Say Hi-De-Hi to Cab Calloway

Cab Calloway was one of the mosy dynamic and foundational figures of jazz in the 1930s to the 1950s. Today more people will recognize him as the old man who raised the Blues Brothers. 

If you want to recognize Cab, then show it off with this great design available at the link below. 

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/62521170-cab-calloway?store_id=2969989 

The Bigger & Badder Halloween Top 13 #12: The Beast from 20000 Fathoms (1953)

Nukes, man. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times; you can't hug with nuclear arms. Hmm, maybe I didn't say that, but I should have because it’s pretty cheesy and clever at the same time. After the world witnessed the awesome force of a nuclear blast at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the awe inspiring power lead right into the nuclear panic age of the 1950’s, and with it came the giant creatures. Today, I'm getting a chance to talk about the first such film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. While it doesn't have the distinction of being the first giant monster movie, that distinction goes to 1931’s The Lost World which saw a dinosaur menacing London in the film’s climax; it does herald the first of the nuclear age monsters. Inspired by the success of the 1952 re-release of 1933’s King Kong, the producers turned to Ray Harryhausen, a protégé of Willis O’Brian, the man behind the world’s most famous giant ape, to bring to the screen an extremely loose adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” first published in 1951 by the Saturday Evening Post. Join me as we travel from the frigid Arctic Circle to the bustling streets of Manhattan with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

Hitch on the Hump: Freddie Young (and Innocent?) of Full Moon Reviews Guests!

For as long as I've been doing this site, there's been a blogger who has been a great pal. He's always had kind words to say about the ever lovin' blue eye'd Bugg, and if you ask me, he's one hell of a writer. Plus if there's a full moon out, then he's always up for an all-nighter. I'm talking about Freddie Young a.k.a Fred the Wolf of the fantabulous site Full Moon Reviews. I'm thrilled that Freddie would take part in Hitch on the Hump so let me stop yammering and let the man do it to it.

I would first like to thank TL Bugg for requesting my services for this month's Hitch On The Hump. It's truly an honor to have the opportunity to discuss the work of one of the Masters of Cinema - Alfred Hitchcock. From the moment I was asked to contribute, I wanted to discuss a Hitchcock work that probably not many people have talked about or even used as a basis for Hitch On The Hump. I mean, how many times can one read about Psycho? Or Rear Window? Or Vertigo? Or The Birds? I think you get my point.

So I looked into Alfred Hitchock's filmography to find this month's subject. And to my surprise [and thanks to Netflix Instant Watch], I found a Hitchcock film that I have never heard of or read anyone discuss. And that film is 1938's Young and Innocent - or The Girl Was Young in the United States.

Young and Innocent is one of Hitchcock's British films, showcasing the director's trademarks long before his American films. The film begins with a couple arguing - Christine (Pamela Carme), who happens to be a famous actress, and her lover Guy (George Curzon), who accuses Christine of cheating on him with random "boys". The next morning on a nearby beach, a young man named Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) strolls along and finds Christine's corpse washed up on the shore. The only evidence is a belt from a stolen raincoat that belonged to Robert. Running off to find help, two female witnesses arrive finding not only the body, but assuming that Robert is the guilty party. When the police arrive, the girls accuse Robert of murder. He's arrested and quickly put on trial.

After some commotion in the courtroom, Robert is allowed to escape in order to hunt down the real killer. He meets up with the police constable's daughter, Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), who he charms into helping him. Even though she doubts Robert's innocence at first, as well as not wanting to risk her life and her father's job and reputation, Erica falls for Robert and decides to help him prove his innocence. Their only lead is one Old Will (Edward Rigby), who claims the murderer has really twitchy eyes.

Young and Innocent is based on a Josephine Tey novel titled "A Shilling For Candles". Tey's novel, published in 1936, was her first mystery novel with Inspector Alan Grant, who would be her main character over a 25 year span. Like the film adaptation, the story of "A Shilling For Candles" involves a murdered actress, whose young friend named Robert Tisdall is considered the prime suspect for her murder. The rest of the story involves Alan Grant trying to solve the case as Robert escapes with Erica, who believes in his innocence.

However, Hitchcock and screenwriters Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, and Anthony Armstrong, decided to go against Tey's novel, changing things around to lessen the mystery aspect while focusing on the relationship between Robert and Erica to craft a more cinematic thriller. The killer in the novel is completely changed in the film [it's pretty obvious who the real killer is here from the start] and there's no Alan Grant character anywhere to be seen here. Instead, we have the traditional Hitchcock male-female duo protagonists that can be seen in The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Vertigo. Both Robert and Erica happen to meet at chance, which links them together for the rest of the film in order the solve the case. Also in the film, the killer is given a specific trait [eyes that twitch] to make him easy to spot. This is similar to The 39 Steps again, where the villain is missing one of his fingers. This trait is not in the novel at all. Also Robert's backstory is different. In the novel, Robert is a young unemployed man. In the film, he has a higher social status and is wittier and more charming than his book counterpart.

There are also moments where Young and Innocent gives hints to other Hitchcock trademarks. In one scene, Robert, Erica, and Old Will are caught in a crumbling mine shaft after being chased by police. While Robert and Will are safe, Erica needs help and reaches for Robert's hand, teasing the audience with slight fingertip touching, before he pulls her out of the pit. This was used again in North By Northwest in the Mount Rushmore scene.

Another moment is a great crane shot in the final act of the film inside the Grand Hotel. There seems to be some sort of gathering or event at the Grand Hotel, involving a group of musicians dressed in blackface as Old Will and Erica search for the killer [who happens to be at this event]. It takes its time really setting up the location of where the mystery would be revealed, ending on a close up on the killer and his twitching eyes. The same technique was used similarly in Notorious during that film's party scene. It's just done so well and it's easy to see why Hitchcock would use it more than once.

Hitchcock also focuses on the idea of eyes and vision in general. The killer can be identified by his eyes. The Robert's lawyer can't do his job without his glasses [the idea that justice is blind]. The hotel clerk needs a pair of magnifying glasses to read her notes. The opening shot is a close up on Christine's eyes. At a birthday party, Erica has to escape her aunt's suspicions about her relationship with Robert by sneaking out after her aunt is blindfolded in a game of "blind man's bluff". And you got to love the title of the film, as the young [Erica] and the innocent [Robert] are the only ones who see the truth, while everyone else is blinded by what they hear from others. It's a motif that Hitchcock comes back to in many of his other films, from Psycho, to Rear Window, The Birds, Frenzy, etc. Young and Innocent is a showcase on things Hitchcock would continue to add to his movies years later.

As for Young and Innocent itself, it seems to have been overshadowed by other British works, such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes - two films that are considered to be the highlights of Hitchcock's British era. And it's easy to see why that's the case. While Young and Innocent isn't a terrible film, it's flawed in a lot of ways. Pilbeam and De Marney don't have much chemistry with each other, which makes the characters they play feel forced in their union. The mystery isn't there, as we know who the killer is. In fact, the police characters are probably the worst policemen you could ever have in your town. Not only do they not go after Christine's main lover, but they don't even check her background, with involved her playing a cougar to multiple younger men. Also for a thriller, it's not really all that exciting to watch. It's more humorous than anything. It's more light-hearted than Hitchcock's other works, making it sort of a black sheep in his filmography.

That being said, even an above-average Hitchcock film is better than most other films. The direction is solid, with some editing issues at times but you can only tell if you really look. The picture, while faded out a bit, still looks beautiful. The acting is solid all around. And the story still happens to be entertaining for 83 straight minutes, even if you want more depth out of it.

I think to ignore Young and Innocent is a shame if you're any kind of an Alfred Hitchcock fan. It's not a classic like his other films, but considering the low-budget he had to deal with many of his British films, the film is put together quite nicely. I believe this lesser-seen film was a blueprint for the great stuff he would put out in later years, which makes Young and Innocent more than worthy of a watch.

I can't thank Freddie Young a.k.a Fred the Wolf for stopping by and dropping the knowledge on The Young and Innocent. Makes sure you stop over at Full Moon Reviews and check out more of Fred's great work!  If you'd like to take part in Hitch on the Hump, then drop me a line at thelightningbug (AT) charter.net and we'll set you up!

Hitch on the Hump: Secret Agent (1936)

An English spymaster with a single letter name is briefing his agent, whose death has been faked, on his dangerous mission. He tells him there will be beautiful women, exotic locations, and unusual contacts, but his mission is one that will benefit crown and country. Along the agent’s path he will encounter beautiful women and treacherous double dealers, but he’s got a mission to kill and he intends to see it through no matter how distasteful it may be. If you think I was describing any number of adventures by Ian Fleming’s British secret agent James Bond, then you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. While 007’s adventures often contained all of these points, today, of course, I am talking about Hitchcock and more specifically his 1936 film Secret Agent.

This was Hitchcock’s third spy oriented film in a row, after The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps, and this time he turned to W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Ashenden: Or the British Secret Agent for inspiration. Maugham, best known for his novel Of Human Bondage, served in World War I as an intelligence officer and modeled the stories contained in Ashenden on his own experiences. For his film Hitchcock settled on two stories from the novel, “The Traitor” and “The Hairless Mexican”, and along with a stage adaptation by Campbell Dixon, a script was culled together by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, etc.). As usual, and much to the consternation of Bennett, after the script was finished Hitchcock invited writers Ian Hay and Jesse Lasky Jr. (the future scribe behind The Ten Commandments) to punch up the dialog.

As the film begins we are introduced to writer Edgar Brodie (John Gielgud) who has just returned from the front lines of World War I to find that his death has been widely reported in the British press. The head of the secret service, ‘R’, informs Brodie that his name is now Ashenden and he has been recruited to fulfill a mission for the crown to kill a suspected spy. Actually, he doesn’t even have to do the killing himself, but rather guide Mexican assassin ’The General’ (Peter Lorre) to the subject and let him do his work. The pair arrives in Switzerland to meet Elsa (Madeleine Carroll) who is posing as Ashenden’s wife, and together they determine who the spy must be. Unfortunately, they knock off the wrong man, and Ashenden soon finds himself in a desperate race to save Elsa from the real culprit. This leads him on a wild chase through first a Swiss chocolatier’s factory and then on a trail packed full of opposition forces.

While Secret Agent signaled a continuation of Hitchcock’s fascination with espionage, it also might be his most unsuccessful attempt at a spy thriller. Where Robert Donat was a dashing figure in The 39 Steps and John Leslie perfectly fit the part of the everyman caught up in international affairs in The Man Who Knew Too Much, John Gielgud’s reluctant spy remains cold, distant, and unknowable to the audience. While his hard nature predicts the cold, aloof character of James Bond, it is not tempered with 007’s off the cuff humor or sexuality. In fact one of the most awkward scenes in Secret Agent comes when Gielgud and Carroll have to face “the morning after”. While Hitchcock stacked his film with interesting set pieces, especially in the climax of the film, the production was marred by a lack of chemistry and connection between his lead actors.

Gielgud was no fan of the film world anyway. As Patrick McGilligan pointed out in his Hitchcock biography, “The medium gave him [sic. Gielgud] shivers; he hated the endless waiting around for lighting setups, and the discontinuous filming of facial expressions and bits of dialog.” Hitchcock finally convinced the stage actor to take a lead at the screen by describing Ashenden as “another Hamlet, only in modern dress”. The reluctant actor agreed, but his reservations carry through onto the screen adding to the reserved, cold nature of his character. Hitchcock had originally planned to reunite 39 Steps co-stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in the lead roles, but when Donat proved to be unavailable, he had to settle for just his leading lady. Carroll, who had little to do in 39 Steps, is here given a much bigger part, but due to her lack of chemistry with the leading man, there is little she could do with the part.

While I might seem like I had little fun with the performances on display in Secret Agent, nothing could be further from the truth. While Gilgud and Carroll perform their romantic pantomime on the screen, the bulk of the film was stolen by Peter Lorre. The German actor had settled in Hollywood after his performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much, wowing audiences with his performances in films such as Mad Love and Crime and Punishment. However, he readily returned to work with Hitchcock who had envisioned the diminutive actor in the role from the very beginning of scripting (even calling naming ‘The General’ Peter in an early script). Though the actor, under a mane of curled hair and a makeup to darken his skin, performs his whole part with an accent that could only be described as Boys from Brazil-esque, he easily is the best part of the film. From his ceaseless flirtations to his casual but strange asides, his performance is magnetic.  This is true even though his addiction to morphine had grown quite strong at the time. So much so that Gaumont, the production company, had to set up injections or the actor was prone to sneak off and make allowances for himself.

Secret Agent is a rare misstep in Hitchcock’s 1930’s output (one he would rectify the same year with Sabotage), and the director later even admitted to regrets about the material feeling he had never conquered it fully. Visually, the film is a solid effect although without any of the technical innovations so often present in Hitchcock’s work. (There is impressive use of miniatures and in camera editing tricks, but nothing the director had not tackled before.) Secret Agent is an enjoyable film that never rises above average to stack up against classics like The 39 Steps. It is however a very interesting window into an early film representation of the British spy,which less than thirty years later, when Dr. No was released,  would become the litmus test against which spy films would be measured. While John Gielgud proves himself to be no Sean Connery, Hitchcock once again shows that he had an eye for what would work if not how to make it work at the time.

That wraps it up for this week, but come on back next Wednesday for the first of two special posts this month when Hitch on the Hump becomes Guests on the Hump. My first guest is the awesome Christine Makepeace of Paracinema magazine, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store for all of us!

Bugg Rating

Secret Agent is in the public domain so I am happy to be able to link it here in its entirety. 

Christmas Shorts: The Christmas Eves (1936): These Gals Stuff Stockings with Gams

I've stumbled across a number of interesting little Christmastime titles over the weekend, so I wanted to share a few of these with you folks. Starting at the oldest thing I dug up, the 1936 film The Christmas Eves. It starts off innocently enough with four girls (who apparently sleep in two beds) wake up for Christmas morning....

When the girls wake up, it's time to gather under the Christmas tree to open presents. 

Which turn out to be stockings and sweaters. Naturally this requires the girls to take off all their clothes to try them on. 

Of course those aren't their only presents, they get trains,

and toy planes...

and apparently handguns...

The handgun was definately this gal's favorite...

Then they participate in a favorite holiday tradition, bottomless target shooting...

It was a very merry Christmas for all, but next year I hope Santa can see his way to bringing these girls some pants. 

It's not the way my family celebrates the holiday, but I do see how it could have certain advantages. 

Hope you folks enjoyed this first rather risqué installment of Christmas Shorts.  I'll have another tomorrow and all kind of goodies planned leading up to the big day. 

Hitch on the Hump: The Number 17 (1932)

Any director that made 53 films in his career is bound to have one or two stinkers. Hitchcock is no exception. While his classic films greatly outweigh the bad ones, there are a few like Topaz and Torn Curtain that are pretty much universally panned. For this week’s Hitch on the Hump, I decided to tackle the film commonly thought to be the worst on Hitch’s résumé, Number 17. Made in 1932 as a film to fulfill his contractual obligation with British International Pictures, it was not a picture he wanted to make. In his interviews with Francois Truffant, the first comment out of the director’s mouth when asked about the films was simply, “A disaster!”, and other than an amusing story about cats, had little else to say about the film. Even Patrick McGilligan, in his exhaustive 800 page Hitchcock biography, A Life in Darkness and Shadow, spends less than two pages detailing the making of this film.

Walter Mycroft, the head of British International, ruled his studio like a dictator, and he was no Alfred Hitchcock fan, a sentiment the director returned. One story goes that Mycroft ordered the entire studio to be repainted, and the next day found the words “Mycroft is a Shit” scrawled on the freshly painted bathroom walls. He suspected Hitchcock was behind the prank, but Hitch denied any involvement though he “didn’t disagree with the message”.  When it came time for Hitch to make his last film, he wanted to direct London Wall, a white collar love story and change of pace for the director of The Lodger and Murder! When Mycroft saw Hitchcock respond to the material, he assigned a different director and pushed Hitchcock over to the film adaptation of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s comic//thriller play The Number 17.

When he and co-writer Rodney Ackland retired to his Cromwell Road home, Hitch all but pitched the play out the window, and over the course of several months (and more than a few of Hitch’s favorite cocktail, The White Lady, a mixture of gin, egg whites, light cream, and superfine sugar, the amusing play became an out and out farce. Ackland recalled that Hitchcock was determined to make the movie a “burlesque of all the thrillers”, and over drinks Ackland, Hitchcock, and his wife crafted a film that was broadly comic to the point of near buffoonery. If Hitch was going to be forced to make a picture he wasn’t interested in, he intended to hand Walter Mycroft a massive practical joke on his way out the door.

The Number 17 is not an easy movie to synopsize. Looking for some inspiration, I poured over my Hitchcock books and throughout the internet looking for some concise way to sum up this film and I came up empty-handed with only bloated blow-by-blow descriptions or misleading one sentence summaries to show for my efforts. So I suppose I will have to put my own spin on it. On the trail of a gang of jewel thieves, Detective Barton (John Stewart) tracks them down to an abandoned house. Inside all he discovers a dead body, and a transient named Ben (Leon M. Lion) who appears to be innocent of the murder. Barton and Ben soon meet Nora (Anne Grey), the daughter of the dead man, and make the acquaintance of the jewel thieves who tie up the detective and the daughter before making for a fast train out of London.

If the summery doesn’t sound particularly funny or tell all that much about the film, there’s a good reason for this. While Hitchcock injected a ton of broadly played humor, it’s mostly so bad that it’s not funny, and the story is such a mess that it doesn’t ever make much sense. If Hitchcock wanted to leave Mycroft with a turd of a film, he certainly did so. It didn’t help that Hitchcock hated Leon M. Lion with a passion. He considered the hammy stage actor, who had originated the role of Ben on stage, an “awful old man”. He gave the actor plenty of time to mug for the camera, but no chance to make the film a star making turn. Lion would appear in a few more films, but he didn’t manage to make a name for himself in those either.

The rest of the cast seem to have as little idea of what was going on in the film as I did. Hitchcock regular Donald Calthrop played the same kind of shady character that he had in his previous works with the director, Blackmail and Murder!, Anne Grey proved herself to be one of the least interesting Hitchcock blondes as Nora, and Garry Marsh never works up any real menace as the crook’s leader Sheldrake. Hitch also inserted a number of sweeping disorienting shots and pointless effects shots in the film to further muddy the waters. Normally, Hitchcock’s work with miniatures was flawless, but, as Patrick McGilligan noted of the climatic runaway train sequence that ends the film “some people think he deliberately staged the wild crescendo so it simply looked cheap.” As the trains are so obviously poorly lit models, this stands to some reason. Even the score by Adolph Hallis (who also scored Hitchcock’s The Rich and Strange), seems to be deliberately disjointed; another hint that Hitchcock might have been sabotaging the film.

I have to wonder, looking back on this film which he ran off the rails with less finesse than the model train wreck, if Hitchcock did not harbor some regret for making a film hat was this horrid. While he had plenty to say about all his features in the Francois Truffaut interviews, after saying the films was a “disaster”, he spent more time talking about the amount of cats on location set and how he had nearly made an early version or Roman Holiday than talking about the film at hand. The Number 17 is by far the worst Hitchcock film I have seen, and it only manages to get the generous rating of 1 Bugg because of a few inspired shots that prove that even Hitch could not remove all of his talent from this picture. This is one solely for Hitchcock completists, and anyone else should stay very far away from this self-sabotaged quota picture.

Bugg Rating

If you're a brave soul and want to check out this film, it is in the public domain and I've included it below. 

Hitch on the Hump:The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Remakes are a touchy subject with film fans. Very seldom does one find a remake that stacks up to the original, and it is rarer that such a feat would come from the same director. In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, the film that first garnered him success in America, with James Stewart and Doris Day taking on the lead roles. It was a grand success, but in the years since the argument over which version was best has been a source of bickering among Hitchcock fans. Hitch once told Francois Truffaut that his 1934 film was the product of a “talented amateur and the second made by a professional.” I’ve previously reviewed the 1956 version, and I thought it was high time I turned my eye toward the original film. While neither seems like an amateur work, there are surely plusses and minuses to each of the versions.

The kernel of the idea that would become The Man Who Knew Too Much originally stemmed from a script by Michael Balcon and playwright Charles Bennett. Based off the popular Bulldog Drummond books, the script was then entitled Bulldog Drummond’s Baby. It followed the daring English detective on vacation in Switzerland where he stumbles on a ring of spies who kidnap his titular baby to ensure his silence. Balcon, who was now the head of British studio Gaumont, asked Hitchcock to retrieve the rights to the script, then owned by British International Pictures, and the director did so selling it back to Balcon at a hefty profit. After going through a groupthink process where Hitchcock seemingly consulted every writer he knew, the story that emerged lost the detective, changed the hero to a heroine, and the baby became a precocious twelve year old. In the wake of his last film, the Johann Strauss biopic Waltzes from Vienna, the most important thing to Hitchcock was returning to the kind of suspense film he relished making.

The story begins in Switzerland where Bob Laurence (Leslie Banks) and his daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam) watch Bob’s wife Jill (Edna Best) participate in a skeet shooting competition. Jill gets distracted by the chime of a watch and loses the match, but later that evening she’s having a lovely time dancing with her friend Louis (Pierre Fresnay) until he is suddenly gunned down. With his last breath, he tells Jill where to find information that must be taken to the British consulate to prevent an assassination. Bob recovers the clue from Louis’ room, but the assassins, lead by the villainous Abbott (Peter Lorre), have taken Betty hostage. The Laurences have no choice but to return to England, and while Bob tries to save Betty, Jill must find a way to prevent the diplomat from being killed.

I guess right off the bat I should discuss where the 1934 and 1956 versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much deviate. In the 1956 version, the hero of the picture is James Stewart’s affable dad while the 1934 version gives the most heroic moments to Edna Best as the mother, Jill. Leslie Banks’ Bob gets to do his share of investigating, but he, along with his pal Clive (Hugh Wakefield), generally stumble around and bungle things while Jill is the linchpin that both foils the radical’s plot and ultimately saves their daughter. Edna Best might have been lacking the glamour (and singing voice) of Doris Day, but it’s interesting to see a woman portrayed in a Hitchcock film as cunning and strong without the flaws that so many women in his films seem to have. The other major changes have to do with the location of opening scene, Morocco in 1956 and Switzerland in 1934, and the presence of the villain, much more an integral part of the 1934 film. The Swiss setting gave Hitchcock a chance to mentally return to the city of St. Moritz where he had honeymooned with his wife Alma.

The lead actors are all very entertaining to watch, and I was especially impressed by Nova Pilbeam as the young girl Betty. Pilbeam had caught Hitchcock’s eye (as well as the eye of most of England) when she starred in 1934 film Little Friend as a young girl driven to suicide after her parents divorce. Hitchcock remembered her as having “the intelligence of a fully grown woman.”, and her performance, while brief, is very impressive. Three years later he would call on the actress again for his 1937 film Young and Innocent. Leslie Banks gives a light performance that encompasses much of the humor Hitchcock injected into his films. His shining moment is a comically tense scene in a dentist’s office originally intended to be a barber until Hitch saw a similar scene in the Paul Muni film I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. (Years later, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man would borrow heavily from the dentist scene, but with rather more intensity.) I also rather enjoyed Bob and Clive’s run in with a faux-sun cult that fronts for the anarchists. Banks would also re-team with Hitchcock in the 1939 film Jamaica Inn. Some have described Edna Best as one of the icy, cool “Hitchcock blondes”, but while her hair color certainly fits, she is much too true blue to fit in with many of Hitch’s other ladies. Best did not appear again in another Hitchcock film, but she did have memorable roles in the 1940 version of Swiss Family Robinson and 1947’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

The family at the center of the plot should surely be the focus of the film, but the real star here is Peter Lorre. Having fled Germany in the wake of the rise of Adolf Hitler, Lorre spoke almost no English. As the story goes, he shrewdly just answered yes to anything the director asked, and when he thought that Hitch might have hit the punch line of one of his famously ribald stories, the actor, “broke out in such laughter that I almost fell off my chair.” Lorre learned all his lines phonetically, but from the performance he turned in you would never know. He had first caught Hitchcock’s eye with the Fritz Lang film M, and the film even contains an allusion to that film in the form or Lorre’s character’s chiming watch. Originally Lorre was considered for the role of the assassin, Ramon, but after the first meeting, Hitchcock considered that the script called for the character of Abbott to be “unctuous but deadly”. Lorre definitely could embody all of that and more. With his bug eyes, skunk striped hair, and leering looks, Lorre projects an air of malevolence. Yet, strangely, in the last act, Lorre still manages to infuse the character with a pathos that you would not expect. Before Norman Bates and Bruno Anthony, Lorre’s Abbott was surely the first of Hitchcock’s great villains.

When Hitchcock previewed the films for executives at Gaumont, they rushed out when the credits rolled without a single word for the director. They thought the film was “too artistic” and when screened for film critic C.M Woolf he declared it a travesty. Thankfully, Michael Balcon overruled everyone and the film got its release. It would be widely hailed as the best British film of the year, and it even garnered a fair bit of attention in the United States. In some ways, The Man Who Knew Too Much paved the director’s way to Hollywood in only a few short years. Not only was the story of the film appealing to audiences, but Hitchcock made great use of visuals to impress. From the Swiss Alps to the climax in the Albert Hall, which was really a set on a soundstage with most of the audience made up of a reflected painting, Hitch stretched his budget to create a film that was as visually appealing as it was suspenseful.

The film benefited by all the German immigrants entering the British film industry, and the cinematography was handled by Curt Courant, who had worked with Fritz Lang, and art director Alfred Junge, who also worked with Hitch on Waltzes from Vienna. The Man Who Knew Too Much is also notable for two other collaborators. First was composer Arthur Benjamin who wrote the Storm Cloud Cantata which was used in the climax of both versions of the film. While Hitchcock preferred the recording by Bernard Hermann in the ‘56 version, it would not have been possible if Benjamin hadn’t written the piece. The second notable collaborator was Joan Harrison who was hired on as a script girl for this film. She would remain a trusted confidant to the director for years. She would go on to becoming a writer of scripts for Hitchcock films such as Jamaica Inn, Suspicion, Saboteur, and Foreign Correspondent before rising to the level of producer working on films and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series.

The success of The Man Who Knew Too Much not only gained Hitchcock his first overtones from the Hollywood studios; it also gave him enough clout to get his next film, The 39 Steps, made when the studio again thought it an incomprehensible mess. Nearly from the time he came to America, he considered remaking the film, most likely because it contained so many elements that Hitch so loved. The Man Who Knew Too Much is funny, action filled, and incredibly suspenseful. So no matter what version you choose to watch, you’re in the hands of a master, but the best thing to do is watch them both and you’ll surely appreciate the “talented amateur” and the “professional”.

Bugg Rating

The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of the few Hitchcock pictures in the public domain, and so I am very happy to bring you the complete film for your viewing pleasure.

The Mummy (1932): Or, Boris' Other Bride

Hello, folks. First off, happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and I hope you’ve all given plenty of thanks. Lot’s of bloggers have been giving thanks this whole week to Boris Karloff thanks to the Frankensteinia’s Boris Karloff Blogathon. I’ve had great fun reading all the posts and getting a chance to take in a few classic Karloff films as well. Today I wanted to talk a bit more about Karloff, but as usual, I also want to turn my eye to another Beautiful Lady of Genre, Miss Zita Johann. After the great success of Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, Universal wanted another property for a Karloff lead. The movie that they made was The Mummy, and what is Imhotep without his long lost love?

I’m sure most of you have seen The Mummy, so I won’t spend very long on the synopsis. Some nosey archeologists in Egypt unearth the cursed body of Imhotep (Karloff), and even though it’s clearly marked, the young upstart archeology student just has to open the container with the cursed scroll on it. You know what happens next, the mummy comes to life, the kid goes crazy, and Imhotep takes it on the lam. Cut to ten years later, Imhotep gets another group to dig up his old girlfriend. He has a plan to get her back, but it’s going to take finding her resurrected form. Luckily for him, she’s right in Cairo in the form of Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), and if he can just keep his magic scroll and pesky archeologists in line, he’ll reunite with his lost love.

I’ve glossed over the whole archeologist angle of the film because honestly that part of the picture is not all that interesting in the first place. The milquetoast hero character, the appropriately named David Manners as Frank Whemple, isn’t very fun to watch, and Edward Van Sloan, who’s been very good in many things, only shows up here to give a repeat performance of his performance as Van Helsing in Dracula. Only this time there’s an amulet of the goddess Isis standing in for a cross. Surely, this Universal horror, the first not to have literary forbearer, owes a great deal to Tod Browning’s 1931 film. From its cast of characters to the story of love across the ages, there are many comparisons to be drawn.

The love story, while similar to Dracula, finds its own footing in the Egyptian mythology from which it was drawn, and Karloff’s Imhotep is surely no suave, dapper count. From the moment Karloff’s character is introduced to us under layers of Jack Pierce’s makeup, he presents a foreboding figure. Even after he sheds his wrappings, Karloff’s gaunt frame and sunken eyes convey everything essential about the character. Add to that the makeup that made his skin look paper thin, and no matter if he was wrapped up from head to toe or not, there was no mistaking Imhotep for anything but a revived corpse. Karloff’s languid performance makes up for the film’s plodding pace and boring protagonists. Just the scenes where he gets his crazy hypnosis eyes going are enough to make up for an awful lot. Before I move on, I just have one last thing about Boris Karloff. When it comes to the big time Universal Monsters, there’s The Mummy, Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein. When you immortalize 50% of those characters, there’s no wonder that hundreds of folks would spend whole week writing about you.

The object of Imhotep’s affections is a Helen whose face might well launch a whole crapload of ships. Zita Johann was an Austrian born actress, but she perfectly embodied the poise and grace of someone that was supposed to have been the resurrected form of an Egyptian priestess. One interesting thing about The Mummy is that its setting is 1932, and unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, it could portray modern style. Zita Johann was perfect for this. With her slight frame and huge eyes, these days she would probably be plastered on a tabloid page alongside Kira Knightly and a title reading “Are They Too Thin?”, but even though she was thin, her look seemed very natural. I also thought her costuming seemed chosen to reflect Helen as a modern girl as opposed to the girl of Imhotep’s dreams. Her performance is a perfect compliment to Karloff’s imposing performance, and I wish she had done more films. She had a very short screen career before leaving Hollywood for Broadway, but she returned one more time to the genre in 1986 for an appearance in the less classic film Raiders of the Living Dead.

While The Mummy is a film fraught with goofs (mouths neglecting to move when a character is speaking), fumbles (the uninteresting hero characters), and faults (a weak story that seems derivative), Karloff and Zita sell the film with the help of director Karl Freund. Before coming to American, Freund established his reputation in Germany as a skilled cinematographer working on films with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. When he arrived in Hollywood, he climbed behind the camera for Tod Browning’s Dracula, and within the span of two years, he was in the big chair shooting The Mummy. The influence of German expressionistic film is evident throughout, and some conceits, like shooting the flashback sequence like a silent film complete with exaggerated expressions, were genius ideas.

The Mummy is a film that only half works, but the half that’s doing the work is doing a hell of a job. Freund told the story with his images, Karloff delivered an imposing, iconic performance, and Johann provides the alluring qualities that make it seem like a guy would come back from the dead for her. When I was younger, The Mummy was my least favorite of the Universal films because it was slow, didn’t have any direct sequels, and there wasn’t more of Karloff in the bandages. As an older viewer, I appreciate it more warts and all, and it’s a classic film that belongs in any horror fan’s library.

Bugg Rating