Burl reviews The Invisible Man (1933)

 

Mwa-ha-ha-ha and hello, it’s Burl! Am I here? Or am I over here! Ha ha, there’s no way of knowing, for I am completely invisible to you! Yes gumchewers, I’m here to review a classic of the cinema, the Universal Pictures production of The Invisible Man, directed by that giant mammal of cinema James Whale! And of course it features Claude Rains, well known as Nutsy from Moontide, in one of the most unusual debut roles any actor ever had - ha ha, his face is never seen until the last minute of the picture!

You’ve got to admire how this one gets going - not with a bunch of boring experiments that fail and must be tried again and again until success is achieved, but with the invisible man already invisible, already well on the way to homicidal madness, and seeking a place to set up his new lab and discover a way to un-invisibleize himself! After a wonderful set of edits showing the uncommonly translucent man arriving at the door of a pub, swathed in bandages and sporting overcoat, gloves, hat and glasses, he takes a room from landlady and professional screecher Una O’Conner, whom we know so well from The Bride of Frankenstein, and her husband, Forrester Harvey from Kongo, who later gets knocked down the stairs!

Naturally the invisible man, Jack Griffin by name, can’t get a lick of work done thanks to the constant botheration he suffers from the reluctant landlady and the nosy townsfolk, who are intrigued by his dark glasses and creepy bandages and haughty, demanding manner! Word of his unusualness spreads, and he must do a few jumpabouts and shock the simple country folk with his floating shirt routine! And then he must repair to the home of a colleague, Kemp, whom he terrifies into helping him with his experiments! Kemp is played by William Harrigan from Flying Leathernecks and Francis Covers the Big Town, and when he can take it no more and reports there’s an invisible man in his home, Griffin threatens to kill him at pre-cisely ten o’ clock the following night! And you know he means it, ha ha!

Gloria Stuart from The Old Dark House and Wildcats plays Flora, who had a love connection with Griffin back when he was visible and of more pleasant disposition! Her father, old Doc Cranley, is Griffin’s mentor, played by Henry Travers from Ball of Fire and Shadow of a Doubt, and of course he wants to help, but there’s no helping this transparency because he’s become a big jerk, a homicidal one at that, pushing people off cliffs and whatnot! He also likes to kick people in the bum! Clearly (ha ha!) he must be stopped, but even with a police force made up of ringers like Holmes Herbert from Tower of London, E.E. Clive from Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, Dudley Digs from The Hatchet Man, Harry Stubbs from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and Donald Stuart from Suspicion, it all comes down to a farmer who hears disembodied breathing in his barn!

Well, this one is a real crackerjack if you ask me! James Whale sure knew what he was doing, the trick effects are absolutely top-notch, the script and the performances are witty, and Rains has just the voice to play this part! He’s not just a voice of course - he does plenty of physical stuff when he’s in his bandages, and he’s good at that too! And most of the actors or even day players who have to react to being touched, jostled, or attacked by him also do pretty fine work! So it’s all very well done, and on top of that an invisible man is in some ways a much scarier entity than a vampire or a werewolf or even a Frankenstein monster! At least he is to me! My only regret in watching it was that I didn’t wait a few weeks, because it’s a pretty good winter movie! But it’s also a pretty great movie any time of year, and so I give The Invisible Man three and a half footprints in the snow!

Burl reviews The Lost Squadron! (1932)

 

Hello chums, it’s Burl, here with a nifty picture about flying fliers and the flights they flew! It’s a story about some airborne veterans of WWI - the Great War, ha ha - and what happens to these fellows once the hostilities have ceased; and it’s called The Lost Squadron!

It opens in the final five minutes of the war as our heroes try to down as many German planes as they can, and then, as the 11 AM bell strikes on November 11, we see them exchange a last friendly wave with their former enemies and fly back to their airfield! Ha ha, it really pushes the alleged gentlemanly aspects of the war, in much the manner as it was parodied many years later by Monty Python in The Meaning of Life, except here it’s in earnest!

Our boys are upright Gibby, played by Richard Dix from It Happened in Hollywood and The Ghost Ship; Woody, the most carefree of a pretty relaxed bunch, essayed by a cheerful Robert Armstrong from King Kong and The Mad Ghoul; Red, handsome and charming, in the person of Joel McCrea from Foreign Correspondent, Sullivan’s Travels, and of course the great Ride the High Country; and their potatofaced mechanic Fritz, played by Hugh Herbert from The Black Cat and Hellzapoppin’! At their demobbing they are told nothing has changed since they left for Europe, but on their return Stateside they find everything has! Personal disasters - bankruptcy, cuckoldry, so forth - befall each man, which they accept with astonishing stoicism; and one drinking scene and a quick montage later, all but one of them have become rail-riding hobos!

On the distaff side we have Mary Astor from The Palm Beach Story and of course The Maltese Falcon playing Gibby’s ex, the ambitious, inconstant Follette - a character not dissimilar to how Astor herself was perceived by the public a few years later when she was beset by the sort of scandal that small, Puritanical minds think is important! As well there’s a crucial character called The Pest, who is Woody’s little sister and is played by Dorothy Jordan from The Searchers!

Gibby, Red, and Fritz, the three members of the squadron who have become stewbums, make their way to Hollywood, where they discover Woody living the good life as a stunt flier for the then-booming genre of aerial war pictures, and The Pest worrying about him and trying to stop him from his habit of drunk flying! Woody’s glad to see his old pals and convinces them to join him in the lucrative if still dangerous endeavor, and so it is that the squadron once again find themselves facing off against a fiery German enemy: this time the shouty director Von Furst, played by The Man You Love To Hate, Erich von Stroheim! Not only is he a sociopathic martinet in jodhpurs, but he’s now married to Gibby’s old flame Follette, who’s the female star of the movie! Ha ha!

Well that is a coincidence! And it’s not one the perpetually angry Von Furst is willing to countenance: he decides to get rid of Gibby by dousing his plane’s guywires in acid! But the irrepressible Woody takes the sabotaged plane up instead, and when Gibby, having realized what’s happening, goes up and flies alongside Woody trying to warn him about the acid attack on his wires, Woody just laughs and gives him the finger! Ha ha!

Well, after the wires break and Woody crashes in a spectacular conflagration, it’s clear to the remaining three that revenge is required, though there is disagreement on the type! However, before this can be resolved an accidental gunshot claims the autocratic filmmaker, and down the stairs he tumbles! Ha ha, the boys have to pull a Weekend At Bernie’s with Von Furst’s corpse to fool a slow-witted watchman who heard the shot! From there events proceed as they must, with noble subterfuge and sacrifice abounding, and in a final touching coda, the squadron members who’ve succumbed in the course of the story reappear as ghost fliers piloting ghost planes!

It was a real pleasure to watch this peppy little picture, I must say! The stunt flying is impressive, and the cast a real delight, and the pre-Code shenanigans are terrific! The gentlemanly comradeliness of the squadroneers is almost alien in its profundity and relentlessness! Von Stroheim is good in his role as the heavy, even if he’s more or less playing a more homicidal version of himself, and the layers of postmodern irony with which the narrative is infused seems almost unintentional, which fact merely adds another layer, ha ha! It’s a crackerjack and no mistake, so I give The Lost Squadron three toasts to fallen comrades!

Burl reviews The Man From Toronto! (1933)

 

I say and what ho and bosh, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a veddy British picture, which is veddy veddy British, perhaps even veddy veddy veddy British, despite being entitled The Man From Toronto! Indeed, however, the colonies are well represented, as the titular Man is not only Canadian, but is played by South African-born Ian Hunter, whom we know from Strange Cargo!

The Man From Toronto’s real name is Fergus Wimbush, so naturally I found myself thinking of him exclusively as The Man From Toronto instead of by his name! Now, I may have a bit of trouble explaining the situation that kicks everything off, but I’ll try! Ha ha, somewhere in England a young widow, Leila, is left a quarter of a million pounds, but she only gets the money on the condition that she marries a certain Man From Toronto! The Man From Toronto is eligible for the same inheritance, but he must marry Leila, who, incidentally, is played by the cute and charming Jessie Matthews, known for her portrayal of Celia Newbiggin in Midshipmaid Gob!

Neither she nor The Man From Toronto are happy about this weird legacy that requires them each to marry a stranger! Leila complains about it endlessly to Mr. Bunston, her solicitor who is also her uncle, or some such thing, and who is the most I Say What What kind of a fellow you could ever hope to see on a motion picture screen! The Man From Toronto travels from Toronto to England despite his disgruntlement and prepares to install himself in a cottage owned by the redoubtable and proudly homely Mrs. Hubbard! Taking advantage of the fact that The Man From Toronto doesn’t know what she looks like, Leila reinvents herself as a parlour maid called Perkins so that she can observe The Man From Toronto before considering marriage!

So begins a sitcom-style comedy of misunderstanding that stretches well beyond the breaking point, and engulfs both Mr. Bunston and Mrs. Hubbard in the web of deception and confusion! Because he doesn’t want to be cornered into explaining to The Man From Toronto what’s going on or revealing Perkins’s true identity, old Bunston is forced into endless, punishing countryside strolls, perambulations he refers to as “these infernal walks,” and which seem nearly to kill him! Ha ha, he’s chased by cows into a pub, where he discovers he doesn’t hate beer quite so much as he thought he did, nor darts; and then he gets sauced on pints, makes a bunch of new mates, and goes home to slap his pudding! Ha ha!

As Bunston, Frederick Kerr, whom we may recall from Frankenstein, gives a delightful performance filled with well-timed little laughs and “bah’s”, and features a perfect delivery of the line “She’s not a bad looking woman, if you don’t look at her!” And Bunston sure does a lot of phumphering around! Oh, ha ha, he can phumpher all right! I’ve rarely seen such phumphering! If there was an Oscar for phumpering, Frederick Kerr would have won it in a walk! Sadly, however, this was his last role, and afterward he phumphered no longer!

The picture also offers an early role from George Zucco of Dr. Renault’s Secret fame, and a brief cameo from the kind of band that ends all its numbers with “Shave and a Haircut!” It’s delightful and frustrating in equal measure, and crudely made in that early British programmer way, but charming and summery and every bit as villagy as A Canterbury Tale! It shyly approaches the idea of addressing class issues, but aside from shots of “Perkins” looking overworked, it doesn’t much stress the challenges a rich layabout would face doing manual labour all day! Still, it’s a fun little number, and I give The Man From Toronto two old fashioned speedometers, as seen in close up during a crazy car chase scene! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Kongo! (1932)

Ha ha and houndstooth, it’s Burl, here to review a bit of pre-code nastiness that plays like Freaks meets Island of Lost Souls meets The Most Dangerous Game! It’s not quite the firecracker that combo makes it sound like - ha ha, it’s too stagey for that - but it frequently comes close! Anyway, it’s lurid, and the name of the picture is Kongo!

It’s a remake of West of Zanzibar, the Lon Chaney silent jungle extravaganza in which he plays a stratospherically nasty jungle kingpin known alternately as Flint and Dead Legs! Like The Penalty, which it strongly resembles, it was an opportunity for Chaney to play a paraplegic who never lets his disability get in the way of his psychotically sadistic behavior! But for the talkie version the filmmakers went for Walter Huston, both because he had already played the part of Dead Legs on stage, and because Chaney was, after all, dead! Huston is not quite as spectacularly demonstrative in the physical aspects of the part, but he does a fine job of crawling around on the floor, lifting himself into his wheelchair, or pulling himself up a knotted rope to his grimy roost in the ceiling!

I’ll back up a bit and give you the plot! Somewhere in deepest Africa, the crippled Flint has set up his palace of torment, where he keeps various sad-sacks in his thrall and from which he manipulates the local people by baffling their minds with parlour tricks! (Needless to say the movie is packed with colonialist racism, with the idea that the indigenous population would be so easily fooled and controlled being only the beginning of it!) His ragtag bunch includes a Portuguese firecracker played by Lupe Velez, a pair of dumbbells who wait on him, and eventually, as part of a long-game revenge plan later echoed in Oldboy, the convent-raised daughter of the man who originally caused his disability with a flurry of kicks to the back! This daughter, Ann, has been brought up in circumstances of absolute purity, and then at Flint’s behest is lured first into servitude in a Zanzibar brothel, and then to Flint’s compound where she is debased and diseased and kept prisoner!

Into this hellish situation stumbles a junkie doctor, Kingsland, whose addiction to some kind of jungle root is cured with swamp leeches! He becomes determined to rescue Ann (who is very well played by Virginia Bruce, it ought to be said), but matters are complicated by the arrival of her ostensible dad, who is also Flint’s greatest enemy and the real object of his vengeance plan! Certain native burial customs further heat up the situation, and a man called Fuzzy plays his part as well! Redemption and escape are in the cards, but hardly guaranteed!

Ha ha, this is a compelling picture if not the feel-good frivolity of the year! I suppose during the depression, before the Production Code came in anyway, movies could opt either to lift the spirits of audiences by presenting happy fantasies, or else make the real-life situation seem easier by presenting a twisted, corrupt, horrific vision of hell on earth! That’s the route taken by Kongo, ha ha! And while it certainly betrays its roots as a stage production, and doesn’t manage to convincingly present its jungle setting, the movie whips up a bleak atmosphere rarely matched in Hollywood and gets plenty of additional power from Huston’s relentlessly mean performance!

Kongo is imperfect, but still a little jungle horror gem, and I recommend giving it a look if you think you can take it! I give the picture three raggedy chimpanzee sidekicks!

Burl reviews Walpurgis Night! (1935)

Happy (Almost) Walpurgis Night, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, believe it or not Walpurgis Night is nearly upon us once again! It always seems to come up so fast, sneaking up as it does right after that other major spring holiday, The Night I Watch The Fog For The Millionth Time! But of course, the proper way to celebrate Walpurgis Night is to watch Walpurgis Night, and that’s precisely what I have done! Ha ha!

With its waltzy soundtrack and overheated dialogue, it’s just the kind of melodrama Careful modeled itself on, though without quite so many mountains as in that more recent picture! (Ha ha, there is a scene of people skiing in the mountains however, and a nifty ski lodge also!) It’s a love triangle plot, spiced up with some blackmail, some duplicity, and a good deal of misunderstanding! Ha ha, in 1930s Stockholm, apparently a world in which everyone is known by their titles, VP Borg works in his office with his beautiful but shy secretary Lena Bergstrom, who is in love with him! But VP Borg is married to the callow and inconstant Clary, who never wants to have children, and who has scheduled a secret assignation on Walpurgis Night!

Turns out her appointment is with "Dr." Smith, the country abortion doctor (the quotation marks are apparently part of his name), but this is successfully kept a secret both from her husband and from the gossip rags, for the moment at least! Meanwhile Lena quits working for Borg, but not before they have a nice time dancing on Walpurgis Night! Lena’s father, Editor Bergstrom, the editor of the Morning Post, catches wind of the date and believes it to be a full-blown lovemaking affair; and when evidence is found connecting Borg to "Dr." Smith, he jumps to what is for a fellow like Editor Bergstrom the worst possible conclusion! After Lena’s self-removal to the mountains comes a blackmail attempt on Clary, which climaxes in murder! Lena returns from her skiing trip and Editor Bergstrom acts, for a time, like a foolish hardhead; meanwhile VP Borg finds himself in such straits that he runs off and joins the Foreign Legion! Ha ha!

All of this takes up the better part of a year, and by the time the next Walpurgis Night rolls around, a convenient suicide - that staple of the extreme melodrama - has paved the way for a happy ending! And finally, you guessed it, the following spring it’s Walpurgis Night once again and circumstances are finally as the rather puritanical morality of this picture demands they ought to be!

Ingrid Bergman, whom we may remember from Casablanca, from Notorious, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, is somehow at once mousy and meek and radiantly beautiful as Lena! Victor Sjöström, the director who also acted, and is so well known for playing the old professor in Wild Strawberries, essays the role of the hyper-Lutheran Editor Bergstrom! And special note should be made of the bowtie-wearing freelance fellow who, in his weird and strange way, is the true hero of the picture! Ha ha!

So now, with the end of April upon us, Walpurgis Night is nearly here, and, though the picture of the same name is a little chonky and a bit on the artificially harsh side, as melodramas will be, it has the beautiful Bergman, the stern Sjöström, and other solid performances; and you know, after all, it’s more Swedish than a Swedish Fish! I give Walpurgis Night two and a half dropped pens!

Burl reviews Randy Rides Alone! (1934)

Ha ha and horseshoes, it’s Burl, here to review another elderly oater! This one stars none other than the Duke himself, but a young Duke, early in his ten-gallon career! It’s called Randy Rides Alone, and yes, the Duke essays the role of Randy, and yes, he frequently rides alone!

This picture has an unexpectedly crackerjack opener, ha ha! Randy is just arriving at a roadside rest stop called the Half-Way House, and he comes in the front door to find the barman and all the patrons completely massacred stone dead! A player piano is tinkling out a tune to the corpses, and mysterious eyes are watching through the cut-out eyes of a portrait! Whoa, spooky!

Randy finds a note on the wall from the culprit, while meanwhile, outside, the sheriff pulls up with his pal Matt the Mute and a full posse! Matt mutely hands the sheriff a note telling him and everybody else to be quiet too! Ha ha, so far not a word has been spoken in the picture, and it looks as though everyone will be communicating by notes the whole way through! Sadly this is not to be, however! That old familiar drawl starts up pretty quick, with the Duke protesting his innocence when he’s accused of perpetrating the massacre! Aii yai yai!

Well, from here things mosey along the expected trail, ha ha! There’s a gang, and a secret bad guy played by Gabby Hayes! It’s a duel identity thing, you see, and somehow the way Gabby disguises himself is to become mute, yet to leave notes under his real name, Marvin, in the same exact writing he uses in his guise as Matt the Mute to shove notes in people’s faces all day! I thought that was going to be the big clue, but nope! No one ever mentions the manifestly identical script!

Alberta Vaughan, whom you all probably know from Meet the Quince, is the new owner of the Half-Way House, which, along with the land upon which it sits, is the object of Gabby’s plunder! There’s also a bag of money, just so everybody knows how high the stakes are! And, ha ha, there’s a badguy hideout to rival the one in Ridin’ on a Rainbow!

As in Susanna Pass, explosives have been strewn all about, but an explosion only happens in a fairly hilarious scene at the end, in which the Duke shows how ruthless he can be! He just straight-up lures Gabby into a trap and then blows him up! Or at least arranges for him to be blown up! Ha ha, law enforcement was a slippery concept back then, as it still so often is today!

Anyway, it all goes by in about fifty-three minutes, so why not take a gander at this little oater? The opening is great, though I’d love to see what Edgar Ulmer or Fritz Lang would have done with it; and the Duke is, well, the Duke; the hideout is superb; and it’s nice to see Gabby Hayes in a role where he isn’t just hamboning around advising people to put a poltice on that! Although, ha ha, I like those roles too! Otherwise Randy Rides Alone is pretty standard el-cheapo fare, and I give it one and a half fake moustaches!

Burl reviews Design for Living! (1933)

Hi, Burl here to deliver a bit more of the old Burlitsch Touch! Ha ha, I’m not sure if there really is a Burlitsch Touch, but certainly we all know there’s a Lubitsch Touch, and that came of course from good old Ernst Lubitsch, who brought us pictures like Eternal Love, The Shop Around the Corner, and Heaven Can Wait!

All fine pictures in their way, but my very favourite of them all is Design for Living, the picture I want to write about today! Ha ha, this is a pre-Code picture, based on a play by Noël Coward, and is very contemporary in its themes! (They were still making pictures on these themes in the 1990s, though considerably relieved of the wit with which Design for Living is amply supplied – remember Threesomes for example, or Three of Hearts? Ha ha, you don’t? Well don’t worry about it!)

Of course this movie’s best and most relevant antecedent is Jules et Jim, but Design for Living neglects to include the tragic ending, and more importantly omits the implication of mental disturbance as a necessary prerequisite for enjoying a non-traditional romantic or sexual situation! In fact the movie celebrates the capacity for such relationships! Most unusual for 1933, or for almost any period I can think of! Ha ha!

The story kicks off on a train, where two sleeping fellows, Tom and George, are sketched by their compartment-mate, a commercial illustrator called Gilda! (That’s pronounced “Jilda,” by the way!) Tom and George (which is to say Fredric March and Gary Cooper) are old friends and roommates who share a bohemian atelier in Paris! Tom is a playwright, George a painter, and neither can as yet claim much success! Quickly a romantic triangle forms, and this is supplanted by a “gentleman’s agreement” whereby the happy-go-lucky Gilda, played by the delightful Miriam Hopkins, becomes the pair’s “art mother,” and guides them to success and acclaim!

But of course the gentleman’s agreement falls apart (“I, unfortunately, am no gentleman, ha ha!” Gilda laments), and matters are further complicated by a stuffed-shirt advertiser played by Edward Everett Horton! (He played these roles whenever a snippier version of Ralph Bellamy was required!) “Ha ha, immorality may be fun, but it isn’t fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals a day!” says Horton several times!

Anyway, the picture is very funny, and the script, which was by all reports, especially screenwriter Ben Hecht’s, vastly overhauled from the original Coward play, is a constant delight! All the performances are good, but I was especially taken with Coop, to tell you the truth! And can you imagine a movie featuring both Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn? Ha ha, friends, this is it!

Yes, this really is a great picture, and almost certainly my very favourite romantic comedy ever! I mean, When Harry Met Sally is fine and all, but this is the real deal! I give Design for Living four Eaglebauers, which is the highest number of Eaglebauers I have ever awarded a film! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Earthworm Tractors! (1936)

Ha ha, vroom, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about earthworm tractors! And what’s the picture called, you may ask? Of course it’s called Earthworm Tractors, because that’s what it’s all about! Yes, they made a whole movie about earthworm tractors, and along with all the earthworm tractors, they managed to stuff a little comedy and romance in there too, ha ha!

Strike that, a lot of comedy, both successful and merely attempted! The star is everybody’s pal, Joe E. Brown, whom we all know best from, let’s face it, The Comedy of Terrors! (And also from Some Like It Hot, ha ha!) In one notice I read, Brown was described as having  “a mouth like a satchel,” and that image stayed with me through the whole of Earthworm Tractors, with me thinking that at any moment Joe was going to pry open his enormous piehole and pull out some Western Union correspondence!

The plot involves Joe E. Brown as Alexander Botts, who, as he proclaims about ten thousand times, considers himself “a natural-born salesman!” But he’s just selling doohickeys, which impresses neither his putative fiancée nor his would-be father-in-law-to-be (who is played by that old familiar face Olin Howland, famed from Them! and The Blob)! Ha ha, so Botts goes off to find something bigger to sell, and settles on earthworm tractors! But because he’s a thoroughgoing idiot, the captains of industry who run the earthworm tractor factory are dubious about hiring him on, and the more so when Botts takes as his target the most notoriously unlikely earthworm tractor customer in the whole Midwest, Mr. Johnson!

Mr. Johnson is played by Guy Kibbee, whom we all know from Captain Blood, and my, he and Joe E. Brown were a pair of daring actors! The escapades of this picture require both thespians to ride an earthworm tractor as it trundles up, down and over all manner of obstacles, and the likelihood of one or both of them being bucked off and churned up beneath the tractor’s metal treads seems dreadfully high!

But soon Botts is romancing Mr. Johnson’s daughter and pulling his house around with an earthworm tractor (a comic highlight!) and generally causing all manner of earthworm tractor-based mayhem, while incessantly flapping his pouch-like anterior orifice! Ha ha! The climax involves Botts and Johnson riding an earthworm tractor through a blasting quarry, with all kinds of explosions and hair-raising near-misses on offer!

The stunt work in this picture is pretty impressive, especially for a little low-budget comedy! Joe E. Ross appears to have been quite a competent earthworm tractor pilot, too, and really a very gifted physical comedian! Ha ha, his salesman mannerisms, as when he strokes his lapels, are priceless! And many of the earthworm tractor gags are funny too! It’s a disposable goofshow of course, but I quite enjoyed Earthworm Tractors, and I’m going to give it three sinking tuffets!

Burl reviews The Devil Doll! (1936)

Eh bonjour, c’est Burl! Hà hà, the picture I wanted to tell you about today is The Devil Doll, which is to say the old Tod Browning one, not that spooky British cheapie from the early 60s! This one is typically eccentric for a Browning picture, featuring as it does a vengeance-crazed Devil’s Island escapee donning old lady drag in an absolutely batty plan to get satisfaction from the bankster blackguards who lied and killed to put him behind bars!

The murderous ex-banker is played by Lionel Barrymore, who was also in Browning’s Mark of the Vampire! Ha ha, his Hal Holbrookian voice is not very Parisian (which all the characters are supposed to be), but his performance is a cured-ham delight, particularly when he’s dressed up as old Mme. Mandelip!

Let me back up a bit: Barrymore’s character, Paul Lavond, busts out of Devil’s Island with a chum: an ailing old scientist with a bonkers idea to save the world from the hassles of overpopulation: shrink everybody to one-sixth their size! Ha ha, the idea is that there’s a lot more food for us! But the plan neglects to take into account the problems of raising and slaughtering, say, a cow as big as a double-decker bus! Or how to fish for a tuna the size of a small submarine! Ha ha, what about all the houses? The clothes? The machines? The cost involved in replacing all of this, even if smaller, would be astronomical! And who goes into the shrinking machine first, and who last? Wouldn’t there be gangs of stubborn giants roaming the world? Or is everyone compelled to be miniaturized? That sounds unworkable!

Ha ha, you can see I’ve put some thought into this! But this bizarre plan is only a small part of the picture – the real crux is Barrymore’s revenge against the confederacy of bunces he blames (correctly) for ruining his life! When he sees that the old scientist can create doll people controllable by mental impulses, he gets an idea that’s only slightly less bonkers: assume the persona of Mme. Mandelip, an old lady who makes hyper-realistic dolls; sell a doll person to his enemies, then have the doll person poison the enemy during the night! Robert Greig from Tower of London plays the chief enemy, and he gets a poking whilst in his bed – a poking from which he’ll never recover!

Meanwhile there’s drama with the now-deceased scientist’s wife, who is a sort of cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Igor, and who wants Barrymore to help continue her husband’s kookywork! Barrymore, however, only wants revenge, and then he’ll have nothing to do with miniaturizing the world! And of course there’s Barrymore’s daughter, played by Maureen O’Sullivan from Too Scared to Scream, and who believes her father to have been a crook and a murderer and hates him for it; and her romance with a penurious cab driver! There’s a marvelously melodramatic ending to cap it all!

That’s a lot packed into a short running time, and, perhaps as a result of this there’s a lot of weird atmosphere in the movie; very indistinct, though! Hard to pin down! But one thing worth pointing out are the excellent special effects, and in particular the amazing oversized sets built to show the homunculi in close-ups! Wow, ha ha! Maybe the movie could have used a few cigar-chomping midgets disguised as babies, but you could say that about most movies! I give The Devil Doll three stricken bankers!

Burl reviews You Can't Cheat An Honest Man! (1939)

Hello all you chumps! Ha ha, I don’t really mean to call you chumps – I’m just channeling the spirit of W.C. Fields! Because it occurred to me recently that there’s a big gap in my classic comedy watching experience – a big gap shaped just like Fields! Aside from It’s A Gift, I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of his movies and routines! And so it was that I decided it would be good to watch one of his later pictures, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man!

Fields had a pretend feud going with famed radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and more particularly with Bergen’s little pal Charlie McCarthy! This movie was largely a framework within which to carry that feud over to the motion picture medium, and apparently it paid solid dividends at the box office! Though, ha ha, the word is that Fields disliked making the picture, and didn’t get along with credited director George Marshall!

Here, Fields is Larson E. Whipsnade, a circus owner in debt up to his lampshade! He’s in constant conflict with two of his star attractions, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy! Ha ha, some of the Bergen-McCarthy scenes, especially a sequence in which Fields feeds the little dummy to the alligators, give off a distinct Dead of Night vibe, as we are shown in no uncertain terms that Charlie is alive, sentient and capable of independent locomotion! It’s pretty creepy, especially if you’ve seen as many living-dummy movies as ol’ Burl has, ha ha!

To the extent that the movie provides a plot, it’s that Larson’s daughter, who worries about her father’s financial well-being (as well she should, ha ha!), falls in love with Edgar Bergen, and by extension Charlie McCarthy too, I suppose, but agrees to marry the rich dewberry Roger Bel-Goode instead! But then Larson arrives at the Bel-Goode mansion in a chariot, terrifies the lady of the house with all his talk of snakes, and then engages in a downright hilarious ping-pong game with a Frenchman! The money problems are not resolved, but Larson and his daughter are chased out of the house for a reuniting (grudging on Larson’s part) with Bergen and his hated manikin!

It’s true that this picture has a stodgy vaudevillian feel to it, with skits instead of scenes and probably too much Bergen and McCarthy! But I’m not overly familiar with the famed duo’s routines, so I didn’t mind that! Fields is funnier though, and I wished there was more of him! I chuckled quite a bit, especially when Bel-Goodie père calls Larson a pharisee, a pecksniff and an egregious tartuffle! Ha ha, Roger is then told by the tomato-nosed con man that “if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, you sir are just that thing!”

It’s not considered on of W. C. Fields’s greatest works I suppose, but I thought it was a pretty funny picture, and I’m going to give You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man two and a half ca-nables! 

Burl reviews Love on the Run! (1936)

Well a ha ha and a jolly hello, my screwball pals! Here I am with another movie review for you, this time of a hoary old picture called Love on the Run! Ha ha, even reading the back of the VHS box I could tell this was a picture that had been made in the wake of It Happened One Night, with the addition of some would-be Hitchcockian cloak-and-dagger!

Clark Gable, well known from his performance in Soldier of Fortune, plays good old Mike Anthony, a newspaper reporter on assignment in England! He’s bunking for some reason with his quasi-pal and top journalistic rival Barney Pells, and gets hornswoggled into covering the society wedding of poor little rich girl Sally Parker, played by the lovely Joan “The Unknown” Crawford!

Through a series of unlikely events, which are the only sort of events you’ll find in this picture, Mike and Sally don big shapeless flight suits and take off in a stolen experimental aircraft bound for the Continent! Barney Pells, hungry for his own big scoop, trails along in a Terminator-like pursuit! And the owners of the plane, it turns out, are some species of spy; ha ha, Bolsheviks no doubt! They’re all after a particularly weak McGuffin, a map which gets mentioned maybe three times through the picture!

The picture has some great patter from Gable and Crawford and from Franchot Tone (Mr. Crawford at the time) in the role of Barney Pells! But the whole thing is such a wisp of a scrap of a titchy-mitchy-fitch of a thing that, charming as it frequently is, it never gains any traction! There’s a scene in the middle in which our pair of runaways find themselves at a palace, possibly Versailles, where they break in and change into the clothes they find there! Well, of course the security guard, played by Donald “Mark of the Vampire” Meek, takes Gable for the Sun King himself and Crawford for his consort, and they all do a little dance that stops the movie cold!

There’s romance and also a series of outrages perpetrated against the gullible Pells, and occasionally the cod-Hitchcock elements assert themselves, but poorly! I’d say the picture is about 65% It Happened One Night and the rest is trying to be The 39 Steps, and it doesn’t come near to either of them! But it’s not without wit, and the stars have charm, and it’s hardly a total loss! The movie was directed by Woody “One Take” Van Dyke, who of course also brought us Another Thin Man, and the job he does here is professional but rather bland!

It’s a poufy entertainment and nothing more, but if it comes on The Old Movie Channel and you’ve got nothing pressing to do, you might as well sit back and watch it! I give Love on the Run two invisible dogs!

Burl reviews Twentieth Century! (1934)

By jimbus and by goo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to look at a classic picture made long ago by one of cinema’s grand innovators, Howard Hawks! I’m tempted to say that Twentieth Century is an atypical Hawks picture, but the man was so incredibly versatile – he took successful stabs at action, screwball comedy, horror/sci-fi, war movies, films noir and westerns, after all – that I’m not so sure there is any such thing as an atypical Hawks picture!

This one is a comedy, though not particularly screwball! It’s a pretty good satire of showbiz personalities, though, and a train picture on top of that! Ha ha, I sure do love a good train picture! It starts with the great and gorgeous Carole Lombard playing Plotka, a would-be actress working on her first Broadway play! The director is the moody and tyrannical Oscar Jaffe, played by le grand jambon John Barrymore; Jaffe is in a Svengaliish frame of mind, and changes Plotka’s name to Lily Garland before first seducing her and then making her a big star!

Ha ha, cut to three years later when Jaffe and Lily are still an item, and have done three hit plays together, but are at each other’s throats! Jaffe is a terrible control freak and manipulator, and poor Lily is tired of it! So off she goes to Hollywood and becomes a big movie star there! We move forward in time again, and now Jaffe’s star has fallen, and he has to escape creditors in Chicago by donning whiskers and talking like Colonel Sanders! Ha ha, it’s great!

The rest of the movie takes place on the titular train, and I do admit that I’d assumed the whole picture took place on the train! So for a while there, through the first half, as much as I was enjoying it all, I was sort of wondering “Ha ha, where’s the train?” But don’t worry, because there’s plenty of train action! It’s packed with characters too, like the nutty evangelist, the goofy acting troupe and so forth! And of course there’s a Bellamy, which is to say a milquetoast pretender to the leading lady’s affections, who doesn’t stand a chance when set against the outrageous antics of the male star! Ha ha, he’s not actually played by Ralph Bellamy here, but close enough!

It’s a funny movie with that rip-roaring Hawksian verve and a hee-larious central performance from Barrymore! And it’s a train movie, like Human Desire, and you know how much I love those! There are some great supporting actors too, like Edgar Kennedy who was in Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher, George Reed, who was in Strange Illusion, and Charles Lane, who had a long career and was in everything! Ha ha!

It’s a terrific picture, and I recommend you have a look at it when you get a chance! I’m going to give Twentieth Century three and a half iron doors!

Burl reviews Madam Satan! (1930)

From out of the clouds appears a huge, cigar-shaped aircraft – it’s Burl, riding aloft a dirigible, here to review a movie for you! Ha ha, what a fanciful scenario! And yet it’s somewhat less fantastical than the climax of this olde-tyme domestic comedy-drama!

It’s called Madam Satan, and it’s a pre-Code comedy of manners from none other than Cecil B. De Mille! I was very excited to watch it, because, you know, DIRIGIBLE MOVIE! I love those! Ha ha, I’m a huge fan of Frank Capra’s Dirigible, for example, a rousing adventure I’ll review here soon! But De Mille of course is legendary for his spectacle and excess, so naturally I thought “Ha ha, C.B. De Mille + dirigible = delirious cinematic bliss!”

It didn’t quite turn out that way! The movie is nearly two hours long, and more than half of that is generally dreary, unfunny, wildly overextended bedroom farce of the sort where people race in and out of doors, hide in closets and lurk beneath satiny bedclothes! It seems there’s a rich lady, Angela, whose husband Bob, played by Reginald Denny from My Favorite Brunette, is fooling around with a chorus girl named, naturally, Trixie! Bob’s dipsomaniacal pal Jimmy, played by the great Roland Young, gets mixed up in this triangle when all he’s trying to do is help out! Eventually Jimmy, who is a rich industrialist, throws a crazy costume party on a blimp, and all the confusions are first greatly amplified and later, in the midst of a proto-Hindenburg disaster (well, nearly!), are sort of worked out!

Ha ha! I know, it sounds great! And parts of it are great, but not nearly enough! I don’t know, maybe my expectations were just too high, because, you know, DIRIGIBLE MOVIE! My main complaint is this: Bob, who is supposed to be a put-upon husband, perhaps a bit of a rascal but ultimately decent, like some upper-crust Homer Simpson, is in fact a fool, a bounder, a twister and a cad! He’s totally unsympathetic, and why his wife wants so desperately to reclaim him was a complete mystery to me! Angela, on the other hand, is a decent sort, but everyone in the movie, including herself, concludes that she’s ultimately to blame for her husband’s houndogging ways!

Of course this is a movie made in 1930, so the attitudes were a little different, but it’s still irritating simply because it doesn’t make any sense as human behaviour of any period! Luckily as a balm to all this we have a touch of the De Mille spectacular, and of course the insane costumes on board the dirigible! The dirigible runs into trouble when lightning strikes it and it tears loose of the mooring mast, but this was seven years before the Hindenburg disaster, so there’s no visual reference to that event, except accidentally! The greatest part of the picture is when all the weirdly-costumed guests parachute out of the doomed craft and land in strange and undignified places!

There’s plenty to like in this movie I suppose, but it really isn’t all that good! There’s a fantastic cameo from The Spirit of Electricity, some ribald pre-Code shenanigans and the mugging of Roland Young, the novelty of Lillian Roth from Alice, Sweet Alice in the role of Trixie, as well as a few other interesting performances; but the tepid farce and the irritating character Bob, and the fact that the dirigible interior seems like nothing but a ballroom set dressed up with a few girder-like structures here and there, as though in a dirigible you can ride around in the whole thing rather than just a gondola below, take it down quite a few pegs! I give Madam Satan just two bespangled masks!

Burl reviews Terror of Tiny Town! (1938)

Hi, Burl here to review a very short movie! Ha ha, it runs barely more than an hour! I’m talking of course about Terror of Tiny Town, a Western made with an all-little people cast! As you can see from the poster, it is “rated comedy,” but in fact it’s a fairly straight-ahead Western action-drama!

Of course the movie is notorious in the exploitation field, more so even than the Werner Herzog movie Even Dwarves Started Small, in which I believe the cast was not only small-sized but hypnotized! But the movie doesn’t do much with the height-deficiencies of its actors, and in fact it’s easy to forget, or at least not fixate on, the shortness of the cowpokes and just get caught up in the wainscoting-high drama!

Ha ha, it seems that there’s a goodly amount of rustlin’ going on around Tiny Town, and two ranching families are each convinced the other is behind it! Buck Lawson, who wears a brilliantly white hat and a dust-repellant ice cream suit, is the good guy, and his dad owns the ranch; Nancy Preston is the young lady newcomer to town whose uncle Tex runs another big ranch! Well, that nasty Bat Haines is behind it all, rustling the cattle and setting the two families against one another!

Buck and Nancy carry on a Romeo/Juliet relationship for a while before Bat opts to raise the stakes by shooting Tex and pinning the crime on Buck! Ha ha! But of course everything eventually gets sorted with the help of a few well-placed sticks of dynamite!

Sure, there are a few midget gags in this movie, like the comedy relief cook who is terrorized by a cunning duck, and who walks in and out of his cupboards like they were closets! And there’s a fellow who guzzles down snifters of beer as big as his head! And the midget who sings basso profundo! (There’s a lot of singing in this movie – the whole town gets to warbling at the drop of a ten-gallon hat!) And, yes, one guy does walk into a saloon by trundling under the swinging doors! But the movie isn’t really a comedy unless you’re one of those people who simply point and laugh whenever you see a little person, and if so, ha ha, you’re a jerk!

The wee folks ride and shoot and fight just fine, though they’re not very good actors! A few of the action scenes are surprisingly exciting, and at one point a penguin shows up! On the whole, this is not much different than the typical Monogram-type Westerns of the period, and if you like those, you should enjoy this one too! And if the look of the film is familiar to you, it’s because it was shot by the same cinematographer as Cosmo Jones: Crime Smasher! Ha ha, I give Terror of Tiny Town two bricks and a short refrigerator!

Burl reviews The Speed Reporter! (1936)

Hi, Burl here with another dusty, creaky old B movie for you! This one is called The Speed Reporter, and it tells the story of a reporter so devoted to getting his story that he’ll face any danger at top speed and engage in almost any gymnastics you can think of to get it!

I’ll tell you this right up front: I love a good newspaper movie! This picture comes from the golden age of them, the same general era that produced The Front Page and His Girl Friday and even Citizen Kane! And even a bad newspaper movie has the power to entertain a broadsheet-minded fellow like ol’ Burl, ha ha!

I guess The Speed Reporter would qualify as a bad movie, more or less! The star of the picture, Richard Talmadge, was originally a tumbler by profession, and the movie makes a lot of room to show off his athletic skills, of that there is no doubt! But he’s got a weedy voice, of the sort we hear from Neil Sedaka in Playgirl Killer if you remember that movie; and a decided inability to deliver the roguish charm with which his poorly-written lines are meant to be laden!

But Talmadge sure can jump around! In accordance with almost every other role he played in his career, his character here is named Dick, and he works at the city desk of a big-city newspaper! His designation as a speed reporter is unmentioned but nevertheless well-earned, for the instant he hears about a possible story, he’s jumping out a window and onto the top of a passing truck in hot pursuit!

The story in this case involves a morality squad set up to police the city’s gangsters, but the squad has been set up by the gangsters themselves, with a milquetoast puppet executive installed as the head of the organization! Somehow the gangsters figure this will allow them to operate with impunity, but they’re not counting on Dick’s speed reporting!

Ha ha, Talmadge does some pretty impressive stunts, and he’ll never leave a room by the door if there’s a window closer by! And the movie is filled with these crazy, flailing fistfights between the indomitable newshound and various thugs and nogoodniks! Ha ha, the speed reporter will throw wild roundhouses, then flip his opponents over desks and chairs! Eventually the bad guys are rounded up and the speed reporter gets his scoop and a special bonus from the crusty editor so he can marry his special gal!

As I mentioned, this is not an especially good movie, but it sure manages to entertain! I’ll give it two amazing futuristic phone booths and recommend you give it a look!   

Burl reviews Port of Missing Girls! (1938)

Hi, Burl here with another old curio of a motion picture for you! This one is called Port of Missing Girls, and it packs a fair bit of incident and action into its brief sixty-two minute running time! This is a classic bottom-half-of-the-bill movie, and sometimes that’s just what you want!

The story begins in New York, somewhere near some stock footage of Times Square, where, at a swingin’ club called Rossi’s, the featured attraction Miss Della Mason is about to warble a tune! But mob shenanigans are afoot, and a killer sneaks into Della’s dressing room and forces her to call in her boss, and then there’s a gundown! Well, poor innocent Della is implicated in the setup, and following an olde-tyme car chase, she has to jump a freighter for parts unknown!

On the face of things she’s picked the worst ship possible to stow away on, because the ferocious captain of the vessel is none other than notorious woman-hater Josiah Storm, known to have despised ladies ever since his wife packed up their baby and left him for another man lo these twenty years! But he’s played by the great Harry Carey, and so you know he’s just an old softie underneath! The steamer makes its way to the South Seas, and, as Della and radio operator Jim fall slowly in love, the captain decides to drop her off at the Port of Missing Girls, an island or peninsular or at least isthmic community which might be Hong Kong or might be Macao or might be some totally invented place, but in any case is where the fugitive girls of the world have gathered to entertain grumpy tourists!

The house mother of this strange nightclub is Minnie, and I do have to admit, with my twenty-first century cynicism, that the place seemed more like a House of Ill Repute than it did a nightclub, and Minnie its Madam! Be that as it may, it also makes Port of Missing Girls a part of that subgenre I love so well, the International Gathering Place of Fugitive Expatriates genre! Lots of great movies touch on that, from Casablanca to The Wages of Fear to Naked Lunch, and even a hucklebuck like Soldier of Fortune uses this trope to a degree, and whatever the movie it’s always welcome as far as ol’ Burl is concerned! An extra bonus in this picture is an appearance from the sassy and gorgeous Betty Compson from The Docks of New York, who plays another missing girl named simply Chicago!

Some vague intrigue involving a white Chinese general and a dastardly Frenchman is whipped up while the ship is in port, and Della risks her newfound freedom to save Captain Storm, Jim and the rest of the boys from a legion of coolies in rice picking hats! Ha ha, the climax of the picture is an enormous popgun battle on the deck of the ship, with the screen almost completely obscured by great drifts of revolver smoke!

It’s an entertaining little movie, though it has all the strange quirks of its time! The Chinese are of course jabbering hordes, and the ship’s cook, Misery, is played as a fearful, foot-shuffling idiot by a low-rent Mantan Moreland pretender named Snowflake! He does get a few good moments in the climactic battle, hiding in a funnel and bopping coolies on the head with his frying pan! Ha ha, racial sensitivity, thy name is emphatically not Port of Missing Girls!

Otherwise it was an enjoyable little daffodil, and although it might have tried harder with the exotic South Seas atmosphere, I give it two and a half cables from Washington!     

Burl reviews Tower of London! (1939)

Hi, Burl here with a bit of history for you! I don’t think it’s what you’d call very accurate history, but it sure is exciting and scary! Ha ha, when you’ve got Boris Karloff playing a hulking, club-footed executioner named Mord, you know it’s going to be a journey into fright!

The picture’s called Tower of London, and though it gets called a horror movie a lot, and is filled with horror stars, and is directed by Rowland V. Lee, a guy best known, inasmuch as he’s known at all, for his horror movies, I’d still say it sits somewhere in the netherworld between spookshow and straight historical drama! But I guess classifying the movie isn’t  the most important thing now, is it!

It’s the story of Richard III’s cruel and heartless path to the throne of England! Ha ha, he keeps a wee dollhouse with figures representing all those between him and the crown, and every time he manages to get rid of one, he tosses their doll into the fire! As this takes him several years, I had to wonder that apparently no one, a servant dusting the room for instance, or maybe one of his wives, ever found his macabre and rather incriminating little display!

The one-by-one nature of his fatal userptions gives it a bit of a slasher move aspect too, like Prom Night or something, which is a little bit of extra fun for those of us who know that genre! And the aforementioned great cast of horror stars is yet another marvelous bonus! Ha ha, we get Basil Rathbone, well known from The Scarlet Claw and the other Holmes adventures, as Richard the Crookback, Vincent Price from Dead Heat as his ineffectual drunkard brother Clarence, Leo G. Carroll from Tarantula as a royal adviser and of course Karloff, from Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, as the terrifying, completely fictional Mord the Dragfoot who is totally and creepily dedicated to his humpbacked master Dick the Third! The rest of the cast is pretty good too!

There’s some good gruesome stuff in this picture! There’s a head-chopping, which of course was a very popular activity of the day, and some scenes in Karloff’s torture chamber, with an iron maiden and a rack and other terrible items; and then of course there’s the scene where Clarence and Richard get into a drinking contest and of course, as we know from Shakespeare's play, Clarence ends up in a butt of his favourite Malmsey! Ha ha, how much is a butt, you might be wondering? It’s about three hogsheads! Plenty enough to drown in, anyway! Poor Clarence!

Of course Richard and Mord get their comeuppance on the battlefield, but it’s a long road of murder and torture and intrigue and deceit before then! It all looks great, with that wonderful 30s Universal gleam and some pretty lush sets! It’s a fine picture for sure, and I’d be so bold as to give it three and a half V.I.P. booths!