August 5, 1935 [The 39 Steps]

When it’s my turn to be pursued by sundry spies, traitors, and lawmen, I hope I can command half the easy aplomb of Robert Donat in The 39 Steps. But even that half may be out of the reach of mere mortals. In a picture that's as much a nimble-footed comedy as an exercise in all-but-unbearable suspense, Donat smiles through with uncanny calm and quick wits, certain he will maintain his forward progress, despite an absolute ignorance of what has actually befallen him.

Alfred Hitchcock, he would be pleased to hear, makes me uneasy. He is a genuine puzzle, with a soul both as cold and jolly as Christmas day at the North Pole, capable of utter ruthlessness toward his hapless characters--and of godlike beneficence, providing miracles of coincidence and timing that effect escape, rescue and resolution, all employing his own particular physics, actions and reactions occurring as Hitchcock sees fit.

And what will stick with us, long after the last villain is dispatched, is poor Mr. Memory, burdened with a Music Hall talent that delights everyone but himself. He follows Donat like a silly little demon--and serves his master, Mr. Hitchcock, with perilous loyalty. I was about to write, “I’m glad I don’t live in Hitchcock’s world”--but a suspicion I will not pursue denies me such comfort, knowing that British villain smiles, and smiles.

July 15, 1935 [Mad Love]

Ted Healy’s quick-patter wise guy giggles-and-groans is the last thing I expected in the world of Mad Love--Peter Lorre finally in America--and be careful what you wish for. Orlacs Hände is revisited--but it’s the doctor who commands Mad Love, Lorre squashed down like a troll, his froggy eyes ravenous for Stephen Orlac’s wife--an actress at the Grand Guignol--and no, nothing is clean in this movie--including Healy, a nosy newspaperman, yukking it up as though he’d wandered in from another picture--one of his own, where everybody else is a stooge, and all problems are solved by head-knocking and pants-dropping.

But Lorre and the plot are so demented that Healy is (practically) silenced. Doctor Gogol loves to watch Yvonne tortured on stage--but all that ends when she marries M. Orlac, the concert pianist, and she quits her career as a theatrical sadist. Gogol’s only consolation is the life-sized wax figurine of Yvonne that had graced the theater’s lobby--and he takes it home and sets it in his room, playing his organ (so to speak) and gazing at her through a mirror. As the director, Karl Freund brings all his fearless German brilliance to the images, which glow like putrescence under moonlight—especially Gogol in disguise, all tinted glass and rubber, in a scene as rife with fetishistic outrage as Kafka’s The Trial--a book glued together posthumously, floating along shining, sluggish night-waters, right to the verge of Mad Love, the two of them beautiful hysterics, their problems insurmountable, no matter how loud Healy barks.

And I won’t forget Orlac himself, hated by the step-father who has crossed out “et fils” from the sign of his business establishment--trying to stay one step ahead of the Oedipal rage that threatens at knife-point. And it is Stephen’s new proficiency with knives that tosses the last irony at this Modern Horror picture, impaling Orlac--is every true monster in the end a vampire?--and exorcising demons, all with a flick of the wrist.

May 12, 1935 [The Informer]

Victor McLaglen’s Gypo Nolan wanders through a Nighttown of his own making--no, of the Irish Rebellion’s, which had asked him to kill in cold blood and sent him staggering into the street to grab at scraps of traitorous paper, like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, and become the victim of desperation--no, it’s the English who built the foggy maze, holding onto Ireland like a drunken drab demanding payment--no, it’s the promise of America, both Gypo and his lass sailing away for £20 total--and isn’t that the price, now, for informing?

I want to blame someone for the long night Gypo spends in The Informer, drinking and sweating, casting off his Judas notes like little candle-boats to light the way directly back to him, amazed he has once more drawn the short straw. As an actor McLaglen is all in here, not a single chip in reserve, as he gambles and wins the right to cobble a tragedy out of his soiled love and fear. It’s a strange performance, almost an impression of “Gypo” rather than an honest depiction. But this is where McLaglen serves the character so well. He wants us to see Gypo’s thick-headedness, and so makes himself thick in the process, lurching ever more drunkenly, waiting for someone to relieve him of the burden of Gypo--and that abandonment of the self lets the guilt overtake the role, and Gypo becomes more than a perspiring caricature. Shot, he wanders into a church--and I held my breath, hoping he would finally ask for forgiveness. It is all he has left, and only a fool refuses the last thing offered, even though it puts the taste of copper in his mouth and he has to accept it on his knees.

April 28, 1935 [Bride of Frankenstein]

Always the Devil’s Advocate, enjoying his meal in the crypt, grinning like a skull, Dr. Pretorius finally gives in to his nature and offers, “Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils.” And there is the poor devil himself, Boris Karloff waiting for his Bride. He “love dead, hate living”--and so fits right in with this midnight choir, warbling the little liebestod song with the giggling cadence of madmen.

James Whale becomes Frankenstein, piecing together dead things to pull his little graveyard prank, bringing Something to life just to kill it, to make us see ourselves dead, from the Shelleys and Byron to Elsa Lanchester, torn from her Romantic hearthside and mummified, hissing in her ceremental robes.

And of course the picture is never more alive than when Pretorius croons like a hag about how rotten it all is, and delicious--while the Monster’s attempts to crawl out of the grave and enjoy life make for ghastly comedy. It’s as though your closest companion, your loving old mother, even your beloved spouse, were nothing but middens, tossed on the common trash-heap--and all for the sake of a gag. And yes I suddenly laughed, like a dry sneeze, Whale tickling the ivories running inside me, all cold bone and hollow thumps.

And the spell must have been complete--or I am growing old--because I felt a catch in my throat as the Monster informed everyone, “We belong dead,” and threw the ubiquitous switch, and blew them all to Hell, giving Pretorius his fondest wish. Suddenly it seemed a tragedy, Karloff once more inviting us to peek inside and feel how lonely it must be, there beneath the clay and mortar of his makeup and the weight of his leaden boots.

February 25, 1935 [Readin' and Writin', Beginner's Luck]

Hal Roach's "Our Gang" is growing up: capable of knowing glances--as Spanky shares with his grandmother their mutual disdain for his stage-mother's praises and aspirations; and noble gestures--Spanky again, assuring the little cutie-pie that the prize money is "in the bag," so that she can buy the dress she wears in her failed attempt at radio stardom.

But the rollicking gang in the audience, planted there by Spanky to ruin his chances at winning--weary as he is of "reciting"--reminds us that this is still a private club, one that recognizes the adult world's schemes. When Spanky has his change of heart and decides to win the ten bucks, he makes the mistake of sending out his mother to convey the news. The gang interprets his okie-dokie follow-up as the "high sign"--that is, "ignore the grown-up" (a safe bet in most cases), and they carry on--alarmingly, spinning their rattles, pelting with peas, forcing the very atmosphere to burst, as the pianist's toupee flies from his dome. Spanky, exerting all his thespian powers, tries desperately to inform "friends, Romans, countrymen" that their ears must be lent--but becomes a floundering fool--and, of course, the winner of the prize, bringing down the house.

Watching these children grow, in sudden jumps--like distant nephews and nieces who visit perhaps once a year--I am struck with movie-nostalgia, built instantly for an immediate past--the Gang as virtual orphans, unfettered by their own need to perform, free in all their cheerfully rough glory. They scamper through a nondescript edge-of-Hollywood early-morning landscape of scraggly fields, stagnant ponds, dirt paths, alleys, and culverts cluttered with handy brickbats suitable for bouncing off dog catchers' and truant officers' bald pates, and of course home to inexplicably available mules. They race between the legs of cruel adults, some of whom are actually armed, others merely squinting with Edgar Kennedy-esque certainty of delinquency; and I am filled as well with Stymie's hunger, broad and blatant, but real, even when he literally licks his lips in anticipation, because I understand the feeling: Anything--everything!--but mush.

But their greatest appetite is for each other. They know how vital it is for children to, like good revolutionaries, hang together to avoid hanging separately. Exclusion from the gang is a bitter, tearful, panicky business; and their friendships demand a calm port after the storms of school and romance, capture and flight. While some adults extend affectionate or charitable hands--the nice ladies whose back porches Stymie approaches to beg for food, or shopkeepers and passers-by who indulge the children's whims--"borrowing" apples for an unsuccessful lesson in arithmetic (doomed to failure because of the apples themselves: they are, after all, food, not academic abstractions)--and of course the lovely Miss Crabtree, still the single most charismatic educator in film history (goodbye, Mr. Chips, you bet)--most grownups in the Gang's world are active threats, far removed from the absolute values of childhood: appetite and loyalty.

To understand--well, remember--those values, all I need consider is the would-be truant, Breezy Brisbane, who, speaking out of the corner of his mouth, rejects his mother's hope that he become President in favor of his own dream to become a street car conductor: "Boy, do they take in the nickels!" He listens to a hardworking man at his "grim forge" describing how he dutifully studied and was first in his class, all in the service of his own aspiration to reside in the White House. But as Brisbane observes with finality, "And you ended up a punk blacksmith." They seem to yearn for a perfected state, one that provides a justification for their appetites, a kind of vacant-lot-as-Pure-Form, that places them out of the reach of starched shirts and outraged dowagers and allows them room to see the world as it is really is--or at least as they are always imagining it, which by the end of the second reel means a full belly, a safe pooch, and arms draped over each others' shoulders, as ready to give one another a kiss as a raspberry, in the safety and freedom of a partly hidden world at knee-level, little but not forlorn.

As Brisbane regrets his truancy, weeping as the Gang often do--and not only because he has let down his mother and the radiant Miss Crabtree, but because, as an expelled student, his freedom means the loss of his pals--he accepts his punishment: to recite a sickly sentimental poem, a rapturous ode to his teacher. He stands at the front of the room, expelling the awful words in shame, while the other kids howl their cleansing derision, drawing him back--and I don't think into simple conformity to adult authority, but to a far better place, where the clubhouse leans and Petey waits with Spanky--so fond of pointing out deviations from the Code of Loyalty with a sarcastic, drawn-out, "My pal"--and Stymie and Weezer and Farina, while that theme music, surprisingly plaintive, more goodbye than hello, reworks the past in its own grainy, mugging, double-take image.

---

My children wanted to see Readin' and Writin' again, and again, which gave me the opportunity to commit to memory Brisbane's punishment-poem. I copy it out for posterity--and as a warning to all truant tykes.

High up grew a daffodil,
I couldn't hardly reach her.
Said I to me, "I think I will
Get it for my teacher!"
I climbed to get the daffodil
Out on a limb so thin.
I tumbled down like Jack and Jill
And skinned my little shin.
And here's the pretty daffodil
I brought to my dear teacher.
I love her dear and I always will--
I'm awful glad to meet cha!

December 10, 1934 [Men in Black, Three Little Pigskins, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup]

"For duty and humanity!" crow the Three Stooges, chowder-headed "men in black" who systematically tear to confetti the Hippocratic Oath, doing all kinds of harm. And they are not alone: the Marx Brothers also have had at it--Duck Soup last year a model of the surreal wise-crack (at home we are still fond of intoning in mock disgust, "Go, and never darken my towels again!")--but in Three Little Piglets the Stooges are no longer merely Ted Healy's--well, stooges--but Stooges in their own right, self-made pan-handlers vainly trying to convince pedestrians that there's a Depression going on.

And they're right: Franklin D. has given me great solace, but Groucho, Moe and Co. have turned the Depression into anarchy's straight man, set up for a fall we may not see for years--but on the screen tumbling beautifully, greased with seltzer-water and pelted with fruits and vegetables. Borrowing their cue from the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers, the Stooges, mistaken for the "Three Horsemen of Boulder Dam," find themselves first the object of female attention--dolled up in dressing gowns after getting all wet (the Stooges, not the dames), pitching woo in pig-Latin--then the object of gridiron scorn, playing pat-a-cake with the rules and whatever dignity the sport might ever have had.

Imagine all of them, Stooges and Marxes, whooping it up together, breaking mirrors like Max Linder, howling down corridors and hot-cha-cha-ing their way to a giddy dictatorship that burns no Reichstags, just Edgar Kennedy and his derby. A prospect too terrible to behold; instead, like Rufus T. Firefly, "I'm going back and clean the crackers out of my bed; I'm expecting company."

November 20, 1934 [It’s a Gift]

As Harold Bissonette, W. C. Fields shuffles along, half-murmuring, half-muttering, plaintive and frustrated, his gaze often averted--and punished with imprecations when he dares to look the world in the eye, his unquiet circumstances in New Jersey alleviated only by a dream of “typical California orange groves.”

The revelatory scene is his attempt to sleep on his porch, to gain simple quiet and the necessary solitude of the weary. But (at methodical, regular intervals) milk bottles (“Please stop playing those sleigh-bells”), a splintering support beam, a homicidal toddler with an ice pick, a gravity-driven cocoanut, and the eager minions of salesmanship (in search of the elusive “LaFong, Carl LaFong”) combine to deny him respite--a denial echoed in his grocery by the calamitous Mr. Muckle and the man who rages for ten pounds of kumquats. It is a world moving along its own trajectory, and to hell with Harold Bissonnette.

The bestowing of the sudden orange grove at the end--delivered without logic after so much dismay and outright disaster--certainly relieves Bissonette, but his rescue is almost as unsettling as his irritations and desperate plights, for it comes with the same unconcern for any of his efforts, fortune as much as failure acting on its own. I’ve noticed that Fields often seems poised to become the villain: The expected hard knocks of comedy he receives are, to his mind, acts of special vindictiveness, and he rears up to knock back--but he halts, not so much in kindness or forgiveness as exhaustion. There’s a little bit of Harry Langdon in Fields--the stunned victim--but the old man is too angry to remain the hapless baby, and lets out his remarkable whine-and-growl, at once apprehending defeat and spitting in its eye. In It’s a Gift I find a man I can understand, as modern as the stock-market haymakers that have been working on us these past few years, bruising and battering.

October 4, 1934 [Our Daily Bread]

King Vidor scatters road-tramp families like corn seed on the open fields of Our Daily Bread: The young couple, brimming with gee-whiz optimism, have nothing, find something: a farm to work on, the rich relative's almost-gift; and they work like mules--literally, with their assembled cooperative farmers, pulling the plows, making the earth turn for them.

And inevitably the Jean Harlow look-alike rattles into the homey Hooverville, dead sugar daddy bundled in the back, Jazz blaring, drowning out the Yumpin’ Yiminys and Oy-Veys that have managed to gather together, without too much fuss, to solve their American problems for themselves and each other, both at the same time. And her hips and curling pout work capitalistic wonders--looking not only for dough but the sheer thrill of giving the road a go: see where it leads and laugh out loud at it all.

But the dry soil calls out to the wayward husband, “Go west, young man, and grow up!”--and he turns back, and leads them all to dig the three-mile irrigation ditch--a climax as exciting as anything a boy with a gang of friends and some shovels could possibly imagine.

It ends with harvest and broad grins, an American Soviet without all the fuss--and I felt myself drawn in, good old Hollywood once more pulling my leg--but a flat voice mutters at my elbow, and I look over at the blank face--and it's Tom Kromer, his book Waiting for Nothing held up like an accusation--also without any fuss, but God how it lies on top of you, "deep almost as life."

And the stuff he tells me, I can hardly bear it, but he won't stop, and I can't stop:

"I lie here and try to think back. I try to think back over the years that I have lived. But I cannot think of years any more. I can think only of the drags I have rode, of the bulls that have sapped up on me, and the mission slop I have swilled. People I have known, I remember no more. They are gone. They are out of my life. I cannot remember them at all. Even my family, my mother is dimmed by the strings of drags with their strings of cars that are always with me in my mind through the long, cold nights. Whatever is gone before is gone. I lie here and I think, and I know that whatever is before is the same as that which is gone. My life is spent before it is started."

I ask him what can a man do, and he tells me, his voice so steady I'm afraid it will break my heart once and for all:

"I know well enough what he can do. All he can do is to try to keep his belly full of enough slop so that he won't rattle when he breathes. All he can do is to try and find himself a lousy flop at night. Day after day, week after week, year after year, always the same--three hots and a flop."

And just when I think I can stop, and go back to the movie, and watch them smile in the sun, Tom says, "She is a tough life, buddy"--and the worst part of it is that he is trying to comfort me. I want to give him everything I have and follow him, but he's gone before I can stand.

April 23, 1934 [Tarzan and His Mate]

Here, on the verge of Will Hays' flat-handed slap to keep the movies in line, the Production Code leaving a broad, lasting mark, red with--what? Anger? Embarrassment?--again: At this moment, standing on the studio-lot African plain, Valentino's old desert garb--serenely encircling willing damsels, silken bedclothes worn anywhere--falls at his feet; and there stands Johnny Weissmuller in the jungle clearing, stripped and staring down Bishops and the Bank of America, God and Mammon cowed, one last time, so that the Ape Man and his Mate can go swimming as Nature intended. And lucky us, we get to watch.

And what violence that underwater ballet, silent and staring, demands! Tribal attacks, bloody and piercing--both the cries of hapless bearers and the spears of the ambushing horde--and boulder-flinging Great Apes, menacing pythons--and the rhinoceros battle, a mad amalgamation of life-sized puppet, life-sized rhino, and life-sized Tarzan clutching his father's knife, astride the beast, driving it to the ground. And Cheetah the First is dead, and both pith-helmeted adventurers and cads are grimly schooled in the finer points of savage victory, lions devouring everything, Tarzan defeating all.

My son was with me, and he remained silent as a churchman--and in church he was, the holy temple of boyhood mayhem. Many years ago I saw that same shining, solemn look on the faces of men at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition watching their first Hoochi-Coochi show, the bare bellies and adamant breastplates encouraging their lonely hearts to beat. And while my son squirmed as the Jungle Lord and Lady had their morning swim, his own boy's heart swelled with noiseless passion when the knife flashed and the elephants trumpeted. We all find our moment of vicarious exultation--and Tarzan and His Mate provided enough primal shenanigans to fill my penny-ante heart of darkness.