It's been my experience that European and South American women are how American women are only on Halloween and New Year's Eve, and if that makes no sense to you, then you've never watched rom-coms or how Jean Simmons is dumb enough to initially let Brando loose since he's not exactly the square dude she's fantasized about from his Poindexter tie to his six figure Fortune 500 BMW time share or tried to be single and unwealthy or unpretty or alcoholic or not in advertising in NYC and then wound up with Europeans or South Americans or no one. So one wonders why then that the dull dishwater white woman is so highly prized amongst "the Orientals." TCM recently showed the always alluring Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and also West of Shanghai, (1937) a film I'd never seen thanks to mediocre Lenny ratings and its post-code date, but actually it's much better at linear momentum and minutiae than the bigger budgeted but overall mad dumber Manchu.
Like oldBitter Tea of General Yen (1933) it turns out rather bogged down by Hollywood racism the like Houdini drowning in a vat of water while trying to wrestle loose from the handcuffs of racist southern markets, but before drowning it has a strange wondrous momentum all its own. Dashes of big business intricacies and zig-zagging first half denote good screenwriting, the type where we just don't know where it's all going, no groans as the old love triangle cliches line up, so we can soak up the atmosphere like a real solo traveller would. It starts like it's going to be Shanghai Express with disparate first class passengers saying their station farewells, then boarding the Orient Express (or something) where we might think at first that the duplicitously jolly interrelation between foreclosing banker and Ricardo Cortez's big oil man as they take the train out to a discovery field in the titular Chinese direction, getting accidentally caught in the midst of war between Boris Karloff's existentially grounded warlord and the Chinese government. Cortez is there to get the oil but also visit his flat note little box-shaped missionary wife played with boxy hungover moroseness by Beverly Roberts, who's in love with the guy working the discovery field, a self-righteous blank slate named Gordon Oliver. The foreclosing banker's slightly less leaden daughter (Sheila Bromley) likes Gordon too, and is the better bet, in my opinion (it always pays to marry the banker's daughter) and this missionary broad ain't no Babs Stanwyck, but go figure, each according to his own closeted lesbian tastes.
Forgive my ever peering liberal arts eye. Like I said, intricate business... for an allegedly lurid and exciting slice of adventure hokum with Karloff making a weird mix of Charlie Chan and Willie Fung as an alleged mix of Fu Manchu and General Yen embodier Nils Asher with just the right psychological headiness - i.e. his warlord measure of a man is how well they stand up to the pressure of a firing squad while sharing last cigarettes and pontificating in typically post-WWI sardonic hipster élan about death, which makes the film resemble another JVS-Dietrich collaboration, Dishonored, where cheery excitement about facing a firing squad is such a righteous mark of cool it's worth betraying your country for. It's like boarding a cool train, in a way, going to that no shore no traveller from returneth, and feelin' ready to board.
But that's why I find I like West of Shanghai: the Asian characters are actually far more complex than the cardboard cutout white colonials. Karloff's main henchman is a Chinese American Chicago gangster with a vibe like the evil version of Chan's #1 son, cool and ruthless while Jimmy was a spazz and unbearable; another genuine Chinese actor plays the mean portly officer who calls the feisty redhead 'little dragon' - he bats the girls around curiously like a native playing with a visiting anthropologist's blonde hair --she comes off worse than he does in this altercation. And before he's assassinated there's a touching, graceful performance by Tetsu Komai, who alone in the cast seems to talk in the steadied and eloquent but succinct, polite and honest style of English as a second language, as the general who winds up glad he's surrounded in his commandeered compartment by white folks he doesn't know as they're more trustworthy than his scheming soldiers. We get an example of one camp of soldiers, then the other, but always on the outside, as white missionaries and capitalists are shown less respect then they presume--in their haughty colonialist arrogance--they are due. This is particularly well-drawn in the scene between Roberts and Karloff after Oliver is hauled off to the gulag for punching the guard. The silken pidgin English-spouting warlord brings her into a special room he's commandeered to ply her with drink and promises of grand adventure and the best food, but there's the clear indication she's bereft of alternatives, other than suicide or murder (via the pistol he's left on the table). "If I want," he says, "I take you. It very easy." The scene is rather chilling, and we feel the protean echo of the violent savaging of women in mainland China at this approximate time (1937) at the hands of the Japanese.
But of course this being after the 1934 Joseph Breen-enforced code, our Androcles Oliver escapes his captors and before he can be killed is recognized for a thorn-out-the-paw favor he did the lion Karloff decades earlier before any deflowering gets underway. Still, we're glad to be spared any further dismay over why anyone would be attracted to this boxy blank broad, and grateful we can spend the rest of the film enjoying the the weird head games as Karloff's snazzy trickster employs as he runs along a silken edge betwixt menace, playful Solomon-style problem solving, and macho existential last cigarette firing squad-style cool. It's enough to earn a place as a ladder rung between Dietrich's smiling exit at the end of 1932's Dishonored (see: Decadence Lost) and Walken's "one shot" at the end of 1978's The Deer Hunter.
SKYSCRAPER SOULS
(1933) Dir. Edgar Selwyn
***1/3
"A man and a wife should never live in the same house," Warren William says to his expensive wife Hedda Hopper (she picks up $100K checks like their AA tokens); he's a tycoon of towering love for his life's work, his monument to his own ego, his skyscraper that dwarfs the Empire State. As with the similar Employee's Entrance or The Mouthpiece there's a weird dynamic of wolfish and worldly titan of industry Dwight (Warren William) and some acutely moralistic little waif typist (Maureen O'Sullivan) and her protector and his mistress and personal assistant (Veree Teasdale). Before she drags him down he has a great stretch of time in his robe at his upstairs apartment (he lives in the skyscraper - probably never actually steps foot outside it at least onscreen), negotiating a stream of assistants, lovers, and the wife: finagling investors can be done in the lower level steam bath; appeasing the foreclosing bankers (after he 'borrowed' thirty million from the kitty) in his office, stalling trustees and throwing a party in his penthouse stocked with booze and hired girls to please endomorphic industry titan Norton (George Barbier). It's a total pre-code delight savoring the practiced ease with which the great WW lies and connives his way out of appointments with two different mistresses (he picks one up at the party) to seduce O'Sullivan at the party, first telling her to stay late and type a second copy of some report he doesn't need, then plying with champagne, only to have her hang onto the less intimidating jolly old prospective client Norton, which of course he can't just cockblock outright... but that doesn't stop a big bad wolf like William.
I'm getting ahead of myself but to watch the fluid ease with which he eliminates this competition without losing his business is truly inspiring. Feeling as if it' unfolding in total real time from the moment we see the peak-of-pixiedom Maureen (that sexy frock at left rivaling her deerskin Tarzan and his Mate) in the workday afternoon all the way through to him walking her out of the building int he dead of night or dawn, it's one continual stream of negotiation and conniving that's so pure pre-code, so truly sophisticated, so impeccable at fusing business and pleasure it rivals only a similar WB film The Mouthpiece.But, this being MGM, these reels of seamless business with pleasure fusion workouts are followed and preceded by working class romance in the lobby coffee shop and elevator, the usual MGM bows to the tiresome parameters of provincial moralism, a kind of hick sentiment that scrappy Warner Brothers or champagne and opium Paramount had left behind (for the most part) when they moved into the sound age, or at least, as here, painted in such a disdainful light that you could smell censor meddling the way a friend might point out the guy trying to buy weed from you is a narc without tipping said narc off.
In this case the narc is pushy little adenoidal mouth breather Norman Foster as the most annoying such allegedly 'romantic' Madison Avenue-style antecedent to Elliot Reid in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a type that's thankfully disappeared long ago from the national register of archetypes, the smug, overbearing Pete Campbell-style ad man, pipe in mouth and a weird feeling he has the innate right to annoy cute girls at their place of work, which would be tolerable accept that this ploy actually works, which seems to condone boorish stalker behavior in a very unhealthy way (1). Thank God I finally just realized I could FF past his scenes without missing a goddamn thing (it's pretty rewarding when he loses his life's savings in a stock market boondoggle though). The rest of the Grand Hotel-aping cast are less remarkable, such as Jean Hersholt a Jewish (vot else?) fashion designer smitten by one of his 'party girl' models (Anita Page). She's great, he's a blubbering fool, but it's great to watch him be smart enough to not lose ever cent of his money in the same boondoggle that wipes out Foster.
Guess who makes a killing on that same boondoggle?
JAMAICA INN
(1939) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
****
Another oversize capitalist of ambiguous design is the great Charles Laughton in JAMAICA INN (1939), a film I'd never seen until last week when it showed up on TCM finally looking drop dead gorgeous in a cleaned-up new HD deep black transfer which made me instantly forget my long embargo on period costume dramas and the dismally depressing time I had trying to watch it in the 90s on some horrific public domain VHS (and not getting farther than the first five minutes). It was so good on this new edition, by jove, I changed my whole costume drama tune and put the Cohen BFI Blu-ray on my bleedin' Xmas wish list and started shouting "Chadwick!" in a worshipful impression of Charles Laughton as the British gentry/local constable. Unfolding over a few dark nights, set on a big tract of windswept foreboding land along the windswept Irish (?) coast near the titular inn, a more Gothically delicious set-up you'll as like never find. It's another tale of an innocent beauty bringing her antiquated morality to bear upon a scene in which she is but a tourist and in the process felling some smitten tyrant or other. In this case the beauty is a very young Maureen O'Hara in her first film. Who wouldn't topple?
NOTES:
1. see CinemArchetype 2: The Skeevy Boyfriend.