I admit to confusing scenes from this picture with those that are really from Red Dust (1932) and Possessed  (1931) and for what are probably obvious reasons: the time, the themes, and the association with Joan Crawford,* when she was really really good ("before her shoulders went to her head," as my grandmother used to say).

Here's what else I forgot about Rain until we watched it again a couple of days ago: 

• The cinematography is pretty modern and inventive; 
• Lewis Milestone is a moodier director than I remembered (All Quiet on the Western Front notwithstanding);
  
• Beulah Bondi was in it, and was, of course, excellent in a thankless role; and
  
• It's kind of a long 92 minutes.

This is the situation: A ship bound for Samoa becomes delayed on Pago Pago when it is discovered that some of the passengers have contracted cholera. In the two weeks it will take for the threat to pass, several of the ship's company bunk down at ex-pat Joe Horn (Guy Kibbee)'s store and hotel. These are an arrogant missionary named Davidson (Walter Huston), his wife (Bondi), their friends Doctor and Mrs. MacPhail, and a prostitute (not their friend) called Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford). 

Nobody is happy with the living arrangements (except possibly Joe Horn) and there is much sniffing and harrumphing on the first class passenger side at Sadie's record-playing, heel-kicking, good-time having with local marines. 

Sadie is a "go-with-the-flow-live-and-let-live" kind of gal. She's been around the block and doesn't expect too much out of life, but figures why not have some fun? This attitude infuriates the Davidsons, particularly Reverend Davidson, whose frequent steely, disapproving glares send shivers up Sadie's spine.

And for good reason. Davidson has taken it upon himself to redeem Sadie by skipping (as gravely as possible) off to the governor's office to see what can be done about getting Sadie deported. He figures if she goes back to San Francisco, whence the ship came, and takes the rap for some crime she is on the run from -- and which she swears she didn't commit -- that'll help her find Jesus or something.

For most of the picture, she is rightly mystified and indignant about this meddling, but somehow (and this is were the story loses me) she slowly comes around to Rev. Davidson's way of thinking. Maybe it's the drums. Maybe it's the incessant rain, rain, RAIN. But eventually, Sadie agrees to go back to California to face (someone else's) music and renounce her sinful ways. 

Davidson is ecstatic at the news. 

But the drums. The rain. 

At the moment of his triumph, Davidson gives in to his baser instincts and forces himself on Sadie. The next morning, he is found dead, an apparent suicide, and Sadie is back to her normal, understandably jaded self. She decides not to go back to San Francisco after all, but runs off with one of the handsome marines to Australia to start afresh.

As much as I love Walter Huston, I was thoroughly unconvinced of his sudden desire for Joan Crawford. Maybe if there had been more of a build up; some struggling with desire at any other point in the picture, but nah. After all his pontificating and her repetitious repenting speeches, it did seem to come out of nowhere. 

Still. It was nice to see her back in the checkered dress. All in all, a happy ending. 

Robert Benchley: A Biography, 
By Nathaniel Benchley, McGraw-Hill, 1955

I've schlepped around the same 20 boxes of books I've half read since 1989 and have been steadfast in my refusal to part with any of them. I finally steeled myself to sort through and divest myself of any book that doesn't fit on current bookshelves, because once again, I bought a copy of something I already owned but didn't realize it and enough's enough.

In every case but one, it was an easy call to get rid of one or even both* duplicates. The exception was Robert Benchley's My Ten Years in a Quandary  and How They Grew, because I forgot I had it in hardcover when I bought the paperback and I'm not giving up the ability to carry it with me everywhere now that I know I can.

People who like humorists remember Benchley as either Dorothy Parker's friend and co-regular at the Algonquin Round Table, or as one of the early essayists and critics for the fledgling magazine, The New Yorker. Classic movie buffs remember him an occasional actor (Foreign Correspondent, 1940; Three Girls About Town, 1941), and writer/actor in about 50 Depression-Era short subject comedies (Your Technocracy and Mine, 1933; How to Sleep, 1935). 

Robert Benchley was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1889, the grandchild of Henry Wetherby Benchley, one of the founders of the Republican Party and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in the mid 1850s. Robert's beloved elder brother, Edmund, was killed in the Spanish-American War, leaving behind a wealthy fiancee, who payed for Robert's education at the posh Phillips-Exeter Academy and Harvard University. Benchley became a popular editor and contributor to the Harvard Lampoon and performed in productions of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, both of which associations forged lasting connections throughout his career.

After a short and unsuccessful stint as a reporter, Benchley found his footing as a writer and theater critic at Vanity Fair, where he met and befriended Dorothy Parker and Robert E. Sherwood, the three of them taking long lunches at the Algonquin Hotel while management was away. When management returned, however, Parker was fired and Benchley quit in solidarity. 

Thus began a period of freelance reviewing for Life magazine, screenwriting for Jesse Lasky silents, and writing and performing in short sketch films for Universal, MGM, and Paramount (The Treasurer's Report, being the most famous). By the late 1920s, after contributing for The New Yorker for a number of years, he joined the publication as its theater critic. He continued to write and perform in radio and films until his death on November 21, 1945 from a cerebral hemorrhage (and cirrhosis of the liver). He was only 56 years old. 

Robert Benchley's son, Nathaniel (with Gertrude Darling, his wife of 31 years), also became a writer (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming), as did Nathaniel's son, Peter, who wrote the Jaws franchise.

So while we're on the subject:

The Story of the Love Life of the Sideshow:

• SEE -  Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?
• SEE - What sex is the half man half woman?
• SEE - Do Siamese twins make love?

Louelle Parsons says, "For pure sensationalism, FREAKS tops any picture yet produced. It's more fantastic and grotesque than any shocker every written."

I had known about Freaks (1932) for years before getting up the nerve to see it. My concern had been that it would be exploitative and cringe-worthy, like race pictures of the day, and it was hard to get in the mood. Because it was mostly shown as a horror/camp classic, the posters and stills didn't do much to dispel that notion: 

The thing that finally made me do it was Katherine Dunn's excellent book, Geek Love, which came out in the late 80s when there was still a happy abundance of rep theaters in the Bay Area and you could be pretty sure to catch Freaks on any given midnight at one of them. So I finally saw the picture* with Dunn's circus novel fresh on my brain, and was very happy I did. Well, maybe not "happy." Positively surprised. 

And last night, for no particular reason, I watched it again after 25 years, wondering if I'd still feel the same way. Turns out Freaks is creepy and discomfiting (and not particularly well-acted) — but that's because it's set in a carnival and those are creepy and discomfiting. It's also a great story with zero ambiguity about who the bad guys are.

It begins with Hans and Frieda, the show's little people (played by real-life Ringling Bros. brother-and-sister team, Harry and Grace Earles), a nice young couple who are about to be married. They are watching the hot new new trapeze artist, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a big, blonde meanie. Hans is instantly smitten and starts to distance himself from Frieda. Cleopatra thinks it's amusing to flirt with the lovesick dwarf, because she's mean and he gives her presents and cash. Her real love interest is the strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor), a big thuggy jackass who recently broke up with the animal trainer, Venus (the underrated Leila Hyams), a really nice girl who could do much, much better.

Venus is pals with poor, heartbroken Frieda and a friendly clown called Phroso (Wally Ford). She hates to see Frieda so unhappy and confronts Cleopatra to tell her to lay off Hans, but in the process lets slip that Hans is actually quite wealthy. This gives Cleopatra big Scrooge McDuck dollar signs in the eyes and she decides to go all in, so when Hans inevitably proposes to her, she accepts.

The whole circus throws Cleopatra and Hans a wedding feast and all the freaks are assembled. The freaks in question were all working carnival performers that director Tod Browning pulled together for the film: "Half Boy" (Johnny Eck); conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton; Josephine-Joseph, the Half Man-Half Woman; and a host of others, including three microcephalic performers ("pinheads"), one of whom was Schlitzie, the inspiration for Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead. Throughout the film, we get to see each of their specialties as they go about their daily lives: one of the twins is married, for instance, and the other gets engaged; the half man-half woman gives the brush to two roadies; the human torso rolls his own cigarettes. Yeah, it's sensational, but also kind of friendly.

At the wedding feast, the gang welcome the "normal" Cleopatra into their group, chanting "One of us! One of us!" as they all pass around and drink from a ginormous goblet of beer. The trapeze artist has been getting progressively hammered, pawing all over Hercules and laughing with him at Hans's expense. When the freaks' cup approaches her, she rejects it, horrified, and tosses it back at them. Hans is mortified and the group sheepishly disbands. Before retiring to their caravan, Cleopatra slips something into Hans's champagne, making him woozy, and she further humiliates him by carrying him on her shoulders like a child.

Cleopatra begins a slow campaign of poisoning Hans, who has not left his sickbed since the wedding. Everyone is suspicious and eventually some of the more compact freaks see her spike Hans's medicine. One night, as the carnival is traveling in blinding rain, Hercules sets out to kill Venus, who has threatened Cleopatra with exposure. This is too much for the sideshow gang, who strike out at the trapeze artist and the strongman while the caravan is stuck in the mud. They descend on Cleopatra and turn her into "one of them" (a legless, tarred-and-feathered chicken lady) and kill Hercules.

In the unedited version of the film, Hercules is castrated (!!) by the freaks, not killed, and their actual attack on Cleopatra was a scene that didn't make it in the final cut. In fact, the original running time of the film was over 90 minutes, but the studio considered the content too controversial for audiences and chopped it down to just over an hour. Wikipedia tells me that no one has seen the full version since the film was released, but I swear I remember seeing Cleopatra attacked under a tree, as well as a scene with the conjoined twins in bed with one of their husbands. I must have seen that someplace, because I'm not that imaginative.

Making Freaks at all was a big gamble for MGM. Originally, Myrna Loy was slated to play Cleopatra and Jean Harlow, Venus, but Irving Thalberg ultimately decided not to have any of his A List in the picture. The gamble did not pay off, particularly for Browning, because the film bombed and the studio couldn't wash its hands fast enough. Even though Lon Chaney was a tremendous draw for MGM, it seems that having someone play deformity was better box office than people who actually lived with them.

 * but probably not that late and probably at The Roxie. 

I was probably 9 or 10 when I first got the bejeezus scared out of me by The Innocents  (1961) even though I didn't completely understand everything that was going on at the time. I do remember being completely mesmerized by radiant, spooky little Pamela Franklin as Flora, the possessed young charge of equally luminous Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, the freaked out governess.  

Not her next picture, but the next one I saw, was The Nanny *(1965), where she played the cool, confident, teen-aged neighbor friend of a disturbed boy accused of drowning his little sister. Very cute, plus she smokes. By the time Franklin turned up in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) with the best part after Maggie Smith's -- the semi-evil, precocious Sandy — I was completely in love with her: dark hair, big grey-blue eyes, British accent, school uniform; oh my god.

So what happened?! How did we get from there to Food of the Gods (1976)? Somehow, by the time she was in her mid-twenties, Pamela Franklin had become the go-to gal for '70s horror pictures. Don't get me wrong, Satan's School for Girls (1973) is a fabulous piece of work, but it does seem a little unfair. At this stage in her career, Franklin was living in Los Angeles with her actor husband, Harvey Jason, and was making a number of guest appearances on popular shows and making TV movies. Like many British performers, she moved easily between film, television, drama, and comedy, but we Americans are less able to cope with genre fluidity in our celebrities, so my guess is she just got slotted in as a TV-movie actress. The pictures she made during this time were pretty forgettable, so that didn't help.

Pamela Franklin worked on everything from Green Acres to Fantasy Island, until finally quitting the business altogether in 1981 at the ripe old age of 31. She never aspired to be a big star and was kept very grounded by her parents, who were very keen observers of how other parents prodded their child performers. Franklin lives in Hollywood with her husband of more than 40 years, where he and one of their two sons run Mystery Pier Books, Inc., a bookshop that specializes in collectibles and first-editions.

Not bad.

Flowers for Algernon,
By Daniel Keyes, Bantam, 1970







Made into the film Charly (1968), for which Cliff Robertson won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

For a handsome, talented guy, Cliff Robertson made a long, long line of forgettable pictures, punctuated by a pretty decent one every decade or so. From what I understand, his appearances on early television drama series -- Playhouse 90,  Celebrity Playhouse, Chrysler Theater and the like -- were very good; he earned an Emmy in 1966 for one of his TV performances.

Unfortunately for Robertson, my first exposure to him was in the film Obsession, a dopey, Vertigo-ish Brian DePalma picture that did nothing for me (or Genevieve Bujold), but that I watched a bunch of times anyway on early HBO. Turns out it was kind of his "thing" to play slightly unstable, nerve-wracked leads, a fact confirmed by my next seeing him in The Twilight Zone  as the jumpy ventriloquist in "The Dummy," one of the scariest episodes ever.* I remember him least fondly as Joan Crawford's love interest in the creepy May-October romance, Autumn Leaves (1956), where he plays a mentally unstable hotty to Joan's middle-aged spinster.**

Cliff Robertson was born in San Diego, California, into a bit of money. His parents divorced when he was a year old and his mother died a year later of peritonitis at the age of 21. Robertson was raised by his maternal grandmother and rarely saw his father, who was something of a ladies' man and spendthrift. After graduating from high school in 1941, Robertson joined the Merchant Marine and served the Second World War in that service. He attended (but did not finish) Antioch College to study journalism, which was his profession for a short time, until the dean suggested he try acting.

The handsome young ex-marine moved to New York to study at the Actor's Studio, earning roles in statewide and national touring productions of popular plays, and eventually making his Broadway debut in 1953.

His first film role was in Josh Logan's Picnic (1955), which should have propelled him into meatier film appearances. Instead, he became a very successful and acclaimed television actor, showing up every so often in a film about the military (he was President Kennedy's choice to star in PT 109, for instance), but then there's Gidget , so who knows?

In the 1970s, Robertson got in a surprising bit of professional blacklisting, when he blew the whistle on a Columbia Pictures executive after discovering that the exec had been forging Robertson's name on studio checks. Turns out the guy had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars, so he was fired and fined. But Robertson was given the cold-shoulder professionally for four years.

Along the way, Robertson was married and divorced twice and became a certified private pilot. Not that one has to do with the other; I just think those two things are interesting. He owned and flew a bunch of planes, including some WWII fighters and entered balloon races and stuff. Wikipedia says he was flying a Beechcraft private plane over the Twin Towers the morning of the 9/11 attack, which is scary for obvious reasons, but also that he was 78 years old at the time, which seems a little risky to me.

Cliff Robertson died of natural causes a day after his 88th birthday on September 10, 2011.

* Bwwooaah. Hate those dummies; they're worse than clowns. 
** Eeeeeoogh. Speaking of clowns...

Flight was barely a decade old at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, but as early as 1912 the British were already trying to figure out how to mount a machine gun on an airplane...and how to fire one without shooting off the propeller. You could face one off the back if you had someone else up there with you. Or you could stand up and shoot facing forward if the gun was mounted above the propeller arc -- shoot with one hand and fly with the other. This is what many pilots did before an enterprising German (that Fokker) improved upon a captured French aviator's design for synchronizing the gun with the propeller blade.

Thus began a six-month period of German superiority in aerial warfare (July 1915 to early 1916). The Allies responded with breathtaking innovation in aviation technology and production, but not necessarily with training or military tactics. It is at this point in the war where both versions of The Dawn Patrol take place, centering on the lives of British pilots at an aerodrome in France along the Western Front. And when I mean both versions, I mean scene-for-scene and practically shot-for-shot. The differences between them are purely in tone and pace: the original is grave and slow; the remake is gravely jaunty and moves. The planes remain shockingly rickety and flammable (sticks, canvas, and wire).

Written by John Monk Saunders (who also wrote the William Wellman classic, Wings), the original Dawn Patrol (1930) features Richard Barthelmess as Captain Dick Courtney, jaded veteran squadron leader of the 59th air brigade or something. He and close pal, Doug "Scotty" Scott (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) are the most senior and best airmen (because they are still alive) and great pals. In real life, an aviator during the Great War beat depressing odds if they managed more than 60 hours of flight time without getting killed. Most new pilots were in their late teens or early twenties and these guys are waaaaaay over the hill at about 27 or 28.

The initial conflict is between Courtney and the squad commander, Major Brand, a very young and handsome Neil Hamilton, who is perfectly fine, but once you realize that he played Commissioner Gordon on TV's Batman some 35 years later, it's really hard not to mentally overdub his one-sided field phone conversations with "What? The Riddler in Gotham City?!" Courtney is disgusted with Major Brand for sending raw recruits out on dangerous missions without training. This was a very real problem during the war: new pilots trained maybe 10 hours before being sent into combat and -- if they weren't killed during training (half the aviation deaths from the Great War were a result of training accidents), they lasted maybe 6-10 weeks in actual combat.

What Courtney doesn't know is that Brand has been fighting with HQ for more time to put replacements through combat practice alongside more experienced pilots. One evening, after a particularly galling taunt from the Red Baron figure, "von Richter," Courtney and Scotty disobey Major Brand's orders and fly over the German air base and bomb the crap out of it. Initially, Brand threatens to court martial Courtney, but just then the phone rings* and Brand learns he has been promoted, thanks to the actions of his rogue airmen and can finally get further away from ordering pointless missions, but first he must appoint his successor. Guess who he picks?

In 1938, the deviations from the original script (and there aren't many) point to the inevitability of war, perhaps because another one is looming on the horizon. The updated script allows more tension between the squad commander and HQ, allowing Major Brand (the tight-jawed, un-compromised-by-later-tv-appearance, Basil Rathbone) to seethe with anger and barely hold it together while carrying out futile orders; he seems more torn with guilt and horror than Commissioner Gordon.** Rathbone also gets to exhibit more natural feeling for Courtney and Scott, and that feeling seems to be mutual.

As new squadron commander, it is now up to Capt. Courtney to send new boys and old friends off to die in combat. His pal, Scotty, commiserates, until one day, one of the new green recruits is his own 18-year-old brother, Donnie (doesn't matter who plays him in either picture), and Courtney is forced to send the kid on a mission. Donnie, of course, gets killed immediately, causing the next conflict of the film: that between Courtney and Scott. This is the crucial difference between the two versions of the movie. In The Dawn Patrol (1938), Capt. Courtney is played by eminently more hail-fellow-well-met, Errol Flynn, and David Niven is the affable Scott. The camaraderie between these two men is more jovial and affecting than the graver, possibly more true-to-life kind of battle friendship shown between Barthelmess and Fairbanks, Jr.

In the 1930 film, Scott is much harsher in his rebuke of Courtney after Donnie gets shot down, calling him a drunken butcher and we get no inkling as to whether Barthlemess's Courtney tried to plead for more recruit training as Flynn does in the later picture. 

And when Courtney counsels the younger Scott (in 1930) on the eve of his first and last fight, he tells Donnie to prepare for losing well, because sure, a dogfight with a vastly more experienced enemy pilot is like a football match against a better team, but in this case, when you lose you lose, well, everything. Go out like a good sport. Scott is livid that Courtney counselled his brother on how to die. In the later film, this discussion is less candid, with Errol Flynn telling Donnie to follow his big brother, learn what he can, and well, good luck.

The friends stop talking for weeks, Ultimately, Courtney gets a message from on high that a heavily guarded munitions plant needs to be destroyed, but a full squadron would be too risky: only a single pilot could possibly get through undetected. Courtney naturally wants to do the job himself, but as commander, is forbidden and must call for a volunteer. A grieving and angry Scott steps forward, but on the eve of his departure, Courtney contrives to get the notorious lightweight drunk and takes his place on the mission.

Courtney successfully destroys the targets, but is killed in the process. 

Howard Hawks started shooting the 1930 film around the time Howard Hughes was finally wrapping up his years-long, expensive, WWI aviation epic, Hell's Angels, on which Edmund Goulding, director of the 1938 version, also worked. Hawks not only beat Hughes to the box office, he'd hired a bunch of Hughes's stunt pilots for the dogfight scenes, which caused them a long stretch of enmity and litigation. The resulting footage was so good, Warner Bros. used it practically in its entirety in both versions of The Dawn Patrol, including the closeups of the enemy pilots: the same guy the shot down Barthelmess shoots down Flynn eight years later. Cute trick.

It's hard to understand why such a literal remake was made comparatively soon after the release of the original movie. No one was officially at war in 1938, tensions notwithstanding, and when the second Dawn Patrol  came out, the first one was still in circulation, retitled Flight Commander so as not to confuse audiences -- even though the script, the story arc, and the fight scenes were identical.

The second film is more affecting, meaning I cried at all the right times, whereas the first is more atmospheric and properly bleak. If you're going to see one of them, I recommend the 1938 iteration for the chemistry between the actors (who are beautiful to behold) and the faster pacing. They're both really good, bleak pictures that are properly critical of detached, blundering leadership. But honestly (and no disrespect to Richard Barthelmess, whom I love), Errol Flynn looks amazing with engine oil all over his square jaw.

This post is my entry for the World War One in Classic Film Blogathon, hosted by Silent-ology & Movies Silently.