The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)

 

Cast: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Roscoe Ates, Edward Brophy, Hale Hamilton, Jesse Scott, Marcia Mae Jones. Screenplay: Frances Marion. Cinematography: Gordon Avil. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. 

David Thomson has made the suggestion that The Champ is only a prequel to a much more interesting movie about how Dink (Jackie Cooper) fares after being turned over to his mother, moving from hardscrabble poverty with his alcoholic pug of a father to affluent gentility and respectability. That movie was never made, and I’m not sure I would have trusted MGM in the ‘30s to have made it anyway. What we have is enjoyable enough, sentimentality made palatable by the performances of Cooper and Wallace Beery, who have real chemistry, and by King Vidor’s superbly confident direction of them. For a creaky antique, it’s superbly watchable. 

China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921)

Alice Terry and Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Julio Desnoyers: Rudolph Valentino
Marguerite Laurier: Alice Terry
Madariaga: Pomeroy Cannon
Marcelo Desnoyers: Josef Swickard
Etienne Laurier: John St. Polis
Karl von Hartrott: Alan Hale
Doña Luisa: Bridgetta Clark
Chichí: Virginia Warren
Otto von Hartrott: Stuart Holmes
Tchernoff: Nigel De Brulier
Lt. Col. von Richthosen: Wallace Beery

Director: Rex Ingram
Screenplay: June Mathis
Based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibañez
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Art direction: Joseph Calder, Amos Myers
Film editing: Grant Whytock

Nobody reads that whopping bestseller of 1919, Vicente Blasco Ibañez's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, anymore, but Rex Ingram's film version, adapted from the novel and shepherded through production by June Mathis, has helped keep it in print for a century. It's an impassioned reaction to the horror of World War I as well as the film that helped establish Rudolph Valentino -- who was discovered by Mathis -- as a superstar the moment he stepped onto the dance floor with Beatrice Dominguez for a sizzling tango. Granted, some aspects of Valentino's appeal have gone out of style: the flared nostrils and lowered eyelids and the oil-slicked hair that glistens like an LP record. But late in the film, when he appears with a few days' growth of beard, he could vie with any contemporary stubble-enhanced leading man. And he was not an inconsiderable actor, more than holding his own in a company of scenery-chewers. Just standing there, he had the quiet self-assurance of someone like Gary Cooper, an actor who draws the eye without begging for it. There is much that's preposterous about Ibañez's story, especially the mysterious Tchernoff, who lives in the attic above Julio Desnoyer's studio and descends at the start of the war to deliver a sermon about the four horsemen in the book of Revelation, illustrating it with Dürer's woodcuts. There are some characters and incidents brought over from the novel that could have been cut, like Julio's sister, Chichí, and the married couple across the way from Julio's studio, a Frenchman and a German woman. The latter falls to her death from her window after her husband marches off to war, a blatant symbolic moment. But Mathis's adaptation is on the whole solid, and John F. Seitz's cinematography makes the most of the expensive sets. 

Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930)

Remembered today chiefly because it was the film that won Marie Dressler the best actress Oscar (for what was by no means her best screen performance), Min and Bill is a good example of the struggle Hollywood movie-makers went through in adapting to sound. Dressler and co-star Wallace Beery had both been stars in silent films, and screenwriter Frances Marion was one of the most successful writers of that era. Unfortunately, Marion and co-screenwriter Marion Jackson don't seem to have mastered writing the dialogue a sound film needs for exposition and continuity, so it often sounds as if  Dressler and Beery are ad-libbing just to keep the soundtrack alive. And director George W. Hill, a former cinematographer who had turned director before sound came in, doesn't quite know how to keep the pace from sagging. The result is a rather choppy movie with a few good scenes, most notably a knock-down, drag-out brawl between Dressler's Min and Beery's Bill.  At the beginning of the film, Min seems to be destined to be one of Dressler's slapstick comic creations: There's an extended chase sequence in which Min and Nancy are at the controls of a runaway speedboat that culminates with Min being thrown overboard and hauled out of the water with repeated dunkings. But the main plot is sentimental drivel: Min runs a waterfront speakeasy/barbershop and has raised a girl, Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), left her as an infant by the now-aging prostitute Bella (Marjorie Rambeau). Now that Nancy is of marriageable age and is being wooed by the wealthy Dick Cameron (Don Dillaway), Bella has shown up again to try to claim the maternal privileges that she fears Min is going to assert. The trouble with this twist to the plot is that we never see Min being particularly loving and maternal toward Nancy, so that the denouement, in which Min tries to keep the girl out of Bella's clutches, doesn't make a lot of emotional sense. Still, the public loved it, and Dressler was for a time MGM's biggest star.

Two With Roscoe Arbuckle

The Round-Up (George Melford, 1920)
"Nobody loves a fat man," the kicker line for Arbuckle's 1920 feature, was meant to be wistfully ironic, since at the time, everybody loved "Fatty" Arbuckle (a nickname he hated). The irony went from wistful to bitter in a couple of years, when the scandal surrounding the death of Virginia Rappe turned Arbuckle into one of the country's most despised men, bringing his career to a halt. But when The Round-Up was made, Arbuckle was so popular that he received the featured billing for a film in which he was a supporting player, the comic relief in a somewhat routine Western. Arbuckle plays the sheriff in a small Arizona town, where he's much admired because he uses his dexterity, rather than his fists or guns, to disarm the bad guys. But he's painfully shy around women, which is why he loses the girl he loves (Jean Acker) to someone else. The main story revolves around a prospector (Irving Cummings) who is thought to be dead, so his girlfriend (Mabel Julienne Scott) marries someone else. Meanwhile, a lot of trouble gets stirred up by the "half-breed" Buck McKee (Wallace Beery). Things get sorted out eventually after a lot of chases and gunfights. Arbuckle and Beery are the best things in the movie, along with some location scenery handsomely photographed by Paul P. Perry.

The Life of the Party (Joseph Henabery, 1920)
As a knockabout comedy more in the Arbuckle mainstream, The Life of the Party seems designed largely to provide him with an opportunity to dress up in children's party clothes. The plot has to deal with a women's group who are out to bust up a trust that fixes the price of milk. Arbuckle plays Algernon Leary, an unscrupulous lawyer who is at first willing to go along with the trust, but is converted to their side by a pretty young member of the group (Viora Daniel). She also happens to be engaged to a judge (Frank Campeau) who, unknown to her, is in the pockets of the milk trust. This leads to much farcical running around, especially after the women's group decides to throw a fundraising party to which everyone is expected to come dressed as babies. It all goes on too long. The cast includes Roscoe Karns, an actor who didn't really come into his own until sound arrived, giving him the chance to reel off snappy patter for Howard Hawks in Twentieth Century (1934) and His Girl Friday (1940).

In Life of the Party, Arbuckle attends a party in which the guests dress as babies.