Pandora's Box (1929)

Louise Brooks is of course a cinema legend, and that legend rests entirely on the two films she made in Germany in 1929. She made more than a dozen movies in Hollywood during the 20s, and that part of her career amounts to nothing. The eight later movies she made amount to nothing. But her performances in the two German films directed by G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) and Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) have led to her being hailed as one of the greats.

Lulu, the heroine of Pandora's Box, is the mistress of Dr Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner). Schön is planning to marry a very respectable very suitable girl, Charlotte Marie Adelaide von Zarnikow. But giving up Lulu is going to be tricky. He doesn’t really want to give her up and she doesn’t want to let him go. There’s a strange old man who keeps hanging around Lulu, a rather sinister but as yet unexplained figure.

There are complications with Schön’s son and with Lulu’s best friend who appears to have a lesbian infatuation with Lulu.

The situation gets very messy and ends with a man dead of a gunshot wound, and with Lulu on trial for her life. But Lulu’s story is far from over.

It is difficult not to compare Pandora's Box to The Blue Angel. Apart from the names of the lead characters (Lulu in Pandora's Box and Lola Lola in The Blue Angel) there are many striking similarities. Both deal with women who ignore the social and sexual conventions of their time. Both have show business backgrounds. Both deal with men destroyed by a dangerous woman. Both deal with the immense power of female sexuality. The two films he made with Brooks were the peak of Pabst’s career while the seven films he made with Marlene Dietrich were the peak of von Sternberg’s career. Both directors slept with their respective leading ladies, so both actresses could claim to be both muse and lover to their directors. Both films are entirely dependent on the performances of their respective leading ladies. Both actresses were, in their private lives, sexual outlaws. And both Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich became stylistic icons as a result of these two films.

There are significant differences. Pabst was a believer in realism, von Sternberg believed in style, style and nothing but style. Pandora's Box plays as melodrama laced with tragedy. The Blue Angel is comedy laced with melodrama.

For such a legendary star Louise Brooks had a catastrophic film career. She also had what could be described as a colourful if frequently catastrophic life. She started as a dancer, broke into films, destroyed her own film career (by being totally unwilling to play by the rules and also as a result of her prodigious sexual appetites), she spent a lengthy period working as a call girl before being rediscovered and finding success as a writer (her book Lulu in Hollywood was a bestseller).

Writing about Pandora’s Box presents some challenges. The movie was not a success when it was released and it was soon forgotten. And within a few years of its release Louise Brooks was entirely forgotten. Both the movie and its star were rediscovered in the late 1950s. When obscure and forgotten movies or stars get rediscovered people tend to get rather carried away. It’s not very exciting to rediscover a forgotten film and find that it is in fact a fairly good film, but not a masterpiece. People want to believe that they have rediscovered a lost masterpiece. And when an obscure actress is suddenly rediscovered people don’t want to believe that she was a reasonably good actress, they want to believe that she was one of the all-time greats who had been unfairly forgotten.

And that’s the problem with Pandora’s Box. It’s a good movie and it’s an interesting one but it isn’t a masterpiece. Pabst was a stodgy director and the pacing is also lethargic. Lulu is a manipulative woman who isn’t clever enough to be a successful manipulator. She does foolish things and gets herself into big trouble and from then on it’s all downhill for her. Her life becomes a series of endless disasters. But she just doesn’t have quite enough psychological complexity to make her story compelling, and from the halfway point she’s really just an appalled spectator watching her life go down the drain. The losers with whom she surrounds herself drag her down but we don’t get a real sense of tragedy because Lulu just drifts helplessly. The ending is silly and melodramatic.

Brooks gives a very competent rather naturalistic performance but the idea that is sometimes promoted that she single-handedly revolutionised film acting just doesn’t stand up.

Had Brooks declined the role Pabst’s second choice would have been Marlene Dietrich. The conventional view is that it’s fortunate for the world of cinema that Dietrich was not chosen. I do not agree. Dietrich was a far better actress with a much greater emotional range and might have made far more of the role.

The main interest of the film, and perhaps the real reason that people get carried away with it, is that the story of Lulu strikingly parallels the story of its star. A brief period of shining brightly, then disaster, followed by escalating self-inflicted further disasters and a descent into degradation and prostitution. And neither Lulu nor Brooks ever seemed to understand what went wrong. It’s easy, and tempting, to romanticise both Lulu and Brooks and to try to make them tragic figures brought down by a hostile world which cannot understand their refusal to avoid self-destruction. The fact that both Lulu and Brooks were driven by an overwhelming desire for sexual freedom naturally ensured that both film and star would become legendary figures in the 1960s and 1970s, seen as bold precursors of the Sexual Revolution.

There is no question that Louise Brooks, more than any other woman, captured the look of the Jazz Age. She had the face that suited the fashionable bob hairstyle, she had the body to wear the fashions of the era and she certainly had sexual allure, at a time when her kind of overt sexual allure was becoming a very big thing. It’s worth seeing Pandora's Box just to see Brooks at her most iconic. When you see this movie you’ll understand why the Louise Brooks look was a sensation. But while it’s an interesting movie it’s not a masterpiece. Worth a look.

A Woman’s Secret (1949)

A Woman’s Secret, released by RKO in 1949, was Nicholas Ray’s second film as a director. It’s been released in the Warner Archive series with Film Noir boldly blazoned on the disc cover. Whether it actually qualifies as a film noir is something we’ll get to in due course.

The movie opens with a shooting. Singing star Susan Caldwell (Gloria Grahame) finishes a radio spot and goes home where Marian Washburn (Maureen O’Hara) is waiting for her. Susan announces that she’s quitting her singing career. The two women quarrel. Susan runs upstairs in tears. Marian follows her into her room. A shot is heard. The housekeeper races upstairs to find that Susan has been shot. The police arrive and Marian tells them that she shot Susan.

Susan isn’t dead but the doctors say her survival is going to be touch and go.

The backstory slowly unfolds in a series of flashbacks. Marian had been a fine singer, headed for stardom, when she contracted a throat infection which ended her career. Shortly afterwards Marian and her accompanist (and apparently her fiancé in a very vague and informal way) Luke Jordan (Melvyn Douglas) discover starving (literally starving) would-be singer Susan Caldwell. Susan has a sensational voice and clearly has the potential to be the big star that Marian never became.

Susan becomes a very big star indeed, with Marian and Luke managing her career. Marian in particular acts as her mentor.

Which gives Marian a plausible motive for trying to kill her - if Susan quit singing Marian would lose her meal ticket.

It seems an open-and-shut case but Luke refuses to believe that Marian shot Susan. The detective in charge of the case, Inspector Fowler (Jay C. Flippen) has to admit that he’s not entirely happy with Marian’s confession. But if Marian didn’t shoot Susan who did?

The first thing that needs to be cleared up about this movie is that its claims to being film noir are very thin indeed. It does star Gloria Grahame who was certainly a bona fide film noir icon but that is not enough to qualify this as a film noir. It’s a mystery melodrama. Not that there’s anything wrong with mystery melodramas.

Gloria Grahame is of course superb. She always was. She’s so good (and at times so adorable) that you have to feel sorry for Maureen O’Hara. She’s very good but she’s inevitably overshadowed by Miss Grahame. Everybody in the cast is overshadowed by Gloria Grahame. She plays Susan as not quite a bad girl, but one who is impulsive and unpredictable and at times manipulative. Susan is just trouble, even though she’s not really aware of it at times. Mostly she’s young and immature and has no idea what she’s doing and she gets away with it because she’s beautiful and talented.

Melvyn Douglas is OK. Jay C. Flippen (one of those wonderful old character actors) and as Inspector Fowler and Mary Philips as his would-be amateur detective wife are fun.

I have to put on record the fact that I have mixed feelings about Nicholas Ray as a director. I like They Live By Night (which is more romantic melodrama than film noir) and Born To Be Bad and I love In a Lonely Place but Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause leave me cold and I thought Party Girl was embarrassingly bad. For me Nicholas Ray is a director who started promisingly but whose career went off the rails a bit. It’s undeniable however that he was very good at melodrama.

Herman J. Mankiewicz (yes, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane) wrote the screenplay and it has some problems. The solution to the mystery is blindingly obvious right from the start, even with some feeble attempts at misdirection. The script is, quite frankly, a bit of a mess.

The movie has other major problems. It gives the impression that either Nicholas Ray wasn’t sure what kind of movie he was making or maybe that studio interference caused the movie to be wildly inconsistent in tone. Maybe Ray just lost control. It starts as a slightly noirish melodrama but then it becomes almost a screwball comedy for a while before uneasily reverting to being a mystery.

The Warner Archive release offers a very good transfer without any extras.

A Woman’s Secret is a movie that seems to have been thrown together without any real thought as to what it was supposed to be. It just doesn’t quite work on any level. It actually might have worked better as an out-and-out comedy. Only worth seeing for Gloria Grahame’s extremely interesting and rather complex performance. For that it’s worth a rental.

Time Is My Enemy (1954)

Time Is My Enemy is a British crime B-picture included in Kino Lorber’s British Noir II boxed set. It was released by Vandyke Pictures in 1954.

The movie opens with the robbery of a jewellery store in which the jeweller is shot. Inspector Wayne (Duncan Lamont) is certain it’s the work of a gang he’s been after for quite a while. All he needs is some evidence.

Inspector Wayne’s publisher friend John Everton (Patrick Barr) and his wife Barbara Everton (Renée Asherton) are about to get unwittingly mixed up in this sordid crime.

Barbara Everton had been married before but her husband Martin was killed in a bomb blast during the war. Nobody, least of all Barbara, regretted his death. Martin Radley was definitely a wrong ’un. Now she and John are happily married with a son and they face a bright future. At least they face a bright future unless something really awful were to happen - something like Martin Radley turning out to be alive after all.

The only thing that could make such a ghastly situation worse would be if Martin Radley now happened to be a desperate jewel thief (who calls himself Harry Bond among other aliases) who has just shot a man, a man who might well die. And if he decided that his only chance of survival was to blackmail Barbara.

Barbara doesn’t know what to do and as is the case with so many movie protagonists just about everything she does do turns out to be poorly thought out and likely to make a bad situation worse.

Don Chaffey was a competent director who went on to have a successful career in television in Britain, Australia and the United States. His feature films included the disappointing slightly noirish sleaze thriller The Flesh Is Weak.

Screenwriter Allan MacKinnon had a not overly distinguished career (which included the reasonably effective railway spy thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste) before his premature death a year after this film was released. His screenplay for Time Is My Enemy is a bit contrived but it’s quite clever.

The big attraction here is Dennis Price as Martin. Price was a wonderful actor who could be charming or amusing or sinister or even downright vicious as the occasion demanded. In this case he’s a nasty piece of work indeed. He’s an out-and-out cad and Dennis Price makes a fine cad.

Renée Asherton as Barbara, Duncan Lamont as the policeman who gets emotionally entangled and Patrick Barr as the well-meaning husband all provide solid support but the movie belongs to Dennis Price.

Is it film noir? Thematically I think it does have some legitimate claims to being noir - we have a protagonist drawn into a nightmare world by a combination of bad luck and bad judgment. It’s also one of those noir films (and there were quite a few) in which a male character acts as the equivalent of a femme fatale.

Time Is My Enemy gets a good transfer from Kino Lorber. The transfer is fullframe which is quite correct and it’s in black-and-white.

The Kino Lorber British Noir II set also includes the disappointing The Interrupted Journey and the very good Cosh Boy and The Vicious Circle as well as Time Lock which I’ve not yet watched.

Time Is My Enemy is a decent little not-quite-noir but noirish B-movie and it’s recommended for Dennis Price’s performance.

Camille (1921)

The 1921 Metro Pictures silent version of Camille starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino has been overshadowed by the 1936 Greta Garbo version. While Garbo’s Camille is unquestionably one of the greatest romance movies ever made the 1921 version is in many ways a much more extraordinary movie. It is a bizarre masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece.

Camille is of course based on the immensely popular 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias) by Alexandre Dumas fils.

Marguerite Gautier (Nazimova) is the most celebrated courtesan in Paris. Young Armand Duval (Valentino) falls in love with her and wants to marry her. His father, a man of wealth and high social position, is horrified. Marguerite is, after all, a prostitute.

And Marguerite is very ill. She has consumption and it is highly likely she will not live.

It’s not a complicated plot but it’s more than sufficient to make this one of the great love stories.

Alla Nazimova was, for a brief moment, a very very big Hollywood star indeed. In the early 1920s she took complete control of her own career (and she had the star power to do so) and began producing her own movies. And, according to some accounts, she was in practice the director as well. She then made a couple of movies which were spectacular flops but which later came to be recognised as masterpieces of a very strange and fascinating kind. The most notorious of these movies was her unbelievably outrageous 1922 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s already outrageous play Salomé. Her career as a star was over by the mid-20s.

Whether Nazimova was a great actress or a terrible actress is an irrelevant question. Nazimova was Nazimova. She invented her own style. Pete Townshend once said that Keith Moon was the world’s greatest Keith Moon-style drummer. You could just as accurately say that Nazimova was the greatest Nazimova-style actress of all time. Whether you like her style or not it certainly attracts attention. Camille is a Nazimova movie. It has her fingerprints all over it.

As extraordinary as Nazimova was you could argue that the real star of this movie is art director and costume designer Natacha Rambova. The look of Camille is entirely Rambova’s work and it’s one of the most visually stunning movies ever made. If you think you love art deco all I can say is that you haven’t seen art deco until you’ve seen Natacha Rambova’s interpretation of art deco.Even in an age of extraordinary women Rambova was something special. She was a true visionary. The word genius is overused but she was a genius. She later became a distinguished Egyptologist.

She is of course more famous for having later married Valentino. Scandalous rumours about the couple and about Rambova’s alleged bisexuality abounded, most of which are almost certainly untrue. What is true is that there was nothing ordinary about either Rambova or Valentino.

Which brings us back to Nazimova, whose personal life was (you guessed it) also scandalous and flamboyant. She almost certainly was bisexual. And in the case of Nazimova her sexuality really is relevant to an appreciation of her as an actress. Exotic ambiguous flamboyant sexuality was an integral part of her style.

As for Valentino, he was in my view a remarkably underrated actor. He was first and foremost a star but given the right material the man could act.

The 1921 version of Camille is included as an extra with the Warner Home Video release of the 1936 Garbo version which makes the disc an absolute must-buy. The transfer of the 1921 version, given the fact that we’re lucky the film has survived at all, is pretty good. Which matters because this movie is such a spectacular visual experience.

The 1921 Camille has enormous historical significance. Nazimova, Natacha Rambova and Valentino are crucial figures in Hollywood (and indeed cinematic) history. If you love movies you have to sample their work. And in its own delightfully strange and idiosyncratic way it’s a great movie and a very entertaining one. It’s very very melodramatic and it’s a three-hankie weepie but it’s very highly recommended.

Abdul the Damned (1935)

Abdul the Damned is a 1935 British historical drama/biopic directed by Karl Grune. It is the story of the latter days of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last Sultan to possess effective power over the Ottoman Empire. More specifically the movie takes place against the background of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

As the movie opens the Sultan has caved in to pressure to restore the constitution and has appointed the Young Turk politician and reformer Hilmi Pasha (Charles Carson) as Grand Vizier.

Fritz Kortner plays Abdul Hamid II and also plays Kelar, an actor who serves as the Sultan’s double (there were numerous assassination attempts against the Sultan’s life so having a double was a sensible precaution).

Yet another assassination attempt fails, with Kelar being shot and wounded instead of Abdul Hamid.

The Sultan may have appeared to have given in to the demands of the Young Turks but he intends to destroy them, and his plans to do so are devious and subtle. His plans are to be carried out by his ruthless Chief of Police Kadar-Pasha (Nils Asther).

There’s also a romance sub-plot. A beautiful Viennese opera singer, Therese Alder (Adrienne Ames), has caught the Sultan’s eye but Therese is in love with a young Turkish officer, Captain Talak-Bey (John Stuart). When the Sultan decides that he wants a woman he expects to get her. There is some subtlety to the relationship between the Sultan and Therese - her feelings towards him are a mixture of horror, repulsion, sympathy and affection.

It’s Fritz Kortner’s performance (or rather performances) that provide the main attraction. He’s delightfully sinister but with a certain roguish charm. Abdul Hamid is cruel and ruthless but he is a fighter and we have to have a certain respect for his determination to survive. And, in his own way, he does believe that the empire needs him. Kortner makes him a fascinating and magnetic personality, with a surprising but genuine element of tragedy.

Nils Asther as the Chief of Police is just as impressive - smooth but utterly devoid of scruples. The whole cast is extremely good.

There were no less than six writers involved in this movie, including Emeric Pressburger and Curt Siodmak.

Karl Grune had an interesting career as a director from 1919 until 1936 after which time he turned to producing.

Abdul the Damned is visually very impressive. The sets and costumes are marvellous but Grune also adds some imaginative touches. There’s a very clever scene early on, with Fritz Kortner as both Abdul Hamid and Kelar being reflected in multiple mirrors. And there’s a wonderful tracking shot at the opera.

This is a very lavish production. There was some serious money spent on this movie, and spent well.

The trick with an historical movie is making the ending work without making a mockery of the actual historical facts. Abdul the Damned pulls off this trick very adroitly. I liked the ending very much.

It should be noted that this is not an adventure movie as such, although it does have some suspense. It’s more of a historical drama with international intrigue set against a backdrop of revolution.

Abdul the Damned is included as a bonus movie in VCI’s three-disc Special Edition DVD release of the bizarre but intriguing 1934 British musical Chu Chin Chow. Since Chu Chin Chow is well worth seeing and the Special Edition is well worth buying you might as well give Abdul the Damned a watch since effectively you’re getting it for nothing. The transfer of Abdul the Damned is reasonably decent. Abdul the Damned has also been released individually by Network in the UK.

Abdul the Damned is an excellent and very handsome historical drama with a great lead performance by Fritz Kortner. Highly recommended.

Fly-Away Baby (1937)

Fly-Away Baby (later retitled Crime in the Clouds) is the second of Warner Brothers B-movies featuring ace girl reporter Torchy Blane. It was released in 1937.

A jeweller has been murdered, and $250,000 worth of diamonds have been stolen. Lieutenant Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) figures it was a professional jewel heist. His reporter girlfriend Torchy has the idea that maybe Lucien "Sonny" Croy (Gordon Oliver) is the real culprit. Croy is a reporter as well, of sorts. Actually his father owns a newspaper and has put him to work much against his will. Croy has a motive for the murder but he also has an alibi.

Croy has come up with a publicity stunt for his paper - an attempt to set a record for circumnavigating the globe by commercial air services.

Rival reporter Hughie Sprague (Hugh O’Connell) has decided to turn the round-the-world trip into a two-way race. And Torchy persuades her publisher to let her make it a three-way race. Torchy hopes that in the course of the race she will be able to gather the evidence to prove her theory correct.

There actually turns out to be a fourth unofficial racer. Gahagan (Tom Kennedy), McBride’s police driver, has resigned from the force to take up a new career as a private detective. Gahagan is the Torchy Blane series’ regular comic relief character and his presence is entirely irrelevant and fails to provide anything more than very mild amusement.

That’s pretty much it for the plot, and as a mystery plot it’s terribly thin. In fact the race around the world is as much as anything an attempt to add some excitement to the film and to distract the audience’s attention away from the deficiencies of the plotting. This attempt at least partially succeeds and it does add a certain air of some glamour and exoticism, through the magic of stock footage.

Aviation buffs will enjoy seeing lots of (stock footage) shots of DC-3s and Pan Am Clipper flying boats and they will get even more of a buzz from the climax on board a zeppelin. I’ve long maintained that no movie that features zeppelins can ever be considered a total failure.

The great strength of the movie is the superb chemistry between Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane. They appeared together in seven of the nine Torchy Blane films. Once again Torchy and McBride are about to get married but every time that happens either Torchy gets the scent of a hot story or McBride gets distracted by a new murder case so we get the feeling that somehow they never are actually going to get hitched.

In Frederick Nebel’s original stories McBride (actually it was MacBride in Nebel’s stories) was the hero and he had a boozy male reporter sidekick named Kennedy. Turning the sidekick into an attractive woman and making her the lead character was a pretty shrewd move on the part of the producers of the movie series.

The stock footage is utilised pretty well. The zeppelin sets (presumably left over from some A-picture) look good.

The race-around-the-world idea is a bit lame. How is it a race if all three contestants take the same scheduled commercial flights? That angle really needed a bit more work.

The Warner Archive Torchy Blane DVD set includes all nine films. Fly-Away Baby gets a very good transfer. Image and sound quality are fine.

Fly-Away Baby is a bit disappointing after the first film in the series, Smart Blonde, but Farrell and MacLane are so good that they manage to carry it off and it’s kinda fun. Recommended.

Cosh Boy (1953)

Cosh Boy (also released under the title The Slasher) is a British juvenile delinquent crime B-movie which is notable for giving 19-year-old Joan Collins one of her first starring rôles.

The movie start with one of those amusing public service announcement type warnings about the dangers of juvenile delinquency and how it’s all caused by parents being too soft.

Roy Walsh (James Kenney) leads a juvenile delinquent gang which specialises in coshing old ladies. Roy and his pal Alfie get picked up by the cops after one of their robberies and placed on probation. One of the terms of the probation is that they have to attend a local youth club. Roy thinks the youth club could have possibilities - if they attend regularly they can use it to provide alibis for their crimes.

At the youth club Roy meets Alfie’s gorgeous kid sister Rene and falls for her. The trouble is that Rene already has a boyfriend, Brian. And Brian is not a loser like Roy.

Roy decides that something will have to be done about Brian.

Rene ends up falling for Roy anyway because, you know, it’s the bad boy thing. And she convinces herself that he loves her. Rene is supposed to be only sixteen so it’s plausible enough that she’d make some disastrous choices.

The amusing thing about Roy’s criminal plans is that they always require someone other than Roy to take all the risks. He justifies this by explaining that he’s the brains of the outfit.

Roy’s mother Elsie (Betty Ann Davies) has been dating a Canadian guy named Bob Stevens (Robert Ayres) and this upsets Roy very much indeed. He thinks it’s disgusting. After all his mother is really really old - she’s in her thirties! Roy’s displeasure may also have something to do with the fact that Bob knows Roy is a worthless little punk. Bob has made it clear that if he marries Elsie he won’t take any nonsense from Roy. Roy is afraid of Bob, as he’s afraid of anyone who stands up to him.

As you’d expect Roy and his gang get into more violent crimes and the romance between Roy and Rene has predictable results. The world is closing in on Roy and he’s getting more desperate, and more scared. When it comes down to it Roy is a complete coward.

This was a fairly early (but very competent) directorial effort for Lewis Gilbert who went on to have a distinguished and varied career. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Vernon Harris. The screenplay holds no great surprises but in 1953 it was pretty hard-hitting. In fact teenage thugs beating up old ladies is still pretty hard-hitting.

There’s nothing noir about this film. Or at least there’s nothing noir about the content - Roy is a vicious little thug right from the start and he’s a loser right from the start. He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The style is somewhat noir with plenty of night scenes and shadows.

James Kenney’s performance as Roy is excessive but effective. He manages to convince us that Roy really is not just vicious but totally out of control.

Joan Collins is good but doesn’t get too many opportunities to spread her acting wings. Rene is naïve but he doesn’t deserve a loser like Roy. Betty Ann Davies has a very unsympathetic part since the movie makes it quite clear that Roy’s behaviour is entirely her fault for pandering to him and being unwilling to face the truth that he’s gone thoroughly bad.

There’s an amusing scene towards the end that reflects 1950s views on how to deal with juvenile delinquents. It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t get away with in a film today.

Cosh Boy is part of Kino Lorber’s British Noir II boxed set (which also includes Vicious Circle, Time Is My Enemy, Time Lock and The Interrupted Journey). The transfer is quite acceptable.

This movie isn’t noir but it’s a good and fairly unflinching juvenile delinquent movie and it’s recommended.