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The safest thing that could happen to you right now is a case of lockjaw
I had a flu shot today. And a Tdap. And the rest of the yearly physical, which generally concluded that most of my systems were go, just very run down and currently dealing with high volumes of pain and a viral sinus infection. I feel about as fantastic as you might guess from this description; I walked over from the doctor's and collapsed with my cats. In the respective filmographies of Clark Gable and Marion Davies, Cain and Mabel (1936) isn't going to make any best-of lists, but it gave me ninety mostly diverting minutes to stare at while my brain felt like a squeegee and it contained bonus Roscoe Karns, so I won't exactly kick it off of TCM for eating crackers.
Roscoe Karns is one of the character actors I have never written about and reliably enjoy whenever he appears. I must have seen him in half a dozen movies before I knew his name; I could recognize him by his birdlike brows, his sharp light voice, and the lines on his slightly elfin face that could go either way, anxious or cynical and sometimes both by turns. His career ran from 1915 until 1964, but his heyday was the 1930's and early '40's, when his rapid-fire delivery kept natural pace with the screwball comedies he thrived in; he very rarely got top billing, but he built a reputation on memorable character turns like mile-a-minute creeper Oscar Shapeley in It Happened One Night (1934),1 philosophically tipsy publicist Owen O'Malley in Twentieth Century (1934), or opportunistic reporter McCue in His Girl Friday (1940).2 For years the most screentime I'd seen him get belonged to the slow-burn police lieutenant in the so-so mystery A Tragedy at Midnight (1942), always one step behind the dashing radio detective and his wife and understandably annoyed about it. Last fall, I finally caught him in a strong secondary role as the Hollywood press agent who lights a fire under the plot of Dancing Co-Ed (1939) and then has to run around frantically putting it out after the aspiring starlet he rigged to win a national college dance-off decides she'd rather play it straight—a professional fast talker with the ulcer to prove it. He's an even faster one in I Sell Anything (1934), playing the faithful accomplice of a crooked auctioneer who sets his sights on high society instead of Second Avenue. You get the idea. His characters could be dubiously honest, but they were rarely the heavies; they were gadflies and kibitzers, drummers, newspapermen, small-time crooks, professions that involved quick introductions and quicker exits. Sometimes they had no first names, sometimes they had no last names, sometimes they barely had names at all.3 More often than not, you could trust them with your heart—even his embittered ex-con in You and Me (1938) turned out a soft touch when it came to romance—but you might still want to keep a weather eye on your wallet, or at least your private life.
The latter is the mode in which Cain and Mabel finds him, playing a former reporter with a Fflewddur-like tendency to let his narrative flair run away with him: "I can cover a bonfire and make it sound like the Chicago Fire, but do they call me the Emerson of the press? No, they call me that lying Reilly." When we meet him, he's broke and jobless and glumly emptying a salt shaker onto the tabletop in hopes of attracting enough bad luck to "wreck the Empire State Building. Having it fall on me is the only thing that hasn't happened to me this week. But this'll fix it up!" Waitress Mabel O'Dare (Davies) feels sorry for him and sneaks him a meal, in return for which he inadvertently gets them both the bum's rush from the restaurant; in order to make it up to her, Reilly in his new guise as publicity man appoints himself her agent and determines to make her a star. He's quite human, there's not a supernatural thing about him, but at this juncture the plot began to remind me faintly of those folktales where the hero gets some kind of trickster figure in their debt and its efforts to make good cause even more chaos than if it were trying to do them wrong. "Are you sure you know this man?" Mabel presses in the waiting room of a talent agency, referring to the person Reilly has just pointed out as a famous theater impresario and an old personal friend. At once he reassures her, "I said so, didn't I?" She gives him a narrow look: "That's what makes me nervous."
Please, go on, take a bet as to whether Aloysius K. Reilly really grew up next door to Jake Sherman (Walter Catlett), who on being told that he "could sell iceboxes in Siberia" responds equably, "You're telling me? That's how I earned my passage money to this country." Fortunately for Mabel, she is a Davies protagonist, so she has star quality on her side even if she also has Reilly. The story that follows is flimsy but cute: just as Mabel blooms overnight from a hash slinger into a Broadway star, prizefighter Larry Cain (Gable) has an equally humble background as an auto mechanic "who happened to have a sock, that's all." Their first encounter is so antagonistic, it must pave the way to romance, but first there's a protracted period of Much Ado About Nothing-lite wangling during which the indefatigable Reilly and Cain's manager Pop Walters (William Collier, Sr.) fix up a phony romance between their respective properties in order to give them "glamour" and boost sales—dressing-room flowers, front-page interviews, photo ops, the works, everything except the ability of America's newest sweethearts to stand each other. As kayfabe goes, it's a hit. The public loves the all-American pairing of the sophisticated showgirl and the handsome bruiser. The box office returns are great. But Larry remembers how he got no sleep the night before a big match because some hoofer was tap-dancing to "Coney Island" all night over his head and Mabel remembers how some swell-headed pug almost loused up her opening night by repeatedly barging into her hotel room during an emergency rehearsal and every time they meet, even with Reilly, Pop, and Mabel's co-star Ronny (Robert Paige) running interference, they cut one another dead with zingers like "You may be a champ to somebody, but you're just a punching bag with ears on it to me" and "If she's a lady, Diamond Lil could get by as Whistler's mother."4 Inevitably they bond over frying pork chops in a hotel kitchenette as an escape from the nightly whirlwind of supper clubs and autograph sessions; they confess their blue-collar backgrounds and they fall in love for real. Their respective entourages find this adorable until they realize that the happy couple's matrimonial plans include mutually retiring from the limelight, at which point everybody panics and Reilly goes into public relations crisis mode, cue narrowly averted disaster. He's not a malicious character—he's always in line with his promise to make her a star—but neither is he exactly the hero of the hour, which is why he ends the film with a damp sponge in the kisser instead of a headline photo of the reunited lovebirds. I find myself hoping they'll collect him for the wedding anyway. The thought of turning him loose again on the undeserving waitstaff of New York City is too dangerous to be borne.
I should mention lastly that Cain and Mabel is not quite a backstage musical, but it does take time out for two major production numbers that have to be seen to be disbelieved. There's one called "Coney Island" whose lyrics actually rival the inimitable "Paducah" ("If you want to, you can rhyme it with bazooka") from The Gang's All Here (1943) for rhymes I didn't know professional adult songwriters were allowed to take money for:
I can't forget the night I met you down at Coney Island
Gee, I was proud you picked me from the crowd at Coney Island
And very soon, I proved to you that my intentions weren't phony
It ended in matrimony
And now we're eating caviar instead of macaroni
But I recall those picnic lunches of baloney with a smile
I guess I'm still a hick
'Cause I still get a kick
Just loving you, a-shoving through the crowd at Coney Isle
Then Marion Davies and Sammy White get razzed by the wax museum. Busby Berkeley isn't even directing this thing. That's even harder to tell by the second number, an eight-minute extravaganza of black mirrored floors and luminous white costuming whose sets include Versailles, Venice, and an enormous pipe organ made out of nuns. Neither of these sequences has a bearing on the plot except to show off Davies in a variety of costumes and demonstrate what kind of show Mabel is starring in, but they're kind of astonishing in their own right. I can't apply the same critical evaluation to the championship fight in which Gable participates at the climax of the film, but it looks like a boxing match to me. Davies had legendarily rejected Gable as a sophisticated co-star in Five and Ten (1931) because he looked "like Jack Dempsey," preferring the more visibly intellectual Leslie Howard instead; by the time Gable got around to playing a boxer, of course, the critical consensus was that he was miscast. I have to say that I'm not sure how much changing the leads could have made a classic out of this pleasant but slightly shapeless comedy, but it's true that after the first five minutes I wasn't in it for the leads. My brain still feels like a squeegee. This diversion brought to you by my persuasive backers at Patreon.
1. The enduring relevance of this character is a thing of wonder and a depression forever. If you have ever been on a bus (or equivalent public transit; he sometimes exists on planes), you have met Oscar Shapeley. I have met Oscar Shapeley. He is the dude who does not shut up. If you cold-shoulder him, he takes your silence as interest and keeps talking; if you respond, however negatively, he takes your interaction as interest and keeps talking. If he decides to hit on you, your best bets are departing the bus at the next stop or faking your own death. I disengaged him once in Arlington Center in 2012 by judicious use of the phrase my girlfriend and that was ridiculous.
2. I can only assume his running gag snuck past the Breen Office because it wasn't in the shooting script. During most of the scenes in the press room, McCue can be seen drifting off to the desk by the window and peering out at the women going up and down the stairs in their calf-length skirts, craning his neck for the best possible view. Evening comes on and one of his fellow reporters, having failed to get his attention by normal modes of address, calls out, "Hey, Mac! Hey, Stairway Sam!" at which McCue jerks his head around, obediently goes to the doorway to flip the light switch, and, seeing in that moment a woman walking by, like Exhibit A by Pavlov tips his hat, gives her a little wave, and tries to get a look at her legs despite being at entirely the wrong angle for it. At a low moment of morale in the newsroom, he wanders disconsolately to the window and looks out for a distraction, but the stairs are empty and he returns his attention reluctantly to the soul-searching at hand. There's no payoff; he never gets lucky. It's a pure bit of business. It never upstages the main action, but is it ever not Code-rated.
3. I know I'm burning my footnotes on this paragraph, but I don't know where else to mention that I can't read the cast list for Gambling Ship (1933) without cracking up because, alongside Cary Grant as Ace Corbin and Benita Hume as Eleanor La Velle, Karns is credited simply as "Blooey."
4. Whatever the script's other failings, the dialogue is great. Nobody uses plain English when there's hyperbole to be had. I like a lot of lines in this movie, including everybody's verbal sparring and the title of this post—addressed to Reilly, of course—but there's something about Dodo (Allen Jenkins) earnestly explaining the concept of the breath-freshening cough drop: "If you've been eating onions, all you got to do is pop one in your clapper and you blow out like a violet."
Roscoe Karns is one of the character actors I have never written about and reliably enjoy whenever he appears. I must have seen him in half a dozen movies before I knew his name; I could recognize him by his birdlike brows, his sharp light voice, and the lines on his slightly elfin face that could go either way, anxious or cynical and sometimes both by turns. His career ran from 1915 until 1964, but his heyday was the 1930's and early '40's, when his rapid-fire delivery kept natural pace with the screwball comedies he thrived in; he very rarely got top billing, but he built a reputation on memorable character turns like mile-a-minute creeper Oscar Shapeley in It Happened One Night (1934),1 philosophically tipsy publicist Owen O'Malley in Twentieth Century (1934), or opportunistic reporter McCue in His Girl Friday (1940).2 For years the most screentime I'd seen him get belonged to the slow-burn police lieutenant in the so-so mystery A Tragedy at Midnight (1942), always one step behind the dashing radio detective and his wife and understandably annoyed about it. Last fall, I finally caught him in a strong secondary role as the Hollywood press agent who lights a fire under the plot of Dancing Co-Ed (1939) and then has to run around frantically putting it out after the aspiring starlet he rigged to win a national college dance-off decides she'd rather play it straight—a professional fast talker with the ulcer to prove it. He's an even faster one in I Sell Anything (1934), playing the faithful accomplice of a crooked auctioneer who sets his sights on high society instead of Second Avenue. You get the idea. His characters could be dubiously honest, but they were rarely the heavies; they were gadflies and kibitzers, drummers, newspapermen, small-time crooks, professions that involved quick introductions and quicker exits. Sometimes they had no first names, sometimes they had no last names, sometimes they barely had names at all.3 More often than not, you could trust them with your heart—even his embittered ex-con in You and Me (1938) turned out a soft touch when it came to romance—but you might still want to keep a weather eye on your wallet, or at least your private life.
The latter is the mode in which Cain and Mabel finds him, playing a former reporter with a Fflewddur-like tendency to let his narrative flair run away with him: "I can cover a bonfire and make it sound like the Chicago Fire, but do they call me the Emerson of the press? No, they call me that lying Reilly." When we meet him, he's broke and jobless and glumly emptying a salt shaker onto the tabletop in hopes of attracting enough bad luck to "wreck the Empire State Building. Having it fall on me is the only thing that hasn't happened to me this week. But this'll fix it up!" Waitress Mabel O'Dare (Davies) feels sorry for him and sneaks him a meal, in return for which he inadvertently gets them both the bum's rush from the restaurant; in order to make it up to her, Reilly in his new guise as publicity man appoints himself her agent and determines to make her a star. He's quite human, there's not a supernatural thing about him, but at this juncture the plot began to remind me faintly of those folktales where the hero gets some kind of trickster figure in their debt and its efforts to make good cause even more chaos than if it were trying to do them wrong. "Are you sure you know this man?" Mabel presses in the waiting room of a talent agency, referring to the person Reilly has just pointed out as a famous theater impresario and an old personal friend. At once he reassures her, "I said so, didn't I?" She gives him a narrow look: "That's what makes me nervous."
Please, go on, take a bet as to whether Aloysius K. Reilly really grew up next door to Jake Sherman (Walter Catlett), who on being told that he "could sell iceboxes in Siberia" responds equably, "You're telling me? That's how I earned my passage money to this country." Fortunately for Mabel, she is a Davies protagonist, so she has star quality on her side even if she also has Reilly. The story that follows is flimsy but cute: just as Mabel blooms overnight from a hash slinger into a Broadway star, prizefighter Larry Cain (Gable) has an equally humble background as an auto mechanic "who happened to have a sock, that's all." Their first encounter is so antagonistic, it must pave the way to romance, but first there's a protracted period of Much Ado About Nothing-lite wangling during which the indefatigable Reilly and Cain's manager Pop Walters (William Collier, Sr.) fix up a phony romance between their respective properties in order to give them "glamour" and boost sales—dressing-room flowers, front-page interviews, photo ops, the works, everything except the ability of America's newest sweethearts to stand each other. As kayfabe goes, it's a hit. The public loves the all-American pairing of the sophisticated showgirl and the handsome bruiser. The box office returns are great. But Larry remembers how he got no sleep the night before a big match because some hoofer was tap-dancing to "Coney Island" all night over his head and Mabel remembers how some swell-headed pug almost loused up her opening night by repeatedly barging into her hotel room during an emergency rehearsal and every time they meet, even with Reilly, Pop, and Mabel's co-star Ronny (Robert Paige) running interference, they cut one another dead with zingers like "You may be a champ to somebody, but you're just a punching bag with ears on it to me" and "If she's a lady, Diamond Lil could get by as Whistler's mother."4 Inevitably they bond over frying pork chops in a hotel kitchenette as an escape from the nightly whirlwind of supper clubs and autograph sessions; they confess their blue-collar backgrounds and they fall in love for real. Their respective entourages find this adorable until they realize that the happy couple's matrimonial plans include mutually retiring from the limelight, at which point everybody panics and Reilly goes into public relations crisis mode, cue narrowly averted disaster. He's not a malicious character—he's always in line with his promise to make her a star—but neither is he exactly the hero of the hour, which is why he ends the film with a damp sponge in the kisser instead of a headline photo of the reunited lovebirds. I find myself hoping they'll collect him for the wedding anyway. The thought of turning him loose again on the undeserving waitstaff of New York City is too dangerous to be borne.
I should mention lastly that Cain and Mabel is not quite a backstage musical, but it does take time out for two major production numbers that have to be seen to be disbelieved. There's one called "Coney Island" whose lyrics actually rival the inimitable "Paducah" ("If you want to, you can rhyme it with bazooka") from The Gang's All Here (1943) for rhymes I didn't know professional adult songwriters were allowed to take money for:
I can't forget the night I met you down at Coney Island
Gee, I was proud you picked me from the crowd at Coney Island
And very soon, I proved to you that my intentions weren't phony
It ended in matrimony
And now we're eating caviar instead of macaroni
But I recall those picnic lunches of baloney with a smile
I guess I'm still a hick
'Cause I still get a kick
Just loving you, a-shoving through the crowd at Coney Isle
Then Marion Davies and Sammy White get razzed by the wax museum. Busby Berkeley isn't even directing this thing. That's even harder to tell by the second number, an eight-minute extravaganza of black mirrored floors and luminous white costuming whose sets include Versailles, Venice, and an enormous pipe organ made out of nuns. Neither of these sequences has a bearing on the plot except to show off Davies in a variety of costumes and demonstrate what kind of show Mabel is starring in, but they're kind of astonishing in their own right. I can't apply the same critical evaluation to the championship fight in which Gable participates at the climax of the film, but it looks like a boxing match to me. Davies had legendarily rejected Gable as a sophisticated co-star in Five and Ten (1931) because he looked "like Jack Dempsey," preferring the more visibly intellectual Leslie Howard instead; by the time Gable got around to playing a boxer, of course, the critical consensus was that he was miscast. I have to say that I'm not sure how much changing the leads could have made a classic out of this pleasant but slightly shapeless comedy, but it's true that after the first five minutes I wasn't in it for the leads. My brain still feels like a squeegee. This diversion brought to you by my persuasive backers at Patreon.
1. The enduring relevance of this character is a thing of wonder and a depression forever. If you have ever been on a bus (or equivalent public transit; he sometimes exists on planes), you have met Oscar Shapeley. I have met Oscar Shapeley. He is the dude who does not shut up. If you cold-shoulder him, he takes your silence as interest and keeps talking; if you respond, however negatively, he takes your interaction as interest and keeps talking. If he decides to hit on you, your best bets are departing the bus at the next stop or faking your own death. I disengaged him once in Arlington Center in 2012 by judicious use of the phrase my girlfriend and that was ridiculous.
2. I can only assume his running gag snuck past the Breen Office because it wasn't in the shooting script. During most of the scenes in the press room, McCue can be seen drifting off to the desk by the window and peering out at the women going up and down the stairs in their calf-length skirts, craning his neck for the best possible view. Evening comes on and one of his fellow reporters, having failed to get his attention by normal modes of address, calls out, "Hey, Mac! Hey, Stairway Sam!" at which McCue jerks his head around, obediently goes to the doorway to flip the light switch, and, seeing in that moment a woman walking by, like Exhibit A by Pavlov tips his hat, gives her a little wave, and tries to get a look at her legs despite being at entirely the wrong angle for it. At a low moment of morale in the newsroom, he wanders disconsolately to the window and looks out for a distraction, but the stairs are empty and he returns his attention reluctantly to the soul-searching at hand. There's no payoff; he never gets lucky. It's a pure bit of business. It never upstages the main action, but is it ever not Code-rated.
3. I know I'm burning my footnotes on this paragraph, but I don't know where else to mention that I can't read the cast list for Gambling Ship (1933) without cracking up because, alongside Cary Grant as Ace Corbin and Benita Hume as Eleanor La Velle, Karns is credited simply as "Blooey."
4. Whatever the script's other failings, the dialogue is great. Nobody uses plain English when there's hyperbole to be had. I like a lot of lines in this movie, including everybody's verbal sparring and the title of this post—addressed to Reilly, of course—but there's something about Dodo (Allen Jenkins) earnestly explaining the concept of the breath-freshening cough drop: "If you've been eating onions, all you got to do is pop one in your clapper and you blow out like a violet."
no subject
ETA: sounds as though the language chimes Runyonesque, if not Wodehouse-esque.
no subject
I've seen her in one silent and three talkies now and she's talented! None of them have been dramatic pictures, so I don't know if she was terrible in them or just obviously not playing to her strengths, but her comic timing is great and she could be as rubber-faced as any of her male competitors. Show People (1928) is the one to start with; it's a Hollywood spoof, with Davies playing the small-town girl with dreams of screen glamour who hits it big as a comedienne, aspires to high art, alienates all her old friends with her new pretensions, and is fortunately brought back down to earth again by true love and a spritz of seltzer. William Haines co-stars and he is a force for charm in this universe. (His career would be over by 1934: openly and unapologetically gay, he refused to trade his longtime boyfriend for a beard at the request of Louis B. Mayer and never made another picture after that year. He and Jimmie Shields became honest-to-God interior decorators and were called "the happiest married couple in Hollywood." I just want the history where he and Shields were together until they died and he was an enormous sound star.) Most of what I can say about Going Hollywood (1933) is that it's fun and full of music and
I wonder whether Hearst was the reason the oddball number was included.
The New York Times thought so. Cosmopolitan Productions was Hearst's studio. Also, everything about that review is hilarious.
sounds as though the language chimes Runyonesque, if not Wodehouse-esque.
Definitely. I am also fond of Jake Sherman's Code-skirting demurral "Don't tell me there's anything subtle about love. I was in the confession magazine business myself."
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OH MY GOD. THAT SONG IS RIDICULOUS AND BEAUTIFUL.
I love your film reviews -- hmm, can I do a one-time thing at Patreon? I know it's set up to be recurring, especially since most of the $$ amounts are smalll, but at this point looking forward even like two months is, uh, overoptimistic. /o\ But I'd love to join the people who contribute for your film reviews, they're so fantastic. //goes to look at Patreon site
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I tried to find a clip of it for you, because it is exactly as catchy as many ridiculous things are (MAR-CO RU-BI-O! MARCO RUBIO!), but nobody on YouTube seems to agree with me! Instead please enjoy Benny Goodman and Carmen Miranda performing "Paducah," because that is also one of the stupidest things I have ever seen on film and it was amazing. Imagine a Technicolor print and an entire audience of people who had no idea what they were in for. Now remember this song is not the strangest part of the film.
But I'd love to join the people who contribute for your film reviews, they're so fantastic. //goes to look at Patreon site
Thank you! I hope Patreon can accommodate. I've had people contribute for a month and then disappear again, if it helps.
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(bbl<--instead of brb)
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Sleep well. I look forward to your return!
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no subject
Enjoy!
no subject
At this juncture the plot began to remind me faintly of those folktales where the hero gets some kind of trickster figure in their debt and its efforts to make good cause even more chaos than if it were trying to do them wrong.
--I love this element in stories, and my goodness, but it doesn't half happen in real life too (well, minus the supernatural part, more or less)--I'm sure you've had people try to perform services for you that made things Much Worse in one way or another; I certainly have!
rhymes I didn't know professional adult songwriters were allowed to take money for
Ouch, those Coney rhymes... on the level of "you're so nice; you don't have lice..."
no subject
I'm so glad! It was fun to watch, too. I just wouldn't call it a classic.
I'm sure you've had people try to perform services for you that made things Much Worse in one way or another; I certainly have!
I have! I'm not sure it's happened to me with the flair of Karns' Reilly, though. He had it down to a science.
Ouch, those Coney rhymes... on the level of "you're so nice; you don't have lice..."
MACARONI.