Saturday’s Animation Program this year was composed entirely of titles that had never been seen at Cinevent before, some of them quite rare. There were ten altogether, as always lovingly curated and annotated by Stewart McKissick. All were choice, but I’ll single out just five of my own favorites, illustrated here (with some YouTube links so you can pop over and watch them if you’re of a mind to). Clockwise from top left:

Mask-A-Raid (1931), an early Betty Boop — in fact, one of the first where she’s an actual human being rather than a weirdly sexy dog. Betty is the queen of a masquerade ball, and the proceedings are marked by the wiggy surrealism that was always Max and Dave Fleischer’s stock in trade. (If you do check it out on YouTube, note Betty’s entrance accompanied by identical-twin Mickey Mouses, both of them cut down to size and forced to carry Betty’s train. Max, Dave, you devils!)

The Hot Choc-Late Soldiers (1934). This one wasn’t a theatrical short, but a sequence produced by Walt Disney (and animated by Fred Moore) for MGM to include as a Technicolor sequence in Hollywood Party, a studio revue hung on a flimsy plot about Jimmy Durante inviting his movie star pals (including Mickey Mouse) to a soiree. Set to a song by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, the cartoon portrays a war of confections, chocolate soldiers vs. gingerbread men. The pic here shows the cocoa army, battered but unbowed, marching home in triumph. The sequence is fun, with a look and style foreshadowing the next year’s The Cookie Carnival, one of my favorite Silly Symphonies. (Interesting side note: Eleven years later, when MGM wanted to borrow Mickey for a tap dance with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, Walt said no.)

Somewhere in Dreamland (1936). Two dirt-poor urchins dream themselves cavorting in the kind of country Disney’s chocolate soldiers come from — then wake up to find it’s all come true. This was the first Fleischer “Color Classic” to be made in three-strip Technicolor; before this Disney had exclusive use of the process and the Fleischers made do with Cinecolor or two-color Tech. Cinevent’s print wasn’t Technicolor, but it looked mighty nice; the YouTube post is almost as good.

Tulips Shall Grow (1942). In 22 years attending Cinevent, I’ve never seen one of producer George Pal’s 1940s Puppetoons presented there — understandably, since good prints of them are hard too find. What prints there are are usually unstable Eastmans struck for TV in the 1950s, now badly faded and beet-red travesties (hence no link for this one — that’s all YouTube has too). Tulips Shall Grow was one of the Hungarian-born Pal’s best and most heartfelt shorts. He had worked briefly in the Netherlands after fleeing the Third Reich; two years later, safely ensconced in Hollywood, he made this allegory of an idyllic Dutch countryside of windmills, tulips and young lovers in wooden shoes, ravaged by the “Screwball” (i.e., “Nazi”) Army. Again, Cinevent’s print wasn’t Technicolor, but it was gorgeous. (Another side note: This makes four straight years that George Pal has been a presence on Cinevent Saturday. In 2016 it was Houdini [’53]; in 2017, When Worlds Collide [’52]; and in 2018, The War of the Worlds [’53].)

Hullaba-Lulu (1944). Little Lulu (based on the popular single-panel cartoon by “Marge” that had been running in The Saturday Evening Post since 1935) was one of the series produced by Paramount after ousting the Fleischer brothers from their own animation studio. Like the Puppetoons, this series was all over TV in the 1950s but has all but vanished since then. In this one Lulu innocently creates havoc when the circus comes to town. I hadn’t seen this one in over 50 years, but I could still sing that unforgettable intro, the all-time-best-ever cartoon theme song.

After the cartoons — just like a Saturday Kiddie Matinee of my childhood — it was three more chapters of Hawk of the Wilderness. Then the Saturday Matinee mold was broken by a silent feature, 13 Washington Square (1928). Based on a popular 1915 Broadway play, it starred Alice Joyce as a snooty rich dame out to break up her son’s romance before he marries “beneath his station”. Going incognito while everybody thinks she’s sailing to Europe, she falls in with a smooth art thief (Jean Hersholt) who’s plotting to burglarize her Washington Square mansion while she’s supposedly out of the country. Everybody winds up running around the house just missing each other — the thief to rob the place, the mother to stop him, the son and his sweetheart (George J. Lewis, Helen Foster) to pack his clothes and elope. It sounds like a good old-fashioned door-slamming farce, and maybe that’s what it was on stage, but Melville Brown’s stodgy direction kept things from really taking off. Still, it was amusing (partly due to Zasu Pitts as Joyce’s maid), and love did triumph in the end.

After lunch it was the return of a longtime favorite feature at Cinevent, a program of Charley Chase comedy shorts. This year’s entries were You Said a Hatful (1934), The Count Takes a Count (’36), and Calling All Doctors (’37), all quite funny. Welcome back, Charley; we missed you last year.

Then came the event that tied in with the Wednesday night Wexler Center program of two Audrey Hepburn pictures — author Robert Matzen gave a presentation on his latest book, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II. Already a bestseller on Amazon in three different categories (World War II History, World War II Biography, and Entertainment Biography), the book recounts teenage Audrey’s experiences under the German occupation of the Netherlands. (Ironically, Audrey had been in school in England when the war broke out. She was called back for her own safety by her Dutch mother, who assumed that England would be invaded any day. Mom further assumed that Hitler would respect the Netherlands’ neutrality as Kaiser Whilhelm had done in World War I. It was the least of the delusions of which Mom was fated to be disabused.)

Robert Matzen introduced Dutch Girl as the third and final volume in what he termed his “Hollywood in World War II” trilogy, following Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 and Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe. His presentation was informative and tantalizing, as he occasionally hinted at juicy details that he wouldn’t disclose — “For that you’ll have to read the book.” I picked up my own copy of Dutch Girl at one of Robert’s book signings; I’m reading it now and may well have more to say in a later post. For now I can certainly recommend my readers hop on the bestseller bandwagon and get the book for themselves. (By the way, a noted filmmaker who shall here remain nameless, but who knew and worked with Audrey late in her too-short life, has expressed a keen interest in filming Dutch Girl. I hope that comes to pass; it would mark the completion of the filmmaker’s own World War II trilogy.) (Oops! Make that a “quintilogy”; Dutch Girl would be the filmmaker’s fifth picture about the war.)

Just before the dinner break came one of the surprise highlights of the whole weekend — a surprise to me, anyhow. Not because I didn’t expect it to be good, but because it was so much better than I expected. This was The Marshal of Mesa City (1939), with George O’Brien as a former lawman who takes up the badge again in a new town — this because he takes a shine to a local schoolteacher (Virginia Vale, O’Brien’s leading lady in six of these B-westerns he made for RKO), while he also takes an instant dislike to the corrupt county sheriff (Leon Ames) who’s been forcing his attentions on the school marm.

George O’Brien deserves to be remembered much better than he is. Starting out in Hollywood as a stuntman, he rose up the ladder to star in some of the biggest pictures of the silent era: John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (’27), Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (’29). The Iron Horse landed him a charter membership in Ford’s stock company, and he later played key roles in Fort Apache (’48), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (’49) and Cheyenne Autumn (’64). In between he was a top box-office draw in dozens of westerns, first at Fox, then RKO, and it’s easy to see why. He combined extreme good looks and physical prowess with likeability and an easygoing sense of humor. And oh yeah, he also served with distinction in the U.S. Navy during both World Wars.

In my limited experience of O’Brien’s westerns, The Marshal of Mesa City is easily the best, for a number of reasons — chief among them a movie-stealing performance by Henry Brandon as a gunslinger hired by Ames to kill O’Brien, but who switches sides when he decides he likes his intended victim better. Another plus was director David Howard (who helmed many of O’Brien’s pictures). He may have been a routine talent, but his climactic shot of O’Brien and Brandon striding into the thick smoke of the burning jail, guns blazing, for a showdown with Ames and his gang — that was worthy of John Ford or Henry Hathaway.

Richard Barrios introduced The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), a risqué Pre-Code comedy from producer Sam Goldwyn and director Lowell Sherman (who also co-starred as a lubricious concert pianist), based on Zoe Akins’s 1930 play. Ina Claire, Joan Blondell and Madge Evans were deliciously well-matched, romping through the story of gal-pals trolling for sugar daddies. The three-gold-diggers-on-the-prowl premise was already familiar, and it would become even more so by way of Warner Bros.’ Gold Diggers series and 20th Century Fox’s recycling its similar story from Three Blind Mice to Moon Over Miami to Three Little Girls in Blue to How to Marry a Millionaire, right down to 2011’s Monte Carlo with Selena Gomez (also from Fox, though the studio was much changed by then). That familiarity may account for why Goldwyn always counted The Greeks a disappointment and sold it off to some fly-by-nighters. Nevertheless, it holds up well today; the stars are sassy and the Goldwyn gloss is much in evidence.

Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1920) was an appealing romantic dramedy (though the word hadn’t been coined yet) directed by Cecil B. DeMille’s big brother William, based on a 1903 bestseller by British novelist Leonard Merrick. Thomas Meighan starred as a disillusioned, middle-aged British Army officer jaded by service in India and seeking to regain the pleasures of his younger self. He learns, of course (20 years before Thomas Wolfe said it), that he can’t go home again. Then, even further disheartened, he falls in with a down-on-their-luck theatrical troupe, eventually learning that happiness is found in looking forward, not back.

Moss Rose (1947) was a decent enough thriller that nevertheless left a sense that it should have been better. Based on a 1934 novel by the prolific Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long (writing as Joseph Shearing), the picture was evidently Darryl F. Zanick’s attempt to repeat the success of Fox’s earlier ventures into Victorian Gothic suspense, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). Indeed, the role of murder suspect Michael Drego was tailor-made for Lodger and Hangover Square star Laird Cregar — who might well have played it if he hadn’t crash-dieted himself to death in 1944. Instead, the role went to Victor Mature — a better actor than he often gets credit for, but, well, Victorian Gothic probably wasn’t part of his skill set.

Then again, if the director had been John Brahm, whose talent for what Andrew Sarris called “mood-drenched melodrama” had made winners out of The Lodger and Hangover Square, Mature might have been able to get with the program. But the director was Gregory Ratoff, who divided his career between the director’s chair and as a character actor playing querulous mittel-European parvenus — and as a director, Ratoff made an excellent mittel-European parvenu.

Peggy Cummins, still licking her wounds over geting canned from Forever Amber, played a music-hall chorus girl investigating the murder of a friend who apparently got too close to the family secrets of Mature’s Drego and his mother Lady Margaret (Ethel Barrymore). Everyone on screen, including Vincent Price as a Scotland Yard detective and Patricia Medina as Mature’s fiancée, gave it their best shot. But the picture failed to find an audience. In a 1950 memo, Darryl Zanuck said it “was a catastrophe, for which I blame myself. Our picture was not as good as the original script and the casting was atrocious. The property lost $1,300,000 net…” Zanuck was too harsh; nothing about Moss Rose was “atrocious”. It was an interesting effort — but it was a bit of a misfire, shooting at a target where the studio had hit the bullseye twice before.

The day ended not with a bang but a whimper: Holy Wednesday (aka Snakes) (1974), produced in San Bernardino, Calif. on a shoestring for the drive-in circuit, it starred ’50s sci-fi stalwart Les Tremayne as an aged hermit siccing his herd of deadly serpents on his enemies. I didn’t stay. I watched about five minutes, enough to persuade me that this was ideal fodder for the robots on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, then I called it a day.

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There was some important news announced on Saturday by Cinevent chair Michael Haynes (on the left in this picture, in case you need to be told) and Dealers’ Room coordinator Samantha Glasser (the one who isn’t Michael).

Cinevent will return for Memorial Day Weekend 2020, which will be Michael’s last turn in the driver’s seat. At that point he’ll pass the baton to Samantha, who will continue the tradition into 2021 and beyond with a new organization which she is putting together even as you read this — a group that will, no doubt, include a good percentage of the current Cinevent staff. Also at the end of the 2020 convention, the Cinevent name will be retired.

Why retire the name? Well, when Steven Haynes passed away in 2015, he was the last of Cinevent’s original founders, John Baker and John Stingley having gone on before him. Now that Michael Haynes and his mother Barbara are withdrawing from active participation, it’s their wish to take the name with them. I can certainly sympathize and agree with that — but it won’t be easy to come up with a name as clever, as evocative, as…well, as downright cool as that.

As for the new name, Samantha is soliciting suggestions. Submit yours to her at SamanthaKGlasser@gmail.com by June 30, 2019. It’s worth free admission in 2021 if your idea is chosen.

To be concluded…

The first silent of the weekend was The Prairie Pirate (1925), a Harry Carey western, and far from his best. (You can always tell that a movie star has really arrived when they’re expected to carry a story like this. By 1925 Harry Carey had not only arrived, he’d definitely set up housekeeping.) Carey played Brian Delaney, a cattle rancher in Old California who comes home one day to find that his sister Ruth (Jean Dumas), besieged in their isolated home by marauding bandits, has committed suicide rather than submit to a fate worse than death. The only clues: a hasty note from Ruth telling Brian “they’ll never take me ali–” and some distinctive black cigarette butts. (Ruth actually knew the outlaw leader’s name, Aguilar, but somehow neglected to include it in her note.)

In the next scene — the reason why is unexplained — Brian has become an outlaw calling himself the Yellow Seal. His life of crime consists mainly of raiding saloons all around the area and confiscating the establishments’ cigarette butts (actual title card: “Now bring me every ash tray in the place — muy pronto!“). This heinous spree of wanton lawlessness has put a $5,000 price on his head, dead or alive — a pretty draconian bounty for cleaning out ash trays, I’d say.

At the same time, Brian (as the Yellow Seal) meets and romances the daughter (Trilby Clark) of a local ranchero (Robert Edeson). She in turn is being coerced into marrying a saloon owner (Lloyd Whitlock) who has won her father’s hacienda at his crooked gaming tables — and who is also in cahoots with the bandit Aguilar.

Harry Carey is always welcome, of course, but that’s about as much time as we need to spend on this nonsense. Carey gets to do some nifty riding and fighting, though both he and Trilby Clark are all-too-clearly doubled in the picture’s barreling-downstream-toward-the-waterfall climax (which comes to an awfully hasty resolution; did they run out of money in 1925, or is footage missing now?).

The next two movies on the program were considerably more rewarding. First came Sunbonnet Sue (1945), a modest but entirely winning little Gay Nineties musical from Monogram Pictures. An ebullient Gale Storm played the title character, setting out on a showbiz career by singing in a Bowery saloon run by her father (George Cleveland) — to the horror of her stuffy Fifth Avenue aunt (Edna Holland), who vows to torpedo this vulgar stain on the family honor before it exposes her own humble roots. Monogram’s entry in the spate of nostalgic turn-of-the-20th-century musicals epitomized by Meet Me in St. Louis over at MGM, Sunbonnet Sue had enough charm to make you wish that the studio had shaken off Poverty Row altogether and sprung for a color production — if not Technicolor, then maybe Cinecolor or one of the other bargain-basement processes. Oh well, baby steps — Monogram was hoping to move into A-pictures eventually, but it wouldn’t do to go too far too fast. Still, Sunbonnet Sue was a nice effort, leaning heavily on old songs that, if not yet in the public domain, were at least well-worn enough that the rights could be had for…well, for a song. The picture even managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Edward J. Kay’s musical scoring (it lost to MGM’s Anchors Aweigh).

Next, after the Thursday dinner break, came the genuinely unusual, little-seen To Mary — with Love (1936). Based on a two-part novella by Richard Sherman that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in late 1935, the picture told the story of a marriage, or at least the first ten years of it (which for a while look like they will be the last ten years of it). We first meet Jock and Mary Wallace (Warner Baxter and Myrna Loy) on the evening of their wedding day — which also happens to be Election Night 1925, so their own little after-wedding party at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel is swamped by a much bigger party celebrating the election of Jimmy Walker as mayor of New York. Helping them celebrate is Bill Hallam (Ian Hunter), Jock’s best man (and a silent torch-bearer for Mary) and a young woman the three have just met that night, Kitty Brant (Claire Trevor), who will become an intimate friend — at one point, perhaps a little too intimate.

From there the picture follows the ups and downs of the Wallace marriage for the next ten years, with major moments set against a background of significant events in America — the Dempsey/Tunney fight, Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, the 1929 stock market crash, etc. Through it all, Bill Hallam is Jock and Mary’s staunch friend, conscience and protector, helping them navigate the rough spots (and some of them are rough indeed), despite the fact that he’s in love with Mary and she knows it. Well-directed by John Cromwell, To Mary — with Love told its story straightforwardly and with a refreshing (not to say astonishing) lack of melodrama or soap opera. Baxter, Loy and Hunter each gave one of their personal-best performances. According to the program notes by Richard Barrios (who also introduced the screening), this unique picture has been kept out of circulation for decades, apparently because of issues concerning the rights to Richard Sherman’s original story, so this screening at Cinevent was a rare opportunity to catch up with it.

Another near-lost picture was the Laurel and Hardy short Duck Soup (1927) (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers feature). This one was believed lost for years, which was a pity, until a print surfaced in Belgium in 1974, which was a blessing, because it’s probably the earliest short in which The Boys played something like the characters they would soon become famous for.

After that it was yet another picture based on a Saturday Evening Post story (“The Spoils of War” by Hugh Wiley). This was Behind the Front (1926), a Paramount silent comedy starring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton as soldiers who become best friends in the trenches of World War I, never suspecting that Hatton is the pickpocket who stole Beery’s watch, and whom Beery was chasing until they both got sidetracked into enlisting. What I saw looked pretty good, but a little Wallace Beery goes a long way with me, so I watched a little, then bailed out to browse the dealers’ room until they closed.

Besides, I didn’t want to miss the last movie of the day, The Amazing Mr. Williams (1939); the thought of Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell in the same picture was just too good to pass up. This was one of Columbia’s entries in Hollywood’s many efforts to duplicate the combination of sophisticated banter and murder-mystery suspense of William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man movies. This time, Douglas played an ace police detective who can solve the toughest cases in nothing flat; Blondell was his fiancée, the mayor’s secretary, ever getting stood up when he’s called away on yet another important case. Both of them get embroiled in the case at hand — which defies easy synopsis, so I won’t even try. Anyhow, the mystery was complicated enough to hold the interest, the love-play amusing, and the supporting cast stalwart: Clarence Kolb as Douglas’s conniving boss, Ruth Donnelly as (what else?) the heroine’s wise-cracking best friend, Jonathan Hale as the mayor, Edward Brophy, Donald MacBride, Don Beddoe, John Wray. Nobody, no studio, was ever quite able to duplicate that Thin Man magic, but watching them try made for a lot of fun in the 1930s and ’40s, and this was a good example.  

So opening day of Cinevent drew to a close. On to Day 2, Friday, next time.

To be continued…

Once again, on the Wednesday night before the first day of Cinevent, some of us early arrivals in Columbus attended a screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State Campus. The theme this year was “Audrey Hepburn X 2”, and the program consisted of pictures at opposite ends of Audrey’s career, one of her last (Robin and Marian, 1976) followed by one of her first (Secret People, 1952). Personally, I would have preferred that the Wexner Center take the program in chronological order rather than the reverse.

On second thought, let me rephrase that. I would have preferred that they not screen Robin and Marian at all, for one simple reason: It’s lousy. It was lousy in 1976 and it was lousy last Wednesday in Columbus. Besides, if any Ohio State students really needed to see it, Turner Classic Movies has been showing and promoting it for months far beyond its merits.

Purporting to chronicle the last days of Sean Connery’s Robin Hood and Audrey’s Maid Marian, Robin and Marian is easily the worst movie either star ever made — mean-spirited, cheap and shoddy. The mean spirit permeated James Goldman’s sneering script. As for the cheapness, well, there was really no excuse for that. The picture’s budget was $5,000,000 — quite respectable for 1976 — yet it takes place in a twelfth-century England where the population is about 35, all of them dressed in cast-off blankets and tin-plate armor that would be hooted out of any meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

The shoddiness came thanks to the director, the less-than-mediocre Richard Lester, who could never stage the simplest action without zoom-lensing and quick-cutting it into incoherence; without overusing his telephoto lens until his movies looked literally flat; without ham-handed “comedy” that made his actors look like small-time boobs. In a career that ran from 1954 to 1991, Lester made exactly one decent movie — but for many people, that one covered a multitude of sins.

The picture, of course, was A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Lester got more credit for it than he deserved. When it came out in July ’64 the Beatles were widely regarded as just four lucky yobbos from Liverpool who had stumbled into a freakish fame. Most everyone who wasn’t a teenage girl assumed it would blow over in a year and all four would be moved to the Where Are They Now File. A Hard Day’s Night‘s stars were assumed to be nothing special; in time, of course, the over-21 world would know better, but for now Lester got credit for making the Fab Four so appealing. The picture also had an excellent screenplay by Alun Owen, so smooth it seemed to have been ad-libbed on the spot. Unfortunately for Owen, it suffered the fate of all such scripts: Lester got credit for that too.

But I digress; back to Robin and Marian. Having seen it in 1976, I didn’t care if I never saw it again, but I supposed once every 43 years wouldn’t kill me. Well, now I’m done; if anybody’s still screening this turkey in 2062, I’ll be busy.

After intermission the Wexner Center redeemed itself with a much worthier effort. Secret People may be remembered chiefly as one of Audrey Hepburn’s first substantial roles (and the one that led directly to her breakthrough in Roman Holiday the next year), but the picture really belongs to Valentina Cortese (or “Cortesa”, as the Brits and Americans preferred to bill her in those days). She and Audrey play Maria Brentano and her younger sister Elenora (Nora), refugees in 1930 from an oppressive dictatorship in their unnamed foreign country. (Their names suggest Mussolini’s Italy, but the dictator is the neutrally-named General Galbern.) Their father, a Gandhi-esque dissident, has smuggled the girls to a friend in London. Shortly after their arrival, they learn that their father has been executed by the Galbern regime.

Seven years later, the two are naturalized British subjects, their surname anglicized to Brent. Maria is unexpectedly reunited with her former boyfriend Louis (Serge Reggiani), who recruits her into a plot to assasinate General Galbern on a visit to London. When the plan goes awry and leads to innocent death, it begins to dawn on Maria that Louis and his cohorts are nothing more than terrorists, as ruthless and callous toward human life as the regime they’re plotting against. Maria’s ambition to be a writer, and Nora’s to be a dancer, mean nothing to them in their lust for blood.

Secret People was directed and co-written by Thorold Dickinson (1903-84), a British filmmaker whose reputation has undergone a bit of a renaissance in recent years. Never prolific (“It’s terribly difficult to direct a film you don’t want to make,” he once said, “that’s why I’ve made so few.”), Dickinson is probably best known over here for his excellent 1940 picture Gaslight, which MGM fortunately failed to destroy when they remade it in 1944. Secret People isn’t entirely successful as either a political thriller or a psychological drama, but it poses intriguing questions, the plot takes some unexpected turns, and Valentina Cortese makes up in screen presence for what the colorless Serge Reggiani lacks. Plus, of course, it offers a glimpse of Audrey Hepburn on the cusp of immortality, indulging her first love, ballet.

In fact, the Audrey Hepburn connection would bear fruit later, once Cinevent itself was under way. I’ll get to that in its own good time.

To be continued…