), one of Walter Lantz’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for Universal. Oswald’s back story is more interesting that any of his cartoons. He had been poached from Walt Disney in 1927, forcing Disney to come up with some other tent-pole character (the result was Mickey Mouse, and no one ever wrestled a character away from Walt Disney again). Meanwhile, at Universal, Charles Mintz and George Winkler tried to make something of Oswald; eventually the character fell into Lantz’s hands. It wasn’t until the introduction of Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker that Walter Lantz struck cartoon gold; until then, Lantz, like Mintz and Winkler before him, was unable to make Oswald anything more that what he had been all along: a dry run for Mickey Mouse. Still, Lantz’s Oswald cartoons weren’t bad, and this one was enjoyable. In it, Oswald and his girl (who looks more like a dog than a rabbit to me) run a short-order diner, dealing with a succession of querulous customers with a smile and a song. Fred “Tex” Avery, early in his career, was among the animators.

The Masque Raid (1937)  was a Krazy Kat cartoon produced by the busy Charles Mintz for Columbia. This was an example of a sub-genre of cartoon that appeared regularly in the 1930s: After hours in some commercial establishment (bookstore, food market, toy shop, newsstand, etc.), the products on the shelves come to life and cavort until the dawn’s early light. Here it was a costume shop, and Krazy is the night watchman observing the doings of various exotic garments as they spring off the racks, all while a rainstorm rages outside. Spoiler alert: Krazy has dozed off on the job, and it’s all a dream.

She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (1937) (second row, left) was my favorite cartoon on the program — as, indeed, it’s been a favorite of mine ever since it cropped up on television in the 1950s. (Alas, Warner Bros. cartoons are thin on the ground at YouTube, and I’m unable to link to this one.) This was the first color cartoon of the day — but it was a bit of a tease, as it takes place in a movie theater and much of its running time is taken up (as in the illustration) with the black-and-white films on the screen. They were fun, though; the main feature was a spoof of The Petrified Forest (“The Petrified Florist“), featuring cameo appearances by animated caricatures of Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. No Bogart, however. Bogie’s stardom was still a few years off, and odds are that even the best caricature of him (there were a number of good ones to come in the ’40s) would have gone unrecognized by 1937 audiences, while everyone knew Bette and Leslie.

The Frog Pond (1938) was directed by Ub Iwerks for Columbia during his years away from Disney. The story wanders all over the place, but pleasantly. What begins with fairly straight anthropomorphic-frog antics around a lily pond segues into the story of a sort of frog gang-lord enlisting underlings to build him a castle on a particularly roomy lily pad, then throwing himself a party at a wetland nightclub, with elaborate Busby-Berkeley-style song and dance, and finally being sent (literally) down the river to land in Croak Croak Prison (“Croak Croak”/”Sing Sing”, get it?). It ends with the Frogfather smashing rocks to spell out “Crime Does Not Pay”.

Then, at last, we got the long-delayed screening of The Tangled Angler (1941), directed by Frank Tashlin for Columbia. Last year this was planned to be a sort of companion piece to Tashlin’s live-action comedy Marry Me Again (1953) with Robert Cummings and Marie Wilson, Tashlin being the only cartoon director to transition successfully to live-action while preserving his freewheeling cartoon style. Alas, there was no Tashlin picture to go with it this year, so Angler was forced to stand on its own — which it did very nicely, thank you. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), Angler tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land. 

Dance of the Weed (1941) (bottom row, left) was produced at MGM by Rudolf Ising (during a hiatus in his partnership with Hugh Harman). Heavily influenced by Fantasia the year before, and foreshadowing Bambi to come in ’42, it was a lush pastoral ballet with dancing flora of various botanical phyla and featuring a flirtatious pas de deux between a gallumphing yellow-brown weed and a delicate green-and-orange poppy. It was gorgeously colorful, with individual images suitable for framing. Interesting sidelight: One of the cartoon’s uncredited writers was Gus Arriola, who later in 1941 left MGM’s cartoon unit to create the comic strip Gordo for United Features Syndicate; he would write and draw the strip until 1985.

SH-H-H-H-H-H (1955) (bottom row, right) was the great Tex Avery’s swan song as a writer/director of theatrical cartoons. Fired by MGM in 1953, he landed back where he started with Walter Lantz at Universal (Universal International, by then). SH-H-H-H-H-H shows him with his wit and talent undimmed. The story: A nightclub musician, his nerves jangled by the constant cacophony of the band he plays with, goes off to a resort in the Swiss Alps (“The Hush-Hush Lodge”) for rest, relaxation, and regeneration — only to be jangled anew by the guests in the room next door. Be prepared for a twist ending.

Nick Santa Maria — not only Benny Biffle of Michael Schlesinger’s 1930s-style Biffle and Shooster shorts, but also a devoted authority on Abbott and Costello — introduced the duo’s Keep ‘Em Flying from their busy year of 1941 (January: Buck Privates; May: In the Navy; August: Hold That Ghost; then this one in November — not to mention Ride ‘Em Cowboy, released in January ’42 but filmed in ’41). This completed Bud and Lou’s trilogy of service comedies begun with Buck Privates and In the Navy; they wouldn’t return to the genre until Buck Privates Come Home in 1947, which actually veered off on a non-military tangent. In the meantime, they played Blackie (Bud) and Heathcliff (Lou), sidekicks to carnival stunt pilot Jinx Roberts (Dick Foran) who become part of his ground crew when he enlists in the U.S. Army Air Corps. (By mid-1941 it was generally accepted that we’d be in that war of Hitler’s sooner or later — though nobody expected Pearl Harbor, exactly.)

Also in the cast was band singer Carol Bruce, whose movie career never really took off, but who was good enough to deserve better breaks. All through the screening I struggled to figure out why she looked so familiar, but it never came. It wasn’t until later, reading Dave Domagala’s program notes, that I got my answer: From 1978 to ’82 she had a recurring role on WKRP in Cincinnati as Lillian Carlson, the flinty station owner and mother of manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump). I would never have figured that out on my own, but now that I know, I can see it. The eyes, I think, are a bit of a giveaway.

Another female holding her own with Bud and Lou — not surprisingly — was Martha Raye, hilarious again as identical twins, one sweet, shy and demure, the other — well, more like Martha Raye. Her scenes, especially with Lou (one sister has a crush on him, the other doesn’t) and her rousing delivery of the hit song “Pig Foot Pete”, were highlights. Beyond that, Abbott and Costello are already falling into a bit of a routine formula — not surprising when you’re cranking pictures out as fast as this.

After the lunch break came Lights Out (1923). I’m sorry I didn’t see this one — took too long for lunch, then opted for the dealers’ room instead — because it sounds interesting. For one thing, it was presented in digital projection rather than the usual 16mm because it was believed lost until 2021, when a digital copy (labeled with the wrong title) was found to have been gifted to the Library of Congress by the Russian Gosfilmofond archive in 2010. The plot has to do with a couple of semi-reformed crooks who con a screenwriter into penning a movie recounting their last big heist — this as a ploy to lure their erstwhile confederate, who absconded to Brazil with all the loot, out of hiding. Joe Harvat’s program notes tell us Lights Out was a big hit, with “universally glowing” reviews — but the only review I found (Variety, Oct. 25, ’23) was a pretty merciless pan. Still, I’m sorry I missed it; I’d probably have to make an appointment with the Library of Congress to have another chance to see it. The story, based on a Broadway play that closed after two weeks in August 1922, was remade in 1938 as Crashing Hollywood with Lee Tracy.

I sure didn’t miss the next screening, and boy, am I glad, because this was another highlight of the whole weekend — for me at least, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone (witness the fact that a poster for it graced the cover of The Picture Show’s program book). The picture, introduced by author and historian James D’Arc, was Blaze of Noon (1947), a movie whose continuing obscurity is a mystery that will confound me to the end of my days. I mean, for starters, just take a gander at the names on this lobby card: Anne Baxter, William Holden, Sonny Tufts, William Bendix, Sterling Hayden, Howard da Silva, director John Farrow. Then there are the names you can’t see here. The cinematographer: William C. Mellor (A Place in the Sun, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant). The composer: Adolph Deutsch, one of Hollywood’s most underrated composers (he contributed hugely to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, among many others). The writers: Arthur Sheekman and Frank “Spig” Wead (the aviator-turned-screenwriter played by John Wayne in John Ford’s biopic The Wings of Eagles). Finally and especially, the author on whose book Wead and Sheekman’s script was based: Ernest K. Gann. Blaze of Noon was Gann’s second bestseller; his first, Island in the Sky, had made him a literary celebrity. His later books in the ’50s and ’60s (The High and the Mighty, Twilight for the Gods, Fate Is the Hunter) would make his name even bigger. 

Taken all in all, that’s one hell of a pedigree.

The story had to do with the four McDonald brothers — Roland (Tufts), Colin (Holden), Tad (Hayden) and Keith (Johnny Sands) — stunt fliers with a traveling carnival in the 1920s who all hang together when Colin decides to quit show business for a job in the burgeoning airmail industry, represented by a gruff but compassionate Howard da Silva. Anne Baxter played a nurse who marries William Holden and becomes the unwitting object of unrequited love from brother Sterling Hayden, while William Bendix was another aviator who has trouble forsaking his hell-raising barnstorming antics and knuckling down to business. Spoiler alert: the life of pioneering airmail pilots comes at a cost to the four brothers, with more than their share of heartache.

Not to mince words, Blaze of Noon is a terrific picture, one that can stand with better-known movies about early flight like Wings, I Wanted Wings, Dive Bomber and Men with Wings without hanging its head. I’m an ardent partisan of John Farrow’s pictures Night Has a Thousand Eyes (’48) and Alias Nick Beal (’49), while most movie buffs are partial to his noir classic The Big Clock (’48), but this one is fully their equal — and as a piece of sheer directorial brio may be the best of the bunch. Note, for example (if you ever get the chance to see it), the opening shot of the story proper (after a prologue singing the praises of airmail pilots): Farrow stages a long, complex tracking shot weaving through the busy carnival with its dancing girls, barkers male and female, rides, popcorn and balloon vendors, and multitude of country patrons ogling the sights and munching their hot dogs and cotton candy. The camera discovers the four brothers leaning against a game booth chitchatting, then follows them back to where the shot started, coming to rest on William Holden flirting with dancer Jean Wallace (that’s her flashing her gams on the lobby card above). It’s a real tour-de-force take that runs a full minute-and-42-seconds, establishing both the four brothers and the world they work in without calling attention to its own virtuosity — one of the highlights of Farrow’s whole career, and that of cinematographer William Mellor. And Blaze of Noon has more to come. It’s a pity that this pre-1950 Paramount languishes in the Universal vaults without a home-video release to give it the reputation it deserves. Indeed, a collector friend of mine recently tried to find a buyer for a 16mm print without success — not even other collectors had ever heard of it. (Part of the problem may be the title; it’s Ernest Gann’s own, but it gives no hint of what the movie is about. It makes it sound like a western.) If this near-classic ever does come out on video, remember: You heard about it here first.

After the dinner break it was the final Laurel and Hardy short of the weekend: Wrong Again (1929), technically a “sound” film but not a talkie; rather, it was a silent with no spoken dialogue, but with a soundtrack of music and sound effects, giving Picture Show accompanists Philip Carli and David Drazin a break for a couple of reels. (Like other studio heads, Hal Roach used this semi-sound approach to transition his studio into the era of talking pictures). In Wrong Again, The Boys played stable attendants tending to a horse named Blue Boy. When the famous Gainsborough painting of the same name is stolen and the millionaire owner offers a $5,000 reward, Stan and Ollie think he’s willing to pay that much for the horse. Imagine the possibilities.

Either Philip Carli or David Drazin — sorry, I forget which — was pressed back into service for So’s Your Old Man (1926), one of W.C. Fields’s surviving silent pictures. Like two of his others, Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and It’s the Old Army Game (’26), it was later remade as a talkie. Sally of the Sawdust became Poppy (’36), It’s the Old Army Game returned (more or less) as It’s a Gift (’34), and So’s Your Old Man was remade as You’re Telling Me! (also ’34). In both So’s Your Old Man and You’re Telling Me!, Fields plays Sam Bisbee, an eccentric small-town inventor whose social-climbing wife is ashamed of him because of the way he and his family are looked down on by the town’s “better” people. Bisbee doesn’t care what the snobs think of him, but he wants to make good for the sake of his daughter (the delightfully named Kittens Reichert), who is in love with Kenneth Murchison (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), son of the town’s snootiest grande dame. Bisbee travels to an auto manufacturers’ convention to sell his invention, a shatterproof windshield, but when someone switches his test vehicle for a regular car, his demonstration fails and he becomes a laughingstock. Returning home in disgrace, he befriends a young woman on the train (Alice Joyce) who, unbeknownst to him, is a royal princess on a goodwill tour of America, and she determines to do what she can to help him.

Fields’s silents suffer today because, unlike audiences of the 1920s, we know well his inimitable, oft-imitated voice and how much it contributed to his comedy, and we miss it in a way that viewers back then couldn’t. Still, So’s Your Old Man holds up nicely because You’re Telling Me! was later a virtual shot-for-shot remake (director Erle C. Kenton was smart enough to imitate original director Gregory La Cava slavishly) and it’s easy to hear Fields’s voice in our heads as we read the intertitles. (Practically the only difference is that in You’re Telling Me! Sam Bisbee’s invention is a puncture-proof tire rather than shatterproof glass.)

Eric Grayson’s program notes tell a fascinating, convoluted story about why So’s Your Old Man is out of circulation. Let’s see if I can make it simple. Paramount sold their 1930-50 library to Universal; that’s why things like the Marx Brothers’ pre-MGM titles, Fields’s talkies, and the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures sport the Universal Globe before the Paramount Mountain takes the screen. Paramount still theoretically owns their 1923-29 silents, but except for special cases like Wings, they don’t particularly care. On top of that, So’s Your Old Man is based on a short story by Julian Street (1879-1947), and even though both picture and story are in the public domain, Paramount is contractually obligated to compensate the Street estate for any screenings or releases of the picture. Back in the ’70s, when Street’s survivors were easier to track down, Paramount made a deal to distribute You’re Telling Me!, but So’s Your Old Man was a silent, so — I say again — they didn’t care. Nowadays, there’s more of a market for silent cinema, but who and where Street’s surviving relatives are is anybody’s guess. Fortunately, some enterprising bootlegger copied Fields’s Paramount silents, including So’s Your Old Man, for the collectors’ market on their way to whatever vault or archive they were earmarked for. How one of those prints found itself in Columbus for The Picture Show is (again) anybody’s guess.

I suspect I’ve rather garbled the story in trying to simplify it — but I’ve spent enough time on it, I think. If you can get in touch with Eric Grayson, maybe he can explain it to you better than I have.

The Turning Point (1952) was a tight, economical crime thriller from Paramount, writers Warren Duff and Horace McCoy, and director William Dieterle, whose pictures — The Life of Emile Zola, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (’39) — were usually less gritty and street-wise. Edmund O’Brien played John Conroy, a crusading special prosecutor charged with breaking up a crime syndicate in a large, Midwestern Chicago-type city masterminded by “trucking executive” Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). As his chief investigator he appoints his father, veteran straight-arrow cop Matt Conroy (Tom Tully). Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), an equally crusading newspaper reporter and John Conroy’s lifelong friend, keeps a close eye on the investigation; he’s sympathetic, but he fears Conroy is too inexperienced to take on the criminal conspiracy he’s trying to tackle. McKibbon uncovers the fact that Conroy’s father Matt is in fact a “mole” on Eichelberger’s payroll — and, making things even more uncomfortable, McKibbon is falling in love with Conroy’s assistant and paramour Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith). The picture was really strong stuff, with some shocking violence — especially for 1952 — plus several very unsettling turns of the plot before the final fade-out.

Day 3 wrapped up with Mystery of the White Room (1939), an installment of the short-lived Crime Club series from Universal. (Short-lived in duration, that is; producer Irving Starr managed to knock out 11 B-mysteries during the two years the franchise lasted. The inspiration for the series, the Crime Club imprint of Doubleday Publishers, had a more prosperous run: It lasted from 1928 to 1991 and published nearly 2,500 titles. There was a short-lived radio series too.)

The “White Room” of the title was literally that — the operating room at a big-city hospital. During a tense operation the lights go out, and during the brief darkness the hospital’s head surgeon (Addison Richards) is murdered with a scalpel to the heart. Complicating the investigation is the fact that both assisting doctors (Bruce Cabot, Roland Drew) and both nurses (Helen Mack, Constance Worth) — everybody in the room, it seems, except for the patient — had reason to bear a grudge. Not only that, but they were all wearing rubber gloves, so there are no fingerprints to enter into evidence. Bruce Cabot and Helen Mack were top-billed as doctor-and-nurse sweethearts, so the rules of 1930s B-movies suggested they’d be innocent in the end — but they came in for their share of suspicion nevertheless. It was a clever little locked-room murder mystery that sets up and resolves its mystery in a no-frills 57 minutes — although some tiresome comic relief from orderly Tom Dugan and switchboard operator Mabel Todd (whose rasping, nasal, annoying voice makes Fran Drescher sound like Angela Lansbury) makes the picture feel several minutes longer.

And that was it for Saturday’s program. Three down and one to go.

To be concluded…