Monthly Archives: September 2013

1937 was another year of firsts at the movies, giving viewers the first full-length animated feature, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Snow White was the top money maker in 1938 and was also the first film with an official soundtrack, and the first film to release a motion picture soundtrack album.  The year also saw the first film pairing of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry and the first appearance of Daffy Duck in animator Tex Avery’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt”.  Louise Ranier won the first back-to-back acting Oscar for her performance in 1937’s The Good Earth, following her Best Actress win in 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld.

Blonde bombshell Jean Harlow died at age 26 due to uremic poisoning on June 7, 1937, before the completion of filming for Saratoga with Clark Gable.  Clark Gable and Myrna Loy were crowned the King and Queen of Hollywood and Gable and Shirley Temple were the two top box-office stars.

In the United States, the average cost of a new house was $4,100.00 and the average wage per year was $1,780.00.  The average unemployment rate was 14.3 percent.  A gallon of gas cost about 10 cents.

In the the news, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian and vehicular traffic.  Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared after taking off from New Guinea during Earhart’s attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.  American popular composer George Gershwin died in Los Angeles of a brain tumor at age 38.   The German airship Hindenburg burst into flame in Lakehurst, New Jersey killing dozens on board..

The rumblings of war continued to intensify in the rest of the world.  The Condor Legion of the Nazi German Luftwaffe, in support of the Francoists in the Spanish Civil War, bombed Guernica, destroying three-quarters of the town and killing hundreds.  The Soviet Union commenced one of the largest campaigns of the Great Purge to “eliminate anti-Soviet elements.”   During the seige of Nanjing, Japanese soldiers killed over 300,000 Chinese in 3 months.  This is remembered as  the “Nanking Massacre”.  Germany, in a note to Brussels, “guaranteed” the inviolability and integrity of Belgium so long as the latter abstained from military action against Germany.  In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler held a secret meeting and stated his plans for acquiring “living space” for the German people (recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum).

The 1937 movies I will try to watch are listed here:  http://www.imdb.com/list/YQrx2nQOaQg/

Hindenburg Disaster – British Pathe newsreel footage

Sisters of the Gion (“Gion no shimai”)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Kenji Mizoguchi and Yoshikata Yoda based on the novel “The Pit” by Aleksandr Kuprin
1936/Japan
Daiichi Eiga
First viewing

[box] O-Mocha: If we do our jobs well they call us immoral. So what can we do? What are we supposed to do?[/box]

This sad but beautiful film by Kenji Mizoguchi is quite thought-provoking.

O-Mocha (Isuzu Yamada) and Umekichi are sisters.  They barely make ends meet working as geishas in the Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto.   The gentle Umekichi’s patron has gone bankrupt and she feels an obligation to take him in and look after him.  O-Mocha’s philosophy is that men are the enemy and should be taken for everything that can be gotten out of them. She plots to rid the household of Umekichi’s patron and find rich patrons for both of them.  Like a Japanese Scarlett O’Hara she will stop at nothing to get her way.  Ultimately, neither sister’s philosophy of life emerges victorious.

I thought this was rather fantastic.  Isuzu Yamada was even better than she was in Osaka Elegy and the cinematic storytelling is stunning.  Once again, there are few sympathetic characters here.  O-Mocha in particular is heartless in the extreme.  However, the film really made me think.  What, indeed, were they supposed to do?  O-Mocha finds herself in a tragic state of affairs at the end and her sister says she would not have suffered her fate if she had been nicer to men.  But O-Mocha says, even when she is broken, that being nice would mean giving in and she will never give in.  And Mizoguchi makes it clear that the nice sister doesn’t get anything for her pains either.  The system is stacked against the geisha and by implication against women in general.

And that concluded my viewing for 1936!

The Milky Way
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Grover Jones, Frank Butler, and Richard Connell
1936/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing

[box] [when asked whether the transition from silents to sound made any problems because of his voice, as with so many other stars from the era] I had to work a little on my voice because I hadn’t used it for years. I went to a voice coach for about five days, and then he said, “Good-bye, you just weren’t using it right”. — Harold Lloyd[/box]

Leo McCarey ensures that this is funnier than your average comedy.

Burleigh Sullivan (Harold Lloyd) is a mild-mannered milkman with well-developed skills in ducking to avoid punches.  One day, he confronts a couple of men who are harassing his sister.  During the incident, on of the men, who turns out to be the heavyweight champion of the world, gets knocked out.  The fighter’s manager (Adolphe Menjou) decides the only way to salvage his man’s reputation is to build up Burleigh and then let the fighter knock him out in a championship bout.  With Verree Teasdale as the manager’s wisecracking girlfriend and William Gargan as the champ’s sparring partner.

A lot of this is quite silly but there is enough inspired screwball dialogue for a good time.  Harold Lloyd’s physical antics are also frequently amusing.  I attribute the film’s success to McCarey who always gives a very enjoyable improvisational feel to his work.

Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights,  original negative, and almost all existing prints and destroyed them when he remade the story as The Kid from Brooklyn, starring Danny Kaye.  The film fell into the public domain and the print I watched on Amazon Prime Watch Instant left a lot to be desired.

Clip

Easy Money
Directed by Phil Rosen
Written by Arthur T. Horman et al
1936/USA
Invincible Pictures Corp.
First viewing

I’ve been unable to find much information about this decent poverty-row production.

Dan Adams works for the District Attorney and loses the prosecution of a man for insurance fraud.  It turns out he threw the case because the defendant was his brother. He resigns his position and gets a job with an insurance company(!) to flush out the big wheels behind the false claim ring, which has been operating under the front of an interior decorating business.  Along the way he falls in love with a claims adjuster.  The audience’s expectations are not challenged by the plot.

Easy Money is not a bad little police procedural type story, though nothing to write home about. This was the kind of thing that developed into film noir in the 40’s when the German immigrant directors got their hands on it.  I caught it on Amazon Prime Watch Instant for free.

Winterset
Directed by Alfred Santell
Written by Anthony Veiller based on the play by Maxwell Anderson
1936/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing

[box] When we’re young we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water.  — Maxwell Anderson, Winterset[/box]

This film marked Burgess Meredith’s first credited screen appearance in a role he had played on Broadway.  It is not cinematically well-rendered but is worth seeing as a typical Depression-era social commentary and for the acting.

The story begins in a 1920 New York City tenament where radical Bartolomeo Romagna (John Carradine) and his family discover their car has been stolen, along with the revolutionary pamphlets and other materials in it.  The car is then involved in the killing of the paymaster of the company at which Romagna works.  Romagna is tried for the crime and sentenced to death based on this circumstantial evidence.  His final words to the judge are to the effect that he is to be pitied since he is killing an innocent man and will carry the burden for the rest of his life.

Segue to 1936.  A law school class examines the evidence and decides that Romagna was not shown to be guilty.  A key reason behind its finding is that a man by the name of Garth Esdras witnessed the crime but was never called to testify.  Romagna’s son, Mio (Burgess Merideth) reads the article and travels to New York hoping to track down Esdras.  Merideth has been obsessed by the execution of his father all his life.

It is here that the coincidences start to pile on inexorably.  Mio meets Garth’s sister, not knowing who she is, and it is love at first sight.  The judge at Romagna’s trial has become unhinged and is now investigating in the hope that he will be vindicated.  The mastermind behind the payroll robbery has been released from jail, is critically ill, and is out to mow down anybody who could possibly prove that he had anything to do with the crime.  They all wind up in the tenement apartment of Garth’s father.

Merideth is unbelievably young and good-looking in this.  All the actors are very accomplished.  The dialogue is too poetic to ever have been spoken by a living human but is powerful.    It’s an interesting period piece that kept me engaged throughout its 77 minute running time.

Winterset was nominated by the Academy for Best Score and Best Art Direction.  It won an award for Best Cinematography at the Venice Film Festival and director Santell was nominated at the Festival for the Mussolini Cup.