The Walking Dead (1936).

Review #2267: The Walking Dead.

Cast: 

Boris Karloff (John Elman), Ricardo Cortez (Nolan), Edmund Gwenn (Dr. Beaumont), Marguerite Churchill (Nancy), Warren Hull (Jimmy), Barton MacLane (Loder), Henry O'Neill (Werner), Joseph King (Judge Shaw), Addison Richards (Prison Warden), and Paul Harvey (Blackstone) Directed by Michael Curtiz (#125 - Casablanca, #416 - Yankee Doodle Dandy, #505 - The Adventures of Robin Hood, #529 - Mildred Pierce, #719 - Mystery of the Wax Museum, #1370 - Life with Father)

Review: 

Sure, of course Warner Bros. thought they could have some fun making a horror film. Sure, you can see the clear inspiration when it comes to having Boris Karloff star as a lumbering man back from the dead, particularly since this came out a year after Universal's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) ...but here it is arranged within the trappings of a gangster film. Of course, the obsession with trying to bring back people from a fate worse than a broken leg wasn't limited to the current day. The "perfusion pump", for example, is shown for a moment during the pivotal resurrection scene. This glass device was designed by Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Alexis Carrel to try and keep organs functioning outside of the body (the process can be explained better in articles such as this); Lindbergh wanted to find ways to help his sister-in-law, who had a bad heart. Labeled as a "mechanical heart" in some circles, Lindberg and Carrel were even featured on magazine covers for their invention (better ways of "organ perfusion" eventually came around in the next couple of years, naturally). In 1935, a film wad made called Life Returns, which featured the exploits of Dr. Robert E. Cornish, a biologist that had an interest in restoring life that tried using a teeterboard/see-saw to try and get the blood flowing of the dead...it technically worked, albeit not perfectly, on dogs (interestingly, the film didn't exactly get a great release). Incidentally, Karloff would star in two subsequent features in the following years dealing with resurrection with The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Man with Nine Lives (1940), which took inspiration from Cornish. Evidently with this film, Karloff was slated with little dialogue to speak before he raised issue with said matter. Five people were given credit for the writing: Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Hardy Andrews and Lillie Hayward wrote the screenplay, while Adamson and Joseph Fields wrote the story. The movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, a particularly busy director in the 1930s that had some experience in horror (among others in the 30+ films he did in the decade) with Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

Okay, you're going to love the way the "resurrected" man decides to handle being framed for murder. After he is brought back from being electrocuted, he seems to have developed a certain type of clot in his brain that gives him a strange knowledge of just who had framed him. Oh, but it gets better, he actually gets his revenge, in perhaps the most curious way possible. Of course, the film is pretty fast and loose at getting there with a 66-minute runtime. Karloff proves a quality knowing presence to unnerve the soul when it comes to second sight with select times to speak or just stare. The funny thing about this horror/crime feature is that there isn't really much of a villainous presence or even a ham actor. Gwenn might be the lead scientist presence, but it ends up coming off as just warm curiosity that is fine for someone with as much experience on stage and film as you'd expect from him (one can take a guess what film you would recognize that voice from). Churchill and Hull are serviceable enough when you consider that the rest of the folks don't have much to do besides being casually terrorized after the execution. Okay, so the array of deaths that happen in the film are done not by any one man but are actually a string of accidents that just happen to involve our lead character because of his "sense" of knowing who led to his death. Probably the most amusing is a guy nervous about who just stumbled in to confront him that decides to run only to encounter a train. The movie has plenty of shadows and fog to keep things looking ideal rather than just being a Frankenstein cheapie. In general, the movie is a quietly solid one, not rocking the boat too much in unnerving horror (the resurrection scene might be the most involving for the sheer execution of it, although the last scene is interesting) but generally working well with one's expectations. This is the kind of movie you can sense was made in a few weeks by professionals that came and went to get things done without too much fuss (five writers, but still) that will prove up to code.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

The Life of Emile Zola.

Review #1347: The Life of Emile Zola.

Cast: 
Paul Muni (Émile Zola), Gloria Holden (Alexandrine Zola), Gale Sondergaard (Lucie Dreyfus), Joseph Schildkraut (Captain Alfred Dreyfus), Donald Crisp (Maitre Labori), Erin O'Brien-Moore (Nana), John Litel (Charpentier), Henry O'Neill (Colonel Picquart), Morris Carnovsky (Anatole France), Louis Calhern (Major Dort), Ralph Morgan (Commander of Paris), Robert Barrat (Major Walsin-Esterhazy), and Vladimir Sokoloff (Paul Cézanne) Directed by William Dieterle.

Review: 
"I've never tried to learn the art of acting. I have been in the business for years but I still can't tell what acting is or how it's done"

As redundant as it may sound, one needs a bit of history now and then. Who better to headline a biographical film than Paul Muni? The son of actors, he had started a career in Yiddish theatre in Chicago after emigrating there from Lemberg (a city that was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now referred to as Lviv, Ukraine). He was noted for his makeup skills, appearing as an 80-year-old man to debut on stage while being just 12. He spent three years on Broadway before being signed by Fox Film in 1929, making two films (The Valiant and Seven Faces), but he went back to Broadway before being enticed to return in 1932, with Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang leading to him being signed by Warner Bros. Muni was noted for his preparation for roles, particularly for biographies, which served him for films such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which won him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Muni made 13 of his 23 films in the 1930s, having script approval over what he wanted to do, a rare thing at the time. He ended his career the same way he started it: with an Academy Award nomination (he had five in total).

Naturally, one is to expect a few wrinkles of inaccuracy, which the film anticipates with a title card stating that the while the production has basis in history, the historical basis was "fictionalized for the purposes of this picture". Relating to that, a cursory search of Zola leads me to a fact I didn't discover in the film: he wrote a cycle of twenty novels named Les Rougon-Macquart, for which Nana (mentioned in the film) was part of. The obvious sticking point with history is how the film deals with the Dreyfus affair when relating to anti-Semitism of the time that was key to the case since he was Jewish (the word isn't even mentioned in dialogue, only shown on screen once), which has been argued to be due to the timidity of studios when it came to dealing with Nazi Germany. There are numerous quibbles that can be freely noted, ranging from how he is brought into the Dreyfus case (not over the tears of the wife) to the fact that his death (carbon monoxide poisoning through a badly ventilated chimney) was not in fact the day before exoneration of said general. But as Zola once said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." The film relies on the sentiment of truth and justice eventually prevailing in the end, with German actor-turned-director Dieterle being the one to help do it, having directed Muni to three biographical films (the aforementioned Pasteur film and Juarez) in a directing run that spanned forty years. The film has a stagy quality to it, where one senses a speech with some sort of platitudes to pop up sooner than later, which can work out well when a moment of dignity is required. In that sense, Muni makes the best of it, where one sees the dedication in bringing an icon of writing to the screen come out without seeming too much like overacting (which Muni has been criticized for, with Dieterle even accusing him of doing occasionally). One can see his conviction on display without hesitation in the monologue scene for the court, a six-minute scene of dedication to making the measure of a man. The rest of the actors (including an Academy Award-winning performance from Schildkraut) do just fine, keeping up with Muni in displaying some dignity in keeping the momentum going without too many bumps in the road, whether as people who stand with Zola for truth or stand among keeping it buried to not have to deal with an army admitting fallibility. Granted, the resulting film that comes from said statements seems a bit long at 116 minutes, but at least one can say that this worked better with being a biography than the previous biographical Best Picture winner in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), even if it is at best a fairly okay experience to spend time with. One can be inspired to inquire further about the famed author than the mild snapshots that this provides. It may not be the most prime material for its decade, but it still finds a way to create curiosity through its attempts at entertainment along the lines of other films of its ilk in most of the right places.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Jezebel (1938).

Review #1022: Jezebel.

Cast: 
Bette Davis (Julie Marsden), Henry Fonda (Preston Dillard), George Brent (Buck Cantrell), Donald Crisp (Dr. Livingstone), Fay Bainter (Aunt Belle Massey), Margaret Lindsay (Amy Bradford Dillard), Richard Cromwell (Ted Dillard), Henry O'Neill (General Theopholus Bogardus), Spring Byington (Mrs. Kendrick), John Litel (Jean La Cour), Gordon Oliver (Dick Allen), and Janet Shaw (Molly Allen) Directed by William Wyler (#509 - Roman Holiday)

Review: 
Admittedly, it is hard to talk about the film without comparing it to Gone with the Wind (#569), which was released one year after this movie, which was based off the 1933 play of the same name by Owen Davis. It has been stated that Davis got the role as a sort of a consolation prize for not being awarded the role of Scarlett O'Hara, which went to Vivien Leigh. However, it should also be mentioned that the original actress intended for the role for Jezebel was Tallulah Bankhead, but she fell ill during rehearsals.

In any case, Davis won an Academy Award for Best Actress (her second and final career win) and Banter would win one for Best Supporting Actress for this movie. For the time, Davis' character must have come off as shocking (manipulating people for love and wearing red to a party), but she just comes off as spiteful and not all too compelling, even with her story arc. It should be noted that Davis does pull of a fine performance, though. I will say that her character is mildly compelling to see progress through the movie, but the ending is a bit odd with her motivations, which seems a bit tacked on. The other performances are pretty consistent, and they (along with the production values) help in making for a film that is at the very least dazzling, with Fonda being a fine standout along with Brent and Bainter. The sequence with Davis and Fonda at the ball is a particular highlight in striking tone. The black-and-white photography is fine, but this is a film that probably should've been filmed in color in order to to make the red dress that she notably wears stand out (this is coming from someone who has nothing against black-and-white, of course). The run-time of 103 minutes is fine for the romantic drama that it wants to be, with a few interesting scenes that make it worth it just enough. It doesn't hold too much of a candle to the other more famous film that followed a year later, but if you look past that and try to see the movie for its own worth, you will find it something that is probably worth a look.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.