What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" (1933), with Al Jolson, Frank Morgan, Madge Evans and Harry Langdon.



Asa Yoelson is a performer you either enjoy or you absolutely can't stand -- even aside from the cultural baggage of blackface (which he does not don at any point in this film), the Jolson performing style, all bombast and big gestures, is an acquired taste that's very difficult for people to acquire the further we move from the 1910s-1920s Broadway milieu that created it. But if you understand Jolson's place in theatrical history and can contextualize that, he's still a very interesting performer to watch. And never is that more true than in this strange, could-only-have-been-made-when-it-was picture.

In the fall of 1932, when this independent film was made by director Lewis Milestone, unemployment in the United States stood at 25 percent. Millions of once-middle-class people found themselves reduced to complete poverty for reasons they could only dimly understand, and "Hoovervilles," shantytowns full of unemployed and desperate people, bloomed all over the country. One of the largest metastasized in Central Park, and that's where much of the story is set. That's where Jolson as "Bumper," jaunty fellow in a dirty white suit, black turtleneck sweater, and bashed-up hat, presides over his fellow hoboes as "The Mayor of Central Park," a charismatic vagrant who is also a good friend and advisor of the city's mayor -- Frank Morgan as "Johnny Hastings," a bon-vivant type of fellow who's as close to Jimmie Walker as they could get without rousing the lawyers. Johnny slips Bumper cash whenever they meet, and Bumper dispenses philosophy and advice, which seems to both parties to be a fair trade.

Back in Central Park, Bumper's closest friends are an odd and rather engaging pair of characters. Diminutive veteran of Black vaudeville Edgar Connor is Jolson's chipper sidekick "Acorn," and silent-screen comedy genius Harry Langdon is "Egghead," a Communist garbage collector who constantly proclaims revolutionary slogans when he isn't picking up discarded newspapers for Bumper to read over breakfast. I keep waiting for Connor to go into his act, whatever that act was, but, frustratingly, he doesn't -- although Acorn's relationship with Bumper has a friendly cross-racial ease that's not commonly seen in thirties movies. And while Langdon is playing a figure not quite entirely removed from his familiar silent-screen character, he's quite good with what he's given to do. My only regret is that he doesn't get to sing or dance a solo number, because he was quite good at both.

Speaking of music, Bumper has a tendency to burst into song at the slightest provocation, but the songs into which he bursts are by Rodgers and Hart, so this habit is one strongly to be encouraged. He and the rest of the cast also shift without warning from time to time into rhythmic, rhyming dialogue, giving the whole picture the feeling of an experimental vernacular opera, which is definitely not the type of production moviegoers expected in 1933 when they saw Jolson's name on a marquee. This isn't a run of the mill movie musical by any means. It's not quite an operetta, and it's not quite an opera either, but it has elements of all three, combined in a way unlike anything you've ever seen. And Milestone even throws in a few expressionistic montages to give the film an unexpected visual kick lacking in most Hollywood product since talkies came in.

Into all of this unreality drops Madge Evans, as Mayor Johnny's lover -- who in a fit of depression after he accuses her of infidelity attempts suicide by hurling herself in a Central Park lake. Bumper, of course, leaps to her rescue, pulls her out, and finds that she has emerged from the water with a case of amnesia. They fall in love, and Bumper determines to change his ways to be worthy of her -- prevailing upon his pal Mayor Johnny to get him, and Acorn, jobs in a bank. And all is delight -- until the inevitable tragic ending.

Jolson has always been considered, pardon the expression, a supreme example of a ham actor. But his work here, when his whole fragile world comes crashing down in the space of a few minutes, is nothing short of heartbreaking and wonderful. As we fade out, he's sprawled on a treetrunk in the park, clothes in disarray, clearly having gone on a drunken binge, with nothing left but his friends to attend to him. But those friends are smiling, glad to welcome him back.

What's the message here? I don't know if there really is one. Bumper starts out a bum, and he ends up as a bum agai, and you get the sense that this is what he really wanted all along. There's plenty of hard-hitting critique of the Depression in the film, but when most of it is being delivered by Harry Langdon, it's easy not to take it seriously. And Mayor Johnny, who, it is hinted, may not be entirely on the up-and-up, waltzes off with a happy ending. It may be the oddly-contradictory politics that caused the film to flop, or the confusion of genres between musical, operetta, comedy, and melodrama, or it may just be that filmgoers were sick of Jolson, who was all over the screen from 1927-31. Whatever it was, the picture was indifferently received at the box office, and Jolson's movie career went into a brief limbo. And nobody ever tried to make a movie like "Hallelujah, I'm A Bum" ever again.

I still don't know what I think of this film, but I do think about it, which maybe is all we have a right to expect of any picture. But I do go away from it with a real sense of appreciation for Jolson the actor -- I don't think anybody else in the business in 1932 could have done what he did with this role, and while it's just a footnote to a very long career, it's still worthy of being remembered.

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" is one of those IWW / Joe Hill songs based upon religious hymns and songs which I absolutely love. From what I have read, the bosses used to try to break up worker organizing street meetings by bribing Salvation Army bands to drown out speeches with revival meeting music- so Hill and the other Wobblies made up their own lyrics and turned the situation to their advantage. "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" was sung to the tune of, "Alleluia, Thine the Glory" (see words below).

"The Preacher & the Slave" ("Pie In the Sky"), sung to the tune of "In the Sweet Bye & Bye") was another good one.

Why don't you work like other folks do?
How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?
Refrain
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.


Oh, why don't you save all the money you earn?
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn.


Whenever I get all the money I earn,
The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.


Oh, I like my boss, he's a good friend of mine,
That's why I am starving out on the bread line.


When springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;
We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.

Edward said:

Watched The Dig on Netflix last night. Mostly stuck with it for the clothes. The slow pace was quite relaxing after a lot of my recent watches, but I felt like it was missing a lot. Too much reliance on "human drama" between characters that were, quite frankly, two-dimensional and ill-fleshed out, and far, far too little information about the actual archaeological dig itself. Watch it for the wardrobe, but that's the only thing really worth it in it, tbh.

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I'll probably watch it with the volume off and some nice music on. I watch a lot of films like this.

Currently on Netflix, Bathtubs over Broadway explores the hidden world of the US industrial musicals from the 50s to the 70s, unseen to almost all bar sales reps at conventions, yet with bigger budgets than anything on Broadway itself... Fascinating. Nice cameo appearance by Jello Biafra, too.

We had "Bathtubs" at our place the year before last, and it was a very big hit. Made me want to produce an industrial musical of our own, "Popcorn For Profit."

Meet John Doe from 1941 with Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold and Walter Brennan

I like some Frank Capra directed movies, they just tend to be the ones that aren't too "Capraesque." It's not just because I disagree with many (not all) of the messages in the Capra movies - if I let that bother me, I'd only be able to enjoy about one percent of Hollywood's message movies. Instead, it's both the pie-in-the-sky silliness and the complete kitschiness of them that grate on me while every point is pontificated and every idea heralded loudly.

Also, Capra leaves nothing to chance or shows any faith in the intelligence of his audience; good is pure good and bad is pure evil in a Capra movie, despite real life being full of gray ideas and morally complex people. Perhaps that's an intentional part of his messaging, but it's also why his most famous movies are really just fairy tales for adults.

In Meet John Doe, reporter Barbara Stanwyck, having just been given the heave-ho from her job, pens a spite-driven story that sparks a Depression-era movement for the common man. Rehired owing to the story's success and its ensuing movement, Stanwyck is tasked by the paper's cardboardly mendacious owner, Edward Arnold, to find a real man to fill the role of the made-up leader Stanwyck created.

In walks hobo Gary Cooper who becomes the leader of the movement of, effectively, an idealized collaboration of everyday people banding together to help their neighbors as a rebuke to slimy politicians and political parties. It's a nationwide political-movement (without politicians - uh-huh) version of George Bailey's town's kumbaya moment or the communally perfect joy in the house in You Can't Take it With You.

The bulk of this long movie, which would have benefited greatly from forty-five of its minutes having been left on the cutting-room floor, is the movement growing while Arnold plots to co-opt it for his own political career. Simultaneously, Cooper and Stanwyck, now falling in love, but (of course) denying it, inconsistently fight Arnold's efforts.

There are a ton of speeches in the movie that, boiled down, say "if we could all just get along and be nice to each other" we would solve most of our problems. Concentrated efforts like that can absolutely work for a limited time in very small groups with a narrow and specific goal, but good luck running a country that way. Yet after having the message endlessly drilled into you, the movie climaxes with a crash, burn and resurrection of the movement that takes suspension of belief to, yet, another level.

If you can put the exhausting treacle aside, the performance of Gary Cooper - a man built for the role of a hero - is outstanding (the scene where he plays an imaginary game of baseball is acting talent at its best). Unfortunately, Stanwyck, an immensely talented actress, comes across as a bit lost in this one as she ricochets back and forth between being an intelligent, thoughtful woman and a shrill scatterbrain. Arnold, like Stanwyck, is a talented actor capable of smart nuance in his performances, but here he's stuck saying such cookie-cutter "evil businessman" lines that he comes across as almost campy.

If Meet John Doe is not the most Capraesque of all his movies, it's close. And if Hallmark today hired a top director, screenwriters and actors and had a big Hollywood budget, its movies would be modern Capra efforts. Most of Capra's movies don't work for me as I quickly become bored and irritated watching them, but their long-standing success argues that many feel differently.


N.B., Meet John Doe does have beautiful Art Deco architecture (the skyscraper in the climatic scene is incredible) and some wonderfully picturesque moments in the snow. Capra seems to love snow's visually magical qualities and, perhaps, its symbolic blanketing of the world's soot. And much like snow, Capra ideas have the same depth of thought as a light dusting does to the ground.

George Clooney's new starring/directed SF flick on Netflix, The Midnight Sky.

I was disappointed. The only thing I was impressed with was the production design - it wasn't realistic (sure, we'll be building spacecraft with huge amounts of empty, wasted interior space in 30 years), but it looked good. The science was bad (sure, a moon of Jupiter would have habitable temps), the plotting was one damn thing after another (wolves attack! the ice breaks and the snowmobile sinks! meteorites take out the radio antenna!), and the net result is another depressing end-of-the-world retread.

Clooney's largely one-man performance - as a dying elder scientist - was okay, but I expect more from him as a director, since most of his earlier films are quite good. The performances of the spaceship crew (Felicity Jones, etc.) were okay... but since their plot events were so damn familiar (everything from 2001 to Mission To Mars to Sunshine to Gravity), they made little impression. Not recommended.

Re Meet John Doe, it's a problematical picture and was from day one. Capra and Riskin wrote themselves into a corner with the plot, and wrote/filmed several endings - none of which really worked, including the one they used.

It's a mess, with Capra stuck between the sappy optimism of his thirties films but not yet matured by the war years into the guy who made It's A Wonderful Life, which of course works so well because of how scary dark it gets in the last act.

Anyway, leave Meet John Doe to the "healots"...

The Beast of the City (1932) w/ Walter Huston, Jean Harlow, Wallace Ford, and Jean Hersholt, who went on to portray kindly Dr. Christian on radio and film, as a mob boss. A preface quotes President Hoover urging more films that glorify law enforcement and not criminals. What followed was much in that vein, with Huston as police chief, Ford as his plainclothes officer kid brother, Harlow as a moll, and Hersholt looking like Billy Gilbert playing the gang leader.
It was a scratchy print, with less-than-clear audio, so subtitles ran the whole time for us. The dialogue was staccato, loaded with tough talk and slang. If you have the opportunity, watch it clean through to the blazing climax.

Hunt for Red October, this time original tone.

Keep Your Powder Dry with Lana Turner and Lorraine Day.

I've had TCM on for most of the yesterday and today as I cope with the loss of my cat. TCM has helped me through a lot of tough times in my life.

Boys' Night Out from 1962 with Kim Novak, James Garner and Tony Randall

This is not a good movie. That doesn't mean some of it isn't enjoyable or that the actors did a bad job, it's just that the story is too silly and forced to keep you engaged throughout.

In the '50s and early '60s, they made a bunch of these "battle of the sexes" movies, basically, romcoms with the slant usually being that the man doesn't want to get married and the woman is too good to do any of the fun stuff unless she is married. Hence, for most of the movie, we watch each plot to accomplish his or her goal: premarital sex for him, marriage before sex for her.

Despite the fact that real movies about real relationships where men and women have sex and live together out of wedlock (see The Apartment or Two for the Seesaw) were being made concomitantly, in these battle-of-the-sexes movies, you just accept that good girls don't do it and good men don't really, truly push (at least, the good) women to do it before marriage.

In Boys' Night Out, three married men and bachelor James Garner, all friends who live in a suburb, rent an apartment together in New York City as a place to have affairs. Kim Novak plays a graduate student who stumbles into the apartment just when they rent it and (and you just have to go with it) agrees to be the paramour of all the men, but she really plans to fend off their advances while studying their behavior for her graduate thesis (uh-huh).

While everything in this movie is silly and safe - with just a little insight, we know from the start that Novak isn't going to sleep with any of them and that she'll end up marrying Garner - there still is something icky about the set up as each man has "his" night of the week with Novak. And since these movies thrive on misunderstandings, the men's wives begin to suspect something is going on with their husbands' staying late in the city, so they combine forces to hire an idiotic private investigator.

Further upping the "conflict," Garner falls hard for Novak (and she for him), but he struggles to accept what he believes is her, umm, career choice, so their relationship moves forward and then stumbles back. She can't tell him the truth (and ruin her research project), while he has a hard time, let's just say it, thinking that his three best friends are all nailing his girlfriend weekly (everyone's got a past, but come on).

As is usual in these movies, massive misunderstandings lead to a climactic scene of chaos, recriminations and threatened breakups, all followed by some sort of last-minute save where everything works out and the couple gets engaged (without having had sex), while the message that marriage is wonderful gets delivered.

Some of these nonsensical movies are fun in a mindless way, like Pillow Talk or That Touch of Mink, but this one started with a ridiculous premise, descended into farce and never recovered. And while Garner and Novak have good screen chemistry, it's all but wasted here.


N.B., Sure, it's a dumb movie, but there's no question that Kim Novak was at the top of her game in this one. Yes, her looks are in their prime, but you can also feel her confidence and comfort in front of the camera: Whatever spark this one has, comes from her.

^^^ I always found Kim Novak electrifying. And her range, more than just a pretty face.
The Man With The Golden Arm and that film with Lawrence Harvey in which she played a Cockney
prostitute...cannot recall title, it was based on a Somerset Maugham novel....

Another superb review.

Post Script: I often wonder how some of these guys like Garner didn't fall in love with their leading ladies.
Kim Novak is a gal I would literally flip out for. (When I was a kid, Kim was in my personal harem with
Jane Russell, Linda Darnell, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Gina Lollabrigida)

Harp said:

Post Script: I often wonder how some of these guys like Garner didn't fall in love with their leading ladies.
Kim Novak is a gal I would literally flip out for. (When I was a kid, Kim was in my personal harem with
Jane Russell, Linda Darnell, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Gina Lollabrigida)

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I think you're right as it spills out from time to time and we learn that a lot of "stuff" does happen between the leads.

I'm sure you've seen it, Novak looks incredible and made the entire movie in "Bell Book and Candle." I commented on it a month or so ago.

And I agree, she very credibly played against type in "The Man with the Golden Arm," a very tough movie.

I thought the B&W pic I posted above of her is beautiful.

Fading Fast said:

I thought the B&W pic I posted above of her is beautiful.

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Gorgeous. Too bad Jimbo is with her....

Of Human Bondage is the film I recalled earlier.

Check out this promo video from TCM for its February schedule.

Best clip, Hattie MacDaniels verbally dope-slapping Olivia De Havilland senseless (De Havilland's response is fantastic).

Honorable mentions to Irene Dunn and Audrey Hepburn

And finally, near the end, look for Ava Gardner's megawatt smile

https://www.tcm.com/video/066667069/this-month-on-tcm-february-2021

Fading Fast said:

Check out this promo video from TCM for its February schedule.

Best clip, Hattie MacDaniels verbally dope-slapping Olivia De Havilland senseless (De Havilland's response is fantastic).

Honorable mentions to Irene Dunn and Audrey Hepburn

And finally, near the end, look for Ava Gardner's megawatt smile

https://www.tcm.com/video/066667069/this-month-on-tcm-february-2021

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Okay, that was awesome! Don't know why I haven't seen it playing on TCM since I have it on so much!

When You Were Born from 1938 with Anna May Wong, Margaret Lindsay, Charles Wilson and Jeffrey Lynn

Many B movies can best be understood as antecedents to 1960's/70's TV shows before there was TV. They are often about an hour long, have small budgets, are fast moving with wash-rinse-repeat stories and some actors you recognize, but who aren't major stars. While there are all sorts of exceptions - a few B movie elevate themselves to A movie status - usually they are simpler and more transparent efforts. Taken for what they are, they can be fun, quick diversions.

When You Were Born is all that - a fun B movie diversion that whips by with some stars you recognize, a by-the-numbers plot and an enjoyably cheap production quality. Anna May Wong is an astrologist who helps the police solve the murder of a wealthy importer where the main suspects are the importer's butler, his fiancee Margaret Lindsay and his Chinese business partner.

The bulk of the movie takes place in the police station (one assumes, to save budget) as Chief Inspector Charles Wilson brings in suspects and witnesses for questioning as he attempts to solve the murder. The hook in this one, though, is Ms. Wong as her advocacy for astrology as a science that can help the police solve crimes is taken deadly seriously by her, respectfully by the inspector and with skepticism by his sergeant. To be fair, modern-to-the-times police forensics get pretty good advocacy, too, as fingerprints, hair samples and bullet trajectories are all used to aid the investigation.

But at least half the movie is Ms. Wong using astrology to help the police as her predictions of events and exposure of facts and evidence bring almost everyone around to her view. Heck, if astrology worked as effectively and precisely as shown here, we'd all be converted. Whatever your views on it, it's surprising that Warner Bros. put out such a full-throttled promotion of it, even if only in a B movie.

Away form the astrology angle, the movie flows not unlike a Columbo TV episode where a lot of mystery and angles are jammed into an hour with false leads and clues everywhere until it all comes clear in the last ten minutes. Also, like a '60s/'70s TV detective show, a little action adventure gets thrown in at the end for excitement, followed by a quick and friendly wrap up.

If you go into When You Were Born expecting a Hollywood A picture, you'll be disappointed. However, if you go into it recognizing that B movies are the progenitors of early TV, you can enjoyed this one's slapdash but enthusiastic attempt to combine astrology with a regular-old murder mystery. Plus, you get the always-fun-to-see Margaret Lindsay having little to do here, but looking pretty doing it.