Category Archives: Pre-Code Reviews

Hallelujah!
Directed by King Vidor
Written by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer et al
1929/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube rental

Chick Admirer #2: Oh, she’s chocolate to the bone!

The plot may be ancient and melodramatic but oh that music!

Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) is the eldest son in a large family of honest hard-working sharecroppers.  His father is also a preacher.  The cotton harvest is over and Zeke and second son Spunk are sent to the city to sell the crop. Zeke gets $100 for it.

He meets up with Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) who has attracted a large audience with her hoochie coochie dancing near the mill.  Zeke, who will be fighting a more or less unsuccessful battle with the Devil throughout the film, tries to get her to go off with him.  It is only after he flashes his wad of bills that she agrees.  She determines to make him spend that $100 on her before the night is over.

She lures him to a saloon where she continues to dance and drink.  Then she introduces Zeke to her con-man boyfriend and the inevitable happens.  Spunk, who had gone looking for Zeke and the money, is killed in the gunfire following the reveal of boyfriend’s rigged dice.

Zeke returns to his family who welcome him as a prodigal son.  It is then Zeke gets a calling to become a revival preacher.  He also proposes to Missy Rose, a good girl who loves him.  Then the whole troop heads off on the revival circuit.  Unfortunately, Chick shows up to be baptized …

This is a morality play and is melodramatic to the max.  The acting is adversely affected by early sound technology which apparently required everybody to speak very slowly and clearly.  What does shine is the music, which ranges from gospel to jazz.  Haynes had a beautiful bass-baritone and Nina Mae McKinney was called the “Black Clara Bow” for a reason. Worth seeing.

The Love Parade
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Ernest Vadja and Guy Bolton from a play by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel
1929/US
Paramount Pictures
IMDb Page
Repeat viewing/Criterion Channel

Queen Louise: Count. Count Alfred, I understand you’ve been seriously involved in a disgraceful affair with a woman.
Count Alfred Renard: No, Your Majesty – with several.
Queen Louise: Aren’t you ashamed of yourself.
Count Alfred Renard: [Shaking his head no] Yes, Your Majesty.

The first of the Lubitsch musical/operettas featuring Maurice Chevalier is a lot of fun, if a little creaky around the seams.

Ladies man Count Alfred Reynard (Chevalier) has gotten into one scrape too many with married women on his assignment in Paris so he is ordered to return to his home country of Sylvania.  The people of the land are anxious to see their young queen Louise (Jeanette MacDonald in her film debut) marry but she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.  Instead, she enjoys her ideal lover in her dreams.  Then she meets the Count and they fall in love.

They marry and then the Count discovers that he is Prince Regent and that he must obey the Queen in everything.  He soon becomes bored and threatens to return to Paris. Things work out as one might imagine.  With Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth as a comic counterpart to the lovers and Eugene Pallette in a small part as Minister of War.

MacDonald shows what a sexy and funny lady she could be in her first film.  The Hayes Code and Nelson Eddy did her no favors in that regard.  The songs aren’t particularly good but the dialogue is wonderful, with plenty of double entendres.  The production is appropriately lavish and Lubitsch works magic with his famous “touch”.  Recommended and one of my favorite films of its year.

The Love Parade was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Sound, Recording.

Applause
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Beth Brown and Garrett Fort
1929/US
Paramount Pictures
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube

Slim Lamont: I mean the way Kitty slams over a number. And boy, she packs the meanest strip and tease routine that ever burned up a runway! You know what I mean.
April Darling: Well no, not exactly.

This movie’s highlights are the great Helen Morgan and Mamoulian’s fluid use of the camera this early in the sound era.

Kitty Darling (Morgan) is a dim and boozy but sweet burlesque star.  She has a daughter she names April (Joan Peers).  When April is old enough she sends her to a convent school where she becomes refined and knows little of her mother’s doings.

When April graduates she reunites with Kitty.  Now Kitty has a boyfriend/manager named Hitchcock who is a complete rat.  He insists that the young pretty girl earn her keep in the burlesque show.  Both April and Kitty are horrified.  Worse, Hitchcock can’t keep his hands off poor April who makes her disgust obvious.

April meets a sailor on leave and their five-day romance leads to a marriage proposal.  But Hitchcock has been selling the idea of putting April in Kitty’s headline spot.  Out of loyalty to her mother, she dumps her sailor and takes the stage.  I’ll stop here.

The acting of all the principals is good, except for the daughter who takes over-earnest to new heights.  The story is pure tearjerker stuff.  But the star of the show is Mamoulian’s moving camera.  This was one of my favorite films of its year.  Recommended.

Clip

Hell’s Heroes
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Tom Reed and C. Gardner Sullivan from the story “Three Godfathers” by Peter B. Kyne
1929/US
Universal Pictures
IMDb Page
First viewing/YouTube

The girl a goad for banditry, the babe the inspiration that led the three bad men through a hell of heat and thirst to…What? (original print ad)

Not too shabby for your first talking picture, Mr. Wyler!

Three bandits (played by Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton and Fred Kohler) ride into the town of New Jerusalem.  After hanging out at the saloon for awhile so we can get a song and dance in, they head off to rob the bank.  During the robbery, the teller is shot dead and one of the three is wounded.  They escape into the desert.

There they come upon an abandoned covered wagon carrying a woman who is in the late stages of childbirth.  The bandits were counting on filling up with water there but the water hole has been dynamited.  The mother gives birth to a boy.  Her dying wish is that all three men become the the baby’s godfathers and bring him to New Jerusalem where the father worked (past tense) at the bank.

The three are complete softies when it comes to this baby.  Will they be able to get him to town before all four of them die of thirst?

This is a really solid Western and seems to flow in a way I hadn’t seen yet in early talkies. The acting is good and the pacing is pure Wyler. The YouTube print is once again quite fuzzy but not so bad that I did not enjoy the film.  Even this early, the story had been adapted for the screen twice previously.  It was also remade later several times, most famously by John Ford in 3 Godfathers (1948).

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I also watched a nice documentary on British silent cinema on YouTube called Silent Britain.  Very nice collection of clips from the silent era.

The Canary Murder Case
Directed by Malcolm St. Clair
Written by Florence Ryerson, Albert S. Le Vino and Herman J. Mankiewicz from a novel by S.S. Van Dine
1929/US
Paramount Pictures
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube

Ending my 1929 Louise Brooks trifecta with this star-studded but creaky early talkie.

Margaret O’Dell (Brooks) known as “The Canary” for the scantily clad flying act she performs collects rich men like diamonds.  When the youngest of her lovers decides to marry nice girl Alice LaFosse (Jean Arthur), Margaret decides this is pay day.  She tries to blackmail him into marrying her.  Just for the hell of it, she also decides to blackmail her three other lovers demanding expensive “wedding gifts” and fat checks.  Then her ex-husband (Ned Sparks) shows up to blackmail her.  So when she winds up murdered, there are a plethora of suspects.

Publicity shot of Louise Brooks

Private detective Philo Vance (William Powell), a friend of the young man, takes on the case.  He works hand in hand with the police and a police sergeant (Eugene Pallette) is usually at his side, jumping to the wrong conclusions and claiming Vance’s deductions as his own.  It would be unfair to say anything further about the mystery.

The viewing experience on YouTube was marred by a very fuzzy print.  The primitive sound technology and creaky direction was partially overcome by the always reliable William Powell and Eugene Pallette and by the lovely Louise Brooks.

Brooks refused to return from Germany to post synch her dialogue in this film.  Paramount was not impressed and spread the word that she did not have a suitable voice for sound. It got revenge by hiring an actress with a very shrill voice to stand in for her –  a voice that did not match up with the character of a man-eating seductress.  Not a particularly good film but interesting for early performances from some of the Golden Age’s stars.

Fan trailer