SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU

The most reductive version of the Entire History of American Horror Filmmaking is that it all began as Hollywood's narrative and stylistic response to German Expressionism, which was, with the odd exception here or there, the only place you could go between about 1910 and 1930 to find anything paranormal in the movies. And this response came in a very direct way, for the most part: several of the leading lights of the Expressionist movement were imported, with the most important for our present purposes being Karl Freund, a top-shelf German cinematographer brought to Universal by Carl Laemmle (himself a German immigrant, though from decades earlier), where his second feature was the genre-defining Dracula. Rumor has held (though with what proof, it's tough to say) that Freund even largely took over directorial duties on that film from the perpetually drunk Tod Browning, which means, in theory, and if we want to stretch a point way too far, that Freund was the individual most responsible for show America what horror cinema should look like.

Even backing away from the most strident claims of German authorship of American genre films, it's certainly the case that Universal intentionally took its cues from Expressionism, while the other studios took their cues from Universal. It was probably inevitable that there'd be a Hollywood remake of a German classic, then - indeed, it's more surprising that the first generation of American sound horror only produced one such remake (ignoring that Nosferatu and Dracula derive from the same novel; the latter film is anyways more indebted to Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston's stage adaptation than to Bram Stoker). Admittedly, the 1935 production Mad Love only sees fit to credit itself as an adaptation of Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les mains d'Orlac, but the more direct influence was surely the 1924 German film The Hands of Orlac, with Robert Wiene directing Conrad Veidt in the title role, the same team-up behind the quintessential Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Not only was Mad Love inspired by a German movie, the two individuals most prominently responsible for its success were recent transplants from the German film industry. One was none other than Karl Freund, directing a feature for the eighth and last time, three years after officially debuting with The Mummy. The other was star Peter Lorre, a Jewish native of Austria-Hungary who'd become a fixture in the German film industry following Fritz Lang's iconic M. Germany in the 1930s being a chilly place for Jews, he quickly fled to France, then Great Britain, where he made his English-language debut as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. Mad Love was his next film, the first step in a Hollywood career that would take a long time to find its footing, and never quite steadied itself. This cannot be blamed on his talents: despite the obvious labor it took him to recite his lines in English, his insane surgeon in Mad Love is a stellar piece of physical acting and uncanny screen presence, and reviews at the time were enthusiastic bordering on rapturous.

In Mad Love, Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a genius surgeon living in Paris, who has formed a pronounced erotic fixation on Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), the star of a Grand Guignol-style horror theater. He's attended every one of her performances, and finally presents himself to her on the night of her last performance, where he's horrified to learn that she's retiring to spend more time with her husband, the up-and-coming genius pianist and composer from England, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive, in the role Veidt played in the German film). In a fit of demented despair, Gogol purchases a wax replica of Yvonne that has served as an advertisement for her act, which he stages in his home as his very own Galatea (a comparison Gogol makes some dozen or so times, drifting from a smart reference to an irritating distrust on the part of the writers as the film goes on). Fate doesn't have much better in store for the Orlacs; on his way to Paris, Stephen's train derails, and he barely survives, with his hands badly mangled in the process. To save his life, they must be amputated, which will end his career at its most promising moment, but Yvonne swallows her pride and begs Gogol to see if he can possibly help rescue Stephen's precious hands. He can't, but he can do something almost as good: that same day, he attended the execution of an American murderer, Rollo (Edward Brophy - his affable whimsy at the prospect of dying, especially his delight in hearing that the Hoover Dam was completed, is one of the most off-kilter and memorable elements of the whole movie), and the dead man's perfect hands - he was a circus knife thrower in life - are the perfect candidate for a limb transplant. The mad doctor tells no-one of this particular development, but when Stephen finds himself, after weeks of costly therapy, able to fling sharp objects with deadly precision, while coming no closer to being able to play the piano at his former level, he starts to wonder whether the miracle of his rescued hands has an unimagined dark side. Gogol, for his part, is delighted to have a lever to nudge Stephen into a madness all his own, and hopefully freeing up Yvonne for himself.

Mad Love has all the necessary components to be one of the great horror films of a generation, though I can't convince myself it quite gets there. A major reason for this is simply because the broadly similar story told in The Hands of Orlac (where the surgeon is a far less important character, while Orlac himself is the protagonist) is handled better there. The reconstructed version of the 1924 film runs something like 40 minutes longer than the neat and tidy American picture, at 68 minutes, and that time gives it more room to linger on Orlac's descent into mental chaos as he grows convinced that his hands have been possessed by the spirit of a murderer. Mad Love has an impeccable opening two-thirds, at which point it realises that has a hell of a lot of plot to resolve, and starts sprinting. And where the original pivots from paranormal thriller to psychological study in a way that's largely elegant and convincing, the remake delays the revelation that this is, in fact, all in Orlac's head to a moment where it rather undercuts what has gone before it.

Those are, however, mostly quibbles, and without directly comparing Mad Love to The Hands of Orlac, its shortcomings are almost invisible compared to what it does well. Sure, there are elements that don't work much at all: May Beatty, as Gogol's soused housekeeper, is on the bottom rung of dreadful comic relief characters in '30s horror, while the plucky American reporter Reagan (Ted Healy) is better mostly because he has such a low bar to clear. And Clive is a wet sponge: nothing in his brief film career is close to the level of his great insane genius in Frankenstein and its sequel, and there are worse performances on his CV than Stephen Orlac, but there's still very little depth or tension in his acting. Not many actors could have favorably compared to Veidt, of course, and Mad Love de-emphasises the character to a point that the role is neither as challenging nor as vital; still, a bit more real self-doubting terror would have been nice, and it's hard to believe that Stephen is really all that horrified by the possibility that his body is betraying his mind.

This is, for the most part, utterly terrific filmmaking, though. Lorre is so incredible as Gogol that he forgives all the other human-sized sins the film could possibly come up with. The makeup artists doubled down on the actor's already weirdly doughy baby features by shaving every bit of hair from his face and head; adding that to his great skill at bugging out his features and winding his voice up to a piercing squeak, and Lorre's Gogol turns out to be an utterly captivating and endlessly creepy figure, lumpy command of English and all, and far more difficult to get a grasp on than the usual mad scientist; he is, clearly, a gifted and passionate surgeon, which makes his descent into psychotic behavior even more disturbing.

And Lorre isn't the only great visual on hand: Freund's direction happily emphasises imagery, and he had the good fortune of an utter genius as one-half of his cinematography team: Gregg Toland shot the film alongside Chester Lyons, and it's possible to see all of the bold, geometric shadows in this film that would later become Toland's signature in things like The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane. And this hard lighting makes Cedric Gibbons's big, menacing sets seem all the more imposing and Gothic.

The number of striking shots in this film is most impressive, for an unabashed B-picture: a guillotine bleakly standing against the clouds, a little mirror reflecting the wax statue in a tiny frame as Gogol dreamily plays the organ to his Galatea. In one scene, Stephen receives a visitor who claims to know the full extent of Gogol's experiments, and the revelation of that visitor's appearance is, in all honesty, maybe the scariest individual image in '30s cinema, though the thready laugh accompanying that image helps a lot. There are two montages that fill entirely different ends - one is a nightmare representing Stephen's memory of the crash, one is a time-lapse showing the Orlacs' bills piling up - but in both cases the mountain of Expressionistic imagery sliced together by editor Hugh Wynn with crazy speed and excellent relationships between frames results in terrifically purposeful style as an evocation of psychology.

That's the secret magic of Mad Love, in fact: it's both a hugely successful example of '30s horror style at its most unhinged and portentously Germanic, and also a nasty, insightful chunk of pulpy psychological study. Gogol is a clear-cut Mad Genius of the most generic sort, but he's also uncomfortably and always recognisably human beneath the madness: the sexual frustration and obsessiveness that drive him are monstrously unpleasant, but they're not unrecognisable as perversions of the way actual people feel. As a result, he's more threatening and more sympathetic simultaneously, and the movie containing him hits harder than the usual mid-'30s horror show. The film was produced, unexpectedly, at MGM - which explains Gibbons, but not really anything else about it - but it's a proud exemplar of the Universal horror mentality at its most effective, right at the moment that the horror fad was just about to start burning itself out. Indeed, Mad Love was itself a box office bomb, a most unfair fate for what should otherwise have become a iconic piece of American horror.

Body Count: 3, plus the undoubtedly large number of victims of the train crash, plus at least two flies fed ominously to a pitcher plant.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'D LIKE TO MEET HIS TAILOR

Watching 1935's Werewolf of London 80 years later is taking a peek into a history that never was. The first feature-length werewolf movie in English (and probably the first in all of sound cinema, though it does well to be a bit cagey with absolute pronouncements on the history of genre films) was one of Universal's more distinct misses during its 1930s heyday, and killed the first attempt at werewolves as a sustained movie monster in its crib. Six years later, the studio would start from scratch with The Wolf Man, doing a great deal in the process to solidify what we now think of as werewolf lore, and most subsequent movies about werewolves have started with some variation of that movie as their foundation. As such, Werewolf of London can't help but look like an evolutionary dead end. It's entirely different from both narrative and mythological standpoints, and the only one of its conceits to have meaningfully survived is makeup artist Jack Pierce's creature design. Though his first werewolf was far less complex and impressive than his second, it was in Werewolf of London that he hit upon the largely original idea of the werewolf as a human hybrid who more closely resembles a giant bipedal Pekingese than anything an objective third party might identify as lupine (classical folklore till that point almost entirely conceived of werewolves as all-humans turning into all-wolves). Elements of its story hung around the cultural subconscious - the 1994 Jack Nicholson vehicle Wolf resembles Werewolf of London much more than any of the better-known werewolf pictures in the intervening 59 years - but watching it now, the film is most noteworthy for how little it resembles any of the films descended from it.

In Tibet - do you see what I mean? Tibet. What werewolf movie starts in fucking Tibet? Do they even have werewolf lore in Tibet? Do they have any kind of wolves in Tibet? But in Tibet we are, alongside the brusque and peremptory Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull), an English botanist hunting for the legendary mariphasa lumina lupina (dog Latin for "man-changing wolf light") a plant that blooms in the moonlight. And he finds it, too, though only after being attacked by a large hairy animal we barely catch a glimpse of, only being able to make out that it has rather more of a human shape than one would expect of a wild creature. Literally bloody but unbowed, Glendon still has his eyes on the precious mariphasa, which he takes back with him to England in the space of a cut.

And back in England, we get a much better sense of Glendon's interest and personality than we had before, and the short version is "arrogant dick". He's so obsessed with his discovery that he can barely feign niceness to his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson) or pretend to be happy about the party being held in his house, for which he is either the guest of honor or the host, it's a little fuzzy. What matters is that one of the guests at that party, apparently uninvited, is a Japanese botanist, Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, a genuinely gifted actor whose talents are tough to appreciate in later days, given that almost his entire career was spent in yellowface), who confusingly claims to have met Glendon back in Tibet (hint, hint), and who quite unprompted goes on a little lecture about "lycanthrophobia", as the script laboriously terms it, and explains that the mariphasa is in fact an herbal retardant that staves off the transformation of a werewolf during the three days of the full moon. And would Glendon believe it, but Yogami happens to know of two men with the werewolf curse in London right that very minute (hint, hint).

Glendon first discovers the truth of Yogami's prattling when his synthetic full moon lamp, part of his experiment to force the mariphasa to bloom, turns his hand into a hairy, clawed monstrosity. And while he's able to use the single flower on the plant to return himself to normal, there are not other flowers at the ready, and the full moon is right around the corner. Thus begins the part of the film that actually resembles the subsequent development of the werewolf genre: Glendon's panicked attempt to cure himself or at least keep himself safely locked up, after he murders a woman the first night.

The single element of Werewolf of London that most likely killed it in 1935 happens to be the most interesting part of it now: Glendon is an unpleasant man, and Hull's performance makes it more so. The actor despised the role and the film, and his performance showcases that, but somehow it ends up working to the movie's overall benefit. The character is snappish and unsympathetic, but he also pops off the screen far more than most horror heroes of the '30s, and after so many years of sad, mopey sorts being terrified of themselves as they transform into beasts, it's bracing to encounter a character so direct and intelligent about dealing with this hideous curse. Particularly since wolf-Glendon is apparently more conscious and intelligent than the usual blunt force of animalistic nature. The very first thing he does is to go to find Lisa at a party hosted by her blustering Aunt Ettie (Spring Byington at her most enervating, and I say that as someone who's usually tickled to see Byington's name pop up in the credits), which she's attending in the company of her old flame Paul Ames (Lester Matthews). The film makes a point of clarifying that werewolves instinctively desire to destroy what they love most in human life, but there's enough meanness to Hull's Glendon that there's a little tension underlying his savagery, like he's almost eager, Hyde-style, to go do the wickedness that he can't as a moral man. And that, in turn, deepens his character arc throughout the slender but impressively dense 75-minute feature: the film tracks Glendon's commitment to besting his smug, nasty self, not just taming the animal within. Lon Chaney, Jr's Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man is the best part he ever played, but there just aren't as many layers there, even if he's infinitely more readily likable and pitiable than the prickly Glendon.

That makes for quite a lot to find fascinating in Werewolf of London, though not, perhaps, as much to love. And it is, in fairness, a bit difficult to respond to as a genre film, by '35 standards or our own. Individual moments work beautifully: the moment when Glendon's cat unexpectedly turns on him and leads him to the knowledge that something inside of him is broken, or one of those newspaper headline montages that turns into a bleak projection of what Glendon thinks might happen in the future, or above all, the film's utterly terrific transformation scene, with Glendon looking a bit shaggier every time he walks past one in a series of tall pillars, none of this "freeze frame and dissolve" nonsense. It's quite honestly the best werewolf transformation scene I can name prior to the watershed year of 1981, when The Howling and An American Werewolf in London both showed up.

In between those singularly great moments, though, the film's something of a drag: the exposition, however necessary to a 1935 audience with limited context for werewolves, is dumped in artlessly, and Oland can't ever find a path to make it feel sensible within a character who's already compromised by how transparently he's there for the eminently predictable twist ending. The whole matter of Lisa and Paul Ames's gentle flirtation is out-of-placed, stuffed in just to add a romantic lead, since Hull clearly can't be one. And the film is wretched with comic relief, above and beyond the standards of '30s horror - there's some business with two drunk old ladies that only takes up maybe five minutes, tops, but also manages to never, ever end.

If I had to sum it all up, it would be by saying that director Stuart Walker is no James Whale, and cinematographer Charles Stumar is no Karl Freund. The film has limited style and absolutely no successful management of tone: John Colton's screenplay mixes lightness and horror and pathos well enough, but the movie itself mashes them all into one unpersuasive flatness. It's a movie that feels cheap, even though by the onscreen evidence, that couldn't have been the case; but there's no atmosphere at all. The cast does what they can to keep the drama steady (absent the comic side characters), and the werewolf is different enough from anything we're familiar with, both visually and in his obvious intelligence, that he's always a bit unnerving and threatening. But for all that I honestly do admire the film's strengths, I will not pretend that it's one of Universal's strongest horror films of the '30s - it is average at best - nor does it offer more, really, than an intermittently captivating snapshot of the road not taken towards a more scientific and urbane werewolf genre than the one we ultimately got.

Body Count: 4, though only half of that number are innocent victims.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

You couldn't order a more perfect first generation horror movie knock-off than The Vampire Bat. The 1933 effort by Majestic Pictures (which had no other meaningfully long-lived productions before it was absorbed into Republic Pictures at the end of the '30s) is very close to the platonic ideal of a cheap-ass attempt to simultaneously copy both Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein, the two films that ignited the horror boom of the '30s while almost single-handedly introducing the notion of paranormal horror into American cinema in the first place. Acknowledging the Frankenstein influence is, I confess, already leading us into spoiler territory; though the rules pertaining to spoilers about 82-year-old Poverty Row programmers easily found for the watching on the internet are a bit slippery, aren't they? You've had every chance in the world to watch The Vampire Bat, while also lacking any reason to assume that you should. Well, here's me coming along to declare that yes, you should. The movie is no timeless classic, but it's definitely a unique one-off in the annals of pre-1968 horror, even though its individual elements are extensively mined from pre-existing material.

The setting is Kleinschloss, Germany, probably sometime around the modern day, if we're going to jduge by clothes, though the attitude of the local populace is decades behind the curve. Seems Kleinschloss has been suffering from two plagues of late: on the one hand, a large number of unusually aggressive bats have been infesting the town. On the other, there have been a distressing number of exsanguination deaths, with the victims all sporting a pair of pristine holes through their necks to the jugular vein. Take those two things in hand together, and it almost inevitably spells "vampire", but at least one man, police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas), thinks that's a load of absolute bullshit. He's been unable to do much in the way of proving that he's right and the rest of town is a bunch of superstitious ninnies, mind you, and the more bodies pile up, the more tense the population is getting, to the point that they're ready to snap. While Karl, his girlfriend Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray, who'd already filmed her career-marking roles in Mystery of the Wax Museum and King Kong, though this film beat those to theaters), and her lodger Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill) work to find some kind of scientific answer to the goings-on, the kind of mob that tends to spontaneously form in movies like this has allowed circumstantial evidence to indict Herman Gleib (Dwight Frye), a transparent knock-off of Dracula's Renfield, right down to the actor playing both parts. And Herman is certainly creepy as all get-out with his freakish adoration of the bats that the rest of the town hates, and his uncomfortably close affection for Martha (Rita Carlyle), the latest victim of the "vampire". But we've got no reason to doubt him, and ever reason to fear for his safety just as much as Karl does. Particularly since we get to meet the real killer long before Gleib ends up running for his life from the mob.

It's no vampire, either - Universal may have paved the road for horror movies with actual monsters from the bowels of hell, but it took a while for that particular innovation to filter into all that many American movies, and The Vampire Bat eschews ghouls for simple monstrous humanst. Yet it finds space for a peculiar, entirely unexplained hypnotism subplot, so it's not entirely allergic to the paranormal.

But still, this is a movie that's deeply undecided what to do with this new thing, "horror", that it has available to it. The opening scene, barring a frantic montage establishing the nightmare that is life in Kleinschloss, is something of a case study in not quite knowing how much faith the audience will have in the film, or how much trust the film can afford to have in the audience. As remarkable as it is to say, 36 years after the novel Dracula appeared, 62 after Carmilla, and 114 after Polidori's short story "The Vampyre", The Vampire Bat is so dubious about its own subject matter that it goes to all the bother of explaining, in extensive detail, what vampires are and what they do. That this scene is palatable at all is due almost exclusively to Douglas, a sarcastic, modernist presence whose sharp energy helps to ease the clumsiness of the writing (and it is enormously clumsy - "Gott im Himmel, don't jest!" is a representative sample of the flop-sweaty Germanisms wedged into the script, and if I wanted to share a sample of the film's puffy exposition, I'd have to spend the next half-hour transcribing bloated monologues). Hindsight's a cheat, but it's not remotely surprising that the actor quickly burst from cheap quickies like this to major studio productions: in the most casual ways conceivable, he acts the pants off of everybody who shares the screen with him, possessing a more distinctive and cutting personality than the rest of the human cast combined. And he manages to add momentum and excitement to the film's rather indulgent reliance on "let's stand around the thing and talk" scenes, enough of them that I'm a little stunned to report that the movie is, in fact, not based on a stage play.

I should be fair and mention that, while Douglas is objectively the best in show, the leads are all pretty solid. Wray is let down by a part that is never more interesting or deep than in her first scene, when she's a focused science-adjacent young woman, and not yet just the romantic adjunct to the main plot, but Atwill's increasingly frayed man of science is one of the reliable character actor's more complicated creations, and Frye blends creepiness with sweet pathos in a lovely way, giving a vastly better performance here than managed to in Dracula. Maude Eburne, stranded in the absolutely unlikable role of the daffy old lady (Ruth's aunt, and Dr. von Niemann's hypochondriac patient), manages to even make the comic relief not as shrill as the writing easily could have encouraged it to be.

The real star of the show, though, is the film's attitude, partially effected by director Frank R. Strayer, who marches the script ruthlessly through its paces (the film's running time, which is variable from source to source, is never reported as more than a few minutes over one hour, and it firmly refuses to dick around with that short allotment of time), while allowing the unstated menace haunting the town to linger in the background and in the spaces where actors say nothing. That's the other thing that drives the attitude: this is actually a fairly brutal, clipped movie, for something made in a nominally more innocent time. Being pre-Code helped The Vampire Bat considerably; it can indulge in a harrowing death for a character who doesn't deserve it, and a shockingly matter-of-fact revelation of unspeakable viciousness on the part of another.

It also benefits from being enormously cheap and efficient: while the sprawling style and atmosphere of a Frankenstein is deeply rewarding in its own way, there's a lot to like about the brusqueness of The Vampire Bat. With no opportunity to slow down and dwell on things, the movie's unfussy look suggests a much more natural, everyday sensibility: the Mitteleuropean sets, looking like a hundred others from the same era, are unexpectedly naturalistic, with Strayer and cinematographer Ira H. Morgan saving the particularly complex, vivid shots for moment of punctuation, or especially intense terror in the characters' lives. As a result, those moments land much harder. And we see in this kind of impulse the seeds of setpiece-driven film production.

Enough is wrong with the film that it can't be regarded as a lost masterpiece: the hypnotism angle is a confusing distraction that writer Edward T. Lowe, Jr. never thinks about resolving, while the necessary expository slowness hasn't aged at all well, now that we all know all about vampires and Gothic derangement in European towns. And the decision to end the movie, an enormously sober look at mob rule, intellectual overreach, and basic human indecency, with a gag about an old lady who has the shits so bad that she might not even make it up the stairs without messing herself - seriously, by the standards of 1933 taste and censorship, it might as well be the diarrhea scene from Bridesmaids - is so peculiar that it transcends "bad filmmaking" into some kind of crypto-Surrealism.

What it can and should be regarded as, though, is a not-quite-great encapsulation of all the things horror was trying to be in the first years as it coalesced out of the ether: society in terror, rich visual atmosphere, pretty girls being menaced, reasonable choices turning into something awful. And there are elements to it that are notable for how little they resemble the horror of the '30s or anytime after: this is a movie in which horror is a strictly human-driven concern, for example, and not even the nicest characters are exempt from culpability, which is the really striking part. It's an invaluable time capsule, anyway, showcasing how much had been achieved by 1933, and how much was left to do. It's nowhere close to the best horror film of the 1930s, but it is maybe the best combination of wide-ranging success with utterly typical elements, and any historically-minded aficionado of the genre owes it to themselves to investigate the singular peculiarities of this one.

Body Count: A whopping 6, a spectacular bloodbath for such an early entry in the nascent genre. And that's not even counting the apparently hefty number of deaths summarised in the opening montage.

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PEOPLE COME, PEOPLE GO, NOTHING EVER HAPPENS

A review requested by John Taylor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Reducing any film to the sum of its Oscar trivia is a filthy habit, but it's also fun and I'm good at it, and Grand Hotel has a real whopper of a piece of trivia associated with it. It's the second of three films to win the Best Picture Oscar and no other awards, which it did at the fifth Academy Awards, given for the awkwardly-shaped year of 1 August, 1931 through 31 July, 1932 (The Broadway Melody, Best Picture #2, and Mutiny on the Bounty, #8, are the other two). But the real point of distinction is that it's the one and only Best Picture winner to have been nominated for absolutely no other Oscars. There's no wholly positive way to spin that, but it does feel kind of fitting in a way - this was the time when the award was still called "Outstanding Production", with more of a connotation of "this is the most impressive act of studio willpower" than "this is the most aesthetically complete and admirable movie". And Grand Hotel is nothing if not an outstanding production, something in which every facet of it is less important than the massiveness of its existence. Grand Hotel is not about anything but the fact that MGM wanted to show off the full range of its resources, and in that regard, it absolutely can be the year's most Outstanding Production even without having the best direction, writing, or acting.

Though even that's missing the point a little; frankly, Grand Hotel does have the best of some of those things, or at least good enough to muscle into the not very mindblowing competition for the 1931-'32 Oscars. I won't way that director Edmund Goulding deserved a slot above King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg, but surely William Absalom Drake's adaptation of his play of Vicki Baum's novel would have been as worthy a writing nominee as the stuffy Arrowsmith. Cedric Gibbons's luscious Art Deco art direction, an extravagant showpiece for MGM's storied set builders, was outright robbed. And in a notably weak Best Actress year, Joan Crawford's failure to land a nomination instead of a pair of slumming theater goddesses doing nothing in particular (though Lynn Fontanne is leagues better than winner Helen Hayes) and an out-to-sea Marie Dressler is fucking baffling as all hell. Except that it's not, because nominating any one member of the Grand Hotel would have been almost impossible to get away with. That, you see, is exactly the point of the production's one-of-a-kind outstandingness.

Grand Hotel is a genre-starter, you see. This was the very first All-Star Cast Extravaganza, with several of MGM's most luminous names given more-or-less equal focus in a series of intertwining subplots filling up the bustling anthill of the classiest hotel in Berlin (inevitably, the shadow of that upstart politician Adolf Hitler, who came to international attention several months after the film's premiere, adds a sense of morbid gloom to the film's depiction of corruption and depravity in Germany for any viewer coming to the film later than 1933). The movie's very own opening credits stress the divine glamor of those stars more than the characters they play, or the story they play them in. Greta Garbo! Joan Crawford! John Barrymore! Lionel Barrymore! Wallace Beery! Lewis Stone! Jean Hersholt! Only about half of those names have any currency with a modern audience, but for a film lover in '32, seeing those names in one place would be their version of The Avengers (Hersholt is Hawkeye). It's hella easy to live in the 21st Century and airily proclaim that Crawford picks up the movie and runs away with it - which I take to be very much the contemporary conventional wisdom about it - but picking favorites is at a certain level entirely contrary to the spirit of the thing, which doesn't make you need to pick favorites. You just get all of them all at once. This is, never forget, an Outstanding Production.

The really impressive thing about Grand Hotel is that even if its goals are transparently those of unabashed gimmickry, it holds up superlatively well. There's only one of these "superstar ensemble" pictures that even arguably betters it, to my eyes, the following year's glorious Dinner at Eight (also by MGM, and with four of the same superstars), which has the benefit of George Cukor, a sturdier director than Goulding, and a more concrete reason for all the actors to appear in one place, beyond "hey, lotsa folks show up at a hotel". Still, while the first may not be exactly the best, it has pleasures galore in its cross-cutting of dignified melodrama anchored by a whole host of people doing sterling work - beyond Crawford's early career highlight, Lionel Barrymore is at his most sensitive and internally-directed here, with only a minimal amount of cartoonish hamming (I am not tremendously fond of the great bulk of his work prior to the full-on old man stage of his career), and John Barrymore is stone-cold serious. Garbo is... not great. Insofar as everybody who loves '30s Hollywood has that one diva to whom they give all their most serious affection and loyalty, Garbo is mine. I don't feel any need to make excuse for loving her career above Crawford's, 98% of the time. But she's on autopilot in Grand Hotel, more than in any other role I can think of. Within just a couple of years, her line "I want to be alone" had hit a critical mass of parodies to prove that this was seen as an iconic work almost immediately, and far be it from me to deny the pop culture of the 1930s its rightful obsessions. But this is the same hurt, tragic Garbo of at least a half-dozen other performances, all of which involve her being more invested and nuanced in her depiction of that hurt, and none of which so dubiously miscast her (here, she plays a ballet dancer, a profession that requires a totally different body shape and way of movement than anything within a mile of Garbo's physical performance). And certainly, none of which require her to make love to a telephone.

Outside of its misuse of a disinterested top-billed star, though, Grand Hotel is a perfect demonstration of why the Hollywood star system persisted so long, and why it still gives such vast pleasure to those of us in its cheering section. This is really and truly a film that bets the farm on the absolute charm of its actors - the script can barely be bothered, listlessly plugging in sturdy but ancient narrative shapes including the destitute baron (John Barrymore) who falls in love with his rich, suicidal mark (Garbo), the innocent stenographer (Crawford) who starts to receive the nastiest kind of attention from a thuggish captain of industry (Beery), the dying man (Lionel Barrymore) spending his last pennies on one chance to experience luxury he's never known. These were musty old chestnuts by 1932, and the film doesn't waste any time on pretending that we're there to be dazzled by the complexity of the plots and the way they interleave. We're showing up to see famous people perfectly inhabit those roles in enormous, loving close-ups and gorgeous lifestyle-porn gowns by MGM's legendary costume designer Adrian. And this is something Grand Hotel overs up by the shovelful, with that top-shelf cast breathing richness and vitality into their well-worn roles. Crawford, with her strikingly modernist and knowing expressions, is, again, the clear best in show, always marginally more wary and withholding than her scene partners in ways that make us desperately crave more information about her. But there's not a wrong foot in the movie, from the clipped brutishness of John Barrymore in his unguarded moments to Stone's weary sternness. Even Garbo's not in any way an active detriment, all my moaning about her performance notwithstanding.

Marshaling this parade of egos presented as demigods on the big screen, all Goulding really has to do is keep the spigot of close-ups and two-shots wide open, and in that respect he triumphs. But it's not fair to pretend that Grand Hotel was a director-proof movie just because it actually totally was a director-proof movie. There are some fascinating shots he carries off, such as the way the hotel's switchboards, used as a narrative framing device, are turned into geometric traps that sneakily imply a more rigid set of structures (aesthetic and social) than the script is quite willing to explore, or the occasional sudden cuts where the characters are dropped into tiny relief against the sprawling reality of the hotel that simply doesn't care about their individually pitiable tales. Cinematographer William H. Daniels gets to play around with Expressionist lighting, or at least the closest MGM's glossy house style would permit him to get to Expressionist lighting, guiding the mood more than is immediately obvious through canny manipulations of the focus and shadow in the back of shots.

It is, all told, a tremendously sturdy, thoroughly unimaginative, and massively entrancing sample of the early-'30s Hollywood machine doing everything exactly right in the creation of gratifying entertainment. It's too sober-minded to qualify as escapism, and infinitely too proud of its foregrounded desire to seduce the audience to be mistaken for high art. I cannot call it a perfect studio film; a perfect studio film would have a mechanically flawless screenplay, not a tossed-off basketful of scenarios that it cares about even less than we do. But it is the perfect Grand Hotel, one of classic Hollywood's most elegant truffles. Sure, it's still empty calories, but every gram of it reveals great, methodical craftsmanship.

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PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN WAX HOUSES

I could pretend I had this reason or that reason to bring 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum to your attention this day, such as the unique value that comparing it and its remake and its un-remake have in showcasing the changing preoccupations of the film cultures that produced them; or its particularly salty attitudes as a Pre-Code film with violence, sex, and profanity all sitting out there with no particular interest in pretending to be nice in any way; or how it's one of the most stylistically accomplished films that Michael Curtiz directed prior to his career-shaping collaborations with Errol Flynn. But as good as those reasons would have been, the actual one is much simpler. It's because Mystery of the Wax Museum is the final example in narrative fiction cinema of the largely forgotten red-green Technicolor Process 3, which we've never discussed here before, and by golly, I wanted to correct that.

Because they are just magically weird, these duochromatic Technicolor pictures. They look exactly like they sound they should: instead of the richer, more-alive-than-life depth and richness of 3-strip Technicolor, this process instead only really captures reds, greens, and the colors that exist in the combination of those two. The overall sensation one gets from the format is of a very reddish-brown world with individual objects that are a kind of fetid mint green (it occurs to me that I've never seen an African-American person in a red-green Technicolor film, and I find myself wondering if the process would end up making them look painfully sunburnt). An accurate reproduction of the colors of life, it sure ain't.

Different films make use of the fairly extreme limitations of the technology in different ways. The 1926 silent The Black Pirate, for example, creates a heightened sense of historical distance and fantastical abstraction through its use of color (it was actually shot in Technicolor's Process 2, but the effect as far as what the viewer sees is extremely similar). And of course, there are films that do absolutely nothing interesting with it at all, being shot in color solely because color was a new toy and the gimmick hadn't worn thin yet.

The applications for a horror film are, anyway, pretty obvious: I've already described the greens we see as "fetid", and "sickly" would do just as well. The color palette, in other words, can very easily be stressed to seem rotten and gross and disturbing. This makes it a natural fit for a movie that wants to shock and scare and offend its audience. In fact, Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot by Ray Rennahan) provides an object lesson in the relationship between genre and color style. Like a lot of other early sound horror films, the movie isn't entirely clear on what "horror" actually means, and so it presents what appears to the modern eye like a bafflingly unmotivated combination of what remains legitimately unnerving horror with the fast-talking take-no-prisoners energy and sexiness of a newspaper comedy. Which, if you watch enough '30s B-movies, you'll find that Hollywood filmmakers saw no end to the number of places they could put motormouthed, defiantly sassy lady reporters, their hard-living, cynically charismatic male counterparts, and harried, witheringly sarcastic editors that kept them in line. A weird and perhaps alienating convention: personally, I have nothing but enthusiasm for the dazzling verbal choreography of the newspaper comedies no matter where they show up, but by God, is it ever dated. Something about the weathered misery of the Depression made that character type possible, and the second that His Girl Friday landed in 1940, the whole thing just stopped, only to return in very deliberate genre pastiches thereafter.

The point being, it's a style of writing and acting that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that any culture has ever labeled "horror", and Mystery of the Wax Museum doesn't just have the usual reporter sidekick on hand to provide comic relief: it goes right on ahead and makes her the protagonist of the whole picture, so that the join between genre is prominent in a way it is nowhere else that I can immediately call to mind. Viewing the film from the 21st Century, this can make it feel like something of a train wreck: the movie oscillates between moments of crawling dread and fever-pitch chatter with heedless rhythm, prohibiting the film from ever building up momentum towards one kind of sustained tone. Scenes of disfigured killers silently gliding through the Paris morgue cut in the bluntest, most jarring way with scenes of Glenda Farrell tossing off withering zingers in a police office. Personally, I am very much in love with the film's absolute freedom from any kind of preconception: something about the sheer inappropriateness of moving from a poppy dialogue-driven comedy into what was, by '33 standards, extravagantly violent and disturbing horror actually makes both halves of that equation stand out more spectacularly. Particularly the horror, which feels even more perverse and disorienting when it's contrasted with the insouciance of a newspaper comedy.

Whatever is going on to make it happen, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a pretty great, discomfiting pre-Code horror film. It opens in Paris, 1921, where the genius wax sculptor Ivan Igor ('30s horror mainstay Lionel Atwill) - he's so good at capturing the essence of life in his work that his sculptures all look like living human beings in heavy pancake makeup trying really hard to stand still, and not blink or breathe or move - gets into a fight with his financial backer, Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell), that ends with his wonderful but underperforming wax museum on fire. The action then skips ahead to the stroke of midnight at New Year's, as 1934 starts in New York, which presumably means that this 1933 production is thus a work of speculative fiction. Here, fearless reporter Florence Dempsey (Farrell) is getting in the latest fight with her editor, her threatening to quit and him threatening to fire her for what is presumably not anywhere near the first time. Her job hinges on getting a huge scoop, and she manages to find one: the recent high-profile suicide of a society girl may in fact have been nothing like suicide at all, but since her body has just gone missing, nobody can prove that. Florence tracks this story around for a while, and I find myself wondering: was it so easy to get out ahead of the story in 1933? It's called Mystery of the Wax Museum, and unless the mystery is why you'd title the film after a place that factors into the plot of the first half virtually not at all, it pretty instantly makes itself clear that the fake suicide and the missing body have to have something to do with Igor's touring wax museum show, currently set up in New York; and also with his crippled hands and urgent desire to replicate all his old statues at any cost. And once you've concluded that a spate of missing dead bodies is related to a wax museum, the precise nature of that relationship announces itself rather urgently. Were the film's first audiences supposed to notice that? Did they notice that? I absolutely cannot say. The point being, while Florence is mucking around wondering if maybe the wax sculptures… nah, that's crazy… but maaaaybe… Igor has taken a fancy to a certain young lady, Florence's roommate Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray), who looks exactly like the Marie Antoinette sculpture that used to be his masterpiece, and which is the only work he hasn't had his lackeys re-create yet.

Curtiz's style was brusque and efficient to the point that he was kind of an asshole about it, and his impulse towards making movies that strike fast and move away quickly resulted, in this case, in one hell of a good horror picture (to be strictly fair, it also resulted in one hell of a shabby horror picture the year before, Doctor X; you can't win 'em all). Compared to other horror movies of the same vintage, the thing one primarily notices about Mystery of the Wax Museum is that it doesn't spare anything: right from the images of wax models melting in a grotesque parody of human decay and rotten, near the very start of the film, the filmmakers pile on images that are more concerned with scoring fast knockouts than sidling around behind us to be creepy and subdued. Mystery of the Wax Museum has many wonderful characteristics, but not subtlety. The camerawork is often heavily artificial and exaggerated, a clear and rather exciting attempt to bring the discordant angles and geometry of Germany Expressionism into the by-necessity well-lit interiors and florid colors of red-green Technicolor. Farrell's performance, which I find absolutely captivating, has all the grace and insinuation of a machine gun nest. The explicit gestures of horror are positively barbarous for '30s standards - I don't offhand know the films re-release history, but I'd be amazed if you could cut it down enough for it to even have a comprehensible plot and still past muster by post-'34 standards.

Rampaging by in just 79 minutes, it's crammed with enough incident that it's pretty easy to overlook some of its most excessive shortcomings: the somewhat nonsensical, coincidence-driven plot (there's a whole thing about Igor trying to get revenge on Worth that doesn't play at all), and the final scene is one of the clunkiest, most false declarations of love in all of '30s cinema. But the look of it is terrific, the speed and spunk are bruisingly fast, and Anton Grot's set designs are wonderfully evocative pulp. It's definitely a programmer first, quality film second, and its remake is better in every respect, but Mystery of the Wax Museum is still one of the punchiest, most watchable '30s horror films made anywhere outside of Universal.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1939: In which people who are wittier, prettier, and just better all around than we are fall in love, and it is outrageously delightful

The recent conversation about the state of the romcom in the 2010s - is it dead or dying? is it revivable? why do people hate laughter and love - amuses me to no end, because it misses the most important part of all: the golden age of romantic comedy was over before most of the people involved in the conversation were ever born. The romcom has been dead a looooong time, it's just that the corpse is finally starting to smell.

I mean, there have been some fine and even great romcoms in the years since America entered World War II, but the genre peaked in the 1930s, and if anyone disagrees with me, I will fight you in an alley with a knife. Seriously. Even a desperate, barrel-scraping C-picture in the genre from that period still oozes wit, charismatic actors, a short enough running time that the contrivances don't register until long after the movie is over. And I think most importantly - at any rate, it explains why the genre went off the cliff after 1940, except for Preston Sturges, and he only hung around a short while longer before hitting his desperate years - prior to the war, leading women in American cinema were of an entirely more sturdy, self-reliant stock than the generations that followed. Just a quick tour of names: Hepburn, Davis, Stanwyck, Garbo,Crawford, Lombard, Harlow, Loy, Dunne. They all were best at playing strong people, the kind who would refuse to put up with bumblers or schlubs, unwilling to stand by as the supporting character in somebody else's story. Social considerations aside, it simply makes for better comedy when you put two equally-matched sparring partners against one another, and there simply haven't the leading ladies with the skill or motivation to sell that kind of thing in any kind of mass quantity in later years.

If you'll permit me to stash my soapbox, we can then turn to one of these Golden Age romcoms, and one that is criminally under-recognised in modern days, Paramount's Midnight of 1939, directed by capable journeyman Mitchell Leisen and written by the unbeatable team of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, whose work was also on display in another exquisite romantic comedy that same year, Ninotchka. It is not, despite all I just said, the most gender-balanced of '30s comedies, owing mainly to a jaw-dropping final act moment in which Claudette Colbert insistently agrees with a judge that men should spank their wives, in a completely frivolous aside that does nothing else besides suddenly make the film bitterly uncomfortable for moderns. But for the most part, her Eve Peabody is the smartest person in every room, a quick-witted con artist and former golddigger who with a little bit of good luck and a lot fleet improv manages to finagle her way into the lives of several upper-class Parisian socialites. And also into the life of a Hungarian immigrant taxi driver named Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), and it doesn't take noticing what two names show up on the pre-title credit card to guess who Eve ends up with. Though I am pleased to note that Midnight doesn't have any twinge of "they have to end up together because they shouldn't co-mingle with richer classes" messaging, but the more direct and satisfying "...well, look at them, of course we want them to fall in love".

Apologies for harping on sociology, but it's one of the strengths of comedies that, because they so rarely feel the need to filter and editorialise, they paint a much clearer picture of the cultural norms that produced them. None of this is necessarily the first thing one has in mind while actually watching Midnight; it's much easier to be carried along by its excellent farcical plot, sharp dialogue (though the script, tweaked a bit by Leisen to Wilder's irritation, lacks the punishing wit of the best lines in Ninotchka), and Colbert's splendid performance. Colbert, I might point out, was not an actress who lacked for splendid performances in a career that included plenty of headlining roles but, maybe, fewer long-lived classics than we might prefer (I suspect that to the casual fan of old movies, she's known pretty much exclusively for her Oscar-winning role in 1934's It Happened One Night), and not nearly enough roles with directors or producers who could really exploit her unusual and unique traits as an actress. Above all, her rather direct, deflating way of cutting through bullshit with line readings that are more honest and rueful than just about any other actor in the '30s could reliably produce - in Midnight, that it including the wry, slightly angry delivery of "Well, from here it looks an awful lot like a rainy night in Kokomo, Indiana", as her first words upon entering Paris. Or, at one point, she issues the instruction "Tell him I wouldn't be at all surprised" to a chauffeur with a remarkable mix of confusion, happiness, and nervousness, all communicated through a giggling line delivery she barely completes. And then there's the matter of her one-of-a-kind looks, with wide-set almond eyes exaggerating her face to look squishy and round, and the set of her mouth looks perpetually amused by a joke nobody else heard that even she doesn't genuinely think is funny. Her look is far enough from the standards of beauty active in the '30s (or today, to an even greater degree) that, coupled with her blunt way of speaking, make it feel like someone who wasn't a movie star somehow managed to get all of these leading roles, and that leaves her performances with an eccentric vibe to them, one that's more, I'm almost tempted to call it "modernist" than any of her contemporaries. She's one of the most interesting '30s actresses to watch; I adore her completely, even when her vehicles aren't the greatest.

No such reservations apply to Midnight, one of Colbert's best films and one of the few to understand that her skills are flawlessly suited to the somewhat artificial and brittle world of screwball farce. Eve Peabody has just arrived in Paris from an ill-fated trip to Monaco, with nothing but the evening dress on her back; her first friend in town is Tibor, who takes her from place to place looking for work that's not to be found. At her last stop, she gets accidentally swept in with a group of other people dressed for a night out, and manages to sneak into a society party held by a blowsy sort of woman named Stephanie (gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the one clunky note in the cast); she is immediately found out by the perceptive eye of one Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), but he keeps mum for reasons of her own. Those reasons, she finds out after Georges secretly bails her when she loses a small fortune at bridge, are named Helene (Mary Astor) and Jacques (Francis Lederer) - Helene being Georges's wife, and Jacques being Helene's lover. Georges has noticed that Jacques had his eye on Eve all evening, and wishes to put the broke American up in a fine hotel with plenty of clothes and a car, under the name Baronness Czerny - the name she came up with on the spot - in order to keep pushing her towards Jacques, thereby breaking up his wife's affair. Seeing nothing but the dollar signs, Eve accepts his offer. But Tibor, meanwhile, has assembled all the taxi drivers of Paris to hunt for Eve, and when he finds her, he shows his own quick wits by posing as the Baron Czerny. And thus it is that everyone ends up at the Flammarion estate for a weekend, with Eve trying to seduce Jacques as Helene tries to expose Eve as a fraud and Tibor concocts a series of elaborate lies for why his fake marriage is sacrosanct and happy.

At the simplest level, Midnight is a wonderfully pure farce: it starts because people tell lies, and in order to keep those lies from being found out have to tell increasingly madder lies, that run afoul of other lies told by other people for their own benefit. The only sour note in all of it is its drowsy final sequence; by no means the most elegant or high-energy way to end, it moves the action to a courtroom where a fake divorce is held, as the protagonist uncharacteristically defends spousal abuse. But everything till that point is gloriously nutty, as Wilder and Brackett ladle one wrinkle on top of the last, never reaching such a fever pitch as to push the film firmly into screwball territory instead of the more arch sophisticated comedy subgenere, though it is certainl manic enough to never be boring. The cast is top-to-bottom divine: Barrymore, in the final chance he had to do something really special before sputtering out in nothing films made in the last stages of his alcohol-related death, is absolutely brilliant, with innuendo-laden facial expressions and a hilarious willingness to go totally silly during a late-film scene on the phone; Astor's snappish iciness is in excellent form; Ameche oscillates between charming mooniness and comic petulance nicely.

But it is Colbert's film, and she makes the most of it. She's the center of every shot that includes her, kept in focus and weighted by the compositions; the film lingers on her line deliveries, which are absolutely perfect in every instance, with a certain calming, "now, now, let's all be sane" cadence and a clear sense of authority, as though even when her fate hinges entirely on the whim of other people, she knows that she's smarter than they are and needs to keep them on track. She's a superb, grounding center to a frequently giddy film, but without ever playing the straight man to the material; there's too much sardonic wit to her performance for that to be the case.

At any rate, Midnight is a flat-out comedy masterpiece, the best work of Leisen's solid but hardly inspirational career, and enough to make a lifelong Colbert devotee of anybody who somehow remained unaffected in the face of It Happened One Night. There's an old-fashioned elegance and formality to the storytelling that dates it, sure; and it's narrative is based in a social situation that makes no sense on many levels (besides the gender politics, the class-based plot could only take place in pre-war Paris). But the crowd-pleasing instincts and high-speed literacy of the dialogue are fresh as they were 75 years ago; it's among the best, sharpest, fleetest comedies of its era, and worthy of far more of an audience and bigger classic status than it has ever enjoyed.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1939, the Greatest Year in Hollywood History
-Producer David O. Selznick marshals an army of actors and craftsman to make the epic of all epics, Gone with the Wind
-Garbo Laughs in Ninotchka
-MGM vomits out the most glorious expression of Technicolor ever filmed, The Wizard of Oz
-Disney's idiot dog Goofy makes his solo debut in the shockingly tender short Goofy and Wilbur
-George Cukor oversees the cavalcade of actressexual delights, The Women
-John Ford zooms in on John Wayne and a megastar is born in Stagecoach

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1939
-The first edition of the Cannes International Film Festival is called on account of war
-Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, a timeless and essential masterpiece, is booed and rejected for its mockery of society on the cusp of war; similarly, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève, though a hit this year, will be banned in 1940 for harming social morale
-Mizoguchi Kenji's Story of the Last Chrysanthemums has nothing to do with war, but it's awfully good anyway

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1938: In which bloody history is turned into a frosted cupcake

MGM was the stylish studio. If you know nothing else about Hollywood in the 1930s, that is the thing to know: when it came to the most glamorous stars wearing the most opulent clothes on the most richly detailed sets, acting out the most robustly dramatic scenarios while the most emphatic strings wept on the soundtrack, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had your back. When we think of the '30s as a decade of grand escapism in reaction to the the Great Depression, we are really thing of this studio and its remarkable ability to graft Cinematic Magic on an industrial scale rarely witnessed anywhere else. Watch an MGM production from the '50s, the '40s, but above all the '30s: you are, it is guaranteed, watching a god-damned Spectacle.

For a studio founded on such an aesthetic, a lengthy (149 minutes without overture and exit music, absolutely monumental for a film of its era) costume drama about the causes and early actions of the French Revolution could only turn out to be one thing; and 1938's Marie Antoinette is, indeed, largely the movie one might suppose it to be sight-unseen, particularly with MGM's First Lady, Norma Shearer (the widow of the studio's wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who'd died in 1936) playing the title role. Shearer was, in those days, in the declining period of her career, having made only a scattered handful of films in the preceding years (just three between 1933 and 1937, the last of them being the notorious 1936 Romeo and Juliet, in which 34-year-old Shearer and 43-year-old Leslie Howard played the most geriatric star-crossed teenaged lovers in cinema history), and the path that led from being one of MGM's most white-hot stars in the late silent and early sound era to being simply another '30s actor that nobody but classic movie buffs much remembers was already clear. But in this, the last project Thalberg put into motion for his wife before his death, she got one of her last chances to truly shine: Marie Antoinette is, in general, giddy nonsense as history and lumpy and overcooked as drama, but it is an excellent showcase for Shearer, in one of the rangiest and most convincing and ultimately most moving performances of a career that deserves better than it gets today.

Let's put off cooing over Shearer for a little bit, even if Marie Antoinette was received in '38 and remains primarily an excuse for watching her do her thing. For there's still a lot going on besides that, some of it good and much more of it loopy in the extreme. The idea behind it is obvious enough: a biopic of the famous and infamous French queen from her learning, in her homeland of Austria, that she was to wed the Dauphin and future king Louis XVI (Robert Morley, in his film debut), all the way up to her death by guillotine in the French Revolution. The expected stops along the way: rivalry with Madame du Barry (Gladys George), mistress of Louis XV (John Barrymore); a too-friendly relationship with the handsome Count Axel de Fersen of Switzerland (Tyrone Power), when her husband seems permanently incapable of generating any kind of emotion towards her; embroilment in an utterly stupid scandal surrounding a fabulous diamond necklace that has her unfairly accused of frivolousness by an increasingly hostile nation. No "let them eat cake", since this film is hellbent on making its Marie Antoinette a good figure, and while it lets some nastiness in at the edges, there's no room for anything that would make her quite that unsympathetic.

First things first: it's laughably bad history. But it's a Hollywood star vehicle from the '30s, and any real attempt to grapple with such matters would never have met with much success, especially at MGM of all places, so I bring this up more out of a sense of duty than of shock, or of a real desire to deal with it. Anyway, that would never be the biggest flaw of the film: the script by Claudine West & Donald Ogden Stewart and Ernest Vajda is a dense monster of a thing that attempts to include just about everything possible: political intrigue, romantic comedy, romantic drama, family melodrama, cloak-and-dagger thrills, and spectacular 18th Century parties. The writers (and those are merely the ones who got credit) never really manage to come up with one single tone, and director W.S. Van Dyke only makes things worse - a generic chameleon who made everything from documentaries to thrillers to, well, this, Van Dyke only ever really stood out, to my mind, in his light-touch comedies (his masterpiece, in this mode or any other, is The Thin Man), and he's not up to handling the sheer volume of different styles required by this project; not until the Revolution comes does the picture find a tone and stick with it, and this has far more to do with Shearer and Morley than anything else, though William Daniels's cinematography, which grows increasingly shadow-dominated as the film proceeds, does quite a lot to keep things deep and grim.

That being said, most of Marie Antoinette is parties and snarking rich people and Marie Antoinette herself oscillating from self-indulgence to social consciousness and back, and being constantly terrified that everyone around her thinks she's just some dumb flit from Austria, and frequently, Van Dyke gives up on trying to make sense of this and just makes sure that the staggering array of gowns designed by master costumer Adrian are properly accentuated. This is, above all things, an exercise in poshness, one that the Revolution happens at sort of arbitrarily - there's no apparent attempt to suggest that the poshness might itself be responsible for the raging violence of the citizenry, since the filmmakers know so clearly that they're selling lifestyle porn and not political history, so any twinge of awareness that maybe this actually is madcap indulgence and wanton extravagance has to be kept offscreen.

The whole thing is resolutely shallow, then, propped up only because the production is so very lavish. I suppose I can imagine a viewer being unmoved by the sheer mass of the set and costume design, though I am pleased not to have to switch places with them. And there's that one other thing: in the middle of all this finery, Norma Shearer is acting her ass off, finding ways to underline Marie Antoinette's essentially childish, self-focused behavior without making her any less appealing a heroine (and as far as childish goes, it's impressive how much the 36-year-old convinces as the teenage and grown-up Marie Antoinette alike, particularly since it went so badly for her in Romeo and Juliet). And then, when imprisonment and the guillotine hit, she reaches heights found nowhere else in her career: eschewing makeup, the actress adopts a kind of flat, staring intensity that's half wild animal, half pathetic human, and her tiny twitches where her desperate attempt to seem resolute breaks down - her last meeting with Louis is an obvious example - find Shearer engaging in far more minute and focused physical acting than the typically gesture-loving actor usually gave us. She's not the single highlight of the cast - Morley is a fantastic king, bland and doughy but fully able to suggest a feeling, sensitive human beneath that, and George's du Barry is an exqusitely sharp schemer with some brilliant line readings and expressions - but she's the only person who could have saved the film from its own excesses, and by God, if she doesn't do just that. Marie Antoinette, the movie, has nothing to say about history, class, violent revolution, or dynastic politics, but Marie Antoinette, the woman and character, has a full rich life and wide mix of feelings. Shearer makes sure of that, and it's enough to make this dodgy, obese slab of prestige moviemaking turn into something sparkling and engaging, the highlight of her entire career.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1938
-Michael Curtiz directs the glorious Technicolor epic The Adventures of Robin Hood at Warner Bros.
-Screwball comedy reaches its most demented extremes with Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby at RKO
-Mickey Rooney makes the leap from child actor to movie star with Boys Town, also starring Spencer Tracy

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1938
-The British Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, gives the play a new, infamous "happy" ending
-Sergei Eisenstein completes Alexander Nevsky, his first extant, complete sound film, in the U.S.S.R.
-French director Marcel Carné releases his first major works, Port of Shadows and Hôtel du Nord

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1937: In which budgets are exploded in the name of spectacle; and we learn an important lesson about film preservation

There's nothing easier than losing favor with Hollywood: no matter how successful a director's high peaks might be, all it takes is one project that ends up costing far too much and makes far too little back at the box office to tarnish even the brightest shining star. This truism takes us to one Frank Capra, who was the closest thing Hollywood in the '30s had to a brand-name filmmaker, and whose highly profitable run of movies with Columbia Pictures - one of the mini-majors, along with Universal and United Artists, but still responsible fora fair number of big hits - came to a bitter close over the matter of 1937's Lost Horizon, an epic that was green-lit with (by some accounts) the highest budget ever allocated to a Hollywood production, and still managed to shoot over it by a third. The film was cut from an assembly edit of six hours down to three and a half, down to two and a quarter, and finally down to 107, the length that was generally released in America to thoroughly unimpressive box office numbers. Capra and Columbia boss Harry Cohn fought nastily over the final cut, over pay, over contracts. And then the next year, Capra directed the Best Picture Oscar winner You Can't Take It with You, Columbia's biggest film of 1938, and it was like nothing ever happened. Because it's almost as easy to gain Hollywood's favor as it is to lose it. It's always, and only, about money.

Adapted by Capra's regular screenwriter Robert Riskin - they too had a falling-out, and didn't patch things up, either - from James Hilton's 1933 novel, the film tells of what happens when a planeful of Brits flees Shanghai following political upheavals in 1935. Cool-headed diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) is the head of the rescue mission, but it's really an Asian pilot (Val Duran) who dictates what's going to happen: the plane is crashed, deliberately, in the Himalayas, where the survivor (not including the hijacker) are found in the bitter snow by a team from a valley hidden deep in the mountains. This unbelievably idyllic place goes by the name of Shangri-La; a rural community guided, but not precisely "led" by the High Lama (Sam Jaffe) who dwells in the lamasery on a cliff overlooking the valley. He doesn't have much to do with everyday life, though; his primary actor is a certain Chang (H.B. Warner), and it is this Chang who explains the ins and outs of life to the survivors, including Robert and his brother George (John Howard), con-man Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), and Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), sixth months past her due date for dying of some dread disease. At first, only Robert is terribly excited by the calm sensibility that permeates Shangri-La; he is encouraged in this upon meeting the lovely Sondra (Jane Wyatt), an oddly European-looking resident of the valley. But as the rest find, one by one, that the slow pace and simple needs of life in the valley can be more rewarding than the chaos of the West - and that the valley has some unexplained power that can restore health and prolong life to extraordinary lengths - only George ends up staying angrily insistent that, goddammit, they need to get out of this weird Oriental hell.

So let's knock the unpleasant bit out of the way first. Lost Horizon has a racial politic that almost can't help but make a modern viewer feel a bit queasy - just the yellowface is enough for that, really, but the story grips with particular enthusiasm an idea of hyper-spiritual, Zen-like Asian spirituality that is, at any rate, a lot easier to handle than the notion of ignorant savage hordes of slant-eyed monsters in the Fu Manchu mode. Still, it is by all of the standards of our time - less so by the standards of its own (in fact, the film was later re-edited to downplay its over sympathy for the Chinese, when this became a political liability) - a deprecatory representation that's long on exoticising foreign culture. And this is not true only of the script: there are many shots that find Capra and cinematographer Joseph Walker framing characters and the Stephen Goosson-designed Shangri-La itself with a kind of precious fussiness, one that, on hand, stresses the ethereal nature of the place (which I think to be appropriate and good), and on the other, is deeply invested in making some kind of Orientalist art object of the frame that denies any kind of life or flexibility to the content.

All that being said, this is a fable, not an social documentary, and a certain sense of rich mystery and formalised ritual in the story and the visuals suits the material just fine. After all, the explicit, top-level narrative of Lost Horizon involves a man - a very British man (Colman could play no other kind), that is to say a man who embodies all the things that the phrase "white European colonialist" calls to mind - being thrown into a completely foreign environment and finding that he is entirely the better for it, and that it is a deeply spiritual place to be. The specific trappings do, of course, put Lost Horizon squarely in a tradition of Exotic Other stories, but I am now thinking less of the degree to which, nearly 80 years after its creation, the film matches contemporary tastes, but of how well it functions as a drama driven by its visuals; and I am inclined to say, it does this very well indeed.

One of the things I perpetually re-learn, as I get older and less worked over what films have political and social agendas I agree with, is that Capra - a filmmaker whose politics are very infrequently cotangent with my own - was a talented motherfucker. For all that he's tarred and feathered with the seemingly immortal slur of "Capra-corn", and accused of ticky-tacky sentiment, that criticism only works if you haven't actually seen many Capra films, especially since his most famous work - It's a Wonderful Life, though I wonder how much longer till Mr. Smith Goes to Washington eclipses it - actively repudiates that line of thinking, though many people do not realise this. Not that Lost Horizon is some kind of dour, cynical downer, but it does pretty bluntly suggest that all of "civilisation" - a word that the film unmistakably puts in those exact ironic quotes - is savagery, violence, and base behavior, and what we should hope for is not that some genius will come to save us from ourselves, but that there's a wonderful land far off in the untouchable mountains where a cluster of decent humanity can be saved and groomed until the world is ready for it. The movie says that we all long for a Shangri-La of our own; in so doing, it implies that damn few of us ever get one.

But that has nothing to do with Capra's quality as a filmmaker, of course. What I was starting to say just then was that he's actually quite a gifted craftsman of stirring, interesting visuals, and an extraordinary director of actors - the list of performers who gave their best or near-best performances under his guidance is not a short one, and this film certainly adds Ronald Colman to that list. I have little use for him on the whole: there's a packaged dignity to most of his acting that I find largely indigestible. But his slowly percolating enthusiasm is communicated here with subtlety and restraint, as Capra builds Robert Conway's character through simply watching Colman's feelings move quietly up through his face. And the last act, in which Conway is full of regret, dismay, and fear at the thought of losing his Shangri-La, is simply the best stuff in Colman's career, bleak without being punishing and hopeless.

The other thing that's really extraordinary about the way the film is put together is its use of sound: Dimitri Tiomkin's music especially, but sound effects too. There is a simple, almost primitive scheme used here: when things are chaotic, driven by conflict, or full of negative emotion, the film is loud. When things are serene, thoughtful, reflective, and at peace, the film is quiet. The opening is a violent rebellion, and then the sound drops out to almost nothing but dialogue on the plane. The plane crash is busy and metallic, and then the early scenes in Shangri-La lack even the hint of ambient noise or music. It's elementally powerful, working on an almost wholly subconscious front - and yet, if it's so obvious and simple, why does it feel so unusual? That the film includes virtually nothing on the soundtrack at its most peaceful moments, besides human voices - no birds, no chimes, no wind in the grass - is genuinely startling, but by God, does it work.

Clever filmmaking, and impressively grand filmmaking too: for a hell of an expensive film, Lost Horizon looks it, with massive sets and setpieces, presented by the filmmakers with an eye towards emphasising their scale - the film looks like it takes place in a huge valley surrounded by massive mountains. The use of stock footage from documentaries about the Himalayas certainly aids in this illusion, but it's not the only reason: the mountain sets often seem just as vast, and it should be noted, not without regret, that the studio-shoot footage and the stock footage don't cut together so cleanly, so consistently, that there's much of an illusion to be had, anyway. But setting that aside, it's a sprawling, epic-sized film, and however much Columbia hurt for it, this was money well spent.

And now, a complete change of subject for our final word. As noted, Lost Horizon was generally released at 107 minutes, with 132 minutes being the longest cut that was ever screened for a paying audience. In the '70s and '80s, a massive restoration was attempted, using every scrap of footage that could be scrounged up anywhere in the world. Though a complete soundtrack for the 132-minute cut was found, several minutes of visual information could not, and so the film ends up with several scenes playing out over stills. Meanwhile, the quality of the restored footage is immensely variable, with some of it so blurred and scratched that only context clues make it entirely clear what's going on. To a degree, then, watching the "full" version of Lost Horizon is an act of interpretation: you can gather what's going on and suppose what it might have looked like, but it requires work to get there. And this is not entirely unknown - the reconstructed A Star Is Born from 1954 is exactly the same kind of hybrid.

What is kind of delightful, or at least instructive is seeing the footage that was snipped out, the footage that Cohn deemed inessential. This includes, mind you, the scene where Lama explains his vision of peace and harmony, and clarifies the entire backstory of Shangri-La. So much for an idea-driven movie (it also includes a scene - one of the still photo reconstructions - where the film-long homoeroticism between Henry Barnard and Alexander Lovett sounds to have exploded into full-blown homosexual domesticity. Since this could hardly have been possible in a film made in America in 1937, even one with Edward Everett Horton, the missing visuals must have downplayed things fiercely). Undoubtedly, this moved faster, but that's really the only thing that can be said on its behalf. The longer version of the film is actually a film, with a throughline and clear character moments; yet it is also a compromised Frankenstein monster of passable and unacceptable elements. And so it is with film preservation and restoration: always a situation of coming as close as possible, never actually getting all the way there. Some things, like Shangri-La itself, are hidden away where no one will ever be able to see them again.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1937
-The first cel-animated feature film in history, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premieres at the end of the year, going on to explode box office records
-Leo McCarey's devastating autumn-years romantic drama Make Way for Tomorrow opens, breaks everybody's heart who sees it
-Daffy Duck makes his first appearance in the Warner Bros. Looney Tune short Porky's Duck Hunt

Elsewhere in World cinema in 1937
-Jean Renoir's magnificent anti-war film Grand Illusion opens in France
-Little-known in the West Yamanaka Sadao's Humanity and Paper Balloons makes a profound impact on the future development of Japanese period dramas, or jidaigeki
-The Polish production The Dybbuk is one of the earliest important works of Yiddish-language filmmaking

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1936: In which we bring a little color into the world

The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for the most vividly saturated, luminous colors that have ever been known; The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind came out four years after the first three-strip Technicolor feature, RKO's Becky Sharp from 1935. And as late as the early 1960s, there was still a certain division between black and white as the medium for serious dramatic filmmaking, with color used mostly for broad entertainment, historical epics and musicals and the like (for example, it wasn't until 1967 that there was an all-color slate of Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards).

Still and all, the technology continued to develop and grow and prove itself long before color film ever became as standard as sound. And we are arrived now at one of the most important single steps in that development, with 1936's The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the first three-strip Technicolor film shot outside of the reliable, easily-controlled environment of a studio; it was filmed entirely on location in the vicinity of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernadino Mountains, far east of Hollywood and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It was the film that demonstrated the flexibility and utility of the Technicolor process, while also proving that the natural world could benefit from the realer-than-real depth of color that process provided to the vibrantly rich sets and colors of a studio production.

That was, anyway, the intention: I cannot begin to say if the fault lies more with cinematographers Howard Greene (the pioneering Technicolor expert making only his second film) and Robert C. Bruce, or more with a deficient DVD transfer released by Universal (the film was among the glut of Paramount titles acquired by Universal for TV and, ultimately, video distribution in the 1950s), who clearly have no real incentive to sink much money for a major restoration into a backwoods melodrama with a minuscule contemporary audience of historically-inclined cinematography buffs. But however it happened, the version of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine we have to watch now is a perversely muted affair, for something whose position in Technicolor history is so profoundly important: it is heavily brown across the board, with brown forests housing brown cabins in which brown clothes are worn by people with pasty, wan faces that haven't been lit anywhere near right (the absence of brown skin is, unfortunately, not remotely surprising).

So whether the fault lies in the filmmakers or their later archivists, the fact remains that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is not so pretty to look at, circa 2014. And as the obvious point of entry for the film is its visual style, the fact that it's conspicuously lacking on that front makes it awfully hard to feel good about anything else in the movie, which is not, if we are going to be mercilessly honest, such a unique and special butterfly that it's worth fighting for above and beyond its unquestionable historic importance. The source novel, by John Fox, Jr, was adapted four times in the silent era - thrice between 1913 and 1916! - so something about it must have struck an intense chord with audiences back then, but the evidence as to why that should have been the case isn't easy to see onscreen.

Basically, this is a drab romantic melodrama that keeps acting like it's an action epic about a pair of warring families, with its secret heart set on being an historical docudrama about coal mining in the Virginia mountains in the early 20th Century. The families, whose feud is one of those "started so long ago that nobody knows the reason" jobs, are the Tollivers and the Falins; we are to be primarily concerned with the Tollivers, including patriarch Judd (Fred Stone), a fiercely reactionary man, and his sensible, long-suffering wife Melissa (Beulah Bondi); their near-adult daughter June (Sylvia Sydney) and little boy Buddie (George McFarland, "Spanky" from Hal Roach's Our Gang series); and cousin Dave (Henry Fonda), widely expected to be June's future husband. But what hunky outsider comes? Why, 'tis Jack Hale (Fred MacMurray), who hopes to buy the mining rights from the Tollivers and the Falins and whoever else owns coal-producing lands in those hills. June falls for him instantly, though it takes a little while for anyone else to notice it. It takes longest of all for Jack to notice himself, largely because he is a massive tit.

If The Trail of the Lonesome Pine had absolutely nothing else that was dramaturgically crippling, that would be enough: Jack Hale is a shit, so breezily assured of his objective superiority to all of the undereducated rural folk he meets that there's not, anywhere in the film's opening hour, even the merest sense of tenderness or charm to his bearing. It doesn't help that MacMurray was extraordinarily good at playing a peremptory, bossy asshole, and commits so hard to that version of the character that it's whiplash-inducing in the second half when he starts to be nice, or basically human. At any rate, it certainly makes the film's romance plot hard to swallow, since the only way to buy that June would be so infatuated with this man is if we take her for a complete and utter doormat, and while the Asshole/Doormat dynamic is hardly unknown in life or the movies, it's not the sort thing that you should really be expected to root for.

The other massive, crippling flaw: the stupefying dialogue all throughout Grover Jones's screenplay, which puts into the mouths of the Tollivers alarmingly colorful phrases that, one hopes, no human beings throughout history have ever actually said, at least in such volume. Particularly in the opening act, it feels less like a family drama than a peek backstage at a Yosemite Sam impersonators' convention.

What this all means, of course, is that the film's conspicuous flaws are front-loaded, and the back half (if you can make it that far) is a considerably more nuanced and thoughtful affair in which the corrosive effect of violence is explored with a bitterness and clarity that's suggested by none of the redneck cartoon shenanigans that open the film. Even at its worst, though, there's a kind of thoughtful gloominess to much of the film that primes us for this eventual drift from tepid romantic movie to morality play. It is a film aware of the harsh effects of violent living even when the plot and the characters are not (outside of Dave, and that owes mostly to how brutish Fonda could be when he wasn't constrained by the star system to play a Sensible Average Joe - his is the best performance in the film by at least a couple of laps). This was an early film in the career of director Henry Hathway, who'd end up making several key Westerns in the '50s and '60s ("key" not meaning "great"; he's responsible for the most turgid portions of the wearisome Cinerama epic How the West Was Won), and his later films, in that genre and others, all suggest a keen sense for how exterior locations can place certain emphases on the drama. That skill is in a nascent form in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, but there is certainly a clear relationship between the hushed, shadowy forests of the mountains and the closed-in, paranoiac lives that are lived there. It's not quite compelling enough to make up for how bland it is as a groundbreaking work of color (in fact, it almost certainly suggests that the film would be better in black and white), but at least there's a consistent visual scheme to the film. Dramatically, the film is at least half a washout, but as an atmosphere piece and visual expression of mental states, it has some skill to it that makes all the hootin' and hollerin' and widespread mugging in the cast (how much mugging? Spanky is comparatively sedate), if not forgiven, then at least relatively tolerable while we wait for the good stuff.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1936
-William Wyler's criminally underseen Dodsworth is released by United Artists
-Universal's 13-part serial Flash Gordon is one of the biggest hits in the history of the form
-The proto-noir The Petrified Forest from Warner Bros. makes a star of Humphrey Bogart

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1936
-Japanese master Mizoguchi Kenji has a banner year in Japan, directing the early triumphs Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, his oldest films that remain broadly available
-The Marathi-language Sant Tukaram is the first Indian film to find international success
-Hollywood production designer William Cameron Menzies goes to Great Britain to direct the science-fiction milestone Things to Come

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