[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here, and for Part Three, here.]
The Marx Brothers Go To Hollywood Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The third writer, Nat Perrin, was a law student who had bluffed his way into a writing job with the Brothers with a forged letter of introduction from playwright Moss Hart.
"You'll rue the day you ever took the assignment," producer Herman J. Mankiewicz told Perelman, warning him that the Brothers were notoriously difficult to work with. "This is an ordeal by fire. Make sure you wear asbestos pants."
The team kicked around a couple of ideas, one placing the Brothers on an ocean liner as stowaways, the with Groucho playing the president of a university. Both ideas allegedly came from Bert Granet, a lifelong pal of Groucho's, who went on to become a staff writer at RKO and later the producer of such television shows as The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone.
It was Groucho who suggested the team flesh out the stowaway idea.
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
"It stinks," said Groucho when Perelman was done.
For the second draft, Mankiewicz brought in writer Arthur J. Sheekman, who along with Perelman, wrote the bulk of the screenplay. The Brothers recent trip to England inspired several scenes, such as one based on a Punch-and-Judy show Harpo had seen in London—
—and another based on Groucho's own run-in with a customs agent in New York, which began when Groucho listed his occupation as "smuggler." (The subsequent investigation led to the discovery of unreported duty items, which in turn led to a stiff fine.)
The Brothers also resurrected the opening scenes from I'll Say She Is! where they pretend to be a famous stage personality, here Maurice Chevalier who had recently starred in two Ernst Lubitsch musicals, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Perelman later described the process as "five months of drudgery and Homeric quarrels, ambuscades, and intrigues that would have shamed the Borgias."
For his part, Groucho felt Perelman's work, on both Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, was too literary and despite his on-going friendship with the young writer, was quite critical of him, both privately and publicly. "The trouble is the barber in Peru [Indiana] won't get it." Years later, though, Groucho allowed that Perelman was "a great writer with a brilliant comic mind that didn't always mesh well with the lunacies of the Marx Brothers."
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
"Mrs. Briggs," he tells her, "I've known and respected your husband for years—and what's good enough for him is good enough for me!"
For the romantic lead, the studio finally got the rather obvious idea of cutting out the middle man and casting Zeppo. I can't say he's great as he chases the girl (Ruth Hall), but he's better than either Oscar Shaw or Hal Thompson who performed the same thankless chores in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, respectively.
The expanded role didn't stop Zeppo from leaving the set in mid-production to vacation in San Francisco.
Although this was Norman Z. McLeod's first directorial effort, he quickly learned to leave the camera rolling, finding that the Brothers' ad libs were often funnier than the scripted material.
Even for a Marx Brothers' movie, the story is tissue thin. Four stowaways wreak havoc on an ocean liner, meet a couple of gangsters, go to work for them and wind up thwarting a kidnapping plot.
"How do you know there are four of them?"
"They were singing 'Sweet Adeline.'"
The shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another, with each gag barely linked to the other. Not that this hurt the comedy any. By shedding the trappings of the Broadway musical, the Brothers' actions become even more deliciously transgressive, tormenting authority not for plot-driven reasons but simply because they can, an approach they built on to great effect in their next two movies, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.
In fact, the forty-five minutes the Brothers spend on the boat is some of the best work of their careers. But then they finally make it through customs and something unfortunate happens—the plot kicks in. The final two reels revolve around rival gangsters, a swanky dinner party and the aforementioned kidnapping, and presumably writers Perelman and Sheekman wanted to spoof the gangster movies that were then all the rage, but very little comedy arises from this set-up and ultimately the storyline feels grafted on.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
This pattern of decreasing box office revenue would be repeated with the Brothers' next two pictures.
Trivia: In the scene where the Brothers finally escape the near-sighted ship's officer and wave to him from the dock, the onlooker sitting on a crate in the background is none other than Sam "Frenchy" Marx, father of the Marx Brothers. He earned $12.50 for two days' work.
Picture:Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) Actor: Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) Actress: Norma Shearer (Private Lives) Director: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) Supporting Actor: Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel) Supporting Actress: Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) Screenplay: Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)
Special Awards:À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) (Best Picture-Comedy/Musical);Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) (Best Actress-Drama); The Music Box (Best Short Subject); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Best Actors-Comedy and Career Achievement); Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Special Achievement In the Use Of Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)
Must-See and Recommended:À Nous La Liberté; The Champ; Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde; Emma; Five Star Final; Frankenstein; Freaks; Grand Hotel; The Guardsman; I Was Born, But ...; Mädchen In Uniform; Marius; Monkey Business; The Music Box; One Hour With You; Private Lives; Scarface; Shanghai Express; Skyscraper Souls; The Smiling Lieutenant; Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas; Waterloo Bridge; What Price Hollywood?
As you can see from the list of winners and must-see movies, the year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 was a great one for horror films. Frankenstein, Freaks and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all hit the big screen during the year (albeit, Freaks only briefly—it was withdrawn from circulation just days after its premiere and didn't surface again until the 1960s). Throw in Dracula, another 1931 horror film released in the previous awards cycle, and you can see that what we think of as the horror genre was pretty much defined during this time period.
Of the four of them, Frankenstein is the most indispensable. As I wrote recently, not only was it the top grossing film of the year, "it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about" and more than any other film released during 1931 or 1932, be it horror or otherwise, Frankenstein "is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well."
You don't want to miss Freaks, though, which while a cult movie that for years was more spoken of than seen, is perhaps the most modern of all the movies that was released during the year. Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks." Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.
Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin—or anyway, it got under mine.
On a wholly different note, the year also gave us some fine comedies, including René Clair's À Nous La Liberté (the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award); Ernst Lubitsch's naughty pre-Code musical, The Smiling Lieutenant; a good Norma Shearer movie, Private Lives; and Laurel and Hardy in the Oscar-winning short, The Music Box.
As was usually the case during the early sound era, the best comedy of the year starred the Marx Brothers. The story of four stowaways who wreak havoc during an ocean voyage, Monkey Business represents the Brothers at their most transgressive—if you can use a word like "transgressive" when referring to a man wearing a grease-paint moustache. Instead of playing a hotel owner, college president, petty dictator or some other reputable scion of society, Groucho is an out-and-out bum who happily hires himself out as a gunman for a mobster, and his brothers are even worse, stealing, chasing women and making everyone around them miserable simply because they can.
In other words, it's great stuff.
The plot of Monkey Business is mercifully slight, and the shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another. But that's true of every Marx Brothers movie—the good ones anyway—and the audience only suffers when the focus turns to irrelevant matters, such as story and motivation. In fact, given that the appeal of the Marx Brothers is the subversive anarchy of their caustic wit and arbitrary actions, plot and motivation only undercut what they're trying to do. Of all their movies, Monkey Business came the closest to their vaudeville roots (the wonderful Maurice Chevalier bit, for example, was a variation on a routine that the Brothers had performed years before) and was the first to shed the trappings of the Broadway musical, freeing them for even greater efforts—Horse Feathers and Duck Soup—in the eighteen months that followed.
And then there are a couple of movies, Shanghai Express and Waterloo Bridge, that critics, Academy voters and fans of the Saturday night fun-stupid movie might dismiss as "women's pictures," "three-hanky weepers" or "chick flicks," but which we here at the Monkey refer to as stylish, well-acted romances that get right to the heart of the only thing that's really important in this crazy, mixed-up world—love. Marlene Dietrich never looked better in the former, and in the latter, Mae Clarke gave the best performance of her criminally-overlooked career. I highly recommend both and I wouldn't say that lightly.
Among the movies I've listed as must-see, three are must must-see movies—Frankenstein, Scarface and Grand Hotel. Frankenstein, I've just mentioned. Of the other two, Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks (more about him in the coming years), was the best gangster movie of the decade, which is saying something considering James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart all made their mark in the genre during the 1930s. I consider it indispensable, though, not just because it's a great movie, but because it influenced so much that came after it.
Similarly, Grand Hotel may be a bit dated by modern standards but it boasted the first all-star cast and without it, there may well have been no Dinner At Eight, no Stagecoach, no Airport, or any of the other big cast potboilers, good and bad, that have imitated Grand Hotel over the years. As with Scarface and Frankenstein, I consider Grand Hotel indispensable not just because I think it's good, but because so much of what we think of as the Hollywood movie flows from it.
Besides, it gives you a chance to see Joan Crawford at her loveliest and, dare I say it, sweetest before her face hardened into that kabuki mask of unbridled ambition and paranoid rage we so often associate her with.
Coming up next are my nominations for the movie year 1932-33. Because the Academy was preparing to abandon the crazy split-year format it followed for the first six years of the Oscars, the next award season covered seventeen months rather than the usual twelve, with everything released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933 being eligible.
And what a great year it was, too. Not only did such classic movies as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise and Dinner at Eight premiere during these seventeen months, but Katharine Hepburn broke into pictures (and won her first Oscar), Busby Berkeley revived and redefined the movie musical, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time. It was a big year for movies, ranking with 1939 as one of the greatest "years" in film history.
Too big, in fact, for the standard Oscar format I've been following to cover it all. But that's a subject for my next post.
Any one of the Mythical nominees for best picture of the awards year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 would be a good one—Grand Hotel was the first movie to boast an all-star cast, Freaks is a genuinely disturbing horror flick that holds up even by the standards of today, and Scarface, directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, is the best gangster movie of an era characterized by great gangster movies.
But only one film can boast both of being the top grossing film of the year, a sensation that spawned countless sequels, spoofs and remakes, and of being so influential that it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about—the only movie of 1931-32 that can make that claim.
That it's also a great movie makes Frankenstein my choice for best picture of the year.
I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than all the year's other nominees for best picture combined, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.
What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?
The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.
But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."
The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)
The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.
James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.
In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.
Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.
Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.
But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.
We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)
The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.
"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."
It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.
After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.
Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.
Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.
"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."
And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis, whether we're a starving refuge in the war-torn Sudan or simply a befuddled suburbanite wondering why Kate Gosselin is on television and we're not.
I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.
So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.
But I digress.
Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture. So I say let's give Katie Awards to the key figures behind the production of this classic movie: Charles D. Hall for interior decoration, what is now known as art direction-set decoration, and Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electronic gear in the laboratory out of odds and ends he collected from radios, airplane motors and industrial machinery; Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells for their iconic makeup job; and to C. Roy Hunter for sound.
And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.
In the end, I chose Frankenstein as best picture from among the dozen or so must-see movies released between August 1, 1931, and July 31, 1932, because more than the others, it is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.
Normally somewhere around here I'd pass along my pick for the year's best musical performance in a movie—not necessarily an original song or even the best song, but the most effective use of a song.
Well, the fact is by 1932, the Hollywood musical was dead and except for Ernst Lubitsch's operetta One Hour With You, songs were pretty much limited to shorts and cartoons, foreign films such as À Nous La Liberté and that's about it. In the early days of sound, the less creative minds hanging around Hollywood's studios—which is to say, most of the producers, directors, writers, and practically all of the guys who signed the checks—had no real idea what to do with the new sound technology so they just kept recycling The Jazz Singer, which is to say, a song here and a song there, even in movies where songs had no business being.
As it turned out, audiences weren't nearly as stupid as Holly- wood thought they were and by 1930, they were sick of it, so much so that studios started cutting songs out of movies, even from movies like, oh, musicals that were supposed to have songs. Jonas Nordin over at the blog "All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!" has written in detail about this anti-musical backlash and has included some pretty interesting clips to back up the discussion. (I suggest you drop in there and take a look.)
Which is to say, choices for best musical interlude of 1931-32 are few and far between.
Fortunately, there was one musical performance that stands out from the year, at least in my mind, even if the guy singing the song, Maurice Chevalier, isn't even in the movie. Given some of my readers' aversion to Chevalier (words like "frightening" and "demented" have been bandied about), perhaps this is a good thing.
Anyway, without further ado, here's "You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me" from the Marx Brothers comedy Monkey Business, words and music by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman, sung by Zeppo, Chico, Groucho and Maurice Chevalier.
The title role in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde is an actor's dream: a dual role playing both a prig and a monster with a dramatic physical and psychic transformation from one to the other requiring the actor to hit a wide range of emotional notes. But the part also presents the actor with a dilemma, too. Ground the performance too firmly in Method realism and the action implodes; play it too broadly, and the horror becomes campy comedy.
John Barrymore, who was without doubt the greatest ham in movie history (sometimes brilliantly so), chewed so much scenery in the 1920 silent version of the story, the performance became the gold standard for over-acting—watch Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s imitation in Our Modern Maidens sometime if you don't believe me.
On the other hand, Spencer Tracy, the most empathetic actor ever to grace the screen, never really convinces us in the 1941 version he's either the priggish Jekyll or the brutal Hyde precisely because he can't convince us he's oblivious to the feelings of his fellow beings. (He probably wasn't helped much by a Production Code-era screenplay that dialed down both the violence and the sex.) It's one of the few performances of his great career that doesn't work for me.
It took Fredric March in the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde to thread the needle between the two extremes and give the definitive performance in the role. The Academy recognized it as the best performance of the year and for once, I agree.
These days we like to pretend we've advanced well beyond notions of moral rectitude, repressed desire and a secret id run wild. As the A.V. Club put it just last month in writing about Stevenson's novel, "Today’s worst impulses run cheek-and-jowl with the best mankind has to offer, and the idea that some saintly seeming public figure might like to drink and whore around in private isn't so much unsurprising as it is a job requirement."
Oh, yeah? Let me just say two words: Tiger Woods.
If the apparently genuine public shock and, in any event, the nonstop tabloid Sturm und Drang over Woods's professed infidelities tell us anything, they tell us we haven't come anywhere close to getting a grip on the notion that a public figure can have a dark side. And as long as fans expect their heroes to be saints, as long as parents expect their children to be perfect, heck, as long as spouses expect their mates to stop banging cocktail waitresses, the story of a man who tries to repress his dark side only to see it destroy him is always going to be relevant.
Thomas Boswell wrote recently in the Washington Post that everyone has a public face and a private face and that "Our interior life, our soul, our truest sense of ourselves, whatever you call it, is too difficult and changing a thing to summarize easily or share widely.
"But," he went on to say, "when the gap between the public face and the private self becomes a vast gulf, people go into crisis. The split inside you becomes intolerable. You feel that are 'living a life of a lie.' You becomes reckless, partly out of self-hatred ..., but also because you want to put the warring sides of yourself back together, even if the cost is huge."
Jekyll suffers from the same intolerable split—"It's the things one can't do that always tempt me," he confesses—but unlike the rest of us, he doesn't want to put the warring sides back together; he wants a permanent split, and not just psychically but physically as well. He works feverishly to perfect a potion that will accomplish this dream, reasoning that once freed of the constraints of conscience and societal norms, the private self will fulfill its dark desires and trouble him no longer.
It's a nutty notion since as we all know (or ought to) once the baser self is allowed to run free, it wants only one thing: to quote Johnny Rocco, "More." Jekyll discovers this truth the hard way and pays the ultimate price for his knowledge.
Director Rouben Mamoulian introduces Jekyll with a tracking shot from Jekyll's viewpoint, starting in Jekyll's laboratory, following his butler through his manor house, and ending with him gazing at himself in a mirror, preening prior to an important speech before his colleagues in the medical profession. Coming from most directors, this point-of-view tracking shot would be a mere film school stunt, but here, it's an inventive way to introduce the main theme of the movie, the two faces of a man, the one people see (i.e., the face in the mirror) and the one we hide away, in Jekyll's case, even from himself.
Tellingly, director Mamoulian has Jekyll return to the mirror when he first drinks the potion and we see his transformation into Hyde in reflection—the handsome public face becoming the hideous private one. (As a side note, listen for Mamoulian's imaginative use of sound in this sequence, typically cutting-edge. The heartbeat on the soundtrack, by the way, is his own, recorded after running up and down a flight of stairs.)
A key to the movie's success is, of course, how well it shows the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde. The special effects work of Wally Westmore is very good, astounding really considering the movie will be eighty years old next year. Westmore created Jekyll's transformation to Hyde using layers of makeup, each a different color, each revealed with a different filtered camera lens, so that without clumsy cut-aways or overlapping dissolves, Jekyll's face changes before your eyes.
Well, and then they put in some big teeth and a Neanderthal's nose. But it's impressive work.
Still, if clever effects, no matter how good, are all a movie has to offer, within a few years of its release, you wind up with something akin to, say, Tron, a special effects extravaganza from 1982 that made lots of money, inspired an arcade game, and is now remembered, if at all, as an insufferably stupid movie with dated special effects. Something to keep in mind as you champion this year's special effects wonder, Avatar.
That Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde continues to speak to an audience nearly eighty years on is a testament to the screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath which takes the original Stevenson tale and adds depth and action; to Miriam Hopkins terrific supporting performance; to Mamoulian's inventive direction—the only horror movie he ever directed, and one he was justly proud of—and above all, to the skill with which March convinces us he is both the pompous, repressed Jekyll and the gleefully brutal Hyde.
"One aspect that amazes me about March's performance," Bill Cooke said as part of a roundtable discussion at Video Watchdog, "is that I don't at any point feel it's the same actor playing both roles. That certainly can't be said of every other version I've seen featuring one actor in the part."
And at the same discussion, Richard Harlan Smith argued, "March remains unmatched as the definitive Victorian throwback. His performance ("I'll show you what horror means!") still unnerves, almost 80 years later."
I agree with both assessments.
It was director Mamoulian who insisted on casting March. The studio was pushing Irving Pichel, who had earlier that year played the key role of district attorney Orville Mason in An American Tragedy, and who had a wonderful voice—he later narrated She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (he also became a director)—but who didn't fit Mamoulian's conception of the role.
"[M]y concept all along for the character of Hyde," Mamoulian later said, "was that of a Neanderthal man, not a monster, because it is the animal side of human nature that attracted me to the piece. At the time I was offered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I had seen Freddie March in some comedy, and I knew he would be perfect. Now I had never met this actor before in my life, but I took a risk and told Paramount that I would not make the film without Fredric March. And he gave an inspired and dazzling performance!"
If you know where to look, you'll discover that March gave a number of great performances throughout a career that stretched across fifty years, from the silent era to the Seventies. He was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, for Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, of course, and for the classic film about the difficulties of coming home from war, The Best Years Of Our Lives. He played comedy and drama equally well, for example, starring with Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitsch's ode to the menage-a-trois, Design For Living, and with Carole Lombard in the screwball classic Nothing Sacred; but also in 1937's super-soaper A Star Is Born (later remade with James Mason and Judy Garland) and the Rod Serling-scripted political thriller, Seven Days In May.
In 1960, March and fellow Jekyll, Spencer Tracy, squared off in a fiction- alized account of the Scopes' Monkey Trial, Inherit The Wind. That movie proved to be a showcase for the two actors contrasting styles, with the naturalistic Tracy and the more formal March playing off each other to great effect. If the Academy Awards are any judge, Tracy won that battle, garnering an Academy Award nomination for best actor. But when it came to the dual roles of Jekyll and Hyde, March was the hands-down winner.
Choosing the best actress of 1931-32 was a bit problematic—the two best performances by an actress during this award season, Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel) were both supporting ones, Hopkins's obviously so, Crawford's not so clearly, since she and her co-stars all received star billing, but Grand Hotel was an ensemble piece, the first in Hollywood history, and to my mind at least, none of its stars were on screen long enough to receive a nomination in the lead category. The Oscars didn't have a supporting category back in those days so it's difficult to say which if any of the film's stars the Academy might have nominated in a supporting category; but none were nominated as lead performers and I'll follow suit here. (The Academy would be faced with an identical dilemma the following year with the star-studded ensemble piece Dinner At Eight and arrived at an identical solution—none of those wonderful performances were nominated then either.)
Which is not to say there were no good choices for the award. The Academy nominated three fine actresses—the ever-popular Marie Dressler (Emma) who had won an Oscar the year before for Min and Bill (and who won a Katie award for her supporting performance in Anna Christie); stage legend Lynn Fontanne (The Guardsman) in the only film appearance of her career; and eventual winner Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet), another stage legend making her feature-film debut. (Hayes would win a second Oscar in 1970 for Airport.)
And then there were unnominated performances such as Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, Joan Blondell in Blonde Crazy and Dorothea Wieck in Mädchen In Uniform. The Academy similarly ignored all four of my nominees—Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge), Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express), Norma Shearer (Private Lives) and Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman).
I'm guessing that Marlene Dietrich would be the popular choice. The first phase of her career was in full swing, she was working with a great director, and Shanghai Express is one of the tastiest collaborations. But I gave Dietrich the award just last year for her Hollywood debut, Morocco, and I can't see giving her back-to-back awards, especially when Shanghai co-star Anna May Wong completely out-cools her and steals every scene they're in together. (Still, it's a must-see performance in a must-see movie. Go watch it. Now. I'll wait.)
As for Stanwyck, she was one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood history, and she has not one but two best actress awards in her future—I'm thinking The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire in 1941 and Double Indemnity in 1944. But while The Miracle Woman, a biting look at the sordid intersection of religion and money, is one of her most interesting pre-Code films, Stanwyck's best work is still ten years in front of us. She'll have to wait a little longer.
Which leaves Mae Clarke and Norma Shearer.
If you only remember Clarke as the good- looking blonde who got James Cagney's grapefruit in the kisser, you really should take time to explore her work during this period. No actress in 1931 appeared in more must-see movies than Mae Clarke. In addition to her memorable supporting role in The Public Enemy, she also played Molly Malloy, a hooker with a heart of gold who befriends a death row inmate in the comedy The Front Page; a mad scientist's much put-upon fiancee in Frankenstein; and in one of the few lead roles of her career, American chorus girl-turned-prostitute Myra Deauville in the first and best version of the tragic romance Waterloo Bridge. Myra meets a naive soldier boy on the bridge where she plies her trade and this being wartime, he falls in love quickly and asks her to marry him. Based on a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert E. Sherwood, there is no villain in this piece other than cold, hard reality. It's the sort of movie that critics of the day dismissed as a "woman's picture"—and dismiss now as a "chick flick"—and if you're tempted to do the same and give this one a miss because it features tears and romance, I urge you not to. In fact, if I thought doing so would convince you to expand your film-watching repertoire enough to include Waterloo Bridge, I would hand Clarke the award as best actress of 1931-32. And maybe she'd deserve it.
But there was another actress from 1931 who I think deserves your attention, certainly if you want a well-rounded sense of the era; and just coincidentally, her wickedly comic portrayal of a recently remarried divorcee who would rather fight with her ex-husband than honeymoon with her new one is my favorite performance of the year.
Much celebrated in her day, Norma Shearer's name is now met by many largely with derision, including I confess by me. Choosing her as the best actress of this or any other year will no doubt get me drummed out of the very exclusive alternate Oscar club—a year ago, in fact, I would have voluntarily resigned my membership before I would have chosen Norma Shearer for an award. But only a schmuck won't admit when he's wrong and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work (and a few silents, too). As it happens, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some fine performances playing against type, including a terrific one here in the film adaptation of Noel Coward's comedy, Private Lives. It's the best of her career—sharp, witty, and here at least, appropriately theatrical. In an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, Dan Callahan called it "Shearer's finest, most well-rounded performance, and it's the only film that you can show to the uninitiated without fear of the dreaded Shearer-isms."
If she'd made more movies like this one, you could safely admit to liking her without fear of making a fool of yourself in mixed company.
"She was hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire," said the ever-classy Mickey Rooney years later, and for those who find that assertion at odds with their preconceived notions of Shearer, well, it's time to dip into her pre-Code work.
Private Lives is what I'd call a divorce comedy, of which there were several in Hollywood's golden age, most of them starring Cary Grant for some reason—perhaps because he was so unbelievably good in them—comedies such as The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story. The formula required discord, divorce (or its threat), laughs arising from screwball attempts to undermine a new relationship and salvage the old one, and by the movie's end, of course, a tender reconciliation.
In Private Lives—a faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay—the twist is that two recently remarried divorcees, Robert Montgomery's Elyot and Shearer's Amanda, find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. While most divorce comedies lean to varying degrees on the screwball comedy, Private Lives leans heavily on the discord. The two ex-spouses are less interested in tenderness than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks, and when that's not enough, they turn to actual biting, along with fisticuffs and furniture throwing. (Indeed, while filming one particularly physical encounter, Shearer accidently knocked her co-star unconscious.)
"I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives," Amanda observes in one of her few introspective moments. "It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do. That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle."
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of mutual spousal abuse but for the fact that the two participants so thoroughly enjoy themselves. Elyot and Amanda are natural-born performers—drama queens, we'd call them now—and after a season apart, they realize each is the other's best audience. They can't live together, but to live apart means they'd have climb off their private little stages and start living with themselves, or more to the point, with their brand new spouses who, they quickly discover, bore them to tears.
"There isn't a part of you that I don't know, remember, and want," Elyot confesses to Amanda even while calling her a "slattern" and threatening to beat her like a gong.
In order to help both Shearer and Montgomery prepare for their parts, the studio filmed a stage performance featuring Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward himself in the leads. The result was what Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called "a swift and witty picture ... one of the most intelligent comedies that has come to the screen." Coward was so pleased with the result, he immediately sold more of his plays to Hollywood.
So why don't we have a similarly positive reaction to the name Norma Shearer?
Well, for one thing, if it's true that the history of war is written by the winners, then it's equally true that the history of Hollywood is written by the ones with the biggest mouths, and a great deal of what we think we know about Norma Shearer is a product of one of the biggest, Joan Crawford's. "What chance do I have now?" she quipped when Shearer won an Oscar in 1930. "Norma sleeps with the boss."
But while it was true Irving Thalberg, as MGM's producer boy wonder could procure almost any role for his wife, if anything, Shearer's career and reputation suffered for her husband's interference. As Walter Clemons once wrote for EW.com, "Thalberg was fatally afflicted with gentility. He cast his wife in movies with literary pretensions—O'Neill's Strange Interlude, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and as a mature Juliet in a suffocatingly tasteful rendition of Shakespeare. Norma gets a bad rap for these turkeys, but the reverence in which Thalberg's contemporaries held him is an unexamined delusion."
And maybe, too, Shearer craved the respect that roles such as Juliet promised. If only she'd always maintained the same cavalier attitude toward the so-called "legitimate" theater she evinced in answer to Noel Coward's early reservations about her ability to play Amanda. "I don't care what he thinks—he thinks in theater terms—I think in film terms. It doesn't seem to occur to Mr. Coward that we both may turn out to be right!" I suspect, though, that the forced smile she always seemed to wear masked a crippling insecurity, and in retrospect it's a wonder she was able to act at all. After her father squandered a fortune in her youth, leaving the family in poverty, Shearer's mother left him, taking Norma and the other children to New York. Shearer coped by retreating into a carefully-constructed fantasy world, and to a degree, she lived in that world for the rest of her life. That bipolar disorder ran in her family as well with Shearer herself suffering from depression, makes her subsequent climb to stardom all the more remarkable.
Her acting career was a sheer act of will.
"How did you ever become a star?" asked an incredulous Robert Morley on the set of Marie Antoinette.
"Because I wanted to!" she laughed.
Unfortunately, as Gary Morris points out (again in Bright Lights Film Journal), "While this description seems to point to Shearer as a sympathetic, even tragic character, she rarely moves far enough inside her characterizations to create a genuine sense of pathos. She seems to work too hard for her effects, almost desperately concerned with image and the mechanical aspects of performance, with measuring up to 'legitimate theatre' standards with their attendant excessive mannerisms."
He may be right. But at the same time, I am reminded of some- thing Norman Mailer wrote about Ernest Hemingway, not long after the latter's suicide. "It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself."
The question is not why Norma Shearer made so many bad movies, but how she managed to make so many good ones.
Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
Even for a Marx Brothers' movie, the story is tissue thin. Four stowaways wreak havoc on an ocean liner, meet a couple of gangsters, go to work for them and wind up thwarting a kidnapping plot.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
