I can’t think of a more appropriate film to begin the year with than Cecil B. DeMille’s only musical, “Madam Satan” (1930), the latest previously hard-to-see treasure now available from the Warner Archive Collection custom-manufacture DVD service.
The film is famous for its climax, a masked ball set on board a zeppelin that is struck by lightning (prefigured by a musical tribute to electricity that has to be seen to believed).
Mitchell Leisen worked on the eye-popping art deco sets with Cedric Gibbons. Kay Johnson — forgotten leading lady of DeMile’s first all-talkie, the arguably even more demented “Dyamite” (1929), wife of husband John Cromwell and mother of character actor James Cromwell — has the tile role, the dowdy wife of a rich man. She disguises herself in a glamorous peekaboo gown to seduce her husband (Reginald Denny) who is straying with the doomed singer Lillian Roth. Roland Young is even more droll than usual as the host of the party.
This campfest, which I hadn’t seen all the way through since it showed at the old Theater 80 St. Marks in the ’70s, was a box-office flop. DeMille blamed MGM’s failure to sign up Rogers and Hart or other top songwriters for the film. DeMille, who had an independent unit exempt from supervision by Irving Thalberg, made just one more film for MGM before returning to Paramount for 1932’s “The Sign of the Cross.”
I watched “Madam Satan” well before an epic nosebleed landed me in New York Presbyterian for a few days, where I somewhat dictated an insert to an article about my 1970 meeting with Ali McGraw during the filming of “Love Story” from the emergency room while receiving a transfusion. When I started recuperating at home, my attention span was limited, so WAC’s latest collection of theatrical shorts, “Vitaphone Cavalade of Musical Comedy” was especially welcome. Though the collection stretches back to filmed vaudeville turns from 1926, I concentrated on the two discs full of three-strip Techicolor shorts, running around 20 minutes apiece, from 1934-1938.
Ralph Staub’s “Good Morning Eve” (1934), which by Leonard Maltin’s reckoning beat “La Cucaracha” into theaters as the first three-strip, live-action Techicolor short, is an especially racy Leon Errol musical about Adam and Eve traveling through history. Errol also stars in Staub’s spicy “Service With a Smile” (also 1934) which centers on an art deco service station photographed in particularly vivid hues.
The dialect comedian El Brendel, who works best in small doses, is featured opposite the lovely singer Wini Shaw (of “Lullaby of Broadway” fame) in a pair of positively surreal musicals, “What? No Men” and “Okay, Jose,” with El appearing in drag in the latter (pictured). Ms. Shaw charms Warren Hymer into replacing her as a volcano sacrifice in the nutty “King of the Islands,” South African child actress Sybil Jason plays tribute to the British Empire in “The Changing of the Guards” and future Oscar winner Jane Wyman joins Dick Foran as a singing minister in “The Sunday Roundup.”
Jeffrey Lynn plays a makeup artist and Fritz Feld a director in “Out Where the Stars Begin,” a fascinating tour of the Warner Bros. lot that was reworked for at least two other shorts.
After a couple of days, I felt ready to tackle a bunch of Warners’ pre-code thrillers and romances from the Warner Archive Collection, few of which run much more than an hour. Some I’d seen before, but several were new to me.
My favorite of the batch is Mervyn LeRoy’s location-filmed “Heat Lightning” (1934), a forgotten pre-cursor to “The Petrified Forest” (1936) set at a gas station and lunch room in the Arizona desert presided over by a tough, independent woman (the superb character actress Aline MacMahon in her first starring role) and the younger sister she is trying to protect from men.
The cast is excellent, from a brief early appearance by Jane Darwell and Edgar Kennedy as a bickering couple to the arrival of two wealthy divorcees (Glenda Farrell and Ruth Donnelly) vying for the attention of their overworked chauffeur (Frank McHugh).
Also turning up is Aline’s old flame Preston Foster, who is fleeing from a bank robbery with his accomplice (Lyle Talbot). Made before the establishment of the Production Code Administration that year, the film makes clear that the skeptical McMahon can be seduced by Foster, who wouldn’t mind making off with the contents of her cash register. The gritty, pre-feminist ending probably wouldn’t have been possible a few months later.
MacMahon and McHugh appear in support as a pair of grifters in Tay Garnett’s “One Way Passage” (1932), one of the most romantic movies of the era, an Oscar winner for Robert Lord’s original story. William Powell and Kay Francis, who had appeared in four earlier films at Paramount before moving over to Warners, have terrific chemistry as a convicted murderer and a dying heiress who have a chance meeting at a bar in Hong Kong.
He’s apprehended shortly thereafter by a San Francisco detective (Warren Hymer, never better) who plans to take Powell back on the same ocean liner that Francis is traveling on. Not revealing their secrets to each other, they enjoy a shipboard romance. Powell plans to escape during a stop in Honolulu, but changes his mind when Francis suffers a setback.
Boasting an especially memorably ending, “One Way Passage” is directed with great imagination and style by Garnett, and holds up extremely well for a film of its age. It was remade in 1940 (with McHugh reprising his role) by Edmund Goulding as “Till We Meet Again,” but Merle Oberon and George Brent don’t have a fraction of the chemistry of their predecessors. (My pal Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren, has her own inmitiable take on the film).
Before he began directing prestige pictures, William Dieterle was a key helmer of pre-codes, and few pack as much plot into 69 minutes as the whirlwind “Fog Over Frisco” (1934).
Top-billed Bette Davis has one of her best early roles as an heiress involved with criminals in this breathless thriller, though she only appears in the first-half hour.
The film’s actual protagonist is Davis’ step-sister, played by her frequent co-star Margaret Lindsay (reputedly real-life lesbian lover of Janet Gaynor around this time) who tries to save the family name and solve Davis’ disappearance with the help of reporter boyfriend (Donald Woods). Davis is involved with shady financiers Douglass Dumbrille and Lyle Talbot. Robert Baratt is Lindsay’s snoopy butler; Hugh Herbert is Woods’ photographer; Alan Hale and William Demarest turn up as cops in this vintage treat.
I’d never seen Ray Enright’s wonderful “Blondie Johnson” (1932), which showcases Joan Blondell as a woman who turns to crime after the death of her mother. Allen Jenkins and Sterling Holloway have juicy supporting roles, but it’s non-Warner player Chester Morris who has terrific chemistry with Blondell as her gangster love interest.
Another of Warners’ seemingly endless crime dramas from the era, Dieterle’s stylish “From Headquarters” (1933) has police inspector George Brent solve a particularly convoluted couple of murders which may or not involve the heiress (Lindsay) he’s interested in. Barrat and Eugene Palette are also on hand for extra entertainment value. The plot was largely recycled for the B-movie “When Were You Born” (1938), also featuring Lindsay but with Anna May Wong as a crime-solving astrologer replacing inspector Brent.
Robert Florey’s “Girl Missing” (1933) snappily combines comedy and thrills as golddiggers Glenda Farrell and Mary Brian endeavor to remove a cloud of suspicion from wealthy Ben Lyon, chief suspect in the disappearance of his bride, their colleague Peggy Shannon, during their honeymoon. With Guy Kibbee and Harold Huber. Warner Archive offers this as a double feature with Archie Mayo’s “Illicit” (1931), a rare Barbara Stanwyck misfire that manages to bore despite the presence of such worthies as Ricardo Cortez, Charles Butterworth and Blondell in support.
Michael Curtiz’ stylish direction and Anton Grot’s expressionist sets more than offset the wild contrivances in the Vienna-set medical melodrama “Alias the Doctor” (1933). Richard Barthlemess brings his usual conviction to the role of a former medical student who does a stretch in prison for practicing medicine without a license — actually taking the blame for a botched abortion by his dissolute foster brother (Norman Foster).
After his release, circumstances and his foster mother (Lucille LaVerne, La Vengeance in “A Tale of Two Cities” the following year) conspire to force him to practice surgery under his now-deceased brother’s name. He’s wildly successful, but the masquerade means everything thinks the love of his life (Marian Marsh) is actually his sister. Oy.
Finally, Kay Francis suffers in high style in Mayo’s “Street of Women” (1932) as a dress designer in a back-street relationship with a financier (shyster specialist Alan Dinehart in a rare sympathetic leading-man role).
Just when it looks like Dinehart might divorce his wife, Francis’ brother, who has just returned from four years in France, meets and becomes engaged to Dinehart’s daughter (Gloria Stuart of “Titanic” fame in one of her earliest roles). The ever-droll Roland Young, as an architect, does his best to sort things out by the final reel in this satisfying obscurity which has some very nice sets and costumes.
Thank you, Warner Archive Collection.
