Bucking the critics

For the following two films, critical consensus -- at least in the form of IMDb ratings and comments -- seems to go one way. As you'll see from these reviews, we go another.

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The Shadow of Silk Lennox (1935)

Grade: D+

The Shadow of Silk Lennox is the fifth film with Lon Chaney Jr. in this box set, though not quite the last (since Bride of the Gorilla will show up in the final subset, 50 Sci-Fi Classics).

Naturally Chaney is our title character, a deceptively genial gangster whose moniker comes from his corny catchphrase: whenever anyone asks after him, the reply is that things are "smooth as silk". Uh-huh. Owner of several nightclubs, he's also the mastermind behind the heists and hold-up jobs plaguing the city of Wherever-This-Is.

Most of the action takes place in and around the clubs, though, where two young lovebirds (Dean Benton and Marie Burton) twitter away on stage. Once offstage, they inevitably get mixed up in Lennox's tangled web.

Soon enough, you've got murder, deception, and the obligatory racist caricature.

IMDb's reviewer base seems to have decided The Shadow of Silk Lennox is uncommonly poor, but we didn't much mind it. Maybe we haven't seen enough 1930s gangster films (not that we feel compelled to go much deeper than we already have), but while a weaker effort than some, it's hardly a disaster -- just a by-the-numbers affair, plus one or two twists we frankly didn't see coming until they were almost on top of us.

It also amused us to see either (a) what passed for nightclub entertainment in the 1930s, or (b) what the makers of this film thought would pass for nightclub entertainment in the 1930s: not sure which. While you can't hear the music in the screenshot, the faces speak volumes!

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The Crooked Circle (1932)

Grade: F

You know, we sort of enjoyed ZaSu Pitts in Strangers of the Evening. Her screentime was limited to a light sprinkling, yielding a film with just the right amount of her forlorn persona: that is, enough to add a quirky twist to proceedings, but not so as to wear out its welcome.

But with a much larger role in The Crooked Circle, Pitts's mournful presence soon becomes a plague. It's hard to imagine an audience to whom her constant handwringing and cries of "Oh!" were a laff riot; for us, they were infuriating.

Same goes for her catchphrase, "Something always happens to somebody!" Sure, we've seen films in which a repeated line becomes a kind of leitmotif that gets funnier as it recurs in more and more unlikely contexts -- but here, it was an irritating contrivance.

(Maybe she should swap with Silk Lennox? Come to think of it, a catchphrase transplant would improve both films.)

And contrived is the word that defines The Crooked Circle, a movie that really seems to have no idea what it's doing or why. "Good old fashioned fun!" says a typical review on IMDb, but that wasn't our experience, to put it politely: this film is torture, awkward and interminable, like watching a bad improv company's attempt at creating an hour-long comic mystery on the fly.

The pacing is trash, the direction and editing are awful, and as K. quite rightly noted, the actors often seem to have no idea what their lines mean. Characters come and go with little explanation, transitions are botched, and cutaways serve to confuse the narrative without intensifying it.

Oddly enough the plot itself -- concerning a clash between a society of amateur detectives and the titular criminal cabal -- isn't so bad, or at least makes a kind of sense, with a decent-if-foreseeable twist near the end. But the script lacks formal rhythm, and whatever energy it picks up is soon squandered: a clever sequence in which hero Brand Osborne (Ben Lyon) gets outfoxed is immediately followed by a scene in which the consequences of that outfoxing are instantly undone. Way to keep the tension, bro.

Some faint specks of light (we can't quite call them bright spots) emerge in The Crooked Circle. Of the two lines of dialogue that graduate to the level of vaguely amusing, one is Pitts's deadpan definition of a myth as "a female moth", and the other comes in a policeman's description of his hard-bitten criminal foes:

"They wasn't born, they was quarried."

Another faint speck is Irene Purcell, underutilized but still appealing as Thelma, Osborne's cipher of a girlfriend. Her short-lived career seems to be fondly remembered by a few film buffs, and it's a shame this turkey was her last role.

None of this is enough to salvage this car crash of a movie -- and we haven't even talked about the tired spooky-old-house and famous-criminologist tropes in which it traffics. (On the latter tip, that's C. Henry Gordon above as Yoganda, the "Indian" sleuth whose name inevitably gets misheard as an African country.)

All the more bizarre, then, that The Crooked Circle holds a unique honor: if IMDb is telling the truth, it was the first feature film ever broadcast on television. What an inauspicious start for the new medium!

Racism al fresco

The customer says: "We'd like a table outdoors, some heterosexual banter as an appetizer, and then at least one ethnic stereotype as our entrée." And do these two films deliver!

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A Scream in the Night (1935)

Grade: D

If your old man is famous and you're in the same line of work, it's not an easy hand to play: just ask the Bach kids, Miloslav Mečíř Jr., or any number of other examples. Lon Chaney Jr. seemed to want to pick up where his chameleonic dad left off, and that's fine -- his prerogative.

But front-load a film to this extent (as seen in the above screenshot), and not only are you putting a lot of pressure on the son, you're already funneling the viewer into too narrow a causeway: instead of responding to the movie's events as they unfold, we're responding to our expectations of Chaney's double casting.

(Also, "Butch Curtain"? What is that, something Charles Nelson Reilly's interior decorator picked out for him?)

Anyway, we've got a huge ruby, owned by the father (John Ince) of Edith (Sheila Terry), the woman sitting with Chaney-as-Jack-Wilson in the screenshot above. Wilson's on the trail of Johnny Fly (Manuel López), nogoodnik criminal --

-- and virtuosic lasso-tosser:

As we soon discover, Fly's favorite hangout is Butch Curtain's bar. He may be a dim-witted thug with a wonky eye (shades of Manfish!), but he's a sure shot with darts and knives.

His bar is also a magnet for attractive birds of one sort --

-- or another:

(P. thinks this uncredited extra shows strong indicators of foxiness, K. disagrees. Either way it'd be interesting to find out who she was: anybody know?)

So isn't it a wild coincidence that Jack looks a lot like Butch, and can even talk like him? And wouldn't it be the funniest thing if that turned out to play a role in the plot? To invoke a double positive, "Yeah, yeah."

Along the way to the inevitable, we get policeman Wu Ting (Philip Ahn), whose clan presumably ain't nuthing ta f' wit. He speaks normally at the start of the movie, but lays it on thick when he goes undercover:

"Me velly solly. Excuse, please. Oh, me just want a dlink. You can do, please? Whiskey, please. You bossy man here? Maybe you do me hon-ah, have dlink with me."

The 1930s: not the greatest time to be an Asian actor.

There's a reason A Scream in the Night apparently sat on the shelf for almost a decade before it was released. Even with a plot this simple, some details are fumbled: ultimately Wilson-as-Curtain gets his cover blown, thanks to Fly's combative girlfriend Mora (Zarah Tazil), but how exactly it happened we have no idea.

Anyway, Chaney is passable here, but not enough to carry the film. Sorry, Lon. Now could we get the number of that foxy extra?

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Jungle Man (1941)
[aka Drums of Africa] 

Grade: D-

OK, so let's get this out of the way upfront: Jungle Man -- called Drums of Africa on our copy, but as we understand it that's an anomaly -- is basically a marginally better version of The White Gorilla. That means it has:

• copious use of stock footage of animals
• characters who don't really interact with the above-mentioned animals
• events recounted through flashback for no particular reason
• repurposed footage from a silent film (not 100% sure about this one, but we think so)
• racist depictions of African natives and Africa itself
• pompous lectures about the jungle and its dangers

So if we found The White Gorilla so terrible that we dubbed one of the worst movies we've ever seen -- after all, we regularly quote "As I watched..." as a kind of metonym for a particular type of bad movie-making -- then how the heck does Jungle Man scrape a D-minus? Well, here's one reason:

That's right, no Crash Corrigan. His "ass-faced voyeurism" (cruel phrase, but fair) is instead replaced here by Buster Crabbe, who's easier on the eyes and a far more charismatic screen presence.

Of course, if you like boot-fa-chays, the movie has some of those too.

You see, we're meant to think this woman will want to marry that guy --

-- but, well, see what happens when she meets this guy:

That's one thing that's refreshing about Jungle Man, actually: from the moment she meets Crabbe as Dr. Robert Hammond, Betty is thoroughly and more-or-less unrepentantly smitten. It's so obvious that when she embraces her fiancé Bruce (Weldon Heyburn) as he's about to leave on an expedition to the mythical City of the Dead, he pauses and looks at her dubiously:

Bruce: You do want me to come back, don't you?

Betty: Oh, of course! W-why shouldn't I?

Bruce: I don't know, I -- I've just had the strangest feeling ever since we've been here.

Betty: Silly.

In the midst of this we cut away to Crabbe and Bruce's pal Andy (Robert Carson), who shoot each other a look, and boy, do their facial expressions tell a story:

So you see, Jungle Man isn't completely stupid. It's got a couple of marginally amusing one-liners -- "But I'm from Missouri, you'll have to show me" is one, if that gives you the idea of the league we're talking about -- and also has at least one other great cutaway, in which Betty's father William (Paul Scott) and his brother Jim the priest (Charles Middleton) have this exchange after Betty announces her intent to join Hammond on a trip to a dangerous village:

Jim: Oh, William, you must stop her!

William: Stop her? You don't know Betty. I didn't want to come to Africa! But I'm here!

Jim: Perhaps it's just as well I turned to this -- I never did understand women.

And the reaction shot:

We surely don't want to give the impression that Jungle Man's few moments of liveliness outweigh the crushing contrivance of its storytelling, though. It's hard to find the right word for the way a movie like this makes us feel, but unconvincing is the closest we've found, though that hardly does it justice. It's not the performers' fault -- they're fine -- but the production itself that feels awkward and cynical and heavy-handed, like it's always playing to the dumbest people in the cheapest seats.

For instance, let's take the sound effects. That "constant jungle chatter" in certain scenes is some sort of squeaky bird call, made by rubbing two dry cylinders together, that sounds like a misaligned fan belt or malfunctioning air conditioner. It's not pleasant. Or there's the lion's roar that sounds like a Superball being rubbed against an oil drum: couldn't they do better in 1941?

Then there are the historical inaccuracies, anachronisms, or whatever you care to call them. First of all, the tiger --

-- which they hang a lampshade on by explaining how Jim "picked him up in one of the Malay states". OK, fine, whatever you say. Clearly they had a tiger available and needed an excuse to use him, and after all he's the only animal that actually interacts with any of the cast:

Oh, and the tiger's name is Satan, which gives us the odd spectacle of hearing a priest say "Thank you, Satan" after the cat defends him from an attacker. Yup.

Meanwhile, this is the famed City of the Dead, in darkest Africa:

Or here's another angle:

If you looked at these shots and said "wat" to yourself like that old lady in the meme, you're exactly right: this is Angkor Wat, in that well-known African country, Cambodia. Yup again.

Really, the African-ness of this movie is solely a product of stock footage, costume design...and hiring a bunch of black actors to demean themselves by shouting "Booga booga booga" and waving spears in the air. ("They're just like children," opines Jim the priest, in an aggression none too micro.)

If at this point you're foolish enough to watch Jungle Man -- and you can't say you haven't been warned -- then, as the kids say these days, you do you. Just don't watch The White Gorilla, for the love of Vlad, unless you really want to dive into despair and question your life choices.

Skulls sans screams

Yep, both of these films feature a prominent object of the craniomandibular sort -- with and without their accompanying chassis, and fortunately devoid of wearying screams (or Steele).

Fact is, we don't come to learn much of anything about the skulls in question, beyond their simple presence. So alas, Hamlet these movies ain't -- though one of them does feature a Hamlet-esque "play within a play".

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Manfish (1956)

Grade: C-

We'll be seeing a fair bit of Creighton Tull Chaney over the next few posts, and -- at least in terms of his bare, middle-aged flesh -- we see the most in Manfish, a film that well may take the cake for the single most deceptive title we've encountered yet.

Now, you're probably imagining some breathless tale of a half-human, half-piscine hybrid. You can see it now, it's either scales from the waist down (too bad it ain't Womanfish, nudge-nudge, know what I mean?) or some fish-mouthed abomination croaking "Please, kill me". Right?

But no, "Manfish" is the name of the boat. YA SRSLY.

Given his age and well-known bad habits, Chaney actually looks pretty good here, in the physique sense -- though in portraying the dull-witted first mate known as Swede, he's still trading on his Lennie persona from Of Mice and Men, nearly two decades later. Oh well, it's a paycheck, and Lon Jr. knows how to play it as well as anyone.

Manfish splices together two of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, "The Gold-Bug" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", and transplants them to the Caribbean to spin its yarn about a treasure hunt, a guilty conscience, and a jacked but thoroughly unlikeable sea captain (John Bromfield) who drives the whole shebang. (It wraps all this in the world's most gratuitous framing story, by the way, but that's soon forgotten.)

Captain Brannigan hunts turtles, which already makes him a bad egg in our book, and really this lying ol' dirty birdy seems to spread misery wherever he goes. He's eking out a living in the Caribbean until he has a confrontation with an aging professor (Victor Jory) and his bored-looking, wonky-eyed consort Alita (Tessa Prendergast) --

-- whereupon he soon develops an acute interest in the professor's sweet ring and his sweet thing.

With this information and the Poe as your guide, if you hazard a guess at the remainder of Manfish's plot you'll probably get it right. Sure, there's tension, betrayal, greed, and angry confrontations galore, but those are essentially condiments, structurally speaking. It's maps, treasure, and post-trangressive psychosis that built this city.

Even so, for the most part Manfish is entertaining enough to watch at least once, and lacks the unpleasant aftertaste of IDGAF cynicism that mars many similar films. The writing and acting are at least serviceable throughout, and the film's underwater sequences are attractively shot...

...though in general it has a habit of letting its wordless outdoor set-pieces -- both above and below the water line -- go on for far too long. Far, far too long. As in, "What the hell is the point of this shit?" too long.

That, and the film's predictability (thanks to its, ahem, Poe-rigins), are the biggest places where Manfish falls down somewhat.

But these aren't lethal flaws in what is otherwise an unexceptional but competent outing. In fact, besides the overlong bits we mentioned above, Manfish is that rare film on this box set that (mostly) didn't make us wish we were watching it for the second time, so that we could reach for the fast-forward button and get it over with faster. Some days, that practically counts as a success in our books.

Add the occasional flashes of warmth or humor that help to liven up proceedings, and though Manfish may be a C-minus film, it's a solid C-minus. You know, the kind that feels like you've accomplished something, even though you'll have to retake the class. Isn't that right, Professor?

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Murder at Midnight (1931)

Grade: D

Here's something telling about this film, and it's not a spoiler so don't worry. The title event? Yeah, turns out the clock is set wrong. Take that, Chekhov.

But as you can see there is a gun in Murder at Midnight, which gets used right away as part of an elaborate skit that itself is merely a clue in some rich-people variant of Charades. If that sounds complicated it really isn't, but what's weird is that everyone seems to think it's normal to put on a one-act play, with props and all, just to clue the word "idealize". Once again one is reminded that the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "different from you and me." (But he didn't say it to Hemingway!)

Of our Umbrellahead pair, at least one of us is fond of early talkies and inclined to be charitable toward them. Still, this tale of intrigue and inheritance was too familiar, yet too muddled, for us to enjoy much. The film's chain of murders is probably one link too long to be believable -- and while it may be amusing to watch a highly visible housefly crawling around on an actor's shoulder, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this production is a fully-assed affair deserving the benefit of the doubt.

Also, we have to say the trope of the "famous criminologist" is already wearing out its welcome -- understandably so, since he's always going to be the culprit, a red herring, or a Mary Sue. At least Sherlock Holmes was an awkward, grumpy cokehead. And that's not the only familiar trope in Murder at Midnight, not by a long shot (or a long-distance call).

Throw in abundant false leads and a pile of unexplained motivations, and Murder at Midnight starts to feel less like an adventure than an indenture. At least Millie the maid -- played by the troubled, scandal-plagued Alice White -- is kinda cute if you're into that sort of thing, and the butler (Brandon Hurst) is thoroughly buttlesome.

It's fascinating to see what films like these think will pass for "comic relief". In the case of Murder at Midnight, it's a portly plainclothesman assigned to the house (Vernon Dent), who eats a lot of peanuts and drops the shells on the rug.

And...that's pretty much it.

It does inspire a prominent vacuuming scene, though, so if that's your kink go nuts (pun completely unintended!).

It feels mean-spirited to pick on Murder at Midnight, and it's certainly not excruciating to sit through, unlike some others we've seen. Still, even in 1931 the industry knew how to do better than this, and in a murder-mystery there's never an excuse for a script that's foggy in the details. A few funny lines or attractively filmed sequences aren't enough to make Murder at Midnight a truly worthwhile watch.