Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  Sometimes, alas, the opposite is true. Witness I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), which is based on an allegedly true story. The title tells it all. A heroic, down-on-his-luck war veteran is standing around rather too near a robbery, is sent to a chain gang, escapes, builds a decent life, is lured back south, where his name is supposed to be cleared—a trick, of course—and back he goes to prison, from which he escapes again, only to be doomed apparently to a perpetual life on the run. The movie’s concluding line is immortal. He visits his wife one dark night. She asks him how he lives, what’s to become of him? He replies, “I steal.”

  The picture was directed by Mervyn LeRoy, half-forgotten now but at the time the producer and/or director of some good pictures (Little Caesar, They Won’t Forget). His star was Paul Muni, at the time considered—not least by himself—a great actor, though in fact he was a great ham, often hiding out in heavy makeup and accents and playing noble historical figures.

  That said, I think you have to enter an exception for Fugitive. Muni is perhaps a little too well-spoken in it, but there’s a naturalness in his playing, a simplicity and directness, that is very effective and quite rare in his career. You can make the case that his fugitive is the unluckiest man in the world (or, anyway, the most naive), but he makes you believe he is an everyman, you or me but for the grace of God. The movie, long by Warner standards (ninety minutes), rattles along at a one-damn-thing-after-another pace that is utterly compelling even now. It was for Warner Bros. a self-conscious attempt to make an “important” movie, an ambition at which it admirably succeeded. It has the pace (if not quite the verve) of its more routine productions.

  Except I wonder about that word “routine.” There was so much at that studio that only looked routine. There was that little raft of Cagney pictures—smart, fast-talking, usually comic, occasionally striking a brief serious note. They were made so quickly, so cheaply, with seemingly so little regard for his enormous talent; he loathed them, though actually they were often pitched perfectly to his freewheeling gift for something like anarchy. There were no less than fifty movies that starred Joan Blondell, who should have attained parity with Cagney, but Warner was such a boys’ club, mostly impervious to her never-ending world-weariness. (See Blonde Crazy or Three on a Match for examples of her rough magic.) Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart came a little late to this party. She didn’t make an impression until she made Of Human Bondage at another studio and then was misused, if not abused, until the studio finally acceded to her demand for chin-up tragedies in the later thirties; he took a long time to recover from his miscasting as the brooding gangster in The Petrified Forest, which played like a limp parody of a Warner gangster film.

  But we cannot leave this studio without referring to its most spectacular directorial star. That, of course, was Busby Berkeley. I think it’s fair to say that in his way, he was among the most unique—if limited—talents in the history of the medium. We all have some idea of what he did. In essence, he set hundreds of dancers in motion in a fashion that was at once militaristic and erotic, in settings as exotic as he could imagine, photographed from angles that literally no one had ever seen before (or, for that matter, have seen since). He could be parodied, but he could not be equaled. There was once “a hall of harps,” there were waterfalls, of course, and girls arranging themselves as violins for spectacular overhead shots. He once did a swell number featuring rocking chairs. His method, often, was to sit around brooding while his cast of hundreds stood idle, waiting for inspiration to strike the master—which, eventually and reliably, it did.

  He was expensive talent, no doubt about that, and seemingly ill-suited to the frugal Warner style—except that for a few years he was a sensation, well worth his price, mostly because his work was so strangely sexy. Never did so many cameras track through so many invitingly open thighs as they did in his production numbers, never did so many scanty costumes invite our fantasies, while hoping against hope that the censors were nodding. The best of Berkeley was generally of the so-called pre-Code era, when censorship was lax and, in fact, his chorines were sometimes actually naked beneath, say, their flowing hair or other covering.

  I’ve never made my mind up: Did the military precision of many Berkeley dances somehow defuse their sexuality, or did it enhance it? We generally want women to flow gracefully in their movements, and these routines often locked them into antisexual poses and postures. I guess the most we can say is that there was, quite often, a tension between the sexiness of the numbers’ intent and their means of arriving at that goal. Or maybe it was simply the sheer number of women involved that carried the day. We were used to seeing relatively few dancers in movie production numbers; Berkeley tended to overwhelm us with pulchritude.

  It is impossible to name a single movie of which he was dance director as a “best.” In those days he did not take a credit as director, a task that was assigned to staff directors, among them Mervyn LeRoy. Their stories were generally cheerful and inane, just excuses, really, to make a movie. But there are two numbers I might single out as outstanding, because they are so dark and risky within the context of musical movies. The first, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” occurs in Gold Diggers of 1933. It’s a plea for men who fifteen years earlier had fought for their country, but are now among the legions of the unemployed. Uniformed, carrying rifles, they are seen marching on a gigantic wheel, which keeps turning and turning but never disgorges them from their hopelessness. It is a powerful image, accompanied by a lugubrious song. It is a genuine shock to find it in the midst of a lightsome musical.

  Where the idea came from is not recorded so far as I can determine. It is certainly a tribute of a sort to the social consciousness of Warner’s nonmusical offerings of the time. But, more important, it is an act of high creative daring. There is nothing else quite like it in the musicals of its time. Possibly we could cite as comparable the ballets of the MGM musicals that began appearing a decade later, but their pleasures were of an aesthetic nature and more or less fit the overall design of the picture, and, of course, they had no “message” whatsoever.

  Berkeley was by no means finished. Two years later, in Gold Diggers of 1935, he was back with what I think is his masterpiece—in my opinion the greatest number in the history of the genre. “Lullaby of Broadway,” by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, was instantly recognized as a great song, but it puzzled Berkeley; he had no ideas for staging it. Finally, he told Al Jolson he could have it for a movie he was planning if he could not come up with something himself in twenty-four hours. Under that pressure, he came through—a dream sequence in which a “Broadway baby” comes to a tragic end.

  She is played, beautifully, by a singer named Wini Shaw. She is introduced as a careless young thing, disporting herself with Dick Powell on a typical night among the bright lights of the big city. Eventually, with dawn beginning to break, she decides to go home. Time passes, and the next night she is back to her careless rounds, at which point something like a hundred chorus boys and girls, who have been innocently deployed to this point, start to form themselves into smiling but somehow menacing lines, surrounding her, starting to harry her. This leads to a wild montage—all quick cutting and raked angles—and Wini finds herself in a tight space, crowded by the dancers, who seem, as does Powell, unaware of the menace they pose to her. She seeks to escape. They are still, ostensibly, having fun, though the underscoring is beginning to grow threatening. She registers something near panic and escapes onto a balcony—where she trips and plunges to her death. The music becomes hushed. Berkeley’s camera moves back through his images of Broadway and settles in Wini’s now vacant apartment, concluding with an overhead shot of her face, which fades from view.

  There is nothing like this piece in American cinema. To say that it is haunting radically understates the case. I said earlier that the coming of sound cut movies off from the further development of their visual poetry; to some degree, this sequence argues against that point. But the poetry is different—ha
rder-edged and, like the “Forgotten Man” sequence, much more socially conscientious. Berkeley is saying that we are, to adduce the cliché, “dancing on a volcano.” Or maybe he was just a desperate choreographer, looking for something to save a number that he liked before giving it to Al Jolson. We do know that he never went in this direction again, though there was no retreat in the matter of visual splendor. He, of course, affected innocence, saying, “In an era of breadlines, Depression and wars…I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour.”

  Which he basically did. It’s just that it’s hard to resist this little asterisk.

  By 1935 Warner Bros. was a somewhat changed place. Zanuck had been replaced by Hal B. Wallis, a smooth, soft-spoken expert executive moved up from the publicity department. His taste was different from Zanuck’s. Or maybe the world was changing. Or maybe it was a combination of the two. The studio did not entirely abandon its hard-bitten ways, as we’ll have occasion to see later. But the romantic Errol Flynn arrived—the first Warner leading man who might have succeeded at other studios—and Bette Davis was at last more or less placated with the aforementioned doomy romances (like The Letter) that she deemed, often correctly, were best suited to her talents. Under Wallis, Michael Curtiz became the studio’s leading director and its most prolific one, too. He made a lot of lightweight stuff (with great conviction) as well as immortal pictures like Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mildred Pierce (which perhaps suggests the studio’s expanded range of interests) and drove Wallis to produce reams of memos complaining of time spent laying out the tracking shots Curtiz adored. But, along with the much more dashing Raoul Walsh (who came to the studio in 1939), Curtiz kept the place flourishing until television, in the late 1940s, almost killed the golden goose for everybody.

  Here is a measure of Wallis’s executive skills: On the one hand, he was capable of solving the vexing question of Flynn’s ill-fitting wig in some movie or other. On the other, he was capable of ordering the spectacular push-in, worthy of Curtiz, that brings The Roaring Twenties, that late, great gangster film, to its heartbreaking climax. I am of the opinion that Wallis, virtually unknown to the general public, is the greatest production executive in Hollywood history.

  I am also of the opinion that Warner Bros. was, in this period, the greatest studio in Hollywood history. But, there’s “sophisticated” Paramount to consider.

  8

  “The Son of a Gun Is Nothing but a Tailor”

  Love Me Tonight begins with a standard opening shot of Paris: the Eiffel Tower thrusting up over low rooftops. Then there are quick cuts to the quays along the Seine, of shutters opening, of a worker digging in the street with a pickax, of shopkeepers setting out their wares. Two shoemakers start hammering out a beat as they repair some boots—one, two, three, one, two, three. Soon a whole district stirs itself into musical wakefulness. There’s a cut to Maurice Chevalier’s famous straw boater hanging on a nail. The star is then revealed pulling a turtleneck over his head. He grabs his chapeau, tilts it at a rakish angle and sets off jauntily down the street, greeting and being greeted—in rhyme—by everyone.

  It is, or was, a justly famous set piece, but it is by no means the end—or the greatest—of this 1932 film’s pleasures. It occasions two immediate thoughts: that Rouben Mamoulian sure knew how to get a movie off to a dazzling start, and that maybe by now this genius of the early sound era deserves something more than his rather patronizing footnote in the movie histories. “Mamoulian’s tragedy is that of the innovator who runs out of innovations,” Andrew Sarris wrote of him, not entirely unjustly.

  But it might be fairer to say that he was an innovator who was inimitable. That’s partly because he made only sixteen films over three decades, choosing to divide his time between Hollywood and Broadway, where he directed the original productions of three touchstone musicals: Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and Carousel. He was, as well, a difficult character who was fired from or quit Laura, as well as Cleopatra and Porgy and Bess. As a Russian émigré (he was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1897) he was never entirely comfortable with dialogue or the conventions of American-style narrative. Love Me Tonight tells a pretty banal story—humble Parisian tailor falls in love with neurasthenic princess—though Mamoulian didn’t give a hoot about that. Or, it would seem, about acting: Let Chevalier’s vaunted French “charm” cloy, let Jeanette MacDonald’s double chins quiver cluelessly in a role that needs spunk and irony.

  Mamoulian was primarily a shooter and a cutter, a man who preferred to communicate in purely visual terms—someone who had rather obviously learned much of his art by studying Eisenstein and the other masters of “Russian montage” and vividly applied their manner to American commercial kitsch instead of Soviet political kitsch. Such borrowed means are often weirdly discordant with his ends, if you stop to think about it. But the bedazzled eye doesn’t really care about that. It is simply hypnotized by Mamoulian’s self-excited daring.

  Love Me Tonight has no great aspirations. What it has is a shimmering Rodgers and Hart score, which it is Mamoulian’s primary business to stage intoxicatingly. For example: “Isn’t It Romantic?” Chevalier starts the song in his tailor shop. It is picked up by a customer who passes it on to a cabdriver, then to a group of French soldiers in a train carriage. Next thing you know, the poilus have switched the rhythm to a march tempo, to which they tramp happily through the countryside—where, apparently, some gypsies overhear them, for we find them singing it in their encampment outside the great castle where most of the film’s action will take place. Has ever a movie story made a transition from point A to point B more delightfully? It’s imitation Lubitsch, of course, made at the same studio—Paramount—where the great man was also, at the time, making his delightful musicals. (Apologies for introducing the great man after his imitator, but so be it—Love Me Tonight can stand on its own.)

  That opening is a superb beginning for a director at the top of his game. He stages the movie’s title song in exactly the opposite way, as a melody sung off camera, haunting the dreams of Chevalier and MacDonald as they toss and turn in their separate beds. He even essays some split screens in the sequence. Toss away a big number with a few intercut single shots? Are you kidding? But Mamoulian knew what he was doing. His simplicity in this passage is powerfully effective, especially because it is followed by two great montage rampages.

  First Chevalier’s true identity is discovered and the denizens of the castle start a sprechstimme number—“The son of a gun is nothing but a tailor.” The swells in the drawing room begin murmuring it, and pretty soon (cut, cut, cut) the whole place—the cooks, the chambermaids, the footmen—have joined them in mock shock.

  Now, however, MacDonald comes to her senses. She really loves the tailor, who has boarded a train for Paris. She flings herself on a horse and into a heroic montage—galloping hooves intercut with churning wheels. You’d think an empire instead of a silly love affair were at stake. That irony is clearly not lost on Mamoulian, who caps the sequence with heroic low-angle shots of MacDonald standing on the tracks and the train screeching to a halt inches from her.

  You can’t quite believe your eyes. Or Mamoulian’s luck. He was at a studio that, like Warner Bros., had a house style—as light as the other studio’s was dark, and also witty and, as people said at the time, “continental.” It didn’t particularly fly with the public; the studio suffered ignominious bankruptcy in this period, and Mamoulian suffered a quick descent into handsome, but rather staid, historicism (Queen Christina, Becky Sharp, The Mark of Zorro). He had his moments, notably with High, Wide, and Handsome (1937), a musical western of supreme goofiness, and in his last film, Silk Stockings, a graceful musicalization of Ninotchka (1957). But he lived on for thirty marginalized years thereafter, making no more films.

  He was not an auteur. He was too restless and cranky for that role. So he has slipped down film history’s page to something like footnote status. One has to think that, either shrewdly or accidentally, he took advantage of
the panicky confusions of the early sound era—when no one quite knew what the talking picture should or could be—to impose a uniquely cinematic vision on the medium. Like Busby Berkeley, he created an electrifying set of stylizations for the musical, which never achieved camp status and therefore was not ripe for the revival that Berkeley’s numbers achieved. We will never speak knowingly of a Mamoulian masterpiece of high silliness. The musical’s later masters, Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, integrated song and story more wittily, more lovably. But they were directors who liked long takes and flowing dance numbers, which Mamoulian didn’t do in his early days. Nevertheless, his admittedly intermittent capacity to wow us remains, giddily, gloriously undiminished—at least in a couple of instances—despite the passage of seven decades. You just have to know where to look for it. And forgive him for making a near-perfect Lubitsch picture before Lubitsch fully invented his mature manner. It’s an accident of history and of release schedules.

  9

  A Touch of Lubitsch