Back to the Slaughterhouse

Up next are two* more Tod Slaughter movies from the Night Screams subset of the Mill Creek box set.*

Plus, as a bonus, we review a feature film* of his that hadn't been seen for decades, until it resurfaced last year.

(*Well, sort of -- on all counts! -- see below.)

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The Ticket of Leave Man (1937)

Grade: B-

Traffic in human depravity though he may, there's something oddly comforting about knowing you're about to watch a Tod Slaughter film. Partly it's the familiarity of seeing the same faces over and over again, until they blend together in a pleasantly delirious haze, wherein names become less important than structural functions.

So it doesn't matter that Marjorie Taylor is called "May Edwards" in this particular film, because it's just another instantiation of her archetypical role as "the woman Tod Slaughter wants to sleep with, thereby making her very uncomfortable".

(Someone should start a Tumblr called "Tod Slaughter making women very uncomfortable.")

This film (The Ticket of Leave Man) and the next (The Face at the Window) blend together even more than most, since they both involve a lot of the same plot points. There's a mysterious criminal named for a dangerous animal, who hides in plain sight by masquerading as an affluent and upstanding citizen. There's a beautiful woman whose charms attract the unwanted attention of said murderer.

And there's an honest young man (John Edwards) employed at a bank -- and in love with said young woman -- who runs afoul of the law when he's falsely accused of one or more heinous crimes.

In this case, the honest young man even gets thrown in prison, though he's paroled before too terribly long. This makes him the titular "ticket of leave man", a phrase totally unfamiliar to us before this film.

To help us differentiate it from other Slaughter films, The Ticket of Leave Man has some striking secondary characters, like this creepy, cigar-smoking child-man...

...or this unambiguously anti-Semitic caricature:

We're hardly the sort to grasp at straws in the name of self-righteousness, but it's not as if there's a scintilla of doubt when it comes to Frank Cochran's portrayal of counterfeiter Melter Moss, or what stereotype it's meant to evoke. Given that he only had three IMDb credits -- one of them for the role of "Ho Tang", we kid you not -- we're guessing Cochran may have been mainly a stage actor, who apparently specialized in ethnoculturally insensitive roles.

The Ticket of Leave Man is a close cousin to It's Never Too Late to Mend, and probably a notch better than that preachier effort. And we get Slaughter with and without mustache, which is always a plus. But we're docking a few points for Melter Moss: OK, we don't know from 1930s Britain, but we want they should do better than that, no?

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The Face at the Window (1939)

Grade: C-

So, when we pulled out Disc 46 of our 250-movie box set to watch The Face at the Window, we were greeted by this:

And this:

Yes, it seems that instead of giving us Disc 46 of the Horror Collection, Mill Creek accidentally gave us Disc 46 of the Western Legends Movie Pack. Oh, well.

Fortunately, all four films on Disc 46 are available for viewing on YouTube and other sites -- which means that, for our next few posts, the screenshots you see won't be from the Mill Creek box. Unfortunately our downloaded source for The Face at the Window is by far the worst of the four, yielding blurry, artifacted results like this:

It was still watchable (barely), but the poor video quality probably detracted from our enjoyment of The Face at the Window -- though, don't get us wrong, we're grateful to the uploader nonetheless. 

Another demerit is the supernatural element in this tale, first hinted at in the opening text crawl:

Then, later, we get a bunch of flasks and beakers, and you know what that means. That's right: science.

Somehow, the inclusion of lycanthropy (sort of) and galvanism dampens the fun -- perhaps because the necessary pseudo-scientific handwaving undermines the classical purity, if you will, of Slaughter's Grand Guignol act.

Or then again, maybe it's that the protagonists too often act like blithering idiots, repeatedly contriving to make the stupidest possible choice in order to serve the needs of the plot? That made it hard to care much about their fates.

But hey, at least we have another entry for our Tumblr.

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King of the Underworld (1952)

Grade: C+

This "movie" is actually an edited compilation of the first three episodes of a British TV series, Inspector Morley Investigates -- aka Inspector Morley (Late of Scotland Yard) Investigates, depending on whom you ask.

However, Inspector Morley was never actually broadcast in Britain: though a full run of 13 episodes was wrapped, the producers were apparently unable to sell the show to the BBC.

Instead, they sold it to the American market -- where it was apparently broadcast for at least one run -- but also took six of the episodes they'd filmed and combined them into two features, King of the Underworld and Murder at Scotland Yard, which were shown in the U.K. (Confused yet?)

The latter feature, and the majority of the episodes, remain lost as of this writing -- but may yet lurk in someone's vault or collection.

You can find more information about the series, including the three other surviving episodes, here. In any event it was a very pleasant surprise when King of the Underworld was unexpectedly shown last year on a British TV station, and we're very grateful to the colleague who was kind enough to provide us with a DVD of the broadcast.

Slaughter plays Terence Reilly, an irrepressibly evil criminal mastermind, and it's nice to see that age hasn't robbed him of his panache or physical presence. Though Inspector Morley solves a fresh case in each episode, some aspect of the crime will inevitably reveal Reilly's sinister fingerprints.

And unlike Slaughter's other characters, Reilly doesn't generally let his wang overrule his brain -- making him far more dangerous.

Opposing Reilly's schemes are Inspector John Morley (Patrick Barr), naturally, as well as his crackerjack assistant Eileen Trotter (Tucker McGuire). Quick-witted and sharp-tongued, Eileen bears no small resemblance to Harriet Sansom Harris (best known for her recurring role on Frasier as Machiavellian agent Bebe Glazer).

In actuality, King of the Underworld doesn't "read" as a feature film at all. The edits (and voiceover narration) that combine the three episodes aren't crude, but certainly aren't seamless, and even contemporary audiences unaware of the film's origins could hardly have been fooled. Still, Slaughter's presence -- he was in every episode of Inspector Morley -- provides enough continuity to forge a reasonably plausible Holmes vs. Moriarty storyline.

That said, the quality of the writing isn't great, and leans too heavily on a handful of gimmicks -- especially disguises -- whose plausibility stretches thin with reuse. Also, Morley himself isn't really as clever as he ought to be, sometimes letting slip information that can only harm him or his colleagues: after Eileen successfully tricks Reilly, why on earth would the Inspector then reveal her identity to him? What purpose does it serve, except perhaps to gloat?

We've seen the other, later episodes of Inspector Morley Investigates that survive, and we're sorry to say that in those, Eileen is woefully underused and dumbed-down. Here, though, she's a real firecracker. Independent-minded, and (ahem) oddly sexy, she's arguably a better foil to Slaughter than Morley himself. Certainly, she's almost as responsible for solving their cases as Morley is.

So naturally, the writers ensure that Eileen eventually gets into deep trouble and has to be rescued. Così fan tutte.

Tod Slaughter fans will be this film's main audience, but Tucker McGuire's fun portrayal means there are two good reasons to seek out King of the Underworld. Otherwise it's largely a standard affair and a period piece -- but as fresh documentation of a great actor's career, it's like rediscovering a home movie you'd forgotten about.

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.