Dead End Kids!

I have been familiar with the "Dead End Kids" (perhaps more famously known as the "Bowery Boys") for many years, but I had never seen Dead End, the 1937 movie by director William Wyler which launched their careers. Now I have, and I can report it's a pretty interesting and even at times compelling flick.

The movie adapts a Broadway play which featured these chaps who are only part, albeit an exceedingly memorable part of a narrative which focuses on the toils and travails of people who live cheek to jowl in the tenements of the poor and terraces of the rich at the end of a New York City street. It's a morality play about the value of human beings regardless of their environment and how that environment can lay foundations for complete lives.

We follow Tommy and his sister Drina (Sylvia Sydney), two siblings who are trying to do the right thing by one another despite painful poverty. Tommy is part of a gang of boys who have little to do aside from swimming in the river and causing trouble with each other and others youngsters on the street. Adults wander in and out of this setting, some rich who sniff at the poverty they usually are able to ignore, some poor who live alongside and within the poverty, and some who have escaped and have returned. The latter is found in the form of Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), a gangster who wants to see his Mother (Marjorie Main) and his old flame (Claire Trevor). He finds that his romantic notions have given way to grim and harsh reality and his response is violence. Violence too marks the life of Tommy and we see two individuals at the two ends of a life turned to crime. What happens is the stuff of the tale.

It's a classy production with a stellar set and functions very much like a filmed play. The static setting is livened by clever camera angles and occasional scenes set inside the tenements, though we never set foot inside the swank apartments of the well-to-do. The story here is about the rough and tumble of the Great Depression and the swelter of the immigrants who found themselves bundled together in situations which demand the most of them and which demand often more than they can deliver.

Highly recommended.

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Marlowes!

Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I had the chance recently to watch some Philip Marlowe movies. Marlowe of course is the savvy detective created by Raymond Chandler who plumbs the depths of L.A. crime to ferret out the secrets his clients seek to hide and to find. To say that Marlowe has been handled different ways by different directors and actors is a decided understatement.

The definitive Marlowe of course is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks. This vintage Bogart vehicle features a clever, fast-talking Marlowe who reads people and leaps to conclusions and finds things which elude others. He's at once smarmy, frank, seductive, and dangerous. You know the threats are piling up around him as he tumbles a casino on his way to finding bodies in cottages. There's patter and there's gun play and the movie is always entertaining, for Bogart of course, and for Lauren Bacall who is vamping it up to eleven. Lots to love in this movie which I've seen many many times and will watch just about any time it hits the screen.

New to me was Marlowe as played and directed by Robert Montgomery in the 1947 production Lady in the Lake. This movie has the peculiar notion we want to see a detective movie from the specific perspective of the detective along and does a sturdy job of keeping us squarely inside the eye line of Marlowe himself for most of the movie. It's a cute gimmick but gets wears out its welcome fairly quickly as the limits of keeping the camera on one character for extended periods of time which becomes static and dull and unfortunately for all its bravura the technique cannot really supply the kind of perspective it promises since peripheral vision is all but eliminated and camera movement always seems too protracted and unduly sober.

On the acting side Montgomery gives us a downright nasty Marlowe, a mean-spirited bruiser who seems to like to take cheap shots at people who he reads correctly mostly except when it really counts. This Marlowe is more bluster and when he might just get the girl in the end, you really don't think he deserves her.

The story is typically complicated and has sufficient twists and turns and for the most part plays fair, though some things do pop up in the end we really didn't have a chance to glom as promised.

From 1969 we get a Marlowe I've seen before, but not in quite a while and it was nice to meet this one again. James Garner's charm is on par with Bogart's and so when he's behaving poorly you feel less bad about forgiving him. This movie titled Marlowe is based on the Chandler novel The Little Sister and takes us pretty quickly into some seamy territory. 

To say the filmmakers take advantage of relaxed standards is to understate things. This far and away the most blatantly sexual of the Marlowe movies in this review, dealing as it does with exotic dancers and hookers and whatnot. Some skins is exposed, but not as much as the poster above might suggest. Marlowe finds himself in a rather confusing yarn about an actress who gets into trouble after pictures of her and a mob boss make the scene. The characters here are not very likeable, even the ones I think the movie wants us to like and that lack of empathy undermines the outcome for me a bit.

This movie is probably most famous for some very brief but very memorable scenes with Bruce Lee who shows up at Marlowe's office and karate chops the crap out of it. Later Marlowe gets the better of the Lee character in a highly unlikely scenario, but which does offer up a gruesome laugh.

And finally we have 1973's The Long Goodbye. This Robert Altman movie gives us perhaps the most peculiar Marlowe yet, a mumbling Elliot Gould stumbles along as a parody of the noir detective in a California which seems to have long before passed him by.

I cannot figure if this was supposed to be a legit detective story with some humor or a complete send up, and I'm increasingly on the side of the latter. That's somewhat indicated by the really vivacious Jack Davis poster above which shows the helter-skelter nature of the events which unravel in front of Marlowe who looks on dully and smokes incessantly. Marlowe never seems to know any more than anyone else in the movie and often less.  As played by Gould, Marlowe comes across as a loyal but dull goofball who is capable of some surprisingly cruel things.

Almost to defang the movie and remove any sexual tension which might wander into the flick, there is an apartment full of naked girls next to Marlowe's who are on display off and on throughout the movie for no particular reason. It's all rather strange, weird, but rarely fascinating.

So Philip Marlowe is a detective who in film at least finds his way in different ways and manners. Beginning as the cool and even at times debonair Bogart, through the snide and brutal Montgomery, and by way of the charming but reluctant Garner, to the stumbling mumbling Gould, the character gets redefined as each director and /or actor imagines.

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The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of!

I did not know that Dashiell Hammett's great 1929 detective yarn The Maltese Falcon had been adapted to comic book form until I chanced across this cover of Feature Book #48 from 1946 by the David McKay Comics company. Reports I can find are that the comic itself is pretty weak, but if the cover is any indication, it might have some of the vintage Golden Age energy which percolated up in many of those vintage comics. I'd love to read it sometime.

I consider 1941's The Maltese Falcon directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and a delicious ensemble cast of morally bankrupt characters to perhaps be the perfect movie. I can watch it over and over without tiring of it. I compare it to great music which always carries you along with changes of intensity and tempo but never losing you and never wearing you thin. The Maltese Falcon is like that, a story that slithers along with fantastic pace but still is possessed of fascinating quiet scenes and character bits which delight but never fail to further the larger story.

I haven't read the novel is some years. I got a class set many years ago when teaching film as literature was momentarily in vogue in schools, but alas never got the opportunity to teach the book. I've since changed schools and had to leave the novels behind for someone else to perhaps make good use of. It strikes me just now I need to get funding and set up a unit for my current classes.

I bought the dvd above some years ago and have enjoyed it several times since. It's loaded with behind-the-scenes stuff as well as other extras.

Not the least of which are the two earlier 1930's adaptations of the Hammett novel, one titled simply The Maltese Falcon from 1931 and the other Satan Met a Lady from 1936
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Sam Spade himself had quite a life beyond the novel's ending, even ending up on radio, television and in these delightful Wildroot ads. My dad was a devotee of Wildroot, and the very name of the product evokes great memories.

This is probably my favorite cover for the novel which sadly often gets covers of limited merit (to not suggest it might have actual pulp action in it I guess).

I picked this up a few years ago largely because it had the original story as it ran in serial form in Black Mask magazine in 1929. I've got it set for reading this spring hopefully.

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