Payment Deferred (1932)

Payment Deferred is a crime thriller and showcase for actor Charles Laughton, who previously played the same protagonist role on stage (both stage and film are based on the novel by C.S. Forester).

Laughton plays a pathetic in-debt banker who commits a crime in order to stay financially solvent. His wife and daughter (Dorothy Peterson and Maureen O'Sullivan) gradually begin to suspect wrongdoing and his affair with a worldly (you can tell because she has a European accent) local merchant (Verree Teasdale) only gets him deeper in trouble. Ray Milland also plays one of his earliest roles. It all adds up to a slowly simmering tale that's a bit darker than the sort of film MGM usually made.

Nearly the entire movie rests on Laughton's slumped, sad shoulders and he's perfect looking for the role. I do wonder if he wasn't too entrenched in the character, after 70 Broadway stage performances, to bring the sort of subtlety in acting the film camera requires. His performances on film in the decades ahead would be much more convincing.

I do need to mention the direction of Lothar Mendes (1894–1974), who quite capably directed a variety of genres over a forty year span and who here shoots some wonderfully evocative compositions which reminded me of Fritz Lang's work on films like M. Payment Deferred also has the sort of decaying sense of place as Lang's House By the River.

Payment Deferred is not available on DVD, but has been broadcast on TCM.

Devil-May-Care (1929)

Although Ramon Novarro first sang on film in The Pagan (1929), Devil-May-Care, made the same year, is his first all-talking picture. He passes this crucial test with ease (many other Hollywood stars were not so lucky). His accent may be out of place in a Napoleonic-era film (the same was true of his co-stars, especially blues and jazz singer Marion Harris), but his voice and singing are splendid.

Devil-May-Care is very much in the swashbuckler mode and, in fact, is somewhat similar to MGM's earlier Bardelys the Magnificent (1926). Novarro plays a Napoleon loyalist who, while escaping from Royalist forces attempting to execute him, falls for a stubborn Royalist daughter, Dorothy Jordan. Compared to other early sound films, Sidney Franklin's direction is remarkably smooth and accomplished. It doesn't seem as stagebound as most other 1929 films and only suffers from a few of the odd editing choices one sees in MGM films of this period. It even features a completely superfluous Technicolor ballet sequence.

That the film is so technically accomplished is made more remarkable when you take into account this was one of the first Hollywood musicals (the songs by Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey range from okay to annoying). It's a missed opportunity that Marion Harris didn't sing in the film.

Ramon Novarro is fine in the film, ensuring more years of work at MGM. His mischevious pursuit (some might call it stalking) of Dorothy Jordan can seem a little creepy, though, perhaps depending on what mood you're in when you watch it. John Miljan's also in this film. But, you knew that.

Devil-May-Care has been shown on Turner Classic Movies.

Pack Up Your Troubles (1932)

Second-rate Laurel and Hardy material is so good it would be nearly any other comedian's first-rate material and Pack Up Your Troubles is a good example. It takes an exceedingly unfunny subject (WWI), adds in a little-girl-lost plot, meanders about as Laurel and Hardy movies often do and is still timelessly enjoyable.

Comedians have frequently used the lost or orphaned kid plot; it usually generates audience sympathy and gives the comedians someone to play off of. Chaplin created the template with The Kid. Some of the many later examples include Pack Up Your Troubles, Harry Langdon's Three's A Crowd (1927), Max Davidson's The Rag Man (1925) and even Jerry Lewis' The Family Jewels (1965).

The girl in Pack Up Your Troubles, who loses her father in a French trench, is played by Jackie Lyn Dufton. She's perfect for the role and has some charming scenes with Stan Laurel. This Hal Roach production is filled with great character actors who our duo meet as they attempt to reunite the orphaned girl with her real family, including James Finlayson, Tom Kennedy and Billy Gilbert.

Pack Up Your Troubles is short (68 minutes), but sweet.

Pack Up Your Troubles has been released on DVD as a part of Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection.

Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

Bardelys the Magnificent, directed by the great King Vidor, is a deliciously satisfying swashbuckler, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, who wrote the source material for many other epic action films.

John Gilbert plays a Don Juan-type during the reign of Louis XIII. Agreeing to a dubious bet layed down by a court rival (Roy D'Arcy at his most caddish), Bardelys sets out to win the hand of honorable Eleanor Boardman.

This is an epic made at the height of MGM's silent period, made in that sweet spot of the era when the sets were gargantuan, the stories filled with easy humor and danger, character actors appeared in nearly every scene and the stories came to a satisfying, relatively leisurely conclusion. Much of the above would go out the window during the sound era. The satisfying attributes of the early sound era of MGM would be much smaller scale (though no less fun): a script by P.G. Wodehouse, songs sung and played by Cliff Edwards, Bessie Love in musicals, glimpses of genius from Buster Keaton allowed to peek out from imposed, rotten scripts.

Meanwhile, back in 1926, John Gilbert's Bardelys the Magnificent did mad physical stunts that (look on screen as if they) rivaled Douglas Fairbanks. For those who love a good, action-filled love story amidst political intrigue, this movie will fit the bill.

One small drawback: a reel from the film is missing which is replaced by stills and title cards to tell the story. MGM apparently destroyed all of their prints of the film due to their choosing not to renew a ten-year lease with Sabatini. The short sequence is relatively painless.

Bardelys the Magnificent is available on DVD.

Kongo (1932)

For dark, rotting depravity, look no further than this sound remake of Tod Browning's 1928 collaboration with Lon Chaney, West of Zanzibar. Both tell the same story, but in Kongo, Walter Huston reprises the same role he originally performed on stage (and which West of Zanzibar was based) and he has a delicious time hamming it up. Huston looks like a deranged pirate with a wicked, mischievous glint in his eye, an insane prototype of Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth.

Huston is "King Deadlegs" Flint, a paraplegic planning revenge in an African swamp, manipulating the natives with magic tricks and living with man-hungry Lupe Velez and two Lupe Velez-hungry henchmen.

If you haven't seen West of Zanzibar or Kongo, I won't give away the plot's twists and turns here. I will say that drug addicted-Conrad Nagel and Virginia Bruce get caught in Huston's web and, like so many Tod Browning-related films, the ending is EC-like in its ironic justice.

All in all, Kongo is probably not as strong as the more tightly constructed West of Zanzibar. Where Kongo excels is in atmosphere; the sweaty and heated look of the film is downright claustrophobic.

Kongo has been released on Warner Archives DVD-R.

Are You Listening? (1932)

William Haines is a murderer on the run from a nationwide, radio-reported police manhunt!

This isn't your typical William Haines flick. In fact, it's the last film he made for MGM and the last feature film he made for a major studio. When he's carried away on a train at the end of the film, he's also, in effect, leaving Hollywood.

Are You Listening? plays like a mashup of MGM's first musical, The Broadway Melody (1929) and Haines' previous radio-centric film, Remote Control (1930). As in The Broadway Melody, half of the film tells the story of how young girls who come to New York
to make a living are used and abused. In the no-less-depressing other half of the film, Haines plays a radio writer married to horrendous shrew Karen Morley who plays evil like you've never seen her play it before. Meanwhile, Haines has fallen in love with one of the aforementioned women, the appealing Madge Evans (also Haines' love interest in Fast Life).

The first half of the movie is an uneasy mixture of light comedy (primarily poking fun at radio's primitive production methods) and drama. Are You Listening? gradually sheds all humor and becomes an outright melodrama, with an almost noir atmosphere unlike any other Haines movie. The technology with which Haines made his living becomes the technology that hunts him down and entraps him.

Those who love character actors will have a field day with Are You Listening?. Neil Hamilton, Wallace Ford, Hattie McDaniel,Jean Hersholt, John Miljan, Joan Marsh, Charley Grapewin and more appear.

Old Time Radio fans will be especially interested in Are You Listening?. I'd direct those just discovering Willam Haines to The Girl Said No, The Smart Set or Navy Blues.

Are You Listening? has been released on Warner Archives DVD-R.

Strange Interlude (1932)

I watched Strange Interlude so you don't have to.

Harsh words for a glossy, high-end 1932 MGM movie, perhaps, but the experimentation in Strange Interlude not only doesn't work, it makes for a downright unpleasant movie watching experience.

Strange Interlude is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Eugene O'Neill play that has the following conceit: the audience can hear selected thoughts of selected characters. This method was handled in various ways onstage, including the actors holding face masks. In the MGM movie, character's voices are heard on the soundtrack while the actors keep their mouths closed but go through facial acting gyrations as if they speaking. It doesn't work. Director Robert Z. Leonard seemed to have realized it doesn't work because the technique is used less often as the film progresses. And, does it progress: the movie's only 109 minutes long, but by the end it feels like three hours.

The story is long, convoluted and unbelievable. Norma Shearer plays Nina, pining for a lost, unrequited love who died in WWI. She has an odd relationship with her Sigmund Freud-like father, who exits the film quickly (I suspect his role was larger in the play version). She then ping pongs between Clark Gable as her doctor and lover, Alexander Kirkland as her long suffering husband and Ralph Morgan as a pathetic, lovelorn uncle type. The mechanics of the plot I'll leave to your imagination or, if you plan on watching the film, your discovery.

The original play's length was at least twice as long as the filmed version, a length which, I hope, allowed for more subtlety and complexity. When those essential elements are stripped away from Strange Interlude, what's left is sheer melodrama. Strange Interlude invokes madness and the prospect of more madness as an essential plot device. Given more space and attention, that device could have been more believable (as in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer). Here, it's just an absurdity piled on top of other absurdities.

Despite the fact that the film is pre-code, its reticence also harms it. The ad for the film claimed, "For the first time, you hear the hidden, unspoken thoughts of people!", but these thoughts are sanitized. In the play, Nina aborts the (perceived) mad child she had with her husband, but that act isn't mentioned here. The script for Strange Interlude was written by Bess Meredyth, who'd been writing movies since 1910. Meredyth worked on a lot of good movies, but MGM's Strange Interlude needed a more modern sensibility. (Groucho Marx had it, with writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, making fun of Strange Interlude in their stage show and movie, Animal Crackers).

The makeup was also no help. As the characters age, Shearer looks beautiful, but poor Clark Gable looks like he walked out of a coal mine; his makeup is completely unconvincing. The best I can say of the many fine actors involved is they did the best they could with the script they were given. Young Robert Young has an especially thankless role, playing one of the most clueless and dense sons in film history.

Strange Interlude is available on Warner Brothers Archive DVD-R.