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1931 - Midnight Spaghetti
19 Plays2 years ago
Iconic voices abound in this episode jam packed with classics! Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang both direct their best(?!) movies, Warner Bros. releases two quintessential gangster pictures, and Universal gets dark with two of the most famous horror movies ever made!
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://linktr.ee/1w1y
And you can watch and form your own opinions from our 1931 Films Discussed playlist right here!
Our Feature Presentation
City Lights
M
Little Caesar
The Public Enemy
Dracula
Frankenstein
See You Next Year!
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to One Week One Year, a podcast where we watch and discuss a year of film history every episode starting from 1895, the dawn of cinema. And this year, this episode, we're on 1931.
00:00:27
Speaker
The 30s, the talkie era, isn't it great? I'm one of your hosts,
Hosts' Backgrounds
00:00:31
Speaker
Chris Elley. I'm a film projectionist, and joining me as always is... I am Glenn Cobell. I am a filmmaker. We're getting into it. Yeah. Except for one, it's all talkies, and this one movie that isn't a talkie is decidedly not a talkie.
00:00:47
Speaker
Yeah. But we'll
Podcast Availability
00:00:49
Speaker
get to it. Before we get into it, if you're watching this on YouTube, be aware that you could listen to this audio-wise on your podcast. If you're listening on the podcast, you can look at our dumb faces on YouTube and get a little bit of extra information there. I'm sorry for calling your face dumb, Glenn. No, it's correct.
00:01:12
Speaker
Anyway, how's it going, Glenn? It's
Glenn's Personal Updates
00:01:16
Speaker
going, you know. Still looking for work stuff, but I've got some sort of side projects to work on, including this one. And I finally got around to start playing Fallout 4 recently because I was feeling left out because everyone's playing Starfield.
00:01:34
Speaker
And Fallout 4, hot take, good game. Are you friends with actual gamers who play actual games and so people around you are playing Starfield? I think I've only actually talked to one friend of mine who's actively playing Starfield. I need gamer friends. I need to get on a Discord.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah. Speaking of video games, I just got a handheld video game console called the Playdate, which has a dope cranking knob on the side. It's it's like it's like a black and white indie video game game boy that has a crank and then they deliver two games to you every week as part of like seasons of games. And I'm loving it. I
00:02:25
Speaker
I am habitually a person who doesn't play as many video games as I want to. And I feel like this movie style of like a drip of video games really, really helps me out. And I've been I've been cranking away all around town. Other than video games, just had my first nightmare about the Denver Film Festival. So that's
00:02:52
Speaker
that's that's when you that's when you know something is uh it's when you know something's important to you is right when you have a nightmare about it right yeah exactly yeah we have in in the at denver film we've got a whiteboard that says days until diff 54 53 52
00:03:10
Speaker
Yikes. Yeah.
Historical Context of 1931
00:03:13
Speaker
Now that we got those pleasantries out of the way. Those pesky pleasantries. Let's talk about the depression. We all love the depression. Yeah. Everyone's over time. So why don't we give ourselves a little context for the time that these movies are coming out and let's hear about what's going on in the news. Glenn, take it away. The news of the year, 1931.
00:03:38
Speaker
At UC Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence invents the cyclotron particle accelerator. The end of the Spanish king. A new republic is formed in Madrid. The Empire State Building is completed. The tallest building in the world. Notorious mob boss Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in the big house. That's prison. The automobile manufacturer Porsche is founded in Stuttgart. The Empire of Japan invades Manchuria.
00:04:06
Speaker
And that is some of the news that happened in 1931. Some of it.
Impact of the Great Depression
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah. Leaving out the more complicated and more dour things. Yeah. I don't want to talk about an earthquake that killed a couple of thousand people. Yeah. Great depression going strong.
00:04:24
Speaker
People don't have money, don't have jobs. It's a rough time out there for not just Americans. I mean, most of the world is feeling the hit. It's a great time for capitalism. Sure. Hey, a pretty great year for movies, though, maybe. Oh, yes. Yeah.
00:04:51
Speaker
I liked a lot of these. Pretty significant year for movies.
Iconic Films of 1931
00:04:55
Speaker
A lot of like a lot of iconic stuff in 1931. For sure. A lot of like real just the stuff that's in every montage that people can that everyone can recognize. We love those montages. Yeah, but we'll we'll get into it. I guess you want to start with our one silent picture. Sure.
00:05:19
Speaker
And that's one of the most famous Charlie Chaplin films, City Lights. Yeah. I mean, this is I think the first Chaplin movie I ever saw. And I think the first silent movie I ever saw also. Oh, wow. Which is kind of funny because it is so notably like not from the silent era. Right. It's like everyone else has moved on. Everyone else is like, nope, we're doing talkies now. Even the other like big silent comedians.
00:05:47
Speaker
And Chaplin, one I think because he had a big ego and he was like, and could throw his weight around and could do whatever he wanted. True. Was like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep making silent movies. But I think that's kind of a cool thing about that is we get to kind of see
00:06:02
Speaker
for the further development of silent movies into the sound era because there's one guy still making them. Yeah. And this
Discussion on 'City Lights'
00:06:10
Speaker
does do some things that silent that could only work as a silent movie in the sound era, which I think is neat about this film. Like it's a silent movie that is not ignoring sound, the potential of sound technology. Yeah. And instead is using sound technology
00:06:32
Speaker
as like what how can we advance the form of silent movies using this, which I thought was cool. In particular, there are some jokes and kind of, I don't know, plot moments that happen that are told via sound. Yeah. And and it's the kind of moments that would not work without a synchronized soundtrack.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yeah, this movie is silent and it still is making better use of sound than the coconuts. In particular, I mean, speaking of speaking of food items, one of the first sync sound things that you hear is a very Peanuts style, Peanuts adult style people talking. And it's like, it's like it's like a kazoo sound.
00:07:22
Speaker
Right. Almost. And I'm wondering if that it's only really in that opening scene. And I'm wondering if that is Charlie Chaplin making fun of like bad dialogue recording of like this is what you sound like trying to have people talk in movies is like.
00:07:40
Speaker
I mean, it's possible, but it kind of seems like it's some sort of bloviating politicians. Right. And so it's probably talking about the substancelessness of what I'm saying. But I'm wondering if that's also kind of a meta joke, if Troy Chaplin himself is almost as like, see, talking is dumb. You don't want that in your movie. Look at this dummy. Like, you can't even understand what he's saying.
00:08:03
Speaker
And then and then look at this cute little tramp. Yeah. Nobody wants to hear what he's saying. Look at this little stinker. That's me. Yeah, he's he is literally unveiled. There's like he's like sitting on a statue and they pull the curtain off them and it's sort of revealing the tramp to the to the audience that way, which is kind of a fun little flourish.
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, and there are some good, so it begins with the statue unveiling, which is the way that the tramp is unveiled, but the tramp is sleeping underneath the cover on the statue. And then there's some fun physical comedy with him.
00:08:48
Speaker
kind of like there's a sword in it and it stabs him in the pants and he gets stuck on the sword and all this kind of stuff of, you know, statue bits. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that I feel like this movie already, even though it's only being made a couple of years after the last few selling comedies that we watched, it already feels like such kind of a throwback. Yeah.
00:09:26
Speaker
I feel like upon revisiting these old silent movies and watching more Buster Keaton and more Harold Lloyd, I feel like Chaplin sort of lowered a bit in my kind of rankings, I guess. Also just reading more about him as a person and being like, ah, gross. But watching this, I was like, oh yeah, this movie is genius.
00:09:35
Speaker
It made me wistful for another era.
00:09:49
Speaker
It's, I don't know, I, had you seen this movie before? I have not, no. Okay. I had seen it once before and I liked it back then and I, it was a nice, it held up for me. I was like, oh yeah, this movie is great. This is like one of the, one of like the masterpieces of silent movies, I think. Wow. I, I, uh,
00:10:13
Speaker
Maybe it's because I've seen a lot of Chaplin Schmaltz by this point. But I think it works in this movie in a way that it doesn't in a lot of his earlier movies. Yeah, yeah. He finally tuned in on it. He got all the levels right.
00:10:29
Speaker
all the ingredients sort of like come together in like a really nice stew in this movie where it's like it's both very silly and very funny and I think the heartfelt more poignant moments also really land in a way that I don't know if I think the kid they mostly did
00:10:47
Speaker
And then some of the stuff in the Gold Rush I thought was good. Gold Rush is a little harsh. I like the circus. I think the circus works quite well. The circus actually, yeah. But as he's going, as he continues to make movies, he's dialing that stuff in a little bit more each time.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, true. And I think, yeah, just honing. I mean, he's been playing the Tramp for 16 years at this point. And so you can still see him honing it more and more to this perfect character just before it's taken away.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, Charlie, or as he's known in the director credits of this, Charles, did not really think that the tramp would work with sound. And they did some tests with the tramp talking and it felt weird, so they didn't do it. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I guess he kind of plays the tramp in The Great Dictator. That's a very different kind of movie.
00:11:49
Speaker
I'm looking forward to rewatching that also. I've never seen Modern Times, which I think is his last, that's like a partially silent movie. I haven't seen it, but I think, I feel like Chaplin is the only one of those like big three silent comedians, right? Like Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton.
00:12:08
Speaker
who I think his most famous movies are made in the 30s or 40s. I suppose that's true. In the sound era. And kind of his best stuff too. I think this movie, City of Lights, is his best movie that I've seen. I haven't seen Modern Times or Limelight. Of everything that I've seen, I've seen a lot at this point. This is clearly my favorite of his movies. Interesting.
00:12:38
Speaker
And that's, I don't know, it's just kind of odd that it's like one that he was allowed to keep making silent movies, but then also that it's like he made his best one.
00:12:47
Speaker
Like, after everyone else had already abandoned it, kind of. It's not really even allowed. It's just that Charlie Chaplin was loaded and he could do whatever he wanted because he owned his own studio. And he spent like a year and a half making this movie. Yeah, they spent a long time. I mean, they they shut down for part of it, I think. Right. But
00:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, but like there were there was there were scenes that they spent like they did 300 takes on the on the first scene where he meets the flower girl. He was wearing people attempting her to quit and then get rehired. Yeah, there was a lot of.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, Charlie Chaplin was a bit of a Kubrick in a lot of ways, as far as just like being a bit of a. Taskmaster director, and it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in a lot of contexts. But I think in particular, this movie, which really just seems like him as an unbridled dictatorial director. Yeah, yeah. I found a quote from Virginia Cherrill.
00:13:56
Speaker
who plays the blind girl. I think that is her name in the movie is the blind girl who like later in life said, I didn't like Charlie and Charlie didn't like me and then refused to elaborate more on that. I mean, what else do you need to know? Yeah, I do think Virginia Terrell is very good in this movie.
00:14:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm, you know the best kind of silent acting which is like not overdoing it but being very expressive through like gesture and expression and not and You know doing it in a pretty naturalistic way for it's subtle. It's subtle. I mean she's playing
00:14:33
Speaker
Yes, like you said, she's playing a blind person. And so that is the instigation of a lot of the plot, which is chiefly that the tramp falls in love with her. But it is under this context of her mistaking that he is a guy who has a car. So he's rich. Yeah. But then.
00:14:54
Speaker
helpfully, he befriends a millionaire who lets him kind of pretend to be rich for various contrivances. And so he can- But only when the millionaire is drunk. When he's sober, he doesn't remember the tramp at all.
00:15:15
Speaker
And so this tension is just him, I don't know, it's not like he's trying to deceive her necessarily. It's just that like he is trying to support her as if he were a millionaire. And he wants to pay for her surgery to be able to see again. Yeah. A lot of the movie, like you're saying, is
00:15:36
Speaker
there is a millionaire who he saves from killing himself while he's drunk and by tying a rock to himself and then throwing himself into the river. And then the millionaire is so thankful that he says, have a car, be my friend, I'll take you out on town. And then promptly forgets as soon as he's sober every time.
00:16:03
Speaker
A lot of great hijinks in this, a lot of great just like classic bits, restaurant bits, seltzer bottles, eating spaghetti, that sort of thing. Swallowing a whistle, another good sound gag when he accidentally swallows a whistle and then every time he breathes any whistles. Yeah, he's like hiccuping whistles and that's a joke that would not really work with how to sync soundtrack.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, or I mean someone just right there with a whistle getting the timing right every time. I mean, you'd have to trust that that would be the case in thousands of theaters. Right, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it's not like he's lying to her, but he's not really correcting her by saying, I'm not actually rich.
00:16:48
Speaker
Right. Whenever the millionaire sobers up and forgets that he knows him, he has to go find work. She's also quite poor and she gets a letter from her landlord saying that if you don't give me twenty two dollars by tomorrow, then you're out on the you're out on your ass.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. One of the more famous parts of this movie is that he he decides to become a boxer for a single match. A guy comes up to him and was like, hey, we'll split like we'll split the money at the end. I won't hurt you too bad. Then that guy finds out that the cops are after him and he has to run. And so a different guy comes in, replaces him. That's like the best boxer anyone's ever seen. He just kind of shows up randomly off the street, but he's very good at punching.
00:17:36
Speaker
And we get this whole extended very well choreographed boxing match with him like hiding behind the referee the whole time and like getting punches in here and there.
00:17:48
Speaker
yeah like very like synchronized kind of ducking behind the referee almost like um was it sherlock jr where uh buster is like tracing the route like behind the guy like walking at the exact same rate or whatever that kind of deal but uh
00:18:08
Speaker
But with, yes, a referee in the way. And so Charlie actually is or the tramp is like doing OK in the boxing match, but it kind of kind of ends up going against him. It's a long match and there's like a lot of hijinks, including more sound jokes of
00:18:28
Speaker
The bell. Yeah. Yeah. He gets the rope for the bell kind of tied around him. And so whenever he moves, the match ends and then he sits down as the match ends and it rings the bell and it starts again. It's good. It's good stuff. That scene is another one that it's like I see like every Oscars.
00:18:49
Speaker
montage of like the history of film there's always thrown in a shot of the boxing match from city lights or it's it comes up a lot this movie has a couple of those things in it where it's like i don't know this movie's i feel like if you want like a go-to charlotte chaplin movie to like pull clips from it's usually this one yeah um probably because it's the best one you know
00:19:11
Speaker
I you know, it's like I kind of when I watched this, I enjoyed it. But I was just like, OK, it's another Charlie Chaplin movie. You know, I think I think this one's like so many things that I feel like don't work about his earlier ones. I think we're great in this, like especially the sort of more poignant emotional stuff where it's like I usually kind of roll in my eyes at his earlier ones because it's like, all right.
00:19:34
Speaker
All right, Charlie, we get it. You want us to be sad now. Yeah, the emotional stuff, I think, did work quite well in this movie, especially the scene at the end. The ending for this movie is so, so good. I love the end of this movie. And it's like, it's very simple. It's very, like, straightforward. So out of the boxing match the Tramp gets, he goes back to his millionaire friend
00:20:02
Speaker
who was drunk, and the millionaire is like, I was like, oh, you need money? Like, here you go. Will $1,000 be enough? He's like, oh, yes, please. And then, unfortunately, there were some burglars in the house, and the millionaire gets knocked out, and then the police show up, and they're like, they catch Charlie, and then the millionaire wakes up, but he's sobered up, so he doesn't remember him. So he's like, why? You have all my money in your pocket.
00:20:31
Speaker
And so then he has to escape. So he escapes, he gives the rent money and the eye surgery money to the blind girl and then leaves and is arrested for the burglary. And there's a time jump, 10 months go by. He is wandering the streets again, you know, penniless. Fresh out of prison, yeah. Fresh out of prison, fresh out of the big house.
00:20:57
Speaker
And he comes across the flower shop girl works at or she with the money she was able to Start up her own flower shop. She used to sell flowers on the street Just to make ends meet they like he recognizes her and she's able to recognize him. I forget exactly like what the exact thing is
00:21:15
Speaker
that she recognized him about it, about him he is. Well, he starts staring at her and then she's like, oh, I have some kind of weird admirer, but he's cute or whatever. And she could tell that he's a drifter kind of guy. A tramp as per.
00:21:35
Speaker
a tramp. He looks like even more disheveled than usual. He just looks like incredibly defeated and sad. And so she goes to give him like a coin because, you know, he's poor and she wants to help him out. And when she gives him the coin, she recognizes the feeling of his hands. Yeah. And and like and she's like, oh, this guy that's staring at me
00:22:05
Speaker
She asked him, like, is it you? And he's like, yeah, it's me. And yeah, that's that's nice. That's nice. Well, then he's like, you can see now. And she's like, yes, I can see now. Because it's like she's I don't know. It's like the metaphorical seeing in addition to just.
00:22:23
Speaker
than being able to actually see each other. It's very sweet, and I don't think it overdoes it in a way that I think some of his earlier ones do. I think a lot of that has to do with their chemistry, even though the actors apparently did not care for each other at all. I do think they have very good romantic chemistry in this movie, and it makes that element of the plot really work.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, I watched a there's a series called Chaplain Today, which is has many documentaries about each chaplain movie. And this one was interviewing Nick Park from Hardman. And he was kind of talking through
00:23:05
Speaker
the his favorite moments in the movie and what kind of influenced him as an animator but in particular there was a moment where he was talking about like what set Chaplin apart from Keaton and Lloyd and he was saying that it was the range which you know I find often that I end up enjoying Buster Keaton movies more than Charlie Chaplin movies because I get more
00:23:29
Speaker
good laughs out of them. But it is true that, you know, Buster Keaton is not really selling the romantic scenes so much, you know, or the pathos like Charlie Chaplin is. And he does a very good job in this movie, for sure, as a director and an actor. Yeah. This is the one where it like it really
00:23:52
Speaker
works for me. And yeah, I feel like I'm repeating myself at this point. This is the first Charlie Chaplin movie that he wrote a score for. I think we
Discussion on 'M'
00:24:02
Speaker
watched some of the earlier ones with his scores. Seven years ago. But those were written later. This was the first one that he actually wrote a score to. And it's good. It's a good score. Yeah, it works.
00:24:18
Speaker
I love this, too, because it gives you an idea of it gives you like a somewhat contemporary idea of what silent scores sounded like or would have sounded like in just a year or two before, because it's somebody like writing a silent movie score that is recorded and synced to a silent movie. Yeah. Yeah. Great movie. But yeah, it's like it is kind of an interesting artifact.
00:24:45
Speaker
in film history, I think, for the reasons that we've talked about. Yeah, I really, really like this one a lot. I liked it okay. Another very famous movie from this year that is not so charming or funny is Am directed by Fritz Long.
00:25:12
Speaker
That is a weird transition. You told me that you had the order of everything figured out already and I failed to see the link between these two except that I have criterions of both of them. Well, the link is that the other four movies that we're talking about are sort of fit into nice pairs and this is the other sort of like lonely orphan of a movie.
00:25:36
Speaker
And it's also like similarly to City Lights is like crazy famous and influential and is one of the best movies by this director. Yeah. This movie is real good. Yes, it is for like entirely different reasons than City Lights. City Lights is so sweet and like and funny and charming. This movie is, if anything, the opposite. This movie is haunting.
00:26:06
Speaker
and chilling in a really kind of in a way that I'm not used to seeing from movies this old for them to like be able to get that level of like old movies just don't tend to get as dark as this one does I think right
00:26:25
Speaker
We've seen some darkness in a couple of these movies, but this one's like, ooh god. But it's funny that even though it's pre-code, movies are still not really, don't really show a lot of- That's a German movie, so it doesn't matter. Right, but it's like old movies don't tend to show a lot of violence or nudity or sort of shocking things to you.
00:26:48
Speaker
But really good directors, like Fritz Lang, can still create really effective scenes out of horrible things happening without actually showing them. And actually, by not showing them, it makes them even more horrifying. And this is a perfect example of that. Because this is a movie about a child murderer that contains no scenes of murder. By the way, he murders children. He's not a child detective or something. Right, right. There's a scene early on in this movie where
00:27:18
Speaker
We the audience can know that a child has been murdered by a serial killer. And we're just watching the mother like run through the house and like in the apartment building. It's good. Calling her name.
00:27:35
Speaker
And as she's calling her name, it cuts around to just an empty place at the table, an empty room. All this just emptiness, just shots of empty rooms. And it is so chilling and haunting of just the lack of anyone in the frame.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's so well done. This movie has a lot of boldness as far as allowing it to just hang on things and be silent and look at nothing, but looking at nothing in a way that makes you uneasy or anticipating something horrible. Yeah.
00:28:15
Speaker
That scene reminded me of the part in Jaws when the first kid is killed and you're just kind of anticipating like who is the mother who is going to be like devastated right now, right? Kind of like in Jaws shows a bit more but like a lot of the early shark attacks in Jaws right focus on sort of like
00:28:37
Speaker
the aftermath or sort of these little elements around it like we don't actually see any of the children being murdered in this movie but there's there's been established that like children have been disappearing there's like posters up and the first time someone's actually killed in the movie it is off screen but it is like the the kid is bouncing a ball as she is like led away by the killer and then we see the ball just kind of like rolling
00:29:07
Speaker
by itself like through the dirt and then the balloon that she was carrying getting like caught in power lines. Yeah. Which is kind of like in Jaws right like the kid is on the floaty thing and we see the floaty the tattered floaty thing just washing up on shore and it's like that's all you need to see.
00:29:28
Speaker
That's like that puts enough of an image in your head. We were just like, oh, God, it's good. It's tasteful and it's like really eerie. It's eerie is good word. Yeah. And we don't we only see I mean, this movie starts off with so much like suggestion and and just, yeah, kind of anticipation and.
00:29:52
Speaker
like the shark in Jaws. It's a while before you see the murderer himself. You get to see a clear look at his face and you get all of this kind of implication before you actually see him of him whistling.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah. And the whistling is like another kind of like haunting thing. It's like, what can I do to freak people out in a sound movie? You know, have a murderer who whistles all the time, which is and just have it hanging off the off the screen. Yeah. It's like such a brilliant use of sound, which is like finally we're getting to the point where people are like really knowing how to use sound in movies. And this is a great example of that, because the whistle is like
00:30:37
Speaker
such an important, I mean, it's incredibly important to the plot, for one thing, but then it also just is so important to the mood and the atmosphere of this movie. There's the link. The two, these two movies have whistles in them. Sure. There you go. So, yeah, the opening scene of this, the opening shot of this movie after its great title card is the creepiest German children's rhyme of them, like doing a sort of
00:31:05
Speaker
I don't know, one of those things where you count down and then in a circle. It's like an inni-mini-mini-mo kind of situation. Yeah, but even creepier and more German. And that's the opening shot of this movie. It's like children singing about being murdered. Yeah. In like a fun way. And the parents are like, would you stop that? There's a serial killer who's killing children. Please stop singing about death.
00:31:29
Speaker
Clearly this is uh like the the translation's a little fanciful because they made it rhyme but it is just you wait it won't be long the man in black will soon be here with his cleavers blade so true he'll make mincemeat out of you.
00:31:45
Speaker
Which is a hell of a way to open any movie and knowing like a bit about what this movie was about just just that opening shot. I was just like, oh boy, here we go. This movie is going to be intense. And then, yeah, we follow one little girl as she like is crossing the street. She's like almost gets hit by a car or two, and that's like a thing of tension. It's like, oh, don't die. And then sees the poster of like the missing children.
00:32:12
Speaker
And we see the silhouette of a man, his shadow falling across the poster. Great, great, great shot. The Killer, by the way, played by Peter Laurie, one of my favorite actors. This is like his breakout role. Yeah, he's very good in this. I mean, you can see why he continued to work, I mean, until like the 1960s.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, at the beginning, he kind of is just doing this sort of like ominous, creepy thing. Right. And then. Then the kind of the back half of the movie, he is panicked and is like an animal. He's like a.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. His big bulbous eyes and just sort of like his mannerisms are so kind of perfect for this movie of like. Really good. His like soft. Very well cast. When he's like soft spoken and creepy. That's one thing. But then also when he's just like panicked and like spitting and yelling and his eyes are popping out of his face, it's like it's really, really intense.
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah, in particular, like the you know, I think nowadays we consider it. I would look at a scene like that and I go like, OK, it's your Oscar scene, you know, but like.
00:33:29
Speaker
I think this predates Oscar bait speeches as a thing, and this part of him talking about his killer compulsions is harrowing, and he does such an amazing job with it. I was like- Because it makes you feel kind of bad for him after he's been established. He's killed a bunch of kids.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But he talks about like the voices that make him do it and all and like how like the only time when he doesn't feel like he's a shadow that's tailing himself is the only time the voices stop is when he's killing someone. It's like, oh, God. Oh, my God. It's so good. Yeah.
00:34:14
Speaker
I think that I didn't really know about this movie that is like kind of other than it just being about a serial killer is kind of the main hook of it and I think that I love about it is that it is it becomes kind of a procedural like a crime-solving movie through like yeah all of act two but the hook of it is that it's like the cops
00:34:34
Speaker
can't find this guy, right? They've been looking for weeks to find this serial killer and they can't figure out who it is. And then because of the increased police, like the police are everywhere and they're like stopping people on the street and they're like busting into like gambling dens and cabarets and like we're just arresting people just to get them off the street in case they might be the killer. All of the local criminals get together and they're like, this is bad for business.
00:35:01
Speaker
Yeah, there's too many cops around. We've got to catch this guy because we can do it better than them. Yeah. And the fact that then the movie is like split between like the kind of ineffectual cops who have like way too many leads to follow and are like not necessarily corrupt, but I feel like the way that they're portrayed is like kind of what's the word, like bureaucratic, just like it's kind of a mess. And then the criminals who are just sort of like cutting through everything to be like, no, we got to like
00:35:31
Speaker
One, it's that it's like it's hurting their criminal enterprises, but it kind of feels like it's like they're the community, right? Like. Right. And they're kind of doing it. I think in addition, they're doing it out of like for their own communities, sort of. They're like, no, this is like everyone's terrified. Like this is this is terrible.
00:35:54
Speaker
We should catch this guy. This guy's awful. Yeah, it's like we're respectable criminals who, I mean, it's like a mafia kind of yakuza sort of like we are, we're like doing respectable criminal stuff. We're not actively trying to kill people all the time. We're not like freaky, like child serial killers. Like this guy, we don't endorse him and he's wrecking up our time. Yeah.
00:36:21
Speaker
So then it kind of becomes like CSI 1930 because it goes into a lot of detail about like about like crime solving and like setting up perimeters and like search search areas and like there's a lot of really cool intercutting between like there's like a conversation over the phone that like with the police commissioner where he's like explaining all the methods that they're trying to use to catch the killer and as he's talking it's cutting away to all these different scenes of like
00:36:51
Speaker
people analyzing fingerprints and looking on maps to make a map of where all the murders happened. Stuff that's pretty commonplace crime movie stuff now, but it's really cool to see in this context. It kind of reminded me of Spies a bit, the other Fritz Lang movie, where he gets really nitty gritty into the
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, like the procedural stuff of like what what is what are they actually doing? Fritz Lang really is like more of a pulp director than I had thought, I guess. Like he loves like he loves like the kind of fun like cops and robbers stuff. And he he feels like with this and spies, it feels like a lot of a follow up to Louis Fuyade in terms of like this movie.
00:37:43
Speaker
You know, there's ineffectual bureaucratic police, but then there is rather effectual, if not very fair, bureaucratic like systems in the organized crime world. And it's drawing all these parallels between the two, where they're even like parts where they're kind of planning out how they're going to catch this guy. And it's cutting back and forth like very seamlessly with like some match cuts.
00:38:12
Speaker
And some just like almost like stuff that you see in like a heist movie today of like someone in one party is starting a conversation and then the other people unrelated are almost like picking up on the same idea and it's cutting back and forth between these people. Really well done. The editing in this movie is phenomenal.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, especially for the time. And and yeah, like the cops, the organized criminals, they have their own like judicial system that is literally underground. Well, yeah, it's underground in I think an abandoned factory that they say is been abandoned because of the depression. So also topical.
00:38:54
Speaker
I think this movie is definitely the least fantastical thing that I've seen Fritz Long do. His really early stuff is just straight fantasy pretty much with Destiny and the ones that we didn't watch, the Siegfried
00:39:15
Speaker
like dragon fighting movies. And then like, you know, Metropolis is like very fantastical kind of like big sci-fi movie. And even spies has like some kind of like sci-fi ish stuff in it. Yeah. And it's very pulpy.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's much more of like a like a, you know, Dr. Claw with petting a cat. Right. Yeah. It's like it's like do his Bond spy stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this feels very grounded for for his movies. Yeah.
00:39:46
Speaker
also like probably the best directed thing i've seen from him like oh yeah i returned a bunch of places where it's just like the camera work in this is really really good and i feel like feels influential too like there's shots in this that i'm like i've definitely seen this in other stuff and it might have like come from this movie
00:40:05
Speaker
There's a great, when the cops do a raid on one of the criminals bars, they're compensating all their stuff, and there's this great tracking shot just across this long table of guns, watches, all this contraband and stuff laid out, and it's just this long- Grass knuckles. Yeah, there's long knives, this long tracking shot across the whole table of all the stuff they're compensating.
00:40:31
Speaker
Oh, there's I mean, there's another kind of big like one shot where the camera is like moving through one scene into the next like goes through a window like it through the window. I was going to say that one next is so good. And it's just physically moving camera up a wall through a window. But it's like. I mean, they probably see it off to someone, but it's it's even got one part that like effect feels like
00:41:01
Speaker
Um, like it transfers the camera in a fluid motion from one shot to another, but it does it like on a blank wall. So it's hard to tell. It does the whole like birdman thing, you know, hiding the edits in camera movement. Yeah, it's yeah. I mean, it's not like.
00:41:20
Speaker
I don't know. The shot doesn't have the most point to it, but like also it's really cool. Yeah. There's another another really great use of camera movement in this movie. There's a bit I think it's with the police commissioner where he's on the phone and every word he says the camera like creeps a little bit closer to him.
00:41:39
Speaker
So he like says something and the camera moves up and then he like, there's a pause. He says something else and the camera moves up a little bit more. And like as he's talking on each of like punctuated with each of the words, like the camera just kind of moving in a little bit. That's great. I want to steal that. But yeah, then the criminals finally talked to the blind man from earlier in the movie that sold. I don't know if we actually mentioned that on the podcast or not, but
00:42:06
Speaker
In the opening, the killer buys a balloon for the girl and the balloon seller is blind, but he remembers the whistle. And so later he recognizes the whistle and he's like, oh shit, I know who that is. And so because he's sort of, he knows, you know, the people on the streets, the criminals find out they're like, oh, we found him, like follow that guy. And someone puts, draws an M for murderer
00:42:34
Speaker
and chalk on their hand and it kind of like slaps him on the back so that then there was a chalk M of the title, like on hit the back of his coat. And so they're able to follow him and he sort of picks up that he's getting followed. And so he ducks inside of an office building. And so then they're like, should we call the cops? No, we got to get them ourselves. And so then they like break into the office building
00:43:03
Speaker
and are like systematically like breaking into every single room in the building and like there's a guy who tunnels through the floor to get into one room and they're like don't set off any alarms like there can't be any cops like we got to get them ourselves they do find him and they do trip the alarm and they have to like run out this is some of his best like bug eyed like terror stuff too right yeah peter lorry like stuck in the attic in like the store room just waiting to get caught and he's like backed into a corner and yeah it's
00:43:33
Speaker
The lighting too helps where it's almost like the light across his eyes. Classic noir guy, Peter Laurie. Yeah. So that one of the criminals gets caught, the guy who tunneled through the floor, and they're kind of trying to get him to rat out the rest of the people to find out where they brought the guy, Peter Laurie.
00:43:51
Speaker
Which of course that yeah, they bring him to the like the basement of an abandoned factory and have like a community trial for him Where they have like with including like a defense attorney and all yeah They like give him a defense attorney and that's when he has his big, you know Oscar clip thing where he describes like his You know his madness
00:44:12
Speaker
It's a dismissive way to put it, even though it kind of gets the idea across of what it is, but it's an amazing, amazing speech. Yeah. And then parallel to that, the one criminal that the cops have caught, they convince him that the night watchman that they had kidnapped actually died and that he's on the hook for murder in addition to breaking and entering.
00:44:37
Speaker
Which then it's very funny when they're like in the interrogation room like that guy died We're gonna get you for murder and then it cuts to the night watchman Alive like eating this a banquet of food and drinking out of this like cartoonishly huge goblet of beer And then cut back to the guy like murder I didn't
00:44:57
Speaker
You know, and so he tells them where the the trial is being held. And so right as right as like the crowd is about to kill Peter Laurie pretty much like they're about to just like tear him apart. The cops show up and take him away. And like the last scene is like a scene of his trial. We don't actually see we don't actually see Peter Laurie. All we see is like the the parents of the dead children almost like.
00:45:25
Speaker
talking directly to the audience at that point like we don't actually know if he like what happened to the killer after that like we know he had a a trial by the state right like not this like underground criminal trial but like a proper one but it never reveals like what happens to him like does he go to jail does he go to uh an asylum does he get re-released back at the society we don't know but it's like
00:45:53
Speaker
Well, I mean, like part of the reason why the criminals want to kill him is because they're concerned that if he goes through the normal criminal justice system, he will get to plead insanity. And then maybe he'll end up getting out when they think he's cured or something like that. And then they'll just kill people and mess everything up again because he can't resist doing it. And I think I don't.
00:46:19
Speaker
It was a little unclear to me, but I think that like that had already happened with him was the thing was that he wasn't in asylum already. And the reason the cops were somewhat onto him was because they were looking at people who had been released, released. Yeah. So like there's maybe a bit of an implication that it might happen again. Yeah. The movie definitely ends on this kind of note of like a failure of the system almost, or like the
00:46:49
Speaker
You know, it feels like it's trying to make a bigger point about like how we treat criminals and like how we treat mental illness and that sort of thing. I'm not sure exactly what Fritz Lang's thesis point is. I know that he was an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, which I definitely get from this movie that it's like,
00:47:13
Speaker
Because the movie is sort of like this is like the worst guy in the world. Like he's done the worst thing that a person can do pretty much. Right. Yeah. And so you see like the crowd at the end is like, no, like kill him. Like we're done talking about it, you know. And I'm like, it's hard to argue with that feeling. But at the same time, like he is a human person.
00:47:37
Speaker
who does deserve a fair trial and that sort of thing. And it's like- And he also deserves empathy in ways, even though he is horrible. He is clearly schizophrenic and- Yeah, he's clearly in pain. And he's struggling. I get the sense that the character recognizes that what he's doing is awful.
00:48:05
Speaker
Right. But he but he has no self-control to stop himself. Like he's he is compelled to do it. And I like how the movie doesn't really give you like an easy like pat on the back answer to that. It's just like, no, like shit's complicated sometimes. Like, you know, and it like it ends on a very kind of like an uncertain
00:48:32
Speaker
note of like what, how do we as like people even respond to something like this? Yeah, which we're still struggling with today. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, this movie still feels very relevant and very like the themes it's kind of grappling with still feel very relevant, I think.
00:48:55
Speaker
I watched some of the William Friedkin interview with Fritz Long, which is on YouTube. And in that Fritz Long talks a little bit about he used to shadow the police.
00:49:11
Speaker
He's followed him around in Germany in the 20s and he met a man who was accused of murder and he was with the police when they found severed hands under his bed, which is crazy. He also heard about a guy, he didn't actually meet this guy, but he heard about a guy who would murder people and make sausages out of them.
00:49:38
Speaker
which is, I guess, a real thing that happened. But he also said in that interview that, like, that every criminal that he met were generally, like, very friendly to him. Like, Fritz Lang was like, yeah, you know, they were all pretty...
00:49:52
Speaker
They all seem like decent folk. And I think that kind of comes across in this movie. This movie has a lot of like sympathy for the safe crackers and the like, you know. It has affection for the kind of gentleman thief type people. Yes, for sure.
00:50:10
Speaker
And oh yeah, I watched this movie on HBO Max and it minimized it before the movie ended, which sucks. And I want to call them out on it because like cut that out and cut that shit out. And I just want to complain. Yeah, this movie is real good. Yeah. And and feels like it might have sort of set a real precedent for like
00:50:35
Speaker
serial killer movies too i think it's the first time we've seen like we've seen movies about murder before but this is like the first i mean the term serial killer didn't exist when this movie came out
00:50:47
Speaker
I think it was inspired by a real guy in Germany in the 20s. Yes. I forgot his name. Or at least partially. The vampire of Düsseldorf or something. He had some crazy nickname like that. There are a lot of creature-based serial killers in Germany in the 20s. There's another guy that's like the werewolf of something else.
00:51:12
Speaker
They had a lot of like, you know, supernatural creature names attached to their murders. But so it was it feel this movie feels both. Like I said before, it feels relevant now, but it feels pretty topical for when it came out also. Hmm. Yeah. Also just a great movie. Yeah. Good stuff. Another movie that is concerning the criminal underworld.
Introduction to 'Little Caesar'
00:51:40
Speaker
is two of the movies that we watched today. So I'm just gonna pick a random one. Well, let's start with the first one released, because I think that is important. With these next four, I think the release order is sort of plays a factor. So 1931 had two very big influential, important gangster movies, both released by Warner Brothers. The first of which was Little Caesar, directed by Mervyn LaRoy.
00:52:11
Speaker
and starring Edward G. Robinson in his big breakout role as the title character who is often referred to as Rico in the film. That's like his nickname. Yeah. Little Caesar is also his nickname, but it's a shorter nickname.
00:52:31
Speaker
This movie is delightful. Yes, it is. I have never seen so much amazing slang in one movie. Oh, my God. Yeah. This movie I realized is so I I knew that this movie existed. I'd heard of it, but I didn't realize how much the sort of like cartoon idea of a 1930s gangster is from this movie.
00:52:55
Speaker
I mean, part of that is like, that's just how gangsters, I think, partially did behave. And I think this is also just Edward G. Robinson just doing an incredibly iconic performance. That's what I mean. It's like Edward G. Robinson's performance in this movie specifically is like where an entire like stock character came from. Yes. Which is the like, I'm a gangster.
00:53:21
Speaker
He says meh a lot. He says meh sure. There are points where he says meh see meh. And it's funny just to see that because it it's kind of silly to watch now but it's also like to see the origin of something that is that has sort of just like spread into culture that much where it's become just like it's like Halloween costume of a character.
00:53:46
Speaker
To see the like source point of it where it actually is like a pretty well realized performance Yeah He feels like a real human in this as opposed to you know, I like Looney Tunes cartoon But that's the thing it's like he is a real human but every time he opens his mouth you're just like wonderful every time he opens his mouth to pop a big stogie in there and
00:54:12
Speaker
and talk about crime, yeah. This movie opens with a Bible quote, which is a grammatically very odd sentence.
00:54:23
Speaker
It's like it's live by the sword, die by the sword, but with a different translation, I think. But with more of an emphasis on stealing. And we see a late night robbery gone wrong at a gas station where presumably the gas station owner is killed. And then we go to a lonely diner at night where Rico and his best buddy,
00:54:52
Speaker
was it? Rico and Joe. Joe, thank you. Joe Massara. Rico and Joe Massara. Who is Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Yeah, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. We're a fan of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. on this podcast. And so it's funny to see like, oh yeah, he had a son that was also in movies like around the same time. Yeah. I don't think
00:55:14
Speaker
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has quite the charisma in this movie that Senior did in Zorro and Thiefa Baghdad. No. But he's fine. He's fine, but I mean, you know, Rico steals the show. He's playing like Handsome Man in this movie, so he doesn't have a lot to do, I feel like. Yeah. He's the Zepo Marx of this movie. Very much so, yeah. And so at the diner, Joe and Rico order spaghetti and coffee, as gangsters do.
00:55:45
Speaker
And Rico's like, we're a small time. We got to move the city where the big leagues are. And so they do that. And the plot of this movie is pretty straightforward. It's like the rise and fall of Rico as a gangster, right? We see him rising to the ranks and supplanting other people and making alliances and backstabbing other people.
00:56:08
Speaker
And he kind of he mainly it just like jumps into the scene as an extremely like ready to be violent and aggressive guy. Yeah. And that works out for him for the most part. Yeah. Like until it doesn't. It is kind of almost the stock like gangster movie plot to even like the next move we're going to talk about after this, the public enemy already is adding a lot more kind of like detail and nuance onto that of it isn't just like this like
00:56:36
Speaker
rags to riches to rags story. Like, this one is like...
00:56:41
Speaker
It does feel like this is the quintessential gangster movie in its most like pure, simplest form. Right. Not there's anything wrong with that. No, because it works right in this movie. Yeah, it's not like it's it's plain or anything. It's just that, yeah, it's iconic. Yeah, I would say there's a great there's a great bit early on just like introducing some of like the side gangster characters and the cameras just like moving around to their faces around like a poker table.
00:57:08
Speaker
And we meet the boys, which are Tony Passa, Otero, Bat Corella, Killer Pepe, Kid Bean, and Scabby. Which are just so good. So good. And that is this whole movie. Like that vibe of just like nicknames and old timey voices and shooting guns at a cars.
00:57:35
Speaker
It's such a fun movie. So much slang. So much slang in this movie.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yeah, I would I would love to just put this movie on whenever you know, it's just a fun. It's a fun watch. Lots of slang stuff like I've been in this game for many years and I put the cuffs on a lot of mugs or it's all Jake to me, which I which I had to look up what that meant. Yeah. At one point, someone's referring to a public execution and they refer to it as a neck stretching party.
00:58:05
Speaker
Which is the most gangster-y thing you can say about someone being hanged. Oh yeah, it's going to a neckstretching party later. Yeah, every moment of this movie is packed full of that stuff. It's awesome. Yeah.
00:58:22
Speaker
Oh yeah there's another there's another one uh that that Rico says it's not even like super slangy it's just perfect gangster speak um there's a rope around my neck and you can only hang once if any it turns yellow and squeals my gun is gonna speak its peace yeah yeah this is this is a movie just to kind of luxuriate and
00:58:46
Speaker
And it is kind of wild how influential it feels like it has been. So Jack Warner, one of the famed Warner Brothers who produced this movie, later said that the movie was a thinly veiled Al Capone movie, which is kind of funny that it came out the same year. It came out before Al Capone was convicted, but it came out the same year.
00:59:09
Speaker
So it's like, Al Capone was in, he was in the news when this movie was being made and when it came out, which is kind of wild that they're just like, let's make a movie about a real criminal who is famous right now.
00:59:21
Speaker
and just like change the name? Well, this was based also partially and like, I don't know, inspired in many ways, too, by a real mobster called Little Caesar, who is Salvatore Maranzano, who had just died that year. I get the impression that the intent of the movie was to kind of capitalize on like,
00:59:45
Speaker
Capone specifically, but I don't know. I mean that's that's what Jack Warner said. He did die like nine months later after this movie came out.
00:59:53
Speaker
Oh, OK. Yeah, he had the same the same name, Little Caesar. Yeah, but which now now just makes terrible pizza. I don't think I've ever had Little Caesars pizza. I think I've had a bite of it once and it was like, I don't need it. This movie has Tommy guns in it, which is fun. I don't think we've seen anything up to this point that actually has Tommy guns on it. Yeah, yeah. And including the cop saying to hand him a Tommy gun, he's like, give me a chopper. Yeah, the best.
01:00:25
Speaker
I wonder how much of this movie is like playing stuff up for the screen and how much of it is like, did people actually talk like that in 1931?
01:00:35
Speaker
The thing is that this is such an outlier as far as how people talk in this movie compared to every other movie that we've watched. Especially compared to like the Public Enemy is a much more kind of like naturalistic movie. We'll get to that in a second. But it does kind of feel like the gangsteriness of this movie is like so
01:00:56
Speaker
like profoundly strong it's it's a really stylish script it's like like the writing is very styled in this movie which is awesome i think uh and this movie also i think is notable for
01:01:11
Speaker
I think, you know, and we might get a little more into this as we go through the next couple of years, but I think that a lot of a lot is made of the pre-code era as being the super edgy era or whatever. And so far, I feel like there have been aspects that have been, you know, it all kind of is in the PG-13 realm, I think. But there's there's a darkness, but it's not a darkness that necessarily fully didn't exist in the silent era. Yeah.
01:01:41
Speaker
But I will say that this movie is notable for being like a pretty like a moral movie about just an out-and-out bad guy like it yeah like it is a movie about an entirely evil person and And you're just like let's watch him be evil. You know right if there's never a point where it's like
01:02:02
Speaker
Uh, so this is a good way to transition to our next movie, but Rico is from the beginning is like, I want to do murder. I have murdered before I want to steal. I just want to be a rich, powerful criminal.
01:02:16
Speaker
And then we see him do that and then, you know, that all crumbles and he is reduced to, you know, a homeless person. And then the police taunt him through the newspaper saying like, oh, he's yellow. He's a coward. He then calls the police, be like, yellow. I'll showdown with any of you. And so then the police find him immediately by tracing the call.
01:02:39
Speaker
And they're like, hey, come out or we'll blast you with our timey guns. And he's like, no, you ain't never taken me alive. And then they blast him. And he's like, I'm dead. And then that's the end of the movie. He's like, Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico? Right. Which is I think I had seen that on some like TCM list of like the greatest movie quotes or whatever. So that that is like
01:03:02
Speaker
a notable line of like, that's that's a hell of a thing to say as you're dying, I think, is to refer to yourself in the third person and be like, am I dying? But it's it's great, you know, Edward G. Robinson, he sells it. Yeah, good. Goodness. Yeah. Another good actor is James Cagney, and he is the star of The Public Enemy, also a gangster movie, also Warner Brothers.
Discussion on 'The Public Enemy'
01:03:29
Speaker
Uh, this one is directed by our old pal, William Wellman, who did Wing. Yes. I think I like this more than Little Caesar. I think it's a better written movie. It doesn't have quite that level of just like uncut gangsteriness to it, but I think it has, it has like more going on under the hood, sort of.
01:03:52
Speaker
It's a more complex movie. It's a very similar movie, but I think it has it has more going on. And I think it's it's less kind of cartoonish. Yeah, I like this movie, but like I I definitely like Little Caesar better because like I just love the cartooniness. Yeah, because it's like this such a heightened like I think just because of the script, honestly, like, yeah.
01:04:15
Speaker
This movie is more well written as far as characters have better motivations and they're more complex. And Little Caesar is more well written as far as just like, how did you sit down and write all this dialogue? It's so incredible.
01:04:32
Speaker
Yeah. I think that kind of goes for like the lead performances and like the main characters, right? So like, I think Tom, the main character of Public Enemy, Tom Powers, which is a great name. Not quite as good of a name as Little Caesar, but this movie opens with him and his best pal as little kids in 1909.
01:04:58
Speaker
Which is kind of a cool, you know, it has this like progression across like multiple decades, kind of leading up into the main bulk of the movie. And we meet our kind of two lead characters as little, two little stinkers.
01:05:14
Speaker
causing trouble on the streets, sliding down escalators and stealing beer. And there's kind of a funny behind the scenes thing where like, the kid actors, so initially the two lead actors of this movie, Cagney and the other guy, whose name I forget, were gonna play the opposite roles, but they switched at some point in production because they were like, wait, Cagney is actually way better and should be the lead of this movie. But they didn't switch the kid actors, so the kid actors were cast
01:05:44
Speaker
to look like the adult actors, but they're switched. So it's like each of the kid actors looks like the other one, kind of. I mean, it's not like a perfect resemblance, but it's like, it's just a funny thing where like the kid actors look like the opposite guy, you know? When I was watching this, like I was watching a story about kids and I recognized that the next people that I was seeing who were adults some years later were supposed to be those kids. But I was like, I don't remember who's who, whatever. One of them was one of them.
01:06:12
Speaker
right they're both kind of interchangeable in the opening scene they are kind of just like ah they're both you know a little little rat kids there is I think a little Caesar right is like we meet him he's already like a hardened criminal who's like I'm in this
01:06:29
Speaker
for the money and for the power and I that's all I want to do. I think starting this movie with the characters as kids lets us see kind of like what sort of like how things went wrong. Right. Like how the circumstances of their lives kind of like push them in this direction in a way that they didn't really feel like they had any other way out of. It feels kind of more sympathetic towards
01:06:52
Speaker
the criminal element, I guess, in that way. And so Tom has a mean cop for a dad who beats him. And it's like the only scene we ever see his dad with is him abusing him, basically. Right. And so it's like the dad only communicates to Tom through violence. So that's like that becomes the only language that he knows, right?
01:07:18
Speaker
You like that? A common trope, you know, it's like, oh, that's what happens. But I think it it thankfully doesn't really overplay that in the movie. It's like it's one scene of him coming home and his dad beating him. And just that is enough to be like, yeah, I get this guy more than I would otherwise.
01:07:39
Speaker
one his sort of like very anti-authoritarian streak and also his sort of like How quickly he will resort to violence later in the movie because it's it's just like that's he's just it's ingrained in him hmm, and so the the two the two young lads meet a a local fence named old putty nose or Putty nose not all I put the oil on there and
01:08:05
Speaker
What's a fence? Fence is a guy who sells stolen goods or sort of an in between to sort of get goods. All right. And we we flash forward to the lads are a little bit grown up and I play by adult actors and play knows brings him in on a job and gives them a gift from Santa Claus, which is to revolvers and they're there to steal first.
01:08:30
Speaker
Tom sees a big stuffed bear behind one of the furs and freaks out and shoots it, as you do. It's kind of silly. It is kind of silly. And so then the cops hear the shots, and they shoot the limpy Larry, who's the lookout. And as they're escaping, they shoot the cop that's after them. And there's a great chef's kiss shot. We see them just running into a dark alley, and the cop runs after them. And then just gunshots go off. Tom and his buddy Matt
01:09:01
Speaker
run out and then we cut to just a close-up of a hand holding a revolver, presumably the police officer who chased them.
01:09:09
Speaker
And that's like the end of the scene, fades out on that. It's like dying, yes. It's just so publicly composed, it's a great shot. This, I guess, is like, speaking of their names, the other one is very much an Italian mob thing, and this is like an Irish mob situation. Right, yeah, a lot of patties and such. Yeah.
01:09:35
Speaker
Patties and putties. Yeah. Is powers really an Irish name? I don't know. I don't know. Then Putty Nose kind of betrays them. He like doesn't let them back into the hideout because they got heat on them.
01:09:51
Speaker
Right, we flash forward again to 1920. Prohibition started. There's a great scene of like all the liquor stores like selling out all their stuff before midnight. This is like one of the baby carriages and like milk trucks and fantastic. I assume all things real people did.
01:10:07
Speaker
I like, I really like this part because like we have seen surprisingly few instances of prohibition being covered in movies. It's funny, I'm kind of surprised how much prohibition stuff we, like how explicitly movies from the prohibition era are just like, oh yeah, everyone's drinking.
01:10:28
Speaker
I guess this movie acknowledges it because I think we've seen drinking in tons of American movies. Tons of American movies post-prohibition and it's either like it was set 10 years ago where people could drink or it's set in Europe where people could drink. True, I guess that's part of it.
01:10:45
Speaker
Nothing is said of it. It's high and dizzy, right? That's like 1920. That's the only other one that I can think of is high and dizzy that actually acknowledges prohibition. I mean, this movie is very explicitly about prohibition. Right. But like I think I really love the depiction of like the last night of liquor being allowed. This mad rush. Yeah. The baby stroller full of
01:11:10
Speaker
full of whiskey, is it great? It all feels like, maybe it's all made up, but it feels like things that would have actually happened. Yeah. Probably not all on the same block at once, like it's shown in the movie, but it feels like all those things were true stories that someone cribbed and put into the script.
01:11:28
Speaker
I think we should take some time at some point just to be like I think James Cagney is very good in this movie This is like he had been in stuff before this but this is like his breakout This is his first big lead role and I do think he has a bit more of a kind of like naturalistic way of acting than
01:11:48
Speaker
Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar anyway? Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, he feels like a real person in this movie. And like and it is true that, yeah, I don't know if the acting like I don't know if it's like I think best acting award goes to Peter Laurie in this episode. Yeah. But like he's doing a very good job and people doing a very good job is still a little rare right now. Right. Yeah. And I think also just things I noticed about his performance in this is like he has a lot of really great physicality.
01:12:18
Speaker
And like business like if he's doing a scene of something he's usually like kind of doing something else at the same time or like Mm-hmm. He has great little like flourishes of things that he does Yeah, like he'll kind of like affectionately like nudge people on there play punches which then his mom does to him at some other point in the movie and yeah, just like in a scene like you won't necessarily like always like look where
01:12:47
Speaker
I feel like so many actors walk into the scene. They're staring straight ahead. They're like, nope, I'm going to stay in my line. It's a bit stilted. It's a bit stagey. Whereas I feel like Cagney walks in a room, and he's looking around, and he's picking stuff up. He's very busy, but in a good way, in a way that it's like, yeah, he's acting like a person. And then there's the famous part of this movie where he shoves a grapefruit in someone's face, which is just
01:13:16
Speaker
It's apparently was very shocking at the time. Which is kind of crazy, because I like this this scene, I feel like it's so oh, my God, like, yeah, he he's a scumbag and he gets in an argument with his girlfriend and then he shoves a grapefruit in this interface. And I heard about it and I was like, oh, sounds like super violent and horrible, like getting it in her eyes and stuff. And I watched it and just like takes a thing and puts it in her face. I'm like, I don't know. He just kind of slapped it in her face.
01:13:44
Speaker
But I think I think part of it was that like if there's conflicting stories about that scene and it seems like there was some element of like he wasn't supposed to do it as forcefully or like there there was some element of like it was unexpected in that take where it's like he was supposed to mime it but he actually like hit it or hit her face with it or something. I don't know what it was. It does seem tame now. It's like
01:14:12
Speaker
having a grapefruit put, not even shoved in your face, just kind of slapped in your face a little bit. Just kind of like mushed into your cheek, yeah. I mean, you know, it's still not a good thing to do. Oh, no, don't do it. Do not condone grapefruit smooshing on this show. Grapefruit is the...
01:14:34
Speaker
I don't know, the French cousin of Bigfoot. He walks around wineries. He walks around. Well, they got to hire him for the winery to crush all those grapes with his Bigfoot. Oh my god, it's perfect. A very good scene a bit later on is Tom's out on the town at a typical 1920s party with lots of streamers at it. And they see Putty Nose, the role boss, Putty Nose.
01:15:03
Speaker
who left him at the dry when the coppers were after him. And so they follow Putty Nose home and put the clampers on him and are like, we're coming inside with you. And Putty Nose knows what's up. He's like, even though they're talking in gangster speak of like, no, we just want to have a nice conversation. He's like, you know.
01:15:25
Speaker
And eventually they like go inside to his apartment and Putty knows it's like really realizing it's about to be murdered. And he's like, please, I don't want to die. I don't want to die. And James gave me this great line of delivery was like, oh, so you don't want to die? Like, oh, big, big man over here doesn't want to die.
01:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, he really like yeah, he does feel like a more real-life like bad person like We can kind of see he has more of an arc right where it's like we can kind of see him getting further and further like down this road and we see his Behavior changing to like the more like sadistic side of him come comes out more and more and another great use of sound in this movie is It pans away from
01:16:16
Speaker
Tom and Putty knows to Matt, who's at the door. And we just hear Tom shooting Putty knows. And then because he's sitting at the piano, we just hear all the keys of a body landing on the piano. And I'm like, that is great. I don't know if they were deliberately trying to be like, we can't show murder in this movie. But they do a really good job of artfully not showing actual violence occurring.
01:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, it reminds me of a scene that was in M, where there are some people getting like tortured. There's somebody getting like tortured for information. And there's like a crowd of people watching it. And as it kind of gets more intense, he's about to get like hit or attacked or whatever. The crowd kind of gathers in so you can't see what's happening. And then you hear just a scream from behind the crowd and the crowd pulls back out again. Yeah.
01:17:14
Speaker
A lot of nice hiding of violence, I guess, or artful, I suppose. There's the scene that I found very funny, or just kind of absurd, where one of their big gangster pals is named Nails Nathan. And Nails Nathan is killed when, because he likes to ride horses, he falls off his horse and is kicked in the head by a racehorse. And so what does Tom do? He's like, well, we can't have any of that. And so he goes down to the track and murders the horse.
01:17:44
Speaker
for revenge. He's like, how much is this horse worth? A thousand? Here's a thousand. Then he walks over the horse and shoots it. Yeah. Great. Again, they don't actually show that. He just walks into the stall right where the horse is and we hear a gunshot and he comes out. Setting the precedent for all time that gangsters hate horses and will murder them at any point.
01:18:07
Speaker
But I just think that's that's such like a funny like gangster-y thing of like our friend was killed It was an accident a horse kicked him and they're like we'll take care of a horse like
01:18:20
Speaker
This movie does end in a very shockingly violent way. Yes. Which I was pretty astounded by. Nails dying kind of leaves a sort of power vacuum. And so a rival gang starts taking over the territory that used to belong to Nails and his crew.
01:18:43
Speaker
And part of that involves it's not safe for you. You got to you got to hide out in a safe house for a couple of days while the boss smooths things over. And so, you know, they go to another sort of pre-code thing is this movie. Tom gets like seduced by the boss's mall, his his girlfriend. He gets like now's the opportunity for you to really break out a lot of this lingo. He gets like super drunk.
01:19:11
Speaker
And the girlfriend is seducing him and it's sort of like, we don't see anything really, but it's like, they like fall into bed and the light goes out. And then the next day she's like, so how was it? And he's like, what are you talking about? I was, I can't remember anything. Very bad, don't do that. But that is like, at least acknowledging that like sex is a thing that people do feels like without it being as much of a just sort of like winky, winky thing of like,
01:19:42
Speaker
get as close to kind of showing it as they probably could even in pre-code times. Right. I feel like Hell's Angels also kind of was like right up against it of sort of like we're not actually gonna show any sex happening but it's like go against the constraints as much as possible. In Haze Code movies I feel like they would have to be more, there'd be more like innuendo around that.
01:20:07
Speaker
that it'd be more sort of like- Probably very light innuendo. Yeah, but that's the thing is like, Hays Code movies tend to have like a lot of innuendo dialogue in ways that are like way steamier than like this scene is, right? Like there's a scene in, I forget what the dialogue is, but there's a scene in The Big Sleep that is like, it's just dialogue and it's like, oh my God, someone turned the heat up in here? Like what's going on?
01:20:34
Speaker
But that feels like a notable scene for a pre-code movie to have. True. Yeah. Some of the most, like, excluding some kind of European stuff, like the sort of most, like, indirect. European stuff. They're going way further than that.
01:20:51
Speaker
It's some of the most like direct like reference to sex that we've seen. It's not like it's it's completely unambiguous. What happened? Partially because of that, Tom was like, I got to get out of here. And so he him and Matt leave the safe as brother was supposed to. But unbeknownst to them, there is an ambush set up with a bunch of giant World War One machine guns across the street and a coal truck.
01:21:16
Speaker
to hide the sound, which is also a great, this is a great bit, right? Where they're like, they're going outside and like the coal truck starts dumping coal and they're like, oh, someone's shooting at us. And they're like, oh no, it's fine. It's just all that coal falling. And then they unload the machine guns at them and Matt gets blasted, but time gets away.
01:21:39
Speaker
right and then he he goes for revenge against the enemy gang as he did with the horse right but because they took his gun when he went to hiding he has to get a new gun or guns plural so he goes to a gun store and acts like an idiot and he's like what are guns how do those work can you show me
01:21:59
Speaker
And the guy's like, sure, here's a gun. And he's like, how did the bullets go in the gun? And he's like, oh, you got some bullets? Like, I happened to right here in my pocket. And then it's like, just put them right here in the thing. And then he's like, like this? You mean like this? And so it loads the whole gun up. Then he's like, put your hands up. I'm taking this other gun. Which is, I'm sure a thing that America, a lot of problems with guns, not a fan. I don't think it's that easy.
01:22:29
Speaker
There's a reason why they keep ammo and guns in a separate place. I don't think you can go to a gun store and be like, hey, I'm dumb. Can I practice putting bullets in this gun? Go ahead. Make my day. Tell them I didn't paint blast. There's a very similar scene to this in the movie The Rover with Guy Pearce, where he's buying a gun on the black market from a guy.
01:22:56
Speaker
And he's like, is it loaded? And the guy was like, oh, yeah. And then he just shoots it. So, yeah, he walks into the enemy hideout. But this scene is so good, is the thing. I feel like just describing it doesn't do it justice because it's got like the pouring rain and he's like waiting outside and he like watches everyone go in. And then there's probably the best shot in the whole movie, which is this like tracking shot of him walking towards camera through the rain.
01:23:20
Speaker
with his hat pulled low and his hands in his pocket with his two guns. And then again, he walks in and we don't actually see any of the gun fighting. We just hear all the gunshots go off and then he kind of stumbles out and we hear agonized screams in the background of people dying from injuries, which is a pretty intense... They're not showing violence, but they're planting it in your head really effectively.
01:23:50
Speaker
They use some kind of strategic drips of blood in places as their one kind of violent thing they can do.
01:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, Tom stumbles out and collapses and wakes up in the hospital, kind of realizes that his life has kind of gone off the rails. A little bit, yeah. His family visits him and he apologizes for being a scumbag, and he takes some time to recover in the hospital.
01:24:25
Speaker
Then the rival gang kidnaps him from the hospital. Yeah. And so, you know, his family is kind of excited to have him back. They're like, oh, our son's nice now. Right. Yeah. And he's remorseful. They hear that he has been.
01:24:42
Speaker
kidnapped but then Paddy, a kind of senior member in their gang, tells them that he's kind of made a deal to get Tom back and he thinks it's a pretty good deal so it's pretty likely that that he'll come back. So his brother Mike is kind of, you know, he's bearing the news that he's been kidnapped in the first place. His mom is
01:25:05
Speaker
very excited to have his son back from the hospital. She thinks that he's just about to get back. And so we see a lot of scenes of her just, oh, like, I'm going to make his bed so it's all nice for him. As soon as that stuff starts, I'm like, oh, no, this is going to end really well.
01:25:22
Speaker
Like it's very ominous this whole section where it's like they've gotten word that it's like oh no Like we're getting him back like they let him go like he'll be here any minute and and I'm just like oof This is something bad is about to happen
01:25:37
Speaker
So they they get a knock on the door and he's like, that must be him. Yeah. And then you see a bruised and bloody corpse of our main character wrapped up in like burlap bags and just rigid from rigor mortis. And then he just flops down through the open door, collapses face first through the doorway.
01:26:02
Speaker
And it's a real stunt like it's kind of just like falling face first. It looks like he's like padded up, but still. Yeah. And then, yeah, his his brother has to is like this got this thousand yard stare and he's walking away. Presumably did like he then has to tell the rest of his family that.
01:26:19
Speaker
He's here. He's dead. Your dead son is in the door. This was like some real shocking violence. Like I saw his corpse and I knew this was coming too. But like I saw his corpse and I was like, damn. I think it's not even really violence. It's just the implication of violence. We see his like bruised bloodied face and it's like that's all you know, we don't see people beating him to death. They're like, yeah, it's just this looks like Laura Palmer.
01:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, wrapped in pillows. And the last shot of the movie is the record finishing. The record that's been playing a song under this whole scene finally finishes and just see the needle kind of on the empty space at the end of the record. Great way to end the movie because then the song that's playing on the record is the same song that plays over the opening credits.
01:27:11
Speaker
sort of bookends. It's like poetry, it rhymes. Exactly. I watched one of the DVD featurettes about this movie. Martin Scorsese talks about, he saw this and Little Caesar on the same day when he was 10, which explains a lot.
01:27:32
Speaker
Yes it does, yes it does. The Public Enemy especially has some real kind of Goodfellas vibes. The way it sort of delves a little deeper into like the actual kind of lifestyle, not so much just the crimes themselves, but like kind of a bit more of the appeal and it being a much more kind of sympathetic look of like, why would someone even do this?
01:27:58
Speaker
Right. Also, I think that Scorsese brings up is how all the music in this movie, like all the early talkies that we've seen, all the music in it is diegetic, except for like opening and closing credits. Except the weird thing is like the one movie that we've seen that has had non diegetic music has been Broadway Melody. Right. Yeah. And not even just for the musical numbers, I think it had some like actual non diegetic score. Yeah.
01:28:27
Speaker
But yeah, it became it became uncommon. Is that where Scorsese got this from? It seemed he seemed to imply that it kind of was of like, oh, you can just have music that the characters are listening to playing throughout the whole movie. And it's like you don't need to score. You just can score it with actual songs.
01:28:45
Speaker
that the characters would listen to, even if they're diegetic or non-diegetic. So him pointing that out, I thought was like a cool thing of like, oh shit, that is like precedent being set by this movie. It's not being set by this movie. An actual needle drop sound track. Very much so. Which the lack of score is kind of weird that
01:29:08
Speaker
Almost none of these early talkies have score of any type of any kind. Yeah. Which I think might be a thing until like King Kong because I was just reading about King Kong recently. Which came out in 33 and how like the score for that movie was like such a.
01:29:25
Speaker
a revelation that it had this big, bombastic, expressive score throughout almost the whole movie. I'm like, damn, that's... I'd never thought about that before, but that might be... I'm now curious to see if we watch anything with 32 that has a score like King Kong's or not.
01:29:44
Speaker
Because, yeah, King Kong feels like it has a very proper film score to it. And a lot of scenes in that movie have music over them. Huh. Yeah. I'm less of a King Kong person than you. Well, yeah. I bought the Life magazine King Kong edition at a...
01:30:08
Speaker
For the podcast listeners, he's holding up the Life Magazine King Kong edition to the camera. The Life Magazine King Kong edition, which I saw at Hudson News and I was like, well, I can't not buy this.
01:30:22
Speaker
You're the exact sucker that like it's just like oh the life magazine of Kenny G. Everybody who's heard of Kenny G. buy a magazine about him. It's true. It's funny that some of the some of the glossy picks in this are clearly very low resolution and it's funny. Oh wow. You couldn't get a high res JPEG of King Kong punching Godzilla in the face? I love low resolution
01:30:51
Speaker
like images in like official signage. That is like one of my aesthetics. Something that I love is when I go into a diner and they have like- The menu is super low res. All the pictures are like, you can see the pixels. Yeah, you could see like the transparency artifacts like on the edges of these really low res picture of a soda cup. I love that. That's my favorite stuff.
01:31:21
Speaker
Oh, boy. I mean, you go to enough diners, you're going to see a lot of that stuff. Yeah, this is a complete tangent. But I might have mentioned this to you before. But one of my favorite diner menus ever, my favorite diner menu ever was at the Mohegan Diner in Peekskill. And for years, for a long time, they had a photo or not a photo like a like a
01:31:44
Speaker
image, like a drawn image of the United States of America on the back of the menu. It said, God bless America. And it was one of those kind of multicolored maps where every state was a different color. And and so it had the state name and then it had the capitals of every state to very educational map, except the capitals of Washington and Oregon were swapped on the map.
01:32:11
Speaker
so and I thought I was losing my my damn mind like was it like a Mandela effect thing where you're just like in my universe these are different seriously it was like like I don't know how you go about having an image of a map that has just the wrong
01:32:30
Speaker
state capitals on it. At least they're close together. Right. You know, it wasn't like Oregon and Florida capitals are swapped. You know, it's like I guess that's an easier mistake to make. But it was like it was like Seattle, Oregon and like like like.
01:32:48
Speaker
What's the capital of Oregon? I don't know. Portland? I don't know. Portland, Washington. Portland, Washington. It made you feel like you were losing your mind when you looked at it. And the thing that really made me feel like I was losing my mind was one day I came back to the diner and it was the same image, but the capitals were right. Oh, so they fixed it.
01:33:13
Speaker
I guess they fixed it with very little fanfare, although I don't know why they would just put a sign up that says, we fixed our menu. If they had a lot of fanfare.
01:33:22
Speaker
I told so many people, I was like, oh, come with me to this diner, their menu, their America's backwards. Oh, no. And then you went there and it wasn't. And you looked like a fool. And it made me feel like, was I just dreaming this whole time? I've come to this diner like a number of times at like three in the morning, as is the best time to come to a diner. You're bleary, you're tired. Maybe it was me the whole time, right? Oh, boy.
Universal Monster Movies
01:33:49
Speaker
I was like, I thought it was so weird that I took a picture of it, and I couldn't find that picture for the longest time, but then I did. I found a picture of the backwards menu at that diner, and I was like, you snuck it. You tried to sneak away, but I have evidence. A secret weird lynching thing where if you go to that diner after 3 a.m., it's swapped, but if you go any other time, it looks normal. That could be it. That could be it.
01:34:17
Speaker
But yeah, a movie that is not Diners. A movie that is... So we talked about a pair of famous gangster movies. Now let's switch gears to a pair of famous monster movies.
01:34:34
Speaker
The Universal Monster movies, the two most famous Universal Monster movies, I would argue. Two of the most famous movies ever made also. And like the most recognizable, like iconic movies. We're really getting into the classics. I mean, these two movies are the poster children of the word classic. We're talking about Dracula and Frankenstein.
01:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, something that I was noticing while I was watching these movies is that Dracula is the oldest film that a normal person would watch.
01:35:11
Speaker
uh like like you could imagine any old person yeah you could imagine any old person going i'm it's halloween time i'm gonna watch dracula i'm a dad i'm gonna watch dracula you know you're not you can't imagine somebody you know you'd have to be a little bit more of a cinephile to go i'm gonna watch all quiet on the western front
01:35:33
Speaker
You'd have to be a lot more of a cinephile if you're going to watch anything silent. A random guy isn't going to watch anything silent. A random guy might watch Dracula. So it is the beginning of cinema history as far as normal guys are concerned. I want to find a normal guy who just randomly throws on Last Laugh.
01:35:57
Speaker
But I don't know if that person exists. It's definitionally not a normal guy. There you go. Yeah, right. Simply by watching Last Laugh, he's no longer normal. You're some kind of freak. So the first of these two movies to be released, and I think the release order is similarly, it's probably more important in this case than the last two. Dracula came out in February.
01:36:23
Speaker
Yes, thirty one, which is a bonkers time to release this movie. The fact that you would not release this movie in like late September or October is crazy. I mean, it is. That's true. But there is a tradition now. There's a tradition of. Yeah. Now there's a tradition of horror movies coming out in February because they just dump them in. Well, because there's nothing else playing and so they can make a ton of money. Yeah. But it's like this.
01:36:52
Speaker
This and Frankenstein both, but like probably even more so for Dracula, is like the Halloween-iest movie maybe ever made. It's like the Halloween vibes are for at least large chunks of it are so strong of like how many cobwebs and bats are in this thing. Spooky castles. Spooky castles. Dracula, like the most, you know, the most famous iteration of Dracula.
01:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, oh, yeah, maybe this was before that was like a thing. Like, did people like Halloween was a holiday in America in 1931, but like how much of the iconography associated with it was established with these two movies? It's exactly the kind of stuff I wonder about all the time. I don't know. This movie, Dracula, directed by Todd Browning, who we I think we had mentioned before. Well, we mentioned London after midnight.
01:37:47
Speaker
which is a famous lost movie from I think 26 or 27 that Todd Browning directed with Lon Chaney where Lon Chaney played a vampire. And so this is his return to the vampire genre. And he was originally going to make it with Lon Chaney again at playing Dracula. But Lon Chaney unfortunately died of I think lung cancer in 1930, like as they were developing it.
01:38:18
Speaker
Um, he might've actually dropped out before that, but it was like lunch and he was not in good enough shape to make this movie from the get go. So they had to find another person and they went with, uh, but a Lugosi who had played Dracula on Broadway in the play 19 twenties play, which this movie is mostly based on. This movie is more based on the play than the book.
01:38:44
Speaker
Which is kind of my main issue with it. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I'm not super familiar with the book and it's been a very long time since I've seen the Coppola movie. Glenn's pulling out the book right there. I haven't read it, but I have it handy. He's someone unlike me who has tolerance for old prose.
01:39:08
Speaker
I was kind of shocked watching this because what I have seen, what I am much more familiar with is Nosferatu. And it made me realize how much of a knockoff Nosferatu really is. Oh, yeah. No, it is directly.
01:39:25
Speaker
a Dracula movie, which is where all the names changed. I would actually argue that I think Nosferatu is kind of a closer adaptation of Dracula than this movie is. I think this movie changes more stuff from the book than that does. Hmm, not counting names, of course. But like, the entire idea of Dracula being like a suave
01:39:44
Speaker
handsome gentleman who seduces women with his European charm is a theater thing. In the book, he's old and gross, more like how Dracula usually is in newer movies where they show him as an old creep, or Mac Shrek is a Nosferatu, where he's a creature more than he is a person.
01:40:08
Speaker
I was thinking about Nosferatu and how comparing it to the suave Dracula of this movie and Hutter, who is the Renfield character in Nosferatu. Well, he's more of the Harker analog in Nosferatu, but also this movie swaps Renfield and Harker in for the first chunk of it. I don't know who this is. The guy who visits Dracula at his castle.
01:40:38
Speaker
Okay. See, I didn't know that they changed that, but in Indosferatu, Hutter is an absolute buffoon. He is a, as we call them, a Himbo vampire hunter in that episode. Sort of a Keanu Reeves type, perhaps. Sure.
01:41:01
Speaker
Nosferatu or Orlok is like such an obvious freak that like you need to be you need to be dumb to just show the castle and you see Count Orlok. You're just like, I know. No, thank you, sir. That is that is a creature that is not a person.
01:41:19
Speaker
where it's like this guy like Renfield in this movie is more of a normal guy. And so if he were to see such a freak as as Count Warlock, he would just turn around again, you know. Right. But but yeah, he goes, OK, this is a reasonable, weird guy. Right. Yeah. He's he's he's from somewhere in Eastern Europe. I guess it's fine.
01:41:42
Speaker
Yeah, everyone tells stories about how he's creepy. Right. He likes to keep 20 foot diameter cobwebs on his staircase. So that's like a pretty big change, I guess, from like the book or the traditional Dracula stories. Usually we start with Jonathan Harker or Hutter in Nosferatu.
01:42:05
Speaker
He's going to visit Dracula's castle in Transylvania to close a real estate deal so that Dracula can buy a castle or an abbey in London. And then John the Harker gets stuck in the castle and he has to escape yada yada yada. This and then there's a different character who's Renfield who at the start of every other Dracula story is like already insane and is locked up in the asylum.
01:42:28
Speaker
This is, I think, maybe the only example where they switch out in the opening scene, it's Renfield going to the castle to visit Dracula. And we actually see him pretty crazy.
01:42:39
Speaker
I think the person who plays Renfield, was it? Dwight Fry. Dwight Fry. He is so good in this. He is, Belagosi is like, he's very good in this and it's like so iconic that it's like, blasphemic to say anything bad about it. But Dwight Fry was, the performance I was most impressed with, I guess, because I didn't, I had no frame of reference for it. I was just like, he's very good in this.
01:43:05
Speaker
Yeah, he starts as a very straight-laced normal guy, and then the second that he is... Even a sort of fancy lad. His suit is really nice, and he's got his hat, and he's just... You get the sense he's very much a city guy, who's totally out of his depth.
01:43:26
Speaker
in a spooky castle. Right. Which is kind of where some of the comedy comes from. But then then he turns into the Renfield that we're used to seeing in Dracula stories, which is just this like animalistic, crazy person who eats bugs. Yes, master. Yes, calling Dracula master and is, you know, his his thrall, his familiar as it were.
01:43:50
Speaker
if we're getting into what we do in the shadows terminology. But I like, I kind of like that change. I think it's like, on one hand, I think it's better to have our lead character be the one to like introduce us to Jack of this castle and to have all that stuff happen. So I think it kind of hurts the movie in that way.
01:44:08
Speaker
But I like showing Renfield pre-crazy because I feel like that almost never happens in Dracula movies or stories or whatever. As soon as we meet him, he's eating bugs and he's talking about the master and all that fun stuff.
01:44:27
Speaker
But like, I like how you can see he's like, oh, he's like a normal dude and then cut to the next scene and he is just a lunatic. Right. He gets bitten specifically. And yeah, it's kind of implied that he's bitten and he's sort of like almost like a half vampire in this, because that also isn't sometimes it's more like hypnotism.
01:44:50
Speaker
of, like, what his deal is, you know? Like, what Renfield's deal is is pretty vague, I guess, I think. And speaking of hypnotism, though, there's a lot of fun stuff done in this movie with Dracula's hypnotic powers, where people, in particular Renfield, are, like, they're just scenes where Bela Lugosi is staring at him and, like, kind of telepathically
01:45:16
Speaker
having a conversation that you're hearing half of. And I think it's pretty well done in this movie. You just get to see Belogosi mug toward the camera in a kind of threatening way. Yeah, he does his eyes. He's got very piercing eyes. I feel like he was cast maybe as Dracula in stage or on film, whatever, purely on his eyes alone.
01:45:41
Speaker
But it's like, I don't know, his performance in this is almost so iconic that it becomes silly.
01:45:46
Speaker
Yeah. Like his voice, his mannerisms is like the entire idea, not just of like Dracula's voice, but like vampire voice comes from him specifically. We had the original Dracula, the original Frankenstein and the original gangster in this. Yeah, it's crazy. The original gangster, the OG. Yeah. No, but it's it's true. And so there's like, you know, when he's like, I never drink.
01:46:14
Speaker
Wine. It's like, one that's a very silly line to begin with, but it's like, even his cadence, his like, the speed in which he speaks is like, it's- it's Dracula voice. It's like, yeah, it's Dracula.
01:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you're getting at something true when you're saying that this is a very Halloween-y movie because this is not a scary film. We've seen scary movies. Like Nosferatu. Yeah, but this is just spooky Halloween fun. It is very spooky. It is almost never scary. There is a single shot in this movie that I do think is
01:46:57
Speaker
It's fairly scary, which is when the ship arrives in London, they don't call it the Demeter, they call it something else. I think the Vesta. Dracula's ship gets to London and the people find that all the crews have all been killed and they open up the hold and there's a shot of Renfield at the bottom of the stairs looking up, like revealed by the light of that hatch of the ship.
01:47:23
Speaker
And he's just smiling and laughing under his breath, this low chuckle, which he does throughout the whole movie. But that shot is incredibly creepy, I think. It's really the only time the movie actually gets under my skin.
01:47:40
Speaker
The rest of the time it's like, yeah, it's Bela Gossi wearing a cape walking around, like, staring at people. And I'm like, this isn't really scary. I mean, you know, to make a comparison with Frankenstein, I think, like, there are very cool sets in this movie, but, like, I feel like there's a whole lot of nothing in it, like... Well, yeah, you are correct. Like, visually...
01:48:04
Speaker
the the scenes are not that rich it's just they're shooting in some cool places and they have some cool matte paintings um and like there are a lot of scenes where just people are just staring at each other and it's not boring it's just a little plain I guess I started to find it boring this movie's very short my big hot take on Dracula is that I don't think it holds up I don't think it's a very good movie
01:48:28
Speaker
I think it's like it's like a nice thing to put on, but it's like I don't. But I don't think it's good. I don't think it's a good movie the way that like most of the other movies that we've already talked about are like good movies are like well made, well directed movies. I watched Dracula and I was kind of disappointed that I'm like, this isn't really good.
01:48:50
Speaker
It's fun, but it could be a lot tighter. I mean, for one, Nosferatu totally eats this movie's lunch.
01:48:58
Speaker
both in terms of adapting Dracula, the story, and also just for being genuinely creepy and creating an atmosphere and all those things. I think this movie feels, even if I hadn't read that it was based more on the stage play, I would be like, this is based on the play, right? Because it feels so stage bound. I suppose so. In a way that a lot of, it feels like this movie suffers from so many early talky problems.
01:49:28
Speaker
even just like bad audio recording at times. So much of this movie takes place in like mansion living rooms. Much like a stage play would, and so much happens off screen too, to the point where I got annoyed, where I'm like, show us something cool. I don't want to be stuck in this dumb mansion living room, the whole movie. There's that whole cool opening, right? Where Renfield goes to the village and meets Dracula in his castle and there's cobwebs everywhere and bats and spiders and spooky stuff.
01:49:58
Speaker
And that part is pretty good. Probably the best part of the movie. And then we get the boat to London. Once we get to London, I feel like this movie really starts to suffer from the stage-iness of it all. One, because I think a lot of the other actors in this feel very British stage-actery, which is a weird complaint to make. But it's like, they don't really feel like they're doing film acting.
01:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, especially with all the kind of standing still and staring. Yeah, I think I think Bela Gossi comes across well. He's not doing a lot. He's letting his presence do most of the work, which is fine because he has a lot of presence to go around. So it works. I think Dwight Fry is really good. And I think the guy who plays Van Helsing is really good. I think those three actors feel like they're actually putting in performances.
01:50:47
Speaker
my kind of skewed understanding of Frankenstein. I was like, OK, wait, so Van Helsing isn't Hugh Jackman, like action, action guy. He does like a big hat and a crossbow and the sword.
01:51:01
Speaker
I was genuinely surprised. I thought that's what Van Helsing was. Van Helsing is, in pretty much every other instance, an old Scandinavian man, as he is in this. Van Helsing is such a metal name. It is. It certainly is. Have you seen the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula?
01:51:22
Speaker
Yes, but a very, very long time ago. I don't remember. Did you watch it at my house? I did, yes. I remember not liking it that time that we watched it because that movie is just so bonkers. I feel like it was like I couldn't reconcile the like different tones and things like that. But it's one of my favorite movies now. I think that might be okay. And Anthony Hopkins, who plays Van Helsing and that is great. That's my favorite Van Helsing.
01:51:46
Speaker
Yeah, I was I was I felt let down by this movie a bit by how much I didn't really feel like it it holds up. It feels very very stagey. There's there's so many places where I'm like you could have shown a cool there's a part right where like Dracula attack someone and like runs off and
01:52:04
Speaker
Jonathan Harker sees that and he's like looking out the window and he's like, oh, look, a big wolf. Look at it run away. I'm like, you could show us that, but, you know, or or anything cool right now. But no, we're just stuck in this living room for like, you know, 70 percent of the movie. That was another thing that I didn't know about was that Dracula can turn into a wolf. Oh, you can turn into all kinds of stuff. Wolf, smoke, bat. I thought he was just a bat guy.
01:52:32
Speaker
Yeah, he's got different forms. It's kind of funny. I don't know why, but this movie really focuses a lot more on him being a wolf guy than a bat guy. It's just they only show the bat. He's got a lot of wolf stuff, yeah. Well, it's also like, he can kind of control animals too. Wolves kind of follow his bidding, it seems also.
01:52:56
Speaker
Before we are done talking about this, we would be sort of remiss in not mentioning Spanish Dracula. Of course. One of the more well-known things about this movie is the fact that there is two of them. Yes. Although we only watch the English language version.
01:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely want to see the Spanish one, though. But yeah, so, you know, they built all these sets and some of the sets are quite cool, I will say, especially the castle. They filmed an English version during the daytime and then with an entirely different cast and crew, they used the same sets and then filmed a Spanish version at night.
01:53:37
Speaker
And there are kind of different aspects of it. It's a bit like it's a bit sexier and like different characters have different there are different people who are kind of have more pronounced performances in the movie. And yeah, I I'm quite.
01:53:55
Speaker
quite curious to see it. It's just such an interesting thing to watch two people take a simultaneous stab at the same movie. Yeah. Also, apparently, the Spanish crew would watch the rushes that were shot during the day and be like, well, we can do better than that. They would see what the English language crew would do and then try to one up them.
01:54:17
Speaker
That bodes well for the Spanish version. The impression I get having not watched the entire Spanish version of it is that some things definitely are better. There's a lot more camera movement in the Spanish one, and there's some performance things. There's a bit where Van Helsing shows, Jacqueline, a mirror.
01:54:36
Speaker
And he sees that he has no reflection and he freaks him out. And so we like, in the Bela Lugosi one, he like slaps it out of his hand. In the Spanish one, he like smashes it with a cane and they're like, pieces go flying everywhere. And that's the sort of thing where they're like, yeah, let's like jazz it up a bit. Let's get it a bit, a bit more intense. I'd really like to watch the full Spanish one, but we didn't do that for the roof this episode because we had a lot of other movies to watch.
01:55:00
Speaker
I read that Todd Browning didn't really like making talkies. Like he enjoyed doing silent movies more. And so maybe that's just a product of him sort of not really adapting to a sound movie that well. There's long stretches of this movie that have no music or sound to them at all. Like no dialogue, no sound effects. It's just silent.
01:55:27
Speaker
Truly silent. It happens enough that it started to annoy me. There's places where it's building atmosphere and it's good just to have the sound cut out and just to have some real tension building that silence. But then there's other times where I'm just like, did they not record any sound for this or put footsteps over it? It's a movie that suffers from not having a score.
01:55:53
Speaker
I think that if it had a Halloween-y score, then it would it would help the movie a lot. And there is on a Blu-ray, there is a score that Philip Glass wrote for the movie, which I'd also be curious to watch that version. Yeah, I listened to part of it and it seems cool. Like it sounds like Philip Glass score, but it's like appropriately spooky.
01:56:19
Speaker
Spooky Glass. Todd Browning was, we'll probably talk more about him and about this aspect of him later with his other famous movie Freaks, but he was like a circus guy. He came up in Vaudeville and the circus and doing spooky shows in the circus.
01:56:38
Speaker
And another fun bit is that some of the sound effects of this movie were done by Jack Foley himself of Foley Artist. Whoa. Like the guy that Foley Artistry is named after. Oh my God. Oh my God. Which is also ironic that I think this movie needs way more Foley in it.
01:56:58
Speaker
than it does. Not enough fully. Yeah. So, yeah, Dracula, very iconic, very famous, super influential. I don't really think it holds up that great personally, but it people liked it when it came out. It did very well. This movie is so the earlier universal monster movies that we had talked about, the like Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback, the lunch. Any ones were produced by Carl Lemley. He was the head of Universal.
01:57:27
Speaker
And by this point, his son, Carl Only Jr., was working at Universal, and Carl Only Sr. famously did not like horror movies. He was like, horror, not a fan. All this monster stuff. Blech. I'll make a Quasimodo picture, but like...
01:57:44
Speaker
It's more about the architecture and all that. It's not like a whole moto picture. It's just a quasi one. Right. Lemley Jr. loved monsters and spooky stuff. He was all about that. So he was like, I want to make more monsters. And so he was like the main producer behind this movie and Frankenstein. This movie did really well. And so they were like, what's what's the next most spookiest thing we can do? Frankenstein.
01:58:11
Speaker
And so, initially, Frankenstein was going to be, I mean, it is another Carl Emily Jr. spook him up. But it was originally going to be directed by Robert Flory, who did the Life and Death of the Hollywood Extra short. And was involved in the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers, right? Or not Animal Crackers, the coconuts. The coconuts, yeah. So he was going to direct this initially. I'm not sure exactly why he left, but then
01:58:41
Speaker
Belle Lugosi was even announced publicly as playing the creature.
01:58:46
Speaker
And they did makeup tests with Bela Lugosi, which were apparently a lot like the golem from the golem. But that didn't work out. And neither of them ended up making the movie. Bela Lugosi ends up in later Universal's Frankenstein movies as a different character. So they got James Whale, who was a sort of respected, who had uncredited, directed all the sound scenes in Hell's Angels. Yep.
01:59:13
Speaker
They got, he apparently just like saw Boris Karloff like on the lot and was like, that guy looks spooky, like putting him in the movie. Because yeah, similar to Bela Lugosi, like Boris Karloff in this is like, goes beyond just like movie character iconography is just like, the Frankenstein, the design of the Frankenstein monster in this movie is like, it's like you could throw, you could put a picture of the monster
01:59:43
Speaker
from this movie to a tribe in the Amazon. And they'd be like, Frankenstein, I know what that is.
01:59:50
Speaker
And yeah, it's not as far as I understand as someone who hasn't read the book. It is not really that in line with how the Frankenstein creature is described, particularly like the square head and the green skin and the bolts in the neck. It's all it's all like the whole the bolts are because of this like electricity angle that was added in the movie.
02:00:13
Speaker
and but it's it's iconic it is the image of frankenstein and even beyond that it's like the image of like halloween and like spooky scary stuff in general almost like yeah this and dracula both are like are like so ingrained in like halloween iconography i have read the book frankenstein
02:00:37
Speaker
I think this is a pretty, so I like Frankenstein the 30s movie more than Dracula. I think it's a better movie. I think this movie is a pretty bad adaptation of the book Frankenstein.
02:00:50
Speaker
which is very different. Doesn't need to be faithful. Right. And it's but it's it's wild almost how much like this movie has like completely supplanted the book in terms of what like the popular understanding of what right the story Frankenstein is even about or like what is in it or anything.
02:01:10
Speaker
Boris Karlov in this movie's got, you know, yeah, the square head, the bolts. He's big. He is mute. He doesn't speak. He just yells and moans. He walks. He walks stiffly. He has like the brain of a child. He has an abnormal brain, as is, you know, labeled in the movie. A bad guy brain that, according to brain phrenology, is not wrinkly enough. So so it's a it's a murderer bad guy brain.
02:01:38
Speaker
But the creature in the book is like not that at all. He has long flowing hair and learns to speak after like a couple of weeks and ends up being very eloquent and is more of like an intelligent... like the creature is scary in the book because of how like smart and determined he is.
02:02:02
Speaker
And that he's like, I'm going to ruin your life Frankenstein for creating me. And that's cool. Yeah. The book I was like most people, I was like, I have Frankenstein. It's like a doctor makes a monster monster goes nuts and like whatever. And then reading the book, I was like, oh, there's like this is so good. There's like so many layers to it. It's like such a good story.
02:02:23
Speaker
I do feel like I blame maybe this movie a little bit for like making people think that the Frankenstein story is like a little bit more simplistic than it kind of really is. But I do like this movie. I'd seen this one before a couple of times.
02:02:37
Speaker
It was actually, I watched the ending of it on TV. It was playing on Svenguli when I was visiting my parents recently, so I watched some of it there. This is, yeah, this is a more enjoyable movie than Dracula. The acting is not good in this movie, I don't think.
02:02:56
Speaker
uh i i mean carlos good but like yeah i think that the the line deliveries like they remind me of the line deliveries that i did when i was 12 i think that yeah this it has a lot of the same problems as dracula it's still feel it is again based more on a stage adaptation than the original book and again a lot of it takes place in like mansion manor house living rooms yeah less of it i think
02:03:26
Speaker
more of this movie takes place in the actual castles. I like this movie, but I had a thought when I was watching it of that Young Frankenstein is a better movie than this. Oh, it for sure is. Like, unquestionably, I think. But I want to talk more about Young Frankenstein in a minute. Okay. The opening of this movie
02:03:48
Speaker
is how every movie should start, which is a man of tuxedo comes out and warns the audience of how scary the movie's gonna be. I want every movie to have that, like a man of tuxedo walks out from behind a curtain and is like, this movie you're about to see fucking kicks ass. Like, get ready. Mr. Carl Lemley would like you to know that this movie, it's a creepy one.
02:04:12
Speaker
Yeah. Hide your eyes, boys. Yeah. Frank and Thumb parodies this bit perfectly of like the guy in the tuxedo coming out. I don't know if you're familiar with Frank and Thumb.
02:04:23
Speaker
I have seen Frank and Thumb also at your house. I don't remember that part of it. My memories of Thumb Wars are a little bit clearer. I did think of Treehouse of Horror that did this. I did, unfortunately, see I probably saw that Treehouse of Horror and Frank and Thumb before I saw this movie, which is a danger that everyone watching old movies comes up. Treehouse of Horror really like kind of
02:04:50
Speaker
I don't know. It might be a bad thing for the world and just how it how it like ruins horror movies. It's likely parodies too many things. And so then it ruins them for people who haven't seen him. One of my beefs. I love The Simpsons. Don't get me wrong. But shortly before seeing The Shining for the first time, I watched The Shinning and that scene where Jack Nicholson is making all those funny noises while he's chasing Wendy up the stairs or creeping up the stairs past her, it
02:05:19
Speaker
borders right on the edge of Silly. And because the Simpsons pushes it just a little bit further, it makes it so it's very difficult to actually enjoy the shining. Right. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure I saw the shinning before I saw the shining also. I don't think it ruined. I didn't watch it like directly before, though.
02:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, Alamo put it in the pre-show of The Shining. Bad, not bad. Don't do it. Yeah, I very much disagree with that. But back to Frankenstein. The opening credits of this movie are kind of fun because it says, for the credits for the monster, it just says question mark. Yeah, that's good. I like that. They make a whole thing about the reveal of the face of the monster. It's hidden for a long time. Yeah, and it's a great reveal.
02:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But then we get into the story and we meet Dr. Frankenstein, who's creeping around the graveyard to steal body parts, and his faithful, hunched-back assistant named Fritz. Yeah. Because that is actually what that character's name is. It's only parodies that have attached the name Igor to it.
02:06:26
Speaker
Whoa. As far as I can tell, because there's a different character in later Universal Frankenstein movies named Igor, spelled with a Y, that Bela Lugosi played. But he's not a lab assistant, and he doesn't have a hunchback. And I think at some point, all Frankenstein movies were parodied enough. They were like, who's that weirdo that's with him, Igor? Yeah, with the hunchback. They became the same character. And so now it's like Igor is his hunchback assistant, even though that's not actually what his name is.
02:06:56
Speaker
And that's in, like, that's in the movie Van Helsing. There's a hunchback named Igor. That's in the movie Victor Frankenstein, where Danny Reikleff plays Igor, who gets his hunchback removed. And then he's just handsome Danny Reikleff for the rest of the movie.
02:07:10
Speaker
But I think that's such a weird phenomenon, right? Where like a character's name just changed through like cultural osmosis stuff, you know? So Frankenstein and Fritz are going to the gallows, going to the graveyard, stealing bodies. Frankenstein sends Fritz to his old college to steal a brain. He's like, oh no, we need a brain, we need a brain.
02:07:38
Speaker
Speaking of acting in this movie, Colin Clive plays not Victor Frankenstein, Henry Frankenstein. Why they changed his name, I have no idea. They're like, Americans can't sympathize with the guy named Victor. He needs to be Henry. Colin Clive is very theatrical and over the top in this movie, but I do kind of enjoy his performance because of how like mad scientist he is. Again, that's another like thing where this movie influence is so influential where it's like, oh yeah, mad scientist kind of comes from this movie a little bit.
02:08:08
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, this movie lifts some of the imagery of the mad scientist laboratory from Metropolis. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But this is the mad scientist laboratory that you think of when you think of mad scientist laboratory. And, you know, talk about something that's in montages. Yeah. This guy. It's alive. Which is the best thing that he does in the movie, for sure. It's like, it's alive. It's alive. It's alive.
02:08:43
Speaker
He says it so many times and each time it's like he's going bigger and bigger with it, but it works. Like he's like frenzied and he's like losing his mind because it's like his entire life's work has led up to this and it's like, he has created life. Colin Clive has this very sort of like aristocratic English accent, which I think works for the character, for me, I think, where people are like, you can't do this, you're mad. And he's like, mad, am I? And this is crazy, am I? I think he says.
02:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, he chews the shit out of that line
02:09:11
Speaker
I think this is another situation of an American movie that just does, you know, it's supposed to be set in Germany. They're calling each other Herr Frankenstein, but they replace everyone's English. Yeah, they replace the the foreign accent with an English accent, which is a which is a storied thing in film history for sure. Also kind of funny that Fritz is played. The Hunchback is played by Dwight Fry, who plays Renfield in Dracula. And they were just like,
02:09:39
Speaker
We got another weird little guy in this movie. Who do we have? Dwight Fry just became the go-to for playing weird little guys, I guess. I think he did become typecast of like, you have to play a weirdo and everything now. And then similarly, Frankenstein's old professor, Dr. Waldman, is played by Edward Van Sloane, who plays Van Helsing in Dracula, who might as well be the same character. Yeah.
02:10:05
Speaker
You could easily have been like, oh yeah, his old professor, Dr. Van Helsing, and then make it a crossover. They did that later. If they really were trying to do their dark universe here. Which they get to. Universal Monster movies do cross over eventually and are part of one of the earliest examples of that shared universe across a ton of movies thing.
02:10:30
Speaker
The first example being, of course, was it Foxy Grandpa? The first comic book movie, the second comic book movie, technically. But I guess, yeah, it's not a crossover. It's just there were three Foxy Grandpa movies. The first cinematic universe, the Foxy Grandpa. The FGCU.
02:10:55
Speaker
Eventually, he zaps the Frankenstein with lightning. He's a Frankenstein, get over it. He is a Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein creates a Frankenstein, played by Boris Karloff. It's like how a father creates a son that also has his last name. I'm a Frankenstein.
02:11:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's he is. He is creature Frankenstein. That is his name. I mean, speaking of that, this movie does like some interesting stuff with, I don't know, it being his son. Right. Mm hmm. They call they call the monster Young Frankenstein or the Young Frankenstein as sort of like a oh, wait, do they call the monster or they call? No, no, they're calling Henry. They are calling Young Frankenstein.
02:11:45
Speaker
because we meet his dad, the Baron, Baron Doofus Frankenstein. He was like, I say, bring me back from the dead. Fightfully preposterous notion.
02:12:01
Speaker
Specifically, it's like he wants to create life. And I had this moment when I was watching the movie, which is a very like high school, high school English moment where I was like, wow, the man's using a lot of technology and and he thinks he's he's he's akin to a god for doing something that a woman does naturally. I mean, creating life. I wonder if you wrote the story Frankenstein.
02:12:31
Speaker
Was it maybe a moody teenage girl? You know, I... One thing about that that kind of irks me is that when in the opening credits... Oh yeah, her screen credit is Mrs. Percy Shelley, which is some bullshit. Yeah.
02:12:48
Speaker
There's the doctor, there's the dad, there's Dr. Frankenstein's fiancé, Elizabeth, who is in the book, and his best friend who gets renamed to Victor in this. And they're like, oh, we're worried about him. So we're going to go to his creepy castle during a rainstorm and confront him about it.
02:13:07
Speaker
So they get to witness the creature getting brought to life. The castle is the set for the castle is and like the laboratory is amazing and is very feels very expressionist influenced. Yes. Yeah, they definitely get. Yeah, Frankenstein or Dracula is a bit more like classic stately Gothic Halloween, where there are some shots in this that are like genuinely like this looks like it's from Caligari.
02:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The sets in this are so good. I love them to death. And they create such a great atmosphere and mood. And yeah, we get our great iconic It's Alive moment. And then Dr. Waldman is sort of having an argument with Frankenstein about like the ethical implications of what he's doing, which is I do like this scene. It's very talky, but it is sort of like it's getting into kind of
02:14:02
Speaker
bigger thematic ideas behind it a little bit. And then we get the big reveal of Boris Karloff as the creature, like stepping out into the light. And we get a nice little like three shot like punch in where it's like each shots getting cutting closer to his face. And yeah, Boris Karloff, he's real good. He's real spooky and also has a lot of pathos in this movie.
02:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, his performance feels very post his performance and what he is doing in this film feel very post the golem. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In the way that he kind of hobbles around and is, you know, a created creature. And then also the the golem has a scene where he's nice to a child.
02:14:58
Speaker
And there's a nice heart inside of this violent creature. But in Frankenstein, he just accidentally kills her. Also, the abnormal brain thing that is so famous from young Frankenstein is in this movie, right? Where it's just like, there's a normal brain and an abnormal brain. And Fritz picks up the normal one and then he gets scared and he drops it. So he just picks up the other one and runs away.
02:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, he says darn, a perfectly good brain wasted. Exactly. Presumably Dr. Frankenstein never checked the giant label on the jar that says abnormal brain. No, but like he also, you know, he told him to take the brain, but he like didn't he made everything else out of criminals like he didn't.
02:15:44
Speaker
He didn't seem to care. He didn't seem to care about it. I think it actually hurts this movie thematically by being like, oh, the creature is this way because he had a criminal brain that makes them violent. I think the idea of just like, this is a bad idea to build a person out of dead body parts and bring it to life and then treat it poorly because you're afraid of it.
02:16:10
Speaker
I think it kind of undermines a lot of what's strong about the book and I think what is just like kind of inherent to the Frankenstein story by being like, oh, if they just put a nice brain in there, it would have been fine. Well, it gives it a very eugenicist angle, which yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because Dr. Baldwin is like, as you see here, these these brain lumps are different from these brain lumps and like. Right. And it's like Frankenstein has an evil destiny because he has an evil brain. Yeah. And.
02:16:39
Speaker
I mean, I think that something that could have been a little stronger and maybe was sort of implied in the movie is that, like, literally the minute that Frankenstein, that the Frankenstein, you know, becomes alive, Igor, sorry, Fritz, is... See? It's so ingrained. It's like Igor, that guy. Instantly abusive toward Frankenstein. Yeah. I'm just going to call him Frankenstein.
02:17:06
Speaker
He's like instantly just horrible to him. He sees that he like doesn't like fire. So he's just like, ah, I'll put some fire in your face. How do you like that? You know? Yeah. And Fritz is a bit of a sadist around the creature for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's just there's a lot of cruelty in this movie and like senseless cruelty, I think.
02:17:29
Speaker
including like from Fritz, from Dr. Frankenstein and from and from the angry torch mob who are an iconic classic torch mob. Yeah, the original torch mob, even though they've been in tons of movies already, we've talked at length about many other torch mobs, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, there's we mentioned that, yeah, the scene where
02:17:55
Speaker
there's the absurdly adorable little girl who's like, I have a little kitten and flowers and it's like hee hee hee and it's like the most like cartoonish vision of like childhood innocence possible and then she immediately befriends the creature who's escaped the castle after being abused and like Dr. Baldwin was gonna kill it with like euthanasia and then he kills Baldwin and escapes
02:18:21
Speaker
But, uh, and then he runs into the little girl and the little girl's like, come, come play with me by the river. And they're throwing the, uh, the flowers, the petals into the river and they float and that delights both of them. And so then the creature picks up little Maria and chucks her into the river also. And she drowns. Um, he doesn't know any better. Yeah. It's a, but it's like, uh, he's like, he, he's been alive for about like 48 hours at this point. Like he doesn't understand.
02:18:52
Speaker
what would happen, you know? He does seem prone toward violence because he has an abnormal brain. And then, but it's like he's immediately feels bad and afraid when that happens and like doesn't know what to do about it. And so it just runs away. I think that's like it's one of the more famous scenes from this movie. I think it's I think it's a good scene. It's good. Yeah. But also having read the book, it's a bit like so in the book, there's a scene where he saves a girl from drowning.
02:19:20
Speaker
And the parents think that he attacked her and so they shoot at him. Which is like to take that and then to be like, yeah, but what if he actually did chuck her into the river? It's like, no, come on, guys. It's dark and gritty. It needs an introduction that tells you how upsetting this movie is.
02:19:41
Speaker
So after the monster escapes, Frankenstein has sort of like come to his senses and it's like, oh, nevermind, I will marry you, Elizabeth. I do love you. I will convalesce in my mansion. And so now we get a lot of mansion scenes, which everyone loves. I'm like, let's have a bunch of scenes of just people sitting in living rooms.
02:20:05
Speaker
But it does lead to a kind of a fun scene where they realize that the creature is on the loose. Someone finds Maria's body. That shot is actually very good, the bit where the dad is carrying Maria's body through the streets, through a parade that's happening around. And he's got this blank stare on his face as he's walking. He knows how to ruin everyone's time and traumatize
02:20:34
Speaker
hundreds of people. Yeah. But it's like I'm taking you down with me. It's like he's not even thinking like it's like just the blank stare on his face is really, really powerful, I think. Yeah. But so then they're like, all right, the creatures out and about. He's doing he's doing murders. And so Doc Frankenstein is like, Elizabeth, go in this room and I'll lock you in. That'll keep you safe. Which then, of course, immediately the creature just comes in through the window.
02:21:04
Speaker
And there's, uh, one of my favorite parts of the whole movie, when she sees the creature, Elizabeth does a big, ah, scream, and then it cuts to Boris Karlov and he goes, rawr!
02:21:16
Speaker
He does like a meow growl, which is just very funny to me. It feels like it's kind of intended to be a bit of a punchline, maybe. Right. He's like mimicking her in a way. A little bit, yeah. They're like busted at the room, and Elizabeth is like lying on the bed, and Frankenstein is escaped. I see. And now I'm calling him Frankenstein. The creature has escaped. He's Frankenstein. The creature is Frankenstein.
02:21:45
Speaker
Elizabeth lying on the bed reminded me of that that painting, The Nightmare, like the Sleep paralysis painting. You've seen that one. Oh, the woman in like lying on her back on the bed and there's like a little demon right on her chest. I don't know if it's intended to look like that painting or not, but it has this sort of like Baroque painting look to it. But Elizabeth is fine. She does get murdered in the book.
02:22:13
Speaker
because spoilers for the book Frankenstein. So then, yeah, the mob gets all their torches. Doc Frankenstein puts on his job for his ready-to-go hunting. Yeah, they all split up to go in three different torch mobs to- Up into the mountains. Yeah. And then they chase him into a windmill.
02:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, which apparently the windmill was a Robert Flory idea to have like the end of the movie take place at a windmill because that's not in the play or the book. Another like pretty iconic bit. It's like, yeah, for sure. The windmill getting set on fire and all that. Yeah, they like Frankenstein goes up to go and confront Frankenstein and and.
02:23:02
Speaker
immediately like like the monster takes Frankenstein picks him up and then throws him off of the windmill and he lands on one of the blades of the windmill and like seems to just buckle on the blade very Saruman in like extended
02:23:23
Speaker
Two towers. It's like, oh, he's dead. Clearly. Yeah. And then later he's just alive. And I'm like, he just fell like 30 feet and then like broke his back on a windmill blade. Like, are you kidding me? But anyway, because it gets thrown off that there's that great shot where there's like the cog wheel and the oh, and they're both looking at each other like through the spokes of the wheel. Great.
02:23:47
Speaker
yes that was good good like duality stuff of like ah they are the same don't you see but it's also like a really good kind of um like i don't know good the bad and the ugly like staring each other down sort of thing very very much
02:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, and then they torch the windmill and then the monster dies. Yeah. Maybe. Well, it is a very like pat Hollywood ending, which is not how the book ends at all, which is like, I guess the monster died because he was bad and the doctor got to live and get married and he's fine now.
02:24:22
Speaker
And it's like, no. Didn't you read this? But hey, it's the famous version. So within the context of the movie, clearly ignoring the fact that there's a better book, it's it's it's a fine ending, I suppose. Whenever a movie is its own thing, I think you must ignore whether a book is better. I think like. Yeah. Yeah.
02:24:43
Speaker
I think, you know, different things can have the same name. Right. And it's kind of so different from the book that it's like it's pretty easy to kind of just let it exist as its own separate thing.
02:24:56
Speaker
At the end of this movie, they are able to give Boris Karloff a credit because they say, a good cast is worth repeating. Yeah, I agree with. And so they are able to credit him as the creature instead of just a question mark. Yeah. So when they're running up and down the mountains, they're on a very obvious set, like a backlot set with a painted background of clouds behind them.
02:25:23
Speaker
Mm-hmm, but it's like and I think a lot of the stuff in Dracula felt very kind of stage II and like That's like I don't know that's a problem and lots of movies where it's like this set looks fake as hell This set does look very fake, but it at least is like kind of painterly like it feels more like an expressionist
02:25:44
Speaker
set than like i mean it feels like a like a hollywood matte painting there there's some good stuff in the beginning of dracula like that too dracula has got some amazing matte paintings in it but yeah especially right at the beginning uh speaking of dracula both the the makeup for both dracula and frankenstein was done by jack pierce who will also go on to do wolfman and the mummy and it's just like he's like the monster makeup guy
02:26:10
Speaker
after lunching, like lunching he did all his own makeup. Jack Pierce did like all the like classic thirties and forties monster makeups. And it's just wild that like that one guy did that. And now it's like
02:26:24
Speaker
Every Halloween decoration is like based off of his work. It's yeah. And Universal copyrighted the Frankenstein monster design. Yeah. Yeah. As created by Jack Pierce for his makeup. And so not only is this like a kind of different interpretation of what Frankenstein looks like, but it is a proprietary one. Yeah. Which is like I wonder how good they are enforcing that, because like, does Universal own like Boo Berry?
02:26:52
Speaker
Like I feel like there's, I see that design so much in everything. I don't know how litigious they are about it. I guess they did nothing of like newer Frankenstein movies and most of them are universal. So it's like the monster in the movie Van Helsing. That's universal movie. Definitely owes a lot to the Jack Pierce design.
02:27:15
Speaker
Ben Helsing has a Frankenstein in it? Yeah, don't you remember? That's like a huge part of the plot. I really just don't remember much about it. I mean, it's not a great movie, but it's fun. I want to watch Ben Helsing again and I want to watch... Do that for our decade review episode. Just watch Ben Helsing.
02:27:37
Speaker
I want to watch the Bram Stoker's Dracula, Coppola one. Yeah, the Coppola one's real good. Pretty like a couple of weeks before I saw Frankenstein, I watched Fleischer Frankenstein, the Andy Warhol produced movie.
02:27:53
Speaker
And then right after Frankenstein, I watched Jurassic Park. So I was I was having a on that day. I was having a bit of a what has science rot? Yeah, kind of kind of day. But also watching Frankenstein while being informed by the contents of flesh for Frankenstein was was quite quite a time. Flesh for Frankenstein is
02:28:18
Speaker
Fleischer Frankenstein is a 70s movie starring Udo Kier as Victor Frankenstein. That is, what if we made Frankenstein horny? Yeah. It's great. It's so good. I did watch this Frankenstein during a rainstorm. So that felt a little weird. This had like a lot of pre-code movies. This was censored on re-releases in like the later 30s and 40s.
02:28:49
Speaker
Notably, they took out the line where Dr. Frankenstein says, now I know what it is like to be God. And they're like, no, can't have that in there. People can't know what it's like to feel like God after creating a horrific abomination. It's almost like that's the theme. Yeah, it's almost like that's one of the more important lines of dialogue in this whole movie. But yeah, they deemed it unworthy for the American public.
02:29:18
Speaker
But it was later restored, thankfully. That's a very common phenomenon with pre-code movies. A couple of lines of dialogue or little things were spliced out.
02:29:31
Speaker
later on during the Hays Code and we're like only later on someone was like, oh, we found it again. We had to like dig through the archives or like someone had an uncut copy of it somewhere. Yeah. Though sometimes like the sensor notes help with the restoration because they have like very detailed
02:29:51
Speaker
you know, information about what happens in scenes and in what order. And so that was instrumental in reconstructing Metropolis, for example, were sensor records. Good and bad. So, yeah, a couple of real iconic movies. Yeah. Which was your favorite? This is tough. I this is this is a tough, a tough year. There was it's between, I think, well,
02:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough. M was the last movie that I saw. And I
Favorite Films of 1931
02:30:29
Speaker
feel like M is far and away the best movie. It's very complex. It's got very good cinematography and editing and acting. And I respect it a lot, and I like it a lot.
02:30:47
Speaker
The unquestioned champion up until I watched M was Little Caesar. I had so much fun with that movie. It is such a blast. It's so corny. It's so it's not it's not corny. It's just like it's awesome. It knows exactly what you want out of it as a viewing audience. Little Caesar is everything that I want out of a gangster movie, everything that I want.
02:31:16
Speaker
Uh, so granted that M is the better movie and I probably do like M better as a movie. I just, I just love little Caesar. So I'm just going to say a little Caesar. Um, right. Then I'll, I can just say M then. Okay. M, M, M I think was the best movie that we watched, but like I got big shout out to city lights. I love city lights. It's, it's a great movie, but yeah, M is just like, uh, uh,
02:31:44
Speaker
tour de force. The M is short for masterpiece. It's actually short for murderer, but yes, that too. It can be short for a lot of things. I'm excited for Peter Lorre to go on and have an illustrious career playing a little weirdo along with the white fry.
02:32:05
Speaker
The best character actors from this era are the people who are just like, I'm just gonna play little weirdos from now on. The best character actors ever are little weirdos. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. But yeah, this was a very fun year of movies to watch. There were a few that we wanted to watch that we did not get to because Time is a Thing. That should be the name of this podcast. Time is a Thing? Yeah.
02:32:31
Speaker
Or we didn't watch this because time was a thing. I don't know. Time is a thing. Yeah. Time. But there were there was a lot of good stuff, definitely. And more good stuff coming up soon. Yeah, more more spookum ups. More Todd Browning, more more gangster movies. Got Scarface, original Scarface next episode. So that should be fun. This this whole town is
02:32:59
Speaker
I don't know, it's a cookie just waiting to get eaten. It's saltdowns one big chicken waiting to get clucked, which is the TV edit, which I love. So look forward to that next episode. We're talking non-pachino Scarface.
02:33:17
Speaker
Um, instead Howard Hughes produced and Howard. And we got freaks and we got, uh, we got, uh, live and payer. We got the mummy is the mummy 32. That's yeah, man. All right. Oh gee mummy.
02:33:33
Speaker
We're in the stacked pre-code era. So join us next week, next episode, for 1932. Thank you all for listening. And follow us on stuff. So Glenn, follow us on stuff. Come on.
02:33:51
Speaker
Leave a comment. There you go. We've been getting a lot of comments on YouTube. If you're angry at our show because we don't like the marks betters, let us know. I like how we're small time enough that we can call out randos in our YouTube comments. We don't really get like four comments in episodes. So yeah, it's easy to. Four is a lot. It's true. Yeah. So please, please comment. Please comment. Please clap.
02:34:20
Speaker
Please clap. And with that, Glenn, I'll see you next year. See you next year.