The Bowery

 (1933)

Directed by Raoul Walsh
Written by Howard Estabrook, James Gleason from a novel by Michael.L. Simmons and Besse Roth Solomon
Staring Wallace Beery, George Raft, Jackie Cooper, Fay Wray
IMDB Entry

Wallace Beery is an unlikely leading man -- not what anyone would consider handsome -- but he was one of the biggest names in Hollywood in the early30s. He specialized in playing men who were gruff on the outside but who had a heart of gold.  The Bowery is a good example of his work.

Chuck Connors* (Wallace Beery) is the king of the Bowery** in the 1890s. His tavern is always packed and he led his own fire brigade.*** He also has taken in Swipes McGurk (Jackie Cooper) a street kid who is on his own. Connors is challenged by the debonair Steve Brodie (George Raft), who has his own fire brigade and competes with him to be king. 

Connors comes upon Lucy Calhoun, a new girl in town, as a couple of pimps try to recruit her. He chases them off, and later, Lucy asks him for help. He takes pity on her and takes her in as a housekeeper. Brodie gets wind of it and thinks at first she's Connors's mistress, but, when he learns the truth, the starts to go out with her -- keeping it secret from Connors. 

In order to make himself better known, Brodie decided to jump off the Brooklynn Bridge.****  A bet with Connors makes him owner of Connors's saloon. Connors fights back.

Beery is delightful. Definitely his gruff personality with a heart of gold fits him perfectly, and the heart of gold part is never obtrusive. Cooper was a big star at the time after graduating from the Our Gang comedies. He was successful as an actor after growing up, playing the lead in the sitcoms The People's Choice and Hennessey, and appearing as Perry White in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies.

George Raft is best known for gangster movies. His schtick was to be constantly flipping a coin, something he originated in Scarface, and which became iconic. Unfortunately, he made a series of bad choices, including rejecting the roles that made Humphrey Bogart a star.

Of course, and film buff worth his salt recognizes Fay Wray. What I've been discovering that she was a busy lead actress before that.

Director Raoul Walsh was extremely successful, directing films into the 60s, including The Roaring Twenties, They Drive by Night, They Died with Their Boots On, Bogart's High Sierra, and the classic James Cagney film, White Heat.

The movie is charming, if slightly melodramatic for modern tastes, but it never stops being interesting.

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*No relation

**A lower class section of New York city, known at the time for its taverns and rowdy doings.

***Accurate for the time. There were many small fire brigades in New York who competed to put out fires. They often fought each other at the scene, as portrayed in the movie.

****Based on the real Steve Brody, who gained fame doing it.

Murders in the Rue Morgue

(1932)

Directed by Robert Florey
Written by Tom Reed, Dale Van Every,  "based" on a story by Edgar Allen Poe
Starring Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Waycoff (Leon Ames), Bert Roach. 
IMDB Entry

I mentioned last week that Edgar Allen Poe rarely had his works translated to film faithfully. Part of that was the Poe worked in short stories, which need to be expanded to movie length, so writers would take a title and a few elements of the original and do what they pleased with it. Murders in the Rue Morgue is an early example.

It's set in Paris in 1845. Dr, Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is kidnapping young women and injecting them with the blood of his sideshow ape Erik because reasons. It fails miserably, of course, and the bodies are dumped naked in the Seine.  Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff) and his fiancee Camille (Sidney Fox) visit the sideshow where Mirakle is showing off his ape.  The doctor becomes attracted to Camille and ends up visiting her. She is leery, so he has his minion kidnap her. Meanwhile, Dupin performs tests on the body of a dead prostitute and finds ape blood mixed in. Dupin becomes a suspect and they go in search of Mirakle before it's too late.

The movie is stagy and bears little resemblance to Poe's tale, other than the fact that Camille's mother is stuffed into a chimney. Again, Dupin's first name is changed for some reason to "Pierre." This attempts to ramp up the horror, but Poe's story is basically a mystery tale.

Bela Lugosi plays Mirakle in typical Lugosi fashion. Leon Waycoff does a good job with Dupin, though he's nothing like the character in the story, but rather an absent-minded student who keeps getting distracted by the search for the killer.``Bert Roach is notable as Dupin's friend and comic relief.

Director Robert Florey is best remembered today, if at all, as the director of The Coconuts, the Marx Brothers first film. He shot this with a nod to German expressionism. The job was given to him after he had been taken off shooting Frankenstein.

Aside from Lugosi, the most durable career was that as Leon Waycoff. A few years after the movie, he changed his name to Leon Ames and had roles in major films, most notable as Judy Garland's father in Meet Me in St. Louis.

The Mystery of Marie Roget

 

(1942)
Directed by Phil Rosen
Written by Michael Jacoby, from a story by Edgar Allen Poe (Ha!)
Starring Patrick Knowles, Maria Montez, Maria Ouspenskaya, John Littel, Marcel Vigneaux, Nell O'Day, Lloyd Corrigan, Edward Norris
IMDB Entry

Edgar Allan Poe was probably the author whose works were rarely made into films by Hollywood. Oh, his titles were used in quite a few films but the stories often had nothing in common with the movie. Faithfulness was not a consideration. An example of this was The Mystery of Marie Roget, based on one of his C. August Dupin detective stories, credited as being the beginning of the genre,

Marie Roget (Maria Montez), a famous stage starin Paris, disappears. Inspector Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan) depends on the police medical officer Pierre Dupin (Patrick Knowles) to try solve the case, trying to deal with pressure from her grandmother Cecile Roget (Maria Ouspenskaya).  Dupin also meets Marie's sister Camille (Nell O'Day), who is engaged to Marcel Vigneauz (Edward Norris).  When a body is found -- her face mutilated as though clawed by a big cat -- it is identified as Marie.  Soon after, though, Marie returns, none the worse for wear.

The story isn't bad, though it gives away the murder plot far too soon. But it has little to do with Poe,* who was writing about an actual murder case and used Dupin to point out a solution that the police of the time hadn't discovered.

Patrick Knowles was a successful Hollywood actor, thought not often as a leading man. He actually makes a good detective here.  Maria Montez was a major star of technicolor costume epics of the era.  Lloyd Corrigan sounds like the name of an action star, but he certainly didn't look like one and never played one.  He was active throughout early television.

Director Phil Rosen had a long career directing B pictures after a start with silents.

The title, of course, used Poe as a marketing ploy. It wasn't a good one, since people had associate Poe with horror more than mystery.

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*That was obvious when they changed C. August Dupin to Pierre Dupin, and made him a police medical officer insted of a detective.