She was a Good Girl in a Bad Joint!

Sensation Hunters
1933 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “THERE WERE PITFALLS AT EVERY STEP ---AND SHE DIDN'T MISS A SINGLE STEP!”
[internet archive]

The “Pre-Code” Era was roughly 1931 to 1934, when American movies were at their most spicy, a time when illicit sex and violence were common themes. The Poverty Row studio Monogram flirted with the exploitation genre. And this odd antique was the result.

It’s not nearly as disposable as silly things like Reefer Madness. It has genuine actors and actresses. The writers worked in character development and a moral with a little heft. In his debut, the director Charles Vidor added artistic touches. Vidor was not a hack and went on to have a respectable career. Hey, he was Hungarian so he must have been cool (my grandmother was Hungarian).

The opening sequence, set on a cruise ship from San Francisco to Panama City, features one woman in hot-pants and another in a bathing suit. A middle-aged man with a fake English milord accent and, worse, a travesty of a country shooting outfit tosses a coin on the floor so he can have a cover story if he is busted looking through keyholes. To fulfill the educational purpose of this production, we get a camera shot through a keyhole to see women changing, in case we weren’t quite sure what he was doing.

Due to the pandering content and the poor quality of the print (like sound drop-outs due to lost frames), I, my mother’s uptight son, was tempted to give up about 15 minutes into it. But the characterization got me more interested in the story and less bothered by the blemishes.

Upper-middle-class woman (Marion Burns) for reasons that are not made clear, signs up as singer in a troupe of dancers and b-girls. The troupe works in a notorious cabaret called The Bull Ring in wild, wide-open Panama City. Her working-class roommate, perennial best friend Arline Judge, is puzzled why such an elegant woman as Marion, brought up in affluent circumstances would take up such a job.

The Mama is played by a silent screen heroine Juanita Hansen, a Mack Sennet protege. Not above smacking the girls around to enforce her expectations, she is crude and bossy and all too effective in this role. The male actors, as usual, are nothing to write home about, but Walter Brennan has a small part in which he stutters in that injured voice he was saddled with after he was gassed during World War I. It was an era in which communicative disorders were played for laughs.

The action moves along briskly, but the real attraction is the setting of the down-at-heels cabaret, the third-rate hotel rooms, and people one does not meet in the normal course of life. Warner Bros had the rep for gritty settings but clearly the Poverty Row studios could render reality in all its romping glory to make us think, “My place is home with mother, but that sure does look fun.”

I’m a Thirties buff so I like anything that gives me a sense of what the time looked and smelled like. I’m also a moralist so I was placated that this movie, while not what I would call prim, was not as saucy as I was fearing. Unless I was reading into (I'm a meaning-seeking animal), I got the message to be careful what kind of people, places, and conditions you settle for since we set bars lower and lower insensibly until one fine day we wake up and realize we’re hanging out with the likes of people Mother wouldn’t have had in the house, I’m sure.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 73

Notes: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. Running pieces more often because many articles are in the can and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner

“The lawyer is like a doctor,” says criminal lawyer Perry Mason to Della Street to open this 1944 mystery, “only for justice.”

Perry Mason sees a parade of iffy clients in his office - but Diana Regis is probably one of the iffiest. She arrives in Mason’s office clad only in a fur coat and a dressing gown, besides the shiner of the title. It turns out that she had been pressured into a date with her employer’s stepson. Not playing the game "put out or walk home" when she refused the stepson’s advances, in the tradition of many players at the time, he tossed her out of the car, forcing her to hike home. Meeting again at the house (she’d been living with her employer’s family), he smacked her when she called him out. On top of this abuse, he colluded with his mother to accuse Diana of theft.

Seeing herself in a vulnerable position, she hoofs it over to the office of Perry Mason. The casual brutality bothers Perry and Della. In court, Perry’s deft questioning shows the stepson to be a lieclops. Everything is quickly resolved – the alleged theft can be explained. Diana Regis receives handsome compensation.

And when - seemingly – the door can be shut on a nasty incident, the plot gets thicker. And poor Diana ends up in in the dock.

This is a good detective story. The twists are intricate, the action doesn’t let you to break away for dinner, and the dueling between the operators of the criminal justice mincing machine and Perry, Della Street and PI Paul Drake is played for high stakes.

European Reading Challange #2

Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross

The setting is a train trip from Pärnu, Estonia to St. Petersburg. The time is 1909, near the end of the road for Czarist Russia. Professor Martens, diplomat and expert in international law, is doing what thinking people do on long dull train trips: ruminating about personal and professional topics.

In complex yet accessible stream of consciousness, Martens remembers his humble beginnings, struggling student days in law school, and his success as a legal expert and writer of treaties. However, in their arrogance and stupidity about his Estonian origins, his superiors who are Russian aristocrats treat him like the hired help and claim his contributions as their own. He is even disdained when he persuades the West to bail out Russia with the loan and so he wonders about the merit of enabling a brutal, stupid regime to hold on to power.

In monologues addressed to his wife Kati, he confesses infidelities but asserts he always loved his wife. Reading the chapter about the love affair with an art student, I found it incredible how Jaan Kross could write in such detail from the protagonist’s point of view.

The narrator seems self-serving, hypocritical, conservative, and defensive, but overall he’s easy to spend 300 pages with, since his story is the story of many people in the 20th century, people who had to weigh the claims of their conscience and integrity with the service to the state, especially when the state is run by people who have the integrity of gangsters. It was a question especially hard for non-Russian people serving Mean Mother Russia.

Today is The Emperor's Birthday

天皇誕生日 Tennō Tanjōbi. The birthday of the reigning emperor has been a national holiday since 1868. Emperor Naruhito was born on this day in 1960. You know you’re getting up there when Japanese Emperors become younger than you are. Let’s light the candles despite this sobering thought by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Some Japanese Portraits - Donald Keene

Born in 1922, Keene was the perfect age to study Japanese and become an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Postwar he received master’s degrees from Columbia and Cambridge and a doctorate from Columbia. He devoted his long career to studying and teaching Japanese literature.

This book is a collection of essays about Japanese poetry, plays, and fiction from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Originally written in Japanese for a weekly magazine, the articles on unjustly forgotten writers are engrossing, articulate and a delight to read. The only problem I had is that Keene assumes his readers are Japanese and thus know as a matter of course things like the modern name of Bingo Province (備後国 Bingo no kuni).

What's interesting is that Keene delivers incredible factoids. For instance, he says the first contemporary European novel translated into Japanese in 1879 was Bulwer-Lytton's novel Ernest Maltravers about which Thackeray fumed, “We cannot conceive an [author] to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel. He says he will give us the likeness of a genius and it is only the picture of a humbug.”

It's so strange that this inept novel inspired the very first Japanese political novel in which a geisha named “Rights” takes a lover named “Popular Government in Japan” and her other boyfriend is named “Inspiring Instances of Statesmanship.” Probably sounds better with the original Chinese characters.

In conclusion, an excellent book for readers into the more obscure byways of Japanese literature.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #6

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

After the Banquet – Yukio Mishima

The main character of this novel is Kazu Fukuzawa. She grew up during Japan’s early 20^th century when her native snow county was desperately impoverished.

Kazu herself beat the odds against her survival being born poor, female, and rural by sidestepping an early death due to malnutrition, infections, and injuries or wounds. She also avoided the occupational hazard of the water trade, shinjū  心中 suicide of two (or more, see Quicksand) individuals bound by love and unfortunate karma. Not so lucky were the men who went down in the world, pissed away their fortunes or did away with themselves all because of Kazu.

Along with an indomitable will, boundless energy, and a child-like honesty, Kazu has no illusions about herself, her customers, or ordinary people. She became the shrewd and street-wise owner-operator of a high-class Tokyo restaurant called the Setsugoan, where she entertains bigwigs in politics, government, and industry. Taking a daily stroll in her garden (which Mishima describes masterfully) keeps clean her moral compass, simple and practical as it is.

In her fifties in about Showa 35 (1960), Kazu is concerned about that old mortality. Not for the sake of creature comforts in old age (she’s set for those), but she worries about what’s in store for her in the afterlife, given those silly paramours doing away with themselves in her early career and given the torments of Buddhistic Hell. When she meets ex-diplomat Noguchi, she realizes how lonely she’s feeling and they fall in love like giddy teenagers. Kazu also figures being connected to an upright family will count for much come the Judgement Day. She wants to ensure that a Noguchi descendent will tend her tomb so that she doesn’t end up in Hamlet’s “little, little grave, an obscure grave.”

Noguchi and Kazu marry. Only to prove that while opposites will attract, they ought not marry each other, especially not in the flashbang of romantic love. An intellectual with rigid morals, tired and listless Noguchi is the worst kind of clueless male: the man who’s positive he’s got a good bead on things. On the other hand, Kazu remains a cauldron of activity, boiling over with initiative and practical sense. She supports her husband in his bid for the governorship of Tokyo by bankrolling and aggressively working in the campaign. She is supported by political professional Yamazaki, who is her link to party big wheels. Yamazaki also acts as a go-between assigned the task of balancing the opposite styles of the two spouses.

But despite Kazu's hefty expenditures of money, time and energy, the snake pit of politics proves too much even for her. Mishima satirizes political campaigning, noting that Kazu’s terrible speechifying on the hustings is still tolerated by average Japanese voters, who have an amused affection for “inept speakers.”  Calling Orange’s babbling and playacting to mind, Kazu’s transparent attempts to be “just folks” takes in no sensible adult, but voters still feel tender toward a suffering savior who’s willing to act the goat for them.

Mishima is great at description of sensory experience though sometimes the minute details of Kazu’s kimono colors and obi patterns went right over my head. But his eye for nature is up there with Hudson, Tomlinson, and Turgenev, awakening that old sense of wonder. His plotting is near perfect with pace and rhythm. His sense of comedy runs from gross to droll. And he can set a scene: incredible are the set pieces about the Omizutori (the water-drawing festival at Tōdaiji in Nara) and the ghastly rally when Kazu realizes that people are just staring at her as if they believed she were a fiend from hell.

He Killed for Love … And Loved to Kill!

Note: Gail Patrick’s film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role in this picture. Down the road, in 1938, Patrick landed the role for which we old movie buffs remember her, the mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey. For good or ill, that part typed her as The Haughty One in many of the 60 roles she landed in the coming years, up to her last outing in Two in the Dark in 1948. Retirement bored her, so in 1957 Gail Patrick Jackson created her own full-time job by becoming the executive producer for the greatest courtroom drama TV series ever, Perry Mason. Raymond Burr was to have ups and downs with her in the coming years about workload and quality of scripts, but he reportedly said she was the soul of the series.

Murders in the Zoo
1933 / 65 minutes
Tagline: “DEATH SET FREE! Striking at a Madman's Bidding in a Zoo Full of Pleasure-Seekers!”
[internet archive]

In this inverted mystery, Lionel Atwill plays a philanthropist of contrasts. On the light side, he generously donates animals he captures to the Zoo. On the dark, he selfishly murders men who flirt with his wife Katheleen Burke. To cover his murder of his wife, he has the zoo shut down. Can the nice couple of Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick save the zoo and stop the killer?

But the experienced movie-goer knows trouble is brewing if top billing is Charles Ruggles. He’s a barrel of laughs as the comic relief: he’s probably most fondly remembered as the eccentric big-game hunter in Bringing Up Baby. But here as the lead, his comical voices and fantods are not enough to sustain scenes. And in fact his clowning seems out of place compared with Lionel Atwill’s frowning, glowering, strutting, and forcing on his wife unwanted embraces. But even as he reaches for evil and diabolical, for me, Atwill never manages to deliver the chilly threat that emanates from George Zucco. I realize mine is the minority opinion re Lionel Atwill.

With her marvelous almond eyes, Kathleen Burke has a persuasive scene in which she withdraws into herself, finally deciding to tell her brutal husband she’s outta here. Rarely smiling, she has that melancholy sensuality going for her. Though it’s a welcome change to see strapping Randolph Scott play a toxicologist (they didn’t make him wear glasses!), Scott produces a high-pitched yelp when sneak-attacked by Atwill.  It's comical, inadvertently. Scott and Gail Patrick’s parts, sadly, could have been played by anybody. But as for Gail Patrick’s life-saving injection, let’s have three cheers for women in the sciences and bio-technology, about the only bright spot in this mercifully short movie 

Groteskeries include a guy having his mouth sewn shut and a woman being tossed to the crocodiles, both crimes by the jealous Atwill. These Pre-Code shockers got the movie banned in Germany, Sweden, and Latvia and continue to gross us squeamish movie-goers out in 2025. Also, with zoos so controversial in our day, the distressed bears, chained with rings around their necks, give us post-moderns pause.

The Ides of Perry Mason 72

Note: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity (may their wisdom inspire us), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. So many pieces are in the can, why not release more often? It's not like saving them accrues interest and I'm not exempt from the universal experience of our species. 

Three Perry Masons

Author Michael McDowell has published three Jack and Susan mysteries: Jack and Susan in 1913, Jack and Susan in 1933, and Jack and Susan in 1953. The titular pair are always 27 years old. They always keep a white shaggy dog. And Jack always ends up exonerating Susan when she finds herself accused of murder.

How could agelessness as artistic and marketing choice not bring to mind Our Favorite Lawyer? Perry Mason is always the same age even if the Mason novel is set in the era of depression, wartime, nervous prosperity, or tumultuous change. His sidekicks Paul Drake and Della Street and his nemeses Lt. Arthur Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger are ageless as well. In a 1986 interview, Raymond Burr said, “[Gardner] also feared that making Perry and Della a certain age would date the books, which always remained in print for years. He learned that lesson once when he used the running board of a car as a major plot element—and then cars stopped having running boards.”

A lifelong learner, Gardner did use changing law, forensics, technology, and cultural values in the Mason novels, but as Burr said above, he had the marketing intuition not to age his characters.

And that’s okay.

Despite this agelessness, Gardner’s most famous character changes as three eras come and go. From the early Thirties to the early Forties, the Perry Mason character is true to his pulp roots. Gardner was a professional writer down to his toes. As such, he was committed to give the pulp audience – mainly male – what it expected: non-stop action and a smart-ass hero.  Mason is cocky, outspoken or cagey depending on the situation. His silences resonate. He can speak “tonelessly.” He’s harsh in conversation with crooks and impudent with cops. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He speeds and takes corners at 30 (not easy, I imagine, in giant cars with no power brakes or power steering). He punches bad guys. He throws shyster lawyers out by the seat of their pants. He uses skeleton keys for illegal entry. He pulls shenanigans with evidence.

From the early Forties to the mid-Fifties, determined to appeal to a mass audience in big circulation weekly magazines, Gardner smoothed Mason’s rough edges. Mason began speaking more temperately. He rarely slugged anybody. Gardner teased readers with a love interest between Della and Perry. Mason was less prone to resort to evidentiary hijinks. In public service digressions, Perry counseled readers to drive safely. In brief tangents, Mason takes the role of the life coach, helpfully suggesting that being on time for appointments establishes a professional image.

From the late Fifties to the mid-Sixties, the TV Mason began to influence the Mason of print. For many of us fans born in the Fifties, because we watched episodes in syndication before we read the books, Perry Mason is Raymond Burr when Burr was in his early 40s and at his most lissome in the late 1950s.

Although Burr lost 60 pounds to land the TV part, he steadily put a percentage of it back on as the nine years of the series went by. One disgruntled fan likened a stationary Burr to a refrigerator. On the other hand, the extra weight contributed to that imposing presence and gravitas that contribute to the caliber of Our Favorite Lawyer. As DeLillo had a character observe in White Noise, “I suggested there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount. People trust a certain amount of bulk in others.”

Burr’s Mason of the piercing eyes rarely smiled. He was grave, self-possessed, and ever polite. The only time he was rough was when he zeroed in on the wretched culprit quaking on the stand. “But you couldn't wait. You were tired of being poor. You were tired of playing the nice, clean-cut boy. And once you and Edna were married, you'd wind up with the money in your hands. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

I’ve never taken to watching Burr in his late sixties in the Mason movies produced from 1985 to 1995. The fourth Perry Mason just doesn’t work for me. And not just due to the salt and pepper beard and looking nearly 300 pounds. The stories seemed as far-fetched as an episode of Columbo, not all too plausible like the original series’ plain illustrations of the consequences of letting fear, love, hate, lust, money, property, ambition, vanity, envy, shame, contempt, anger or sheer foolishness shove reason and caution aside.

Lots of people became lawyers because they were inspired by Perry Mason, but uncountable must be the fans who have taken him for a role model of integrity, rationality, resourcefulness, and professional markers like imperturbability and snazzy attire.