They don’t make old-time movies anymore, so I SHOULD be able to see them all, right?

I mean, if I count “old-time” as before I was born, they’re not making those anymore, so some day I’ll have seen them all!!!!! Let’s take a look at some more!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Apparently, it’s actually pronounced “Jeek-ill,” not “rhymes-with-heckle,” and this movie is the only one that gets that right. It’s very weird, though. EVERYTHING I KNOW IS WRONG!!!!!

March won the Oscar for Best Actor (he actually tied with Wallace Beery, so I assume they just cut the trophy in two, Solomon-style), and while it’s interesting that an actor in somewhat of a horror movie won, it’s not as if there was a super-long drought before it happened – these were only the 5th Academy Awards, after all. He is quite good, but it’s always interesting watching movies within a few years of the silent era, because the actors are usually really overwrought, which worked in the silents but seems obnoxious in talkies. March does a good job, though, as do Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart as the women that Hyde/Jekyll lust for/love. Hopkins, in particular, is pure sex as the showgirl that Hyde digs and then terrorizes, while Hobart is a bit dramatic as the society girl Jekyll loves, but she still does a nice job. March’s transformation is done well, and the cinematography, in particular, is very neat – it was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Shanghai Express, which is not the worst movie to lose to in this category. The first few minutes are all done “first person” – the audience looking “through” Jekyll’s eyes, which becomes important later when he looks in a mirror to see himself transform, so we feel like we’re “inside” him as he does. Some of the shots are composed very beautifully and weirdly, and director Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer Karl Strauss often film characters straight on in close-up, which creates an odd, disconcerting intimacy with them. It’s a neat movie, but it would be kind of neat to see a version in which Hyde is the attractive one – he’s the evil one, and evil in the past was generally ugly, but now we know how attractive evil can often be, so it would be interesting to see that kind of version. In this, Hyde is grotesque, as he usually is, and while he bullies Hopkins into living with him, it would be more interesting, I think, if she was attracted to him like she is to Jekyll, who’s all suave and sophisticated. Just a thought.

Anyway, it’s a good movie, pre-Code so the sexual overtones are a lot more obvious than, I imagine, they were in the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy. Stupid Hays Code!

The Most Dangerous Game (1932). I don’t watch these in the order I post about them, because I post about them in chronological order of release, yet I watch them when I watch them. So, sometimes I write something further down that applies to movies further up, and in the brief review of The Saint Strikes Back (see below!), I write some things that could easily apply to this movie, as in, it’s way too fucking short. This movie is slightly over an hour long, and that’s far too short, and it’s not like movies from the 1930s couldn’t be longer, and 20-30 more minutes of this would have really made it superb. You probably know the story – crazy man hunts people on his remote island – and that’s never a bad plot, but directors Irving Pichel and Ernest Schoedsack (the latter of whom would turn around and make King Kong right away, using some of the same sets from this movie, and that was a good 90+ minutes, so he could do it!) zip along so quickly that it’s almost impossible to get invested in the characters, so who cares if they live or die? Joel McCrea does his ramrod-straight, all-American decent tough guy thing, as he’s a big-game hunter who’s on a yacht with friends when it strikes a reef (the lights guiding boats through the channel were cleverly moved by the crazy hunter on the island to trap boats) and everyone board but McCrea dies (in a hilarious scene, sharks kill two people in the water, the second one whom says, almost calmly, “Oh, it got me!” and then simply slips under the water). He makes it to the island, where he meets the owner, Count Zaroff, and his two guests, Fay Wray and her brother, Robert Armstrong (who were also shipwrecked). Zaroff, played by Leslie Banks, is Russian and a hunter who grew bored with hunting until he figure out how fun it would be to hunt humans. Armstrong is the most obnoxious houseguest in history, and we shed no tears when he disappears. Banks tries to recruit McCrea, but he’s not having any of it, so Banks sends him (with Wray tagging along, because she’s just the “prize” for the winner of this game) into the jungle, saying if he survives 24 hours he’ll be free (Banks even says he’ll only hunt him for the final 4 hours of those 24, giving him a nice head start). The hunt is fine, but again, it’s too short. McCrea and Wray spend their day setting up one (1) trap for Banks, who spots it easily. They run into a swamp, so Banks uses hounds to track them, which seems contrary to his stated motive of a one-on-one hunt (he even asks them to forgive him for the use of the hounds, but come on, Zaroff!). He thinks he kills McCrea, but of course he has not, which leads to a final showdown. It’s fine, but again, it could easily have been a bit longer. Maybe one other person who’s not obnoxious survives from McCrea’s boat and he’s the first victim? Maybe we spend a bit more time with Zaroff, Wray, and even Armstrong (as annoying as he is) before we find out Zaroff is evil so that it’s a bigger surprise and maybe we care a bit more about Wray’s character? The actors do what they can, but only Armstrong – because he’s so obnoxious – makes much of an impression. It’s not a bad movie, certainly, but it’s just too rushed to be a great one. At least the filmmakers seemed to learn their lesson on King Kong, because that’s a much better movie.

Thirteen Women (1932). There are not, I should point out, 13 women in this movie. I guess some of them ended up on the cutting room floor to cut the movie down to its ridiculously long ONE HOUR RUNNING TIME!!!! Sheesh.

This movie could and maybe should be remade, as it feels like a lot of meat was left on the bone of what could be a fascinating film. I don’t know if it’s the first of the “mean girls do mean things to one girl who later seeks revenge,” but it’s a nifty example of it, as Myrna Loy, playing against type, wants revenge on all the girls who were mean to her in high school. In the beginning, she’s working with a “swami” who sends dire horoscopes to the women which then come true, but Loy soon dispatches the swami (and makes him predict his own death, which just raises the esteem some of the women have for his powers) and goes after the women herself. Irene Dunne is the only one of the group who doesn’t believe in astrology, but she does know that someone is coming after her, so she takes precautions. None of the characters are that well developed, unfortunately, including Dunne and Loy, who do what they can with the time they’re given. That’s why it could easily be 90-120 minutes long, so we could get to know more about the characters and what happened to Loy, because it’s very vague. Loy is quite good as the “exotic” half-Indian, half-white Ursula, as she gives a brief speech at the end that feels like it could not have been made a few years later under the Hays Code, because it calls out the racism Loy experienced at the hands of the white girls at the school and how she tried to fit in and “be white.” It’s an interesting speech, bold for the time, and Loy gives it all the venom she can muster. It would be interesting to see what a good director and cast could do with this material. (On a sad note: one of the women, Peg Entwistle, committed suicide right after the movie premiered, jumping off the “H” in the Hollywood sign. This is her only movie credit.)

The Saint Strikes Back (1939). Let’s continue the theme! This movie is 64 minutes long, which is ridiculous, because it moves at such a clip that nothing really sticks – George Sanders is fine as Simon Templar, because Sanders is fine is everything – but his attraction to the femme fatale (Wendy Barrie) is skimmed over, as is the character development of the Big Bad, so who cares when he’s actually revealed? Jonathan Hale is back at Henry Fernack, the New York cop who became Templar’s ally in The Saint in New York (Louis Heyward did not return for this movie, and I don’t know why), and his on-again, off-again suspicion of the Saint is annoying because it seems to be so flighty. I mean, yes, Templar works a bit outside the law (although, notably in this movie as opposed to Heyward’s movie, he kills far fewer people, and they could all be argued as self-defense), but Fernack knows he has his methods, and it’s strange to see him move back and forth on the trusting scale. The plot is wonky – Barrie plays a woman whose father – a cop – was linked to a mysterious gangster and who committed suicide in disgrace, so she’s trying to clear his name by … committing crimes? The Saint comes up with a weird scheme to smoke out the Big Bad, which works, but it’s still very confusing and involves stealing and then returning and then re-stealing a wad of cash. It’s just a bit goofy. Sanders and Barrie don’t have much chemistry, although Sanders never seems to have chemistry with anyone and I’m not sure if the studios should have tried. Plus, Barrie is not the greatest actor, so she’s kind of a wet noodle here. It’s too bad – the first Saint movie wasn’t top-level cinema, but it was decent enough, and Heyward played the role with a bit more fun than Sanders and Kay Sutton was a decent femme fatale. This movie, however, doesn’t rise to that level. Oh well.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941). I first knew about this movie through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as the Coens took the name of that movie from the fictional movie that Joel McCrea wants to make in this movie. McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a director of light and frothy movies who wants to make a serious movie about the poor, but his bosses point out he knows nothing about being poor, so he decides to hit the road and find out what it’s like. Preston Sturges made this as a response to “serious” films made by Hollywood people who had no idea what it was like for the non-glamorous, and it’s very funny (although there are some serious parts – Sturges ended up making a “message” movie despite himself). McCrea tries to head out of town, but he ends up back in Hollywood, where he meets Veronica Lake, who is trying to leave town because she hasn’t made it as an actress yet (Lake never gets a name, sadly – she’s credited as “The Girl”). Eventually she finds out what he’s doing and joins him, and they discover some bad things on the road after some misadventures (McCrea keeps getting back to Hollywood, which pisses him off). Then McCrea gets robbed and thrown onto a chain gang (it’s a long story), so he really experiences the life of a poor person. The final message is a bit schmaltzy – I mean, Sturges can’t really point out that the entire political system is rigged against the poor, so he goes in a different direction – but it’s fine. McCrea is very good as the vexed director who wants to do good but doesn’t know how (he doesn’t handle the pathos at the end quite as well), but Lake is brilliant in the movie. She was only 18 during filming (of course, because of the time, it was her 9th movie already), but her comedic timing is superb, her wry delivery crackles, and she is drop-dead gorgeous. I’d seen Lake in photographs before, but I’ve never seen one of her movies before, and photographs just don’t do her justice. Sheesh, she’s beautiful. Even if she weren’t, she’s really terrific in this movie, piercing McCrea’s earnestness and condescension excellently. Anyway, this is a good movie. There’s a reason everyone digs it!

Macao (1952). I’m in a mood about remaking movies (see above AND below), and I think someone could make a really good movie out of this, as this version is fine but a bit slight. It clocks in at about 80 minutes, so even if you pump it up to 100-120 minutes, you could really flesh out the story. This is fine, but, for instance, the romance between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell feels very rushed and perfunctory (the two don’t have a lot of chemistry, either, which doesn’t help). In this movie, Mitchum (an ex-soldier), Russell (a drifter who wants to sing), and William Bendix (a salesman) arrive in Macao, where Vincent Halloran (Brad Dexter) takes an interest in them. Halloran runs the biggest casino in town, and he’s wanted by the New York police, so he can’t leave Macao or the cops will pick him up (we’re told in the beginning that the cops can’t go into Macao – filmmakers love these little lawless enclaves). He thinks Mitchum is another cop sent in undercover (he’s already killed one), so everything he does is based off of that. Mitchum, of course, digs Russell (I mean, who wouldn’t?), as does Dexter, and that fuels his paranoia about Mitchum’s presence, as well. Gloria Grahame, gorgeous as ever, has a small and somewhat thankless role as Halloran’s Girl Friday, and she plays a crucial part in the end of the story. All the elements are there for a great movie, but Josef von Sternberg/Nicholas Ray (apparently Ray replaced the fired von Sternberg at some point) rushes through it, so we don’t get much in the relationship between Mitchum and Russell or Dexter and Russell or Dexter and Grahame or even Mitchum and Grahame, so Grahame’s motivations at the end make little sense – she wants Russell out of town, of course, but does she want Dexter out of there, as well? The way Dexter leaves Macao – because of course he does! – is a bit weak, too. Mitchum, as I have noted before (to the chagrin of some of our commenters!), doesn’t have the greatest range as an actor, and he’s supposed to be a bit more laconic here than straight tough guy, but he plays it a bit too inert. Russell, just by being gorgeous, outshines him (I mean, this is during Mitchum’s “hot” phase, so he’s no slouch, either, but it’s Jane Russell – come on!), but she also plays the world-weary wanderer with not a lot of options pretty well, and it doesn’t reflect well on Mitchum. I just think of what a good director and cast could do with this kind of story – set at this time, of course, because the story wouldn’t work in the present – because the bones of a great movie are there, it’s just that it’s only a mildly entertaining one. So sad!

Man in the Attic (1953). A few years ago, I watched The Lodger with Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon, and George Sanders, and I have to compare that movie to this one, as it’s a different take on the same short story. Jack Palance plays the lodger, who shows up at the Harleys’ London residence looking to rent some rooms at the height of the Jack the Ripper hysteria, and he becomes far too weirdly obsessed with the Harleys’ niece, played by Constance Smith. He says he’s a pathologist and keeps weird hours doing research, but Mrs. Harley (Frances Bavier) begins to mistrust him (despite her enthusiasm for him when he moves in) and believe he’s the Ripper. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard detective Warwick (played by Byron Palmer) likes the cut of Constance’s jib, so he begins hanging around even as she and Palance get closer. There’s never any proof that Palance is the Ripper, but it still all ends tragically, as Palance, whether he’s the Ripper or not, has some serious mommy issues, and that’s no good for any woman in his life. Palance is not a bad choice as the lodger, and while he’s not as creepy as Cregar was, he’s definitely hotter, so you can believe more readily that Smith digs him than Merle Oberon digging Cregar. Smith and Palmer aren’t as good as Oberon and Sanders, but they do a good job, and the movie hums along fairly well. Smith’s risqué dance numbers seem a bit more risqué than in the earlier movie, but perhaps I’m misremembering those (and perhaps the times had changed a bit, as this was made 9 years later). Much like a lot of older movies, it feels like this could have been a bit longer so that the characters could have been developed a bit more – it’s slightly over 80 minutes, so another 10-15 minutes wouldn’t have dragged it down – but such is life. Watch this and The Lodger back-to-back and compare and contrast!

The Searchers (1956). It seems that, like True Grit when the Coen brothers got ahold of it, this is ripe for a remake, because there’s a LOT going on in this movie that John Ford never really touches except very obliquely. John Wayne is an ex-Confederate, but he’s been away for three years and seems to be fairly rich, so where he’s been and what he’s been doing is something. He wants to kill Natalie Wood instead of rescuing her, and Ford doesn’t really get into his hatred of Indians as much as he could (even though Wayne’s character also seems to respect Indians more than most of the characters – he’s complicated). Why the Indians attack Ethan’s brother’s farm is glossed over, too. Natalie Wood originally seems uninterested in returning to “civilization,” but then she changes her mind, and given that this story is very loosely based on Quanah Parker’s mother, who never adjusted to being returned to Anglo society, it seems like that could be a thing. The U.S. cavalry shows up and slaughters an Indian village, which is glossed over quickly even though there had to be women and children there. Even Vera Miles, who loves Jeffrey Hunter’s character, is interesting, as her parents basically force her to marry a doofus because Hunter is never returning from the hunt, and the role of women in that society could be examined a bit. I’m just saying that it’s clear Ford, Frank Nugent, and Alan Le May (the screenwriters) had a lot on their minds, but it was 1956 and they couldn’t be too upfront about it. This is a terrific movie, of course, worth all the praise that’s heaped upon it, even with Wayne – a wooden actor at the best of times – at its center. It’s beautiful to look at (Arizona’s Monument Valley standing in for Texas), it’s exciting, it’s tragic, and it’s compelling. Ford generally cast Indians in the roles (here, they’re Navajo, not Comanche like they’re supposed to be), and there’s less casual 1950s-style racism than you might expect. I mean, the characters talk about how horrible and uncivilized the Indians are, but when Ford has them on screen, they’re not as awful as the white characters make them out to be. It has its problems, of course, but it’s still a great movie. I’m just curious what a modern filmmaker might do with it.

The Terror (1963). This Roger Corman movie is notable for a few things, none of which make it a good movie but would have consigned it to oblivion had they not been present. First, Jack Nicholson is in this, relatively early in his career (he was about 26 when this was made and he had already been in Little Shop of Horrors, so he wasn’t a completely unknown quantity, but he still wasn’t a star); second, Boris Karloff is in this, relatively late in his career (he died in 1969, but he worked a lot right up until his death); third, Francis Ford Coppola is listed as “associate producer,” and apparently he (and some others) directed a lot of second-unit footage, some of which ended up in the final version. So the pedigree is interesting, but the movie is bad. It’s spliced together very poorly, with Corman re-using stuff from his previous movie, The Raven (in which Nicholson and Karloff both appeared) and then just shooting footage of Karloff and cramming it into the movie. Nicholson is terrible – he has the beginnings of the sneer he would later perfect, but his deliveries are generally flat and wooden, and he has no chemistry with Sandra Knight, the love interest (which is a bit weird, as they were married at the time). Karloff is always fun, but he also seems a bit bored by everything. Richard Miller, who could play a snide, low-rent tough guy really well, is hilariously miscast as a European servant (none of the principal actors – Nicholson, Knight, Karloff, and Miller – attempt anything like an accent, even though the movie is ostensibly set somewhere in Europe), but he gives it the old college try. The story, such as it is, gives us Nicholson as a French soldier in 1806 or so, wandering a craggy coastline (is he AWOL? lost? on a scouting mission?) and coming across Knight, who acts enigmatic and then disappears. Nicholson is attacked by a bird and passes out, waking in a cottage where an old woman tells him there is no girl in the vicinity and he should take off, but of course he doesn’t! He heads up to the castle of Count Boris, who lives alone except for his servant, and of course he hasn’t seen a young woman! Nicholson is adamant, and he threatens to bring back his unit and turn the castle upside-down, which cows Karloff for some reason. Nicholson has no reason to interfere, and who knows if the French even have any jurisdiction here (again, it’s unclear if we’re supposed to be in France or not). Nicholson sticks his nose in, and discovers all kinds of secrets Karloff would rather not reveal. It’s almost a funny movie, because like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Nicholson’s presence really changes nothing about the plot, and he’s wildly ineffectual throughout. The plot is ridiculous (Miller explains it toward the end in a ham-fisted way, and boy howdy is it silly), but some movies can get away with it. This movie really can’t, unfortunately. Again, it’s a nice curio – it’s always fun to see actors like Nicholson before they became icons, Knight is easy on the eyes, Karloff has presence even if he’s phoning it in – but not a good movie in any way.

The Wild Bunch (1969). I had actually never seen this before, so I figured it was about time to, and it’s a pretty good movie, but it is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? I mean, consider: the gang lets Angel (Jaime Sánchez) take one of the boxes of rifles they steal from the U.S. Army to arm his village, which they know the Mexican general (Emilio Fernández) for whom they stole the guns will not like. Then, as part of their plan to sidetrack the general from double-crossing them, they allow him to find only some of the weapons in exchange for some of the payment, and each gang member goes into town to get their portion, which isn’t a bad plan. But Ernest Borgnine goes into town with Angel, and the general knows immediately that he stole the guns. If the gang broke up the amount into smaller portions, why didn’t Borgnine just lie when the general asked him how many boxes they had? Instead, he says one got lost on the trail, which the general knows is a lie. And why did they let Angel go into town anyway, what with his burning hatred of the general? Then, Borgnine leaves Angel with them because he’s not a dummy and knows he has no chance to get Angel away safely, but because Robert Ryan and his gang of bounty hunters are chasing them, the “bunch” heads back into town in the hopes that the army will kill the bounty hunters. They see Angel, near death, but do nothing – again, they’re outnumbered something like 200 to 4, so what are they going to do? Well, if you’re William Holden, you grow a conscience and march up to the general and demand Angel back, which leads to nothing good whatsoever. Angel knew what he was doing, you idjits, and he probably would have been fine with sacrificing his life just so his comrades could get the guns. Anyway, overall, this is a good movie – Holden is steely and determined, Borgnine is a good right-hand man, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates do nice work as the dumb brothers who just want to drink and fuck, and Ryan is good as the world-weary ex-comrade of Holden who just wants to stay out of jail. As with older movies, some things are a bit weird – the laughter in the movie feels fake and too loud, there are some odd musical choices (despite it getting one of its two Oscar nominations for Best Music) – and it’s a bit too long, as there are some parts of the quieter moments that could be trimmed a bit, but the violence is still quite visceral, and Peckinpah doesn’t forget that occasionally innocent people and women are sometimes killed in gunfights. There’s a good reason why it’s a classic. Check it out today!

All right, who’s seen any of these? Am I typing into the void here????