It's rainin' hoboes, that's what's happenin'

Tonight rushthatspeaks and I had a date, meaning dinner at Muqueca and then the kickoff of the HFA's William Wellman retrospective with Beggars of Life (1928).

I had been seeing stills of Louise Brooks in boy's clothes for years: this is the film they come from, as her unnamed Girl shoots her abusive foster-father in the head one breakfast morning and takes to the rails with Richard Arlen's come-by-chance Boy, the "dark-haired tramp" of the police bulletins that follow them across freight lines and through a hobo jungle on their journey to Canada, where the Boy has an uncle and the Girl hopes to find "just a place to be quiet in—a place to keep clean in—a place to call home." Despite the deserved fame of Wings (1927), I never think of Wellman as a silent director; I associate him first and foremost with pre-Code Warner Bros., where he was one of the defining contributors to their gritty, socially conscious studio style. Beggars of Life may be more lyrically filmed and romantically plotted than the talkies it prefigures, like the similarly dispossessed Heroes for Sale (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933), but it's not lacking in either social awareness or grit. 1928 is just too early for the Depression, but you wouldn't know it from the faces of the men around the jungle fires, hard-weathered, most of them not young, already living in the cracks so much of society would shortly find itself falling into without even needing to do anything as dramatic as pull a shotgun's trigger. There is a documentary feel to the pair's travels, whether hitching a footsore ride on the back of a baker's cart or leaping to catch a passing boxcar; that's a real train Brooks gets bounced off the first time she tries to catch one singlehandedly and a real train she and Arlen get thrown off when their next, successful attempt is discovered by a bull with a baton. Pleasingly, it is never a question on the film's part that the Girl was justified in her violence—just bitterly believable that she doesn't credit for a second that the police would take her side. (If those wanted posters are anything to go by, she was right.) If the movie only treated its sole Black character a little less like a stereotype, there wouldn't be anything in it that wouldn't hold up today.

I appear to have seen Arlen previously in Wings, where he's the one who gets kissed by Buddy Rogers but doesn't get Clara Bow; he is in the unenviable position here of being a straight romantic lead and he doesn't let it dent him, especially in quiet scenes like a night conversation curled inside a haystack, which is intimate without being romantic. Still a year from stardom with Pandora's Box (1929) and fully as transfixing in case you thought it was just Pabst's direction, Brooks never passes for male and it's plot-relevant that she doesn't; she looks fantastic in trousers and a flat cap and the movie must know it, because when events conspire to put her back in skirts, they are a terrifically inappropriate bonnet-and-sundress affair that only the actress' iconic poise makes even remotely reasonable. I recognized none of the actors playing the hobos except Roscoe Karns, who gets a nice turn, in a chaotic, parodic sequence that is never more than a malaprop away from horror, as the lackadaisical defense attorney of a kangaroo court convened to put the Boy off the train and the Girl on her back. (This film is both very direct and very adult, by which I don't mean graphic, about the pervasiveness of the threat of rape.) And star-billed and worth it, Wallace Beery shines in the kind of tricksterish, never safe and always magnetic role that is not usually assigned to stubbled, beary men built like eighteen-wheelers. He enters the picture with a keg of stolen moonshine on his shoulder, singing; he reminded Rush of Loki. The decision he makes in the last reel would be sentimental in another film, but not in a story that has so credibly established his amoral bona fides. Seeing two young people prepared to die rather than abandon one another, Beery's Oklahoma Red looks from the Boy to the Girl with a quizzical, reckoning expression. "I've heard about it," he muses aloud, "but I never seen it before." He means love, but before the audience can relax into the comforting cliché of a heart of gold, the big man continues, "I knew there was somethin' wrong with you two!" He has one of the strengths of a comic actor in a serious part, the ability to make the audience smile with him even when we know we can't trust him. The mercury ran the right way this time, is all.

Since coming home, I have read that Beggars of Life in its original form was an early part-talkie, but we saw a purely silent DCP. There's a nice article about the compilation of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra's score, influenced but not controlled by the film's original cue sheet, and I am pleased to report that you can hear it, as well as watch the movie, on Kino Lorber's recent Blu-Ray/DVD. I must sleep, because tomorrow evening is my family's annual Halloween party and spatch and I have to pick up pumpkins first. I am sorry that American film did not know what to do with Louise Brooks, because she certainly knew what she was doing in front of a camera. This high iron brought to you by my tramping backers at Patreon.

Ella, poets who suffer pain should fall in love with girls named Jane

Tonight was my family's annual Halloween party, which this year was full of children: my niece as Elsa from Frozen, Fox with the tail and ears of a black cat, Peter as a Rowling wizard, two granddaughters of a family friend (accompanied by their aunt rather than their mother, which it's good someone told me, because otherwise I thought I was having a terrible time telling faces in that family apart) in black-and-orange Halloween regalia. There was mulled cider and a lot of pizza and pumpkin-carving, which was the only time all evening I had a chance to sit down until people had left. spatch's pumpkin reminded me of Sesame Street's Yip Yips and my sister-in-law of Hyperbole and a Half. Mine is the traditional cat. It was a good time.

( Not Mars. Nope. )

For about a day and a half now I have been listening to the original television cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Evening Primrose (1966) with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr. It's wonderful music—four songs plus reprises and about half an hour of incidental music, lyrical early Sondheim. Given its whimsical, macabre, Twilight Zone-ish plot, I can understand why the musical never had more than a cult following, but at least two of its songs developed enough of an independent afterlife that I had encountered them in the wild before finding last month's YouTube clips and the other two are equally as strong, if more difficult to excerpt. (And clever. The lines that lead to the title of this post are a heartfelt but out of his depth poet trying to rhyme the name of his beloved: "Ella, gay as a tarantella / Pure as larks singing a cappella / Let my poem be your umbrella—") I am seriously thinking of trying to get hold of the DVD. And I still wish Perkins had done more musicals.