skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Wallace Beery plays a German beer garden wrestler and waiter in the oddly-named Flesh. Beery, childlike and naive, falls for a just-out-of-jail and penniless Karen Morley, who's also pregnant, though she keeps that fact to herself. Beery takes pity on her and gives her a place to stay. Flesh then becomes a sort of slow-burn cousin to The Blue Angel, as the smitten and child-like Beery is fooled, manipulated and swindled by both Morley and her lover posing as her brother (played by Ricardo Cortez), a slimy ex-con who doesn't treat Morley with any more respect than Beery.
Though uncredited (no director is listed in the credits), the great John Ford directed Flesh while on loan to MGM. Many Ford fans don't think much of Flesh and it's far from a masterpiece. It does keep the viewer interested in these characters all the way to the tragic end, though. Beery plays the part with such pathos and innocence it's hard to be unmoved by his predicament - his uncompromising stance when he's pressured to "fix' a fight also makes him endearing. (The awkward German accent, though, is a minus.) Morley's world weary criminal is just conflicted enough about her feelings and guilt to make her character stand out from the cinematic cliche. The role could have been one-dimensional.
Flesh also features character actors like Jean Hersholt, Ward Bond, Nat Pendleton and, for better or worse, the ubiquitous John Miljan.
Flesh is available on Warner Brothers DVD-R.
Salute to the Marines, starring Wallace Beery in Technicolor and Margaret O'Brien and Jimmy Durante in Music for Millions are being released to DVD-R for the first, by Warner Archives.
Check the Warner Archives site for details:
http://www.wbshop.com/category/wbshop_brands/warner+archive.do
Although originally released by Metro in 1921, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was rereleased by MGM in their first year in business, 1924.
A long (132-minute) tale of two generations of a splintered, warring family, The Four Horsemen is primarily known today as the film which made Rudolph Valentino famous. He plays a rich, spoiled wastrel through much of the film, until he falls in love (with a married woman) and attempts to redeem his sorry life by joining the French infantry in WWI.
Directed by Rex Ingram, the story is hokum, pure and simple, complete with a pious, emotionless, creepy Nostradamus/Christ figure (one of several who pop up in MGM silent films when sanctimonious sentiment is needed) who foretells days of apocalyptic wrath and brotherly love.
The movie is, though, good, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle. The sets are gargantuan, filled with the kind of mysterious clutter you only see in silent movies. The themes are large, accented by color-tinted images of Hell. And, with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you get a star in the making. The very first scene Valentino appears in, rakishly stealing another man's vampish date to dance a tango with, is alive, smoldering and timeless in a way most of the rest of the movie isn't. The scene has "classic" written all over it.
Be prepared to slog through a lot of the second half of the film, though. You know you're getting starved for entertainment when your eyes light up at a lost monkee jumping out of a handbag.
You do get to see Wallace Beery and Alan Hale playing evil German scavengers and the film's love interest, Alice Terry, has an acting style more subtle than you often see in silent films.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has not been released on DVD. The version shown on Turner Classic Movies, a Photoplay production with a grand orchestral score by Carl Davis, is the one to beat. Amazon is selling an on-demand DVD-R version with a simpler score. I recommend holding out for the TCM version.
Hell Divers, while routine in many aspects, impressed me as being much more ambitious than I'd expected - it was the Top Gun of its day. The movie sports some amazing aerial footage, Navy-lent filming of the huge carrier USS Saratoga, bombings galore and even dirigibles, beautifully photographed drifting through the clouds. Naval and aeronautics fans will go nuts with this film.
Wallace Beery plays the sort of character he usually did: a "lovable" (depending on your perspective), incorrigible (until the end) big kid in a cartoonishly gruff, middle-aged man's body. Clark Gable, in the twelfth of twelve films he made in his first year in Hollywood (!) is his in-the-air and on-the-ground competitor. The antagonism between the two, which reportedly carried off-screen, propels the plot forward until the sentimental end, when Beery becomes a hero through his unexpected maturity.
Hell Divers also features silent star Marie Prevost, Marjorie Rambeau as Beery's girlfriend, and Cliff Edwards (no ukulele in this one, alas, though Beery does sing and play the piano).
Hell Divers hasn't been released on VHS or DVD, but is shown occasionally by Turner Classic Movies.
This is my kind of movie!
I initially approached Billy the Kid with trepidation. The great King Vidor directing a 1930 MGM western? The movie had to be an odd antique. It is, as it turns out, odd, but it's not an antique.
Billy the Kid is a slick, romanticized version of the real Henry McCarty and Pat Garrett and their involvement in the six-month long, 1878 Lincoln County War of New Mexico. Though the war is much simplified, some of what happens in the film was apparently true: the corrupt, government-tied land monopoly in the county, the cold-blooded murder of John Tunstall, the women's safe passage from the McSween house before it was burned.
It was Pat Garrett himself who helped mythologize Henry McCarty after the Kid's death. Garrett claimed to have killed him, but that story's been disputed. The real Billy was reportedly as cold-blooded a killer as the posse he was fighting against, an unscrupulous opportunist. Played here by Johnny Mack Brown in a star-making role, Billy is a romantic, non-compromising sharpshooter who's willing to risk everything for justice and is heroically non-plussed; when the ceiling beams of a burning house fall in front of him, he takes the opportunity to light his cigarette from the flames.
Wallace Beery, in a role which confirmed him as a star, is perfect at the ambiguously-motivated Garrett. Kay Johnson plays the love interest in a minimally-written role, and the movie is packed with character actors like Karl Dane, Roscoe Ates and Russell Simpson.
This is a western that doesn't play the by the rules of western movies. Like most MGM films of the period, it mixes humor into the events, creating some bizarrely incongruous, violent scenes.
King Vidor does a fine directing job; the location shots are gorgeous, the sets memorable, the storytelling compelling.
Billy the Kid was originally shot in the widescreen format, but only the more standard size ratio print exists. The film is available on Warner Archive DVD and has been broadcast by Turner Classic Movies. The version shown is the American one, wherein Pat Garrett allows Billy to escape with his life; the European version has Garrett shooting him dead.
A 1931 crime film with Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Lewis Stone, Ralph Bellamy, and Johnny Mack Brown – a recipe for a great film, right?
The Secret Six has a great opening act, but then loses its way. First it’s the story of a low-life slaughter-house worker, Beery, opting instead for a rising career as a bootlegger and well-paid thug. Then it’s a love-triangle, with reporters Clark Gable and Johnny Mack Brown vying for the attention of club worker Jean Harlow. Then it’s a police procedural, with a bizarre and unexplained group of black-masked men in power working behind the scenes to bring down Beery, who by this time is in politics. Lastly, it’s a courtroom drama.
Get all that?
The casting is perfect. Beery, who wants steak for dinner after a day of killing cattle, could be reprising his role from The Big House. Lewis Stone gives an unexpectedly understated performance as the quiet head of the gang (did Brando see this?), and Ralph Bellamy, in his first role, is convincingly menacing as a double-dealing gangster. Gable, Harlow, and Brown play early versions of the sorts of characters Hollywood made them famous for.
The Secret Six also falters in its dialogue. I hate to dis the honored Francis Marion, who worked on 166 films from 1912 to 1940. She was Mary Pickford’s personal screenwriter (some great films, those), and brought good, basic storytelling skills to many silent and sound films. By the early ‘30s, though, the tropes she relied on in her dialogue were perhaps getting stale: The Secret Six must contain at least a dozen instances of the responses, “Yeah?” and “Oh, yeah?” Producer Irving Thalberg may have had a hand in the script’s plot, though, as there’s talk about Thalberg making Gable’s role in the film larger late in the shooting process.
The Secret Six has been released on Warner Archives DVD-R.
Posts
