HOLLYWOOD PARTY: while Mayer's away the employees will play

This 1934 feature from MGM is really bizarre. It's part Busby Berkeley-style musical, part

Marx Brothers-wannabe comedy and 100% a shambles.
If HOLLYWOOD PARTY had been made 30 years later I would have assumed it was the product of a bad acid trip but as this pre-dates LSD by a good couple of decades and was produced by MGM, a studio not given to committing hallucinations to celluloid, I'm at a loss to understand how the film ever came to be made.
Given the studio's emphasis on class, style and family entertainment I have to imagine that studio head Louis B. Mayer and production chief Irving Thalberg were out of town and unreachable by phone, telegram or carrier pigeon while shooting took place because I can't conceive of the circumstances in which they would have given their approval.   
In what starts out as a spoof on MGM's 'Tarzan' movies, Jimmy Durante stars as Schnarzan the Conqueror, looking to revitalise his flagging jungle man franchise by purchasing a pride of genuinely wild lions to wrestle in his next movie. To persuade their owner to do the deal Durante throws a lavish party in his honour inviting everyone who's anyone in Hollywood although, with the exception of cameos by Robert Young and The Three Stooges in the days before they were the Three Stooges, no actual film stars turn up.
Instead we're forced to make do with a motley bunch of charisma-free C and D list entertainers now mercifully forgotten by history who are lavished by more screen time than they could ever possibly deserve.
Eddie Quillan (a man in desperate need of some serious orthodentistry) and the impressively plain June Clyde fail to strike a single plausible spark as a young couple trilling their new love to each other, while Durante goes all Groucho Marx in some leaden routines with Polly Moran as an ersatz Margaret Dumont. The 'humour' is punctuated by some sub-Busby Berkeley dance numbers which earn a little credit for creativity if not style, and a Walt Disney cartoon, introduced by Mickey Mouse, which seems to exists for no other reason than MGM had a distribution deal with Disney.

Then, just when you think it can't get anymore weird Laurel and Hardy show up, playing themselves and go rather listlessly through some of their more well-worn routines at what feels like half speed. I'm an L & H fan from way back, and their appearance was my sole motivation for watching the film, but I can't pretend I enjoyed it. It's not that they're bad but they're out of their element and their comedy just doesn't mesh with the semi-surrealism of the surroundings. Their sequence with Lupe Velez lacks any of the life which makes their 1930s shorts for Hal Roach such a joy to watch regardless of how many times I've seen them.
Tellingly, the end credits fail to identify a director for this farrago, although according to IMDb no less than 8 directors made a contribution including some of the biggest names of the era. Presumably their agents were more effective in keeping their names off the finished product than Mayer and Thalberg were in preventing its release.

PICK A STAR: just not one from the A-list or B-list

PICK A STAR was independent producer Hal Roach's brave but ill-advised 1937 effort to take on the big studios at their own game.
MGM, Warner Brothers and Paramount had the stars, the production talent and the money

to turn out lavish musicals even when the subject was the Great Depression. Roach had Patsy Kelly, Jack Haley and whatever change he could find down the back of the sofa.
It's understandable that he'd want to set his sights on bigger things than the two reel Laurel and Hardy comedies that had made him famous. Shorts are alright, and the Laurel and Hardy shorts were more than alright, but if he wanted to be taken seriously as a film producer he needed to step up to the big time, and that meant full length features. That also meant bigger production costs and while Hal Roach was certainly not a member of the Poverty Row group of studios he wasn't anywhere near the top tier either.
The paucity of funds is only too evident in every frame of PICK A STAR. It's not just the unimpressive sets but it's the uninspiring cast of C-list actors none of whom have the star-power to carry a film. Patsy Kelly carved out a very respectable career for herself as the loud and unladylike comic-relief in a long string of mostly low budget movies, but even she must have been surprised to find herself top billed in a musical, while Jack Haley was a fine song and dance man (and was to achieve immortality 2 years later as the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz') but he's definitely not romantic leading man material. Roach further hampered his own ambitions by casting Rosina Lawrence (who? - exactly) as the nominal leading lady despite her glaring lack of charisma, charm or appeal.  If that's not already enough to turn off audiences, the character she plays is so shallow and self-centred that there's really no incentive to root for the Cinderella ending the story's setting her up for. If plausibility were a pre-requisite (and of course it's not because this is a Hollywood musical) she'd walk off into the sunset with the equally shallow and narcissistic Rinaldo Lopez, the patently inauthentic Latin lover movie star played by Mischa Auer. But in that scenario, Jack

Haley would discover true love in the arms of Patsy Kelly and that's something no audience would buy!
Combined with an unimaginative and well-worn (even in 1937) story about a small-town midwestern girl dreaming of stardom in Hollywood, and some clumsily staged musical numbers which serve only to further highlight Busby Berkeley's genius as a choreographer, PICK A STAR boasts all the ingredients of a solid gold bomb. The film's saving grace is the cameo by Roach's biggest stars, Laurel and Hardy. The boys appearance has nothing to do with the story's forward motion but everything to do with giving moviegoers a reason to fork over ticket money to see the film. Their two scenes, while not classic L & H, are a very welcome distraction from the increasingly dull proceedings and the only real reason for watching the film in the first place.

THE LONG HOT SUMMER: a giant steamed ham

Why, bless your heart y'all! Pour me another Mint Julep and fix me some grits while I rest mah weary bones on this here bale of cotton. THE LONG HOT SUMMER puts 'Gone With the Wind' to shame when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes about the Deep South.
Granted it doesn't have slaves pickin' cotton under the hot sun - this is 1958 - but that's about the only cliche screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr omit from their  adaptation of William Faulkner's novel 'The Hamlet.'
A star-studded cast of non-southerners pour on the honeychile' accents thicker than molasses as they act out this entirely predictable tale of overheated passions and frustrations in a godforsaken backwater of deepest Mississippi.
Paul Newman is the sexy tomcat with trouble written all across him in flashing neon lettering who sets his sights on Joanne Woodward, a proper southern lady whose prim exterior conceals a bubbling cauldron of lustful longing. Anthony Franciosa plays her inadequate brother struggling manfully to live up to his overbearing father's expectations of what a son should be, and Lee Remick is his sexpot young wife seriously lacking in a sense of decorum. Looming over all of them is Orson Welles as the ultimate parody of a southern patriarch, spouting aphorisms and puffing on a succession of well chewed stogies as he surveys his kingdom and bends everyone to his will.
In the absence of surprise or suspense the only real pleasure is in watching Welles serving

up one of the largest slices of ham ever to grace the silver screen. As the domineering, cruel and manipulative Will Varner he gives a performance absolutely devoid of shame. Not content with simply chewing on the scenery, Welles takes countless greedy bites out of it with an accent so ludicrously overblown that half of what he says is unintelligible, although it's pretty safe to assume that it's mostly nonsense.
Not content with simply sounding ridiculous, Welles is also determined to look ridiculous. To that end his make-up has been applied with a paint brush and chalk dust liberally dusted into his thick head of hair in a vain attempt to convince us the 43 year old actor is a 61 year old father in uncertain health. The result is a sun-burnt clown.
Despite Welles' overpowering presence, Newman more than holds his own, demonstrating genuine star power in what was only his sixth film, but it's not enough to save the film from sinking under the weight of its overblown predictability.

CUBAN REBEL GIRLS: an abysmal swansong for a Hollywood legend

CUBAN REBEL GIRLS is literally the wretched final nail in the coffin of Errol Flynn's once glittering career.

This dramatised documentary about Castro's Cuban revolution, shot while the fighting was still in progress, is barely half a notch above the best that legendary bad film director Ed Wood could manage at the height of his powers.
By all accounts Flynn was a bloated, drunken wreck, an oversize shadow of his former matinee idol self, by the time he commenced production on this ultra-low budget project in 1959. The expanded waistline is clearly visible beneath the loose shirt as are his swollen, alcohol ravaged features, despite the abysmal lighting which condemns many of his scenes to semi-darkness. He plays himself as a war correspondent for Hearst newspapers, risking his life to cross the battle lines and trek into the mountains of Cuba's hinterland to interview Fidel Castro himself. Flynn appears only at the beginning and end of the film but narrates much of the story in a voice that betrays a lifetime addiction to booze and cigarettes. It's practically unrecognisable as Flynn's voice, sounding flat, tired and lacking in intonation. Given his condition it's a miracle he lasted long enough to succumb to a heart attack after the end of filming, rather than during it.
The bulk of the story is carried by a group of men and women one might loosely describe as actors if one were feeling particularly charitable. Most give the mountainside trees a run for

their money when it comes to woodenness, but the mightiest Oak of them all is Flynn's 17 year old girlfriend Beverly Aadland. In the lead role of an American teenager who joins Castro's rebel army to be close to her boyfriend, she displays not the tiniest measure of acting ability, delivering her lines with all the vocal range and conviction of a Speak Your Weight machine. It's a clear indicator of just how badly the booze had addled Flynn's brain that he agreed to cast his platinum blonde lover in such a central role when it was apparent to anyone older than three that she had zero talent and could not possibly be anything but a major embarrassment to the project.
Aadland's atrocious acting is neatly complemented by Barry Mahon's witless direction and Flynn's threadbare script, creating an axis of awfulness that makes the 68 minute running time feel like a lifetime and half lived at half speed. And the film's not even bad enough to have kitsch appeal. It's just bad. Really bad.

STORM WARNING: beware of star names in unsuitable parts!

STORM WARNING is a taut and atmospheric thriller marred only by the leading lady's inability to act like an actress rather than a film star.

Ginger Rogers was past her prime by the time she signed on with Warner Brothers for this 1951 B-movie but she wasn't about to get her hands dirty by playing the role the way it was intended in the script. Rather than have the actress subsume herself in the character she made sure the character came to her. That meant playing the part the way she'd played all her parts in her prime - as movie star Ginger Rogers; with just a token hint of the character's personality dabbed lightly on her neck like an expensive perfume.
It was a formula that had worked for the musicals and light comedies that had been her stock-in-trade, but it was considerably less appropriate for the part of a New York model who witnesses the mob murder of a reporter by the Ku Klux Klan in a small southern town. Although she's from the Big Apple, Marsha Mitchell's no big-time glamour model. She lives out of a suitcase, riding the Greyhound bus from one small town to the next to model the clothing her salesman traveling companion is trying to sell to local department stores. She's a working girl without a past or a future. She has no dreams about making the big time, nor any resentments about her lot in life. Marsha Mitchell simply exists in the present.
Back in the early 1930s, when she was first at Warners and before she met Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers could have pulled it off. She was a convincing showgirl on the make in films like '42nd Street' and 'Gold Diggers of 1933' but by 1951 that scrappy ambitious young woman had solidified into a bona fide film star, trapped by the rigid cast of her on-screen persona.
That persona wasn't much interested in depth. The fact that Ginger Rogers was playing the part told us all we needed to know about the character. Except that Marsha Mitchell is not a Ginger Rogers-type character. She's an ordinary working woman who finds herself intimately involved in a nightmarish, life-threatening situation, and confronted with a terrible moral dilemma. None of which can be adequately conveyed by the Ginger Rogers

on-screen persona. Ginger tries, but her efforts amount to little more than alternately looking sad and looking at people with an almost blank expression.
Which is a real shame. Because the story's genuinely exciting and suspenseful, with a real sense of small town claustrophobia and fear, and fine performances from Ronald Reagan, Doris Day and Steve Cochran. Unlike Rogers, Reagan pitches it just right as the DA determined to bust the local Klan despite the threats to his life and, unlike Rogers, Day successfully sheds her songstress image to convince as the naive and trusting wife of the man (Cochran) that Rogers has just witnessed committing the murder.
Admirers of Don Siegel's classic 1954 'Invasion of the Bodysnatchers' will appreciate the similarities in the delving beneath the surface of apparently picture-perfect small town America to expose the sinister secret life of friends and neighbours, although unlike 'Bodysnatchers' STORM WARNING has no aspirations to deeper political meaning. Indeed, if it has any message at all it's a bizarre one. The Ku Klux Klan should be condemned not because it's a racist organisation that takes the law into its own hands to terrorise and murder innocent people solely because of their religion or the colour of their skin, but because it's a racket run by corrupt men who steal the money they charge members for dues, and costumes and other Klan activities.
Despite the missed opportunities, the pulled punches and an unsuitable leading lady, I have no hesitation in recommending STORM WARNING as a worthwhile investment of 93 minutes of your time.

CONVICTS FOUR: viewers snore

Having just struggled to remain awake and engaged through CONVICTS FOUR I am seriously considering reviewing my ranking of Ben Gazzara as my favourite actor of the modern cinema.
He won the title through his work with John Cassavetes, Peter Bogdanovich and Marco Ferreri in the 1970s and 80s. His performances just blew me away, and I felt there was something of a modern day Bogart quality to the characters he played. So I wanted to see more of his work, and while I discovered there was a great deal of dross among his tv

movies I was prepared to forgive that as the price an actor paid to keep working. He made the cinematic movies for art and subsidised them with the tv stuff was how I rationalised it.
I've been more reluctant to explore his earlier work from the 1960s because so much of what I read about it sounded so unappealing, and CONVICTS FOUR confirmed my worst fears. Not only is this 1962 true-life drama deathly dull but Gazzara is too. He brings nothing to the part that would differentiate him from the way a dozen other on-the-rise young actors in the early 60s would have played it. He's flat, uninspired and unconvincing.
It doesn't help that the tension of the early scenes in which convicted murderer John Resko (Gazzara) counts down his final hours before execution is completely destroyed by the opening titles which announce that John Resko served as technical advisor on the project - and therefore must still be alive unless he advised from beyond the grave. When, almost at the last minute, the death sentence is commuted to life in jail I didn't realise I'd be required to serve it alongside him.
I've heard a life sentence described as worse than death and that's pretty much how I felt as I accompanied Resko through the following 17 years behind bars in the company of a horribly hammy Ray Walston and pseudo-tough guy Sammy Davis Jr, with cameos from Vincent Price, Rod Steiger and Broderick Crawford. I've never understood the rationale behind the description of cameo appearances by famous faces as 'guest stars.' The phrase suggests that there's a regular show with a regular cast which they are joining for a one-off guest appearance, but a film by its very nature (franchises excepted) is a one-off so - logically - every cast member must be a guest since none of them will be returning for a subsequent episode.
But I digress. The sole purpose of these guest appearances would appear to be to inject a bit of much needed life into the proceedings, but they actually serve more as a distraction because they bring with them the promise of interesting new characters who don't actually stick around long enough to fulfill their potential.
Which leaves us with no choice but to focus on the relationship that develops between Resko and the unnamed prison officer (Stuart Whitman) who rises to the rank of warden, and encourages Resko to develop his natural talent as an artist. It's a worthy cause but when it's stretched out over 17 years you'll appreciate that the development is somewhat on the slow side to put it mildly.
If writer-director Millard Kaufman's intention was to illustrate the case for the abolition of the death penalty he failed. CONVICTS FOUR will have you begging for a swift end to the misery.

WONDER BAR: the not so wonderful side of Warner Brothers

Murder, suicide, racism, theft, and infidelity - WONDER BAR has a funny way of trying to make its audience feel good.

This 1934 musical trades heavily on the enormous success Warner Bros had enjoyed over the previous two years with backstage musicals like '42nd Street', 'Footlight Parade' and 'Gold Diggers of 1933.' But while WONDER BAR reunites director Lloyd Bacon with master choreographer Busby Berkeley, leading man Dick Powell and comedy foils Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert it lacks all of the magic of those previous productions.
By 1934 Warner Bros had developed a reputation for producing films that unashamedly acknowledged the tough times of the Depression. They pulled fewer punches than any of the other studios when it came to depicting the poverty and the sense of hopelessness inflicted on a large majority of the US population, but even by Warner's tough standards WONDER BAR is disturbingly hard and cynical in its portrayal of the human condition. The film skirts perilously close to condoning murder and suicide, and is ambivalent at best in its attitude to adultery. There's a real sense that in these tough times the survival of the fittest trumps all moral considerations.
What's most surprising is the role that the film's star, Al Jolson plays in all this. On the surface he's tough but kind-hearted businessman, Al Wonder. The Wonder Bar is his nightclub where he not only manages the place but also greets the guests and headlines the floor show. Behind the glad handing razzle-dazzle there's a coldness in his treatment of his star dance team Harry (Ricardo Cortez) and Inez (Dolores Del Rio), driven by his secret crush on Inez and his consequent desire to exploit their unhappiness so as to split them up. Jolson's Wonder takes a sternly moralistic view of Harry's attempts to sell a diamond necklace he's cajoled from his secret lover, but has no qualms about saving Inez from the police after she murders one of the other main characters.
One wonders whether Jolson really perceived the truth depth of his character's moral ambivalence when he read the script, but I suspect he was more interested in the opportunities it gave him to hog the screen. His performance is borderline ham and it's all he can do not to roll his eyes as he schmoozes the customers and participates in some obviously over-rehearsed comedy routines. The main attraction for Jolson, I'm sure, were

the big musical numbers and in particular the very long fantasy sequence which forms the film's climax and sees the great entertainer in blackface playing a poor farmer who goes to heaven on a mule and discovers "de promised land" in an afterlife peopled entirely by other white actors in blackface. It's a deeply disturbing piece of cinema that's impossible to watch today without being shocked and appalled at its patronising, condescending, exploitative and stereotypical portrayal of African Americans. I struggled to try and imagine how unshocking and normal many 1934 audiences would have found this, and failed. I recognise that my initial reaction of 'why didn't they just hire African American actors to play the African American parts?' just barely grazes the surface of the dominant attitude toward African Americans at that time.
The result is an extremely unpleasant taste in the mouth that is difficult to wash away, and which colours (absolutely no pun intended) my already less than stellar opinion of the film to that point. Even Busby Berkeley's trademark dance sequence with its dozens of perfectly choreographed blonde showgirls, gliding pillars and mirrors stretching - seemingly - to infinity - fail to salvage the viewing experience.