After being overwhelmed by William Wellman’s  Wings (1927), I wanted to see another of his few surviving silent films. This is a haunting tale of tramps wandering through a shadowy underworld, starring Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery.

Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen

Although this film was made before the Great Depression, it looks forward to later Wellman movies like Wild Boys of the Road (1933) in focusing on the outcasts of society and showing poor people’s desperate struggle to survive. I’m not going to go into as much detail about this movie as I did about Wings, but I definitely think it’s another masterpiece – and I’m saddened that it is so little known.

The film is a powerful melodrama loosely based on Jim Tully’s tramp autobiography Beggars of Life, which had already been successfully adapted as a Broadway play Outside Looking In, by Maxwell Anderson, starring Charles Bickford and James Cagney.  I’m not sure how close the film is to the play –  Anderson isn’t mentioned as a source at the imdb – but one review of the play I found does mention the mock trial scene, which is also a key section of the film, and I have the impression Bickford and Cagney’s characters on stage must have been very close to those played by Beery and Arlen in the film.

There have been showings at cinemas in recent years, so there must be a good print in existence,  but the DVD I got hold of is a dark and grainy video transfer, where whole scenes are almost impossible to see . Yet, even watching the film under these conditions, the moody cinematography by Henry W Gerrard is striking, with the characters glimpsed in a space of light in the middle of the screen surrounded by shadows.  The night scenes are tinted blue and the day scenes red (this seems to have been done in a lot of silent films), adding to the atmosphere.

Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery

The most striking part of the film is the first few minutes. Arlen’s character, the tramp Jim, is indeed seen “on the outside looking  in”, hungrily peering through a window at a man slumped over a table set with a lavish breakfast. He walks in and asks for something to eat, but is ignored – and eventually realises that the man has been shot dead. A moment later a young girl (Louise Brooks) walks down the stairs and sees him. He is about to explain that he isn’t the killer, when she tells him that the dead man is her adoptive father and she killed him after he tried to rape her – as she speaks, the events she is recounting are seen happening in a shadowy  form behind her, a brilliant experimental sequence which I would love to have seen more clearly.

Jim and the girl, Nancy (she is never named in the film, but her name is given as Nancy in the cast list) decide to flee before she is arrested for murder. She disguises herself as a boy and they try to jump on to a freight train, but she falls off, and, when they do get on board, they are thrown off . There are then scenes of them walking, hitching lifts on passing vehicles and going back to the trains again – some shots just show their legs trudging, or their arms and hands as they cook makeshift meals over campfires. There is one dreamlike scene where they turn a haystack into a temporary shelter, or nest, sleeping inside it. Their relationship is all very tentative and gentle, with no kisses, but just expressions on their faces showing how they are coming to love one another.  The film does give a feeling of the hard work of walking such long distances, and of their poverty and isolation as outsiders in society.

Louise Brooks is luminous as Nancy,   while I think Richard Arlen is also great as the quiet, noble tramp Jim, doing a great deal with his eyes. Both of them give poignantly understated performances despite this being a melodrama. Wallace Beery hams it up more as an older tramp they run into on their travels, Oklahoma Red – when the film was originally shown, it had some sound sequences, including a title song performed by Beery, but this has been lost, though I did find a version  on the web performed by another singer, Scrappy Lambert.

Nancy and Jim meet Red at a sort of shanty town for tramps, which has its own laws and system of government. When police come looking for Nancy, Red helps them to escape, but then insists that she should be handed over to him as his reward – “If I’m in a gang, it’s my gang, and if there’s a girl in the gang, she’s my girl.” He organises a mock trial which seems to be a savage parody of the criminal justice system, with Jim being assumed guilty and sentenced before his “defence counsel”, another tramp, has even been allowed to say a word. The intertitles bring home the parallels with real courts, with sardonic changes to the official words – for instance, the prosecuting attorney is the “persecutin’ attorney”.

This is one of the earliest films I’ve seen with a major role for an African-American actor,  Blue Washington, who plays another tramp, Mose, looking after and struggling to save a sick friend. There’s nothing particularly comic about his performance, but some scenes are all too stereotyped and the inter-titles keep pointing him out as comic relief by heavily mocking his accent.

After the high point of the trial scene, there are then a number of increasingly unlikely and sentimental plot twists which see Beery’s character having a change of heart and changing from bullying predator into the real hero of the film. It’s all compelling  enough to watch, but I think the film’s real greatness lies in its earlier scenes.

All in all, though, this is a film I’m glad to have seen – and the quality of both this and Wings makes me so sad  that some of Wellman’s other silent films have been lost forever.

Just thought I’d pass on word that there is going to be a season of Josef von Sternberg movies at the BFI (British Film Institute) in London during December, including some exciting rarities! I’m especially intrigued by the sound of Children of Divorce (1927), a silent movie starring Gary Cooper and Clara Bow, as I’ve just seen them both in Wings, which was made the same year.

It is amazing to me to realise that this haunting and dazzling silent epic was so nearly lost forever, despite being winner of the first Oscar for best film. It had been thought that no copies of William Wellman’s early masterpiece still existed, until a print was discovered in the  Cinémathèque Française archive in Paris and quickly restored. Watching it and seeing how powerful the imagery and acting are, with great performances by Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Charles “Buddy” Rogers, plus a memorable cameo by Gary Cooper, it makes me wonder how many other great movies have indeed been lost to us.

Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Clara Bow and Richard Arlen

Although this film does survive against all the odds, and has been shown in a few cinemas with an organ accompaniment, it hasn’t as yet been released on DVD, except as a video transfer on the “grey market” and on a Chinese DVD, which I believe has subtitles that can’t be removed. After watching it twice in a good unofficial copy, I’d love to see it fully restored. According to the article on it at Wikipedia, which includes a good clear plot summary, the original release was colour-tinted and had some scenes in an early widescreen format, as well as some prints having synchronised sound effects. A special edition DVD could try to re-create all this, and have a commentary from a film historian – I’d rush out to buy it! However, even a DVD without all those bells and whistles would be very welcome.

In the meantime, I think the movie itself is incredibly powerful, and stands up well against later aviation dramas, perhaps even outdoes them. The spectacular aviation footage and stunts are even more impressive when you remember that there were no advanced special effects such as those we have today – if a plane is seen crashing down to the ground in flames, then it was really crashing, and a pilot had to get out in a hurry. Sadly, there were injuries and even a fatality, as a good article at the Moviediva website recounts. I won’t repeat all the fascinating background  information she has put together, but just say that some of the stunt flying was done by the stars themselves and one particularly daring stunt by Wellman, who lands up hanging down headfirst in his upturned plane. However, a lot was also done by US army air corps pilots whose services were lent to the production, because it was believed it would increase understanding of their work.

Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Clara Bow

Made only nine years after the end of the First World War, the film was written by John Monk Saunders, a veteran pilot who who also wrote Howard Hawks’ classic The Dawn Patrol, filmed three years later. Saunders hadn’t actually served in France, a matter of bitter regret to him himself, but he was a flight instructor in the First World War and a member of the Lost Generation who eventually killed himself – here is a link to a fine piece about him.  Wellman himself did serve in France and was mentally and physically scarred for life – so they knew their stuff. Wellman insisted on waiting a month for the “right cloud formations”, much to the fury of the bosses at Paramount – but I think the power of the flight sequences, with all the piles of cloud glimpsed from and around the planes, shows he was right. (I can maybe experience this more as an original 1920s moviegoer would have done than most people today, since I have never flown – as yet – which may be one of the reasons why aviation movies fascinate me so much.)

The only part which doesn’t seem altogether authentic to me is the opening sequence, introducing the young Jack Powell (Rogers) as a lad in a small American town dreaming of flying, building himself a car, and joking with girl next door Mary Preston (Bow), but failing to realise that she is in love with him. Jack’s existence just seems too vague and idyllic, reminding me of the country idyll in the opening scenes of another great silent film, Henry King’s Tol’able David (1921). It’s hard to believe that anybody was ever quite this carefree! However, as in Tol’able David, the aim is to create a happy memory which will serve as a touchstone, helping to deepen the later misery – and this is certainly achieved. As in so many 1920s and 30s films, a movie which begins as near comedy will later deepen into tragedy, in this case inevitably given the subject matter.

Despite Mary’s adoration of him, Jack is in love with Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston), who, one of the inter-titles informs us, is from a city and so much more sophisticated than the local girls. Sylvia is in love with David (Arlen), and the two are first seen together, sitting in a garden swing with a roof in a long tracking shot . These swings tend to be seen as quite glamorous in Europe (in Germany they are known as Hollywood swings!) and I think the shot does give Sylvia an air of glamour and mystery from the start, by contrast with the sweet, down-to-earth Mary, who is first glimpsed standing under a pair of large white bloomers on a washing line, before blithely climbing over a garden fence! Both Jack and David seem very fresh-faced and at first I found it hard to tell the two actors apart at times – but, on the second viewing of the film, I noticed more that Jack is clearly the younger of the two, and David (“the richest boy in the town”), has something of the same sophistication as Sylvia.

Richard Arlen as David

Both men sign up to train as aviators, and one of the most powerful sequences in the film for me is the footage showing long crocodiles of men marching off to war. There is a sort of split-screen effect, with the marching men in the bottom half of the screen, and shadowy images of the fighting in France in the top half – showing what they are going to.

When Jack and David go off to train as pilots together, at first their rivalry over Sylvia means they dislike one another – but, after a boxing session turns into a full-scale fight, they make up and become inseparable. I think this idea of two men fighting and then realising the depth of their friendship may be something that recurs in Wellman’s films. There is a more tragic version in his early talkie Other Men’s Women, and I’ve seen a clip from a film he made about a boys’ school (I don’t remember the title)  where two boys are seen fighting and one of them uses exactly the same line to the other at the end of the fight as in the inter-title in Wings – “You’re game!”

Gary Cooper

However, here, the fight scene isn’t really the point – the key to Jack and David’s friendship is that they are both living in the shadow of death, which is borne out when Gary Cooper appears in a brief scene, as Cadet White. He rises sleepily from his bed, tells the others he needs to do some flying before breakfast, goes outside and is killed – leaving them looking at the outline of his body on his bed, and his toothmarks in the bar of chocolate he was chewing minutes earlier. Cooper makes an amazing impression in just a couple of minutes –the scene is said to have made him a star, and I can believe it. I’ve seen him in plenty of talkies, but somehow in a silent film his physical beauty is more stunning, and the whole way he moves, shrugging and stretching, seems far more naturalistic than the other actors in this film, good though they are. His eyes look cold and bleak as he tells the others that there is no point in carrying good luck talismans because, if you are going to die, then you are going to die. Wellman claimed in an interview that Cooper asked him to do the scene again because he picks his nose when he first wakes up – in fact he just seems to wipe his hand across his nose, but, in any case, the sleepy gesture is all part of his naturalness.

Cooper’s character dies offscreen, but there are also several powerful scenes of aerial fights, including images of men dying in the cockpit, with blood spreading across their faces – more graphic, I think, than death scenes in films made over the next couple of decades, where you often don’t see much blood.

I don’t want to just go over the whole plot, but will say that there were several twists which surprised me, although they then seemed to have a sort of dream inevitability to them. I was also impressed that, rather than just being left at home to wait, Mary is shown serving as an ambulance driver on the front –  I’d been wanting to find some First World War films which show women serving, and didn’t realise this would be one of them! There aren’t any very realistic scenes of Mary’s war work, but it is still something to see her working, and in uniform, not in the sort of designer gowns Joan Crawford, playing a nurse, wears in Hawks’ Today We Live.

In one of the most memorable sections of the whole film, Mary spots a drunken Jack, on leave from the air force, in the Folies Bergeres in Paris, and tries to win him away from a prostitute on his arm. The astonishing thing here is the way Jack sees imaginary champagne bubbles everywhere, which are somehow painted on to the screen (a “making of” featurette on the DVD I’m dreaming of could explain how!) – this is kept up for several minutes and works very well. The picture also goes out of focus several times when we see through Jack’s eyes, to give an impression of just how drunk he is. This doesn’t sound like much when I describe it, but, watching it, it feels so experimental and clever. This sequence also includes some brief nudity, when Mary is persuaded to dress up as one of the dancing girls in order to get Jack’s attention – this is notable as a pre-Code sequence, but I found the giant bubbles more surprising and off the wall.

Probably the most famous scene in the whole film, though, is David’s death scene, where he dies in Jack’s arms, as Jack kisses him and strokes his hair – this is a heartbreaking scene which really brings out the love between the two, built through all they have gone through together, and it would have spoken to all those watching who had lost their loved ones in the war, and especially to those who had lost comrades in battle. The featurette about Wellman in the new box set of his films discusses this scene as being one of the most intense expressions of love between two men on film. I think this is also a scene where silence helps, because, if we could hear Jack crying, it might all become too much and go over the edge into sentimentality – whereas, as it is, the lack of sound helps to keep the audience at a slight distance.

I’ll just add that Henry B. Walthall and Julia Swayne Gordon are great as David’s proud and stiff, but loving, parents. And, oh yes… have I mentioned that I’d like to see this movie released on DVD?

Next up I’ll be writing about Wellman’s Beggars of Life, another brilliant silent film – but it might take me a few days to get my head round that one. I’m probably the slowest blogger around, so thanks to all those who are sticking with me.

Clara Bow

William A. Wellman

I’ve decided to write a series of postings over the next few weeks about the neglected great director William A. Wellman. I’ve been interested in him since first seeing The Public Enemy (1931), and am puzzled as to why he is so much less-known than contemporaries like Hawks or Ford, when you look at his wide-ranging body of work, from tough dramas set during the Depression to comedies, Westerns and his great war films.

One of the things that appeals to me is the way he tends to sympathise with underdogs – I wrote a while ago about his early film Other Men’s Women (1931), which focuses on railway workers, a while back and was impressed by its gritty portrayal of working life, as well as its blend of humour and melodrama. (I hope to write about this one again and do it more justice, as I now have a better print of it and can actually hear the dialogue!)

Actually, the good news is that Wellman is starting to be a bit less neglected than he was, with the release this year of the Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume Three, which features six of his pre-Code movies, including Other Men’s Women – I got this box set for my birthday last month. But, sadly, it’s still the case that his silent masterpiece Wings (1927), starring Clara Bow, which won the very first Oscar for best film, isn’t available on an official DVD. A shame in a way it was made by Paramount, since I suspect if it had been a Warner film they would have included it in the set, silent or not! I’ve just finished watching this great movie and will be posting on it this week, but I would really like to see it fully restored, complete with the original colour washes.  I know it has actually been shown at one or two cinemas in the US , and I’d love to see it presented on the big screen.

To get some background information on Wellman, I’ve watched the two featurettes included in the set. The first of these is Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick, executive-produced by Wellman’s son, William Jr, who looks and sounds just like his father. This detailed account of his life and work at times borders on hagiography, but still gives a flavour of an awkward and  uncompromising personality. It’s suggested his legendary temper was partly a legacy of his experiences as a pilot in the First World War, which left him with serious injuries and a steel plate in his head – but, in any case, there are plenty of colourful anecdotes about outbursts on set, sandwiched in between the clips from his movies.  There are several contributions from Martin Scorsese, who also takes part in the special features on the DVD of The Public Enemy,  and he makes it clear what an important influence Wellman was on his work. A number of other famous names also take part.

After watching this film, I was just thinking that maybe Wellman wasn’t quite as difficult as his reputation suggests, since so many people seem to regard him with affection – but then I watched the second featurette included in the box set, Richard Schickel’s interview with him from the series The Men Who Made the Movies , and in this Wellman certainly does come across as determined, awkward, and refusing to back down over anything. To be fair, it seems as if you had to have those characteristics to make a film in the way you wanted under the studio system – and it also sounds as if much of the time Wellman was fighting for, rather than against, his cast and crew, to make sure the studio treated them properly.

I haven’t been able to find any books with much information about Wellman – David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film is dismissive, suggesting that both Wings and The Public Enemy are overrated and stating that another of his masterpieces, The Ox-Bow Incident, isn’t even worth watching. There is a biography by film historian Frank Thompson, but it is out of print and very expensive. What I’d really like to find is a book which looks at his work rather than just going on about the “Wild Bill” image. Anyway, I’m looking forward to watching some of Wellman’s movies in the next few weeks and hopefully writing about them.

The title sounds reminiscent of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang – and the posters for this John Garfield movie tried to give that impression too, oozing toughness and desperation. However, as so often in movies of the 1930s and 40s, the advertising is misleading, and this tale of a troubled young boxer wanted for murder is a very different film from the image Warner Brothers was trying to sell here.

Admittedly, the first few minutes are dark and powerful, almost giving an early foretaste of film noir. But the rest of the film has a more hopeful flavour than this moody opening. The intensity falls off  - although the film as a whole, surprisingly directed by Busby Berkeley between musicals,  is still very enjoyable. This was Garfield’s second movie and his first starring role – and it feels quite similar to Cagney movies like the previous year’s Angels With Dirty Faces, especially as it co-stars the Dead End Kids.

The film’s biggest flaw is that it also co-stars Claude Rains, wildly miscast as a New York cop. I don’t suppose this great actor ever looked or felt more uncomfortable in a role. Rains doesn’t seem even to attempt an American accent, except that he talks faster than normal, and it just sounds ridiculous when, in his clipped English voice, he has to say lines like: “That was one swell-looking dame.”  Rains’ character is  a frustrated detective who has been stuck on “morgue duty” for years as a punishment – something which might have felt all too close to home for Rains himself, who was reportedly forced to take this part or face a suspension by Warner.

The noirish opening minutes see Garfield’s character, New York boxer Johnnie Bradfield, win a world title fight and soulfully dedicate his win to his dear old mother – also informing the press that he doesn’t waste his time on drink and women. Unfortunately, within minutes of making this announcement, he is busy knocking back large quantities of booze and in the arms of his girlfriend, Goldie (a tiny part for Ann Sheridan – whose two-dimensional character might just as well be called “gold digger”.)

Soon extremely drunk, Johnnie boasts loudly about how he doesn’t really have a mother at all, and the sentimental story is just designed to appeal to “suckers”. A newspaper reporter overhears this and rashly comments that it will be a great scoop for him – but he ends up dead as a result, when Johnnie’s manager first punches him and then hits him over the head with a bottle.

John Garfield and Ann Sheridan

As Johnnie lies in a drunken stupor, the manager, Doc Ward (Robert Gleckler), and Goldie briskly strip him of everything he has, including his watch, and run off with his car – neatly bearing out the boxer’s comment made a little earlier: “There’s no such thing as friends. You’re my friend, for fifty per cent. If I was down, you’d take my watch, my girl and my car.”

The couple run the car off the road in a police chase and it bursts into flames, killing them both. As a result, when Johnnie finally wakes up, on top of his hangover,he  discovers from the front page of the newspaper that he is believed to be a murderer – and thought to be dead. His misery is completed hen he asks his lawyer for help - but, corrupt like everyone else, the legal expert instead steals his $10,000 savings, handing Johnnie just $250 and advising him to change his name and run away. “Stay dead.”

So far, so dark. Not a single character has seemed remotely trustworthy. As in the world of noir, everyone has a price and nobody really cares about anyone else. However, the  hardboiled dialogue has also given Johnnie a certain poignancy, as we know that he has no family and no true friends.

The mood now changes and that poignancy deepens, as, in a brief sequence, the champion boxer is seen on the run and facing destitution. When he is thrown off a train roof where he has been hitching a ride, he walks – and, when his boots wear out, he goes barefoot. Eventually, and rather improbably, he turns up at a date farm in Arizona, and casually asks for

John Garfield, looking like a tramp, with Gloria Dickson and the Dead End Kids

a handful of  dates, but turns away when the young woman at the desk tells him he must work before he eats. She thinks he is too lazy to work, but, as he leans slightly against a table, it’s clear to the audience he is too weak, and, when he tries to walk away,  he faints on the ground.  This whole sequence reminded me of  scenes in earlier 1930s movies, like Hawks’  The Crowd Roars or Borzage’s Man’s Castle, where starving people try to hide their hunger and put on a good show - I realise the height of the Depression was receding by 1939, but the memory of it was still raw.

The young woman, Peggy (Gloria Dickson) nurses Johnnie, now known as Jack,  back to health. He decides to stay on at the farm, which, it turns out, is being run as a sort of unlikely unofficial reform school for a group of New York teenagers, played by the Dead End Kids. At first Johnnie is a bad influence on the younger lads – but, as so often in these older films and some contemporary ones too, the countryside turns out to be a kinder world than the city and he is soon being reformed along with them, softened by his growing love for Peggy and inspired by the woman who runs the farm, known to everyone as Grandma (May Robson). I was interested to see that this film features two women running a business, which I think is quite unusual in movies of the period. However, they are both fiercely maternal and seem to spend most of their time worrying about “their boys”.   Peggy is the older sister of one of the boys, Tommy (Billy Halop), and at the farm mainly so she can keep an eye on him.

The whole interaction between Johnnie and Peggy and the kids really reminded me of reform school movies like The Mayor of Hell, with the same feeling that young people’s lives can be turned around if they are given a chance to develop and govern themselves.

Claude Rains, John Garfield and Gloria Dickson

Gloria Dickson is hardly mentioned in much of the advertising for later issues of this film, despite being the leading lady, with Ann Sheridan, who hardly comes in, getting bigger billing – the reason being that Dickson died in a house fire within a few years, while Sheridan went on to have a successful career.

When Johnnie discovers that the women are struggling financially, he decides to take part in a boxing event locally, taking on a boxer who is boasting that he will fight any comer, so that he can raise the money they need. Johnnie is much smaller than this giant (Garfield was only 5ft 7in and many of his co-stars towered over him), but vows to take on the challenge.

However, cop Monty Phelan (Rains) just happens to see a newspaper photo of our hero, and travels all the way from New York to find out whether Jack is really Johnnie. The fight scenes seemed convincing to me and I found them quite hard to watch because of the level of raw violence, though I’m no boxing expert.  (Garfield was an ex-amateur boxer, so it should be authentic - and eight years later, of course, he went back into the ring in the great film Body and Soul.)

A fight scene from They Made Me A Criminal

Unusually, in this film, his character takes a terrible beating and gets knocked out, rather than triumphing in the best cheesy  movie style – though it’s suggested that he is pulling his punches in order to disguise his identity from the watching Phelan. Before the fight, there are some good scenes where Johnnie talks to another of the challengers, who needs to win some money to pay his pregnant wife’s medical bills – these scenes reminded me a little of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, as you get the Depression-era feeling of so many people being willing to risk exhausion and injury for the slim chance of winning some cash.

I hadn’t come across screenplay writer Sig Herzig much before, but enjoyed the crisp dialogue. All through the film, I was watching out for hints of Busby Berkeley’s unique  talents. There aren’t any dance scenes, though the fights seem well choreographed – but there is a dramatic sequence where the kids are trapped in a pool, including underwater filming, which shows Berkeley’s flair for making the most of a big scene. And, in another scene, there’s one unmistakeable cheeky signal of his presence, when one of the Dead End Kids loudly sings part of By A Waterfall, a song from Berkeley’s movie Footlight Parade.

I wanted to see Mr Skeffington because it stars Bette Davis, who is one of my favourite actresses. However, I ended up feeling that Claude Rains gives by far the stronger performance in this movie, which saw them both receiving Oscar nominations.

Bette Davis and Claude Rains

I was also interested to see it because I’d read that it is one of Hollywood’s first films to tackle anti-Semitism, and I’ve recently seen a couple of other films which look at this – but there isn’t as much about this theme as I’d expected. There are some brief, painful scenes where the Jewish hero, Job Skeffington (Rains) is shown being cruelly snubbed by members of society – and towards the end of the film there is some limited suggestion of what the Nazis were doing in Europe, leading to a shocking climax. However, most of the movie in fact focuses on Mrs rather than Mr Skeffington and on her struggle to come to terms with growing old and losing her looks – something which is unfortunately  portrayed by Bette Davis wearing unconvincing wigs and  inch-thick make-up.

The movie, a 145-minute epic covering several decades, is directed by Vincent Sherman and loosely based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim. I decided to read the book after watching the film, but found that, while both are absorbing, they are very different, so there isn’t much point in doing any detailed comparisons. Von Arnim’s novel feels very English and is a sharp but understated tale, unfolding in flashback and following Mrs Skeffington’s thoughts – there are long scenes where nothing much happens.  By contrast, the film, scripted by Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein and moving the story to America, is a glossy, elaborate melodrama with strong elements of soap opera. Another big difference is that Mr Skeffington is hardly present in the novel, despite being the title character, whereas in the movie he is an important character and has some of the most powerful scenes.

I especially enjoyed the early part of the film, which shows Bette Davis’ character, Fanny Trellis, as a society beauty with a whole army of adoring suitors. Although Davis was a little old to play a young girl in the opening scenes, she makes you believe that she is irresistible, and is so charismatic that it is easy to believe she has all these people under her spell. Fanny’s secret is that, despite having a Gothic-looking old house, she doesn’t have the money to support this lifestyle – and must marry well, something which becomes all the more imperative when her brother, Trippy (Richard Waring) is caught swindling money from Job, who is his boss on Wall Street.

Mr Skeffington agrees not to press charges and then falls in love with Fanny, who visits him at his workplace. This might sound like a deal, like Fanny selling herself, and that is what  the anti-Semitic Trippy claims. But, as far as Job is concerned, it is a love match. He  is generous to a fault all through the movie, and has already shown he doesn’t care about the money before there is any romance. There are some affectionate scenes between the couple, including one where Job opens up about his impoverished childhood, and it is clear there is a real attraction between them. However, we are repeatedly told that Fanny doesn’t love him as he loves her – her real love is for her brother, with hints of incestuous feelings, and she is really marrying  in order to protect Trippy. Her brother rewards her by making cruel comments about Job and then going off to fight in the First World War, where he is killed.

The Skeffingtons have a daughter, but Fanny is more interested in being worshipped by a succession of young men (although she never seems to have affairs) than in looking after her child. Showing a woman as a bad mother is definitely a way of stacking the dice against her in a classic Hollywood movie, and this whole plot development is clearly designed to make Fanny less sympathetic – though I must say I don’t think she ever quite loses my sympathy, because she always seems to have an essential friendliness and interest in other people, and of course she is played by Davis, who I think always has a vividness which makes her characters appealing.

When she discovers that Job has had a succession of affairs because he is so lonely in their failed  marriage, she decides it’s a good opportunity to divorce him – and he goes off to Europe, taking their daughter with him. One of the most powerful scenes in the whole movie is where Job takes their young daughter out to a restaurant to persuade her to stay with her mother, but she pleads with him to take her with him instead. I’ve mostly seen Rains in parts where he is deceptively quiet and controlled, as he is up to this point  in this film, but here his emotion comes to the surface – though without any hamminess – and you have to realise what a great actor he was.

Bette Davis in a wig as the older Mrs Skeffington

The later sections of the movie seem weaker than this first part, as Job disappears and all the action centres on Fanny, who worries about her fading looks. I thought this whole theme went on for too long and seemed to get rather repetitive, as Fanny meets up with her old loves and is repeatedly shocked to find that they no longer see her as attractive. They have aged just as much as she has, of course, but she doesn’t seem to worry about that. All this is drawn from von Arnim’s book, but in the film there seems to be  a disturbing element of gloating over the idea of an older woman making herself ridiculous by trying to attract men.

There are a number of plot twists which I won’t go into, leading to a final wildly melodramatic reconciliation, when Job, who has been tortured by the Nazis but somehow escaped,  turns up at what used to be his house, and Fanny decides to take him back – partly, it is suggested, because he is now blind and so will still think she is beautiful. There is something peculiarly tasteless and cruel to both characters about this ending, yet I’d say Davis and Rains transcend that because there seems to be so much real affection between the characters, and so much longing to help and support one another despite all that has happened.

I was interested to read an article in today’s Guardian about classic little-known children’s films. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the main movie discussed in the piece, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, but it sounds intriguing.

I’ve watched quite a few 1930s and 40s films giving down-to-earth portraits of men’s working lives, including a number about the armed services – but haven’t come across all that many older movies about women at work, or at war.

However, thanks to the UK TV station Film 4, now I’ve seen this British wartime propaganda film about the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), directed and narrated by Leslie Howard, which was quite an eye-opener to me. It isn’t a masterpiece, but I  think it has worn pretty well, despite the patronising title and an occasionally heavy-handed commentary from Howard, for instance, quoting lines from poems about women’s traditional role as they are seen carrying out military tasks. He is only briefly glimpsed from the rear – in what sadly turned out to be his last film appearance before his own death in the war.

After Howard opens the film by picking out seven women in a crowd at a railway station to be his heroines, the rest of the movie gives  what looks to be a realistic portrayal of life for these characters, all from different backgrounds. I was impressed that there is no attempt to make any of them look particularly glamorous, and the real hard work is not glossed over. The meals and dormitories seem very realistic.

At times it is hard to keep track of all the individuals, especially as I thought one or two of the actresses looked rather similar. Maybe there are just too many of them for any one to get enough screen time. Joyce Howard (no relation to Leslie) plays Anne, who is from a service family and quickly gets into the routine, with Rosamond John as cheery Scottish Maggie, who quotes Robert Burns to herself to count her stitches when knitting. Jean Gillie plays Dot and Joan Gates is Gwen, two modern working women who I kept mixing up with one another.

A very young Joan Greenwood plays the baby of the group, Betty, who has never been away from home and “Mummy”, and is at first overwhelmed by the thought of doing ordinary household tasks for herself – but quickly finds that she can cope.   The least sympathetic member of the group is bossy, upper-crust Joan (Barbara Waring), who gets her stripe as a corporal – but although there is occasional friction between her and the others they manage to work alongside one another and eventually it is revealed that much of her snappiness is really down to shyness. It was nice to see a film where the focus is on the women helping and supporting one another rather than on any rivalry.

I thought Lilli Palmer gives the most moving performance, as an exiled “foreigner” – probably Polish, as her character’s name is Erna Debruski, but I believe her country is never stated, probably deliberately, so that her plight can represent that of all the exiles who had signed up to fight in the British forces. Most of the time she stays silent about what she has been through, with just her burning eyes telling her story – but there is one powerful scene where, in response to another character, Joan, thoughtlessly remarking “At least the Nazis are efficient”, she tells them exactly what that efficiency means in terms of death and suffering.

A scene from the movie featured on the sleeve of a Spanish DVD

Apparently the movie was made with the co-operation of the ATS and some of the extras were real servicewomen. The film shows them training and carrying out tasks such as driving lorries through the night and, in the most dramatic scene towards the end of the movie, operating anti-aircraft guns under fire. A male soldier expresses surprise at the lorry-driving, commenting: “Women, working through the night?” and is told: “Yes, this is a woman’s war.”

I was surprised to see how little romance there is in the film – Leslie Howard actually comments as narrator that the women are too busy to have much time for love. Anne has a brief whirlwind romance with soldier David, played by John Justin, who is later lost in action, “missing believed killed”. But she only has a couple of scenes with him and then one with his mother, Mrs Sheridan (Mary Jerrold). During tea with Mrs Sheridan, Anne starts to declaim about how women are now serving alongside men for the first time and predicts that the role of women will change after the war. Mrs Sheridan quietly reveals in response that she herself was an ambulance driver at Ypres in the First World War, and was wounded in action – but gives the impression she wants to see women’s social position change too.

Maggie does dance once with a middle-aged Scottish soldier in full Highland dress, Alexander, played by Dad’s Army favourite John Laurie, and we are told in voiceover at the end that they will marry – but, apart from that, love is very much secondary to work throughout the film, and the women are shown working alongside men in matter-of-fact style.

I especially liked the ending of the film, where the women are seen queuing for mugs of tea in the open air, and Leslie Howard bids each one goodbye in turn, giving a brief suggestion of what the future may hold for them, but with no certainty, either for them or for the viewers.

Oddly enough, the movie appears to be only available on DVD in Spain – but it seems to be shown on TV in the UK quite often. After enjoying this film, I’m hoping to track down another one which Howard produced about wartime nurses, The Lamp Still Burns.

Just a short review today as I don’t have time for one of my epics, you may be relieved to hear! In all honesty, I also don’t have all that much to say about Devil Dogs of the Air, which is a light comedy-drama, though it does feature some spectacular aviation footage. However, I thought I’d write something about it before it fades in my mind.

On the face of it, there are quite a few similarities between this movie , directed by Lloyd Bacon, and one of my favourite James Cagney films, Howard Hawks’  Ceiling Zero, made later in the same year. Both see Cagney playing a daredevil pilot, and both team him with Pat O’Brien as a long-suffering old friend in a position of command. (They are mail pilots in Ceiling Zero, fleet marine force aviators here.) Cagney even makes almost the same entrance in both films. In each case his character has had quite a build-up before he appears, and is first seen in a plane doing daring aerobatics, before cheekily throwing himself into a dismayed O’Brien’s arms on landing.

Yet the two movies feel very different to watch – partly of course because Devil Dogs is mainly comedy and Ceiling Zero mainly drama, but also, I think, because Hawks’ film gives so much more complexity to the characters.  In Ceiling Zero Cagney’s character, “Dizzy” Davis  is in his mid-30s (with a thin moustache to make him look a little older and more dashing), getting rather old to fly and also finding his life of womanising starting to wear thin.

Margaret Lindsay, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien

James Cagney as Tommy O'Toole

In Devil Dogs, by contrast, his character, Tommy O’Toole, is supposed to be a young lad straight out of flying school (in black and white and a lot of make-up, the 35-year-old actor could just about get away with this!), who hero-worshipped Bill Brannigan (O’Brien) as a teenager.

Most of the characters seem to be alternately charmed and infuriated by O’Toole. That was my reaction too, but I must say that – rarely for me with a Cagney role – I find him more infuriating than charming much of the time. He boasts, breaks the rules, carries out a series of daft stunts, and shamelessly sets out to win the heart of  Bill’s  girl, Betty Roberts (Margaret Lindsay, who was Cagney’s leading lady in several films in the 1930s.)

There are some lovely moments, all the same, such as a scene where Tommy files his nails with great finesse all through an instruction talk just to prove that he’s heard it all before. As always, Cagney pours a lot of his own mercurial personality into the role – but it’s still hard to care all that much about the big-headed Tommy, and I found myself half-hoping Betty would stick to Bill. Pat O’Brien does at times give the feeling of a man really in love with Betty, although apart from that much of his role consists of shouting.

Eventually, and predictably, O’Toole does prove his worth as an aviator, becomes more of a member of the team and also feels some pangs of conscience about breaking Bill’s heart by stealing the woman he loves – though it is a bit late to worry about that.

The actor who seems to have the most fun in the film is Warner regular Frank McHugh, another great friend of Cagney’s. He all but steals the show as ambulance driver “Crash”  Kelly, who is fed up with exercises and false alarms and desperate to see someone really break a leg (even if he has to organise it himself) so that he has something to do. Ironically, in the one scene in the film where someone is genuinely hurt, Crash is nowhere to be seen!

Apart from McHugh’s antics, the best thing about this film is the aerial footage, which is breathtaking at times and compelling to watch. As the film feels so light, I was slightly surprised to see that it is based on a story by John Monk Saunders, who also wrote the story for the dark and harrowing First World War movie The Dawn Patrol (1930), directed by Howard Hawks. One similarity is that this film, too, shows the skill and dedication needed to fly – and, although here the flying is in peacetime, at moments, for instance when a plane catches fire, there are glimpses of danger amid all the joking.

Looking at still photographs from this movie, set in post-war Paris and loosely adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, I was expecting film noir. The fact that it stars great actor John Garfield, opposite French actress Micheline Presle (billed here as Prelle), added to this expectation.

However, although some scenes do have that moody, brooding quality, and the shadowy black-and-white camerawork adds to this, the film as a whole is a strange mixture of noir and sentimentality. Director Jean Negulesco and screenwriter Casey Robinson both made some great films, but in this one they seem to be caught between two stools, with flashes of brilliance in between scenes which unashamedly manipulate the emotions. As many reviews point out, the main plot  is almost like a reworking of The Champ, moved from the boxing ring to the racecourse.

One of the biggest attractions of this film is the footage showing Paris in 1950. By coincidence, I’ve just seen the new film Julie and Julia, which is also set in the city around this period. But the real black-and-white footage of the post-war bars and streets has a battered quality to it which a movie made in 2009 can’t quite recapture, although that is not to say anything against Nora Ephron’s film, which I liked very much.

Garfield plays Dan Butler, a struggling jockey who is wandering round Europe winning a few races, but more often losing them to order,  so that gamblers can clean up. At the start of the film he has to make a quick getaway after double-crossing a group of gamblers by winning a race he was supposed to lose – and, all through the movie, he is pursued by one of the gamblers who lost out, the heavily scarred Louis Bork (Luther Adler). Even when Dan decides to go straight as an owner-rider and not throw any more races, there is always a feeling that his fate and his past are about to catch up with him.

John Garfield with Orley Lindgren and Micheline Presle

As he moves between seedy hotels and seedier racecourses, widowed dad Dan is accompanied by his son, Joe (Orley Lindgren), aged about 11, who tries to hero-worship him but is constantly brought up against the glaring evidence of his feet of clay. The youngster is a good actor and does everything possible with the material he is given, but my feeling is that he just has too big a part, and often his lines are too sentimental  - there are too many maudlin scenes of him trying to trust his dad against all the odds. Whenever he is out of a scene, the film immediately gets more of an edge and improves, for a few minutes, until he comes back in. After seeing the film, I read an etext of Hemingway’s story, My Old Man, and, although he is not one of my favourite authors, I felt his tale didn’t have the sentimentality that is there in this movie. In the story, the boy loves his father, but is under no illusions about him, and fully recognises that he is a cheat on the racecourse.

After arriving in Paris, Dan becomes involved with nightclub singer Paule Manet (Presle), who tries to resist him, but in the end can’t. Presle is a fine singer with a smoky voice and compelling presence, and I’d say the scenes where she sings her torch songs in the club are among the best bits of the film.

There is one electrifying sequence where a drunken and heartbroken Dan – who has just put his son on a train for America – staggers into the club and watches Paule singing, as a woman in the club comes on to him, stroking his face.  He then leaves the club and Paule follows him. There is a great, unsettling bit of hardboiled dialogue, when she asks him “Are you sick, Dan?” He snaps: “Yeah, I’m sick – I went to the doctor and he told me I’d got everything, cancer and TB and you. But (grabbing her face) I haven’t got you. Let me have a look at what I haven’t got.”

John Garfield in 'Under My Skin'

I thought this particular scene was bound to be taken from the Hemingway story, but I was wrong – the character of Paule isn’t even in the original tale. However, as a writer on Casablanca and another great Bogart film, Passage to Marseille,  Casey Robinson could write this kind of dialogue to perfection. It’s just a shame that in this film these sorts of scenes are sandwiched in between so much tear-jerking schmaltz.

On first watching the movie, I was slightly shocked by a couple of scenes where Garfield’s character has to run in training, and can’t do it – sweating and looking grey. Knowing of his real-life heart condition, which killed him only a couple of years later, I wondered if this was a case of the studio pushing him too hard. However, reading Hemingway’s story, there is a description of Dan being unfit and sweating while running. So this is Garfield showing his brilliance as an actor  - but, knowing the reality, it’s still sad to watch.

John Garfield and Micheline Presle