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.

The (inadvertent) gold diggers of 1932

In 1933, Busby Berkeley and Mervyn LeRoy struck gold at the intersection of economic hardship and showgirl opportunism, beginning with that triumphant -- and ironic -- clarion call: "We're in the money!" When times are tough, marry rich, and figure the rest out later. (If that sounds awfully cynical, it probably is -- but hey, it worked out perfectly for one of our grandmothers.)

But though these two films also use Gold Diggers of 1933's secret-millionaire trope, they don't crow about cash at all, whether at the start or the end. Maybe an extra year of Depression-era desperation made the difference, but in this case, the women lucky enough to end up with Mr. Moneybags just seem glad to have found themselves a nice fella. 

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Strangers of the Evening (1932)

Grade: C-

This confusing tale of morgues, mayhem, and mistaken identity took us quite a while to unpack, though by the end we'd finally sussed it all out (more or less).

From the opening sequence -- in which the body of a man who allegedly fell asleep at the wheel is deposited at a morgue -- it's clear something sketchy is afoot...

...and if our intuition didn't tell us that, we certainly know it explicitly once Dr. Chandler the undertaker (Warner Richmond) finishes a phone call with his unsuspecting assistant Tommy (Harold Waldridge), turns to his friends, and triumphantly says "They fell for it."

But even though we understood the basic trajectory of the plot, something in the telling of Strangers of the Evening left us very confused as to its mechanics. OK, it's a story of mistaken identity, but how exactly did the swap happen? Were we supposed to infer that certain key items changed hands, or was it depicted in some non-obvious, veiled way?

Similarly, though it may appear Dr. Raymond Everette (Theodore von Eltz) has murdered the father of his fiancée (Miriam Seegar), there's little doubt that all is not as it seems. You're meant to feel clever at moments like those, but instead we had the nagging feeling that we'd missed something -- something that would bring coherence to events themselves, rather than an explication of the underlying scheme (which would obviously be premature at the sub-10-minute mark).

These issues -- and others, like a medical-experimentation subplot that goes nowhere -- are probably down to subpar direction and scriptwriting, in whatever proportions. A second viewing makes things clearer, of course, but that's hardly the standard...or is it? Perhaps some of these films were meant to be seen more than once, by truant schoolchildren and unemployed workers desperate for distraction.

The main selling point for many prospective viewers of Strangers of the Evening was probably the presence of Zasu Pitts -- pronounced "say-zoo", if you didn't know (and we didn't). She's Sybil, the flaky girlfriend of a befuddled amnesiac (Lucien Littlefield) who wanders through the movie in search of his real identity. Pitts does about what you'd expect, and does it as mournfully as ever.

In several details Strangers of the Evening bears an unexpected resemblance to The Midnight Warning, right down to the "dead body rising from a table" and "let us never speak of this again" tropes that shape a significant chunk of its narrative. Maybe it's instructive to compare the two films, since while Strangers of the Evening throws a lot of seemingly unrelated information at the viewer and gradually reveals the underlying structure, we had an easier time following The Midnight Warning's more parsimonious approach, starting with a firm foundation and then introducing new facts one at a time until the picture was complete.

All this probably gives the impression that we didn't like Strangers of the Evening -- which is literally true, but we didn't dislike it either. It's not stupid or irritating, just poorly made in certain respects. (Plus a few flubbed lines here and there, but that's hardly unusual in films from this period.) And we were able to differentiate between at least some of the white guys in hats, which is a nice change of pace.

One can hardly recommend this film, but it's reasonably watchable and not unpleasant -- putting it miles ahead of, say, The Phantom or The Midnight Phantom.

And hey, that's a nice segue into:

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The Phantom Express (1932)

Grade: B

There are too damn many films with words like "phantom" and "midnight" in their names, leaving our heads filled with a muskless miasma of monikers: how to differentiate between The Midnight Phantom, The Midnight Shadow, and The Phantom Shadow?

(OK, that last one is actually a Scooby-Doo villain, but you get the point.)

So -- with one foot already in that river of titles untethered to their filmic content -- it's easy to assume The Phantom Express is yet another interchangeable Poverty Row effort, a poorly-acted Sack special, or any number of other been-there done-thats.

That'd be a shame, though, as we were rather charmed by this modest but engaging little movie. True, the plot itself mostly colors inside the lines, and could be summed up like so: a small railroad, plagued with derailments caused by the phenomenon in the film's title, will soon be sold for pennies on the dollar unless the owner's son can solve the mystery.

In all honesty, that mystery isn't terribly hard to unravel, and we guessed its basic outlines well before the final denouement. That said, The Phantom Express doesn't really depend on a whodunit (or a who-conducted-it) to sustain our interest.

Rather, a combination of elements made The Phantom Express a pleasant surprise. One is the skillful cinematography, yielding set-pieces that, for a film of this vintage and budget, are impressively striking.

The biggest factor, though, is the film's unexpected decision not to focus myopically on the hero's quest to save his inheritance. Sure, it's predictably fun to see the boyish Bruce Harrington (William Collier Jr.) go undercover, disguising himself as a grease-blackened railroad worker to find out what's really happening -- and, when the opportunity arises, play a prank on the only person around who knows his true identity.

But instead, The Phantom Express devotes a surprising amount of time to the plight of Smokey (J. Farrell MacDonald), the veteran engineer who's dedicated his life to Southwestern Pacific, only to come under fire when a major derailment happens on his watch. Then as now, loyalty and seniority are no guarantee.

Of course, Smokey's daughter Carolyn (Sally Blane) also turns out to be young Mr. Harrington's love interest (having ditched the heavy-duty RBF you saw a few screenshots ago). Even better for him that he's boarding in their house, for propinquity without iniquity.

Still, The Phantom Express puts Smokey -- and his grief -- front and center for a good portion of its running time. Seldom have we seen a film devote this much care to showing how completely a middle-aged man can be crushed by the loss of his job.

The pathos and intensity here is genuine, and unflinching enough in its depiction that we dreaded -- but half-expected -- the looming prospect of a slow pan and out-of-frame gunshot.

However, a friend in need is a friendly Swede, and none more so than Smokey's irrepressible pal Axel. Played by an actor billed as Axel Axelson (!), with no other credits on IMDb, we have no idea whether we're dealing with a genuine one-shot, or an actor working under a blatant pseudonym for contractual reasons. Either way, Axel's the kind of guy who, if you need him, will show up to help save the day faster than you can say tutenbobels. (Or jazz hands.)

All this means that the closing act of The Phantom Express isn't just a standard boy-solves-crime-and-gets-girl affair, but is as much -- or more so -- about whether Smokey's hopes for redemption will be fulfilled.

Of course, we get the obligatory Scooby Doo action, since these meddling kids still have to solve the crime, unmask the culprit(s), and race against time -- in whatever order. (Bet you thought that "Phantom Shadow" reference was just a one-off!)

But one suspects that, with its frank depiction of a grown man's pain, a film like The Phantom Express may have meant a lot to thousands of aging male moviegoers. With no other socially acceptable way to work through the crushing experience of losing their livelihoods after age 40, at least they could see someone else's grief mirroring their own, while trying to find a way forward in a dark, friendless time.

And sadly, that's still as relevant now as it's ever been.