West of Zanzibar (1928) — A Mini-Review

In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel with his wife's lover (Lionel Barrymore) and takes his revenge on the daughter he believes to be theirs. First he forces her to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.

As with most Lon Chaney movies, it starts out weird then rides the twists and turns to a bloody and bizarre conclusion. Like an O. Henry story written by a psychopath.

Good stuff.

With Mary Nolan as the grown child.

Olga Baclanova: Three To See

One of the most enduring tropes of the early sound era is that of the silent film star who finds his career in ruins when his voice proves unsuitable for the new medium. Isn't that what Singin' in the Rain is all about?

More often than not, the tale of an actor's vocal woes was simply a cover story for a studio's own greed, spite or incompetence (see, e.g., Louise Brooks, John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively).

But in the case if Russian-born Olga Baclanova, the myth is right on the money.

A native of Moscow, Baclanova was a star of stage and screen in the early days of the Soviet Union, and received the title of Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, the USSR's highest honor for artistic achievement.

In 1925, Baclanova toured the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre then stayed behind to try her luck in Hollywood.

She made a handful of films in the two years before talkies — including a pair of classics (below) — then found herself, thanks to a thick Russian accent, limited to "exotic" parts and B-pictures.

Baclanova abandoned Hollywood for the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then permanently retired from the movies.

She died in Switzerland in 1974 at the age of 81.

Although her movie career was relatively brief, Baclanova made three classics which have stood the test of time:

The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus attraction, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.

Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess (Baclanova) with a fetish for his ruined face.

Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided.

In The Docks Of New York Baclanova plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.

Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.

It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie.

Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.

"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"

While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting as von Sternberg's later work featuring his greatest star, Marlene Dietrich, it's more relatable and moving. Here — before he descended into wretched excess and maybe even madness — von Sternberg was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.

Finally, you don't want to miss Freaks, which is wildest and most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era.

Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks."

In this one, Baclanova plays the cruel circus performer Cleopatra. She seduces and marries the star of a traveling carnival (little person Harry Ealres), hoping to loot his fortune. Things don't work out quite like she planned.



Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.

Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin — or anyway, it got under mine.

Out Of The Office

I'm working on a couple of projects for Sharpologist, the online shaving magazine, that will take me out of the office for a couple of days, so if I don't respond to your comments, it's not from lack of love, just lack of access.

In the meantime, Halloween is rapidly approaching, so I'll be reposting reviews of some classic horror films from the early sound era. Some of the reviews are short, some long, and some, as those of you who've been following the Monkey for a while already know, are very long.

But let's start with a short one, a mini-review of Tod Browning's Freaks.

You don't want to miss Freaks, which while a cult movie that for years was more spoken of than seen, is perhaps the most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era. Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks." Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.

Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin—or anyway, it got under mine.

A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1931-32 And The Year's Must-See And Recommended Movies

Picture: Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
Actor: Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Actress: Norma Shearer (Private Lives)
Director: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Supporting Actor: Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Supporting Actress: Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Screenplay: Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)

Special Awards: À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) (Best Picture-Comedy/Musical); Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) (Best Actress-Drama); The Music Box (Best Short Subject); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Best Actors-Comedy and Career Achievement); Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Special Achievement In the Use Of Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)

Must-See and Recommended: À Nous La Liberté; The Champ; Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde; Emma; Five Star Final; Frankenstein; Freaks; Grand Hotel; The Guardsman; I Was Born, But ...; Mädchen In Uniform; Marius; Monkey Business; The Music Box; One Hour With You; Private Lives; Scarface; Shanghai Express; Skyscraper Souls; The Smiling Lieutenant; Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas; Waterloo Bridge; What Price Hollywood?

As you can see from the list of winners and must-see movies, the year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 was a great one for horror films. Frankenstein, Freaks and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all hit the big screen during the year (albeit, Freaks only briefly—it was withdrawn from circulation just days after its premiere and didn't surface again until the 1960s). Throw in Dracula, another 1931 horror film released in the previous awards cycle, and you can see that what we think of as the horror genre was pretty much defined during this time period.

Of the four of them, Frankenstein is the most indispensable. As I wrote recently, not only was it the top grossing film of the year, "it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about" and more than any other film released during 1931 or 1932, be it horror or otherwise, Frankenstein "is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well."

You don't want to miss Freaks, though, which while a cult movie that for years was more spoken of than seen, is perhaps the most modern of all the movies that was released during the year. Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks." Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.

Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin—or anyway, it got under mine.

On a wholly different note, the year also gave us some fine comedies, including René Clair's À Nous La Liberté (the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award); Ernst Lubitsch's naughty pre-Code musical, The Smiling Lieutenant; a good Norma Shearer movie, Private Lives; and Laurel and Hardy in the Oscar-winning short, The Music Box.

As was usually the case during the early sound era, the best comedy of the year starred the Marx Brothers. The story of four stowaways who wreak havoc during an ocean voyage, Monkey Business represents the Brothers at their most transgressive—if you can use a word like "transgressive" when referring to a man wearing a grease-paint moustache. Instead of playing a hotel owner, college president, petty dictator or some other reputable scion of society, Groucho is an out-and-out bum who happily hires himself out as a gunman for a mobster, and his brothers are even worse, stealing, chasing women and making everyone around them miserable simply because they can.

In other words, it's great stuff.

The plot of Monkey Business is mercifully slight, and the shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another. But that's true of every Marx Brothers movie—the good ones anyway—and the audience only suffers when the focus turns to irrelevant matters, such as story and motivation. In fact, given that the appeal of the Marx Brothers is the subversive anarchy of their caustic wit and arbitrary actions, plot and motivation only undercut what they're trying to do. Of all their movies, Monkey Business came the closest to their vaudeville roots (the wonderful Maurice Chevalier bit, for example, was a variation on a routine that the Brothers had performed years before) and was the first to shed the trappings of the Broadway musical, freeing them for even greater efforts—Horse Feathers and Duck Soup—in the eighteen months that followed.

And then there are a couple of movies, Shanghai Express and Waterloo Bridge, that critics, Academy voters and fans of the Saturday night fun-stupid movie might dismiss as "women's pictures," "three-hanky weepers" or "chick flicks," but which we here at the Monkey refer to as stylish, well-acted romances that get right to the heart of the only thing that's really important in this crazy, mixed-up world—love. Marlene Dietrich never looked better in the former, and in the latter, Mae Clarke gave the best performance of her criminally-overlooked career. I highly recommend both and I wouldn't say that lightly.

Among the movies I've listed as must-see, three are must must-see movies—Frankenstein, Scarface and Grand Hotel. Frankenstein, I've just mentioned. Of the other two, Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks (more about him in the coming years), was the best gangster movie of the decade, which is saying something considering James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart all made their mark in the genre during the 1930s. I consider it indispensable, though, not just because it's a great movie, but because it influenced so much that came after it.

Similarly, Grand Hotel may be a bit dated by modern standards but it boasted the first all-star cast and without it, there may well have been no Dinner At Eight, no Stagecoach, no Airport, or any of the other big cast potboilers, good and bad, that have imitated Grand Hotel over the years. As with Scarface and Frankenstein, I consider Grand Hotel indispensable not just because I think it's good, but because so much of what we think of as the Hollywood movie flows from it.

Besides, it gives you a chance to see Joan Crawford at her loveliest and, dare I say it, sweetest before her face hardened into that kabuki mask of unbridled ambition and paranoid rage we so often associate her with.

Coming up next are my nominations for the movie year 1932-33. Because the Academy was preparing to abandon the crazy split-year format it followed for the first six years of the Oscars, the next award season covered seventeen months rather than the usual twelve, with everything released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933 being eligible.

And what a great year it was, too. Not only did such classic movies as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise and Dinner at Eight premiere during these seventeen months, but Katharine Hepburn broke into pictures (and won her first Oscar), Busby Berkeley revived and redefined the movie musical, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time. It was a big year for movies, ranking with 1939 as one of the greatest "years" in film history.

Too big, in fact, for the standard Oscar format I've been following to cover it all. But that's a subject for my next post.

Best Picture Of 1931-32: Frankenstein (Prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)

Any one of the Mythical nominees for best picture of the awards year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 would be a good one—Grand Hotel was the first movie to boast an all-star cast, Freaks is a genuinely disturbing horror flick that holds up even by the standards of today, and Scarface, directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, is the best gangster movie of an era characterized by great gangster movies.

But only one film can boast both of being the top grossing film of the year, a sensation that spawned countless sequels, spoofs and remakes, and of being so influential that it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about—the only movie of 1931-32 that can make that claim.

That it's also a great movie makes Frankenstein my choice for best picture of the year.

I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than all the year's other nominees for best picture combined, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.

What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?

The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein.

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.

But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."

The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)

The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.

James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.

In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.

Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.

Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.

But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.

We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)

The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.

"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."

It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.

After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.



Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.

Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.

"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."

And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis, whether we're a starving refuge in the war-torn Sudan or simply a befuddled suburbanite wondering why Kate Gosselin is on television and we're not.

I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.

So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.

But I digress.

Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture. So I say let's give Katie Awards to the key figures behind the production of this classic movie: Charles D. Hall for interior decoration, what is now known as art direction-set decoration, and Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electronic gear in the laboratory out of odds and ends he collected from radios, airplane motors and industrial machinery; Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells for their iconic makeup job; and to C. Roy Hunter for sound.

And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.

In the end, I chose Frankenstein as best picture from among the dozen or so must-see movies released between August 1, 1931, and July 31, 1932, because more than the others, it is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.

I say, time to drink from the source.

Best Director Of 1931-32: Part One

I. And The Winner Was
In selecting the best director of 1931-32, I had a deep field of fine directors to choose from, but with the exception of Howard Hawks, they are by modern lights an obscure lot, none more so than the Academy's pick, Frank Borzage who at the 1932 ceremony picked up his second best director trophy in five years. Like most of his films, Bad Girl focuses on the trials of a young couple in love—in this case, the girl (Sally Eilers) conceives a child out of wedlock and the boy (James Dunn, who later won an Oscar for A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) gives up his dreams of owning his own business in order to marry her—but there's nothing memorable about the direction, not by the standards of today or 1932, and after a promising first half hour, the picture devolves into an idiot plot and fizzles like a damp squib.

While admittedly, Bad Girl is not as bad as its reputation, neither is it very good, and like the picture that won Borzage his first award, 7th Heaven, both he and Bad Girl are virtually unknown today. As I have previously written, "At most all you can say is that the chord Bad Girl undeniably struck with audiences in 1931 has long since ceased to reverberate and there's little chance the modern movie fan will make sense of Borzage's award."

So who should have won the award in 1931-32? Well, the Academy also nominated King Vidor (The Champ) and Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express), two great directors at the top of their games. Vidor was already a Hollywood legend, having previously directed the 1925 blockbuster war movie The Big Parade, and von Sternberg had not yet worn out his welcome; Shanghai Express was a big hit in 1932. Neither men had won before (or would ever win, for that matter). Either of them would have been a solid choice for the award this year.

And then there are my five nominees, all of them having directed critically and/or commercially successful movies during the Oscar season: René Clair, whose comedy À Nous La Liberté was the first foreign language picture to ever receive an Oscar nomination (for set design); Rouben Mamoulian, who directed Fredric March to a best actor Oscar in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; James Whale who directed one of the true blockbusters of the age, the groundbreaking and influential horror movie Frankenstein; Edmund Goulding, who directed the movie that won best picture, Grand Hotel; and Howard Hawks, at the front end of what would become one of the greatest careers in Hollywood history.

I could have also gone with Yasujiro Ozu for the silent Japanese comedy I Was Born, But ..., Tod Browning for his cult classic Freaks or Ernst Lubitsch for the musical comedy The Smiling Lieutenant. They're all great directors, they're all great movies. Maybe one of them would be your choice for best director of 1931-32. You won't hear me say you're wrong.

But one thing I'm sure of: you could pick a name out of a hat and draw a better one than Frank Borzage.

[To continue to Part Two of this essay, click here.]

Latest Poll Results

The latest Monkey Movie poll question was "Looking ahead to 1931-32, four movies will definitely get Katie nominations for best picture—À Nous La Liberté, Frankenstein, Grand Hotel and Scarface. Which movie should get the fifth nomination?"

The results were decidedly inconclusive.

Of the eleven choices, three—The Guardsman, Marius and The Smiling Lieutenant—failed to garner any votes at all. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde got two votes and four others—The Champ, Mädchen In Uniform, The Music Box and Shanghai Express—copped one each.

That left Tod Browning's cult classic Freaks, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business and a pre-Code version of the tragic romance Waterloo Bridge tied with four votes apiece.

What to do, what to do?

Well, I'll tell you. There's no rule that says I have to limit myself to five best picture nominees. The Academy certainly doesn't. It nominated eight movies for best picture in 1931-32 and as you probably know, it's nominating ten this year. No reason I can't nominate seven. So those of you who voted for Freaks, Monkey Business and Waterloo Bridge, rejoice, they're all getting best picture noms. As for those of you who voted for one of the other movies, some of them will receive nominations in other categories and I think I can safely promise I will be writing positive reviews of all of them. Something to look forward to—or not, depending on what you think of my essays.

I plan to announce all the the nominees for 1931-32 on New Year's Day. Stay tuned.

Results Of The Latest Poll: Another Big Win For Lang!

The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?

Fritz Lang who directed Peter Lorre in the serial killer classic, M, ran away with it, receiving 6 of the 10 votes cast. The immortal Charlie Chaplin picked up 2 for directing City Lights and René Clair (Le Million) and Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or) received one vote each.

Tod Browning who directed Dracula had admitted last week in a interview conducted strictly between the left and right lobes of my cerebral cortex that he feared he was just in this poll to round out the field and this proved to be the case.

Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg were annoyed not to be in the poll at all and called for an investigation.

After the win, Lang and his (alleged) mistress, actress Joan Bennett, shared a celebratory cigarette on the set of their current movie project, the film noir thriller Scarlet Street.

"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."

By the way, perhaps I'm telling stories out of school, but the vote for René Clair came from none other than our own beloved Katie-Bar-The-Door. She felt Clair's work on Le Million was innovative, clever and warm, not to mention it's her favorite movie of the five listed here. She's right, of course. Le Million is on the short list for most pleasant surprises I've received while working on this blog and I give it my highest recommendation. But, well, I went with Lang for the reasons I've previously stated at length.

In any event, whoever you voted for, you're right, their work was the best of the year. A good year for directors all the way around.

The Nominees For Best Director Of 1930-31

This is probably the richest crop of Katie nominees for best director you'll see for a long while—the three greatest directors of the era each producing the best movie of his career, all within a four month span.

Charles Chaplin (City Lights)

René Clair (Le Million)

Fritz Lang (M)

In fact, 1931 was a good year for directors all the way around: Tod Browning (Dracula), William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy) and James Whale (Frankenstein) (more about him in 1931-32) also served up what were arguably their best movies. Maybe there was something in the water.

(Oh, and what do I think was the best year for directors ever? It happened fifty years ago in 1959 when six of the greatest directors of all time—Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, Billy Wilder and William Wyler—produced what may well have been the best movies of their careers, Rio Bravo, North By Northwest, Floating Weeds, The 400 Blows, Some Like It Hot and Ben-Hur, respectively. Not to mention that Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film Wild Strawberries was released in the United States in 1959. And there was also Anatomy of a Murder, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Pillow Talk, Imitation of Life, Black Orpheus and Ballad of a Soldier, possibly the best movies ever from their directors. Even Ed Wood, God bless him, gave us Plan 9 From Outer Space. And I haven't even mentioned Oscar winners Room at the Top and The Diary Of Anne Frank. Good year to be a movie goer.)

Best Fun-Stupid Movie of 1930-31: Dracula

In honor of Bela Lugosi's birthday today, I am moving my choice for the best fun-stupid movie of 1930-31 ahead by a few days.

The brain child of Oscar-winning producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., Dracula was the first of Universal Studios' classic "monster" movies, a series that included Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein and continued well into the 1950s (see, e.g., Creature From the Black Lagoon). The title character was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian film actor who had had a huge success on Broadway with a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. Although Lugosi was not Universal's first choice to play the title character (Lon Chaney was reportedly set to play the role until his untimely death; also considered were Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni), he became so closely associated with the role, he rarely appeared in any other kind of movie.

The story, based more on the stage play than the novel, is by now a familiar one. A young British lawyer (Dwight Frye in the movie's other great performance) journeys to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula's sea journey to London. Once there, Dracula begins to prey on beautiful young women, first Lucy Weston then Mina Harker—famously conflating sex, seduction, virginity and horror, soon to become staples of the genre—until that old vampire hunter Professor von Helsing arrives and divines Dracula's true nature.

The movie was a big box office hit upon its release in February 1931 and continues to enjoy acclaim today. Just last month, the London Telegraph included Dracula on its list of the twenty-five best book to film adaptations in movie history. The American Film Institute chose Lugosi's Dracula #33 on its list of the fifty greatest villains, ranked the movie #85 on its list of the 100 top thrillers and voted the line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." one of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Dracula for the National Film Registry.

Lugosi himself didn't fare as well. Although he continued to work right up until his death, even appearing posthumously in Ed Wood's camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, most of his roles after the early 1930s were in campy, low-budget horror films for poverty row studios. He did have a supporting role as a Russian commissar in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka and in the 1945 Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff. Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956.

Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's comedy Ed Wood.

Will you find Dracula scary? Not unless you under the age of four. I mean, the guy's wearing a tuxedo for crying out loud—how scary can he be? I'm not even sure audiences in 1931 found this movie scary and certainly by the time Bela Lugosi reprised the role for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he was playing the part strictly for laughs. But while it's true that one generation's horror becomes the next generation's camp, the appeal of Dracula has always rested not on its shock value but on its ideas and it's there you will find the lasting power of its horror.

You have to know what kind of a movie fan you are. If you're a sit back, arm's crossed "show me something" kind of viewer, you may find Dracula slow and campy. But if you're willing to give yourself up to it, particularly with Halloween just around the corner, I think you will find it fun. At least I did.

Best Supporting Actress Of 1928-29: Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)

Those of you with sharp eyes and long memories are no doubt scratching your heads to see Anita Page listed here as the best supporting actress of 1928-29. Didn't I choose Olga Baclanova in Docks of New York that year? Well, yes. Yes, I did. But because of a technical glitch we in the trade call "changing my mind," I'm going back in time and choosing Anita Page instead.

The fact is, Anita Page's performance in Our Dancing Daughters still resonates for me nearly a year later whereas Olga Baclanova, despite a fine effort, has pretty much slipped the surly bonds of my memory, the only Katie winner I can say that of.

Moreover, Page's performance resonates with other movie fans as well, showing up more often on other "Alternate Oscar" lists than any other actress in the mythical supporting category for 1928-29 (supporting performances wouldn't be officially recognized until 1936).

Anyway, I have cobbled together a short essay about Anita Page from everything I've written about her over the course of the year and substituted it for the original essay on Best Supporting Actress of 1928-29, leaving the original essay about Olga Baclanova as an addendum.

Sue me.—The Mythical Monkey (2/10/10)

I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.

Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn in Our Dancing Daughters as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, and Irving Thalberg, a warped frustrated young man, saw to it that it didn't.

Well, you take what you can get.

Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.

What's not to like?

Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.

Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.

MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."

Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades.

"I thought Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said later, "but Broadway Melody was Bessie Love's. I love good English, and I hated saying things like, 'Gee, ain't it elegant?' In my opinion, silents were much better than talkies. One thing you could have was mood music, which you could have playing throughout your scene to inspire you. The trouble with talkies was, they let you have the music, but they'd stop it when you had to talk, and that was always a let-down for me."

After The Broadway Melody, Page made two more movies with Joan Crawford, and appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.

Her final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven. It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.

Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937. After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI. On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.

(Original essay follows):
For the best supporting actress award, I've nominated a trio of superficially similar actresses—each blonde, beautiful, at the peak of their careers in 1928 or 1929, two playing hookers, the third playing a heartless gold digger—but who arrived on and departed from the Hollywood stage by very different paths. All of them turned in tiptop performances during what proved to be the last year when silent movies still had an outside chance of finding an audience and I'm sorry their careers, which cracked up for a wide variety of reasons, weren't longer or more celebrated.

The most visible of the bunch, at least at the time, was no doubt Anita Page whom I've nominated here for her performance as a gold digger who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her in the Jazz Age flapper picture, Our Dancing Daughters. Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age phenomenon of young girls gone wild. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was reportedly infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

On the other hand, the least visible of my trio of nominees was Mary Nolan—and apparently she wanted it that way. Earlier in the decade Nolan, whose real name was Imogen Robertson, had been a Ziegfeld girl performing under the stage name "Bubbles Wilson." But she had the misfortune to fall in love with married comedian Frank Tinney who routinely abused her and finally beat her so savagely, she landed in the hospital.

She also landed in the tabloids, which battered her reputation nearly as savagely.

Robertson/Wilson fled the United States, and after two years working in the German film industry, returned to work under the name Mary Nolan. In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, she plays a victim as ill-used as Nolan was in real life. Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel and takes revenge on Nolan, believing her to be the child of his late wife and her lover, not realizing she is in fact his own flesh and blood. First he forces Nolan to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.

Either of these actresses would be fine choices for a Katie but I'm reserving the award for the third beautiful blonde in this trio, Olga Baclanova, who co-starred in one of the best movies of the year, Josef von Sternberg's The Docks Of New York.

You might recall that I mentioned her as a potential supporting actress nominee for 1927-28 for her performance as a kinky countess with a fetish for the disfigured Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. In The Docks Of New York she plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.

Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.

It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie. Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.

"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"

Lou surprises herself and us with a pivotal act of violence in the film's third act that reveals just how much her estranged husband's thoughtless cruelty still hurts her.

Soon after this film, director von Sternberg would enter into the cinematic (and personal) relationship for which he is best remembered, the six films he made with Marlene Dietrich. These movies, while highly-regarded by cinephiles and showcasing some of Dietrich's best work, were increasingly characterized by wretched excess and a voyeuristic interest in Dietrich (Literally. In The Scarlet Empress, for example, the royal wedding night consists of the groom watching the bride through a peephole) that's inaccessible to most audiences.

While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting or cinematic as von Sternberg's later work, it's more moving and from my perspective more worthy of attention. Here, the director was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.

As for Baclanova and my other nominees, all three were pretty much out of the movies by 1936.

Anita Page, who only just passed away last year at the age of 98, said late in life that her career was unfairly sabotaged when she refused to sleep with producer Irving Thalberg and studio chief Louis B. Mayer (hopefully in response to separate propositions and not as part of some twisted, resentment-fueled three-way). She left Hollywood in 1936, but came out of retirement a few years ago to take small parts in a few low-budget horror films, including one, Frankenstein Rising, which is listed on the Internet Movie Database as being in post-production and due out later this year.

Mary Nolan made a handful of fine movies at the end of the Silent Era, including Desert Nights with John Gilbert, but she didn't adjust well to the demands of sound and was soon out of work. She developed a heroin habit and died penniless at the age of forty-two.

When talkies became the norm, Olga Baclanova's heavy Russian accent limited her to "exotic" parts and B-pictures. She made one more unforgettable movie, playing the cruel circus performer Cleopatra in the cult-film Freaks, the role for which she is probably now best known. She returned to the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then retired from the movies permanently. She died in 1974.

Note: I want to mention one other actress, Dorothy Mackaill, who was blonde, beautiful and turned in a well-received supporting performance as a tough-as-nails bad girl in 1928.

Once thought to be lost, a lone copy of The Barker languishes in UCLA's Film and Television Archive, unavailable on VHS or DVD. The handful of people who have seen it cite Dorothy Mackaill's performance as possibly the best of the year and certainly the best and most complex in this Oscar-nominated movie. As of this writing, at least, I'll have to take their word for it.

If you're in the mood for a road trip, The Barker will be shown at Noon on August 8, 2009, as part of the annual Capitolfest film festival at the Capitol Theater in Rome, N.Y.