Once again the Picture Show opened with a serial, with its once-weekly episodes (twelve of them this time) parceled out among the four days of the convention. So it was that Day 1 opened with Episodes 1-3 of Spy Smasher (1942). Based on a caped hero introduced in the February 1940 issue of Whiz Comics, a sort of Batman-like vigilante battling sinister spies and saboteurs on American soil, the serial went into production at Republic Pictures on December 22, 1941, two weeks after America’s entry into World War II. This meant that unlike 1941’s King of the Texas Rangers (screened at the last Cinevent in October 2021), Republic didn’t have to pussyfoot around the bad guys, having villains speaking in pronounced Teutonic accents while coyly declining to state exactly which country they’re working for. Nope, here the spies being smashed are Germans, no doubt about it, led by a U-boat commander known only as The Mask (Hans Schumm), who dons and doffs his mask apparently at random. Episode 1 opens with Spy Smasher (aka Alan Armstrong, played by square-jawed Kane Richmond) being rescued from a firing squad in Nazi-occupied France and smuggled back to the States to try to thwart The Mask’s scheme to flood the American economy with counterfeit money. Oddly, while the comic-book Spy Smasher had a fiancée, Eve Corby, whose father Admiral Corby is high up in U.S. Navy Intelligence, the serial gives Alan Armstrong a twin brother Jack (also Kane Richmond) who is the one engaged to Eve. This change suggests that Spy Smasher having an identical twin will figure in the plot later on (spoiler alert: It does). Meanwhile, it leads to confusion early in Episode 1 when the Corbys mistake Alan for Jack, with Eve (a fetching Marguerite Chapman) running to his arms and planting a nice big kiss on his astonished lips. Understandably, he decides not to disabuse her of her error — although five minutes later the Admiral (Sam Flint) is calling him “Spy Smasher”, apparently forgetting that he ever mistook him for Jack.

Such lapses are frequent in Spy Smasher, but only the churlish will quibble when the thrills and suspenseful cliffhangers come this fast and frequently. William Witney (directing his first serial alone after co-directing 16 with John English and two with Alan James), after a somewhat leisurely set-up in Episode 1, keeps the actions barreling along like one of the cars, trucks, motorcycles and speedboats that the heroes and villains regularly resort to. Much of the action is staged with the back projections that were common at the time, but a surprising number of the stunts are the real McCoy, and excellently staged and executed (particular kudos here to David Sharpe, doubling Kane Richmond).

The first feature of the weekend was Moon Over Her Shoulder (1941), though at a modest 68 minutes it just qualified. Lynn Bari plays a woman whose husband (the ever-bland John Sutton) is a celebrity marriage counselor who, in his office, on his radio program, and in his bestselling book, advises couples — especially women — on how to keep their marriages alive and engaging. Meanwhile, this clueless dolt, in a textbook case of physician-heal-thyself, fails to notice that his own wife is bored out of her skull. He suggests that she find herself a hobby — painting, for example, which she dabbled in before they were married. Unbeknownst to him, what she finds is Dan Dailey (still sporting a “Jr.” in his billing), a sport-fishing yachtsman who shanghais her aboard his boat, thinking she’s despondent and he’s saving her from suicide. His romantic but chaste attentions stroke her lonely ego until even blind hubby sees the improvement in her (and in her paintings) but is still too blind to suspect the reason. As everyone in the audience can see coming, things get out of hand when the skipper falls for her and proposes. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther dissed Moon Over Her Shoulder as a “flimsy bit of nothing”, but Variety’s “Char” was kinder, commending a “workmanlike” script and the “steady direction of Alfred Werker”. This hit closer to the truth, and “Char” displayed a gift for prophecy by saying Dan Dailey did “a swell job and appears to be destined for further importance.” Well, when you’re right you’re right.

Next was Lady and Gent (1932), a Paramount Pre-Code with George Bancroft, Wynne Gibson and, five steps down the cast list, a fledgling John Wayne. Here I insert the notes I wrote for the Picture Show program booklet:

The 1932 Pre-Code Lady and Gent caught George Bancroft midway in his transition from burly leading man to stalwart character support. Behind him were his days starring for Josef von Sternberg in Underworld (1927), Docks of New York (1928) and Thunderbolt (1929), snagging an Oscar nomination for the latter. Still ahead lay such roles as Jean Arthur’s editor in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the father to Mickey Rooney’s Young Tom Edison (1940) and — arguably his best performance of the sound era — Marshal Curley Wilcox in Stagecoach (1939).

If Stagecoach was Bancroft’s best performance, though, his work in Lady and Gent ran it a good second. He was still being billed above the title, even if it was in a Paramount B-picture. Here he plays “Slag” Bailey, a prizefighter not yet aware that he’s over the hill — though he gets that rude awakening early in the picture’s 86 minutes. When we first see him, he’s still cruising the speakeasies and womanizing enough to exasperate his girlfriend Puff Rogers (Wynne Gibson): “If dames was a dime a dozen and you were a billionaire, you’d be broke in one week.”

The high-flying Slag is brought down to earth — or more accurately, down to the canvas — when he’s knocked out by the young up-and-comer Buzz Kinney (John Wayne). The loss throws his manager Pin Streaver (James Gleason) into a financial panic, and a desperate attempted burglary gets Pin shot dead by a night watchman. Feeling responsible, especially after he learns the reason Pin needed the money, Slag tries to set things right, dragging the protesting Puff along with him. From there, as it covers the next 15 years, Lady and Gent becomes an illustration of the old saw about life being what happens while you’re making other plans.

Bancroft is matched in Lady and Gent by Wynne Gibson, who is a bit of a revelation here. Granted, Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt’s script gave Puff Rogers most of the best lines, but they also wrote a character that would test the resources of any actress: querulous, sharp-tongued, impatient, yet for all that, rather soft-boiled. As Slag says of her early on, “She’s a little screwy at times but she’s a good gal, and you can always depend on her to be in on the showdown,” — and it’s true, when the chips are down, Puff always manages (albeit grudgingly) to do the right thing. We meet her onstage at the speakeasy she bought with Slag’s winnings, warbling the Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow song “Everyone Knows It But You” (a tune that will return to Puff years later with a very different and rueful meaning). Gibson would go on to a steady career through 1956, hopping around the B-units of various studios (plus what passed for A-pictures at Republic), and later on television, without quite breaking into the top ranks of Hollywood players. Later in 1932 she would re-team with director Stephen Roberts for another career highlight in the Paramount omnibus If I Had a Million, playing a streetwalker who uses her windfall to check into a deluxe hotel for a good night’s sleep, for once having the bed all to herself.

In 1932, director Roberts had finally broken into features (Lady and Gent was his second) after an apprenticeship directing one- and two-reel shorts all over town, 97 since 1923. He would go on to such varied fare as the notorious The Story of Temple Drake (’33) with Miriam Hopkins, which would do as much as any one picture to provoke the crackdown that ended the Pre-Code Era; One Sunday Afternoon (also ’33) with Gary Cooper and Fay Wray, later remade as The Strawberry Blonde with Cagney and de Havilland; The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo (’34) with Ronald Colman (screened at Cinevent in 2017); and Star of Midnight (’35) with William Powell and Ginger Rogers. Alas, his early promise — he might have become another Raoul Walsh or William Wellman — was cut short by a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 40.

Also fated to meet an untimely end was writer Grover Jones. He and co-writer McNutt would hit their stride in 1935, adapting The Lives of a Bengal Lancer for director Henry Hathaway. Jones’s work with Hathaway at Paramount would eventually result in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (’36), Souls at Sea (’37) and The Shepherd of the Hills (’41). The latter was a posthumous release for Jones; an infection set in after kidney surgery and carried him off in September 1940 at the age of 46.  

Lady and Gent was well-received. Variety’s “Rush” called it “so well played that minor flaws…fade into insignificance beside the human pull of the narrative.” And at the New York Times, “L.N.” called the picture “a good one along — well, sentimentally tough lines.” And Jones and McNutt were Oscar-nominated for their original story (they lost to Frances Marion for The Champ).

Paramount recycled Jones and McNutt’s story seven years later in a nearly-shot-for-shot remake (right down to the inclusion of “Everyone Knows It But You”) called Unmarried (’39). Helen Twelvetrees, making her last picture, played Puff Rogers (renamed “Pat”); cowboy star Buck Jones was cast against type as the ham-and-egger Slag. Robert Armstrong and Larry “Buster” Crabbe took over for James Gleason and John Wayne, respectively, and 13-year-old Donald O’Connor took the role played by Billy Butts in the original. Who know? Maybe one day a print of that one will become available, and Columbus Moving Picture Show-goers will have a chance to compare the two.

The first silent picture of the weekend was East Side — West Side (1923), a title so utterly obscure that I couldn’t find a review in Variety or The New York Times, or even an authentic image online — all there was was this composite, superimposing stars Kenneth Harlan and Eileen Percy over a New York cityscape obviously from several decades after the year the picture was made. To be honest, calling them stars is a bit of an overstatement; Harlan and Percy were definite B-listers. Still, they were both good here. Percy, the erstwhile leading lady of Douglas Fairbanks before he swashbuckled into costume pictures (Wild and Woolly, Down to Earth, The Man from Painted Post and Reaching for the Moon, all from 1917), played Lory, a young woman from the East (i.e., “Poor”) Side of New York, living in a one-room flat with two roommates. One of them is a tubercular invalid (Maxine Elliott Hicks) who brings out her motherly side; the other (Lucille Hutton) disappears early in the action when she runs off to be kept by her stockbroker sugar daddy in a Central Park West apartment — exactly the sort of moral compromise Lory is determined to avoid. The desertion puts the remaining roomies into financial straits, so a kindly doctor (Charles Hill Mailes) arranges for Lory to do some typing for a well-to-do writer. This takes us to Duncan Van Norman (Harlan) of the West (“Rich”) Side. He’s a writer, supposedly, but he’s also a high-society dilettante and stuffed shirt who writes (in the doctor’s words) “a lot of high-sounding, unadulterated bunk.” Lory’s typing gig evolves into a full-time job as Duncan’s secretary, in which position she humanizes him and urges him to write “a thrillin’ story that somebody can understand”. The course of true love runs smooth — until snooty society tongues start wagging about Duncan and “that girl he calls his secretary” — prompting Duncan’s mother (Lucille Ward) to intervene. All ends well, of course. The action did seem a bit truncated, probably because East Side — West Side survives only in one of those five-reel Kodascope condensations that George Eastman House made for the home market. So we have what we have, and if we feel like important scenes are missing, it’s not necessarily because they weren’t there in the first place, and what remains is enjoyable and well-acted. Eileen Percy in particular is charming enough to make us want to revisit some of her pictures with Doug Fairbanks to see if she held her own better than we recall. Meanwhile, East Side — West Side, obscure as it may be, is available on YouTube, albeit in a somewhat shorter and considerably more battered version than what screened in Columbus. Curious Cinedrome readers can check it out here.

Also, I see on IMDb that Kenneth Harlan, who amassed some 200 credits (mostly in supporting roles) between 1917 and his last picture in 1943, died in Sacramento, Calif. in 1967, age 71. This puts me in mind of an actor acquaintance of mine here in Sacramento, Dan Harlan, who was born in 1935, when Kenneth would have been 40. I do imagine I can see some resemblance between the two; I wonder if Dan (who I believe is still with us) or one of our mutual acquaintances can confirm or deny any connection?

Last on the program before the dinner break was More Songs in the Dark, More Dangerous Rhythms, another of the Picture Show’s (and Cinevent’s before it) welcome compilations of musical clips curated and introduced by historian Richard Barrios. The title refers to two of Richard’s books, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter (both are among the indispensable books on movie history; if you don’t have them, get them). As always, Richard’s compilation was an embarrassment of riches (where does he find these clips? I don’t mean the numbers, I mean the actual strips of film.) A complete list of the hour-long program would be exhaustive (besides, I neglected to take adequate notes), so I’ll just mention a few favorites. A genuine oddity — and not really a “musical selection” — was a Vitaphone trailer for The Jazz Singer, with silent-screen heartthrob John Miljan (about to embark on a long, graceful decline into supporting roles and old-times’-sake cameos through 1957) stepping out from behind a heavy curtain to nervously regale the audience about the imminent arrival in their theater of Warner Bros.’ latest sensation. Curiously, Jazz Singer‘s main selling point, hearing Al Jolson sing, is not demonstrated; instead, Miljan natters on over newsreel footage of celebrities at the New York premiere, then introduces a couple of silent scenes from the movie. (You can see it here on YouTube, in a darker and higher-contrast print than the Picture Show screened.) The delightfully piquant Lillian Roth teased her way through “Come Up and See Me Sometime” from Take a Chance (1933), giving a foretaste of the complete picture, to be screened on Saturday night (more on that when I cover Day 3). Then there were the two clips pictured here. TOP: A scene from Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) in which the title character (Alice White) shoots a production number for the film-within-the-film. The song, “I’ve Got My Eye on You” by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green, is catchy, but what makes the scene great today is its glimpse at the nuts and bolts of shooting a musical at the dawn of sound — the three cameras in their soundproof booths shooting simultaneously, the fourth booth recording the sound on 16-inch discs, the off-camera orchestra. It’s practically a documentary, and the sort of thing Hollywood usually (at that time) didn’t like to publicize for fear of undermining the magic. (And it’s easy to see the need for the booths: Those clattering cameras sound like wringer washing machines.) This one can also be seen here on YouTube. BOTTOM: “People Have More Fun Than Anyone” by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts, featuring a spirited pas de trois by Rita Hayworth (singing dubbed by Anita Ellis), Marc Platt and Dorothy Hart, choreographed by Jack Cole. This elaborate number is also on YouTube here; what we saw in Columbus runs roughly between the three- and six-minute marks.)

After dinner came Malice in the Palace (1949), a Three Stooges short from the days after Shemp replaced Curly. (When I was a kid in the 1950s, Columbia was still producing theatrical shorts with the Stooges — Moe, Larry and Shemp — and I saw many of them first-run on my own hometown screen. Years later, when their earlier work began turning up on TV, I was nonplussed: “Where’s Shemp??? And who the heck is this Curly??!!??“) This one had the boys running a restaurant in some vaguely Arabic-looking desert emirate, then getting embroiled in a plot to steal a priceless jewel from the tomb of King Rootintootin. The short is a favorite among Stooge aficionados; myself, I took a pass in favor of spending more time in the Dealers’ Room.

Any true film buff knows that Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) would be a highlight of any weekend of movie-viewing, and so it was here. However, the time has come, as I mentioned in my previous post, for my vacation travels to take me away, before I can properly get into a discussion of Keaton’s last masterpiece — which, incidentally, was filmed barely six miles from where I sit typing this. More about that later. I’ll stop for now, and pick up where I’m leaving off as soon as I can. Please stand by, and thank you for your patience.

To be continued…