The comments section to last week’s post developed a thread regarding the legacy of Harry Langdon, a comedian dear to my heart. Some of y’all said what I was going to say already, but nevertheless I feel it incumbent on me to step forward and explain my own position more clearly in this space. I haven’t really written about Langdon here in part because I wanted my work on the Harry Langdon DVD box to serve as my word on the subject, but also because I realize that Langdon is a love-him-or-hate-him performer, and I don’t like to argue about opinions. If you don’t care for Langdon, that’s not something that’s open to debate.

The comments thread was initiated by Jeff H. who asserted this position:

Langdon relied more on his team of people like Frank Capra and Harry Edwards, without realizing that the character that made him so beloved was created for him, not by him. If you want proof of that, watch THE STRONG MAN, with Capra and his team then watch THREE’S A CROWD, which Langdon made after he fired Capra-there is no comparison. 

That’s more a question of fact, not opinion, and it’s worth digging into it in more detail.

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One of Sam Fuller’s most personal films, Park Row (1952), has been released on DVD through MGM’s burn-on-demand service, the “Limited Edition Collection” (available through Amazon and other retailers). Inspired by his time as a copy-boy for Hearst’s New York Journal and as a crime reporter for the New York Graphic, it is an impassioned paean to American journalism, opening with a scroll of the 1,772 active daily papers at the time (in 2009 the numbers were down to 1,387).  I can confirm that the listed Waukesha Daily Freeman is still running, with reasonable subscription rates. Fuller’s artistic temperament was formed in his ink-stained years, as he wanted his films to have the visceral impact and clarity of a 100 point size headline. Park Row is his gift to the business that made him. MGM’s DVD is presented in a solid if unspectacular transfer, with strong contrast. It includes a trailer.

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Please Note: In Tribute to Jackie Cooper, on Friday, May 13th TCM will broadcast nine of the actor’s films, which are listed here.

Jackie Cooper, who was an Oscar nominee for Best Actor in a Leading Role when he was only nine,  died on May 3rd at the age of 88. His shy smile, seemingly artless candor, and innate ability to suggest an overwhelmed child’s desire to make everything all right in the world continues to make those who stumble on his films smile in recognition.

If your most vivid mental image of Jackie Cooper is still as one of the ragamuffins in Hal Roach’s The Little Rascals, or the boy pleading with The Champ (1931-King Vidor) to rise again, or the privileged child befriending a kid from Shantytown in his Oscar-nominated performance in Skippy (1931-Norman Taurog), that’s understandable. Despite the fact that his early performances are eight decades in the past, his wonderfully natural portrayal of boys on film are still painfully fresh and have an evergreen realism at their core. In the darkest years of the Great Depression audiences felt a connection to that innocent, lion-hearted kid on screen whose life wasn’t going any more smoothly than their own. I like Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Freddie Bartholomew very much. I’ve been astounded by Mickey Rooney’s seemingly boundless talent. Yet to me, Jackie Cooper was one of most natural child actors, even though he had a different, understandably complex perspective on his own work. “I wasn’t great,” he claimed. “The directors were great. I was just a kid who did what he was told. And what I wasn’t told to do was done for me.”

His son, Russell Cooper, commented that his father “was a fascinating guy who really did everything, from all different aspects of the business. You can’t really say that about many people.” Looking back at Cooper‘s long life, when he acted in over a hundred movies, plays and television shows, and directed and produced over 250 TV projects, it seems that he may have done everything but sweep up the stage–and, as an apparently down-to-earth person–he probably did that at least a few times.

Much of Cooper‘s acting has a similar, recognizable quality, as he personified a kind of ragged moxie laced with a guileless intensity. Even when the stories were schmaltzy, he was not. As he grew up, and seemed likely to succumb to the neglect and adulation that early fame often breeds, he eventually approached his later problems with a similar ingenuousness as he struggled to become an adult in real ways. As he later pointed out about his childhood career, “I was trained to be a professional, not to be a person.”

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The year is 1933, and times are tough all over.  What of the poor little rich boy, Henry Gibson (Ben Lyon), who can’t even inherit his millions unless he gets married by his 27^th birthday?  And yes, Keaton fans, that’s the same idea as SEVEN CHANCES—but where Buster turned that premise into a feature-length chase scene, the movie we have in front of us here has different plans in store.  Luckily, Gibson’s got himself a wife—a beautiful young debutante whose icy good looks and haughty demeanor prove her high social standing.  On their honeymoon, the girl goes missing (hence the title of this flick, GIRL MISSING), and our distraught hero offers up a reward for his wife’s safe return.  This is all sensible enough, and fairly familiar thriller territory.  But Gibson’s life is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a pair of gold-digging “chorus girls,” whose complete lack of restraint or decorum may very well save the day.  This is a movie that wouldn’t have been made even just a few years later, and pretty much doesn’t exist anymore even today.  This is Pre-Code, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s a riot.

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Last week I posted an essay about 1930′s comedy star William Haines, and ignited some impassioned responses in the comments area from some Haines supporters who took umbrage at what I wrote.  I like to provoke intense feelings—I can’t see much point to wasting my life writing about movies if I don’t generate some kind of response.  I could be spending my time playing with my kids, or drinking. . . or drinking with my kids.  So, I think angry comments are better than no comments at all—but this particular firestorm has encouraged me to write a sequel.

This week isn’t about Haines, though, but is about the issue that informed last week’s controversy: how changing cultural attitudes influences how we react to comedy.  And the touchstone I’ll be using for this week’s discussion is blackface comedy of the 20s and 30s—I use the term “blackface” broadly, to cover not just white actors playing blacks but black actors playing crude black stereotypes.  If you click on the “read more” button, you will be greeted with some images and film clips I fully expect to be offensive.  Proceed advisedly.

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This is the story of one of the least funny (or most not funny) comedies I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.  A film so profoundly insulting and hateful that it almost exceeds my ability to imagine how anyone ever found it amusing.  But they did, and so this is also the story of changing fashions, in movies and comedies and men.

William Haines was born in 1900—he was a child of the movie age.  At the age of 14, he ran away from home (under circumstances I’ll explain later) and led an itinerant life until he was discovered by Samuel Goldwyn and signed to a movie contract.  This was not a ticket to stardom—he proceeded to work in background roles and bit parts for years, as if destined for also-ran status.

Little by little he migrated to the front of the screen, and as he did, critics started to take notice—and as they started to take notice, they started to complain.  Below are some typical descriptions of Haines’ performances, and see if they gradually cohere into a picture for you:

“brash, perennial youth”

“fresh, breezy, overconfident”

“overbearing wisecracker”

“conceited, obnoxious”

1926 was the breakthrough year.  Two important things happened in 1926, of which I’ll only tell you one now (if you get the sense I’m withholding something, you’re right, I am).  He starred in BROWN OF HARVARD, in which he played an obnoxious charmer—a role he inhabited so perfectly, and which audiences embraced so thoroughly, it became his personal niche.  A William Haines movie was a vehicle, a justification for Haines to come on and act like a jackass.  Metro’s ads plugged “the smart aleck of the screen” and “its irrepressible wisecracker.”  Irving Thalberg said that Haines was what modern movie audiences wanted from a comedian—as opposed to the old-hat stuff being offered by the slapstick clowns, now increasingly seen by the big studios as passé.

Critics pretty much hated this act, while audiences embraced it.  Screenland Magazine wrote of one of his flicks, “the star plays another of his cut-up roles that makes the critics gnash their teeth and audiences chortle.”  Haines was his generation’s Adam Sandler.

Before I start to take apart Haines’ THE GIRL SAID NO, which may be one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, let me establish the guy’s credentials: from 1928 to 1932 he was one of the top 5 box office stars.  An exhibitor poll listed him as second only to Lon Chaney in popularity.  When MGM entered the talkie age, the first of their major stars to speak onscreen: Haines.  He may be a forgotten name today, but his work was mainstream American comedy in its day.

Let me also state that while I chose THE GIRL SAID NO as my example to present here, I’ve seen a few other of Haine’s vehicles—enough to feel confident that I haven’t plucked one bad egg out of the bowl to unfairly denounce.

On the surface, this thing appears to have promise: its comedy pedigree is respectable.  THE GIRL SAID NO was a 1930 feature directed by Sam Wood, just five years away from directing the Marx Brothers in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and A DAY AT THE RACES.  It co-stars comedienne Polly Moran and features a showstopping cameo by Marie Dressler (and it is a sign of Haines’ diminished presence in popular culture today that Warner Archive, despairing of selling this DVD on the basis of Haines’ name alone, heavily emphasizes Dressler’s, as if her brief screen time constitutes a major part of the movie).

The scene goes on as you might predict: Dressler gets increasingly drunk, and Haines takes advantage of her inebriated state to sell her some bonds.

In a way, you’ve now got an inkling of what the title means.  In this case, we had a girl, or a woman, Marie Dressler, who was adamant about her desires (I won’t buy any bonds, and I hate Denver, plus I don’t like parks), and in comes Haines who steamrolls over every objection she has—literally forcing her to yield to his will.  Doesn’t matter if she says no, Haines doesn’t take no for an answer.

But. . . buying a bond isn’t a bad thing, and financing a public park isn’t a bad thing, and he confesses to her and she accepts him, and we can leave that scene feeling OK.  He was a good salesman, using his wiles and charm to make a sale.  Society smiles on that.

Too bad the title isn’t referring to Marie Dressler.  No, THE GIRL SAID NO means exactly what you think it does.  This is basically a rape comedy.

Now, Haines doesn’t actually rape Leila Hyams.  But watch this clip and tell me if you think I’m exaggerating:

I don’t know about you, but watching him make sport of her crying gives me the willies.  I felt like I needed to shower after watching this thing.  Haines’ behavior throughout the film violates all manner of laws, norms, and social convention regarding sexual harassment.  He cajoles, threatens, taunts, and manipulates Leila relentlessly.

This is just a taste of Haines’ idea of courtship.

At any given moment in the film, Leila’s face is contorted with horror or revulsion.  It goes on like this for 90 minutes!  All the way to the damn ending!  In screwball comedies, the playful hostility between boy and girl melts into romance by the final reel, but that moment of conciliation almost never occurs here.  Even as late as THE GIRL SAID NO‘s finale (am I SPOILING this for you?) he literally ties her up and gags her, to drag her unwillingly from her wedding.

And to this we are expected to laugh, and cheer.  By all evidence, audiences in 1930 did.

I was so appalled by all this, I pulled out  The Funsters, edited by James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard, to get some background and context on Haines.  I needed to understand, seriously, how did anybody ever enjoy this?  The biographical essay didn’t help much in answering this question—reading those things about Haines being a top box office star, hailed by Thalberg as the Next Big Thing in Comedy. . . I mean, it just got me depressed.

At the same time, the book’s entry on Haines asked a new question, one that hadn’t occurred to me before.  There was something more to Haines, that Parish et al found problematic.  They clearly didn’t want to address it but couldn’t entirely avoid it–so they did the literary equivalent of mumbling something under their breath and coughing into their collective hand.  There it was–a fleeting aside in a throwaway sentence–and it changed my impression of Haines.

That passing comment prompted me to do some more research, some more digging—because I was realizing that it wasn’t just that THE GIRL SAID NO seemed to wallow in the obsolete sexual mores of a different age, the fate of Mr. Haines overall did.

When Haines ran away from home at the age of fourteen, he did so in the arms of another boy, a lad Haines called his boyfriend.  When he was discovered by Goldwyn in 1922, Haines was working as a model, living in the nascent gay community of Greenwich Village.  The second important thing that happened to him in 1926 was that he met Jimmie Shields, who became his committed partner.  They lived together for nearly fifty years.

Haines’ homosexuality was no secret to the studio, but the studio hoped to keep it a secret from audiences.  His oversexed screen persona was one way of projecting a straight image onto comic mannerisms that, if you rewatch the clips above with this new information, may now seem effete.  Studio PR hacks invented gossip linking him with Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Barbara LaMour.  To which Haines told the press, he preferred the company of Polly Moran.

Let’s run a clip of Polly Moran to clarify that reference:

I don’t doubt that Haines enjoyed Moran’s company.  I don’t doubt the experienced comedienne would have been enjoyable company for anyone—but for studio publicists trying to establish Haines’ heterosexual bona fides, he wasn’t helping.

Nor was he helping when he was arrested for soliciting sex with a sailor in a YMCA in 1933.  Newspapers got wind of this, and MGM realized the genie was out of the bottle.  Haines was presented with an ultimatum: he could maintain his career if he squelched these “rumors,” and the only way to do that definitively (in the studio’s estimation) was a sham marriage.  To his credit, Haines didn’t blink.  He walked out of the studio, forever, with Shields’ hand in his, and never looked back.

Now, none of this changes the fact that THE GIRL SAID NO tries to make jokes out of ignoring that a girl said “no” (and even puts it in the title!)  None of it makes Haines’ excessive mugging funny.  But, it does put Haines’ behavior into a social context: he lived in an age where America was much more comfortable with joking about rape than it was admitting that two men could be in love.  And in a world of such upside-down values, he stayed true to who he was–and accepted the consequence of his decisions.

So, I’ll still rank Haines as one of the least funny and most annoying screen comedians of all time, but he another side as well: he and Shields founded an interior design company, and among their clients were such Hollywood luminaries as Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, Nunnally Johnson, and Jack L. Warner.  Their firm still exists: www.williamhaines.com, and it seems all his talent was in design.  He wasn’t funny, but he had a good eye.

Buster Keaton has a problem.  Working backwards: 5)  he’d very much like to get an audience with a certain general, so he can present his latest invention—a gun fitted with a headlight, for improved aim; 4) the general is inside a swanky casino; 3) the casino’s dress code requires formal attire; 2) renting a tuxedo costs money; 1) Buster’s broke.  But Buster has recently made the acquaintance of a loudmouth (Jimmy Durante) who has explained that casinos are naturally jumpy around men with guns—they’re worried about bad publicity when people commit suicide.  If a dead body is found near a casino, the house has a habit of stuffing money in the corpse’s pockets so it won’t look like he killed himself after losing.

You can see the light bulb go off behind Buster’s sparkling eyes.  He needs money, he’s outside a casino, he has a gun…

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love THE PASSIONATE PLUMBER.  Keaton’s first four talkie features at MGM were hit-or-miss affairs that, even at their best, never felt like proper Keaton movies.  And while conventional wisdom would have you believe that the addition of Jimmy Durante marked the beginning of the end, in fact it was a decided improvement.  I’m going to work through this thesis in more detail below, but for those of you in a hurry who just want the gist of it, just copy and paste the following formula into your head and be done with it: THE PASSIONATE PLUMBER = funny + stylishly made + smart Buster + appropriate use of Jimmy Durante = good movie.

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A few weeks ago I was bloviating self-importantly about Laurel and Hardy’s debut talkie, Unaccustomed As We Are, and how I felt it demonstrated the ability of silent-era comedians to weather the transition to sound without losing a step.  Some of the replies in the comments section addressed the central question directly:

“What’s strange to me is that, to judge from most of the histories I’ve heard, people suddenly stopped being interested in the kind of comedy they’d loved for decades, silent comedy in the style rather than the technical sense, as soon as sound showed up. People watch that kind of comedy now- Mr. Bean is an internationally popular figure, and Mr. Hulot was one before him, both of them fundamentally silent comedians dropped into a sound world a la Modern Times. So what killed it back then? Why did people suddenly want all Grouchos and no Harpos?”

That’s a superb question, Tom S., and very carefully phrased at that.  It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for many years, and while I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, I do have some ideas.

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“Looking at [Ann] Harding,” wrote film historian Mick LaSalle in his book, Complicated Women (St. Martin’s, 2001), “is like looking into clear, deep water. Nothing stands in the way. No stylization, no attitude, no posing. In fact, little about her technique could date her as a thirties actress.”

These are some of the words that inspired Scott O’Brien, author of Ann Harding – Cinema’s Gallant Lady (BearManor) in his research into the career and life of actress Ann Harding (1902-1981). For those who met her during the height of her Hollywood career, she left starkly different impressions. Laurence Olivier called her “an angel.” Henry Hathaway said that she “was an absolute bitch.” Myrna Loy found her “a very private person, a wonderful actress completely without star temperament, but withdrawn.” Ann Harding may not be as well-remembered as actresses whose stellar careers extended well beyond the pre-code era, such as Norma Shearer or Barbara Stanwyck. Her natural reserve means that her name does not automatically come up when particularly saucy favorites of the period like Ruth Chatterton, Joan Blondell or Dorothy Mackail are discussed. Powerful icons whose last name conjures something singular, such as Garbo, Dietrich and West, are better remembered. In recent years, in large part because of the rediscovery of her early films on Turner Classic Movies, occasional revivals of her movies and the work done by film historians reassessing the pre-code period, Harding has begun to captivate audiences again. Her lustrous beauty and surprisingly modern style of acting are only part of her appeal.

With the publication earlier this year of Scott O’Brien’s beautifully illustrated and well written biography, a balanced portrait of a skilled actress emerges, as well as some sense of the publicly guarded but privately intense woman behind her fame. Recently, I had a chance to ask the author of this meticulously researched and long overdue biography of Ann Harding about his interest in this unique, transitional figure in American film. Perhaps after reading this post a few more people who have yet to discover her work will pause next time one of her rarely seen films, such as Devotion (1931), The Animal Kingdom (1932), Double Harness (1933), When Ladies Meet (1933), The Flame Within (1935) or Peter Ibbetson (1935) emerges from the movie vault. This often surprisingly modern actress may intrigue and touch you with her presence. You might find yourself unexpectedly enthralled.
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