B. B-LIST: AFTER AFI 100, THE REST OF THE AMERICAN CANON
After the 1997 AFI 100 "A-list," this is the rest of the American canon through 2019. This list includes all of the American-made films that are NOT already on the 1997 AFI 100, from the following lists: Metacritic Top 25 IMDb Top 25 2007 AFI 100 University of Turin's study of the 20 Most Influential…
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BEST LOVED FILMS
“Seeing youth drawn to youth, Miss Jenkins realizes the bitter fact that she is no longer part of the younger world.”

After The Birth of a Nation, Griffith had several scripts for shorts lying around; he might have made them as written, or he might have developed each one into its own feature. He chose to do neither, and instead combine four of them into one interwoven, monumental story that would, unlike any short, justify the sort of lavish sets and costumes that would wow the crowds, and maybe even rival or improve upon Italian epics like Cabiria. Griffith would borrow Cabiria’s moving camera and put it on a crane for his most spectacular shot, that of Babylon in sumptuous splendor, with six train-engine-sized colonnades supporting balconies full of people walking around life-sized upright elephant sculptures – a testament to cinema’s power to conjure tableaus beyond that of any other medium.

Griffith told one of his stars, Lillian Gish, that they were creating a new language, one that Griffith saw as combining the other great art forms to create a new art form. Contemporaries agreed, writing that for millennia, six art forms had existed, namely the three so-called plastic (or permanently molded) arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and the three less molded arts of music, dance/performance, and poetry/prose, and then one day, voila, a seventh art form appeared called cinema. Griffith enjoyed comparing himself to Shakespeare and Dickens, and was thrilled when critics praised the novelistic, melodramatic cross-cutting in the final 30 minutes of Birth. For his next film, Griffith would cut between locations and between centuries, even millennia. He would film literal pages of a book, or sometimes stone tablets, with title cards over them in case any audience members got confused. When possible, Griffith would assign a different color tint to each of his four periods, although none of those specialized prints now survive. All Griffith needed was a unifying theme, and he felt he found it in the triumph of love over intolerance. Griffith meant to also rebuke critics of Birth, as though his prejudice against non-white people was simply prejudice for letting people love. I realize some people will never see Intolerance because of, well, intolerance of Griffith, and while I understand that, Intolerance is both foundational and fascinating. Griffith’s conflicting prejudices made Intolerance what it was, and what it wasn’t.

Intolerance is never boring or lacking for intrigue. It begins by establishing the motherly motif of Lillian Gish rocking a timeless, or really time-straddling, cradle. In the present day of 1916, we meet a wealthy, maybe-35-year-old Miss Jenkins standing outside a vibrant dance hall as she is becoming, titles tell us, “bitter that she is no longer part of the young world.” We meet the Dear One, old enough for love but girlish enough for pigtails and cartwheels, clearly part of Griffith’s preferred world. We cut to the birth of Jesus, while in the nearby Bethlehem streets, land-owning Pharisees demand local Jews deference. We cut to French Court in 1572, where Catherine de Medici looks on with bitterness as her son, King Charles the Ninth, favors the upstart Huguenots. In the Paris streets, a mercenary soldier thirsts for an already-betrothed Huguenot named Brown Eyes. And we cut to ancient Babylon of 539 B.C., with prodigiously opulent fixtures and 50-foot castle walls that no enemy has ever broached. In Babylon we meet the Mountain Girl, the film’s fieriest, fiercest, fearlessest female, who throws rocks at would-be suitor Rhapsode. Back in 1916, workers strike, bosses cut wages, and so Dear One and her father move to a nearby slum where they rub shoulders with unsavory citizens. Back in ancient Babylon, Mountain Girl’s brother puts her up for auction where she laughs at dudes until she meets Belshazzar, fresh off establishing the world’s first court of justice, who gives the Mountain Girl a seal that will permit her to marry or not. Meantime, Rhapsode tries to convert people away from Belshazzar and toward the High Priest of Bel, who schemes as he watches the city from on high. Broke and hungry, Dear One’s father dies, and she begins dating a Boy who, under her influence, quits working for the criminal Musketeer, who in turn makes an example by framing the Boy for theft and sending him to prison. The movie makes a big deal out of Jesus’s first miracle, in Galilee, being the changing of water into wine. The Pharisees show up to stone an adulterous woman until Jesus stops them by saying “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” By now, the spinster Jenkins has given her fortune to, and joined, the Uplifters, a group of stiff-upper-lipped women who shut down dance halls and take away alcohol. Outside Babylon, we see Cyrus’s troops preparing to attack, and we are invited to despise this holistic group of “Barbarians,” Persians, Ethiopians (seen for three seconds, these are the only Blacks in the 3-hour film), and the treacherous high priest of Bel. With Dear One’s Boy wrongly imprisoned, she must raise the infant alone, and seeing this, The Uplifters seize Dear One’s babe right out of her arms. Another older woman that the film hates, Catherine de Medici, persuades her Catholic courtesans to declare war on the Huguenots. Cyrus assaults Babylon with siege towers in a long, long, long battle, but Babylon barely holds, partly thanks to the Mountain Girl’s assiduous arrows. The Musketeer meets Dear One and promises to help recover her infant. More than an hour into any cut of the film, we finally see Babylon in the full splendor I mentioned, including a lot of lasciviously vertical and horizontal women, even as Mountain Girl becomes suspicious of, and secretly follows, Rhapsode and the high priest of Bel. More invidiously, the Musketeer’s wife follows her husband to Dear One’s flat, and sees him seducing/assaulting her even as the Boy, fresh out of prison, breaks in to stop them; the Musketeer’s wife shoots her husband dead and throws the gun into the flat, causing the police to arrest and charge the Boy with murder. A jury sentences him to hang. In France, Brown Eyes awakens to the start of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Finally, the Musketeer’s wife admits her crime, and as she and Dear One race to the gallows to stop the execution, the French army slaughters and the Mountain Girl speeds to cut off Cyrus, causing the intertitles to give way to rushing, chasing, and carnage. The thirsty mercenary soldier tries to rape Brown Eyes, but when she resists, he kills her and his allies kill her boyfriend. Cyrus invades Babylon, and Mountain Girl fights to her death, attended by two solemn white doves. Jesus is hung on the cross as the women arrive just in time to save Dear One’s baby daddy from the gallows. In a final rush of aspirational double-exposures, prison walls become wisteria, warring soldiers become warm comrades, and love brings peace as the cradle will rock throughout time.

Intolerance, a film about straddling periods of time, was both behind and ahead of its time. As a Kentuckian defending alcohol through the ages, Griffith was too antiquated for the coming 18th amendment, but actually anticipatory of the later-coming 21st amendment. With the exception of the Mountain Girl, delightfully incarnated by an 18-year-old Constance Talmadge, Intolerance is parochially, paternalistically prejudiced against every woman over the age of twenty-five as snooty and intolerant. But timing was perhaps the biggest difference between the box office fortunes of Birth of a Nation and Intolerance: when the former came out in early 1915, America was patriotically pacifist, but by the time the latter came out in late 1916, most Americans were resigned to the Great War, and Griffith’s repeated reminders of love and peace were not really reading the room. But if Intolerance battled to a draw at the box office, the film won the war of history’s wider judgment. Intolerance was Europe and Russia’s favorite American film for most of the next decade, influencing innumerable filmmakers. Intolerance influenced, intimated and even initiated Hollywood. By 1916, shoestring film companies had moved to Los Angeles, but within the next decade they would become well-financed Hollywood studios with backlots that could simulate Babylon, Judea, France, modern New York, or a dozen other picturesque locales. And on a stylistic level, Intolerance proved that a motion picture could simulate or even elevate literature’s narrative fluidity without losing melodramatic pathos. Apres Intolerance, le deluge.

Influenced by: Italian historical epics, 19th-century literature

Influenced: Hollywood casting conventions, Pickford Studios, European masters from Lang to Eisenstein

“He hurt a Native.”

Johnston McCulley’s story “The Curse of Capistrano” was published in 1919 in five installments in All-Story Weekly, one of the period’s pulpy magazines whose potboilers were perpended by product-hungry, prolific, cut-price movie studios. Mary Pickford suggested the story to Fairbanks, who might have taken the path of least resistance and made Capistrano into a madcap comedy, but he saw instead a chance to shift the stale swashbuckler genre. (Fred Niblo directed, but this was the sort of film where the producer-writer-star made first and final decisions.) Partly because McCulley’s story was set in Spanish-ruled California, the film’s period details could be filmed economically, mostly assured by the horseplay, swordplay and rope-play. Onscreen Fairbanks wouldn’t entirely lose his renowned sense of humor, particularly when dressed as Zorro, but the idea was to contrast his heroic alter ego with his dandyish Don Diego de la Vega, a new kind of two-sided hero for new 1920s audiences.

The Mark of Zorro begins with a title card that warns that oppression creates the power that crushes it, whether Cromwell or someone like this film’s masked rider. The first word of dialogue, spoken by one bar patron to another, points out a man who beat “a native” for no reason and now bears the mark of Zorro – and we see the Z on his face even as he and his drunk friends prepare for more oppressing. Quote “In the hut of a native,” unquote a dark-faced man says Señor Zorro is their only friend. Corrupt Governor Alvarado overtaxes Don Carlos Pulido and hires this drunk band of racist oppressors to kill Zorro, but Zorro shows up as Don Vega, fools them, leaves, sees them attack innocent Natives, changes into Zorro, and returns and fights and defeats the mercenaries. As Don Vega, our hero meets the Pulidos and tries to court their adult daughter Lolita, but she finds him foppish and repulsive, telling a friend, “he isn’t a man, he’s a fish!” The banditos, led by the dark-hearted Captain Ramon, invade the Pulidos’ home looking for Zorro, and Vega changes into Zorro to lead them away and astray. When the Pulidos go to the military Presidio to beg to keep their house, Captain Ramon shows up and sexually assaults Lolita, but before he gets too far, Zorro drops from the ceiling, sword-fights with Ramon for a few minutes, brands his neck with the Z, and chases him off the property. Lolita is now in love with Zorro but wants nothing to do with his fancy-pants alter ego. Impudent soldiers invade an indigenous-friendly iglesia and string up its Father Felipe and flay him, causing Vega to change into Zorro, roust some allies at midnight, and string up and flay the chief flayer. Now it’s war, and Ramon’s men arrest and imprison a lot of brown men as well as the Pulido family. Some of the government’s newer conscripts arrive at Don Alberto’s looking for Zorro, and Alberto shames his friend Don Vega for doing no more than offering them wine and then leaving. Minutes later, Zorro shows up and shames this landed-gentry dinner party for permitting oppression and peering at the flaying of a priest; this odd recruitment rhetoric persuades them to roll with Zorro. With their help, Zorro stages a raid and frees the prisoners, and when he asks Lolita if she trusts him, she says love means trust. Zorro’s allies escort the former prisoners to Don Vega’s house as Zorro distracts a couple dozen of Ramon’s soldiers with an elaborate, exhilarating cat-and-mouse game around a large estate. Zorro returns home as Don Vega only to find that Governor Alvarado and Captain Ramon and their personal troops have taken over his house because they now know Zorro will come for Lolita. Zorro’s allied troops are also there but seemingly useless. Ramon insults Vega’s manhood, causing Vega to set off, scrap with Ramon, slip the collar off of his neck to reveal his Z scar, and shamelessly show off his sword, resulting in Ramon remarking, “I know that blade – Zorro?!?” Everyone, including Lolita, stares at Don Vega and says “ZORRO?!?” Vega-slash-Zorro slashes up Ramon and puts his epee’s point to the Governor’s chest, demanding that he abdicate. The governor sees that even his troops are now lost to him and he surrenders, causing everyone in the room to rejoice. Vega leaps up to the balcony to let Lolita know that he looks, lectures, and loves like Zorro. They try to kiss discreetly behind a bandana, but the breeze blows it high, and…so these sweethearts smooch anyway.

For Fairbanks himself, The Mark of Zorro marked a pivot from contemporary satire to historical swashbuckling, a mini-genre that became more spectacular, and expensive, with more Fairbanks films like The Three Musketeers in 1921, Robin Hood in 1922, The Thief of Bagdad in 1924, and The Black Pirate in 1926. These pictures set the standard for action-adventure, a genre that provided work for a lot of other silent-film actors, although none matched the fame and fortune of Fairbanks, who in 1927 was the first to place his feet in the cement outside the new Graumann’s Chinese Theater and, in the same year, was elected first President of the Motion Picture Academy, a job that included handing out the first Academy Awards. In many ways, every action star, from Fairbanks Junior to Flynn to Ford to the Fast and the Furious, are following in Fairbanks’ wet-cement-formed footsteps.

The character of Zorro, formulated by Fairbanks for folks that had never heard of him, is himself foundational. The key precedent is The Scarlet Pimpernel, a character created by Baroness Orczy in 1903, featured in his own book, play, and even a 1917 movie starring Dustin Farmer – just the sort of formulaic film that Fairbanks hoped to transcend. The Pimpernel is a masked hero who leaves calling cards and attracts women who dislike him in his “ordinary” life. But the Pimpernel’s calling cards are flowers, his clothes are ruffly, and his raison d’etre is saving aristocrats from France’s reign of terror. By contrast, Zorro’s calling cards are carved “Z”s, his clothes are shiny black topped by a sombrero cordobes, and his raison d’etre is defending commoners and indigenous peoples of California from tyrants and other deplor-ab-les, ably assisted by his clever deaf servant Bernardo and his faithful black stallion Tornado. In many ways, Zorro was the first American superhero, inspiration of every humble populist masked avenger who attracted a woman (and repulsed her with his secret identity); young Bruce Wayne’s parents were coming out of a screening of The Mark of Zorro when they were killed, leaving Wayne to grow up and become the Zorro-like Batman. Bottom line, Fairbanks’ Zorro made a major mark.

Influenced by: The pulp story, having only been invented the year before

Influenced: led to Fairbanks’ 1920s, from Robin Hood to Thief of Bagdad to The Black Pirate, setting the template for future action films

“Don’t you lay your fingers on that sack!”

The story of the making and unmaking of Greed is probably better-known than the film itself; amongst film scholars, Greed has taken on almost Talmudic significance, like an endlessly enigmatic elegy from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Von Stroheim-friendly version avers that the director signed with Abe Lehr because he bragged about encouraging directors their “individuality and personality,” and at the same time Abe Lehr bragged that Von Stroheim would be saving money by not building new sets. This latter point was remarkable for a picture set thirty years in the past in fidelity to the novel, but that fidelity also meant extensive location shooting in San Francisco, the high Sierras, and Death Valley – the latter in summer. Some histories call Greed the first feature filmed fastidiously on location. Quantitatively, Abe Lehr’s Goldwyn Company’s investment paid off handsomely – Von Stroheim filmed an unprecedented 85 hours of footage – but qualitatively, the Goldwyn Company didn’t really want a 2-hour film’s ratio of footage shot to footage used to be anywhere near 40 to 1. Ah, but Von Stroheim had no intention of making a 2-hour film; his ratio may have been closer to 10 to 1, as evidenced by the 9-hour film he showed to his colleagues and about a dozen critics.

Remember that it had been less than ten years since Americans adjusted their attention spans from 30-minute films to 2-hour films; maybe people could do another quadrupling? In fairness to Von Stroheim, he expected to, and did, cut it down to a more manageable, uh, roughly 5 hours, perhaps inspired by Germany’s 5-hour-ish Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. What Von Stroheim did not expect was that during his year of editing, for reasons unrelated to him, the Goldwyn Company would merge with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer, forming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, placing yet another film of Von Stroheim’s at the mercy of Irving Thalberg. Later, Thalberg told the L.A. Times that he had taken the film to different suburban theaters, “took note of the places where interest seemed to droop,” and cut accordingly; naturally Thalberg defended these cuts as having made the film stronger. Von Stroheim disagreed vehemently and eventually violently; during one explosive shouting match, Louis B. Mayer apparently punched the Austrian, an anecdote that in itself shaped much of Hollywood’s 1930s product.

In Greed, John McTeague is a coal miner in Placer County, California, who meets a traveling dentist and becomes his apprentice, eventually opening his own practice in San Francisco. One day, McTeague’s friend Marcus Schouler brings his fiancée Trina to the dentist, and while she waits, she buys a lottery ticket. Trina and McTeague begin dating, and when her ticket wins her $5000, Schouler is bitterer about the lost money than he was about the lost fiancée. Just before Schouler leaves SF to pursue cattle ranching, he reports McTeague for practicing without a license and causes McTeague to lose his business. As months pass, Trina and McTeague become so broke that they must sell their few possessions, but Trina refuses to let McTeague touch her 5000-dollar windfall or a few hundred other dollars she has saved. The film makes much of her fingering her own money before McTeague, in frustration, bites her fingers. McTeague takes four hundred fifty and tries to earn a living fishing as Trina’s fingers become infected, and she takes a job as an elementary school janitor to pay for her fingers’ amputation. McTeague fails at fishing, forfeits his funds, and finds himself begging Trina for more; a day after she refuses, he comes to her job at school, beats her to death, and takes the five thousand dollars off of her corpse. Now a fugitive, McTeague returns to Placer Valley and establishes his own mining company only to learn that most of the region has been claimed. Following rumors, McTeague moves south and finds a quartz deposit just north of Death Valley, but before he can begin mining it, he gets word of marshals nearby. McTeague tries to lure them into summertime Death Valley where the marshals may get lost or dehydrated or killed from afar. As it happens, Schouler is with the marshals and pursues McTeague on his own course. Schouler and McTeague shoot at each other, resulting in McTeague’s horse running away and his canteen punctured and emptied. McTeague and Schouler fight in close quarters, and Schouler handcuffs himself to McTeague just before McTeague delivers the death blow. As the film ends, McTeague huddles in the heart of a hundred-degree desert handcuffed to a corpse with no horse, no water, and no way to return to his money.

Von Stroheim essayed from the best of then-current artistic movements from France, Germany, and the Soviet Union, using impressionistic flashes in some parts, collision editing in others. With that, as Blichert says, the genius of Greed is that we feel increasing empathy for its increasingly despicable leads, a tone that many, many masters imitated, among them Visconti, Welles, and Wilder. Arguably, the film’s planned length would have deepened our investments and moral concessions. However, Erich von Stroheim said that Greed was “cut by a hack with nothing on his mind but a hat.” Its editors worked for Louis B. Mayer, who never believed that the bleak, gloomy film could be a hit, and so demanded cuts that assured that…it wouldn’t be. In this regard, the battle over Greed presaged countless future battles between moguls and movie-makers. After many more developments that I’m deleting with the ruthlessness of Metro’s editors, a few parts of America saw a 4-hour version of Greed, but the most commonly available one ran about 2 hours and 20 minutes, and that’s the easiest one to see today. We can also see a stilted, reconstructed 4-hour version, but anything more is permanently lost – 81 hours’ worth of celluloid melted for traces of silver nitrate that Mayer presumed would be more valuable. Today, we wonder why von Stroheim ever thought to make a five-hour film – or possibly a nine-hour film, if that really was his intention – about such a relatively simple story of a corrupted love triangle. To ask the question is to invert the logic: cast-of-thousands, wide-angle, epic-scope films are the only films permitted four hours precisely becausevon Stroheim’s film wasn’t allowed to succeed. A century on, Greed comes to us as the original fort/da of film history, as interesting for what it contains as for what is missing.

Influenced by: camera innovations; social Darwinism; films like Intolerance; von Stroheim’s understanding of America and Hollywood, onscreen and off

Influenced: Eisenstein, Renoir, von Sternberg, Welles, Del Toro, Sontag, Hawks, Kurosawa, May, etc

“He’s a disgrace to the South.”

Keaton’s co-director and longtime collaborator, Clyde Bruckman, too often forgotten by film historians, brought to Keaton William Pittenger’s memoir “The Great Locomotive Chase,” the true story of the Confederate Army stealing a Union train and sabotaging the rail lines behind them. It was Keaton’s idea to swap armies, because in the 1920s, authors and culture-makers saw Confederates as a defeated people, not to be made into villains. At that point, Keaton might have turned the rest into a fairy tale, but instead he over-compensated with relative realism, bringing to set 18 freight cars’ worth of Civil War-era cannons, props, wigs, costumes, passenger cars, stagecoaches, wagons, and even house facades. Cottage Grove, Oregon, turned out to be a better shooting location than the actual Tennessee localities, partly because it had unused vintage trains and tracks, but also – less often noted – because some tracks were built far enough apart so that Bruckman could follow the onscreen train with a dolly camera on the unseen track. Jo seph Schenck, the then-head of United Artists, loved Keaton and Bruckman’s ideas and allocated a then-high $400,000 budget – only to see, that summer of ’26, as Keaton’s meticulous manipulations of made-up militias brought the budget far beyond $400,000, perhaps as much as double that number. One multi-camera shot of thousands of extras dressed as soldiers cost about $42,000, which would be considered the most expensive shot in silent-film history were it not for another shot that cost just about as much, the climactic moment of The General falling from a burning bridge into a river.

The General begins with the General, a train engine, and its engineer, Johnnie Gray, just as the Civil War breaks out. Gray tries to enlist and is rejected twice, first by his native Georgia, second by his fiancée Annabelle, who prefers a man in uniform. A year later, Annabelle’s father is wounded and she travels north to see him on a W&ARR train pulled by The General. At a station, most passengers get off for a meal, but Annabelle remains onboard the General as it is usurped by unabashed Unionists. Johnnie Gray gives pursuit by foot, handcar, and boneshaker bicycle, arriving at a town where he finds an engine called Texas, and Confederates to help him, but a failed hitch-up results in the former leaving the latter. Driving the Texas, Johnnie passes a cannon on a flatbed, hooks it up, arms the cannon, lights the fuse, watches as the muzzle falls to point at the Texas, then gets lucky around a bend as the cannon fires and just misses the Union Soldiers on the General, causing them to believe an army is firing at them. They attempt to derail the Texas by throwing wood beams on the tracks; in one rather memorable moment, Johnnie rides his cowcatcher and unmoors one beam with another. Eventually, the Union soldiers dump 2 by 4s on the Texas from atop a high bridge, where they see that Johnnie is sans mates, do an about-face, and give chase, causing Gray to disembark and hide in the wooden glades. Hungry, Johnnie sneaks into a house, only to hide under a table as Union officers enter, sit next to him, and plan a surprise attack at the Rock River Bridge. Gray sees Annabelle held captive in a room, manages to knock out her two guards, and escapes with her into the rainy woods. The next day, when Johnnie and Annabelle see the Union gathering for their secret assault, Johnnie dresses in Blue, hides his fiancée in the General and steals it back. The Union’s hot pursuit reverses the situation of the film’s first half. After changing back to his Rebel uniform, Johnnie manages to warp a track, delaying the Union for a crucial hour while Johnnie sets fire to the Rock River Bridge and alights in a Confederate camp to warn them of the sneak attack. Annabelle reunites with her wounded father while Johnnie joins the Rebels to counter the Yankees, whose commander insists that the Rock River Bridge isn’t so burned as to prevent an engine crossing it. The camera actually pans to show the Union engine attempting to cross the bridge, which spectacularly collapses with the engine’s weight. Forces conflict at the forded river; Johnnie fights poorly but is fortunate. Back at camp, Johnnie’s valor gets rewarded by medallion and by Annabelle’s renewed happiness with him. As they lean on the General, Gray tries to push away her hair to kiss her, but the etiquette of passing soldiers requires him to salute and miss the kiss. In a last bit of symbolism that may also be a, ahem, salute to Zorro, Johnnie switches sides for a final time and smooches Lolita using his left hand to push away her locks, his right hand saluting and saluting and saluting as more soldiers pass.

Keaton expert Noel Carroll wrote, “The most recurrent themes in Keaton’s narratives and gags [are] the question of mastering and understanding causal relations in a world of things, on the one hand, and the question of correctly locating and precisely orienting oneself within one’s environment on the other hand.” The General provides an exceptionally audience-friendly version of these themes, with Johnnie Gray adjusting to chaos in the first half, and coordinating the chaos in the second. The General comes to us now as the funniest of action movies, or the most action-packed of comedies, in many ways better than any single film of Chaplin’s, certainly separating Keaton from Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy in terms of scale and scope much as The Gold Rush had done for Chaplin in 1925. But The Gold Rush was a well-loved hit, while The General, well…the General is categorized as a 1926 film because it was released in two theaters in Japan on December 31, 1926, but its proper release was in February 1927, where it earned…roughly as much as Schenck’s original budget, or about $300,000 less than the film cost. Like Von Stroheim, Keaton would now be bound to a burdensome MGM contract for the rest of the peak of his career; like Von Stroheim and Fairbanks, the coming sound era would do him no favors. One of the underdiscussed reasons that we underdiscuss the silent era is that late-twenties audiences over-dismissed its stars and styles at the sound era’s sunrise.

Influenced by: vaudeville, Keystone films, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin

Influenced: this film did so poorly that Keaton never again enjoyed complete filmmaking freedom, but later, this film and Keaton influenced postmodernists and comedians from Billy Wilder to Woody Allen

“What am I bid for my apple, the fruit that made Adam so wise? On the historic night, when he took a bite, they discovered a new paradise.”

Paramount Pictures, having extended von Sternberg’s contract after Underworld, was probably only too happy when, in 1929, its sister studio in Germany, UFA, asked for von Sternberg to travel to Berlin to make the first sound film of prestigious stage and silent actor Emil Jannings. If you’ve seen Cabaret, you might now imagine Jannings traveling to the real time and place and discovering none other than Marlene Dietrich and casting her as Jannings’ muse and undoer. In winter 1930, von Sternberg wrapped production on The Blue Angel, secured reels of a few scenes, received from Dietrich a copy of “Amy Jolly,” returned on a boat to the United States, and convinced Paramount to offer Dietrich a contract even before The Blue Angel’s American release. Dietrich was brought to Hollywood in mid-1930 and almost rushed to the set to make her first American film, based on “Amy Jolly” and retitled Morocco.

Morocco is probably Von Sternberg’s American masterpiece, and together with his German masterpiece, The Blue Angel, he set the tone for his 1930s string of Dietrich-obsessive love stories in war-torn foreign locales, a considerably influential oeuvre. Dietrich herself, introduced in Morocco in tux and tails with a kiss for a woman, became, with a little help from Paramount Pictures’ promotional team, what Andrew Sarris called “the purveyor of pansexuality and the supreme lover, male or female.” Dietrich was the ne plus ultra of sultry even for the less androgynous, from Garbo to West to Del Rio, but her pairing with Gary Cooper was more than just the singular matching of two of the most desired persons of the century. Dietrich proved that sound-era Hollywood could produce vibrant new stars, but Cooper in Morocco proved that sound-era Hollywood wouldn’t always have to. Gary Cooper in Morocco didn’t need lessons in movement, voice, or really anything; his projected persona was just what his most ardent silent fans might have hoped for, right down to the fact that he was playing a French Foreign Legionnaire in an unaltered plainspoken Montana drawl. In the unprecedented tumult of the sound transition, Morocco was the first great film that reappropriated most of the silent-film apparatus, from a lead like Cooper to the chiaroscuro lighting to the Arab-world sets. Quoting Charles Silver, the film curator at Museum of Modern Art, Morocco was the first film “to attain full mastery and control of what was essentially a new medium by restoring the fluidity and beauty of the late silent period.” Morocco is on this list not as the first great American sound film – that would be All Quiet on the Western Front – but as the first one that Hollywood could and would repeatedly emulate.

Morocco begins in an unnamed port city of Morocco where a contingent of the French Foreign Legion arrives around the same time as a passenger ship containing one Amy Jolly, whom we see rebuff the interest of one M’sieur La Bessiere. Amy Jolly turns out to be the headliner at a local nightclub, where she comes onstage in tuxedo and tails, performs “When Love Dies,” kisses a woman on the mouth, and playfully throws the woman’s flower to Legionnaire Private Tom Brown. She dresses in a womanlier fashion for her second number, “What am I bid for my apple?”, and afterward, while selling apples to the audience, she gives Private Tom her key. Tom visits Amy’s dressing room, and they talk of heartbreak and the shame of not meeting ten years before and decide that they like each other. As they walk arm-in-arm, a jealous ex-lover, Madame Caesar, hires two locals to assault Tom, but Tom attacks them back. The next day, when officers bring Tom before Adjutant Caesar on a court-martial-worthy charge of injuring two harmless natives, the Adjutant accuses Tom of romancing his wife. As a favor to Amy, the thirsty and wealthy La Bessiere persuades Caesar to drop the court-martial and instead send Tom on a suicide mission to Amalfi Pass. After La Bessiere tries and fails to court Amy, Tom stops by her dressing room to say goodbye, and Amy begs him to desert to the desert. Tom suggests they board a train to Europe together, and she agrees, but when she leaves to perform, he notices La Bessiere’s lavish gifts, decides she would be better off with a rich man, and writes on her mirror, “I changed my mind. Good luck!” When Amy comes to see Tom off anyway, she finds him in the company of many women that he has gathered to make her think him a scoundrel. She asks La Bessiere about some other women she watches following the men into the desert, and he answers that they may appear mad, but “you see, they love their men.” At Amalfi Pass, during a firefight, Caesar draws a pistol on Tom but is apparently killed by the enemy. Back in the town, Amy is behaving erratically at work and with La Bessiere, and when he confronts her about her feelings for Tom she shows him the mirror note and she agrees to his marriage proposal. At their engagement party, they learn that Caesar’s surviving troops are in a nearby hospital, and Amy insists on seeing what’s left of Tom. In the hospital, Caesar tells Amy Tom has been faking injury to avoid combat, and she finds him in a local bar cuddling with a local woman. He encourages her to marry the rich guy and gets up to join his unit which is mounting a new mission in the morning. Amy, distraught, sifts through Tom’s table of playing cards and cigarette ashes, and finds a wood heart on which Tom has carved the words “AMY JOLLY.” The next morning, Tom marches off and Amy remains torn, but as she watches a group of local ladies following the Legionnaires they love, she joins them.

Charles Silver writes that one reason Morocco was such an effective early talkie was that, perhaps ironically, von Sternberg’s “understanding of the value of silence itself.” From a modern perspective, there may be too many pauses between lines, leaving one to wonder if perhaps Paramount over-worried about dubbing it into other languages. Another way to see it is that 1930 audiences were seeing for the first time in a sound film the breathless longing and yearning between two very attractive people that had previously only existed in books or on stage. Without need for any particular dialogue, we understand why their characters would be better off without the other, why they can’t let the other go, and why at the end she follows him through the desert. Morocco was a big box-office hit, and Dietrich was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Her uninhibited sexuality and independence influenced Hollywood and American culture for the remaining two-thirds of the century.

Influenced by: German and American trends in filmmaking

Influenced: Gary Cooper became a symbol of America, Dietrich became an oasis for the gender-fluid before that term existed

“There are far worse things awaiting man than death.”

Last podcast was partly about F.W. Murnau, whose excellent Expressionist film Nosferatu, released in Germany in 1922, led to 1931’s Dracula in more ways than one. The Irish author of the novel “Dracula,” Bram Stoker, could not rise from his coffin to challenge Nosferatu’s obvious plagiarism of his story, but his surviving widow Florence could get enough money for lawyers, ironically, by licensing her late husband’s story to a stage actor/producer who had worked with her late husband. Hamilton Deane’s play of “Dracula” debuted in Darby in 1924 and worked its way through England until 1927, when it began a successful yearlong run in London. In October 1927, on the same day The Jazz Singer debuted, the American adaptation opened on Broadway starring Bela Lugosi in his first major role, as the aristocratic Hungarian Dracula of Stoker’s story instead of the ratlike apparation in Murnau’s film. I told you last podcast that Murnau’s Sunrisewon Most Unique and Artistic Picture at the first Academy Awards in 1929; what I did not tell you was that award led to the long-delayed American release of Nosferatu in 1930, despite Florence Stoker’s lawyers’ best efforts. Louis B. Mayer and the other prestige-peddling moguls were wary of vampires and horror, but Carl Laemmle and especially his son Carl Laemmle Jr., the latter then head of production at his father’s Universal Studios, were willing to risk journeying to Transylvania despite the blood-sucking percentages demanded by Florence Stoker and Hamilton Deane.

Laemmle Jr. was hands-on, eventually giving himself a co-producer credit alongside director Tod Browning, and they had no easy time with the many names that might have been their Dracula. Lugosi had been replaced for the play’s American touring production, but like a vampire, happened to replace his American replacement in 1930 when the tour made it to Los Angeles. Lugosi lobbied hard and landed the part partly because he accepted a paltry total salary of $3,500. Laemmle Jr. and Browning instructed their designers, and screenwriter Garrett Fort, to study silent horror like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera, but they focused closest on Murnau’s Nosferatu, lifting scenes from it that weren’t in the book or the play, for example an early pricked finger that tempts the vampire. Laemmle wasn’t above plagiarizing his own work, for example a 1925 Universal film called The Storm Breaker for shots of a ship adrift during a violent seastorm. Some say that the performances felt made for silents, but it’s closer to the truth to say that they were made for the stage, cued by Lugosi and the fog and spooky lighting and puppet bats. In the big scenes, much of this staginess is overwhelmed by sound effects created by Jack Foley, for whom the job of creating film sound-effects would be named, the Foley artist.

Dracula begins by introducing an Englishman named Renfield arriving in a Transylvanian town populated by people who, upon learning of his plan to complete a business deal with Count Dracula in his castle, warn him “you mustn’t go there.” The film cuts to the castle’s basement, where creatures emerge from coffins: rats, bees, and four people, these being three women in white and the aristocratically coiffured Count Dracula. Cutting back to Renfield, his new coach arrives, driven by Dracula in disguise. On the way to the castle, Renfield looks out his coach’s window to see that the driver has disappeared and a bat is hovering where the driver was. Somehow, the coach’s horses stop at the correct castle, and Renfield gets out and enters the spooky building, greeted by a caped man who says “I bid you…welcome,” cheers the distant, chilly noises of “children of the night,” and points out a spider spinning a web for an unwary fly. As Renfield sits to complete the business paperwork, he cuts his finger, causing the camera to zoom in on Dracula’s thirsty gaze before Renfield’s cross scares him off. After Dracula offers Renfield wine, Renfield asks “aren’t you drinking?” and Dracula answers, “I never drink…wine.” Dracula hypnotizes Renfield into opening a window, which lets in a bat, leading to all of Dracula’s wives biting Renfield before Dracula waves them off to bite Renfield himself. Aboard the schooner Vesta, Dracula feasts on most of the crew, and when the ship reaches England, Renfield is both the only man alive and a raving lunatic, causing him to be committed to Dr. Seward’s sanitorium. At a London theater, Dracula introduces himself to Seward, and meets his daughter Mina, her fiancé John Harker, and their friend Lucy, who takes an interest in the Count, gets a vampire visit in her sleep, gets rushed to the hospital for blood transfusions, and dies…or does she? Professor Van Helsing interrogates Renfield, who talks of vampires and wolfsbane and eats flies and spiders and how Dracula convinced him to enter custody by promising him thousands of delicious rats. During a visit to Seward’s parlor, as Dracula flirts with Mina to Harker’s consternation, Van Helsing notices that Dracula’s image does not reflect in the mirror, and when Van Helsing points this out to the Count, he smashes the mirror, stalks off, and attacks Mina in the garden. When newspapers report a woman in white luring children to the garden to bite them, Mina recognizes that Lucy has become a vampire, and Van Helsing orders Lucy to sleep with protective wolfsbane around her neck. Van Helsing and Dracula confront each other: the Professor promises to drive a stake through the Count’s heart, and the Count responds by trying to hypnotize the Professor, failing, lunging at him, and being repelled by Van Helsing’s crucifix. On a terrace that night, a bat cues Mina to attack her fiancé Harker, but Seward and Van Helsing save him, and when Mina explains what Dracula did to her, Harker dumps her. Dracula hypnotizes Mina’s nurse into removing the wolfsbane, grabs Mina, and kills Renfield for leading Van Helsing and Harker to him. In a climactic skirmish, Van Helsing impales Dracula through the heart.

Universal couldn’t be sure that audiences would accept a supernatural fright-fest, but viewers and critics mostly loved Dracula. If some found Bela Lugosi’s performance paralytic, others praised it as redolent of a walking, talking corpse. Released in February 1931, the film’s box office turned out to be more than double its budget, and Laemmle quickly repurposed the castle sets for another gothic horror story, Frankenstein, as mentioned in the A-list podcasts. Thanks to the success of Dracula, Universal repurposed itself as the House of Horror, following it first with Frankenstein, next with The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula’s Daughter, and many more.

Influenced by: Bram Stoker’s novel and Nosferatu, but only up to a point, because this film made the Count more of a suave aristocrat

Influenced: few had heard of vampires or Transylvania; the iconography of blood, crosses, and castles seeped into the American imagination

“What do you mean, you could go for her yourself? You could go for an eighty year old chick with rheumatism.”

By mid-1930, as two Hoovers sucked into prison America’s leading criminals – those two Hoovers being President Herbert and FBI Director J. Edgar – Hollywood became both less afraid of violent reprisals and more interested in putting Al Capone-like figures onscreen. The uncomfortable truth was that as the Depression worsened, some Americans saw some gangsters as Robin Hood-like heroes, and it was Darryl Zanuck, Warner Bros. new head of production, who staked his reputation on films that would come close to glorifying gangsters but avoid censure with moralistic opening and closing title cards.

Zanuck also wanted to come close enough to Capone to capture audiences without capturing a lawsuit or a bullet, and found it in two places: W.R. Burnett’s novel “Little Caesar” and John Bright and Kubec Glasmon’s unpublished novel “Beer and Blood.” For the latter, Zanuck chose William A. Wellman to direct partly because Wellman had served in World War I much like the character Mike Powers who gives the speech about Beer and Blood, and Wellman told Zanuck, “I’ll bring you the toughest, most violent picture you ever did see.” The name of the film came by way of the Chicago Crime Commission, in March 1930, designating Al Capone “Public Enemy #1,” an appellation that became part of every article about Capone. Jimmy Cagney was actually cast as Matt Doyle, Tom Powers’ longtime best friend, and Edward Woods was cast as Tom Powers, but after watching the two actors for a couple of days, Wellman switched them. This is why the actors playing Matt Doyle and Mike Powers look like brothers, and also why the kids playing young Tom and Matt look like they’ve been switched. Wellman didn’t have the budget or time to reshoot the kid scenes or recast much of anyone. You can well imagine Cagney’s accented, brusque, ethnic demeanor being relegated to sidekick stature, so give Wellman a little credit for intuiting what would play well to 30s audiences, and also for making a decision that would resonate through every wise-guy, hey-palooka film of the next two decades. The default home for such scripts became Warner Bros; after a dozen imitators of The Jazz Singer wore out their welcome, Little Caesar and The Public Enemypivoted Warner Bros. to the rough and ready, gutter-savvy, hard-boiled identity that it maintained throughout the 1930s.

The opening titles of The Public Enemy warn of the hoodlum problem that society must solve. The first few shots of prewar Chicago are as painterly and evocative as their descendants in Godfather Part II. In 1909, young adolescent Tom uses a string and a wooden sidewalk to trip the old-timey roller-skating sister of his friend Matt, establishing the distant past as well as Tom as a no-good kid. Tom and Matt bring boosted watches to the bar of a guy named Putty Nose who reluctantly gives them a few bits for them. Putty Nose enlists them to help on a warehouse robbery that Tom fouls up, leading to the police killing a fellow gang member, Tom and Matt killing a cop, and Putty Nose skipping town leaving Tom and Matt holding the bag. As young adults, Tom and Matt deepen their delinquency despite Tom’s older brother Mike’s discouragements; both brothers keep their doting mother in the dark. As Mike returns from World War I, Tom and Matt become bootleggers in the growing illegal trade of liquor, a business so lucrative that Tom and Matt can attend a fancy club and pick up well-anointed women despite their rough demeanor. But Tom never loses his street edge; when a bartender fails to stock the correct beer, Tom spits it his face. Tom turns a family dinner into a sumptuous feast, with steak and a keg of beer, but when his brother Mike sulks, Tom asks, “What’s eating you?” and Mike throws the keg across the room accusing Tom of trafficking “beer and blood!” Tom retorts, “You killed and liked it. You didn’t get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.” At breakfast, his girlfriend Kitty complains at how Tom treats her, and a silk-pajama-clad Tom impulsively picks up the half-grapefruit off of her plate and shoves it in her face. Driving around Chicago in a beautiful new 1920s convertible, Tom and Matt see a lovely woman who looks and acts like Mae West and convince her to take a ride with them. The woman, Gwen, tells Tom he’s not the worst she’s seen, and agrees to call him later; as they drive away, Matt says he could go for her, to which Tom replies, “you’d go for an 80-year-old chick with rheumatism.” Nonetheless, Matt marries his longtime beau Mamie, and at the wedding reception, Matt and Tom recognize Putty Nose, follow him and confront him; as he tries to play them a familiar song on the piano, the camera pans from the piano so that we hear, but don’t see, Tom shoot Putty Nose twice in the back. When Tom gives his mother a big wad of money, his brother Mike pushes it back to him, causing Tom to rip up the notes and throw them into Mike’s face. As Tom and Matt get drawn into war with a competing gang, they begin walking around Chicago more cautiously, and at one point they together jump and crouch and pivot at the rat-a-tat-tat sound of a coal truck loading. As they stand up laughing at the misdirect, they do incur sniper fire that kills Matt as Tom only barely skitters away. On a rainy night, Tom arrives at the rival gang’s jewelry shop to mete out justice, only to receive bullets himself; he staggers out of the jeweler, bleeding from the head and torso, says “I ain’t so tough,” and falls onto the rain-drenched curb. In the hospital, covered in bandages, Tom reconciles with Mike and agrees to reform. Back home, Tom’s mother gets a message that Tom will soon be coming home and merrily prepares the bedsheets as Mike takes a second suspicious look at the message, having heard that Tom was kidnapped from the hospital. Mike hears a knock at the door, makes sure that he answers it alone, and opens it to see Tom’s dead body, wrapped in sheets, fall CLUNK through the doorway. The closing title warns us that the hoodlum is society’s problem to solve.

In those 30s, gangsters became part of American mythology, as suffering Americans and even much of the world lionized these amoral ethnic white men with tommy-guns who took what they wanted and damned the long-term consequences. That lionization led to at least two surprising developments in 1933, first America’s first and last repeal of one of its own Amendments, Prohibition, and second a stricter Hays Code that would prevent more movies like The Public Enemy – at least until the Code fell apart in the 60s, permitting criminal-themed masterpieces that are also the favorites of critics and imdb users, like Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction. All these films and many more owe their basic structures to Darryl Zanuck’s greenlighting of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy for 1931, and then United Artists reacting to those films by releasing Scarface in 1932.

Influenced by: Capone’s story and reputation, Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931)

Influenced: Among other things, Scarface, whose Howard Hughes and Ben Hecht loomed over 30s and 40s Hollywood

“Petting in the park? Bad boy. Petting in the dark? Bad girl. First you pet a little, then let up a little, then you get a little kiss.”

Threes curlicue around the film – there are two threes in the title, the film is about a trio of women who wind up with a trio of men, and the film was the third filmed version of Avery Hopwood’s 1919 play “The Gold Diggers.” The first was a 1923 silent adaptation that the second, in 1929, made into a successful talkie musical called Gold Diggers of Broadway. The third, Gold Diggers of 1933, owes these versions both everything and nothing: the story had been done often enough for Warners to know exactly what to cut, but the 1933 film’s new material would have been unimaginable in 1929. For one thing, almost every plot turn is explicitly because of the Depression, a situation that goes a long way toward excusing the ladies’ occasional materialism, even putting the title in something like air quotes. But the real groundbreaking here came from choreographer and designer Busby Berkeley, who staged elaborate, near-abstract musical numbers that could have no easy referent in real life or this podcast. 17 years after Griffith told Gish that they were creating a new language, and after many, many subsequent abstract filmic experiments by the likes of Dali, Delluc, Dulac, Duchamp, and many others, Busby Berkeley brought to bear the business he began in 42nd Street and brought abstraction into the mainstream.

In many ways, deep-Depression-dependent backstage musicals 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 should be considered two sides of the same coin, or two versions of the same story; for the first one, for the first time, Warner Bros. hired songwriters Warren and Dubin, choreographer Busby Berkeley, and actresses Ruby Keeler and Ginger Rogers, all of whom did or played the same roles in both films, as did Dick Powell as the young male ingenue singer-songwriter. Having to choose between 42 and 33 for this list, I chose Gold Diggers because the repartee is just a bit faster and more knowing, making the women seem more feminist; “The Gold Diggers Song (We’re in the Money)” and “Forgotten Man,” written for this film by Warren and Dubin, are classics and even somewhat deep; and here the Berkeley set-pieces are more extensive, extravagant, and extreme.

Gold Diggers of 1933 begins with a stupendous production of “We’re in the Money”: the camera pans over the closeup faces of beautiful eyelash-batting showgirls before yielding to a dance number that carefully coordinates coin props and chorus girls into kaleidoscopic shapes. Within five minutes, then, the film establishes the Berkeley style: sumptuous closeups with elaborate group work, or what you might call a rather 1933-apropos radical individualism with radical collectivism. Despite all that, this Money show gets closed for lack of money before it opens. Three of the show’s stars – Polly, Carol and Trixie – share an apartment and sit in it, dejected, until a fourth co-star, Fay, shows up promising that their producer is coming with a new offer. A neighbor, Brad, plays a torch song on piano in order to serenade Polly, who is very receptive. The producer, Mr. Hopkins, shows up, hears Brad, tells Polly to bring him over, and slyly jokes “I can fire Warren and Dubin.” Hopkins enjoys Brad’s first song, hates his second, and loves the third, envisioning men marching, spinning fantasies about a song and a show about jobs and struggle and the Depression. When Hopkins bemoans his lack of funds, the girls all moan…until Brad promises to bring Hopkins $15,000 tomorrow as long as Polly gets a featured role in the show. After many jokes back and forth over this offer, Brad shows up the next day with the cash, but he refuses to sing onstage despite his terrific tenor, causing the ladies to think him a thief. After Trixie tells him that without him the show will fail and the cast and crew will starve, he reluctantly agrees, and sings onstage, with Polly, his number “Pettin’ in the Park” which goes “Pettin in the park, bad boy, pettin in the park, bad girl, first you pet a little, let up a little, then you get a little kiss.” For this one, Berkeley regulates a roundelay of roller skates, snow flurries, showers, balls made into geometric patterns, park dwellers, police, and a pea-shooting baby played by Billy Barty. The next day’s newspaper names the show a hit and notes the surprising presence of wealthy scion Robert Bradford, whose family warns him to stay away from the theater in general and showgirls in particular, all being gold diggers. When Brad refuses to give up his dreams of theater or Polly, Brad’s brother Lawrence and family lawyer Faneuil Peabody come to the showgirl’s apartment to buy off Polly. Carol is so bollixed at their blue-blooded bombast that she pretends to be Polly, and she and Trixie play jokes on the men, leading to Trixie taking them out to a new speakie. Trixie, the one genuine gold-digger and jokester, makes light of Faneuil, or Fanny, but really does enjoy getting more of his cash and kisses. Carol, as pretend-Polly, prefers to punish the prudish plutocrat Lawrence, but after a few more nights of singing, dancing, and Fay and real-Polly playing along, both Carol and Lawrence confess that what started as a game became affection all the same. When Lawrence says he still opposes Brad’s engagement to the real Polly, Carol breaks it off. On a Broadway stage, Brad and Polly lead “The Shadow Waltz,” another wildly inventive, intricate investiture involving innumerable ingenues that could never have been mounted on an actual stage. Backstage, when Lawrence tries to break up Brad and Polly, Carol swears she may never see him again, and so he relents, meaning that along with Trixie kissing Fanny all three housemates are ending the movie with rich men. That said, Hopkins hustles Carol onstage, along with African-American torch song specialist Etta Moten Barnett, to sing “The Forgotten Man,” an evocation of exiguity and an Expressionistic encomium to men who fought in the Great War only to be dismissed in the Great Depression.

Of all the films on the A- or B-list, Gold Diggers of 1933 probably took the least amount of time from conception to release. 42nd Street was made as FDR was being elected, released in January 1933, a hit by February, so Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck put Gold Diggers into production in March and premiered it that May. The short timeframe spoke to the previous adaptations, although who then or now released a remake four years later? Warner, Zanuck, director Mervyn LeRoy, and even Busby Berkeley knew that what they had was good, that it could be Depression-savvier and sort of post-Cagney-hard-boiled-er than anything from that wave of herky-jerky, hit-and-miss musicals from 1929. They alchemized that anarchy into something approaching art. They also made a third musical that year, Footlight Parade, and the fact that they all competed at that year’s Oscars might have indicated too much of a good thing; in any event, Gold Diggers was Warners’ biggest hit of the year.

Influenced by: the flurry of Broadway-based films of the early sound period, but mostly as contrast

Influenced: musicals; the Busby Berkeley style is widely renowned, sometimes condemned as female objectification, sometimes called symbolic of Roosevelt-era politics (individualism pressed into collectivism)

“I have here an accident policy that will absolutely protect you no matter what happens. If you lose a leg, we’ll help you look for it.”

Under Irivng Thalberg’s strict guidance, A Night at the Opera established a new or modified formula for MGM’s Marx Brothers films, like extravagant backdrops, Harpo as Chico’s brother or partner, Groucho and Chico having an extended “who’s on first?”-ish routine, a friendship between the romantic couple and Chico, and a big Act III setpiece where everyone appears and all the plot strands come together. The latter had been standard with Shakespeare and MGM comedies, but not with the Marxes. The plot of A Night at the Opera permitted and encouraged MGM-style large-scale musical numbers, and indeed Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones were already operatically trained contract players who were happy to dub their own voices.

1935 audiences saw A Night at the Opera begin with a musical number loosely based on Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, performed by a succession of everyday Italians doing everyday things, apparently full of “O solo mio”-level stereotyping. Quoting Glenn Mitchell’s The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, Leonard Maltin, on the audio commentary on the current DVD, says that the musical opener was cut during the war as a diplomatic gesture to Italy, but MPAA records show that it was actually cut earlier, in 1938. This suggests that MGM was probably capitulating to Benito Mussolini prior to the war, but later didn’t want to admit that. The Italian-street opener was removed from the master print and no longer survives, which is why the often-stated running time of the film, 95 minutes, is three minutes more than the actual film.

The truncated film begins at an upper-class Italian club with a waiter, no longer singing, but instead calling out for Mr. Otis B. Driftwood, who has stood up wealthy dowager Mrs. Claypool by dining with a blonde woman just behind her. Driftwood (Groucho) turns, insults the waiter, receives the check for a meal, tells the blonde “If I were you I wouldn’t pay it,” joins Mrs. Claypool, and continues a barrage of overtures and understated insults. When the dowager mentions that after months he has mostly failed to get her into society, he introduces her to Herman Gottlieb, head of the New York Opera Company, and they arrange for her to finance the the New York Opera debut of Rodolfo Lassparri, “the greatest tenor since Caruso.” We soon learn that he also has one of the world’s greatest tempers when we see him backstage abusing his cross-dressing dresser, Tomasso (Harpo), to the chagrin of sweetheart soprano Rosa Castaldi, who spurns Lassparri’s advances and dotes upon the unknown tenor Ricardo Baroni, who hires his childhood best friend Fiorello (Chico) as his manager. As part of assuring the investment, Driftwood drifts backstage at Milan’s opera, where he sees Tomasso mallet-bonk Lassparri into unconsciousness. Fiorello tells Driftwood he represents the world’s greatest tenor, and Driftwood believes he’s signing Lassparri when he’s really getting Baroni – if in fact their patchwork contract is enforceable. As an ocean liner prepares to leave for America, Baroni sings a tearful goodbye to the departing Castaldi, but it later turns out that Baroni has snuck into Driftwood’s enormous steamer trunk along with Tomasso and Fiorello. Driftwood discovers this at about the same time that he grasps that his Gottlieb-granted stateroom is little more than a closet, but when he tells the hungry stowaways to leave before Claypool arrives, they insist on food first. This leads to one of the funniest and famousest scenes in comedy history as Driftwood orders a restaurant’s worth of food and the ship sends a hotel’s worth of service-people, from engineers to towel maids to a manicurist, all culminating in the closet containing maybe 15 people when Claypool opens the door, causing half of them to pop out of the stateroom like a freed jack-in-the-box. Later, on deck, during a ship party, the three stowaways can’t help but perform, with Chico on piano, Harpo on harp, and the singer played by Allan Jones singing “Cosa cosi.” After they’re found and placed in a detention room, Driftwood manages to throw a rope to their porthole, and Tomasso, after taking the rope from the ocean to the ship’s mast, lands in a room where he finds scissors and three sleeping, long-bearded aviators. When the ship arrives in New York, three impostors, posing as the heroic pilots, press forward with a press conference with their self-appointed interpreter, Driftwood, and everything goes preposterously. The stowaways are hiding out in Driftwood’s hotel room when they see their picture on the front page of the paper and soon foil a nosy policeman, leading to Ricardo climbing in the window of Rosa’s hotel room, leading to her joy and Lassparri’s fury, leading to The New York Opera Company’s sacking of Rosa and Driftwood. Revengefully, the team sabotages opening night of Il Trovatore, kidnapping Gottlieb and Lassparri and motivating some madcap mayhem, including Fiorello and Tomasso throwing a baseball as they conduct the MGM Orchestra playing Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and Tomasso swinging along various backstage ropes that make different modern sceneries interrupt the period piece. I might add that Chico and Harpo are happy to leap into drag to play the opera’s gypsies. Without any other tenor ready, the opera hires Baroni, who insists that he needs a familiar Leonor and thus gets Rosa, and together they wow the crowd. The film ends with the lovers performing an encore as Driftwood and Fiorello negotiate another contract.

Thalberg won his bet: A Night at the Opera was a big hit, and is regularly cited as one of the funniest and most influential comedies of the period. And as Thalberg had also predicted, critics were less than enthused. Mark Bourne spoke for many when he said the Marx Brothers “still let the air out of stuffed shirts and barbecue a few sacred cows, but something got lost in all that MGMness when the screen’s ultimate anti-authoritarian team started working the Andy Hardy side of the street.”

Influenced by: Monkey Business; Irving Thalberg, the MGM wunderkind who gave them free rein to do what they wanted

Influenced: the Marx Brothers’ spirit of creative anarchism reverberated through Warner Bros. cartoons and all of culture

“Lucky, please don’t feel bad. You still got me. Course I ain’t a young and pretty girl. I ain’t even a girl, but I’ll stick. I’ll never leave you.”

Swing Time is in tune with the times in ways large and small, including running gags about clothes that keep Astaire in formal-occasion fashions for almost the entire film, even if his character is coming close to starving. By mid-1935, Astaire-Rogers films were clearly a beautiful thing quite unlike any other thing Hollywood was doing (or would ever do again), and RKO could choose from the wealth of would-be collaborators wishing to work with the pair. Erwin Gelsey’s spec script, featuring Astaire’s character disingenuously taking dance lessons from Rogers’ character, was about as clever as any. Irving Berlin and Max Steiner had done terrific work on previous Astaire-Rogers films, but RKO producer Pandro S. Berman wanted a songwriter who would set up the songs more snugly with the story, and so he summoned the melodist on Roberta, the great Jerome Kern, who brought in Dorothy Fields to help him with lyrics. Kern and Fields were hired to write seven songs, six of which made it into the movie; at least three are among the period’s finest. Another key hire was George Stevens, a director who had just established his feminist bona fides with Alice Adams, starring Katharine Hepburn, and Annie Oakley, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Rogers later wrote that Stevens let her redo takes if she had better ideas, and the result is that Rogers as Penny Carrol is considerably convincing in every frame of Swing Time, resisting Lucky’s charms when she doesn’t quite believe him.

Rogers very much appreciated Stevens, which is crucial background to the legendary anecdote from this film, that at some point between two of the 48 takes of “Never Gonna Dance,” Rogers took off her shoes to see that the insides were bathed in blood, and then kept right on dancing anyway. “Never Gonna Dance” is arguably the pair’s most melodrama-motivated great dance together, and the title was a working title of the film, but RKO worried that people would think the film was a non-dancing musical. If anything, the script invited more story-oriented cavorting than usual, with the exception of “Bojangles of Harlem,” in which Astaire appears for the first and last time in blackface…for about 12 minutes on and offstage. The elaborate number, featuring a salute to Al Jolson and rear-screen shadows moving in and out of synch, took three full days of shooting and some last-minute fixes by Kern and Astaire, who worked to pay tribute to his one-time teacher, John W. Bubbles, vaudevillian and father of rhythm tap, later one of the first black artists on TV. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson became broadly famous in 1935 by dancing on stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, and the blackface is mitigated by Astaire’s sincere affection…and yet even that affection is mitigated by Astaire’s undercurrent of “oh that? I can do THAT too!”

Swing Time begins with a peek at the peak part of the performance of a dance troupe, who hurry to get offstage so that their leader, John “Lucky” Garnett, can rush off to his wedding to Margaret. Not wanting to lose Lucky, the troupe tricks him into fixing a fake fashion faux pas, and plays on his love of gambling, to delay him until the wedding is called off, unbeknownst to Lucky. One troupe-mate even bets Lucky’s bankroll that he won’t be married, and Lucky accepts, only to arrive at the venue with the bride, her father, a dog, and a cat all hissing at him. Eventually the father agrees that $25,000 would change his mind, a sum that Lucky feels he can earn with enough gambling and hustling in New York City. Lucky troops to the train ticket office, where his troupe-mates cut him off and insist on his bankroll because he bungled his bet on the bride, and so the bereft Lucky bounces onto a freight car train, trailed by his older sidekick, a magician who is confusingly yet endearingly named Pop. Walking around New York City, the pair are broke except for Lucky’s lucky quarter, so Lucky asks a random passerby, Penny Carrol, to change it, Pop pilfers it back from Penny’s purse, Penny accuses Lucky of theft and importunes a police officer, and then Penny, impugned, departs. Pop admits he pickpocketed the coin, leading to Lucky chasing Penny into her job as a dance instructor and pretending to promenade poorly. When a peeved Penny pronounces “I can’t teach you anything!,” her boss overhears and fires her, causing Lucky to show the man how much she really did teach him with a sudden spontaneous polka in perfect syncopation. Not only is Penny not fired, her boss sets up an audition for the pair, but Lucky needs a tuxedo, gambles and loses, and misses the audition, flipping Penny against him. Lucky and Pop march outside Penny’s apartment wearing cardboard signs, a la 1930s union strikers, that say “PENNY CARROL UNFAIR TO JOHN GARNETT” until Penny, with a little prompting by her older sidekick Mabel, permits them into her outer room. From there, Lucky sits at a piano and serenades her with the brand-new “The Way You Look Tonight,” impressing Penny so much that she shows up with hair in shampoo, conferring on the canticle a comical coda. Lucky and Penny’s next audition is thwarted when the club’s band leader, Ricardo Romero, in love with Penny, refuses to play for her to dance with any other man. At Romero’s club’s roulette table, Lucky is about to win the full $25,000 needed to marry Margaret, but pulls his chips at the last minute, proving he would prefer Penny. Lucky uses the almost-25-large to gamble with the club owner for Ricardo’s contract, but when Pop sees that the club owner is using a rigged deck, Pop uses sleight-of-hand to make sure Lucky’s card is the winner. Now that Lucky owns the club, Ricardo must reluctantly play for Penny’s dance with Lucky, and they sashay through one of the most superb of Astaire-Rogers sequences, a complex swing-waltz with tap overlays, a floating on air briefly punctuated with a knowing middle polka. Later, Lucky tells Pop not to leave him alone with Penny until after he tells her about his engagement to Margaret, but, reacting to Lucky’s reticence, Mabel arranges a double-date weekend at a rural, snowy cabin. Lucky and Penny sing the frustrated “A Fine Romance” while trudging their feet through the snow, marking the second standard-worthy song that doesn’t need to be, and isn’t, turned into a dance, instead relying on strong acting while lip-synching particularly from Rogers. Returned to New York City, Mabel dares Penny to act on her feelings, and you know it’s a post-Code film when you watch the over-the-moon reactions of Penny and Lucky to their mere first kiss. Ricardo Romero conducts as Lucky boogies through a boffo “Bojangles in Harlem.” Backstage, in blackface, Lucky’s life begins to break apart, first when the former club owner demands to replay for his club with a fair deck, second when that loses Lucky the club, third when Penny finds that out, and fourth when Penny finds one Margaret looking for John Garnett. After Penny tells Lucky she has accepted Ricardo’s marriage proposal, Lucky sings that he’s “Never Gonna Dance” without Penny, and they share a two-step that moves from melancholy to marvelously realized. (As an aside, Astaire also name-checks Groucho and Harpo.) The next day, Margaret reveals that she is leaving Lucky for another man, causing Lucky to say “Gee that’s swell!” and run to stop Penny’s wedding. After a few reversals, Penny agrees, and rather artfully, Penny sings “The Way You Look Tonight” while Lucky sings “A Fine Romance” as they walk to a window watching over the New York skyline, and conclude with a clandestine kiss.

Astaire and Rogers dancing together can’t be explained; seeing is believing, and no sights onscreen command your undivided attention quite like Fred and Ginger in harmony to a classic song. The comparison is to Broadway’s best dancers, but the comparison doesn’t take into account the hermetic details of plotting, acting and magazine-wedding-level elegance typical to 1930s Hollywood. As Edward Gallafent wrote, despite the tuxes and tails and trains, “this star couple seems to exude a sense of ease, or accessibility, even an intimacy – we can feel at home with them.” In Astaire and Rogers’ ten films together, not every scene could be said to work, but when everything’s working, as in Swing Time, effervescent dance supporting romance effects a transcendance not unlike eating the best meal of your life. The pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is a one-time filmic phenomenon, without equivalent in any other country or cinema with the exception of Bollywood. Gene Kelly is Astaire’s dance equal, but never had a partner that developed the same degree of prancing and romancing. No one else on a Western screen has come close, though it should be said that no one was allowed to; a more enlightened 21st century would have found the equivalent of Top Hat and Swing Time for someone like Savion Glover.

Influenced by: previous Astaire-Rogers films; 1930s codes; perhaps George Stevens’ confidence

Influenced: this is one of the leading examples of why Fred and Ginger are part of even the briefest versions of cinema history

“I’ll condemn anything that leaves the task of holding England to outlaws like me.”

It was called The Adventures of Robin Hood to distinguish it from the earlier Fairbanks film that most people called Robin Hood, which was ironic because that 1922 film’s technical full title was “Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood.” Warner Bros. had long ruminated on reviving Robin Hood for its biggest star, Jimmy Cagney, but the star and studio parted ways in 1935, the same year Jack Warner took a chance on two near-unknowns, 26-year-old Errol Flynn and 19-year-old Olivia De Havilland, to work under a new-ish director, Michael Curtiz, to star in a new swashbuckler called Captain Blood. After the big-budget picture broke out at the box office, Flynn and De Havilland became something like Warners’ Astaire and Rogers, co-starring together in eight films over the next six years. Robin Hood was sorta their Swing Time, their next logical step, but it was a far bigger gamble, its three-strip Technicolor bringing the budget to roughly double that of Captain Blood, more than $2 million, by far a first for the famously flinty studio. One reason there hadn’t been more color features was that then-necessary lighting for color scenes indoors was torturously hot (a year after Robin Hood, all theWizard of Oz actors would complain of their makeup melting between takes); Robin Hood was an ideal production in that every scene was either filmed in a mock castle, with lights hanging 30 feet overhead, or outside. Tarzan descended from branches that could never have supported his weight, but, declining to ask audiences to suspend their disbelief, Jack Warner demanded high-thick-branched trees that Los Angeles County didn’t have, and so half of production was moved hundreds of miles to an oak-filled park near Chico, California, while the other half was filmed in Pasadena and Warners studios, necessitating two credited directors, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley. As color and location costs accumulated in the winter of 1938, Warner and producer Hal B. Wallis worked to film and edit Robin Hood efficiently enough that it could be released as early as May 1938, giving the film a full six months in theaters before Gone with the Wind would inevitably replace it as America’s color-suffused sensation.

A minor footnote to this particular story concerns Viennese opera conductor and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whom Wallis begged and pleaded and cajoled to come from Austria to America to compose the score for the new film. Though Korngold felt that an “action” picture was beneath him, he reluctantly agreed to a week-by-week deal that he could leave anytime he felt dissatisfied. Korngold arrived in America apprehensively planning to stay no longer than a couple of months, but then, on March 12, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria along with all of the Jewish composer’s possessions. Korngold remained in Los Angeles through 1945, lived until 1957, and always told anyone who asked that the Robin Hood movie saved his life. Beginning with Robin Hood, Korngold became one of Hollywood’s most influential composers, starting with a lush, passionate, chromatic score that elevated Robin Hood way beyond Flynn’s previous sword-fight films.

In an odd echo of what was almost Korngold’s fate, The Adventures of Robin Hood begins with medieval-scroll-looking title cards telling us that Richard the Lionheart, King of England, has been captured in Vienna. Out in Sherwood Forest, after an older, diminutive huntsman named Much kills an apparently royal deer, Sir Guy of Gisbourne turns up to punish him, and Robin Hood and friend Will Scarlet turn up to punish Sir Guy, laughing and threatening him enough that Guy rides off in a huff resulting in Much the Huntsman pledging his loyalty to Robin Hood. At a sumptuous, fully appointed royal feast in Nottingham Castle, Richard’s treacherous brother Prince John tells the many knights, as well as Lady Marian, that he is now usurping the throne with plans to over-tax the Saxons to recover Richard’s ransom. Disgraced Saxon nobleman Sir Robin of Locksley, aka Robin Hood, shows up at the feast, lays down a fresh deer for dinner, and bawdily, boldly, brazenly blazons his intent to restore Richard to his rightful throne. A bloodless brawl begins, but Robin Hood somehow smilingly subdues several soldiers and slips away out Guy of Gisbourne’s gates. Robin and Will recruit roustabouts in Sherwood Forest, like the stout but sword-skilled Friar Tuck and the staff-master Little John, who bests Robin Hood in a staff-off (probably because the actor also played Little John in Fairbanks’ film). Speaking to maybe twenty merry men, Robin makes them promise to fight for free England until Richard’s return, to rob from rich to give to poor, and to treat women with courtesy. From bows and branches high above, the Merry Men quite literally descend upon a traveling Norman party that includes Sir Guy, Lady Marian, and the Sheriff of Nottingham, commandeer their horses, and bring them into a bawdy Saxon feast that resembles an Octoberfest with endlessly overflowing mutton and venison. (In this motion picture, deer leg shanks are both motive and motif.) Maid Marian refuses to eat, eats, and declares herself unafraid of anything least of all Robin Hood, prompting Robin to escort her through the gypsy-refugee-looking backside of the encampment where she sees Saxon serfs’ sincere suffering due to Sir John. When Robin permits the Norman party to depart unharmed, he credits Lady Marian’s presence to Sir Guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham. When these two trip back to the castle and protest that they tried to arrest the Hood, Sir John asks where are their battle wounds, John apparently unaware that this is a clean Code-compliant film. Hoping to play on Robin Hood’s competitive nature, the Sheriff announces an archery tournament with a grand prize of a golden arrow to be presented by Lady Marian. Here the color pays off: in prior scenes, Robin distinguished himself wearing bright green tights, but in the archery tournament, in muted hues and a head scarf, Robin’s disguise is made more plausible. A rival’s arrow lands in the dead center of the bullseye, but Robin’s arrow splits that arrow and he wins, reveals himself, causes a fracas, and gets captured and sentenced to hang. Marian maneuvers the merry men into breaking Robin out of prison, and Robin returns the favor, sort of, by sneaking into Marian’s tower offering courtship and a wastrel’s life amongst the Saxon peasantry. When Robin threatens to fall from her high window and land on Norman guards, she chastely kisses him and admits her love for him, but refuses to leave with him on the grounds that she can help his cause more from inside the castle. At a roadside inn, a Norman bishop discovers that King Richard has returned with his retinue, all disguised as monks, and alerts John and Guy, who hire a disgraced knight to kill Richard in return for both the restoration of his rank and the receipt of Robin of Locksley’s legacy land. Marian gets word of this perfidy and quills a warning to Robin, but Guy intercepts the parchment and puts Marian in the castle prison pending trial and probable execution. Like the leads of Swing Time, Robin and Marian have older sidekicks who have started up their own relationship, and so Marian uses hers, Bess, to get a message to her sweetheart, Much, who manages to find and kill Dickon even as he, Much, becomes much wounded. Robin Hood and his men find the “monks” and feed them and find fault with them for fighting abroad when Richard needed them in England. When Will finds Much wounded he brings him to Robin to tell tale of Richard’s arrival in England, causing Richard to reveal his real identity, replete with a Royal Banner-lion-bedecked breastplate, provoking Robin and the Merry Men to kneel. Robin importunes Richard and his “monks” to remain in disguise as part of Sir John’s coronation, and sure enough, after they are inside the castle, Richard reveals his royal self and arouses a raging ruckus. Robin Hood and Sir Guy square off in a somewhat epic sword battle to the death that Robin finally wins. Robin releases Marian from her cell as Sir John’s soldiers surrender their swords, shields, and sigils. In the final scene, Richard holds court, exiling John and his followers, pardoning Saxons, and elevating Robin to Baron. Richard sees the way Marian and Robin are, checks in with each, and then commands Robin to marry Marian, a requisition to which Robin replies, “May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!”

Errol Flynn didn’t exactly make America forget Douglas Fairbanks, but he did confirm that Hollywood was now in an era of bold new sensations, for example its first beloved Australian star. Warners got lucky when Gone with the Wind went way past its schedule and was rescheduled for Christmas 1939, allowing The Adventures of Robin Hood to rob from rich studios and give to poor color-deprived moviegoers for 18 full months. Robin Hood was the first live-action full-color hit, and could even be called the first summer blockbuster. Released in May 1938 to avoid conflicting with more serious-minded Christmas competition, Robin Hood took advantage of new technology to present action-adventure and men in tights in new and good-humored ways. Swashbucklers aren’t superspies or superheroes, but those hadn’t yet been invented – well, to be precise, Superman only appeared in his first-ever comic book in April 1938 as Korngold was scoring Robin Hood’s picture lock edit. The Adventures of Robin Hood reminds modern viewers of the trappings of Medieval Times restaurants, with too many clean ramparts and coats of arms, but 1938 audiences cottoned to the colorful combination of English accents, literary pedigree, kinetic action scenes, and vague class warfare – somehow Robin’s stature as nobleman and royal sycophant was never a problem, or may even have increased his appeal.

Influenced by: 1920s’ swashbucklers, though Australian roustabout Errol Flynn remakes the type into his own image

Influenced: action movies; anyone who ever wanted to take from the rich to give to the poor

“Someday I’ll get a straight answer from you, and I won’t know what to do with it.”

Even many film aficionados don’t know Only Angels Have Wings, and its place in Sight and Sound’s Top 175 owes much to its citation by Andrew Sarris as an example of style serving as auteur signature across different genres. That said, Only Angels Have Wings endures as an excellent example of the almost routinized distinction of Hollywood product by 1939. Dmitri Tiomkin’s score is understatedly atmospheric, Viola Lawrence’s editing is supple, and Joseph Walker’s cinematography makes one think one could be in South America. Keeping with then-current sausage-making standards, principal photography was planned as a sixty-day shoot in rough script order, although Hawks went more than a month over, and then needed even more time for second-unit photography of Pilgrim Model 100-B “Barranca Airways” planes flying over parts of the Rocky Mountains substituting for the Andes.

Only Angels Have Wings may also be popular amongst foreign filmmakers and film critics because it unknowingly, or knowingly, comments on vicissitudes of American imperialism. The original script outline was by Anne Wigton, but Hawks rewrote the outline himself based on his experiences making films like Viva Villa! and Ceiling Zero.

Only Angels Have Wings begins by introducing us to (fictional) Barranca as a banana boat arrives bearing bushels of bananas and a piano player named Bonnie Lee, who disembarks and finds some sweaty, film-sped-up locals dancing to a Latin groove that goes “chiggi-chi, chiggi-chi.” Two Yankees, Joe and Les, creepily follow and then approach Bonnie, so she tells them how happy she is to hear something that doesn’t sound like Pig Latin, her apparent name for Spanish. They introduce her to their kind-hearted boss, Dutchy, who is also Barranca’s postmaster, banker, bar proprietor, and airline owner. As Joe leaves to deliver mail by air, Bonnie, in a possible gesture to the film’s title, marvels that pilots aren’t like birds at all, and the overbearing Geoff Carter, manager of the airline, says gruffly that a bird wouldn’t go out in this muck. Indeed, in an insane incident, Joe’s plane crashes and Joe dies. Geoff disingenuously blames Bonnie for distracting Joe and says “who’s Joe?” along with the other men, and after recoiling, Bonnie eventually plays along, literally on the piano. Privately, Dutchy argues with Geoff that the mail service isn’t worth sending more men to their deaths, but Geoff argues that if they can just finish this six-month probation period, they’ll secure a government contract that will earn the funds for better planes that won’t crash so easily. When Bonnie hits on Geoff and Geoff resists, Bonnie asks her about the honey that hardened his heart, only to learn that Geoff never asks a woman to do anything and never trusts a woman not to want everything. Joe’s replacement happens to be a pilot who can’t get work Stateside because he once parachuted out of an airplane leaving the plane’s mechanic to die – who happened to be the brother of “Kid” Dabb, Geoff’s favorite of his pilots. Geoff keeps Kid from killing McPherson, but will only license the latter to do a lunatic-level trial run, one whose snowy mountain peaks may be the most beautiful sight in the movie. McPherson has brought his wife Judy, and we soon learn that Judy is the woman Geoff once thought wasn’t like other women. When Kid confronts Geoff about McPherson, Geoff makes Kid take an eye exam, but after Kid learns about the six-month probation, Kid confesses to cheating on the exam, and both men realize Dutchy has been too kind to them and too hard on his own airline. Geoff says “Judy, Judy” to Judy and pours water on her hair to make her hear that she’s as repellently risk-aversive as every other woman. Because this is post-Code Hollywood, Bonnie, a piano-playing professional, seems perfectly pleased waiting around backwater Barranca for a week with the very occasional kiss from Geoff. When bad weather closes the mountain pass on the final day of the probation period, Geoff decides to take an untested Ford Tri-Motor that may or may not get above the clouds. The Kid insists on going and persuades Geoff to flip his, ahem, lucky quarter for it, winning passage until Geoff realizes the coin has two heads…but Geoff lets the Kid accompany him anyway. By this time Bonnie has seen Geoff take several risky flights, and so she hugs him as she begs him not to go…and pulls his pistol out of his holster saying she’ll shoot him if he sets off. After joking about whether he dies now or later, Geoff turns to go, and Bonnie puts the pistol on a table, where it goes off and shoots Geoff’s shoulder anyway. With Geoff too hurt to fly, McPherson and the Kid have to do the flight together, and their plane fails and then gets clocked by a convocation of condors, with McPherson barely able to bring the broken bird back to Barranca. As the Kid dies of his injuries, he avails Geoff of McPherson’s heroism, and the gang now accepts him. The next morning, the weather clears, Geoff’s wound feels better, and Geoff insists on flying one last attempt for the contract. Bonnie, on the verge of leaving, ventures to Geoff “I’m hard to get, all you have to do is ask me.” When Geoff takes out the Kid’s coin and says “all right tails you leave, heads you stay,” Bonnie holds back tears. Geoff kisses her goodbye, hands her the coin, and dashes out the door to pilot a plane. Distraught, Bonnie looks at the coin, sees that it has two heads, smiles widely, and shouts “Geoff!” as he flies his plane off the runway.

Working for Columbia meant using their actresses, which meant Howard Hawks was expected to hire, one, an unknown groomed and trained by studio head Harry Cohn for her featured-role debut, Rita Hayworth, and two, Frank Capra’s star actress, Jean Arthur, for the lead, who wound up fighting on set with Hawks. For a story set in South America, Hawks wanted the wise, wan, worldly “Hawksian woman,” while Arthur wanted to play her usual homespun sweetheart charm because it was a story set in South America. They fought on set a lot, and if they hadn’t, she might have obeyed Harry Cohn’s orders to star in Hawks’ next film, His Girl Friday…instead, she was suspended and missed that chance at eternal esteem.

Influenced by: Night Flight (1933), Ceiling Zero (1936), Flight From Glory (1937)

Influenced: merged Columbia house style with Hawks style, as model for many

“You keep out of this. All right, Bruce, suppose you have Mr. Burns examined over in his office and see what they’ll allow on that old carcass of his. If…eh, it was never anything to brag about.”

After looking for comedy scripts with the same wit and urgency as 1931 film The Front Page, Howard Hawks finally asked Harry Cohn to buy The Front Page, the twist being that America’s most trusted newsman, Walter Winchell, could play Walter Burns, the lead editor, opposite Grant as the star reporter. Cohn didn’t really care about Winchell as long as Grant would be starring, and Cohn coughed up the high rates demanded by now-major-Hollywood screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Their 1928 play The Front Page had served as their entry into Hollywood back when it was made into the 1931 movie starring Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns and Mr. Pat O’Brien as star reporter Hildy Johnson.

But then…something wonderful happened that Hecht, MacArthur, and Cohn could never have foreseen. During post-production on Only Angels Have Wings, while Hawks was doing half-days in the editing room searching in vain for takes of Jean Arthur sounding less drecky and more smart-alecky, Hawks was also holding informal auditions for supporting roles in The Front Page, and he asked his secretary to read the lines of the role Grant was signed to play. Hearing the reporter’s lines come out of a woman’s mouth, something clicked for Hawks, and he began rewriting the script as a divorce comedy, with Walter trying to get Hildy back at his paper and back in his bed. Hawks, writing with Charles Lederer, knew that Code logic dictated Hildy would have to wind up with the only man she’d ever slept with, that being Walter. That being said, Hawks and Lederer knew Cohn and the Hays Office wouldn’t like the anti-marriage, ethics-optional tone of the revised script, and so the film began with titles saying, “It all happened in the ‘dark ages’ of the newspaper game – when to a reporter ‘getting that story’ justified anything short of murder. Incidentally you will see in this picture no resemblance to the men and women of the press of today.” Hawks hoped Cohn and Hays wouldn’t notice the cheeky tone of that “resemblance” line, nor dialogue like Hildy describing journalism as asking people “if Hitler’s gonna start another war.”

This was impressively improvised interlocution, considering Hitler had invaded Poland two weeks before principal photography began. Hawks encouraged so much improvisation that production went a week over the standard two-month schedule, finishing on November 21st. Hawks wanted what he felt was missing from Bringing Up Baby, the blustering, bantering, and bickering that was how smart ambitious people really talked to and over each other. Thirty years before Robert Altman pioneered modern overlapping dialogue on M*A*S*H, Hawks had no recourse to multi-track sound recording, and therefore dangled multiple hanging microphones and directed his sound mixer to switch between them speedily, sometimes dozens of times. Hawks purported to put plot points in the middles of sentences so that either sentence end could be spoken over, as part of Hawks’ determination to break the record for fastest dialogue in a film, then held by The Front Page; for a few friends he screened his film and the 1931 version side-by-side to prove that he’d surpassed their pace. Average American speech is about 140 words per minute; average speech in His Girl Friday is about 240 words per minute.

The good-natured Grant gave no resistance to swapping roles from reporter Hildy Johnson to editor Walter Burns – Columbia wouldn’t ask audiences to accept a woman as Grant’s boss and a newspaper’s boss – but that left Hawks with the difficulty of finding his ideal Hildy. Hawks had imagined Carole Lombard, but Harry Cohn couldn’t afford her; over summer 1939, Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullivan, Irene Dunne, and Katharine Hepburn all said no. (Hepburn was then starring on Broadway in The Philadelphia Story, another screwball-comedy-ish story that, a year later, Hepburn would make into her film comeback with help from Cary Grant playing a very Walter Burns-like smart-aleck.) Cohn forced Hawks to offer the role to Jean Arthur; when Arthur declined to fight on set with Hawks for another two months, Cohn suspended her, and Cohn’s general reputation with women may have had something to do with some of those refusals. Rosalind Russell wrote she was “everyone’s fifteenth choice” to play Hildy, something she gleaned reading The New York Times before meeting Hawks. Russell felt couldn’t turn down the role – she had hated being typed as a sophisticated lady and wanted to prove her Carole Lombard-esque chops – but after reading the Times, Russell turned up to Hawks’ office with swimming-pool-drenched hair as if she didn’t care, and later brought in her own writer to “punch up” Hildy’s dialogue. The lighting department complained about Russell’s soft chin, forcing them to overhead-cross-light her to create a jawline. I mention all these unlikely contingencies because Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson is surely one of the shining lights of feminine strength of the period, the equal of Scarlett O’Hara or Mildred Pierce or Leslie Crosbie. To be clear, as reimagined by Hawks and Russell, Hildy shares only the serendipitously androgynous name of her role from The Front Page; in this remake, she is every inch a woman, vascillating between imagined traditional domesticity and her professional virtuosity. As the only woman in the police station’s press room, in an awesome art-deco blazer-skirt combo, Hildy comes in for appreciation, approbation, and stronger connections to both the condemned man and his girlfriend. This remake needed a new title that somehow nodded to Hildy and Walter’s tempestuous relationship, like She Writes His Words or Stop Her Presses or something. Way after it was too late to rename Hildy Friday, Cohn and Hawks finally decided on His Girl Friday, which sounded vaguely cub-reporter-ish but was meant as an ironic reference to Robinson Crusoe’s dogsbody Friday – ironic because anyone who sees the film knows Hildy’s hardly Walter’s girl, although as Hildy says of an albino temptress, she’ll do til one comes along.

His Girl Friday begins with the aforementioned tongue-in-cheek title card, and pans through a carefully anonymized city’s Morning Post’s bustling newsroom of barking, braying reporters. Hildy Johnson arrives to tell her ex-boss and ex-husband, Walter Burns, that she’s quitting journalism and getting married in the morning. Humorously but relentlessly, Walter tries to change Hildy’s mind, telling her he needs her help writing a story that might stop that night’s scheduled execution of Earl Williams, apparently wrongly convicted of killing a black policeman, apparently framed to earn the mayor African-American votes. (This detail is carried over from the 1928 play and 1931 film; in no film made before World War II do we see any actual black policemen.) Walking in front of Hildy, failing to clear doors from her path, Walter approaches then mistakes Hildy’s fiancé Bruce for an old man instead of the kindhearted, mild-mannered insurance agent he is, Cary Grant doing his best Groucho Marx. Walter insists on taking the happy couple to lunch, and at the restaurant, after an abundance of back-and-forth banter that probably leaves their food cold, Walter offers to buy a $100,000 insurance policy from Bruce if Hildy will only delay their train trip to Albany long enough to write the Williams story. Bruce wants to go buy their train tickets to Albany, but Hildy insists on doing that and on all of their cash, about $500, because she doesn’t trust Walter. In Walter’s office, a doctor examines Walter and he signs the new policy with Bruce, but Hildy, on the phone, insists on a certified check and, after Walter leaves the room, insists that Bruce hide the check in his hat. At the prison press room, Hildy shows off her train tickets and assures the other six reporters – all average-sized middle-aged men – that she’s retiring after this to raise babies. The journalists do more smirking than working in the press room waiting for the execution even and especially when Mollie Malloy turns up and tearfully accuses them of telling lies about her and Earl until Hildy finally takes her out of the room. Bribing a guard with a dropped $20 to get into see Earl, Hildy offers the condemned man a sympathetic ear, even explaining his excess with Marxist theory, along the lines of a gun produced must be used. Bruce lands in jail for stealing a watch, forcing Hildy to go to another police station where she can only get him out by threatening a cop with becoming a headline in the next day’s Morning Post. Back at the prison press room, Hildy rips up her story, phones Walter, and says, “if I ever lay my two eyes on you I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours til it rings like a Chinese gong!” As she’s leaving, Earl Williams stages a shootout/jailbreak, and Hildy pivots, knowing she must stay on such a sensational story. In the chaos of the jailbreak, Hildy, the only woman in sight, dashes through policemen, cars, bikes, and sirens to literally tackle a fast-footed guard whom she knows she can bribe. $450 of Bruce’s money later, Hildy extracts Walter’s phone promise to reimburse it and reveals that the prestigious New York doctor evaluator, as an exercise, loaned Williams a gun which Williams used perhaps because a gun produced must be used? The mayor turns up to chew out the sheriff, and both of them greet Pettibone, the governor’s messenger who has brought Williams’ reprieve, but needing the execution for election, the Mayor entices the messenger’s silence and distraction for a few hours, telling the sheriff to command his me