PBR: Regeneration (1915)

Rosemarie closes out Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount Theater.

Before the last in the series of Silent Crime Spree films unspooled our host and organist Jim Riggs reminded us about the early 20th century settlement movement, which established houses in poor areas where middle class volunteers lived among recently arrived immigrants, assisting with social services and education. A settlement house on New York’s Lower East Side provided the focal point of our movie: Regeneration, directed by Raoul Walsh.

The story is taken from My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare, which tells the story of his childhood on the mean streets of New York. In the film, three actors play the part of Owen, who loses his mother at the age of 10 and becomes an orphan taken into the neglectful care of the battling neighbors across the hall. Owen at 17 doesn’t have much going for him except a quick way with his fists that lands him where we find him at 25, leader of a gang that rules their small patch of the neighborhood.

Into that rough society comes settlement worker Mamie Rose. Her beauty and kindness appeal to Owen’s better nature. She teaches him to read and under her tutelage he gives up his gangster ways. If there’s anything we learn from crime movies, though, is that you can’t escape your past. Owen’s friend Skinny stabs a cop and needs a place to hide out. Owen obliges and things go downhill from there.

The painted sets and harshly lit interiors are reminders the film is almost 100 years old. Yet some of its images are timeless: young Owen sitting alone in a window watching a hearse carry his mother pull way, children dressed in rags playing in the dirty tenement staircase, and a Madonna-like mother cradling her infant on the steps of a church.

Too sad? I agree. I respect Regeneration for what it does, namely enlivening a hortatory memoir with some well-executed action. Like when the cornered Skinny, after having attempted to violate Mamie Rose’s honor and shooting her in the process, tries to escape by sliding down a clothesline strung high between two apartment buildings. Owen, taking to heart Mamie’s plea to leave vengeance to the Lord, hesitates in pursuing the scoundrel. No such qualms for another young man who loved Mamie Rose from afar. He pulls out a gun and blasts Speedy, sending him plummeting to a messy death. Now that’s how you end a crime spree.

Next up on Silent Movie Mondays, starting in April: films about New York. I can’t wait.

Editor’s note: Rosemarie also participated in Donna Moore’s Ramones flash fiction challenge. Her story is here.

PBR: Underworld (1927) & Bouchercon, Recapped Redux

Rosemarie continues to attend the Silent Crime Spree at the Paramount Theater in my absence.

At the top of the stairs stands a beautiful young woman in a feather-trimmed coat. A few dark curls peek out from under her cloche. At the foot of the stairs a young man sweeps the barroom floor. He’s unshaven, dirty, maybe a little drunk. As the woman adjusts her coat a feather escapes, floating downward. The man catches it in his palm, regards it with wonder. Did it fall from the wings of an angel?

This romantic moment in Underworld is one of only a few director Josef von Sternberg allows between Feathers McCoy (Evelyn Brent), gangster Bull Weed’s moll, and Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a down-and-outer whom Bull turns into his elegant right hand man. In no time Bull is calling him Professor and setting him up in a hideout full of books with a secret door to where the hooch is stashed.

While drawn to each other with the inevitability of fate the pair are loyal to Bull, leading to guilt and a painful decision when Bull is sentenced to hang - help him escape or let justice run its course?

Ben Hecht received his first screen credit and his first Academy Award for the original story. George Bancroft plays Bull “as broad as a highway,” to borrow the phrase used by our Silent Crime Spree host and organist, Jim Riggs. Bancroft does play it big, befitting his role as an untouchable criminal in the unnamed big city’s underworld. When he finds something funny, as he often does, Bull doesn’t just laugh, he throws back his head and roars like the king of the jungle that he is. Some audience members found this hilarious. To me it was more than a little chilling.

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As Vince mentioned in his Bouchercon recap, we shared panel duty. Here are some high points from the ones I attended:

Heather Graham talking about her short-lived acting career and demonstrating the torso-twisting motion she used in her one and only TV commercial, for an exercise disc. Moderator Reed Farrel Coleman, a quick study, picking up the move and breaking it out at key points during the remainder of the session.

Megan Abbott relating how she and co-author Alison Gaylin sent the artist for their upcoming graphic novel a picture of Season Hubley’s boots from Hardcore, so he could reproduce them for their heroine.

Columbo co-creator William Link noting that the only reason he and partner Richard Levinson ever wrote anything was to “amuse, delight and mystify ourselves.”

Movie: Beggars of Life (1928)

Once again, I’m unable to attend the Silent Crime Spree at Seattle’s Paramount Theater. Once again, Rosemarie files her report.

When we first see Louise Brooks in William Wellman’s Beggars of Life, she’s already dressed in boys’ clothes, her trademark bob ready to be tucked up under a cloth cap. Her character, Nancy, doesn’t realize it yet, but she's illustrating a useful piece of advice for young women taking to the road - try not to look like a woman. Another helpful tidbit is get a companion you can trust. Jim, played by Richard Arlen, finds Nancy while sneaking into a house where a savory breakfast sits fresh on the kitchen table. Unbeknownst to him, the man not answering the door has been killed by Nancy, who shot him to stop an attempted rape.

The two hit the road together, pausing only to liberate a ham steak off the dead man’s plate. Posing as brothers, their trip to reach Jim’s uncle in Canada is delayed by train dicks tossing them off freights and the police looking to arrest Nancy for murder.

Another roadblock in their path is Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery). Applause broke out in the theater with Beery’s first appearance, singing at the top of his lungs as he walks along with a barrel of moonshine hoisted on his shoulder. Now that’s a good time guy. Beery is terribly charismatic in the role. With his easy charm in a beefy frame, he reminded me of English actor Tom Hardy (Inception).

It only takes an eyeful of Nancy bending over for the tramps in a hobo jungle to realize she's nobody’s little brother. The rest of the film centers around who is going to get possession of Nancy, Red or Jim, clearly her true love. Louise Brooks is beautiful and magnetic throughout, though she looses some of her glamour when put into a dress at the end of the picture, complete with an unfortunate bonnet.

As always, this Silent Movie Monday featured a bravura performance by Jim Riggs on the Paramount’s Mighty Wurlitzer, impersonating the locomotives with brake squeals, steam hissing and of course the lonesome whistle announcing the passing of another freight into the dark night.

Movie: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

My work schedule will prevent me from attending Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount Theater, but fortunately I have resources at my disposal. Here’s my lovely wife and VKDC correspondent Rosemarie.

It had been ages since I’d been to Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount, but when they advertised their latest series as a “Silent Crime Spree” I knew I couldn’t miss it.

I got there early, not because I worried that the 3,000 seat theater would fill up but because I was hoping that sponsor Trader Joe’s would be making with the delicious giveaways. And were they ever. I filled my pockets with chocolate, lollipops and taffy and settled in among a nice-sized crowd for A Cottage on Dartmoor.

But Anthony Asquith’s thriller was so engrossing I forgot to eat my candy. An escaped convict dashes across the titular landscape to the titular edifice. The woman of the house, her baby asleep upstairs, recognizes the wild-eyed fugitive. This cues a flashback that takes up the bulk of the film in which we meet John, a barber’s assistant, who’s infatuated with Sally, a manicurist. Unfortunately for the intense and somewhat creepy chap, Sally has eyes for a hail-fellow-well-met customer who is only too happy to flirt with her, appearing at the barber shop every other day for any and all beauty treatments on offer (setting up a nice visual gag during the “vibro massage” service). By the time he’s proposed to Sally he has the handsomest fingernails in Britain.

The standout scene takes place in a movie theater. Sally’s beau escorts her to a cinema and John slips into the row behind them, apparently just to torture himself. The 15 minute sequence cuts among the audience members, showing their reactions first to a Harold Lloyd silent then to a talkie, a melodrama that keeps them on the edge of their seats. Never once do we see what’s happening on the theater’s screen, only the crowd’s responses. It’s riveting watching them laugh, recoil and swoon while we do the same right along with them.

Before the screening the Paramount’s organist for the evening, Jim Riggs, a virtuoso on the Mighty Wurlitzer, pointed out a cameo in the talkie sequence. The young fellow whom a schoolboy mistakes for Harold Lloyd is director Asquith himself.

The ending is more pessimistic than I would have imagined, not just in its action, but in what it tells us about Sally’s seeming domestic bliss. Perhaps John wasn’t the only one who wanted to run away from his prison on the moors. For a dark, dare I say noir film, there are more comedic uses of an ear horn than you would imagine and I, for one, couldn’t be happier about it.

Lady, Make a Note of This: The Nicer Side of Reality

Because we could use a female perspective around here, welcome to the first in a series of occasional guest posts by my significant other. Take it away, Rosemarie!

I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy Lifetime’s new show How to Look Good Naked, hosted by Carson Kressley, mostly because of the host himself. On Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, he was the fastest with the double entendres, trying on the style-impaired firefighter’s helmet and making jokes about hoses. Not that I mind a good hose joke, but the constant sniping got old quick.

On Naked, we get a kinder, gentler Carson with a great idea for a show. Women who don’t like their bodies because they think they’re too [skinny, fat, short, lumpy, whatever] receive advice. Not the “lose forty pounds and get a nose job” kind of advice dished out by other reality shows, but the “you’ve got great shoulders and you can conquer the world when you’re wearing the right size bra” kind of advice.

A woman who was crying because she didn’t want to look into a full-length mirror ends up posing for some strategically-draped nude glamour shots and feeling like a million bucks. I start weeping during the opening credits and don’t stop until it’s over. What can I say, empowerment gets to me. And on a personal note, that bra size thing is true.

Miss America: Reality Check is another show that doesn’t go mean. The contestants are the 52 young women who will be competing for the Miss America crown this Saturday. The show, part of the pageant’s ongoing attempt to update its image, brings in stylists and beauty consultants to help the women become the best “modern” Miss America they can be. So it’s out with the hairspray and in with the flat iron. The show’s fun, because I for one don’t mind a reality series where no contestants are voted off, fired, or have their sashes snipped by rhinestone-bedecked novelty scissors, to cite another Carson Kressley program. But 52 contestants are about 40 too many. The few singled out were the quirkiest ones – i.e., they had short hair – who were alternately praised for being themselves and reprimanded for acting oddly.

That kind of conformity is what cut short my pageant career. That and my chosen talent; apparently the judges don’t care for Zasu Pitts impersonators. My favorite talent of this year’s cadre? Miss Texas’ Character Jazz on Pointe. I have no idea what it is, but I’m rooting for her to win it all.