Thankful for YouTube

Film: Thunderbolt
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I’ve mentioned before the usefulness of YouTube when it comes to tracking down some obscure films. Thunderbolt is one that has appeared on my personal database as “unfindable” since about the time I started this project. I was extremely pleased, one might even say thankful, to find it on YouTube this morning. There’s something really interesting about pre-Code talkies, and Thunderbolt is one of the first.

Make no mistake here; this is absolutely a pre-Code crime drama that turns on the romance that is forced into it by the evident necessity of needing a romance in every film of the time. Because this is such an early talkie, a lot of the clichés that play into the genre certainly got part of their start here, at least in terms of the talkies.Thunderbold hits all the notes: unrepentant criminals, jailhouse confessions, a good girl gone bad, secret romance, and even a police captain who is trying really hard to sound like what Edward G. Robinson sounded like in his early talkies. Sure, there’s a lot of cliché here, but there’s a lot to like as well.

Payback's a Bitch

Film: The Last Command
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There’s a hefty little subgenre of films about the making of films. There may be some that exist before The Last Command from 1928, but I’m not aware of any (although I’m certain that should they exist, I’ll be corrected in the comments below). The Last Command uses the movie industry as an actual plot point—this is a movie that wouldn’t work as it does without the movie industry, which serves as something like a framing story for the flashback that contains the bulk of the actual story here. It also contains one of Emil Jannings’s performances from this year, one or both of which won the first-ever Best Actor Oscar.

In the early days, directors, actors, and actresses were often nominated for multiple performances. In fact, there were four performances nominated for Best Actor for 1928 but only two actors; Emil Jannings was nominated for two and Richard Barthelmess was nominated for the other two. It’s not unlikely that his work in The Last Command was what secured the win for Jannings.

Lust in the Dust

Film: Duel in the Sun
Format: DVD from Mt. Morris Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Anyone who has worked on a group project knows that there’s often a benefit to having the suggestions of other people. Sometimes, though, other people turn out to be much more of a hindrance than a help. In the case of Duel in the Sun, King Vidor is give the sole directorial credit, but there are six uncredited directors on this film. Six. I can only imagine that at some level, this led to a “too many cooks” situation.

This is exacerbated, at least for me, by the fact that this film stars Jennifer Jones, who tends to leave me cold. This is balanced by it also featuring Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. Still, I specifically watched this because Jones was nominated for Best Actress for this film, so she was the main reason I spent time with Duel in the Sun in the first place.

Legionnaire's Disease

Film: Morocco
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

There are plenty of conceits in older films that one learns to deal with, with enough of the films watched. One learns, for instance, that comedy tends toward the physical (which is fine) and that drama tends to mean melodrama. Directors and the talent hadn’t yet learned the art of being subtle with anything. The farther away we get from the silent era, the less this becomes a problem. I can deal with most of these conceits. The one I’ve never really been able to handle is the idea that many a director and moviegoer in the 1930s thought Marlene Dietrich could sing. She couldn’t, and so any film that involves multiple Marlene Dietrich torch songs is alternately comedic and painful for me. That’s what we’re signing up for with Morocco; Dietrich plays a vaudeville singer.

So strap in, because we’re getting a pair of Dietrich numbers before the first thirty minutes are up. We travel by map to exotic Morocco, where Amy Jolly (Dietrich) has arrived in Morocco to perform at a local club for the wealthy residents as well as the common troops of the local Foreign Legion regiment. She is accosted off the boat by a man named La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou), but Amy Jolly is far too jaded to be interested in some fancy boy who tries to pick her up at the docks. As it happens, as Amy arrives, the legionnaires also return, one of those being a man named Tom Brown (Gary Cooper).

Herr Kurtz's Legacy

Film: Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

If you took German at Wheaton North in the 1980s, you could guarantee that once a year he’d show you Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). I’m not sure why he showed us this film other than the fact that it was in German and available. Honestly, I’d have preferred to have watched Das Boot. But no matter.

Der Blaue Engel tells the story of Professor Doktor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), a professor at the local preparatory school. He discovers at the beginning of the film that his students (who seem to be of disturbingly varying age) are almost to a man obsessed with a woman named Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a performer at the local seedy cabaret club, Der Blaue Engel. He goes to the club that night and finds himself entranced.

It’s worth noting at this point that for the current age, Marlene Dietrich is a bit zaftig. However, she’s downright skinny compared with most of the women on stage. Some of them are a bit plump and a couple of them are essentially barrel-shaped. In this group, she’s anorexic.

Regardless, Rath goes back the next night, again ostensibly to track down his misbehaving students who should be concentrating more on their studies. But in reality, he’s there to see Lola Lola. We find out that she’s a bit more than a just a cabaret performer when a ship captain attempts to buy her services for the evening. Rath, however, stands in the way of this and defends Lola’s honor. Everyone else in the cabaret is a bit entranced by the professor, and makes him something of a hero. Kiepert, the show magician (Kurt Gerron) takes Rath and puts him in the reserved box, and Lola sings “Falling in Love Again” to him.

As it turns out, Rath spends the night with Lola, and is late for class the next day. He gets dressed down by his boss and becomes a brief laughing stock for his students before he essentially walks out of the job, goes back to Lola, and proposes. She accepts, and the two are married. He immediately puts his foot down on the sale of her postcards (and the sale of everything else) while he has money. But the money runs out, and so does his will to protect Lola from the seamier sides of things. Eventually, he is forced to join the show as a clown, a huge step down from his former position of importance and respect. Worse yet, the troupe is returning to his home town and Der Blaue Engel. Worse still, Lola has grown tired of him, and is now taking up with a new man.

Der Blaue Engel is a tragedy in the classic sense—we have a man of power and position who falls to extreme depths by the end of the film, becoming essentially a degraded version of himself and a parody of his former stature because of a fatal flaw. In this case, it’s a combination of his pride and his blind love for Lola, who eventually becomes disgusted with the man that she married.

There are a lot of noteworthy moments in the film. The first time that Rath is backstage, for instance, he continually runs into the current clown, a man who never speaks and looks completely emotionless and numb. By the end of the film, this self-important professor is in the same position, playing the same role, giving us a nice foreshadowing for what is to come. Additionally, at the reception of the wedding, the magician performs a trick where he causes eggs to appear out of thin air. Lola begins clucking and the deliriously happy Rath begins crowing like a rooster. Toward the end of the film, on stage, the trick is repeated, and Rath is forced to repeat his rooster crow in front of his former colleagues and townspeople, a moment of almost complete degradation and humiliation.

Given that this film hits Shakespearean depths of tragedy by the end, I have to wonder what the hell Herr Kurtz was thinking when he put this in front of a bunch of 14-year-old freshmen every year. I mean, Das Boot isn’t any less depressing, but at least there’s some explosions.

Regardless, this is a great film and regarded as such for a reason. It’s a tremendous performance from Jannings, who is the real star. It’s also a literal star-making performance for Dietrich, who was an unknown before this film.

It’s also an interesting piece of film history for a couple of reasons. The film was simultaneously shot in both English and German (I watched the German—Herr Kurtz would want it that way). It’s also a bridge from the early silent German expressionist dramas into the world of talkies. There’s a bit of expressionist influence here, seen mostly in the street exteriors outside the nightclub. In biological terms, this film is a transitional fossil to a more modern form.

Why to watch Der Blaue Engel: One of the great dramas of the early days of film.
Why not to watch: It’s really depressing.

Train in Vain

Film: Shanghai Express
Format: VHS from Genoa Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

There was a huge mystique around Marlene Dietrich in the early days of talkies. Part of this was undoubtedly her beauty, and part of this was her groovy accent. Shanghai Express puts both of these qualities to use, giving us a film that borders on 1930s racism and cultural insensitivity, mystery, war, and romance, as well as taking place almost entirely on a train and in train stations.

Captain Harvey (Clive Brook) is a medical doctor being sent to Shanghai by train to perform a delicate operation. He learns as he boards the train that the notorious Shanghai Lily (Dietrich) is on the train with him, but the name means nothing to him. Lily is known as a “coaster,” or a woman who lives by her wits on the China coast. In other words, she’s a courtesan. As it turns out, though, Harvey does know Lily, but knows her by another name. It seems they were something of an item about five years previous. She did something (it’s never said exactly what, although it’s hinted that she may have pretended to be with another man) to test him, and instead of confront her, he left. And this, plus many, many men, turned her into what she is—still beautiful, but now mercenary and not above selling her affections for some comfort.

Also on the train are a number of passengers including a German invalid who also smuggles heroin (Gustav von Seyffertitz), an inveterate gambler (Eugene Pallette), a dowdy woman who runs a boarding house (Louise Closser Hale), a stuffy preacher (Lawrence Grant), a Chinese courtesan who may or may not be traveling with Lily (Anna May Wong), A half-Chinese man of dubious past (Warner Oland), and a few others.

We learn pretty quickly that China is in the middle of a civil war. The train gets stopped at one point to search for a rebel agent, and he is removed from the train. Surrounding this incident is various levels of outrage from the passengers when they realize that the notorious Shanghai Lily is on the train with them. And, of course, Harvey deals with the fact that he might still be in love with Lily and she with him.

Then things take a turn for the dangerous. It turns out that the half-Chinese man is actually a higher-up in the rebel army, and he takes over the train and forces it to stop. The man removed from the train earlier was important to him, and he wants to arrange a trade for someone of equal value to the Chinese government. He also would like to spend a little time in Lily’s company, and asks her to come with him when his current mission is complete. She refuses, since she is undergoing something of a crisis of faith with the sudden return of Harvey in her life, a crisis both aided and damaged by the presence of the clergyman.

And, it turns out that Captain Harvey is just the man he is looking for. Harvey’s affront in coming to Lily’s defense at the man’s advances put Harvey in terrible danger, although he doesn’t know it. And to save him, Lily agrees to leave with him despite her rekindled affection for Harvey.

It’s actually a pretty good set-up. The danger is real, the reactions of the people are real, and Harvey is just enough of a stick-in-the-mud traditional upper crust Brit to not want to give in to his feelings for Lily. He’s been wronged by her, and he refuses to trust her anymore no matter what he is told, and this stubbornness is what turns the entire second half of the film. While it’s a bit predictable, it also tries for believable in these two characters and the way they are portrayed to us throughout the film.

But that’s really it. This is high melodrama in a lot of respects, the villain needing only to twist a mustache or two to get that Snidely Whiplash feel complete. More distressing is the fact that virtually everyone on the train has the survival instincts of a brain-addled lemming near a tall cliff. When the train is stopped by the rebels, for instance, it’s stopped thanks to a large machine gun that fires off for a good minute. Everyone we see on the train just keeps walking around like they’re listening to thunder and not like dozens of pieces of hot lead could come rattling through the windows at any moment.

My biggest problem, though, is that I just don’t buy the romance. Dietrich is gorgeous, if a bit overdressed, while Clive Brook is puffy, a bit doughy, and completely bland. He’s also a good bit older than she is. Dietrich was 31 when she made the film and Brook was well on his way to 50, meaning that in terms of characters, he was close a good third older than she was when their love affair started. The whole May-December thing probably played more in older films, or was at least a lot more common, and I could accept the idea that the 14-15 year difference here was relatively unimportant. And perhaps it is. But Captain Harvey is such a stick-in-the-mud, such a fussbudget, such a bland nothing, that I can’t see the vivacious Shanghai Lily seeing him for anything but another meal ticket and another sucker.

It took me awhile to find an actual copy of this film instead of internet video, and now I sort of wonder why I bothered. It’s interesting for what it is, but what it is isn’t that much.

Why to watch Shanghai Express: Marlene Dietrich at her sultry, foreign best.
Why not to watch: The romance is hard to buy.