Fog Over Frisco (William Dieterle, 1934)

Fog Over Frisco (William Dieterle, 1934)

Cast: Bette Davis, Donald Woods, Margaret Lindsay, Lyle Talbot, Hugh Herbert, Arthur Byron, Robert Barrat, Henry O'Neill, Irving Pichel, Douglas Dumbrille, Alan Hale, Gordon Westcott. Screenplay: Robert N. Lee, Eugene Solow, based on a story by George Dyer. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Jack Okey. Film editing: Harold McLernon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

San Franciscans don't call it Frisco anymore but they do call the fog Karl. Not that fog has a lot to do with the story of Fog Over Frisco, which is mostly a fast-paced murder mystery involving a socially prominent family and some stolen securities. Although Bette Davis is nominally the star, she's the murder victim and disappears from the film halfway through. Her prominent billing probably has to do with the realization at Warner Bros. that she was becoming a big star: This is also the year of Of Human Bondage, the John Cromwell film that Davis made on loanout to RKO.  Although Margaret Lindsay, who plays Davis's stepsister, has the larger part, and the cast is full of watchable character actors like Hugh Herbert, Alan Hale, and (in a small part) William Demarest, Davis still shines -- so much so that we miss her in the latter half of the movie. Another attraction to the film are the scenes shot on location in San Francisco, notably lacking any shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction.

Sally (John Francis Dillon, 1929)

Sally (John Francis Dillon, 1929)

Cast: Marilyn Miller, Alexander Gray, Joe E. Brown, T. Roy Barnes, Pert Kelton, Ford Sterling, Maud Turner Gordon, E.J. Ratcliffe, Jack Duffy, Ethel Stone, Nora Lane. Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Andrew Percival Younger, based on a play by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse. Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings, Charles Edgar Schoenbaum. Art direction: Jack Okey. Film editing: LeRoy Stone. Music: Leonid S. Leonardi, Jerome Kern.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Paul Muni in the final scene of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

James Allen: Paul Muni
Marie Woods: Glenda Farrell
Helen: Helen Vinson
Pete: Preston Foster
Barney Sykes: Allen Jenkins
The Judge: Berton Churchill
Bomber Wells: Edward Ellis
The Warden: David Landau
Robert Allen: Hale Hamilton
Mother Allen: Louise Carter
Linda: Noel Francis

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Howard J. Green, Brown Holmes
Based on a book by Robert Elliott Burns
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Jack Okey
Film editing: William Holmes
Music: Bernhard Kaun

With the exception of the rather stilted early scene in which World War I veteran James Allen returns home to his stereotypical sweet, gray-haired mother and his oleaginous preacher brother, who urge him to give up his dreams and go back to his old job in the factory, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang mostly feels fresh and urgent. Its final scene gives up nothing in the way of a happy ending, as Allen backs away from his girlfriend into the darkness and chokes out the words "I steal," in response to her question about how he lives. It's above all a critique of American justice, particularly the concept of "states' rights," a shibboleth that was used for a long time as a defense of slavery and then of segregation and Jim Crow. The book on which the film was based was titled I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang, pointing the finger at the state at fault, and while Warner Bros. gave in to the government of Georgia, partly in deference to the Southern box office, and trimmed the title, everyone knew that this particular exploitation of convicts was primarily Southern in nature. And even the use of maps in the montages that show the course of Allen's travels makes it pretty clear where the chain gang is located. If American movies had remained as candid as this one is about social problems, they might have had a real impact. But two forces exerted pressure to tame the movies: the box office and the censors. I Am a Fugitive was made just before the Production Code went into effect, after which some of the brutal realism of the film would be forbidden -- along with the sexual frankness surrounding the character of Marie Woods. This was also Paul Muni's finest hour on film, along with his performance in Howard Hawks's Scarface the same year, before his energies as an actor were tamed by roles in William Dieterle's biopics The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) or hidden behind yellowface makeup in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937).

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Chester Kent: James Cagney
Nan Prescott: Joan Blondell
Bea Thorn: Ruby Keeler
Scotty Blair: Dick Powell
Francis: Frank McHugh
Silas Gould: Guy Kibbee
Harriet Gould: Ruth Donnelly
Bowers: Hugh Herbert
Vivian Rich: Claire Dodd

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Manuel Seff, James Seymour
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Anton Grot, Jack Okey
Film editing: George Amy
Choreography: Busby Berkeley

Busby Berkeley's great trifecta of 1933 also includes 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy). Footlight Parade is the least distinguished of the three by virtue of having the most inane of plots, but it also has a blazingly wonderful performance by James Cagney as the harried impresario Chester Kent, who creates "prologues" for movies -- live action musical numbers designed to precede feature films, a phenomenon that survives today only at Radio City Music Hall. Cagney not only gets to display his typical volcanic persona but also gets to strut his stuff as a dancer. As in other early Berkeley films, the great mad production numbers are not spread throughout but instead clustered at the end. First comes "Honeymoon Hotel," which is a string of double entendres about the fact that people have sex in hotels, and aren't necessarily newlyweds: e.g., everyone registers as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Then there's the lavish "By a Waterfall," which anticipates (and excels) the swimming pool numbers that Berkeley would later craft for Esther Williams at MGM. And finally, Chester Kent gets to save the show by going on for a lead dancer who comes down with stage fright in the "Shanghai Lil," number with Ruby Keeler in yellowface, dancing on the top of waterfront bars with Cagney -- her clunky, anxious tapping is an odd mixture with Cagney's stiff-legged style. (We are fortunately spared one of Kent's more appalling ideas, a musical number about slavery in which the female dancers would appear in blackface and be captured by the male dancers.) The whole thing is good, mildly ribald pre-Code stuff: Joan Blondell's Nan, who crushes on Chester Kent, introduces the predatory Vivian Rich by "accidentally" almost pronouncing her last name with a B, and comments that as long as there are sidewalks, Vivian will never be without a job.