Pharmageddon: JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012) and fuzzy horror

As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 7000 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy horror guru. What is fuzzy horror? I can only tell you it encompasses all of Coscarelli's films, the early Sam Raimi, Cronenberg, and John Carpenter til he started doing cable TV, Quentin Tarantino --if he ever made a horror movie. It's a loosey goosey termite art digging and goofing around - simultaneously mind-expanding and brain-addling. It never has to rely on vicious sexual violence, in fact when there's sex at all it tends to be fairly chaste. Who loves fuzzy horror? Any one who suddenly found themselves cheering watching BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA just because it happened to be  the 80s and never looked back, and has seen both THINGs more than a dozen times each. Why is it Hawksian? Because it's still scary even though it tends towards humor; it transcends genre and is based on character interaction, a droll shared language, the gallow's wit of RIO BRAVO, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE THING, THE BIG SLEEP, and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. And having interesting things to say and do because there's so much less pointless twisting and random acts of shock designed solely to get bad (better than no) publicity and it understands the two bros being cool language of deadpan calm and running jokes. Why fuzzy? Because it can get pretty sloppy, best to watch late at night, feeling good. Fuzzy horror rewards fuzzy viewing... and the films only get better with each new view, cuz the fuzzy has made you forget most of it anyway.

I won't go too much into JOHN DIES plot - you can just mosey over to Netflix streaming and watch it, and then come back to this scintillating post. But let's just say this - that dude up in that picture with the sunglasses and mysterious device? He played the infantry trainer ("Medic!") in STARSHIP TROOPERS, another fuzzy horror masterpiece.

I will say also that time looping is involved but I liked this film way way better than LOOPER. And I believe in time travel, if only via one's third eye. And when a movie makes the third eye hallucinations real it works, because it's a movie and so exists totally on the hallucinatory level. Unfuzzy directors feel compelled to separate the two - what is just a dream and what is real - like we'll upend the apple cart if not brought safely back to the grind. An example of this unfuzziness is AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, wherein the wolf must come out of David through grand physical agony or it won't be 'believable' --and if you want to have a pack of Nazi werewolves with machine guns, then you must make that part a dream. If John Landis made the dream the real and focused on those Nazi werewolves for the whole film, than hot damn, that would be hardcore fuzzy, and also a bit like the opening of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME.

Because what mainstream science still can't quite admit, but which leading edge scientists are realizing to their amazement, is that the universe is subjective (see books like The Subjective Bioverse) and if we can move past notions of size, perspective, relation, and spatial relativity, then space/time travel is possible regardless of the distances between solar systems. As humans with limited to no ESP ability we can't imagine space travel any other way except by carting our bodies from point A to point B, in a vessel relative to own size. The closest we have to ESP now is the cell phone and wireless router, but while we take those things for granted - sound waves that beam all over the globe constantly, billions of voices soaring up and down like ping pong balls between humans across their orbiting satellite nets and we take it for granted while scoffing at alien abductions. Perhaps this is why what was absurd fiction a mere century ago is taken for granted today and yet no one dares broach the subject of dimensional travel's validity as a scientific fact based on the subjective experience of hardcore psychedelic drug trippers. In other words, if you can imagine it, it will be. It's on its way. At least in the movies. Even back in the day, Lovecraft was tapping into some really groovy shit, man. He knew the tentacles from the fifth dimensional rift were ever pulling that gate open. But the only way he could express it is through fiction.

All of which serves as a flawed introduction to my praise of Don Coscarelli, a man who I've written of in the past as being suspiciously like myself in extrasensory speculation, to the point that one of my pet intervention metaphors, self-performed eye surgery. Check out this exchange in the film after Dave calls a priest because John seems possessed.

Dave: What do you think it's like, Father?
Father Shellnut: What's what like?
Dave: Being crazy, mentally ill.
Father Shellnut: Well, they never know they're ill, do they? I mean, you can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. I suppose you just feel regular, and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.

Now check this from an old post of mine in the C-Influence:

Eyewitness testimony can be considered “fact” in a court of law but means nothing to science, which cripples itself through its dismissal of everything “subjective” as if there was something that wasn’t (...) Our collective disbelief about things beyond our comprehension is itself beyond comprehension, revealing the fundamental impossibility of trying to think about nature objectively from inside an organic brain (sort of like trying to perform eye surgery on yourself without a mirror) (5/27/11)

I have no choice, therefore--considering the film's avalanche of uncanny coincidence-- to believe the film was written by me in the future.

I mean this as no disrespect to JOHN DIES' creators, Coscarelli and author James Wong (a pseudonym so they say). But I'd know my handiwork anywhere. Of course all three of us are clearly inspired by Lovecraft, William S. (and Edgar Rice) Burroughs, Alan Moore, and maybe even Hunter S. Thompson, so who knows who I really am? I always hoped Lovecraft might read my work one day in a time travel loop and be inspired to write the Chthulu mythos based on my own August Derleth-based fiction. That's probably not in our immediate 'future' but one thing I do know: if time is elastic and we are all one, then we are all one right now, connected through an elastic time tentacle, everyone of us, back and forth through time in order to play not just many parts ala Shakespeare but every part, right down to Vishnu's former Indra ants in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. In other words, if you weren't me before, you are now, just reading these words binds you to me. This is how we become our own great-grandmothers, and why karma never fails, nor Ramboona.

Such weird collapse-of-time distortions in JOHN DIES AT THE END are only one of the great side effects of a black ooze-style drug dubbed 'soy sauce,' a mix of the black ooze from the X-FILES and the black centipede meat of the NAKED LUNCH, and the Black Sheep Dip from my own unpublished novel... and of course, probably, some real naturally amazing drugs like psilocybe mushrooms and Salvia Divinorum. Aside from time dilation, this soy sauce allows one a Zen-like calm as well as the ability to read minds and to astral travel, which includes visiting an Interzone-style alternate reality that imagines if we had gone on to invest in biotech that was a literal fusion of biological material into technology, to have computers and Lovecraftian mutli-tentacled horrors fused into one entity that sucks and intellect and experience of the entire world through its crab-claw-tentacles, ala Corman's ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (or David Cross in FUTURAMA: BEAST WITH A MILLION BACKS - see my 08 post, and More Tentacles from the  5th dimensional Rift). Or if SKYNET was a giant octopus. That's not even forgetting the tiny nanobyte brainputating spores that take over bodies ala the manipulatin' monsters in THE THING (1982), GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), and the ones that just dissolve humans from the inside out, like those pinpricks in THE FLESH EATERS (1968), all super fuzzy.

And of course we can't not mention Don's own previous films, including the definitive fuzzy, the PHANTASM series, which depicts one of the more frightening post-death Archon soul harvesting procedures, and the zany melancholy of BUBBA HO TEP, wherein the real Elvis and the fake JFK battle a mummy from the old west. 

There's great intertextuality and meta asides in all Coscarelli's films but JOHN DIES is particuarly clever: the 3-D glasses Fabianne Therese wears is a nice touch; she has phantom limb syndrome, and the ghost of her hand turns a magic key in a secret door in the abandoned mall, which is one of my more memorable dreams (in my version Marcia Brady was waiting in a hospital bed through the door, to hold my hand and confess her love and ask me to get her a coke - I went to get it and never found the door again!). She can only see her phantom hand with the 3-D glasses! That they would work in a 2-D film, for a 2-D character to see beyond the limits of their known virtual 3-D perceptions, is just one of the stunning choices that puts Don's film way out in front of the cult-contending pack - up past even BUCKAROO BANZAI (1982), which for all its archness never could quite commit to its interstellar overdrive psychotronic roots, as if REPO MAN came up to it at a party and BUCKAROO got scared of getting high in the back room and left early.

More similarities with my own work to solidify my case that I am the future author of this work: Pay close attention to the banners hanging on either side of the church pulpit in the above still, as I get ready to lay down more of the massive flood of similarities to my own work that will bear out the theory I shall become John Wong. Note that the phone Dave uses in the scene depicted on the far left banner is a hot dog, similar to the banana and Marlboro phones in my QUEEN OF DISKS! (2007)

What's that you say? Everyone does the old banana phone gag? Well not when addressing psychedelic transdimensional time slippage! Another similarity is that the 'Mall of the Dead' where some the ghost door to another dimension dwells is most similar to my 'Mall of Time' from an old unpublished short story about a guy looking for a special cigarette that gives the user and out of body experience (based on a time when I briefly lived in the head of a Chinese baker) at a conceptual mall . Here's an excerpt:

The mall of time had been designed to appeal to the tactile senses to lure the net-dazed shopper back in. The theme was an evolution of history with spacey gadgets on one end and gradually decades receding as you walked down the aisles until you past the dawn of man and into some weird cannabalistic pagan wordlessness. Eighties clothes and jewelry down to seventies retro, flapper prom tuxedo shops, Cowboy Dan's, and then farther back still… through pre-Columbian dining room sets, a series of moving sidewalk exhibitions with tinsel rain and roaring plastic volcanoes and the voice of Christian Bale narrating your trip through time. The roar of a dinosaur as we reach the kid's robot dinosaur displays, and, if you are a tripper, looking for the special cigarettes, back farther still...

... and as we took the escalators down and down and ran giddy but full of dread along the black tiles, our shoes echoing amid the cacophony of music and the crowd thinning down to only us, and Bale’s voice on the loudspeaker as it discussed the mating habits of the terandadon, that flying dinosaur that was the missing link between birds and reptiles. Down where we were heading the music got quieter and the lights got lower, and the animatronic dinosaurs became lower to the ground, hiding in the shadows and in the coin fountain now bubbling with fake moss and plastic sludge. Blood and mud filled the air, like a slaughterhouse zoo. 

Right? Coscarelli's film is a little different, but the idea of a mall being associated with interdimensional time travel is the same, and and I dig the writing of James Wong, who also writes really bizarre, perceptive stuff for Cracked. Am I totally comfortable in saying that Wong is me in the distant future? Yes. Do I 100% believe it? Well, that can best be described in a line from the film, espoused by the Arkham University-style detective in the film:

Detective Lawrence 'Morgan Freeman' Appleton: I'm an old school Catholic. I believe in hell. I believe it's more than just murderers and rapists down there. I believe in demons and worms, and vile shit in the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it's not just some place down there. Oh no, that it's right here with us. We just can't perceive it. It's kinda like the country music radio station. It's out there in the air, even if you don't tune into it.

So what does that tell you? That Don Coscarelli is amazingly prescient about the realities of post-death alternate dimensional enslavement, forging a direct link with theories espoused by everything from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the writings of Nigel Kerner, Nick Redfern, and David Icke. He understands the collapse of reality that comes from opening up past mainstream science and Christianity's tight-ass gates and out into the land where just entertaining crazy ideas becomes better than either fiction or reality, i.e. mythic.

So much written about something that most of us, in our limited ideas of heaven and hell can even admit has happening. That's the only way to describe it, in a mix of past, present, and future tenses. The heaven and hells of the bibles is all around us; the future, present, and past exists simultaneously. The heaven and hell we create for ourselves is created with each breath. Karma is so instant that the retribution may precede the crime, and this also explains the lucky in love unlucky at cards truth, which I have experienced firsthand. It's real, son! And if this time travel is possible than people from the future have already manipulated our past to suit their own ends. The Hassidic Jewish community has mastered this which is why they continue to dress the same as they did before the stock market crash, to as not draw attention to themselves. Do I believe that? Not really, yet it was revealed to me by the alien intelligence from whom I get all my secondhand news!

Right, now you want to talk to your own alien intelligence. Well, I know of two, one is legal. One alien intelligence is found in psilocybe cubensis space spore, the other Salvia Divinorum. One is like a strict Catholic gardening teacher, who regularly skins you alive in a slow, circular orbit, like clockwork de la Kubrick of dragon's teeth. And if you can sufficiently let go (of self, time, duality) and identify with the nature of the universe, with the floor beneath your meditation cushion, then you can just let the teeth strip away your crappy egoic shell and 'pop' you are suddenly free in awash of one love no sense of time or space --the bright yellow cosmos, where any question the remainder of your psyche can think to ask is answered, in a way wherein you remember being told this answer in the distant past.

The psilocybe intelligence on the other hand feels a little younger, a less austere -- the cool hippie teacher instead of the stern egocidal gardener; not quite as carefree as the marijuana spirit, but like a space jockey from 1967 who moves into your body with you like a fun out of town visitor you loved from high school who sweeps into your life and encourages you to abandon responsibility and sneaks you into all the coolest wildest clubs and teaches you how to see the spirits between the cracks of reality, but after awhile he starts to get on your nerves, but it takes hours and hours for him pack up his duffel (stealing your watch as well) and you're like it was great having you around but now you're getting on my nerves, bro; and you're still seeing his shadow a week after he's allegedly gone home.

So as you can see, these 'poison path' pen pals do take a bite before they go. Your mileage and enlightenment may vary - as set and setting is all important. Only fools, madmen, and artists would ever go it alone. But how else will you get writing done?

If this rambling 'review' has been more about me than JOHN DIES AT THE END then I apologize. All you really need to know is its kinfolk, where it exists in the family tree of midnight cult goofball fuzzy, alongside THE EVIL DEAD, TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL and REPO MAN and right up the street from Don's PHANTASMs, and sitting at the same table as Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, BUCKAROO BANZAI, NIGHT OF THE COMET, and HAUSU. With even maybe a smattering of HELLBOY and CONSTANTINE waiting in the corner. It's ANTS IN YOUR PLANTS OF 1939 meets 80s John Carpenter. That should be enough for you, or indeed any man, woman, Indra, or ant. As long as you're fuzzy you're gonna be all right.

Early Hawks: THE CRIMINAL CODE, TIGER SHARK, CEILING ZERO, BARBARY COAST, ROAD TO GLORY

Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for his Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked about his three favorite American directors and answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." How dare he exclude our greatest director, Howard Hawks? Of course it should be Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges. Ford was brilliant visually and emotionally but easily mired in his misty-eyed Irish sentiment. When he tried to do comedy he got lost in children's choirs and rolicking brawls. None of that for Hawksian men there's never any religion, or children. What these men do instead of all the stuff the Ford men do is to face danger on a daily basis, and make music together, and drink and smoke, and when they die, they die like men, or they survive like men; either way, without speeches. And if they meet a woman, it's ten times faster and more disorienting than a Maginot line charge. There's no chaperone, no parson beaming, no dance, no time for blarney. The whole fabric of the John Ford fort, the small town unity that extends in generations for centuries back, is sublimely shrunk down to a gummy old cripple, a drunk, and a limping sheriff, holed up in a jail and visited daily by attractive women who seem more modern and free of phony glamor than even Ford's dirty-faced tomboys. There's no mutually consenting nonmarital sex in a Ford film, and nothing but in a Hawks.

Needless to say, John Ford John Ford John Ford has won the history, he's got dozens of boxed sets in his name, Hawks none (aside from R2) and part of that may be that Hawks films are still very modern. There are very few misses in his canon but also nothing of superficial importance like GRAPES OF WRATH. The closest Hawks gets is maybe his most unHawkslike, SGT. YORK. Usually, instead of emotion, race, and historical accuracy, Hawks' films are fun, archetypal, witty, engaging, resonant more on a Jungian than Freudian level. In some ways it's as if Hawks films take place in the universe that Ford has set up, the same towns and valleys, but then hides out from all the boring town functions. While the Ford characters are square dancing, speechifying, voiting, learning to read and write, and eating big breakfasts, Hawks' characters quietly grab a bottle of whiskey off the table, sneak out back, roll cigarettes and skateboard around. Fords films are about obeying the rules, worshipping tradition, joining the social order with a deep Catholic devotion, and letting Victor McLagen ham it up; Hawks films are about breaking rules, sidestepping tradition, letting Dean Martin suffer through the shakes and PTSD brought on by past films enduring Jerry Lewis. "In case you haven't figured it out yet," John Wayne explains to his prisoner; "the minute your brother starts somethin' you're liable to get accidentally shot." The way Wayne says 'shot' is a chilling reminder of death's finality. In some films guns are just toys and marksmanship almost irrelevant - the heroes never miss and the villains never hit- but in Hawks it's about being a dead shot even with a pistol fired from the hip, or else staying the hell out of the way. The rules in most westerns seem very arbitrary and inconsistent. Hawks' films it's always perfectly clear. It's not that all good guys are great shots, it's that only great shots are welcome.

In the 30s, though, Hawks was still figuring himself out. He had some great writers, many of whom had also witnessed a lot of death, like William Faulkner, a fellow WW1 pilot who took very clear-eyed looks at buddies in danger. BUT Hawks had yet to find his signature action movie style, the male bonding-in-isolation, the querencia mentality, wherein courageous, noble, chivalrous marksmen, pilots, or hunters band together against great odds in an enclosed space. He had some masterpieces like SCARFACE, but in some of these early films he's bound by love triangles and other odd choices. Anyway, maybe examining these five early films (in order of release) will help. They're all rather obscure so I mention how to locate each film, be it available only on VHS, DVD-R, or TCM--which is a crime considering nearly every John Ford movie ever made is remastered out there on disc, and my own ratings.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)
Avail. on VHS and Region 2 DVD
***
Walter Huston is a tough but fair warden who, as DA, sends a naive kid (Phillip Holmes) up the river for ten years after he whacks a masher with a bottle in a notorious speakeasy.  "An eye for an eye - that's the foundation of the criminal code!" snaps Huston, waving a black book like a blackjack. But there's also a different criminal code, which means don't rat out your fellow inmates. And there's a climax wherein if Holmes rats out a killer of a squealer he'll walk out a free man, but he won't violate the code. He won't! He won't he won't! he won't! Huston gets in some intense acting, grabbing the boy by the lapels and demanding to know who did it. WHO DID IT!??

There's some good press room overlapping dialogue introducing the action, but this doesn't feel particularly like a real Hawks film. Once he becomes warden, Walter Huston gets some chances to be super tough, like walking unarmed into a throng of hateful prisoners, or getting a shave from a guy in for life for cutting another man's throat, and there's a great silent build-up to the whacking of a squealer, with Karloff looming around like a white tunic-sporting Frankenstein, but otherwise characters are trapped in situations clearly contrived for Big Moral Issues, and an air of existential gloom hangs; there's not much room for Hawksian heroics in such a clamped-down situation (like if the whole of RIO BRAVO was told from the point of view of the imprisoned Joe Burdett).  In TARGETS (discussed here) it's the film Peter Bogdanovich and Karloff watch on TV while getting drunk in Karloff's hotel suite. The VHS is pretty solid, made back in the day when they built them to last.

TIGER SHARK (1932)
Occasional TCM airings, Warner Archive DVD
***
When Hawks focuses documentary-style on a tuna fishing off the coast of Steinbeckain California, going into the heart of tuna schools and pulling them up one after the other, throwing them all into a big trough where they flip and flop trying to escape, slicing each other up with their razor fins, you get an idea this was what John Huston was trying for with his mustang hunt in THE MISFITS. When one man fishes for himself, it's the natural order; when a crew fishes for half a state, it's mortifying. The good part here is that man's not strictly the apex predator, because where there's fish there's tiger sharks, and they love Portuguese commercial a-fisherman for dinner. Edward G. Robinson's jovial capatin loses his hand to one, and so wears a shiny hook (he gets it polished on his wedding day). Another guy loses his legs, dies, and leaves his daughter (Zita Johann) powerless against Eddie's boastful charms. Johann's weird pallor worked in THE MUMMY but she doesn't have the inner fortitude of, say, Greta Garbo's Anna Christie, and so when she falls for Eddie's partner, two-handed hunk Richard Arlen there's only the sense that he might have access to some benzos that would make the overacting of Robinson's angler bearable. Wrote Andrew Sarris, "Hawks remorselessly applies the laws of nature to sex.The man who is flawed by age, mutilation, or unpleasing appearance to even the slightest degree invariably loses the woman to his flawless rival." There's some good scenes and no bad ones in TIGER SHARK, but the problem is all this remorseless law applying and less natural danger. Robinson seems miscast, his constant chatter and Portuguese accent seem unduly weak for such a great actor. When he shoots at sharks from the safety of the crow's nest it only makes you sick, not inspired.
 

CEILING ZERO (1936)
VHS
****
Here's the first film where Hawks shows the rapid fire overlapping dialogue style that would become his trademark. A chronicle of the early days of Newark airport, wherein stray pilots are nursed through heavy fogs by a radio operator or two and Pat O'Brien, who try to deal with crises while old friends and a snoopy aviation bureau rep (Barton MacLane) try to interfere and/or say hello. We come to admire the way O'Brien can refrain from snapping people's heads off while he's engaged in life-or-death radio contact and some oblivious person walks through and starts joking around. Then, enter (tumbling) daredevil pilot James Cagney who served with O'Brien in the WW1 in the Signal Corp (where Howard Hawks served with William Faulkner). It's a bit similar to DAWN PATROL, in that O'Brien doesn't fly the planes, and has to send men up in bad conditions (ceiling zero means the fog is so low and so high even the sea gulls are grounded) and he doesn't like it.

A highlight is when they're all trying to help a lost in the fog Stu Erwin land after his honing beam goes out, and he can't get their radio signal but they can hear him shouting in panic and rage, presuming everyone on the ground is off playing poker and they're all shouting into different phone lines all along the flight plan to various listening posts and police stations, and the girl in the room cries and shouts "Why don't you do something?" and they all bark at once "SHADDUP!!!!" We see a slight strain in Hawks not misogynist per se, but his Hawksian woman was still being formed, and while the girls are of varying degres of toughness here, they are shown to crack up in a crisis, throwing little tantrums. There's also some surprising sexual frankness: June Travis offers herself to Cagney for succor after he loses Stu Erwin, who took the doomed flight so Cagney could have a date with her in a shadowy prefiguring of Joe's death in the early section of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

The ending is one of those bits where everyone's noble self-sacrifice has to constantly trump one another's, but it's almost beside the point. What counts is that here is that Hawks has found his thing, the zippy overlapping dialogue of a bunch of professional men united in a common cause, against a common foe, and the weather, and the (notably Irish blarney-free) velocity of the Pat and Jimmy chemistry at full manly throttle. The VHS I got is blurry.

BARBARY COAST (1935)
(available on a solid DVD from MGM)
***
It's a rarity for a Hawks film to follow the leading lady around. Usually it's the leading man, the hero. He may not start the film but as soon as he comes on we never leave his side. But here it's Miriam Hopkins as the first white woman in San Francisco, back in the gold rush boom town days, when a ship from New York had to travel all the way around South America and took the better part of a year to get there, only to find a city of unpaved mud roads so nasty they can suck you under like quicksand, a dense fog filled with scammers, pickpockets, and ruffians, and inside nothing but crooked roulette wheels, shady murdering bouncers, and that pint-sized unlucky-in-love big shot Eddie G. Robinson.

There's a few elements that lets you know Hawks isn't fully himself in this, one of the films he made for MGM; he was a hired gun of Goldwyn's, and delivered the goods on time, end of story. He's not particularly enamored with his leading man, Joel McCrea, is a foolish poet-type who loses his hard-earned sacks of gold in one turn of Hopkins' fixed roulette wheel, a "cheap price for such an education." This after they fell in love as strangers both seeking shelter from a rainstorm at an old deserted cabin, the oldest excuse in the book, as Edward G. Robinson knows, myeah. Notes Cinephile:

"There’s little sexual tension, chemistry, or even the vaguest hint of innuendo between the two leads, it would seem a sign attached to one of the gambling tables in Robinson’s casino which reads “No vulgarity allowed at this table” is a rule disappointingly applied to the rest of the film as well. It has little visual identity beyond Ray June’s atmospherically foggy night-time photography (which does some fine work with shadows towards the end) and little of the cynicism or edge which marked out other collaborations with screenwriter Ben Hecht, instead opting for flowery, pretentious dialogue many of the cast clearly struggle with."

Gambling is a hard trick to do right by in film and Hawks isn't a great one for making money cinematic. The idea of everyone having to lug around sacks of gold through throngs of thieves, leaving us to worry about how easily they could be robbed is as far from the Hawksian sense of groups solidarity as you can get. Saving it all is Walter Brennan as a shell of his future self, Old Atrocity, he alone seems to achieve some sort of noble 3-D savagery. His survival in this place, his being welcome even in his disheveled form in the glossy casino (he lures strangers off the docks over the roulette wheel, perhaps for a cut of their trimmings) makes him one of those rare figures (like C3PO or Dennis Hopper) who can wander back and forth between classes, enemy camps, nature and civilization, because he really fits in neither.  Add some throw-away lines like "it's hard rowing when I'm so emotional" and it still adds up to a formulaic but well-detailed socio-historic romantic thriller that's no SAN FRANCISCO (1936), nor even, when all is said and done, a TIGER SHARK.

THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936)
(Portugese DVD - Region 1)
***1/2
William Faulkner co-wrote this one, a name-only remake to a 1926 Hawks silent. It's hard to imagine this was made a year after BARBARY COAST as it looks straight from 1930. Hope Lang prefigures the later Hawks heroines as a dreamy WW1 Parisian combat nurse with a beautiful black velvet choker-wrapped neck, bangs, pale skin, bangs, a sexy Red Cross on her cape, and a lower-registered speaking voice. She has the air of Lauren Bacall on the cover of the March 1943 Harper's Bazaar that won her a Hawks protege-ship.  You can see it in Lang's face, that same petulant weariness, just determined to do her part and her empathy for the boys' suffering never so haughty as to preclude sex.

The plot to ROAD is an uneasy mixture of the auld love triangle - new officer Frederic March meets Lang when they take shelter together in a bombed out saloon. He plays some tunes, and puts his coat over her as the Huns bomb the street above. Next day he's stalking her, bothering her at the hospital while she tries to bandage the wounded, unaware she's the mistress of shaky drunk Warner Baxter, his new C.O. Once Baxter finds out, of course, it's suicide mission time for March, a bit like the situation in Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY or Von Sternberg's MOROCCO, or any of a dozen other films (like FRIENDS AND LOVERS, reviewed a few posts ago). Adding to the trouble is Baxter's father showing up and being played by Lionel Barrymore, who wants to get into the young man's game to prove his worth. He ends up hogging screen time with his usual business before grenading his own team. March puts up with it all stoically, and there's no guess how it ends --he winds up in command, DAWN PATROL-style, winning by default, and indulging in the pills and booze regimen that made Baxter able to send brave men to their deaths.

A memorable segment of the film involves Germans digging underneath the allied trenches. The soldiers know they can't abandon the trench, or the Germans will march right in. So they have to stay... and wait, as the Germans scrape away below, knowing that as soon as the scraping stops the bombs are likely to off beneath them. That's where the true courage is tested, the painful, prolonged waiting... and smoking. And there's a rousing charge across no-man's land, as well as sneaky night time flank maneuvers! It's great in its way, but its way isn't full Hawks, there's still the love triangle, the ignominy of war, the sense of being pawns in the grip of a story teller with a theme and message, rather than being characters gripping a director for no reason other than instilling a sense of pride in being human.

See also, the 1932 Hawks film THE CROWD ROARS, which I capsuled earlier. 

"In the words of my father... Oxnard." - Ghoulardi

For the average auteurist critic, deconstructing an opaque work like Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012) tends to involve making connections to the topographical 'conscious' of the artists' life, while the geological 'unconscious' -- the subtextual kernel to which the artist himself is usually blind by definition -- tends to be ignored. And yet it's this exact lower strata where underpinnings are made clear, a strata linked inextricably not to the artist but to his parents. In other words, to understand THE MASTER don't look at at Paul Thomas Anderson, look at his father, Ghoulardi.

I just re-watched THE MASTER (2012) today, and while the first time it mainly left me irritable (too stuffy in the theater), this time, on the safety of my own couch, paying only marginal attention, I thought of my own late father, Jim Kuersten, and of Paul Thomas Anderson's late father, Ernie Anderson, aka Ghoulardi, a Cleveland horror movie host of some legendary renown from the mid-60s. I knew the name, but figured he was just a Vaudeville schtick-jiving Mockula ala mein own Dr. Shock (with daughter Bubbles, below) on Channel 17, my favorite as a child in Wilmington, Philadelphia.

 

But as I researched Ghoulardi on Wiki, my eyes started widening and the pieces of the MASTER plan puzzle popped into place. He was beyond any mere horror-host pigeonholing, apparently. Ghoulardi was a maniacal anarchist, blowing up models and toys the kids sent in, live on air. He used a lot of free-associative beatnik slang of his own invention, like 'stay sick!'  He played his own surf rock intros (he was a direct inspiration for the look and sound of The Cramps), and ranted against suburban towns like Parma (Par-ma) with its polka music fetish. He had a pet raven named Oxnard. He smoked on air. He aroused the ire of the higher-ups. It was all broadcast live, and he said whatever the hell popped into his head. Not a lot of it survives. But the T-shirts live on. 

Watching THE MASTER this second time I could see some of Ghoulardi in the Satanic twists of Freddie Quell's forehead and in the cult-building improv 'making it up as he goes along' prowess of Lancaster Dodd. Anderson's cult might have been of young, crazy Cleveland mid-60s proto-punks rather than serious-minded adult proto-Scientologists, but it was a cult nonetheless. As Cleveland.com remembers: "Ghoulardi came before all the things we identify with the 1960s: the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, Vietnam, civil unrest... Ghoulardi was the last Beatnik from the '50s and had this wisecracking irreverent attitude..." Check out this, one of the few surviving clips of the great Ghoulardi in action:



Listen to that deep, resonant Charles Middleton-ish voice! Do you hear a touch of Lancaster Dodd's deep croak? Most interesting is the knowledge that he had trouble memorizing his lines so just made it all up as he went, live on air, which is how Dodd's son describes his dad's methodology. And Ghoulardi was a chronic challenger to authority, standing up to the big wigs at his local TV station, and regularly doing crazy things like driving a motorcycle through the offices.

 Here's what Paul Thomas Anderson said about his dad in an interview, as reported in WIKI

"He was in the Navy stationed mainly in Guam. I don't think he did any fighting. I think he was trying - he was fixing airplanes and knew just where the beer was stashed and played the saxophone in bands and stuff like that. You know, every picture I have of him [shows] a beer in his hand. Every single picture from the war he's got - so he was pretty good about probably finding ways to get out of fighting. But again, you know, we never really talked that much about it."

In other words, Ernie Anderson was a wild man, a ballsy, deep-voiced iconoclast, a trickster, the father as wild man. He later became the announcer for most of ABC's programming and promos. And some of that fine work can be heard here. 


I know it's weird to write about a father on mother's day, but I was just on the phone with my mom to wish her a happy one, with THE MASTER paused on the first big 'session' between Dodd and Freddie. My own dad died of cancer a year and a half ago, and I never got to visit him in the hospital; he never would have wanted me to, either. He despised soap operatics. Our true good-bye was watching and rhapsodizing over Lumet's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), the highballs making him merry and open, and both of us enraptured by the pure ballsy artistry of every aspect of the film. I'm sure I'll think of him whenever I next see it again, which I hope is soon. I don't have any recordings of my dad, but he lives on in whispered pro-golf announcers, and old horror movies for me, which we used to make fun of together in a ritual of wit-honing.

My dad was fierce, tall and with a booming Wellesian voice, a drinker. He was larger than life, and he drank right up until the end, like a superstar. The doctors were amazed his metastasized cancer hadn't killed him years earlier, they theorized the booze was keeping him alive.  He fell and broke his ankle mixing a drink and had to be hospitalized, since his bones were shot because of chemo. And of course being in the hospital meant no booze. He was dead in a matter of days. I've hated doctors ever since, worse than Kate Hepburn in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY.  I still smoke, because fuck living forever like my 107 year-old granny, and when I feel my big Wellesian dad's archetypal energy alive in a film I tend to love that film as if it were my father's ghost. I want to avenge it against the Claudius critics and shout it from this blog's parapets. 

Ernie Anderson died of cancer in 1997, the year BOOGIE NIGHTS came out, the year I was first struggling to get sober. Paul Thomas was there for it all, sitting beside his dad's bed ala Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his 1999 film MAGNOLIA (see here for an analysis of this in context with Edward G. Robinson's death scene in SOYLENT GREEN).  Anderson wasn't around for his dad's Ghoulardi thing, as it was over by the time he was born. He did get to see it on the VHS tapes that are around in circulation and pieces of which are on youtube (and above): "What I do and what he did is so different, but he hated authority and he wanted to stir things up. And I hope my work always has that kind of spirit."

It does. Tell your parents to turn blue, he'd say. "Stay sick and turn blue." That must be a weird thing for PT to hear on a tape made by his own late father, but it's a weirdness the same late father left him equipped to handle. As a result PTA's films fly past the maudlin sand traps and safety-first Clyde-hopping of most films about flawed or dying fathers, and into modern myth. There's no stern moral or tsk-tsking in a PTA film, no matter how vile some figures are (such as the incestuous talk show host in MAGNOLIA), Paul just shows them love, not for their humanity but for their thrilling wild man energy. It's pretty clear in studying the Ernie Anderson story just where PT's love of wild man Screamin' Jay Hawkins-esque energy comes from.

There's also the sense Ernie was a partier, like my own dad, like me, like Jason Robards and his dad in LONG DAY'S, and of course Freddie Quell, who always has a drink in his navy hand, and knows alcohol for what it is, the last true line of defense against the void, and the void itself, the mirror through which the artist may behold the Medusa Muse of Mortality without turning to stone. If, in the end, it stones you just the same, at least you get to pick your frozen pose. 

---
One last coincidence, my dad always joked he was going to retire... to Oxnard. I forget why. He loved that name. It wasn't related to Ghoulardi's use of it, to my knowledge. We never lived anywhere near Cleveland, but he too loved its crazy name. Oxnard. He joked he wanted to retire there, and I needed to make money to pay for it. "You gotta earn a lot of money so I can retire in Oxnard," he'd say. I didn't. Oxnard exists now only in my memory.

(See also Great Dads of the 70s: Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights)

(and my initial post on The Master - Butler of Orbs 
and the The Master's Questions Answered by the I Ching)

High Society and the Matrons of Frank

From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian Blaine

The enduring image of Mr. Frank Sinatra today is as a ring-a-ding-dingin', woo-flinging Vegas lounge wiseguy, crooning, chairman-of-the-bordering the Rat Pack, and shtupping a plethora of broads. But did you know he used to be called 'Frankie' and was once but a humble and naive wingman to blustery Gene Kelly in MGM musicals? The women he wound up with were bigger and strong and he was too thin and/or unwilling to escape. But it was wondrous because after some initial resistance he rolled with it. Like a smart operator he realized that beauty and innocence weren't much compared with easy action. If she had a good pitching arm, a car, an apartment, money, and a refusal to take no for an answer, what could he do? Ring-a-ding-Ding! 

The reasons for this unique rubric began in WW2, wherein Sinatra's quiet storm radio broadcasts won a massive following of soldier's stateside sweethearts. The skinny kid needing a mother angle was played up to keep the soldiers from getting jealous. Women could love Frankie and not be unfaithful in their hearts because it was platonic --they just wanted to cook and to care for him. Frankie was a good sport about being mistaken for a broom or carried off by strong winds when he guested on Bob Hope or The Jack Benny Show. But after the war he found it a hard habit to shake. Was this, once again, a product of the war? There were enough widows out there now, slightly older maybe than he was, who didn't need to wait for marriage to get laid. And so now their mother instincts were more intense than ever. And these ladies perhaps found their model in Betty Garrett, a brazen, no-nonsense gal with appetites, who picked up Frankie (literally) in On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 

In Ballgame, their relationship was perhaps best summed up by the song "It's Fate, Baby it's Fate," a duet wherein Garrett makes her play, and Frankie tries to argue his way out as she chases him around the empty ballpark: 

 Betty: Too late, baby, too late,
So accept your destiny,
It's fate, baby, that you were meant to fall into love with me.
(break)
I'm gonna start it out on my astrology, and phrenology

Frank: It does not matter that you are Aquarius, or Sagittarius
Or Gemini or Scorpio or Taurus the Bull, Capriconicus or Pisces the fish.
Betty: Winter, summer, spring or fall,
As long as you were born at all,
Mister, you're my dish.

It's fate baby, it's fate.
Frank: Can't I even put up a fuss?
Betty: It's fate, baby, the stars have written that you and me is Us.

In On the Town she's a NYC cabbie who sings "Come up to My Place," and--in a move very bold for the 1949--convinces Frank, as a navy man on a 24-hour pass, to abandon planned sightseeing. Their horny quicke / nooner hook-up vibe gets so intense that the clueless cockblocking of her sniffling roommate is almost not funny. Luckily, Garrett gets her off to the movies so she and her mother love object can presumably have some of the most forthrightly implied casual afternoon sex since Dorothy Malone closed up the bookstore in The Big Sleep (1946).  (See more about my love for the Garrett / Sinatra dynamic in my 2006 piece, "The She Wolf Gets Her Man").

Garrett was a blast in both roles and was a tough act to follow. She wound up blacklisted--a commie!--and Frank lost the 'ie' at the end of his name and landed a major role in From Here to Eternity (1953). He still made musicals, of course, contending with the bossy broad Adelaide (Vivian Blaine, above) in 1955's Guys and Dolls, but it wasn't until 1956 that his musical persona began a transitional phase. He made two films that year-- The Tender Trap and High Society. The staid, supportive, witty, and patient Celeste Holm took over for Garrett, though he started both movies already knowing her, and only semi-interested despite spending all his time with her. Holm was no cabbie, but a photographer in one and a concert violinist in the other. Frankie was moving up and outside of his Hoboken class, and making the grade. But there was no spark with Holm. She was his launch pad, boosting his courage and catching him if and when he ever fell.

In High Society, Holm is in the place usually reserved for Joan Blondell or post-code Jean Harlow, the patient, long-suffering girl friday. It's Grace Kelly Frank really sparks with. They bring out the best in each other, which says a lot. It's supposed to be Bing's show, but as soon as Sinatra gets behind a bar and gets to make some drinks and sing to Kelly, a curious magical thing happens, Kelly feels it, we feel it. Sinatra looks and sounds and moves the way the giddy warm flush when the first drink hits you right as the setting sun starts to shine in your eyes. Frank's set to 'smolder' and he leaves Bing looking almost anemic, hungover and outgunned.

This wasn't just a Hoboken son getting lucky with a future princess but a career-turning revelation. A deep, poetic, sincere romanticism that Sinatra could only really convey in his best recordings comes out right there and the old innocent 'Frankie' disappears forever. The booze, the bar, the saloon song, the intimacy of two people alone at a bar, this--it was clear--was Frank's sacred ground.

But he still had to go back to Holm in the end, because he would never be able to go all the way into high society. He was meant for the quiet hideaway bar rather than the ritzy soirees. And Holm, at least in High Society, wins by default. But her mother instinct was growing obsolete. She expected her Icarus high-flyin' swinger would plummet back into her arms once his wings melted into the morning's hangover. But there was emerging from the sands a city where the bars never closed, the crooning, drinking, and seducing could go on 24/7 - there was no need for Holm because there was no need to ever come down... Las Vegas.

In Frank and Holm's other 1956 film, The Tender Trap, Frank's a swinging New York City talent agent with a constant stream of dames, allegedly, but he only seems to be seen with Holm, whose classy carriage (she's an orchestra violinist) and Broadway wit anchor his confidence. She works in the scheme as the girl who will put up with his tomcatting and stick by him because she's got nothing better going on. When they meet marriage obsessed singer Debbie Reynolds (one of Frank's new clients), they grill her on her life goals (three kids and a home in the country within five years, or bust) and she's so naive she doesn't even recognize they're kidding her. Holm gets to seem cosmopolitan here but then the censor steps in, presumably, and it's revealed Holm is plain old-fashioned girl, too. At least she's fun, while Reynolds' character is bossy and controlling and frowns at any kind of non-Better Homes and Gardens-style party planning. Still, Frank's womanizing attitude buckles like arctic summer ice when he finally falls into her arms, and its beautiful to see.

Frank was now drawing the A-list stars, but the stars on the virgin side of the old dichotomy--Doris Day and Reynolds--and on the other, rat pack stalwart Shirley MacLaine, whose 'party girl' make-up and a solid range of acting chops didn't preclude her playing the doormat, adopting some Vivian Blaine-shrillness as the girl who won't stop chasing Sinatra even into his hometown (where he goes for a frigid English teacher instead) in the non-musical Some Came Running (1958). As he almost did with Holm in Trap, Sinatra marries Shirley for the wrong reason and she happily take her pimp's bullet to save his life and open him up for more reciprocal relationships. Were any of them coming? Or just some more mothering Brooklyn-type broads (whom he considered himself too good for) and slumming college-grad good girl virgins (vice versa)?

Pal Joey (1957) was another musical, another Sinatra stepping persona stone. He's a self-aggrandizing but small-time crooner / strip club emcee, 'mothered' by the babes (here he calls them "mice") but now a new form of Sinatra film was cohering--wherein the songs 'functioned' within a dramatic context, and the babes competing for him were both hot and aggressive. With his method of seduction stated as: "treat a tramp like a lady and a lady like a tramp," it's natural he would get one of each--Kim Novak as a small town innocent in the chorus and Rita Hayworth as a rich widow / ex-stripper. A bunch of showgirls do his laundry, serve him bagels, and so forth, but since none of them get jealous over each other we wonder if they just feel that old devil mother instinct, because more than ever, in Joey, Frank looks very, very thin, wan, undernourished, especially compared with Novak, a big girl more suited to a big man, like Bill Holden with his shirt open in Picnic. 

But Frank was finding his inner fire, a heat forged from booze, artistic aspirations (he did after all pioneer a whole new style of recording, single-handedly popularizing and promoting the long playing LP) and that old black magic power he was generating, a power that's socks-your-knocks off in his "Lady is a Tramp" seduction of Hayworth, or when he starts to walk away at the end in his iconic white raincoat and hat. It's this film wherein he seems to find his enduring Vegas style it's all in that walk, away from Hayworth's yacht and off into the Frisco fog, with a dog and Novak at his side. Bogey had that same walk and a similar raincoat in Casablanca, and we all know Bogey ran the original Rat Pack, which Frank had been in, as an admiring young pup. It paid off.

A mark of his maturity was his willingness to look foolish. In one of the Joey songs, "My Funny Valentine," Novak sings of his less-than-Greek figure and unsmart dialogue. For "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," Hayworth refers to him a "half-pint imitation." Each song is a smoldering high point in the film, bringing both those now-standards to giddy heights of smolder, each basically about the eternal Frank question: why this half-pint imitation-- skinny, arrogant, class climbing--still delivers the sexual goods. It's a testament to all three performers that we can feel their rapture so keenly. As Stephanie Zacharek recently wrote about Baz Lurhman's Gatsby, there's a difference between a faker and a phony. And Frank is so authentic he can submit his faker persona to enough withering epiphanies and humiliations to kill ten ordinary Gatsbys, and not even flinch.

By 1960, due no doubt to all this good bad behavior, his mother instinct stigma had receded even farther into the background, to the occasional needy ex-one night stand cum-stalker, while in the foreground the McLaine broad types, the slumming socialite types, and the homey types were coalescing into one perfect package, such as Angie Dickinson in 1960's Ocean's Eleven. An ironic mention of the old mother instinct is found in a snatch of dialogue between Dean Martin and Dickinson upon their meeting up:

DM - What made you come back? I've come to the conclusion it must be love. Mother love
AG: I'll consider many things: mistress, plaything, toy for a night, but I refuse to be a mother, that's out.
DM - Don't get me wrong, I'm the mother....

Then there was one final mother: Janet Leigh i The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This one comes in like a relapse, understandable since Frank's character is major in the process of becoming unglued as a result of nightmares and PTSD. Janet Leigh, hardly a matron or a broad follows him out of the bar car; he's shaking and glazed with sweat, unable to make eye contact and she gives him a cigarette because his hands are too shaky to light his own. This prompts her to give him her address and phone number, presuming a man in his DT-esque condition will effortlessly remember both. To seal the deal, he calls her to pick him up from jail, and in the cab home she announces she's already broken off her engagement because sweaty, shaky, twitchy Frank is such a catch. She says she's an orphan, a reincarnated Chinese laborer (an eerie prefiguring of Mrs. Iselin's Asian connections), so is she a spy, or is the mothering instinct here gone so rogue it's gone red, found its way into the cold nether regions of political intrigue in a bizarre mirror of Lansbury? Leigh's character is sexy and smart, but her love is so total and so unearned its unnerving. At least, by the end of the film, Frank looks great - the sweat glean is gone, the uniform is pressed, and he's not skinny anymore. He looks ready...

Then, JFK, a personal friend of Frank's, died. It traumatized him, the nation, the world, and brought an immediate end to all innocence. Mother instincts were out, for keeps.

Do I have a purpose here, in following this 'mother instinct' thread through Sinatra (whom I adore so don't think I'm criticizing him). It's just that as an ex-boozer, an ex-rock band member, an ex-husband, a struggling writer whose work is littered with typos, a burn-out, I've had my own troubles with mothering co-dependent women. I've been fought over and plowed under, ignored and suffocated, I've stared out hotel windows at dawn with a bourbon in my hand and Steinbeck on the bed in the wee wee hours.... not even trying to be legendary, just trying to not shake. Have I suffered for Frank's sins? Is the whole mother instinct thing and Frank's efforts to be rid of it responsible for the glamorizing of boozy misogyny that coursed through Sinatra's Rat Pack schtick, and which in turn infected generations of boozing men like me?

Frank would know--he was always more intellectual and caring than he let on--but he's gone, flown off to the next seedy marquee and the next studio. Hopefully he won't have to spend another film career escaping and then submitting to the tender trap, and then maybe those of us who follow after him (avidly) won't confuse maturity and womanizing, and we won't try to escape the hydra's many-stringed apron by finding a different apron, until we wind up getting tired, and settling for the one that ties us up faster than the rest, and ties so tight we can't escape, and so then we can spend the rest our stage time escaping, bemoaning the leash like the courageous dog whose a coward off it. It's not fate, baby, it's just men trying to figure out how the hell they got into the messes they call their lives. Once they figure it out, they're gone. They'll call you, baby, but don't crowd them.

Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was very advanced artistically but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS, which is based on the diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia. The film begins contrasting the flower-encrusted but regimented life of a young Austrian noble woman whose married to Russian Prince Peter the Half-Wit --via long distance courier, the handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge. The beginning scenes in Prussia are so unbearably stuffy with 17th century decor and pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies that an air of claustrophobia hangs over everything, there's one unbearable matriarch after another as Dietrich is poked and prodded like a piece of meat at the butcher's; by the time Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow he's in love with her and she with him, and we're in love with all the richly photographed sable wraps. The reigning queen in Russia is played by perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser), and her no-good nephew Peter a bug-eyed Sam Jaffe, who dislikes his new wife and returns to prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland. 

Things are even more oppressive in Russia, at least at first. The dowager doesn't give a damn about what Catherine wants, so long as there's an heir to the throne. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras") and the intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit") and nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, lengthy songs in churches and ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, nonrepresentational and boring, IVAN THE TERRIBLE-prefiguring film ever made. That said, John Lodge inhabits the bright, drearily cheery Austrian parlor in the beginning like a tall dark shadow, glistening with sexy sable collars, and if you're in the right half-asleep, stressed frame of mind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin, then Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and the urge of Peter to drill holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky,  then you should have no trouble sponging up any aesthetic gloom overkill, and just lean back and watch Dietrich age 20 years over the course of the film. Based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry, that's kind of what happened, thanks to his slowly mounting hatred of his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigarillo-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed lover of Garbo (and possibly Babs), Mercedes De Acosta. It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives Barbara Stanwyck after she proves herself tough enough to get along, but knowing what we know about Stanwyck's private life (though she never came out of the closet, so it might not be 100% true) it's interesting to find her character semi-mocking a fellow sewing circle sister onscreen; then again, at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, especially at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors (such as a scene of a fey tailor taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY, only recently restored after being cut for re-release) were made fun of, winked at, but never sneered at or hate crime targets. They existed, in some form, only until 1934, and then again, deeply coded, in the 40s-50s (i.e. Joel Cairo, Arthur Gwyn Geiger). Since LADIES was never re-released aside from pre-code festivals, and Maltin's groundbreaking Forbidden Hollywood VHS series, which is where I first laid eyes and heart on it.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the rest of the film deals with an on-off love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster). Theirs is one of those martyr-ish love affairs where each one tops the other in sacrifice and honesty. He trusts her word and gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory. She takes him up on his true love offer, and confesses she was really guilty; He sends her to the joint; she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to see her; when she relents it right about the same time she's aiding two men from across the prison in an escape. Dan's terminal earnestness all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they looove Stanwyck. She's given plenty of those great freak-out scenes, where a terrifying tough madness comes through her soul and hits the screen like a ton of two-fisted feminine moxy, the kind Sharon Stone aimed for and hit, but never really shattered the target like Babs. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave, hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except, as when Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at a trying-to-be-sinful MGM. Like the beginning of SVENGALI, we begin the film seeing gigolo Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing train, and afterwards affixing himself to British socialite Myrna Loy. Naturally, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that like all British socialites visiting Egypt, she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead, these exotic Egyptian mothers); she's here to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny), whose saddled with an unbearably controlling mother, and blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left).

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-strewn hotel room via offers of service as a guide; he absorbs the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British, when he accompanies them on a trip to the pyramids, a weird highlight of the film. But the film is from MGM, so let’s face it, woefully short of Paramount's charm or Universal's lurid expressionism. If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper MOROCCO desert with the Mummy, but he wasn’t the mummy anymore but some Egyptian gypsy prince or whatnot, and add in some 50 SHADES OF GREY un-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot here, and don’t ignore the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene; it’s approximately. as sexy as Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan’s underwater nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all these details. And so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders (C. Aubrey Smith included).

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS
1931 - **
British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always right on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning, with Erich Von Stroheim as nymphomaniac Lilly Damita's porcelain collector aesthete husband. Lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort at having his lame alibi so casually deflated, it turns out Erich's habit is to catch, then blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day by the director and hasn't had a bath or a bite to eat.  Nice legs, though. Too bad that later best buddy and fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings). This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps us on the curb, since everyone's weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them all out for conformity's sake. It's a lot business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim, to the grave if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US
1932 - **1/2
Divorce, in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a film back in 1932, even at Warner Brothers. This time the action revolves around novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first, but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably. Brent always presumes these things which is one reason I dislike him. He's the gateway rationalization of rapists, always presuming no means keep trying since who can resist him, in his mind? Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, if the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra and it's the early 50s.
 

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new Paris Hilton-esque gold-digger wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?"  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce rather adult, and Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper, boy, but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, BAM! She's killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.