Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
1933 - Lubitsch Please!
51 Plays2 years ago
1933 was a year full of big and wild movies! Popeye! Marx Bros! Busby Berkeley musicals! Throuple rom-coms! Psychic supervillains! An invisible man and KING KONG! Pre-code Hollywood is putting out some of the most daring films made so far, and we're gonna talk about 'em!
Documentary explaining pinscreen animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ3DSFv4vAg&t=608s
You can watch along with our video version of the episode here on Youtube!
You can check out our Instagram, Twitter, and other social media crap here: http://lnktr.ee/1w1y
And you can watch and form your own opinions from our 1933 Films Discussed playlist right here!
One Week, One Reel
Popeye the Sailor
Night on the Bald Mountain
Our Feature Presentation
Duck Soup
The Gold Diggers of 1933
Design for Living
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
The Invisible Man
King Kong
See you next year!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to One Week One Year
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to One Week One Year, a podcast where we watch and discuss every year of film history in order, starting in 1895, the dawn of cinema, and this week is 1933. I'm one of your hosts, Chris Ellie. I'm a film projectionist and joining me as always is...
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm Glenn Covell, I'm a filmmaker. He makes films. Yeah, we are back at it again in 1933. Just a quick note for everybody that you can watch this on YouTube or listen on your podcast app of choice. Different little slight bonuses depending on which avenue you go. Maybe there are, I don't know, maybe you should listen to it twice.
Historical Context of 1933
00:01:00
Speaker
You really shouldn't.
00:01:02
Speaker
But whatever your preference, thank you for listening. Glenn, how's it going? What's up? It's going. It's going fine, I suppose. I have a nice little Thanksgiving holiday in the Hudson Valley, where I'm from and where you're from, I suppose.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yes, that's why we know each other. Very, very true. Guess I haven't recorded since before the festival and the Denver Film Festival was one of the craziest, most stressful things I've ever done, but it was cool. It was a lot of fun stuff that happened. And yeah, I did my own kind of Thanksgiving jam, but
00:01:41
Speaker
That was sort of, and we're at the theater, we're returning to playing a 35 millimeter film. We played this movie Divinity on 35 a couple of days ago, and it looks really, it's really cool. 1933, let's get into it. Glenn, what happened in the year 1933? What was some of the news items of note?
00:02:09
Speaker
The news of the year, 1933. After being claimed as spoils of the Spanish-American War, the US Congress votes to allow independence for the Philippines. The Nazis seize power in Germany after Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor. Germany bans all other political parties and trade unions. The Reichstag parliament building is burned to the ground. The Dachau concentration camp is open to imprison political dissidents.
End of Prohibition and Nazi Regime
00:02:33
Speaker
Unemployment reaches 25%. One quarter of the United States is out of a job.
00:03:04
Speaker
And that is the news, and...
00:03:08
Speaker
I have a prop this time for that last one.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah. An authentic reproduction newspaper of the repeal of prohibition. The Herald Examiner. What a generic newspaper title. It's Chicago. It's a Chicago page. Read it out for the podcast audience. You can hear the fine ASMR audio of this newspaper. Do you have your microphone switched to ASMR mode? No. I don't know if it has one. The headline is prohibition era ended. Loop crowds. Hail repeal.
00:03:44
Speaker
I didn't read the articles, I'm not sure about these loop crowds, but just the fact that I had that, I felt like I should put it on the camera. Nice prop. We should be drinking for this one, although it's really late December when prohibition ends. Most of 1933, by being immersive, we should stay sober. And also the Nazis, that's a bummer, right? Huge bummer.
00:04:13
Speaker
Hot take. Huge bummer. I actually went to that concentration camp when I visited Germany a few years ago. And it is obviously the most heavy thing that I have ever done, basically. Just walking in there feels awesome.
Cartoons of 1933: Popeye and Beyond
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
00:04:42
Speaker
But let's switch gears a little bit. Let's not talk about the Nazis right now. We don't want to do that. But for now, let's get into one week, one reel, a couple of short cartoons to whet our appetites. I feel like it's kind of funny how all the shorts we've been covering lately have just been cartoons.
00:05:06
Speaker
That's sort of where shorts are at now is like, it's mostly cartoons that are kind of the most notable things to talk about. That's the sense that I get is that, you know, cartoon shorts, newsreels, and then features. Maybe there are, I think there are some live action shorts, like some short comedies or whatever, but like all of the kind of notable comedy people seem to have moved on to features. Yeah.
00:05:32
Speaker
But I think there's maybe we'll do some like three Stooges pretty soon. I think they're going to start doing a short, some like the mid 30s. So that's fun. I will say like I the more cartoons that I watch from the early 30s, the more I want to watch there. I saw little pieces of a Disney
00:05:52
Speaker
33 cartoon recently and it just looked so fantastic. We're not talking about this episode but it's just like as we kind of traced the the evolution of Disney and Fleischer like animation over the course of however many previous years uh and watched it get more advanced I think it is really really matured at this point and it's it's
00:06:18
Speaker
They're doing really interesting stuff. Speaking of Fleischer though, we've got Popeye the Sailor Man, Betty Boop cartoon. Just Popeye the Sailor, I think is the title of the short, right? Maybe. But the song is Popeye the Sailor Man. Yes. Popeye the Sailor with Betty Boop. I didn't realize that this is like...
00:06:43
Speaker
I guess Popeye has more screen time, but it's like this is like a Betty Boop cartoon that like introduces a new character. It does. Yeah, it does seem like a lot of what has been happening is that Betty Boop is such a like standout star here that like everything has to be like like Bimbo got wrapped up into Betty Boop. And so like
00:07:09
Speaker
She can just make a cameo in anything that they wanna do that is not related to her. Yeah, this is like Betty Boop presents Popeye.
00:07:18
Speaker
Betty Boop no longer a poodle in this one. Yes. Full human. Full human flapper. She appears for a second as a hula dancer. A tanned Betty Boop, I guess. Let's not get into the politics of that.
00:07:41
Speaker
that is a hula dancer in a short segment in this, but it is mostly about Popeye. And he arrives fully fleshed out as the Popeye we know. Like exactly the classical, all the Popeye stuff is in this first short. Popeye immediately came onto the scene with all of his character traits fully formed and then did not change ever.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yes, he introduces himself with a like kind of cat style. This is who I am song Hmm. Yeah, I'm pop either sale a man And then he kind of gives some details about what his deal is. He hates all palookas and what ain't on the up and square Don't we all
00:08:33
Speaker
The usage of Palooka, and they say it a couple times in this one, they call people Palookas, and I quite enjoy it. Yeah, Palooka. Yeah, he likes eating spinach and punching objects into smaller versions of the same object. Like picks up a big anchor, punches it into a bunch of small anchors, picks up a big clock, punches it into a bunch of small clocks. Classic sailor activity.
00:09:02
Speaker
That is what sailors do. Yeah. My understanding of the world is mostly informed by cartoons, but yes. It is funny that like Popeye, what I think of as Popeye's kind of whole deal is like eating spinach and fighting. Right. And like neither of those are those like
00:09:20
Speaker
Like he's not, it has nothing to do with boats. Like he's not doing like sailor things. That is true. I mean, like I wonder if there is some kind of, um, some kind of association between sailors and spinach, but I don't really know. Maybe it's just like a can, a can of spinach. So it's like the, the, the kind of spinach that you'd eat on a boat.
00:09:42
Speaker
I said, you know, he's not eating fresh spinach. Right. He's not cooking spinach up in like into a nice salad. He's just eating it right from a can. I did think this this has a lot of kind of classic Fleischer brothers cartoon stuff, though. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of fun, like really fun cartoon logic in this.
00:10:04
Speaker
like going across a rope bridge and the rope bridge gets cut and then he kind of like, it stays rigid as it falls down. It stays rigid on the left side as it falls down from the right side so you can run away on the rigid bridge. Or then he, to get across the ravine, he throws a rope across and just pulls the whole mountain so that the ravine closes.
00:10:32
Speaker
That's maybe my favorite bit from this. That was definitely my favorite bit because it got me. I did not expect that to happen. It's some classic cartoon logic, which they have a good amount of in here where Popeye's strong and he hits the bell and you hit the hammer on the ground and it makes the bell ring
00:10:56
Speaker
carnival game thing and then flies out in the air and then hits the moon and bounces off the moon. But then he punches Bluto, the villain, and his Adam's apple on his neck goes up and hits his head and that makes the same bell sound. Which is also a pretty good bit.
00:11:15
Speaker
Uh, and we also have a, uh, tying olive oil to the train tracks type situation. Although it's muscle guy version where they, uh, they wrap the train tracks around her. Which I, we probably talked about this on
Racial Caricatures in Cartoons
00:11:31
Speaker
the show before. I'm just trying to find a while ago, I was trying to find like, what is the first instance of like tying a woman to train tracks? Well, it was vaudeville.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah but like I couldn't because of all of the like early 1910s shorts and things and I think we watched a single one that had that in it. Um I feel like we did but I don't remember. Yeah like I think it's one of those things that people kind of associate with like old-timey silent movie stuff that it's like it's not really in there.
00:12:00
Speaker
There is definitely a, yeah, it's like a trope. It's a trophy thing of old movies.
Innovations in Animation: A Night on Bald Mountain
00:12:07
Speaker
I believe movie silently has an article about that specifically. If I find it, we can link it. Yeah. I also thought, so speaking of that carnival game with the hammer and hitting the bell, apparently the reward for that carnival game in Popeye universe is a box of cigars.
00:12:31
Speaker
right and then they do they do a bit that is done in some in one of the other movies here which is uh uh you're handed a box of cigars to take one you take one out and then hand the one back to them and take the entire box which is done with cigarettes in in a movie we'll talk about later oh i don't know if i even picked up on that yeah they did that in design in um in
00:12:56
Speaker
Gold diggers of 1933. Anything else to say about Popeye? It's a cartoon. It's fun. Watch it. There's some racist caricature stuff happening in this also, which is a bummer, but it's 30s. Things were shittier back then.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, on that, and I think we've touched on this before, that one of the things that was most astounding to me watching the early, early movies is how there was relatively few instances of outright racism and stuff like D.W. Griffith really feels like an outlier at the time. Well, then I think because of him, it became less of an outlier. Maybe, yeah. It feels like there's definitely been more
00:13:42
Speaker
not even depictions of racism on screen of just like movies that are like in their being racist, it's their like depictions and their ideals kind of. Right. Sense, brother of a nation, which is also a bummer. I would say even especially in the late 20s, early 30s, like the kind of like racial caricature stuff sort of turned up a notch. Yeah. Unfortunately.
00:14:09
Speaker
On that note, let's talk about a different movie. Yeah. The other short that we looked at was A Night on Bald Mountain, which was super cool. Yeah, super cool. I had never heard of this movie. I only found out about it because it's listed on letterboxed.
00:14:25
Speaker
I never even heard of this type of animation before, which is also super cool and interesting. Yeah. Pinscreen animation is the method that it was animated with, which was basically invented the year prior. This movie took, what, 18 months to finish? For nine minutes, approximately. Which, like, it makes sense. Like, this is so intricate. It's really...
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's really absurd like the amount of I don't know new and strange imagery that can be made with this technique. Yeah, yeah, it's really distinctive, but it's also like I wasn't really sure how it was done until I looked up a YouTube thing or like there's a like a short documentary about how it's done that was made in the 60s, I think. Hmm.
00:15:15
Speaker
But it's with the original co-inventors of this animation.
00:15:29
Speaker
I should really look up how to pronounce things before recording them on a podcast. His middle name is Alexandrovich. His parents just picked one name and just went with that, huh? They were just like, let's just put a bunch of variations on that. Alex, Alex, Alex. Yeah. And this movie was also directed by the two of them.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, Claire Parker was an American, like, MIT-educated engineer, and Alexandre was a Russian filmmaker and illustrator. And they together invented this wacky, pinscreen animation technique, which is like a board full of tiny,
00:16:15
Speaker
black pins that depending on how many and how far the pins are sticking out of the board create a black and white image. Based on like the amount of light that they're letting through, right? Yeah, which is like, it's very, I think very difficult to describe. This is definitely an instance where the YouTube version is going to come in handy because we probably put up some visual aids.
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah, the imagery that it produces almost ends up looking like it's printed on like cloth, like a burlap sack or something like that, which is really distinctive. It's got this kind of like grittiness to it that... Yeah, it's very kind of smoky almost. It has sort of this like...
00:17:03
Speaker
like lines aren't super clean and there's a lot of uh just like variation in in light and shadow kind of like i mean i think that the imagery that they make with it kind of uses that to his advantage too it's a lot of like clouds and smoke and yeah spooky stuff but i mean speaking of the imagery that they make with it there are
00:17:27
Speaker
like this really must just be to do with their animation prowess and not with the the device itself because there is some really incredible imagery in this movie not just in and of itself but also like in terms of like how it was animated there are a lot of like
00:17:47
Speaker
very convincing looking like 3D rotations of objects. Almost as if you're looking at like a clay figurine, but you're not. Like it kind of produces that effect in a way, but like the way characters move around and shift and the way that like shadows fall on faces, it's so intricate. It is like, like no wonder it took so long because it is, it's incredibly
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, it seems incredibly labor intensive and artistic, as far as what is afforded in animation. Yeah, well, 18 months for nine minutes. For as long as stop motion takes to make, this feels like it's somehow even more labor intensive, because it's pushing tiny pins through a screen. Yeah, wild. Yeah, it feels very expressionistic.
00:18:46
Speaker
And playing with perspective stuff was I was like, I don't understand how they did this. This is crazy. There's a lot of really cool kind of shape shifting, which is a big deal in like this era of animation, I guess, because there's a lot of that in Popeye also of just like objects turning into other objects and like.
00:19:07
Speaker
you know, that like a train that grows a face or is this is like a horse that turns into a different horse or like a face that turns into a cloud into like a yeah. Yeah, it's a bunch of a bunch of chat like teeth that like appear through stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this also has like a very
00:19:31
Speaker
It has a very Fantasia kind of vibe to it. It's just music. It is the song Night on Bald Mountain, the classical song by Mysorgsky. Sure.
00:19:48
Speaker
And it's just a bunch of like really kind of, it's like the devil scene in Fantasia. Just a bunch of macabre imagery set to that piece. Right, because that piece is also used in Fantasia, right?
00:20:05
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. Maybe it is. Oh, is it the same thing in Fantasia? I'm not. It's been a while since I've seen it. So I'm not sure. But if so, then I it's very likely that this this short was an influence on Fantasia. Wow. Yeah, no way. Yeah. The imagery is very similar. I'm a little distracted because my front window is open. And I think that the delivery guy just saw me podcasting, which is no.
00:20:37
Speaker
The greatest shame being outed as a podcaster. Uh, do you have anything else on Night on Bald Mountain? I don't think so. It's on Criterion channel and spot and not Spotify, uh, uh, Canopy and Pi YouTube also. Go, go watch it. It's cool. Uh, and with that, let's move on to our feature presentation.
Marx Brothers' Duck Soup
00:21:00
Speaker
And now we're pleased to bring you our feature presentation.
00:21:07
Speaker
All righty, shall we start with... Should we start with Glenn's obvious favorite? A classic, an absolute classic that you'd be insane to try and say anything negative about. It's Duck Soup. It'd be insane, but yeah, let's talk about Duck Soup. The Marx Brothers movie, probably their most famous movie.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, that or not the opera. Definitely the one that I was kind of familiar with the most like, yeah, Duck Soup, Marx Brothers, that one. Which, directed by Leo McCarry, we kind of touched on, or I don't think we actually, the two, you and me kind of talked about another movie called Duck Soup that was a short film that was a Laurel and Hardy, and he reused the title for this.
00:22:00
Speaker
going with the sort of animal theming of the previous Marx Brothers movies. Animal Crackers, was it Horse Feathers, was the one we didn't watch, I think? Yes. And Duck Soup, which, so I guess the backstory is that the previous Marx Brothers movies that we watched I was not a big fan of.
00:22:20
Speaker
And so I was very curious to see how I would react to this one, which is like the one that everyone's like, oh, it's the best. It's their best stuff. And I thought it was pretty good. Oh. Oh, wow. OK.
00:22:37
Speaker
I mean, you know, so when we watched Animal Crackers after watching Coconuts, I was like, oh, Glenn's going to hate this because it's exactly the same. And I wasn't feeling that as strongly watching this movie, but also it feels like more or less the same thing, but just maybe done better. Right. It is like the setup and the structure of it. It is like they haven't changed their shtick at all in this movie, really like.
00:23:03
Speaker
Their thing of like, it takes place all in one location. Groucho is like some kind of wacky authority figure who shouldn't be in a place of authority. Like all their character archetypes are the same. The sort of taking jabs at like high society are the same.
00:23:22
Speaker
But this one just feels a little more polished and a bit funnier, I guess. I think it all kind of works a lot better in this movie than it has in the earlier ones. It feels like they're basically making the same movie over and over again and it's getting a little bit better each time.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, that is true, right? And they're even using Margaret Dumont again, who really does feel very essential to the formula, much more essential than Zeppo. Yeah. Zeppo, once again, is like, he's also there. Yeah.
00:24:01
Speaker
This is the last movie with Zeppo. Oh, really? Yeah, he got sick of doing all this. What I was hearing is that Zeppo was quite funny and did have a lot to contribute, but because he took over from
00:24:25
Speaker
Because he took over from their previous brother who was the straight man. He was kind of relegated to the straight man and He just felt unfulfilled in these Marx Brothers situations. So yeah, he went he went and did something else after this. Yeah, I Also think this movie has like is almost like feels accidentally very like timely Hmm
00:24:54
Speaker
Um, cause I think their previous movies are just, are basically just kind of satirizing like high society and like wealthy American culture kind of. Whereas this is sort of has a broader scope of like international politics and like European countries.
00:25:15
Speaker
Right. And so it feels very, the impression I get having seen it is that it's mostly making fun of like World War I and the sort of like politics leading up to World War I and like the state of Europe kind of like around that. But because it was released in 1933, it feels very kind of like not entirely
00:25:38
Speaker
was what I'm thinking of, like a prophetic, I guess. But it's like, it feels timelier than I think it was even intended to. You mean timely as far as like the lead up to World War II? Yeah. It's like, it does kind of feel like it's maybe taking a couple jabs at like fascism also. But I wonder how much of that was like on their mind making this movie versus just sort of like in hindsight.
00:26:05
Speaker
Yeah, hard to say. I do like this a lot better than the extremely amateurish animal crackers and coconuts. But it is a movie where a bunch of bits happen with a different coat of paint on them.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah. And this coat of paint is rather than, I don't know, a hotel owner or an adventurer. It is a guy who is appointed the leader of Fredonia. And then there are some spies around as well, which are played by Chico and Harpo. Some very effective competent spies, as you can imagine.
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, you could consider this political. I think there is like political. There are political aspects to it, but it's hard for me to see it as more than like a coat of paint in this movie. Yeah, it does kind of feel like, oh, and that's like the theme for this one. It doesn't necessarily feel like they have any sort of big take that they have on like the politics of the day. They were just like, I don't know. What if we have some like soldiers and pointy helmets in this one?
00:27:14
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I think maybe like one of the most salient political ideas is just like the how how flippantly a lot of the political figures will treat like, let's go to war. Like, let's let's let's do a war. Which is sort of, I feel like primarily satirizing World War One, but little did they know
00:27:39
Speaker
that they were actually satirizing a future war also. Well, I mean, World War I was definitely a lot more pointless than World War II. True. On that note, I did also read that Mussolini banned the movie immediately, which the Marx brothers loved. They were, like, hilarious.
00:28:00
Speaker
One of my favorite lines from this, which felt very like almost the most modern joke in it, was I think it was Chico going like, this is spy stuff.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of, like, I think the dialogue in this one feels a little slower, so the jokes land a little bit better. There's a lot of, like, really kind of classic Marx Brothers wordplay in this that I did think was very funny. Like, ah, we need a standing army. Why a standing army? Because they've got to save money on chairs.
00:28:37
Speaker
That's just like, it's all very dumb, but I did like it this time more. I don't get it. That's exactly the kind of stuff that you hated before. I don't know. I just like, I think before it was like, it made me roll my eyes. And for some reason in this one, I think it landed better. Like, it was delivered better. It was like...
00:28:57
Speaker
The timing of it works better. I think they're just getting better at performing on camera and editing it properly and now it's actually being funny. And this is also the first one that we've seen that hasn't been an adaptation. It was specifically scripted. Yeah. I think that probably helps also because it does feel less like it's like playing to a
00:29:17
Speaker
a live audience and more it's like playing to a camera. One of my favorite jokes in this happens pretty early on and there's it's a great like one two three rule of threes joke which is that Harpo will be riding a motorcycle up for for Groucho to jump into the sidecar and twice in a row Groucho gets into the sidecar and then Harpo just rides the motorcycle away with the while the sidecar stays still
00:29:44
Speaker
Which is like, ah, good funny joke. But then the third time, he gets in, he, Groucho gets on the motorcycle and then Harpo drives just the side car away. Yeah, Groucho thinks that he has defeated Harpo, but yeah. Also, I just realized, I wrote down, why does nobody simply murder Harpo?
00:30:09
Speaker
Like he's always bothering everyone around him. Everyone gets really mad at him. But everyone is just kind of fine. Like no one does anything about it. He's just like causing chaos and everyone's just sort of like huffing and puffing. Harpo's bits are the kind of bits that I wish I did more in the world. You want to grab people's legs more?
00:30:32
Speaker
specifically grab their hand and use it to hold up my leg and then make them wonder why they're holding up my leg. I've tried some Harpo bits in the last couple of days and it didn't work out very well. That's a shame. It is fundamentally annoying. You didn't ruin their lemonade stand?
00:30:54
Speaker
He had to do like a grape stomping in the lemonade tank. Yeah. Some other kind of like, I don't know, because I really love the Groucho quips. Yeah. Where it's like, like he's telling people to get in the car and he says, if you run out of gas, get Ethel. If Ethel runs out, get Mabel.
00:31:15
Speaker
Good stuff. He's got his nose like a bloodhound and the rest of his face ain't that good either. That's a solid joke. It is, yeah. I think the writing of this one just feels a little stronger than the other ones that we watched. I still think the editing in this is kind of janky. There's having some edits in this that are like, oof, yikes. But in general, I mean, this is not a movie that's really built around
00:31:40
Speaker
or even like visual gags that much. It's mostly like slapstick performance and wordplay. There's the mirror scene is very good. I think that's sort of like a famous bit from this movie. That's right, yeah. Where Harpo and Chico end up impersonating Groucho by putting on a mask. He does make himself very easy to be impostored.
00:32:09
Speaker
He's wearing a disguise already. He's wearing the classic disguise of a Groucho Marx mask. Harpo and Chico are pretending to be him as if in a mirror.
00:32:25
Speaker
and sort of mirroring all his movements as he's standing in a doorway. And then the other one will enter the room, and so then there's two of him, stuff like that. It's very cartoonish, but I think that stuff worked pretty well. Another thing of like a joke purely for a joke's sake, which is very much like a Gratitude or not a Gratitude thing, a Marx Brothers thing of like, this joke doesn't need to make any logical sense. We're just gonna put it in there because it's funny.
00:32:54
Speaker
Right. Which is another thing that kind of, kind of a thing I have against Marx Brothers movies that I think worked better in this one is like, the jokes felt like they had a bit more intention. A lot of them felt less like they were there just for their own sake, kind of.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah. One aspect that did kind of feel like it was there for its own sake, which continues on from the other stuff is the musical parts, which this movie is like a musical for, you know, 10 minutes and then stops being a musical, specifically this kind of opening song introducing Groucho.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, playing Rufus T. Firefly, which is a great name. That's a good name. Yeah. And the song has a very like Gilbert and Sullivan vibe to it.
00:33:45
Speaker
The thing that I really like, along with that political commentary we were talking about earlier, is him describing all the things that he's going to do as ruler. He starts off saying, oh, if people rebel against me, pop goes the weasel. And then he starts saying, if they do some really innocuous thing that I don't like, pop goes the weasel.
00:34:16
Speaker
brutal dictator yeah but it's that's the thing where it's like oh what a you know what a cut up and then I'm like in the context of this movie when it came out like that is a very dark joke and I don't know if that's how it was intended you know
00:34:30
Speaker
I think it was. It seems like this nod to some extreme darkness. We're at the end, we're closing in on the end of the pre-code era. We'll see how the Marx Brothers fare when they can't make references to death and sex. Yeah, which yeah, they do a lot of in this movie.
00:34:54
Speaker
I actually want one instance where I think the editing of this movie is very good is right at the end after war has been declared. And there's this like wild madcap scenes of war happening. It's like every single individual shot. Grad shows uniform changes like he'll be in like a revolutionary war uniform than like the next shot. He's in like a Civil War uniform than like he's wearing like a completely different uniform. And it's like
00:35:20
Speaker
Every time you see him, his uniform is completely different. Just like between different shots and it's very funny. Pretty good. Pretty good. Fun time. Apparently this was not nearly as well received as the last few Marx Brothers movies, like at the time, which I think is kind of ironic because now it's like considered one of their best.
Musical Comedy: Gold Diggers of 1933
00:35:41
Speaker
But it was like kind of seen as like a weaker installment and like wasn't as successful as their other ones.
00:35:50
Speaker
But speaking of musical numbers. Yeah. Let's talk about the Gold Digger or sorry, Gold Diggers of 1933. Indeed. This movie was the biggest surprise to me. I think it probably was for me too, because I really like this movie a lot. Yeah.
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, I was honestly shocked at this movie being any good. My expectations were so low just because I was thinking about the Broadway melody too much. Right, which is sort of like...
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that was our kind of only real reference point for like early 1930s show biz musical. But this one is quite a bit better. I mean, one for being like Broadway Melody is a bad movie. This is a very good movie, I think. Yeah, yeah. Directed by co-directed, I guess, or like different scenes are directed by all of the kind of narrative stuff is directed by Mervyn LaRoy, who also did Little Caesar. Mm hmm.
00:36:52
Speaker
And then all the musical numbers are directed by Busby Berkeley. Heard of him? And that stuff is like, I think this is the first actual Busby Berkeley musical movie that I've seen. But it's funny how familiar I am with that name.
00:37:07
Speaker
just like, oh yeah, Busby Berkeley musical. That's just like a reference point of like, that's what this other thing is like. Yeah. And also seeing that sort of very distinctive kind of visual style and like the way that that stuff is shot and edited and like the production design of it. I'm like, oh, this is, I'm so familiar with like this style, but just from like watching The Simpsons
00:37:30
Speaker
and like Looney Tunes and like things that have been, or like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, like things that have like taken the Busby Berkeley style of like a musical number. But this is, it's funny then now going back and like actually watching a movie that is
00:37:49
Speaker
original yeah i'd like vaguely heard the name busby berkeley but um i scrolled through his filmography and i was really not familiar with any of the titles right it's like the actual movies i'm like not that familiar with but like the like the style of musical number in this movie is like oh it's this it's like really intricate choreography like giant sets
00:38:11
Speaker
and like overhead shots of like dancers forming different shapes and things. Yeah, I mean like I, you know, I will say that the musical segments in this movie, they are calling back to some of the best mid-20s kind of
00:38:32
Speaker
using cinematic imagery in a painterly way, like in The Last Laugh or something like that, making interesting shapes and images with what you can do on screen. And so this movie, in some of these musical segments more than others, but some of them are just
00:38:59
Speaker
creating these, like, paintings out of people. They are, like, staggering to watch. Yeah, like, I was literally, like, my jaw hanging on the floor looking at some of these sequences. I was, like, I was, like, getting a little misty just to, like, the beauty of it, you know? And then they're also, like, at times very funny or very sad or, like, very dramatic. Like, there's so much done with the musical numbers in this movie.
00:39:24
Speaker
it's like completely most of them are like completely outside of the actual narrative of the movie which we'll get into in a second but like well the idea with the musical numbers is they are from the musical that they are putting on right in this in the movie but they are clearly like these
00:39:45
Speaker
kind of amplified impossible to do in reality, but like versions of these musical numbers, right? It's like it's not necessarily pretending this is what people are looking at on stage. It is just like as we do a musical number, we go into like a liminal fantasy zone where we can express ourselves with music and dance in
00:40:11
Speaker
the most imaginative way possible. Yeah, I think it might be the only maybe the only instances of this that I've ever seen because it's like normally in musicals there's either like all the musical numbers are like diegetic and exist within it's like either they exist in like a musical reality or like all the musical numbers are putting on a show whereas this movie kind of combines the two where it's like we're putting on a show but then once they do the actual musical number for the like the live show that they're doing it does shift into this like magical reality
00:40:43
Speaker
just kind of portraying that and then kind of shifting back once it's over. Yeah, some of the images from this movie are just, yeah, so cool. So, so cool. And it's not just images, too. It's like creating moving image tableaus of people moving around in. I'm thinking like the images that I love the most are
00:41:08
Speaker
toward the end of the movie where there are some, yeah, we should really get into the structure of this movie. There's a part with some like marching soldiers and they are going like in an arch across the screen and then they're kind of moving like across various planes of this archway with like a centerpiece in the middle and they're in silhouette in the background.
00:41:35
Speaker
And there's another part where there are some people dancing in like a complete black void with these like really bright white dresses that create these just like really amazing shapes everywhere. And then they like take out some like neon violins. The neon glowing violins are amazing. And I don't really know how they did that other than maybe just like
00:42:04
Speaker
literally making like neon bulbs. Yeah, I think they just made 40 neon violence. The coolest thing in the world. This movie is also just a funny comedy outside of these amazing musical tableaus. Yeah, yeah. I think the title of this movie, I was like, oh, boy, here we go. This is going to be like, I don't know, I kind of expected this movie to be less
00:42:32
Speaker
I don't know, more sexist than it is, maybe. You know, I wasn't even thinking about that because I was like, this is old times and they probably don't have the same use of gold diggers that we have today, but it is the same use. It's like, oh, it's about people mining. Yeah, or something like that. It's not. It is the sort of common modern term, but this movie is based on a play from the 20s where that terminology originates.
00:43:01
Speaker
This is the story that invented that phrase of a woman who marries a man for his money, I guess, is the gist of it. But it's also, it's not that cynical. It's not that... Yeah. It's not that like, yeah, sexist as you were saying. It is really a movie that is...
00:43:27
Speaker
It's really a movie about some people who are poor and find a way to enjoy themselves messing with rich people. Yeah, this movie is maybe of all the things we watch the most that is directly about the Great Depression, which is also super interesting. I didn't expect from it at all to be like,
00:43:47
Speaker
That's like a major theme of this whole movie is that it's like about people who are out of work in show business because their shows keep getting shut down because like the guys ringing them is in debt and having to avoid the landlord because they don't have money to pay rent. Yeah, the opening song. Steep stealing milk.
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah, it very much deals with the depression, which seems to be rare in movies that were made during the depression. They're more escapist, I guess. And this movie also is the only non-crime movie that I've seen to acknowledge speakeasies, too. A speakea is what they say. A speakea they call it, yeah.
00:44:42
Speaker
But yeah, the opening song of this movie, We're in the Money, is this almost like fantasy of the end of the depression. And they talk specifically about the like, ah, the depression's over. We can look the landlord in the eye. We got money. Yeah.
00:45:02
Speaker
We're in the money. Which is, I had heard that song tons of times. It did not know it came from this movie. I heard that song tons of times and I was like, oh, this is just in the culture. But I realized that speaking of The Simpsons before, it's just that The Simpsons has referenced this movie three times within their like golden seasons. OK, see, that's I. I assume you looked that up and you just didn't just know that off the dome, although you being you, that wouldn't surprise me.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there's so much in this movie where I was just like, I've seen this in The Simpsons for sure. Yeah. Like and I think that's so funny that it's like just the way that like culture is forms and reforms that like this is an old movie from the 30s. All the people who wrote The Simpsons are like nerds who grew up watching old movies.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yeah. And so they put all this stuff from like 30s and 40s movies into The Simpsons. And then we grew up watching The Simpsons. And so we're all like, oh, yeah, like musical numbers and this and that. And then it's it's so funny now to like go back and watch the sources of all these things and be like, wait a minute. I thought The Simpsons invented all this stuff.
00:46:11
Speaker
This is not the only movie we're going to talk about that has extensive Simpsons. Oh, yeah, I have. I know. Yeah. I definitely have multiple other Simpsons references to talk about.
00:46:27
Speaker
So yeah, like the rough plot is that there are a group of actresses who are kind of showgirls in Broadway reviews and they live together. They all live in one big bed.
00:46:49
Speaker
The opening scene is the kind of last attempt that they had to do a musical that got shut down right in the middle of dress rehearsals. This guy Barry, or sorry Barney, who I love his vibe.
00:47:14
Speaker
He's always telling people to scram. Yeah, but he's he's like such a kind of classical like showbiz producer character where he's like, all right, he has a plan. We're going to have a, you know, a hundred dancing girls in this thing.
00:47:28
Speaker
It's going to be huge. He comes to visit because they think they have another gig and true to his showbiz producer ways, he goes, what's that piano sound over there? That's magic. Bring that guy over here.
00:47:45
Speaker
And so one of the four girls is in love with this guy that's kind of across the way, who is a singer and piano player, and they eventually bring him in and
00:48:01
Speaker
a whole musical based on his music. He writes a bunch of songs for this new musical but refuses to sing in the musical and he won't say why. He also like mysteriously appears with the $15,000 they need to fund the musical when their backers drop out. It's like, ah, is this guy into crime? What's he doing?
00:48:24
Speaker
Right, so then the showgirls are talking about, like, he's got all this mysterious money, like, what's the deal there? And they think that he's robbed a bank and so doesn't want to perform in the show because then people will see him and he'll get caught by the coppers.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, and Polly, who's in love with him, is like, it's okay, I'll love you even if you're a Toronto bank robber. Yeah, she says, if he goes to prison for this, I'll visit him there. When Barney is talking about putting on the show, he's saying, it's all about the depression.
00:49:01
Speaker
And Trixie, who's the kind of comedian of the group, says, we won't have to rehearse that. There's a lot of other kind of like very thirties wordplay jokes in this movie, which I enjoy. But the guy who's supposed to sing in the show gets lumbago on the day they're opening. And so he can't perform. So Brad is forced into singing in the show.
00:49:28
Speaker
I've never heard the term Lumbago. Yeah. It's lower back pain, but I know it mainly from in Red Dead Redemption 2. There's a character who always complains about, it's Lumbago. I can't work. I got Lumbago.
00:49:45
Speaker
So, Brad finally agrees. This is the sexy neighbor. He finally agrees to take on the main role, and he's fantastic in it, as expected. But then, during the intermission, all these snoopy audience members go, who is this guy? He seems familiar. They call off some of them.
00:50:12
Speaker
They call up some of their informants and realize that he is the heir to a fortune in Boston. He's part of a blue blood family in Boston. And that's where he got the money. And they print a big article saying, famous rich boy slums it by being in a musical. A massive Broadway musical.
00:50:38
Speaker
And the rest of the story is his family, his brother and their kind of- Their lawyer. Lawyer. Yeah. Like trying to intervene between Brad and Polly's relationship and trying to get Brad off of the show because this is undignified. Yeah. They say, we cannot have you mixed up in this theater business.
00:51:03
Speaker
So, and then the rest of the movie is like a lot of hijinks of them just like fucking with these rich people. Yeah, really? Yeah, pretty much. You nailed it. Like, they don't really have like an endgame in mind so much to just like, let's mess with these guys. These guys suck.
00:51:22
Speaker
And like Brad's on board with it. He's like the cool, rich guy who shuns his family. Yeah. He's like, I want to be in showbiz. And they're like, show business? What an undignified thing. You should be composing classical music. Yeah. I do really like the sort of how kind of exaggerated the like the wealthy brother and the lawyer are of just like, oh, oh, oh, dear me, like a theater. What a horrible place.
00:51:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You're watching the progress of their kind of like hoity toity attitudes being broken down systematically by all of the interactions between them and the showgirls and Brad, including that's a lot of a lot of tricking them into thinking that one person is another person and all this kind of stuff.
00:52:17
Speaker
Right, because then Carol, who's another one of the showgirls, pretends to be Polly and kind of seduces Brad's brother.
00:52:28
Speaker
because he thinks that she is Polly and he's trying to kind of seduce her away from his own brother so he won't get married. It's very complicated. It's a selfless act. I'm going to seduce my brother's fiance to prove to him that he should go back to the world of French people. It kind of starts with Carol and Trixie, who's the kind of like the comedian of the group.
00:52:55
Speaker
of they are both kind of trying to seduce the brother and the lawyer just so they can get free stuff. Like they kind of trick them into buying them really expensive hats. And so then they're like, we got to keep this going. Set $75 hats. Which $75 hat is like a $500 hat in the 30s.
00:53:14
Speaker
No, actually it's even more than that. So $75 for a hat would be quite a chunk of change now. It's nearly $2,000 in today's money. Okay, there you go.
00:53:26
Speaker
Damn. But so, yeah, there's a lot of, like you said, a lot of hijinks. The person who falls victim to their feminine wiles the most quickly is the lawyer Peabody. Peabody, yeah. Peabody. Trixie gives him the nickname Fanny, which is very cheeky.
00:53:49
Speaker
They get a few jokes out of the fanny line. Yeah, and he's very like wiping his brow all the time and it's like very flustered around all the gals. Yeah, Brad's brother is initially like, you know, it takes him a while to kind of break down, but he's just, as soon as they show him affection, Peabody is just, huh, huh, huh. Yeah. The biggest line. Hold this hat.
00:54:15
Speaker
The biggest laugh that I got in this whole movie was like, you know, they're kind of done putting the moves on these guys. They leave the scene. And then Brad's brother just goes, Peabody, you're disgusting.
00:54:32
Speaker
I also wrote down that line is a huge laugh for me. But then as as right. So like Brad's brother is like so disdainful of of like showgirls. He thinks they're all like he thinks they're all cheap and vulgar as he puts it. Yeah. And naturally because during this whole ruse that Carol is is putting on Carol and and and the brother. What's the brother's name? Brad's brother's name. Yeah.
00:55:02
Speaker
Jay Lawrence Bradford. Right. Jay Lawrence Bradford and Carol naturally end up kind of actually falling for each other, despite each of them kind of trying to seduce the other one for less honest intentions. And it's very sweet, I feel like. It works. It's a movie where people almost Shakespearean, I guess,
00:55:31
Speaker
Everybody is trying to trick each other, but then eventually they all pair up and they end up being happily married by the end. Trixie and Peabody end up finding the truth in their relationship and then the two of them and then Brad and Polly are kind of chilling the whole time watching the whole thing. Watching the chaos happening around them and laughing at it.
00:56:00
Speaker
And to the title, it's Peabody who is talking about the type of girls that showgirls are, and he calls them... He says, women of that type are chislers, parasites, or we call them gold diggers.
00:56:18
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like this this also this movie has some some fun like pre-code stuff. It's not that kind of salacious, but it is a little bit more than I'm used to seeing from old movies. Yeah, like definitely more so than than a Hays Code era movie.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there are weed references in this, or there is a weed reference in this movie. Wait, when? I forget exactly the context. Somebody says something kind of ridiculous, and they says, what does he use? I'll smoke it too.
00:56:59
Speaker
One of the ways that they're messing with Brad's brother is they get him really drunk at a speakeasy, and then they put him in Carol's bed to have him wake up in that bed, not knowing how he got there. Very directly implying certain things that they might not be able to so directly imply later. There's the big musical number, Pet in the Park.
00:57:25
Speaker
which has a lot of references to doing it. There's some heavy petting. There's some nude silhouettes in that dance number. There's fun stuff. Yeah, this movie was real cool. I liked it. Yeah, like I was saying, I had such low expectations. I liked it a lot. One kind of strange thing that
00:57:53
Speaker
I don't know if this is the case with a lot of other musicals, but it seems like much of the musicals that have been coming out have been, they've been about Broadway. They've either been like a filmed Broadway production or they have been this kind of backstage drama thing where the musical numbers are supposed to be this sort of
00:58:16
Speaker
amped up versions of the diegetic musical numbers within the show. So we haven't yet seen a musical that just portrays a story and then like has musical numbers amplifying the story. Right. Specifically. Other than like, I guess the Marx Brothers movies kind of do that. Oh, you know what? Yeah, you're right. Never mind.
00:58:38
Speaker
at least up until duck soup those were all based on actual sage shows uh some of the previous ones were like horse feathers and monkey business might not have been but yeah i guess one last note that i have about this movie is that in the opening we're in the money we're in the money song i think it's carol singing that right
00:58:57
Speaker
I thought the opening song is sung by the other one, Faye, who is played by Ginger Rogers, I think is the singer during that one, but I may be wrong. Well, she starts singing part of the song in Pig Latin for some reason, which is... Very weird, but sure. It's a weird choice, but it also just made me realize that money in Pig Latin sounds like anime.
00:59:27
Speaker
That's the last thing that I have to say. Onime. Onime, you're way in hate.
Progressive Romance: Designed for Living
00:59:34
Speaker
Onime. Good note to end this discussion of this movie on. Another comedy from this year, also dealing with high society and romance. Yeah. Is designed for living directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
00:59:55
Speaker
We're finally getting back to watching some of Lubitsch's Hollywood pictures, which I don't think we've talked about yet, right? We've only talked about his German silent stuff.
01:00:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's been a minute since we've checked in with Lubitsch. Yeah. I guess our the first movie we watched with him was on 1918. Yeah. Now we're kind of in the era. He's I think kind of most famous for. Yeah. But he continues to be fantastic. Yeah. I loved this movie. This movie is so good. This movie is really good and like I feel like deserves to be like
01:00:32
Speaker
Watched more than it is like I this is a movie that I want to like recommend to people because yeah, it's very good
01:00:39
Speaker
This is another valiant entry into the fast-talking thirties. People are playfully mean to each other genre. And the dialogue in this is incredible. The actors are so charismatic and they just deliver these lines with these just wry smiles that just, oh, they get me. Oh, they get me.
01:01:06
Speaker
Also, I mean, the thing that this movie is like, I guess most famous for, probably, is that it's about a throuple, technically. Yes. A developing, a developing, thriving throuple. Yeah. And I think...
01:01:21
Speaker
like some of Ernst Lubitsch's other earlier movies it like it doesn't fully commit to like a like fully non-traditional like romantic relationship like i think some of like i don't want to be a man does i think by the end that does i think it's a little it's left a little ambiguous but i definitely take it to be like oh yeah they're a triple now and it and they're all fine with that
01:01:41
Speaker
yeah this does follow as you're saying it does follow in the Lubitsch tradition or at least of movies of his that we've seen of like challenging gender and and sexuality yeah uh in in very direct ways that i think
01:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, are quite impressive and daring for the time. This is like a poster movie for pre-code Hollywood, I feel like. This is a great example of like the kinds of movies that were being made in the early 30s before the Hays Code cracked the whip. And it's making me like anticipate
01:02:19
Speaker
1934, 1935 movies that are like postcode and be like, God damn it, like these pre-code movies are so fun. I'm so annoyed that this happened. And we're like, this is going to go away. But I'm I'm really excited to see like Ernst Lubitsch movies that are made during The Hayes Code and like how he kind of will, I'm sure, circumnavigate those arbitrary rules and like still make fun stuff that is still kind of like challenging the societal norms.
01:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, in this movie, just like the ways that they challenge this stuff, we can get into a little bit like after after establishing some of the plot here, which is the movie set.
01:03:05
Speaker
primarily in France or initially in France. And there are three Americans who meet each other or two best buds of 18 years. And then they're they're on a train car and a spunky lady appears and it starts razzing them. She starts she starts harassing them in charming ways. Yeah, pretty much.
01:03:32
Speaker
And they both simultaneously fall in love with her. Yeah, like immediately simultaneously. Yeah. To the point that they're immediately jeopardizing their, their decades long friendship over, over this lady.
01:03:49
Speaker
The two best buds are played by Gary Cooper, who we've seen in a few things, and Frederick March, who was in We Go to Hell. He was also the male lead in that movie. Oh, I didn't recognize him from that, yeah. Much like in that movie, he also plays a playwright
01:04:10
Speaker
who is down on his luck. In this, he says, I write unproduced plays when he introduces himself, which is a good line. A funny thing about when the kind of three main characters all meet, they're in France, and so they start speaking French to each other, and then they realize that everyone's American, and so the two men just start singing the national anthem and saluting to say that they're Americans.
01:04:40
Speaker
Which I think is how every American should introduce themselves in other countries. Just like, if you meet another American, you have to salute and sing the national anthem. It's hilarious. I think by that point, I was just so sold on this movie.
01:04:57
Speaker
When they meet each other in the train at the beginning, the banter is already so good and the comedy hits so hard. And the rest of this movie, my face was sore from just smiling the entire time. It was just joyful every moment.
01:05:17
Speaker
Um, maybe this is just my own kind of, this movie's definitely a lot more like highbrow than the Marx Brothers. But I also think it's much, I think this movie's much funnier than Duck Soup, so. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I think a lot of that's just writing. Like, it's like, all the jokes come out of character. They don't feel as kind of random and slapdash. There are some kind of similar like wordplay things like, uh, like what's your salary in round numbers? In round numbers? Zero.
01:05:48
Speaker
But so it's based on a play and I think a lot of these, a lot of these kind of jokes feel very like stagey jokes, like stage banter jokes.
01:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think so much of it works, but also like a lot of it is owed to just the charisma of the of the main characters. Yeah. Yeah. All three leads in this movie have insane charisma. I think Gary Cooper is the one that kind of stood out to me because I'm used to seeing Gary Cooper in more like dramatic roles, I guess, like I think of like High Noon or something from later on.
01:06:25
Speaker
But he's very funny in this movie. Yeah, no, he's they're all they're all great. Yeah. Once they realize that they're all falling in love, it all kind of they're the best friends end up starting to like try and spite each other and hate each other. And they're like, we can't be doing this. Like we got to we're friends. We're not going to let some dame tear us apart. And
01:06:48
Speaker
eventually, and then she comes by and they both fall apart again. And then Gilda, who is the woman they meet, she says she finds herself in a position that men usually find themselves in, which is that she's in love with two people and has to make the decision but can't. So, yeah, some commenting on gender roles and stuff there of, you know,
01:07:15
Speaker
kind of traditionally like it's like women are like they choose one person and then men are trying to like you know talk to everybody at once kind of thing but she just can't get over the fact that she loves both of them equally and they can't get over how much they love her in spite of each other
01:07:38
Speaker
uh and they agree uh that they'll live together as as friends and uh another kind of very pre-code moment is they just specifically using the word say no sex yeah which really stood out to me as like old movies don't say sex in them and yeah other than pre-code movies right and so it's like
01:08:02
Speaker
This is also another really good example of like how pre-code movies just feel more kind of alive because they're not hampered by a bunch of dumb arbitrary rules all the time. Yeah. But so, yeah, they come to a gentleman's agreement, as they put it, to like they're going to live platonically. They're going to like platonically just have she can see both of them, but they're going to keep it as platonic.
01:08:29
Speaker
And then almost immediately Tom, who's the playwright played by Frederick March, his play gets produced and he has to go off to London to oversee his play, leaving the other two just to kind of stew in sexual tension, which does not last long. Yeah, he worries about when they leave. I love also like he's going back and forth about trying to leave to London and this movie has so much
01:08:57
Speaker
so much indecision in it. It's so much about people coming up with something and then going, oh, no, I shouldn't, I shouldn't. And the scene where he's leaving, he's having this debate about whether it should go. He decides to stay in Paris and then smash cut to him leaving to London. Yeah. There's a lot of really good smash cut jokes in that. There's one earlier when it's like they're establishing how Gilda is in love with both of them.
01:09:26
Speaker
And one of them like two camera almost says like, oh, I'm in love. And then like cuts to her making out with the other one. I think it like this this stuff kind of plays into the theming of the movie, too, of like it being about indecision and then showing that with the with the editing as well. And kind of like contradiction, too. Yeah. Yeah. But yes, that they had the gentleman's agreement. Gilda says, I'm not a gentleman.
01:09:57
Speaker
Like the same night, pretty much. He's like, well, I'm not a gentleman, so. And yes, so they get together. Then Tom said then. Right. Well, because Tom doesn't know that until later, like he's at the premiere of his play and he finds out and does not enjoy his premiere at all.
01:10:17
Speaker
And so then it's like he returns to Paris after a period of time. And at this point he's kind of like forgiven them basically, or forgiven, he's forgiven his friend because he knows how hopelessly and loved both of them are. Yeah. But he hasn't forgiven Gilda.
01:10:37
Speaker
for what she's done. So he gets back to Paris, and after yelling at each other for a while, they immediately hook up. Yeah, while Gary Cooper is out of town. And so then when he comes back, they're like, oh, now we got to tell him that we hicked up while he was out of town.
01:10:59
Speaker
And someone says, like, oh, he's going to break something. And they say, we have to tell him the truth, regardless of what happens to the furniture, which is also a good line. And then later, they do tell him, and he is angry. And just off screen, you hear the sound of breaking dishes. And they just kind of nod to each other, like, yeah, we knew this would happen. Yeah. And so there's a lot of back and forth in this movie about who's with who and everything. But it's all this kind of,
01:11:28
Speaker
they respect each other but they are completely incapable of holding back their feelings for each other. Gilda eventually tries to kind of solve the problem by leaving the situation entirely and marrying her nerd sycophant. Right, this guy Plunkett who is kind of like her
01:11:55
Speaker
like boss, manager, guy. Caretaker. Yeah, he says caretaker, which is like a very vague role. I think early on, someone kind of like makes fun of him for like not marrying her or like hooking up with her.
01:12:10
Speaker
One of them says like, oh, he never got to first base, which I'm assuming is like the base system, which I also I don't. When was that established? Like, was that a thing in the 1930s? Did people refer to like baseball bases as like levels of like sexual encounter? I don't know.
01:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's the term gold diggers, bases, these are things that existed longer than I thought. I think the thing that throws me a little bit with some of these older movies is that the word they use for making out is making love.
01:12:49
Speaker
which is not the same as it became. But yeah, she is eventually extremely unhappy with this guy, this compromise. This guy plunket who sucks is who she decides to marry and it's immediately a bad idea.
01:13:11
Speaker
He is very much about keeping up airs with the rich people around him or whoever is interested in whatever thing. He has a party and he's like, oh, you've got to be interested in concrete, Gilda. This guy is the number one man in concrete. On their wedding night, he keeps trying to get her to go to bed with him and she is like, no.
01:13:37
Speaker
Like he keeps saying, I have an appointment tomorrow morning. And he's like, all right, go to bed by yourself. And he has like sheepishly go to bed by himself.
01:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, he's throwing this like fancy high society party that Gilda hates because it's terrible because he's trying to introduce her to all of the concrete magnates. Yeah. Oh, the other thing. Sorry. The other thing on on on their wedding day was he asks her if she loves him and she says, like, you don't ask that on your wedding day. Like, it's either too early or too late for you to ask me that, which was a good way of her dodging the question. Yeah.
01:14:19
Speaker
But yeah, this is probably a year later or something like that. And then Tom and George end up showing up at this party. Yeah, they crashed his high society tuxedo party. And then. Where everyone is playing 20 questions.
01:14:37
Speaker
Oh my God, 20 questions. Plunkett loves 20 questions. And I feel like Ernst Lubitsch hates 20 questions. Cause he's like, what's the worst thing that can happen at a party is playing 20 questions. And literally this, it's so ridiculous. Like him running to every room in the house going, we're playing 20 questions. We're playing 20 questions. Come on over. And then everybody's like, Oh God, we're playing 20 questions. It's so exciting. It's 1933. This is exciting.
01:15:03
Speaker
And Gilda is like, if I play 20 questions, I'm going to shoot myself. Sometimes when I throw a party, I feel like plunk it here because I'm just like, everybody's got to be happy. We've got to run over here, make sure this happens.
01:15:25
Speaker
uh but yeah tom and george crashed the party and uh and meet jilda up in her room uh and they eventually all realized this was silly we shouldn't have been mad at each other we should all just
01:15:40
Speaker
become a throuple we should all just uh you should leave plunk it because we knew that wasn't serious in the first place and uh you should be with the two of us and we're gonna we're gonna love you both at the same time yeah we're both gonna love you at the same time because like it ends with them saying like all right we're gonna like they say like gentleman's agreement and everyone's like okay gentleman's agreement but i
Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
01:16:01
Speaker
I feel like that could be interpreted either as them agreeing to live together platonically as per their original agreement, or it's a reference to the fact that that agreement immediately went out the window and that they should just agree to be an actual throuble.
01:16:14
Speaker
I think it's like a winking thing with a gentleman's agreement because right after they say that, she kisses one of them and then kisses the other one. And that's how the movie ends, is they're riding away in a car and they all just, they all just Polly smooched each other.
01:16:36
Speaker
Um, there is a line when, uh, when Gilda is yelling at Plunkett where she says, uh, your whole flock of Eagle Bowers, Eagle Bower being the family of concrete magnates. But it's said quickly enough that I legitimately thought the line was your whole fucking Eagle Bowers.
01:16:58
Speaker
And I was like, wait, is there, did they just drop an F-bomb in this movie? Like pre-code is going hard, but I put on subtitles and it was flock of, so. The only, the most extreme language we've seen in the pre-code movie has been Hell's Angels. And it really has not been matched since then. Where they say, damn.
01:17:18
Speaker
They say God damn and they say son of a bitch. Yeah. So, yeah, this movie made it through that. The Hays Code existed when this movie was made, but it just wasn't really as enforced as it would be.
01:17:30
Speaker
like a year or two later. This movie was, however, banned by something called The Legion of Decency, which I had never heard of, but it is a Christian group from the 1930s that I guess existed to try to keep decency alive. And we're not a fan of this picture. Not surprised. Yeah, but I am. I think it's a good one.
01:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, I love this movie. It's so good. I really want to. It's so, so funny and it's so charming. It's great. It's like surprisingly progressive for when it came out. I think this movie would be progressive now. Like I still don't think a romantic comedy about polyamory is like it's not like a common thing. I guess any romantic comedy now is uncommon and it's like, oh, my God, someone made a romantic comedy.
01:18:24
Speaker
Um, I really want to seek out, even if not for the show, like I want to watch more Ernst Lubitsch movies because there's just such a kind of, all of the stuff that we've watched from him has this really kind of infectiously fun tone to it. Yeah. Um, and it's very, it's very cheeky and, uh,
01:18:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think if you were to show people like anybody an old movie, like this would be something that could scratch at modern, you know, modern sensibilities. Yeah. There's nothing about this movie that feels like you're watching something too old. Yeah. Yeah. Changing gears a whole bunch. Yeah. I guess I guess we kind of there's no really clean transition, I guess, to the next movie.
01:19:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like as per I'm talking about the Testament of Dr. Mabuza, directed by Fritz Lang, who has said it's like very outspoken about this movie is about Nazis and like Nazis taking over Germany and kind of like the the the fear and like. Yeah, just the the bad vibes that that brings with it.
01:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, it is about like it's reaching at some kind of like fundamental anxiety that you would be feeling as a German citizen at the time. Though it is kind of in line with what Fritz Lang has been doing, which is ping ponging back and forth between seriousness and pulp. And like this is definitely pulp. Yes.
01:20:06
Speaker
This, like, M is a very, like, dark, serious movie. Yeah, for sure. And then, like, and there's a character, like, the police inspector character is, like, held over from the movie M. But in this movie, he's in, like, a proto James Bond, like, proto Roger Moore James Bond, you know? Right, yeah. But, yeah, like Spies, it's very, it's very, like, you know, Spectre and Secret Agents and all kinds of stuff. This movie feels like
01:20:35
Speaker
Spies and M had a baby kind of like yeah Yeah It's like the the pulpy like supervillain stuff from spies meets the kind of like more grounded like crime procedural stuff from M Yeah, this movie premiered in Budapest Hungary Because it was immediately banned in Germany like before it was even released pretty like it it did not play in Germany they had to have the premiere in a different country and
01:21:01
Speaker
Because, yeah, the Nazi propaganda machine was not a fan of this picture. Yeah. I believe this is the last movie that Fritz Lang made in Germany. Yes. Before moving to the US. Immediately after this movie, I think he left his wife Theobhan Harbu and moved to the US. It's kind of like under threat of death.
01:21:27
Speaker
Like I know that Goebbels tried to get Fritz Lang to be like the head of the Nazi propaganda machine. Like he was like, we want you to like head to like the Nazi film industry. And Fritz Lang was like, oh, no, thank you. And so then he like had to kind of flee Germany in the night almost because it was like he had people like staking out his house and things like that.
01:21:54
Speaker
We kind of made some assumptions I think in previous episodes that he left his wife because of her association with Nazis, but I was reading up on Thea von Harbo who wrote this movie. This was her final collaboration with him too. They broke up like during the production of the movie.
01:22:12
Speaker
And it's a little unclear exactly what her associations with Nazis is. She stayed in Germany during the Nazi regime and made, collaborated on films with the Nazis.
01:22:28
Speaker
The specific reason that he left her was I guess Fritz Lang was like always was always like going after other ladies and And so she finally did they kind of you know They knew what was going on, but she finally did she and then Fritz Lang found her with another director and And then he calls it off
01:22:51
Speaker
So, even though he's not the Nazi in this relationship, he's not a scoundrel. Oh, no, yeah, he's for sure a scoundrel. I mean, on his Wikipedia page, there's stuff like he might have murdered one of his previous wives, we don't know. Fritz Long was a bit of a scoundrel, for sure.
01:23:14
Speaker
I think Scoundrel even is too playful of a word. He might have been a real piece of shit, I don't know. But this movie is, I'm a fan. Yeah, it's a fun one. I didn't really expect this movie to be, I guess, what it is. I mean, this movie is a sequel to Dr. Mabuza the Gambler, which is a... Which we missed. We missed because it's four hours long. But that movie is about a supervillain who uses hypnosis
01:23:43
Speaker
like commits all these crimes and then gets caught at the end and then this movie is picking up where he has been and like this movie was made like 10 years after that and it's like in real time he's been locked up for 10 years in an insane asylum which is cool yeah i expected this movie to be like oh he's gonna break out of prison and like resume his crime empire but i think the movies you kind of want to think that for a while the movie is way more interesting than that because it's more like he is he hypnotizes his doctor into like
01:24:13
Speaker
becoming the new Dr. Mabuza after he dies.
01:24:18
Speaker
which is crazy. I wonder if it was like how much of it was hypnotizing and how much of it was the things that Dr. Mabuza wrote in his journals were so insane that they broke the mind of his therapist. Right, it's kind of that too, but it's like Dr. Mabuza is such a brilliant mind that is also insane and evil that just like by being around him,
01:24:48
Speaker
It like corrupts you. It's like a Harley Quinn situation. Right. But it's like he's almost transferring like his own his criminal mind, his own essence into his psychiatrist. We see Dr. Mabuza like die in this or like a carcass. And I'm like, oh, he faked his death. And it's like, no, he really does die. But then it's like he lives on through through his ideas and his plans and plots.
01:25:18
Speaker
So while he was in the asylum, he was like frenzied, scrawling all of these plans, very, very meticulous plans for crime operations. This is reading this and also like his philosophy on spreading chaos through the world.
01:25:39
Speaker
And that is the testament of Dr. Boos, the titular testament. His kind of last will and testament, yeah, was so powerful that his empire was able to continue on without him. And so he is in a sort of like video-drome Brian oblivion fashion. The psychiatrist ends up taking the mantle of Dr. Mabuza, but then doing it only through voice. And
01:26:08
Speaker
His crime empire still exists, but it's propped up by like a Wizard of Oz phantom of the original Dr. Mabuza hidden behind a curtain with a microphone and a silhouette to order people around. Yeah. And Fritz Lang made a third Dr. Mabuza movie in the 60s that I think is also like a direct sequel to this movie of like Dr. Mabuza has been dead for 30 years.
01:26:36
Speaker
but somehow he's back. And there, at least I think this one and the first one are based on like pulp crime novels, sort of like Fanta Mas-esque books. And I think in those, there's like even more of a sense of like the supernatural around Dr. Mabuza, like he might be like more of an evil spirit than that person who like possesses, like his like essence is like transferred from person to person. Like Irma Vep.
01:27:06
Speaker
I guess kind of right if we're going on by the Irma vet like TV show. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I love the like such a main like pillar of this movie is the idea that like ideas can be dangerous and that like just the fact that Dr. Mobuzi is like writing this stuff down. He doesn't even have to be like enacting all these criminal plans. Like as long as people are following his instructions, like it's it'll still happen. And even after he's dead, like he's still sort of like exerting his
01:27:36
Speaker
evil influence. Also, Dr. Mabuz's whole thing is he's not in crime to make money or to grab power. He just wants, to paraphrase a movie directly inspired by this one, he just wants to see the world burn. Chris Nolan had his screenwriter watch this movie. His screenwriter, his brother.
01:28:02
Speaker
with the other Nolan. Yeah, Jonathan Nolan. I just realized that me and my brother have the same names as Nolan's brother. Do you have a secret third brother who's a con artist? That's none of your concern. Well, damn. Maybe. But enough you see a lot of how much Christopher Nolan has sort of
01:28:29
Speaker
not necessarily directly lifted from this movie but you can I think he's he's clearly a fan of Fritz Long movies and this movie is I think like this Metropolis are the two that I think are that is the most apparent in because yeah there's definitely a lot of like
01:28:43
Speaker
supervillain Dark Knight stuff in this one. And also Metropolis is the name of where Superman lives. True. And yeah, I think like Spies there's a lot of James Bond stuff, the literal man behind the curtain is very Blofeld-esque.
01:29:04
Speaker
Even if it turns out to be an elaborate ruse in this one. There is some great crime spy stuff of being locked in the room with the ticking bomb and having to escape. Like having to use your wits to escape. Yeah, that whole section is great.
01:29:25
Speaker
It really it is just like as we were watching spies were saying this like it James Bond owes so much to these movies Yeah, like to a degree that I had no idea before watching them
01:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, like apart from what kind of like, I don't know, sort of, you know, specters and evil organization. But like it's not like talking about real organized crime stuff. And I think this does touch on this kind of gritty aspects of organized crime where they talk about like, like, oh, yeah, we're selling like cocaine, morpheum and morphine, morphine and opium. Yeah. Talking about actual drugs. Yeah. Instead of just making a reference to them.
01:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's like it is kind of like I said before like marrying the the the really pulpy James Bond stuff from spies with like really grounded like crime procedural stuff in M like There's a bit in this where a guy is assassinated in his car
01:30:21
Speaker
during a bunch of honking horns, which is great. And then the cops investigating it are using like ballistics to like, oh, like the angle of the bullet and like the bullet was clearly fired from this gun because we tested the bullet. We like compared the bullets being fired from different guns and this one matches.
01:30:38
Speaker
Yeah, which I think is is I've never seen that in a movie before this and it's really cool. And then so the besides the sort of like Dr. Mabuza, Dr. Mabuza, the guy is like barely in this movie. He's only in like a couple of scenes. And then there's like the crazy hallucination of him, which is amazing.
01:30:58
Speaker
Yeah, which Fritz Lang said that he regretted keeping the supernatural elements. Crazy, because that stuff is amazing. That stuff is so cool. I think that the double exposure, he's seeing the Phantom of Dr. Mabuza, I think that stuff's
01:31:19
Speaker
you could play that however like that could just be like his imagination or that kind of thing as as the psychiatrist has been driven insane but um it goes as far toward the end of the movie as doing a like the shining style like the ghost is opening doors to help people out uh well it's like
01:31:40
Speaker
This guy thinks that a ghost opened the door and then other people see that like it's not necessary like no one else could have opened the door but it's like from this one character's perspective who is clearly like is hallucinating and is unhinged it's like I don't know it's ambiguous enough that I think it it works as like how did this door get opened maybe it was a ghost we don't know.
01:32:03
Speaker
Right. It's interesting, the ghosts. Yeah. And that stuff is like there's a lot of cool like expressionism stuff in this movie during when we're like in the heads of people who are who have gone mad. Kind of like there's the doctors like seeing like phantoms of Dr. Mabuza and like hearing his voice talking to him and things like that. And there's also the guy who is like an informant for the cops who is like driven insane.
01:32:32
Speaker
And then it's like there's a bit where he's like answering the phone and we see like the room he's in is like a normal table and like chairs. But then we see it kind of from his perspective and everything's made out of glass and like is transparent. Super cool. Yeah, that's really neat.
01:32:49
Speaker
Yeah, them like trying to get information out of this informant but his mind got so broken that like he cannot really tell them anything and they're just trying to like divine what
01:33:05
Speaker
what information they can out of his uh out of like the state that he's in and like the things that he's saying he's kind of like stuck in this uh stuck in this moment of like pre-attack from uh from from when he was getting silenced by the gang. Dr. Mabooza is played by Rudolf Kleinrog? Rog?
01:33:28
Speaker
um i'm probably butchering that again but this is what happens when i do no research but he's the guy who played the the mad scientist in metropolis and the supervillain guy in spies also uh and he played dr mabuza in the original right yeah he does not return in the third dr mabuza movie as far as i know uh looks like he died before the 60s yeah but his his voice in this movie is really
01:33:55
Speaker
like he's like talking in a whisper and like people are just kind of hearing it in their own heads and it's it's very unsettling. The kind of main characters they're actually following for most of it are there's the police inspector Loman. Loman. That isn't the guy's name in M, but it is like almost the same character, right? Yeah, he's inspector Karl Loman in M as well. Oh, okay. Oh, cool.
01:34:18
Speaker
So I guess this is the Fritz Lang cinematic universe. The Langaverse. It's like a Tarantino thing where you got your recurring characters. Oh, that is cool, though. I didn't really put that together. So right. So the police inspector from M is also in this movie and smokes lots of cigars and is a hard ass. Then we also follow Tom and Lily and Tom is
01:34:46
Speaker
A criminal who works for Mabuza's crime gang, but he's also in love with Lily and is sort of torn between the two worlds. He's haunted by, he doesn't want to kill nobody, and he's haunted by the killing that he's done, but he can't get out of the criminal gang. He does eventually confess to Lily that he went to jail for murdering his last girlfriend.
01:35:11
Speaker
And Lili is like, that's okay. You seem okay. And it's like, okay? I would take that as a bit of a red flag, but...
01:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, let's just hit the brakes for a second. Yeah, Lily is very understanding. Eventually, Tom fails to show up to work at crime. Him and Lily are put in the secret meeting room and find out that the man behind the curtain is just a speaker and a wooden cutout. They're locked in and there's a ticking
01:35:42
Speaker
So they're going to get blown up if they can't escape. And there's the whole scene of them trying to cut through the ceiling. Pull up the floorboards and get to the floor. They can't get out of the room. So Tom decides to break the pipes.
01:35:59
Speaker
flood the room so that when the bomb goes off it'll the force will be dissipated through the water and then the bomb will open a hole in the floor that they can escape out of. It's also got this like whole like there's other plot stuff happening at the same time so it's sort of like doing this very this thing's done in a lot of movies these days which is just like you know you've got like this tense scene
01:36:21
Speaker
And you keep kind of like coming back to it as it develops Yeah while like and it's and like the other scenes that it's intercutting with they're kind of relieving some of the tension but then creating some of their own tension a lot of time a lot of the editing in this movie rules like is There's a lot of feel like intercutting between different kind of like parallel scenes happening. There's lots of like a
01:36:46
Speaker
a character starting a conversation and then we cut away to a different scene, but that conversation carries over into it because that's what they're talking about. There's a really great transition where someone holds up a photo of someone and then it transitions to that person sitting in the exact same position. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many different threads that we're following that it's jumping between them all really well. Then it ends with Mabuza's plan works. He blows up this factory and releases poison gas into the air.
01:37:16
Speaker
And it's like, it's only after that that they kind of like figure out that he's sort of like imprinted his own mind onto his psychiatrist. Right. Like the success of the movie is that they have determined what's going on, but like his plans were good and he won. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, like his plan isn't.
01:37:40
Speaker
like it's just to like mess up Germany, basically. Fritz Lang really being subtle on that one. You were talking about the cigars that Lohmann smokes and I forgot to bring up that cigarette bit was in gold diggers. That was also in Popeye. Do you have anything else on
01:38:06
Speaker
The Testament of Dr. Mabuza? I don't think so. I mean, I really like this one a lot and was very surprised by the twists and turns that it took. Yeah, it's a fun one. 1933 is a solid year. Very good movie year. Yeah. Another movie that is about a completely anti-social guy who wants to destroy the world.
01:38:31
Speaker
is the Invisible Man. Ah, what a picture. Which also rules this... Also a returning director.
The Invisible Man: Madness and Chaos
01:38:42
Speaker
Yes, this is James Whale, who we saw on Frankenstein as well. And in many ways, the Invisible Man feels like him kind of like redoing Frankenstein, like his version of Frankenstein. There's a lot of similar plot elements, but I think this movie is executed a lot better than Frankenstein. Frankenstein's good, but this is like really good. Yeah, this is definitely, for the show, this is definitely,
01:39:12
Speaker
my favorite Universal Monster movie that we've watched so far. We're kind of hitting all the big ones, but even like in the grand scheme of them, of like all of them that I've watched, I might like Creature from the Black Lagoon more than this, but like this might be my favorite Universal Monster movie.
01:39:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this this movie is it's really intense. Yeah, it's like the guy, the Invisible Man is very threatening and the voice work that the guy who they hired to play him, Claude Rains.
01:39:43
Speaker
he was a relatively inexperienced actor and a lot of people didn't think that he would be very good on screen. He had just kind of been in stage stuff and he didn't screen test very well, but James Whale hired him just based on his voice, which is what he mostly is in this
01:40:07
Speaker
movie and his voice is very imposing. It is him like playing him in the bandages also I think but yeah it is like he gets so much out of that voice. It is really a sort of like a very voice forward naturally
01:40:27
Speaker
Performance and yeah Claude Rains crushes it. He's got a great voice for this character I feel like this is another instance where it's like the Claude Rains invisible man voice is like Has become such a thing where it's like if you want almost like an like an evil mastermind voice like do that like that's kind of right in the book on it almost and
01:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, especially a British one. Yeah. Interestingly, like both the Invisible Man and Dr. Mabuza are these sort of like criminal mastermind types who just want to like blow things up. And Dr. Mabuza talks in like a horse whisper all the time. He's always whispering into people's ears and stuff. Whereas the Invisible Man likes to make very grand declarations and yell at people and complain about people entering his room.
01:41:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like he is in, you know, both of these characters are invisible in some ways. But Dr. Mabuza is, you know, kind of using that invisibility to, yeah, like seed ideas. And this guy is just like, do what I say, damn it.
01:41:39
Speaker
Or I'll strangle you when you least expect it. Yeah, he's using his invisibility in an extremely threatening, ominous way. There's a scene where he talks about what he can do and his ambitions for ruling the world.
01:41:57
Speaker
And because he's figured out the secret to becoming invisible, and he's like, I will make the governments of the world compete for who was going to get this secret from me. They'll grovel at my feet. Everyone's going to worship me. I can rape and kill however much I want. It's very extreme. Yeah. He really goes off the deep end.
01:42:25
Speaker
Part of the framing of all of this is that the serum that makes you invisible also makes you crazy. Right. He uses a fictional chemical called monocaine, which is a sort of bleaching agent, but then also just happens to cause murderous thoughts and megalomania. Makes you go mad.
01:42:51
Speaker
Um, I didn't think it was kind of funny. They're like, monocain. It comes from India, which feels like then kind of, it's a far off place that we don't know about. It's scary. It's very orient. Yeah. It's very like, it's, it's foreign. It's scary. But so I, I like how this movie kind of starts with him.
01:43:07
Speaker
already invisible, already crazy, already like plotting awful things. Like we don't see him as a scientist before any of this. Everyone just talks about Jack Griffin, the scientist, as like he was obsessive but he's like a swell guy. We never meet that guy. We never see him. People only talk about him. It's like the only Jack Griffin we ever
01:43:29
Speaker
interact with or like see on screen or not see on screen, more like, is Crazy Invisible, Jack Riffen. He's not just invisible, he's crazy invisible. Yeah, he is crazy invisible. Classic, iconic look of him with like wrapped up in bandages with either goggles or red sunglasses.
01:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, I am. I'm a big fan of his wardrobe in this movie, I got to say, because he either you've got like two looks. He's either like in a suit with like big goggles and the bandages over his face or he's in like nice pajamas and a robe and and bandages and like cool Victorian sunglasses. He this movie starts with him walking into a town like
01:44:17
Speaker
Does that happen at Frankenstein? No. There's kind of a similar scene in Dracula, where they're coming from town. Dracula. Yeah, but it's not the bad guy, I guess, in Dracula. Well, it's Renfield, actually. So it is kind of like, yeah. But anyway, he is kind of following some road signs in a snowstorm, and he ends up in this village called Iping.
01:44:44
Speaker
in Sussex and finds his way into this inn with these people with very funny accents. Including. Very cockney, heavy duty English accents. Including. And so, you know, he goes up into his room. He's very rude to people. He would have been fine, honestly, if he wasn't so rude. Yeah. It's a side effect of the serum also. It makes you very rude.
01:45:13
Speaker
Like, if he just wanted to be left alone to work on his invisibility serum so that he can become invisible and cure himself at will and then make other people invisible if they give him piles of gold. Right. Well, because initially he is trying to figure out a way to make himself visible again. Yeah. And then kind of abandons that as his insanity deepens and he is just concerned with
01:45:39
Speaker
causing mayhem. He's not nice to all of these people in the inn and also they're not that nice to him because they they they think he's weird because he's covered in bandages and that's and and they want to spy on him and all that so that's not very nice but I mean speaking of the accents they end up you know he ends up getting a little violent with them and they call a cop over and
01:46:07
Speaker
the cop they call over, the Bobby that they bring over. He says, what's all this then? Yeah, I teared.
01:46:19
Speaker
He's a very, like, bumbling cop. And when he starts going on a bit more of his, like, murderous rampage and the actual police get involved, they start shaming this guy for being a bit of a bumbling fool. Well, at first no one believes that there's an invisible guy. Yeah. Because the tan's people kind of, like, bust into it after he's, like, pushed people down the stairs.
01:46:44
Speaker
They bust into his room and he's like, ah, you think I'm just a crazy person? Check it out. I'm also invisible. And he takes off his bandages in a very cool scene that is still, I think, very impressive to look at, like the VFX of it. Looking at those at the invisibility scenes like and the kind of reveal of the Invisible Man, it's amazing. It's the best effects I've seen in any movie so far. At least until the next movie that we talk about.
01:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, super impressive. Like holds up surprisingly well. He takes off all his clothes and goes on a little invisible rampage for the town, which I do like how this movie is set during winter. And so it's like when he's going full invisible, he can only kind of do it for short periods of time because it's so cold out. And he's like, I'm freezing. I need to go inside for clothes on. Yeah, there's there's a naked invisible man wandering around. Yeah.
01:47:40
Speaker
which I think the movie does acknowledge more than I kind of thought it would, that it's like, yeah, he gets really cold. This movie is very concerned with the mechanics of him being invisible. It also talks about how he can't go out and commit his crime sprees if he's eaten in the last hour because the undigested food still is visible hanging in his stomach. I do wish they showed that, but I also understand why they didn't.
01:48:08
Speaker
He points out, yeah, it's like he has to keep his nails clean because the dirt under his fingernails will give him away. Yeah, it's very, very well thought out of the mechanics of it. I do think it's funny he's talking about all his grand, and some of which he does get into, of causing accidents and disasters and things to happen. But initially, all of his crimes as an invisible person are pushing people down the stairs, or spilling their drinks, or tripping people, or taking their bicycle.
01:48:40
Speaker
He starts very small. Innocent. Not really innocent, but he's just kind of using his invisibility to fuck with people. But at the beginning, he's fed up with all of these townies. And so he's like, ah, look at me. I'm stealing your bicycle. Isn't that silly?
01:49:00
Speaker
he does eventually he goes breaks into the house of his former friend and kind of demands that he be his visible helper in all of his crimes against humanity. Another shared element of this with Frankenstein is that there's like two scientist understudy buddies who want who
01:49:25
Speaker
one goes off and does something crazy and the other one's after his girl at the same time. Like super obviously after his girl, yeah. Yeah, Jack Griffin and Dr. Frankenstein are very similar characters and are like treated in very similar fashions I think about these movies.
01:49:44
Speaker
James Ware loves a mad scientist who's going off the rails. Yeah. Jack Griffin, he starts exerting his invisible powers upon his old buddy and very quickly makes his threats like very real. He's like, I could be anywhere like you.
01:50:06
Speaker
like can't escape me. I can follow you and you won't know it. It's all like very threatening. It's all like once he has decided to use his power to manipulate people, it's it's very easy for him to do so. And it's like terrifying. Like he is invisible. There's nothing you can do about it. Well, that's that's the thing. It's like I feel like as a monster, the invisible man initially is like invisible. Like, who cares? Like, what's he going to do? I think this movie does a really good job of explaining how terrifying that implication really is.
01:50:36
Speaker
Yeah. If someone's invisible, then they can sneak up on you and stab you or choke you to death. His preferred method of murder is strangulation, which is a scary way to kill someone. Yeah. But then I think that this movie does really well and that I was very impressed by and didn't expect there to be as much of this as there is, is that as the movie goes on, you start to get
01:51:03
Speaker
more and more just kind of like uncertain about whether or not he's even in the room in certain scenes. Yeah. Like the other characters are starting to be like we have to just assume that he's always next to us because he might be. And so good that idea is terrifying. I'm just like the fact that he could be anywhere anywhere at once. He almost starts to actually be everywhere at once. And like people start to act in that like just assuming that he's in the room because like right.
01:51:31
Speaker
The hijinks in this town that he was staying in, they start off as this silly thing of this whole town thinks there's an invisible guy, isn't that dumb? And then once he chokes out a cop in front of the other cops,
01:51:48
Speaker
The radio starts saying, everybody lock your doors. Yeah, there's an invisible crazy man. And I think I think this movie starts to do that the the 2020 remake of this movie also does really well is it's like it'll just show you like an empty corner of a room and just that is very threatening because it's like, is he there?
01:52:11
Speaker
He might be, he might not be, but you have to start to assume that he's lurking in every corner because that's always a possibility.
01:52:21
Speaker
Yeah. And speaking more to the mechanics, after this all becomes apparent, there's basically a nationwide manhunt for him. And the precautions that the cops are taking are like, okay, we've got to think about what could it imply that there might be an invisible man near us? And it's like, how do we ensure that
01:52:44
Speaker
Like, what are some strategies we could use to capture him? And like, how do we ensure that he's not near us while we're talking about our plans? And so they go into this room and then run a net across the entire room to make sure that he's not in the room with them, which is a really great touch. And they're like part of their plans toward capturing him are like spraying him with paint or like knocking some dirt onto him so that it sits on his shoulders and you can see it floating.
01:53:14
Speaker
very very very cool stuff yeah yeah another thing that i was sort of i guess i sort of like almost like the intellectual implication of this movie is like how much is
01:53:27
Speaker
griffins like insanity and his like cruelty coming from the fact that he's taking this weird chemical and how much of it is just him like tripping out on the power of being invisible because he does he does like get worse over the course of the movie like he starts out and he's just like a jerk to everyone he's just rude and is like
01:53:46
Speaker
He's clearly, you know, not well. But then by the end of the movie, he is like plotting to like take over the world and like commit mass murder and things like that. And it's like I like how much of it is sort of like some of this might just be him. The fact that he has been invisible for like weeks or months on end might have just like changed his the way that like he sees the world almost. Right.
01:54:15
Speaker
It's like just by being invisible has made him more evil. I mean, yeah, there's a there's a there's a contender for there's a contender for that for sure. It's kind of the absolute power corrupts absolutely argument. The way that this movie ends is
01:54:35
Speaker
Well, the way this movie ends is also quite a Frankenstein ending. So after this manhunt, there's a farmer who's discovered some kind of strange mysterious snoring sounds.
01:54:55
Speaker
uh leaves or like hay rustling in his barn yeah uh after he's been on the run for a while during his his manhunt also he does he causes like a train derailment by like murdering the the guy who works at the train yard and like
01:55:11
Speaker
turning the tracks so that the trains collide and explode. Yeah, he is really just wanting to cause as much havoc as possible to just show people how powerful he is. Maybe I'm skipping a little bit ahead to the ending.
01:55:26
Speaker
But he also just brutally murders his friend after he realized that he called the police. He's like, if you betray me, I will find you and murder you. You cannot escape. I'm going to be behind you at some point, and you won't know. Very ominous. And so the guy, he's like, no one can leave me. I have to always be in a room with powder on the floor. He's taking all these precautions, and he thinks that he's gotten away.
01:55:54
Speaker
He gets into a car and he's driving along and then he hears a voice in the back seat. And yeah, Griffin like causes his car to go off a cliff and explode. Yeah. I knew you should, you, I told you, you shouldn't betray me. Yeah.
01:56:11
Speaker
now you'll suffer the consequences. There's some good stuff also with him sitting in cars while he's having his friend do his bidding because you can see so much stuff to just make him feel like he is present in the space.
01:56:28
Speaker
They do a lot of really good stuff with moving props around with wires that you can't see. And making them move in ways that don't look like they're being pulled by a wire. Like they're being manipulated by a person. But specifically with the cars, you see the seat depressed down when he sits down. Just another great touch.
01:56:51
Speaker
You're seeing that with the hay and the barn at the end. It's snow, and the cops know that they can track him in the snow, so they're like, this is the time. We've got to find him now while it's snowing.
01:57:05
Speaker
They get a call from the farmer and they, and Allah Frankenstein, they set fire to the barn to either smoke him out or burn him alive. And they have a ring, like a ring of cops all the way around the barn so that he can't slip past them.
01:57:29
Speaker
And they also and they can see the snow all around it. So as the as the fire as the barn burns, you see footprints in the snow. And they even the cops say like no one walk over to it because I'm like, we have to keep the snow clear.
01:57:45
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, they're able to shoot him, like based on the footprints. And once he gets shot, he falls in the snow and you see like a body, like the snow depress, kind of like the seat. The way they did that, John P. Fulton is the engineer who did all of the special effects in this movie.
01:58:05
Speaker
And he did the invisible effects and he also did these, which the way it was done was they put fake snow on top of a platform and then had cutouts, foot-shaped cutouts in the bottom of the platform that they pulled down to sink the snow down in foot shapes. Fantastic. The best.
01:58:27
Speaker
Like, such a simple thing, but like all the effects in this movie are like really kind of almost deceptively simple. But, uh, right, so after he gets shot, he gets brought to the hospital and his old girlfriend Flora comes and visits him. And kind of Flora's like the one person that he kind of acts normal around, like presumably how he used to be.
01:58:50
Speaker
before he went crazy and invisible. I do kind of wish the movie had a little bit more of this doomed romance subplot because I think it's a cool idea that
01:59:03
Speaker
He's going crazy, but his connection to her is kind of his one tether back to sanity. She's definitely more developed than the equivalent character in Frankenstein. Yeah, yeah. But so then when he dies, they sort of have a moment as he's dying where he's kind of returned to his old self a little bit. And then he dies and he becomes visible again in the hospital bed.
01:59:29
Speaker
And we get our one shot of Claude Raines' face in the whole movie. Oh, yeah. So Flora, the girlfriend, is played by Gloria Stewart. He was most famous for playing Old Rose in Titanic. I didn't know until after I saw this movie. And that's a fun fun video.
01:59:48
Speaker
She does some really kind of classic 1930s capital A acting in this movie. Like, oh, why? She's also one of the co-founders of Screen Actors Guild and of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Good job, Gloria. Well done, Gloria. You're done good. Going back to the effects a little bit, like these just mind blowing invisibility effects, the
02:00:14
Speaker
Um, the way it was done, it's, it's still using double expo or multiple exposures as has been the trick from every movie, uh, since 1896. But they are just being used to an extreme level of expertness.
02:00:32
Speaker
The way that they were able to isolate the certain areas where he was supposed to be invisible was they would cover everything that was supposed to be invisible in black fabric. So the effect of that is that
02:00:45
Speaker
You're not getting any of that janky translucency that you get in other movies that haven't done it as well. There's no translucency in the composited, quote unquote, things here. Like it looks like it's fully in the scene. It's three dimensional, too. Like you're seeing things being unwrapped and like the you know, you're seeing the the cloths moving around. Yeah. God, it's amazing.
02:01:16
Speaker
There's also, right, there's the multiple exposure thing, which is like, they had to do like, I think like four passes of. On the mirror scene in particular. Well, I think the mirror scene, they had to do like eight passes because they'd have to do it once for the image in the mirror and then once for the like foreground image of him also taking the bandages off.
02:01:40
Speaker
But then they needed to do the back plate of the mirror and the back plate. Yeah. Of the foreground. Crazy. Yeah. And then there's there's at least one shot of a close up of him taking the bandages off his face. And that was done with like a wire frame that they actually just wrapped bandages around. So that one has like even more kind of like 3D. You can see the back of the bandages in that one. Whereas in the multiple exposure stuff, they kind of
02:02:05
Speaker
When he's like, has the bandages half off of his head, you can't see the back of them in the front. This is an awful thing to explain in audio. The shots are very thoughtfully composed to make the effects pop as well as possible. And then there's also just fun stuff like a pair of pants chasing someone down the street.
02:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, this movie's a blast. This is great. Super fun. Great lead performance. Great monster. Did you say great monster? I did say great monster.
King Kong: A Cinematic Icon
02:02:39
Speaker
Great transition to one of the best monsters in any movie ever. It's King Kong. King Kong. We finally did King Kong. Oh, we finally did it. We don't have to change the album art for this episode at all.
02:02:53
Speaker
Yes, the background of all of this is that if you have been seeing the lovely album episode art that we have done custom for every episode, it is based off of a photo that I took of a print of King Kong that I ran.
02:03:11
Speaker
held the loop up to the kind of iconic scene of him in front of a skyscraper and and took a photo with my phone and then cropped out the the King Kong imagery and we put in different stuff. But now we don't have to. Yeah. Now it's the original photo. You did take like the best single frame of King Kong possible. It's like the most iconic thing I had to on the Empire State Building with an airplane. Yeah.
02:03:36
Speaker
When I'm running movies that I know well on film and I'm trying to capture imagery, I know what images I want to capture. I got one of those for Nightmare Before Christmas 2 while he's standing on the spiral hill. I had seen this movie a bunch of times. This is one of my favorite movies. I saw this movie as a young kid. I hadn't seen it in a while before I watched it this past week.
02:04:05
Speaker
But it's like it's up there in terms of I think I might have actually liked it less this time Nicely liked it less, but there's more stuff stuck out of like oh boy. This is an old movie, right? Um, but they're often kind of so over-the-top that it doesn't really hurt the movie as much as it maybe should for me Yeah, I people know what King Kong is but it it feels worth mentioning that this is like one of the most famous movies ever made probably I
02:04:34
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. It's one of those. This is a huge movie. It's very influential. It's like so. It was duty that killed the beast. Yeah. It's like so ingrained in culture, though, that like an entire building became associated with this movie and is like inseparable. Yeah. And even like the idea of like any primate of of any notable size is like, oh, King Kong.
02:04:59
Speaker
Donkey Kong. Right. And we're just like, King Kong is like a nickname. If someone's really big, like King Kong over here, like King Kong is like so it's like a reference that everyone gets. Yeah. Yeah. And it's anytime someone is standing on top of a building and starts like swatting at someone like King Kong. It's iconic. Yeah. It's iconic. It's like, but it's it's so iconic. We talked about this like Frankenstein and Dracula, but like King Kong might be even more of a like
02:05:29
Speaker
Also, because also those were books first. This is like a purely this came from movies and it's still kind of I feel like it's in the Roku background. You know, it's like it's it's so associated with if you've made it into the Roku background. That's what you know, you've made it. But it's it's like if you're going to throw like five like scenes from all of movies and you want to pick like the five most iconic ones, this would be one of them.
02:05:58
Speaker
Yes. I had seen this movie before as well. I've probably seen it a couple times back in the day. I'm pretty sure you watched this at my house at some point. I'm sure I have. Yes. But it probably been at least a decade since I've seen it. Yeah. And I was shocked at how brutal this movie is. Oh, yeah. I forgot that this is a pre-code movie and that it is like it goes places.
02:06:22
Speaker
Uh, this, this movie, you know, it's not, I think that you feel empathy for Kong, but it's not quite like the Peter Jackson movie where like, uh, he's a bit more, like, it's a bit more sappy or whatever. Like he is a monster in this movie.
02:06:39
Speaker
And you see that he's suffering a little bit, but also he's just chomping people and breaking their backs and snapping dinosaurs in half. This is some of the most shocking violence in any movie we've seen so far.
02:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. A lot of it's against dinosaurs, but still. Even with the people. People getting crushed and stomped and eaten. Speaking of the ways in Invisible Man where the special effects are integrated into the scene, it's done really, really well in this movie.
02:07:19
Speaker
where like there's a part where he's coming up to like some guys who are crossing a big gulch on a log and he starts shaking the log around to like make them fall down which you know they have the stop motion composite like in the background kind of moving its hands and then they have a giant log that they're just moving with the actual people on it and then
02:07:47
Speaker
And then the people fall down to their deaths and like snap their backs on the ground. Yeah, it's brutal Yeah, this movie it does such a good job of like the stop motion animation in this is the best That's been done up to this point like hands down yeah, but it does such a good job of integrating it into live action of like always having sort of like something in the foreground or something in the background that is being shot live action of like with real actors or real sets to kind of
02:08:17
Speaker
give this illusion of- Yeah. They also sell that really well with some super tight close-ups of Kong's face that are made in much more detail. It's still stop motion, I think, but it's like- They did build a big Kong head too though. Okay, yeah. There's a big Kong head and they built a big Kong hand. Right, yeah.
02:08:41
Speaker
I don't know how there's a lot to talk about with this movie. I feel like should we just like start at the beginning? Sure. Because right at the beginning, before the movie even starts, we see the RKO logo, which maybe look a little familiar to someone who watches the show.
02:08:59
Speaker
I guess, I mean, you know, they didn't invent that imagery. I think they did. I think that's RKO. That's like where the the. They did it in the radio tower. True. Also true. Funny because we also use a radio tower on a. Yeah, we're we're very we're a very con centric show. But this is the first RKO movie we've seen. Really big, famous production company. Yeah. RKO, which was about to go bankrupt.
02:09:29
Speaker
When they made this movie, they kind of put all their chips on it and it saved their entire company. I mean, it looks it. It looks so expensive. I guess we'll get into it. This movie cannibalized whole other movies and absorbed them into its production. But this movie opens with a completely made up old Arabian proverb, which goes, and lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty, and it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
02:09:59
Speaker
which is not a real proverb. It's made up by either Marion C. Cooper or Ernest Shodsek, one of the two directors of this movie, which we'll talk about them more too probably.
02:10:10
Speaker
This movie also starts with an overture, which is new. Well, I think that's on the DVD. I don't know if that was a thing when it first came out or not. Oh, really? Why wouldn't it be? I don't know. But I'm curious how much of that was like I don't know if that was something added back in when it was like released on DVD because like earlier releases of it did not have the orchard.
02:10:32
Speaker
Oh, interesting. But this movie, like any movie from this time period, got censored and, like, recut later on. So, who knows? Oh, King Kong originally did not have an overture. Okay. Okay. I like how it does now, though. Turner Classic Movies added it in 2005, apparently. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, so, like, right off the bat, we meet Carl Denham.
02:10:59
Speaker
who is a moving picture director and is a pretty direct analog for one of the directors, or I guess both directors of this movie, either Marion Cooper or Ernest Shodzek, because both of those guys
02:11:15
Speaker
were like crazy adventurer filmmakers that like went off into far away countries and like made sort of not really documentaries, sort of like Nanook style documentaries where they a lot of it was scripted but they were kind of trying to show people in the United States what like other cultures were like and then kind of misrepresenting them by doing so but um
02:11:40
Speaker
You know, they had a lot of wild animals and lions and things. So, Carl Denim is very kind of clearly based on them. He is also pretty much every, like...
02:11:51
Speaker
toxic negative trait that like a filmmaker can have in one character like he's incredibly egotistical and Reckless and willingly puts other people in danger and does not care that was another thing I think we're watching this movie I was cuz like in remakes of this they usually treat Carl Denham or the Carl Denham analog is like more of a like a villain and
02:12:15
Speaker
And I was like, I'll call that name in the original movie. He's like, he's OK. He's just trying to get his movie made. And it's like, no, he's like a crazy person in this movie. He's a very dangerous person to be around. Extremely reckless. Yeah. And so he's getting ready to go off to a mysterious place to make his new picture. And the producers are saying, you need a girl in this picture. You need a lady. And he says, isn't there any romance in the world without a flapper in it?
02:12:44
Speaker
The dialogue in this is also very 1930s banter heavy, which is very fun. There are a lot of people who just are not fans of women in this movie. But when you say that, I feel like normally it's like, oh, OK, they are kind of sexist or treat women badly. No, they directly say to them, I don't like women.
02:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean like this is the first movie that Carl Denham has made that has a woman in it, apparently. So they're like, God, the studio is forcing me to make a picture with a romantic angle. So it'll sell more tickets. The romantic angle. So yeah, Carl Denham goes out on the streets of New York that night to find a woman.
02:13:32
Speaker
And the first place he goes is like a woman shelter because it's the depression and like people need food and housing. He's like, ah, these are all uggos. I got to go somewhere else. He doesn't say that, but that's the vibe. Yeah. This section of the movie in New York City, I was surprised, I guess, at how like directly it is kind of commenting on the Great Depression, like. Hmm.
02:14:00
Speaker
this is a very like depression era movie and it's about kind of like money being tight and like things are are rough out there on the streets and it's like hard to get food because then he's walking by an apple stand and and arrow is uh stealing an apple that he he pays for played by fay ray classic fay ray
02:14:25
Speaker
It's been in lots of movies, but this is like the only one that she has ever remembered for because obviously. Something went wrong with Fay-Ray in Kong. And so then Carl Denham has to convince her to just get on a ship that night to go somewhere that she doesn't know where. And he won't tell her. Yeah. And not an actress, but she's like, hey, you're pretty. You want to be in a movie?
02:14:53
Speaker
She's like, sure, mister. Yeah. Well, she takes a little bit of convincing and he has to say, look, I'm on the level. No funny business.
02:15:02
Speaker
I have the quote. Yeah, like, yeah, she thinks that like, you know, he's trying to like take her up to his apartment or whatever. But yeah, no, I'm not interested in ladies. Yeah. I am an asexual reckless adventurer. Yeah. And so they got on the moving picture ship and head out to parts unknown. And on the ship, Andara runs into the first mate of the ship, Jack Driscoll.
02:15:30
Speaker
who, one of the first things he said, well, the first, the way they meet is Jektorskull accidentally slaps her in the face because he's throwing his arms up in the air. And then he says, women can't help being a bother, made that way, I guess. It's like, Jesus Christ. Tell us how you really feel.
02:15:49
Speaker
And this is the Smithers role in the King Kong, Simpson's Three Houses of Horror segment. One of the best Three Houses of Horror. Where he says, I think women and seamen don't mix. But so Jack, Tris, Glenn, and Darrow, they start to fall in love with each other, but the way it's dramatized in this movie is a little clunky.
02:16:17
Speaker
It's mostly just them saying that. Like, I don't actually think they have that much, like, romantic chemistry in this movie, but... No. He does become a strapping adventurer when he stops being, like, a whiny first mate. Yeah. Carl Denham picks up on the fact that he's getting sweet on Anne. And he goes, some big hard-boiled egg gets a good look at a pretty face and bang. He craps up and goes sappy.
02:16:44
Speaker
Incredible line of dialogue. It's around here that we find that the destination for this expedition is a place called Skull Island. There's also a Skull Mountain on Skull Island. It's like how there's a New York in New York. Right, yeah. And then that mystery solved. It's a mysterious island no one's ever been to. It's not on any map. Carl Denham has the only map because he interviewed a drunk sailor in Singapore.
02:17:14
Speaker
and got him to draw a map for him. And he's doing some screen tests with Anne on the deck of the ship with his old Bell and Howell hand-cranked camera. And we get a shot of the three crew guys all on a ladder, stacked on top of each other, which immediately stood out to me because that's where, in the Simpsons episode, there's the best joke in that whole thing. We're going to Ape Island.
02:17:41
Speaker
To find a big ape. I wish we were going to Candy Apple Island. What do they got there? Apes. Not so big though. It's a classic Simpsons joke.
02:17:54
Speaker
It's so simple, but it's the funniest thing in the world. One of their classic misdirection style jokes. Oh my god. Yes, while they're on the ship, she starts kind of befriending one of the monkeys on the ship, like a monkey that's just hanging out on the ship, which I think is a nice bit of foreshadowing. Yeah. She's just friendly to this like little charming monkey. And Darryl, friend of apes. Friend of apes, yes. Also, this is when when they're doing the screen test, we get our first fey-ray scream.
02:18:24
Speaker
Fae Rae famous for her screaming in this movie. Maybe the first Scream Queen, like, actor who's like known for being in horror movies and screaming. I guess especially because you can only newly scream at all in movies. That's what I thought about that of like you that can exist without sync sound so it's like
02:18:46
Speaker
That's kind of the genesis of that whole Hollywood trope also. They get to Skull Island through the fog. We got our first look at it with the big matte painting, which looks really cool.
02:18:57
Speaker
Um, even like the, some of the simple, like really simple VFX in this movie are really effective. Like they're like animated birds in the foreground, like flying in front of the kind of view of the island. They do so much in this movie with like depth to really sell these scenes. And like multi-pane stuff and like, yeah.
02:19:19
Speaker
And like they're just silhouettes of birds. They're in the foreground while they're landing on the beach. So it's just like like black animated figures. But like it works. It's good. It like sells that there are creatures here. You know, once we get to the island, too, is kind of when the score starts really kicking in. And this is like one of the first movies to have a like extended like dramatic orchestral score.
02:19:48
Speaker
Like the Mummy had a little bit of score like here and there, but this has like most scenes in this movie that aren't just like straight dialogue scenes have music under them, like non-diegetic music. And Max Steiner who wrote the music just doesn't, like the score of this movie is still a great movie score.
02:20:09
Speaker
Yeah, and it's and it's like used in a very like classic, you know, movie score or fashion. Yeah. Like there isn't anything that feels out of place with it. Which definitely like watching this movie growing up. It's like King Kong. It's got it's got music in it like whatever.
02:20:25
Speaker
But watching it in context, it's like that really stands out really dramatically. It's got music. Yeah. Yeah. When something happens and there's like a big musical staying under it, it's like that no one's done that very much. Like it's very kind of sparingly used in other movies. And this is not sparing the score. And it's great.
02:20:45
Speaker
This movie takes its time, too. It feels like it's about halfway through the movie when you first meet King Kong or maybe like a third of the way through the movie. Yeah, I think it gets progressively longer in each remake. I think it's like there were a lot of reviews of the Peter Jackson King Kong. It's like it's like an hour and a half until King Kong shows up. But I like that.
02:21:07
Speaker
opening section. I like how much it takes its time and kind of builds tension of like, where are we going? We don't know. Like, Skull Island. What's the deal with Skull Island? I don't know. There's like a beast there or something. Don't worry about it. And then they go to shore and spy on the local indigenous islanders who live on Skull Island. This is definitely the part of the movie that holds up the worst.
02:21:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was watching it and I was just like, ah, racism. Yeah, it's definitely a big, like, for as much as I love like classic 1930s adventure shit, it's like, it's all pretty racist.
02:21:48
Speaker
This movie in particular kind of, yeah. It's the kind of thing that it's not hateful, right? It's just like, oh, the indigenous people, they wear bones in their hair and stuff like that.
02:22:07
Speaker
It's very fearful. Quite ignorant. Yeah, it's ignorant and it's very fearful and it's definitely like playing up sort of like cultural differences as like, ooh, they're scary. Yeah. I will say this movie at least is able to cast people of color as opposed to just putting paint on them.
02:22:27
Speaker
Which would be worse. The Lost World, which this movie is nearly remake of, did that, and it was bad. But so the indigenous people see Anne, and that she's blonde, and they're like, that's new. And they say, yeah, blondes are scarce around here. And they say, we'll trade six of our women for your one blonde one. Yeah, which they think about, but then don't actually do.
02:22:54
Speaker
And also yikes. They don't immediately refuse, which is kind of funny. They have this kind of tense standoff with the village. They have their big Kong ceremony, sort of sacrifice that's going on.
02:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of like come in just at the right time because they're having their like yearly Kong sacrifice. Right. But so they kind of they kind of leave under tense terms. Carl then was like, I want to go back and I want to film more. And they're like, no, like we can't like calm down, Carl.
02:23:30
Speaker
We need to be safe. And back on the ship, Jack and Anne are talking, and Jack says, say, I guess I love you. To which she responds, why Jack, you hate women.
02:23:42
Speaker
The chemistry. I know. And he's like, well, that's true, but I guess you're OK. There is a bit of I don't know if this is intentionally comedic, but there's like this like swelling romantic music under this conversation. And then it cuts away to Captain Englehorn, the captain of the ship. And like the music immediately cuts out when it cuts away to a different person. And then like it comes back when it cuts back to them. And I found that so funny.
02:24:09
Speaker
I didn't notice that, but that could also just be like a factor of them being new to this kind of stuff. But it was like, oh, it's great. So then the Skull Islanders sneak aboard the ship and kidnap Anne.
02:24:24
Speaker
So they have to mount a rescue party and they get all the boats and they get all their rifles and pack into the boats and go back. Backpack full of bombs. Yeah. They got the gas bombs that had been set up right from the beginning of the movie. Like, what are we bringing all these gas bombs to the island for? And Carl's like, oh, you'll see.
02:24:42
Speaker
We got our first big reveal of Kong coming out of the jungle. Yeah. Giant like giant. I mean, y'all anybody listening has seen this imagery before. The big door. Yeah. The giant door that they keep locked to keep Kong on the other side, but they open it every once in a while to give him a sacrifice, a new bride of Kong. Yeah. And they decide to make it.
02:25:05
Speaker
they tie her up and offer her up to Kong. And you finally see him. He finally reveals himself in another shot that is kind of like using the depth and multiple exposures to put
02:25:24
Speaker
her and the giant animation creature in the same frame. Because it'd be one thing to have like a school animation of Kong coming out of the jungle, right? But by having actual Anne be like in the foreground, it gives it such a sense of scale of like immediately you see how big Kong is. Yeah. Because there's a person in the shot.
02:25:44
Speaker
We also haven't mentioned Willis O'Brien yet. True. Who is kind of just the lifeblood of this entire movie. Yeah. He is the animator of Kong and the dinosaurs and he did The Lost World previously and a couple other shorts. Also like the Slumber Mountain and was it the ghost of Slumber Mountain, right?
02:26:09
Speaker
Yeah. And a little backstory on on how he got involved in this movie is that he was already making a like people go to an island full of dinosaurs movie called Creation in the early 30s for RKO and had already like built all the dinosaurs for it and like shot footage from it and things.
02:26:30
Speaker
And then RKO was like, we're shutting you down because we're running out of money and we're going bankrupt. Mary and Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were like, hey, we have a crazy ape movie. You want to bring, you want to do, one, do the effects for that, but then also bring in all of your dinosaurs that you'd already made. And he's like, I love dinosaurs. And so it's like this, so this movie really kind of, this movie has like full scenes in it that were kind of planned for creation.
02:26:57
Speaker
So that's what I mean when like this movie kind of like ate a whole other movie and absorbed it into itself. As Kong eats people. Sure. And it kind of really eat people. He just kind of munches on them and spits them back out. Yeah. Yeah. Once once the kind of send the rescue mission into the jungle after and we get the best part of the movie, which is like
02:27:20
Speaker
Ann and Kong in the jungle fighting dinosaurs, and then the crew of The Venture, uh, chasing after through the jungle, also fighting dinosaurs. And, uh, all of these scenes are the best and I love them. And I want them to be playing in the background all the time.
02:27:38
Speaker
This is where that scene where the calling of shaking the log happens. Almost all of the adventurers die except for our strapping hero. But they use a lot of that same kind of mixing two different scales together, popping between pulled back fully stop-motion scenes with stop-motion human beings in them.
02:28:04
Speaker
sometimes like Kong will be holding her and then she's stop motion while he's holding her and he puts her down on a tree to go fight a dinosaur and then she becomes like the live-action version composited in.
02:28:22
Speaker
while he goes and fights a dinosaur, which is sick. When he fights a dinosaur, it rules. And that's the thing, this movie would be a cool movie, were it not for Melissa Bryan. But I think Melissa Bryan is the one who makes it a great movie because he's able to infuse so much character into the creatures in this movie.
02:28:46
Speaker
And I mean, this the fight with the T-Rex, right, is the coolest. But it's like that's all Willis O'Brien kind of like doing choreography and stuff like. Apparently, Willis O'Brien was like was into boxing and wrestling earlier in life. And so that's where we get like a lot of the great like fight choreography in the scene where King Kong is like sock on a T-Rex in the mouth and like throwing him over his shoulder and things like that.
02:29:16
Speaker
Um, where it's like, yeah, it's like, there's so much personality in, in the animation too. Um, and so much of like why Kong works as like a character as opposed to just a monster is because like, there's a bit right after he shakes all the people off the log and Jack stabs him in the finger as he's like reaching down to grab at him. And it's like, Kong is like hurt by it and he's like checking his finger and like, he's like, ah, that hurt.
02:29:45
Speaker
yeah it's all very very well planned out animation um or even yeah like fighting the t-rex and after he he breaks the t-rex's jaws open which is a crazy way to end a fight and there's all like gore spilling out and king kong just starts like playing with the jaws because he's a monkey right but it's like just that extra little detail
02:30:07
Speaker
is such a, like adds so much and like gives King Kong kind of like interiority. It's the same thing in the spoilers death scene at the end where like he is gradually getting more and more shot by the airplanes. And you see him go from like bravado to like vulnerability to like accepting his death. And you can see that like on his face and in his movements.
02:30:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's like, that's amazing that all that stuff comes through as well as it does. Yeah. After the log scene is the kind of infamous lost spider pit scene, which is in the Peter Jackson one, but was deemed too gruesome, even by pre code standards.
02:30:55
Speaker
and is like a famous like lost scene. Like they probably burned the film and it's gone forever, but there was originally a bit like in the April Jackson one where a bunch of spider creatures come out and eat the crew that fell off the log. There's also like a weird two legged lizard thing that crawls up to get Jack after the log bit, which is that like weird creature design kind of comes back in the Skull Island movie.
02:31:24
Speaker
the Kong Skyland, the sort of monster-verse movie. But, yes, then it's just Jack chasing after Anne through the jungle. We're skipping over, like, the whole Stegosaurus fight, the whole bit where they go through the swamp and the Brontosaurus comes out and eats a bunch of them, a bunch of the crew.
02:31:47
Speaker
That's a good part. Yeah. So good. A real vicious brontosaurus. Yeah. A brontosaurus that is just eating people left and right, which I also love that kind of like every dinosaur in this movie is like the most monstrous version of a dinosaur possible.
02:31:59
Speaker
Like even the herbivorous dinosaurs are these like horrifying creatures that will just kill you immediately. Stego's a nice guy. Stego's my favorite dinosaur. Yeah, but like the Stegosaurus has like, it has like eight spikes instead of four. Like it's just, it's this like amped up version of a Stegosaurus, which is really cool. Jack eventually catches up to Ann and they escape while Kong is fighting a pterodactyl up on top of Skull Mountain.
02:32:29
Speaker
And so they escaped back and then Kong chases him and Carl's like, hang on.
02:32:35
Speaker
We can catch Kong and then we'll all be rich. Right, there's the bit where Kong is coming at the gates and they're all holding, it's like both the crew of the venture and the villagers are bracing against the door. They had their differences, but they both have an interest in stopping Kong from getting through. Then Kong busts through.
02:33:00
Speaker
he wants his he wants his lady back and like destroys the village and eats a bunch of people or stops on him like crushes them into the mud like oh yeah yeah yeah it's it's pretty gruesome maybe not gruesome but it's like more violent than even other pre-code movies
02:33:20
Speaker
I want to mention also like like so like one thing while Jack is saving saving and from Kong and in Kong's lair is That like there's all this smoke coming up from the ground and it's like one more thing that like integrates him into the scene live-action
02:33:42
Speaker
lady, stop motion, Kong, miniature cave, and then superimposed smoke that really just adds a really, really great sense of scale to everything. Including another way that Smoke is used is in Invisible Man, where he smokes some cigarettes while invisible, and the smoke just blows out of nowhere,
02:34:08
Speaker
It's a really good way of solidifying a scene in real physics. They throw some bombs at Kong and they're like, let's take him to New York. Cut to New York where he's on Broadway. Kong is now a Broadway show.
02:34:28
Speaker
As you do with a big giant animal, put them on a Broadway stage. This made me really mad that I never saw the Kong Broadway show a couple of years ago. Same, yeah. I really wanted to see that and I never did. Even just, I did walk by the marquee though once and that was maybe, that was worth it.
02:34:48
Speaker
Because to see an actual marquee that says Kong in Times Square is very cool. And then we get some other sort of funny inflation bit where there are people lining up to get into the theater and someone goes, these tickets cost me 20 bucks, which that's where I got the figure of $500. 20 bucks in 1933 is like $500 now. I mean, I might pay $500 to see Kong. It's like, hey, there's a Broadway show. It's about a big gorilla.
02:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, people walk in thinking that it's a movie and then the usher's like, no, ma'am, it's a giant monkey. Yeah, which I think is like that's kind of what I don't really know what audiences in this movie are supposed to think Kong is. They just see a sign like it's a bit hazy, like.
02:35:37
Speaker
They just are big director people, and they'll follow Carl Denham wherever he goes. Maybe. One kind of strange thing about this potential movie that he was making is that it's a hand-cranked camera, which makes me wonder if this is supposed to be set in the silent film era. I think it's probably early enough in the talkie era that if you're going to a jungle to make a movie,
02:36:06
Speaker
You're not necessarily going to be shooting Sink Sound the whole time. Right. So I think the kind of the implication is that he's making movies like Cooper and Shozak made movies, which I think was oftentimes with hand cranked cameras like in the jungle. But yeah, we got our big King Kong on Broadway thing. They're taking pictures of him. He gets mad. He breaks out and runs amok.
02:36:29
Speaker
He doesn't like the flash photography, as all performers hate. I really don't know if I'm going to make somebody... I don't know if Cirque du Soleil is going to fall to their deaths if they see a flash bulb. I don't know why people act like it's that serious, but it is for Kong, certainly.
02:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, this is where Carl Denham also gets the idea. It's like, yeah, that's the angle beauty in the beast from kind of workshopping with the reporters how to how to do this. But so Kang escapes, runs amok, busting trains.
02:37:08
Speaker
And he finds someone that he thinks might be Anne, but isn't, so he just drops her to her death. And then reaches into a building and pulls Anne out and climbs the Empire State Building, which got that great wide shot of the entire Empire State Building, and you see the skyline and just the little silhouette of Kong climbing up the side. And they're like, oh no, oh no, how will we ever get him up there?
02:37:34
Speaker
And Jektros was like, airplane C, that'll get him. So they send a bunch of airplanes after him. And the great climax of the movie happens where King Kong fights the airplanes on top of a building and then gets shot. He's able to take one down, but eventually they plug him with enough lead that he slowly loses energy and falls off the building. Like a thing that is...
02:38:02
Speaker
this scene is kind of the thing that like really puts this movie over the edge of being like a great movie is that even though Kong is treated like a monster for most of the runtime of like he's scary. He's a big yeah scary gorilla like watch out he'll get you there is that like over the course of this whole scene you go from being like not me I was like Kong but like I feel like at the beginning of the scene it's like yeah the airplanes gonna get him to being like oh no this is so sad
02:38:25
Speaker
Yeah. And that's just through like Kong's body language as he's like getting weaker and he's bleeding out and he's like kind of starting to realize that he's dying. Like you can see like a moment of realization where like he he understands that he's about to die. And he puts he puts Anne down because he doesn't want to kill her along with him. Yeah. Yeah. It's like there's such a sense of and the music matches that like it's definitely intentional. This is supposed to be like a very tragic scene when he eventually falls.
02:38:53
Speaker
Because, you know, he's just an animal. He didn't do anything wrong. Except kill lots of people. But I mean, like, definitely I felt, especially when Kong was getting loose and killing people in New York City and also killing a lot of the adventurers, I had the same feeling when the dinosaur got loose in the Lost World, where I'm just like, hell yeah! Yeah, same. Absolutely, yeah.
02:39:17
Speaker
Anytime Kong is rampaging in this, it's great. But after he dies, we get the classic last line.
02:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, and then the movie like wraps up real quick. Yeah, it's the last shot of the movie and then it's like done. We're done. It ends very abruptly. But yeah, yeah, good picture. It's a good. It is. I think like the writing in it is like worse than I remembered with all of the sort of like women are dumb.
02:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, the dialogue writing is not fantastic, but I think that like just the whole adventure aspect and the effects and like the scale, it all works so well. It's a great example of like both spectacle and like emotion accomplished through effects.
02:40:11
Speaker
There's all of just the fun of seeing dinosaurs eating people or just like how big Kong is and things like that. But there's like all of the emotional stuff of Kong dying or interacting with with Anne are like also that's like full credit to Willis O'Brien for being able to do that as well as he does in this. I think I found that about this movie regarding the effects is that they like while promoting it, they released like fake explanations for how the effects were done.
02:40:42
Speaker
I guess to keep it a secret, they were like, we can't tell anyone how we did this. And so there's full diagrams and things of forced perspective sets that they didn't build and people in ape costumes and things that they never did. They did that for Invisible Man also. They also lied about how the effects were done.
02:41:01
Speaker
proprietary effect I guess like that's the only reason I can think of why they would just straight up lie about it but I think that's actually really fun like I kind of want a movie to do that now I'd be like oh do this uh shoot this in the volume or like you did this with mocaps like no it just makes make up an explanation I think that would be great I don't know any other
02:41:22
Speaker
Big thoughts on Kong? I think I've said everything that I've thought of. You're the big Kong guy. I am. I am a big Kong guy. It is. I think I showed this on the show before. I bought like a King Kong souvenir magazine. Yeah. The Life magazine King Kong edition.
02:41:44
Speaker
For the podcast listeners, he is holding up the Life Magazine King Kong edition. And it's got some cool behind the scenes pics in here. Maybe I'll try to find JPEGs of those and throw them up in the video. This movie was shot simultaneously, or around the same time, as The Most Dangerous Game, which was released in 32, which we didn't watch, but I have seen. Have you seen that movie? No. You know about The Most Dangerous Game, though, right? Two minutes. Yeah.
02:42:12
Speaker
Exactly. That's what I know. Crazy guy hunts people on his island, but it's like it's the same island, basically. Like it's all the like a lot of the jungle sets and stuff. There's like clearly the same sets. Also, Feyre is in both movies. And yeah, this movie is a long kind of cultural tale, I guess. They immediately, because this movie was so immediately successful, they made a sequel and released it in the same year called Son of Khan, which I have seen and is very bad.
02:42:42
Speaker
it's about Carl Denham is so ashamed that he has killed Kong. Carl Denham gets a real sort of like redemption arc in the sequel, which is kind of fun. That's like the best thing about it. Otherwise, it's a very obvious cash grab.
02:42:57
Speaker
But so Carl Denham like goes back to Skull Island and finds Kong's smaller son who's like a cuddlier version of King Kong. And there's like more kind of like cheaper dinosaur stuff happens. And then Skull Island, there's an earthquake in Skull Island sinks into the ocean at the end of that movie. But it's not good. Don't watch it unless you're a King Kong freak like me. I kind of want to see it.
02:43:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, whatever. This was remade in the 70s with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. And I do not like that movie. I think it sucks and it's bad. Have you seen the 70s, King Kong? I haven't seen that. Also, not a fan. I do really like the Peter Jackson remake, though, even though it's I think the last time I watched that movie, I said it feels like every scene in this movie feels like a deleted scene.
02:43:54
Speaker
in that it's like, this is a crazy scene. I understand why they cut this out, but it's really something to see. Well, you were watching the, were you watching the extended? I was watching, I don't remember which, I think I was watching the theatrical cut last time I saw it, but I don't remember. I mean, there's like, King Kong versus Godzilla in the 70s, where like, King Kong is a entirely different character almost, who's just a different big Relevance than an island.
02:44:20
Speaker
And then there's the recent King Kong movies, Skull Island and Godzilla vs. Kong, which are very wacky, kind of dumb movies, but I like a lot. I like the Monsterverse. Actually, Kong Skull Island is, I think, the only King Kong movie that treats the, like, indigenous islanders with any respect whatsoever.
02:44:43
Speaker
and the only one that isn't super fear mongery around them. In all the other ones, they are scary, subhuman, just othered, xenophobic people. And in the Skull Island movie, they're just an indigenous village. They don't do sacrifices. They also live on the island.
02:45:10
Speaker
And it's like, okay, yeah, that's what actual human cultures are like. So, I guess, shout out to that movie. Probably 2005 King Kong was getting toward the end of when that was broadly culturally accepted. Rewatching that movie, it's like, yikes, dude. I think it almost tries to overcorrect by being like, they're so far from a real human culture that they're just monsters.
02:45:36
Speaker
But yeah, it doesn't play great, I don't think. But so even today, there are still movies being made about King Kong because he's just that great. The ape lives on almost a hundred years later. And then I mean, Marion C. Cooper later made Mario Joe Young. There's another big ape movie. We got Dwayne Johnson in Rampage making his own big ape movie.
02:46:07
Speaker
Like, big apes became like a whole sub-genre after this. Right. Yeah? True? I mean, I guess, yeah, you're talking about Rampage, which was based on a video game, which probably was just directly inspired by King Kong. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, King Kong. Crazy movie. Crazy, like, even by, like, any standard, like, this is a pretty crazy movie just in terms of, like, what happens in it.
02:46:36
Speaker
Mm hmm. But I think it is really there's like the thematic ideas of it, I think are really strong and really hold up of like civilization and like the wilderness and kind of, you know, nature versus versus man nature. Yeah. King Kong cannot live in New York City.
02:46:58
Speaker
It wouldn't work, you see. The moral of the story is King Kong can't live in New York City. King Kong. What a picture. What a picture indeed. Got anything else on King Kong? No, I'm Konged out. I mean, I probably could keep talking about King Kong, but I don't know if it would be much for conversation so much as just me saying King Kong things. That'd be a Kong-versation. All right. Well, that'll do it for this week. Dang it. Could that be the name of the episode?
02:47:29
Speaker
A conversation. Yeah, I like that. I like the other one they came up with more still, but... If you like our show, you can follow us on socials and all that kind of stuff and subscribe to our YouTube channel. And yeah, that'll do it. A lot of good movies in 1933. Wait a second. Glenn, what's your favorite? I mean...
02:47:57
Speaker
I guess it kind of by default has to be King Kong, almost. But I don't know. I also really liked Design for Living. And I really like Invisible Man. And I really liked Mabuza and Golddiggers also. Design for Living's got to be it for me. Yeah. I think I have to say King Kong, just by obligation, almost.
Hosts' Favorite Films of 1933
02:48:23
Speaker
Because otherwise, my entire identity would shift.
02:48:27
Speaker
You could just become a Design for a Living guy instead of a Kong guy. Maybe, yeah. I gotta buy the Life magazine Design for a Living edition. So that'll do it on this episode. We're doing 1934 next. A lot of good movies looking like they're coming up there. Some I'm really looking forward to from that year, for sure. Well, Glenn, I'll see you next year. See you next year.