The setting of Shanghai Express, constructed in the studio artifice that Sternberg always preferred, is an elaborately conceived and utterly fictitious China, embodied in the films opening sequence: a huge, dazzlingly white locomotive steams out of Peking Station and straight down the middle of a narrow street seething with lampshade-hatted coolies, stallholders, children, and animals. Years later, Sternberg visited China for the first time and was gratified to discover that the reality differed completely.
Clive Brook as Lilys ex-lover, a British army captain, plays the kind of staunchly traditional Englishman beside whose stiff upper lip steel-reinforced concrete would seem flabby, and Anna May Wong is no less enjoyably cartoonish as the embodiment of feline Eastern guile. But the film belongs to Sternberg and Dietrich, and the strange fetishistic chemistry between them. Together they created something deliriously unique in cinema; apart they could never quite recapture the same magic. PK
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1930s
FREAKS (1932)
U.S. (MGM) 64m BW
Director: Tod Browning
Producer: Tod Browning
Screenplay: Clarence Aaron Tod Robbins, from his novel Spurs
Photography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Cast: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Schlitze, Josephine Joseph, Johnny Eck, Frances OConnor, Peter Robinson
From its original conception as a horror movie exceeding all expectations, something more disturbing than anything seen before (via Dwain Espers exploitation of it under such dubious and misleading titles as Forbidden Love, Monster Show, and Natures Mistakes), to its revival as an avant-garde film in the tradition of Luis Buñuel and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tod Brownings Freaks has been classed as everything from horror to art house to documentary (because of its realism as expressed in the movies use of real freaks). Nevertheless, despite its originality of conception and design, and its startling ability to both move and frighten audiences, Freaks has remained to this day an underappreciated film.
Freaks opens with a carnival barker addressing some curious spectators. After the crowd catches sight of the female sideshow freak nearby, several women scream and the barker starts telling her story. Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a beautiful trapeze artist with the carnival, is adored by a midget named Hans (Harry Earles). But Cleopatra is having an affair with Hercules (Henry Victor), the Strong Man, and the couple devise a plot to get their hands on Hanss recently-inherited fortune: Cleopatra will marry the midget she despises and then poison him. During an unforgettable wedding ceremony-cum-initiation ritual, Cleopatra rebuffs the assembled freaks (when casting the film, Browning had the largest conglomeration of professional freaks ever assembled trying out for roles), teasing them mercilessly and calling them dirty and slimy. Back in her wagon she poisons Hanss drink, but her plan is foiled and she is attacked by the freaks, who have banded together to exact a brutal revenge. Finally returning to the carnival barker in the present, we now see the result of the freaks attack on Cleopatra: she has been turned into a legless, half-blind stumpa squawking chicken woman. A final scene, tacked on later as the studio insisted on a happy ending, shows Hans living like a
millionaire in an elegant house, reconciled with his midget ex-girlfriend Frieda (Daisy Earles).
But no mere plot summary can do justice to this alarming yet profound movie, which truly must be seen to be believed. It is a supreme oddity (freak?) of world cinema considered by many to be the most remarkable film in the career of a director whose credits include the original version of Dracula (1931). BH
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1930s
ME AND MY GAL (1932)
U.S. (Fox) 79m BW
Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Philip Klein, Barry Conners, Arthur Kober
Photography: Arthur C. Miller
Music: James F. Hanley
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Marion Burns, George Walsh, J. Farrell MacDonald, Noel Madison, Henry B. Walthall, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, George Chandler
Set in Manhattan, Me and My Gal is about a soft-hearted, none-too-brainy cop (Spencer Tracy) who romances a chowder-house waitress (Joan Bennett) and, through dumb luck, catches a notorious gangster who has conveniently chosen her sisters attic to hole up in. Raoul Walsh and his writers apparently took this rickety premise as their cue to do whatever the hell they wanted. The result is a delightful, unpretentious, often completely crazy film.
The populism of Me and My Gal rings true; although the films portrait of Irish-American life in Depression-era New York is doubtless idealized, the real optimism, tenderness, warmth, and depth of shared experience behind the idealization are unmistakable. In this film made before the repeal of Prohibition, not only is there a running comic motif involving a belligerent little drunk (the eccentric Will Stanton), there is also a wedding scene that riotously celebrates drinking, with the father of the bride (J. Farrell MacDonald) walking into close-up and shooting a jaunty invitation into the camera lens: Whod like a drink, huh?