Sneaking a Camera into the Death House

 

If you start watching 1933's Picture Snatcher with no knowledge of what it's about, you'd be forgiven for thinking its a gangster movie as you watch the opening scene. It is, after all, a Warner Brothers movie. And it starts with James Cagney (playing a guy named Danny Kean) getting released from prison and quickly reuniting with his old gang.

But, though the movie does have gangster elements to it, it goes in its own direction. Danny breaks off with the gang, determined to go straight and chasing his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter.

He ends up with a job at a sleazy tabloid called the Graphic News. working as a picture snatcher. In other words, he gets pictures of people who don't want their picture taken. His boss Al, played by Ralph Bellamy, is the city editor--who used to work for more legit newspapers before he started drinking.

Danny also gets a girlfriend--which causes problems of its own when her dad turns out to be the cop who sent Danny to prison.

Danny is the sort of wise-cracking, fast-talking character that Cagney excelled at playing and we enjoy hanging out with him even as we realize that what he does for a living can be a little bit sleazy. And we have to admire his moxie.

A key event in the movie is when he sneaks a camera into the first execution of a woman by electric chair. Danny sneaks in a camera strapped to his leg to get a picture of it (a scene based on the real life Ruth Snyder case). 

This certainly demonstrates his moxie, but it also gets him into trouble. The cops are looking for him and he gets into trouble with his girlfriend's dad (who gets demoted as part of the fallout). 

But then he learns that the man who took over his old gang has killed a couple of police officers. He and Al realize that if Danny can use his old connections to find the killer and get some pictures, this might be their ticket to jobs on a legitimate paper. 

Picture Snatcher doesn't quite reach the level of True Classic that so many of the Warner Brothers gangster movies achieved, but it's still gives us an incredibly entertaining 90 minutes. The comedy and the drama are mixed together expertly and leavened with snappy dialogue. And, of course, Cagney is always top notch.

I'm a farmer. If I lose my farm there must be a reason for it. The sacrifice of one poor village - what will it accomplish?

Edge of Darkness (1942) is a film that can be downright heartbreaking at times.

It’s set in a small fishing village in occupied Norway. The people are just people—they fish, work in the cannery or run small shops. They want to resist the Nazis, but don’t have the resources to do anything beyond a few minor acts of sabotage. There are some—such as the town doctor played by Walter Huston—who just want to wait it out and avoid getting everyone unnecessarily killed.

Then they learn that the British will be smuggling in guns and ammo. The plan is to arm a number of villages along the Norwegian coast, then launch a general uprising. But this must be done according to plan. The villagers must wait until the right moment before they fight.

But several acts of brutality by the Germans might anger them enough to rise up too soon.

What makes all this work so well—to resonate with so much effective emotion—is how average and normal the villagers are. Their leader is a fisherman played by Errol Flynn and he’s not average, of course. Whenever Flynn is on the screen—no matter when and where the movie is set—you always expect a sword fight to break out at any moment.

But that works fine in context to the film—he’s the leader because he’s above average. But everyone else is just normal, everyday guys and gals who are essentially now living in a hell on earth. They don’t look and act like soldiers—they look and act like fisherman and shopkeepers who are struggling to figure out what they should do next.

There’s a scene in which most of the townspeople are meeting in church. The pastor is on the pulpit, making it look like they’re having a regular church service if a German looks in. But a man sitting in one of the pews is doing the talking, telling them about a village that rose up against the Nazis and was wiped out.

So what should they do? One man thinks it’s always wrong to kill. Others think that fighting would be senseless and only get their families killed. Others think they must fight no matter what, but when and how to fight is open to further debate.

This is a war-time film, so in the end it takes the side of those who want to fight. And, of course, history has justified this—the irony being that the Nazis turned out to be even more brutal than they were portrayed in propaganda films such as this.

But during that church scene, everyone is given their say. There’s no derision or condemnation of those who don’t want to fight. The film seems to understand how difficult a decision this is for the townspeople—how much courage it would take to pick up a weapon and charge a machine gun nest full of trained soldiers. Edge of Darkness represents people who want a free society and it remembers that in such a society people are allowed to have different opinions and debate with each other.

There’s not a lot of action in the film until the climax—the film effectively uses character moments to help build up the tension. The running time is just under two hours, but the various characters all get sufficient time for us to get to know them and to like them.

Little moments of dialogue are used with laser-like precision to define individual characters. During the climatic battle, for instance, a maid who has always been deferential to her employer is told that the women and children are being evacuated to England. “The women with children are going,” she replies. “I’m staying to fight.”   Then she adds a modest apology for speaking above her social station. But, by golly, she stays and fights.

The film does such a great job of getting us to like the villagers that the climatic battle is actually a little painful to watch. There’s no punches pulled here—people we’ve gotten to know and like are being killed and we actually hate it when we watch them die.

I have a real love for the war-time films. I recognize them as propaganda as well as entertainment, but I think the message they preached about confronting evil is a moral and still important one. Edge of Darkness is one of the best of these because it is very intelligent and very, very human in the way it makes its point.

DECADE BY DECADE: Part 3: G-Men, gangsters and tommy guns

-

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-

As we enter the 1930s, it soon becomes apparent that if you want the absolute best in slam-bang action and tough guys (any of whom could, without exception, beat the snot out of modern day leading men such as Tom Criuse or George Clooney without even working up a sweat), then you have to turn to Warner Brothers.


The WB is responsible for the best gangster and crime films ever made. The studio played off the talents of Cagney, Bogie and E.G. Robinson, while drawing plot elements and story construction from the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, Warner Brothers gave us classic after classic during the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties, Bullets or Ballots, Little Caesar, Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and other gangster films gave us wonderful stories and characters, filmed in beautiful black-and-white while dropping in more than their share of superbly designed action set pieces.


G-Men (1935) is a fun and interesting example of the genre because it takes Cagney's image as a tough guy and manages to believably plop him down on the side of the angels. Cagney is "Brick" Davis, a down-and-out lawyer who nonetheless remains honest and refuses to work for gangsters. When a friend who joined the Justice Department is killed, Brick opts to join up as well, hoping to get a chance to nail the thugs who committed the murder.


The plot is a well-constructed police procedural, with Brick and the other G-Men using reasonably believable methods for tracking down the bad guys. Along the way, they engage the villains is a series of blazing gun battles. There are few more entertaining images in existence than those of Warner Brothers tough guys blasting away at each other with tommy guns, shotguns and .45 automatics. The director was William Keighley, one of a number of Warner house directors who had a spot-on sense of what looked good on film.

A subplot involving Brick's adversarial relationship with his boss and his eventual romance with his boss's sister is handled well, getting us to like these characters all the more without interfering with the flow of the main plot.


-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Cagney is backed up in the film by a number of talented character actors, including Robert Armstrong, Lloyd Nolan and Barton MacLane. That is, of course, another main strength of the WB gangster films. The old studio system (where actors were under contract to a specific studio and assigned to the films they appeared in) is open to a lot of legitimate criticism in terms of labor practices, but it did create a stable of skilled character actors that gave real backbone to the movies of that era.

Comics, Radio and the Prelude to War, Part 2

As we saw in the last post, Milt Caniff had to tap dance ever so slightly around the issues of Japanese and German aggression in his comic strip. Meanwhile, on the radio, something very similar was going on.

Superman began life in Action Comics in 1938, but his immediate and extraordinary popularity bounced him into other media almost without pause. He showed up on radio in February of 1941--The Adventures of Superman was one of the best children's serials of that decade and is still fun to listen to today.

A storyline broadcast in 1941--but still well before the attack on Peal Harbor brought us into the war--featured Superman going up against a gang of foriegn saboteurs. The spies are identified as anti-British and speak with obvious German accents, but are never actually refered to as Germans or Nazis. The show was doing the same tap dance Caniff was doing--taking sides in the war while avoiding the ire of any radio station owners with isolationist leanings.

In fact, at one point in the story, Daily Planet editor Perry White is captured by the foriegn agents. In what is, in retrospect, an absolutely wonderful moment, Perry starts to call his captors "dirty Nazis," but he only gets as far as "Dirty N..." before he's slapped and told to shut up.

As with Terry and the Pirates, Superman was able to overtly identify the villains as Axis agents once we were officially at war. In fact, the Nazis remained the bad guys for a while even after the war ended. In an extended (and truly excellent) story line that ran in late 1945, a German scientist injects a fanatical Nazi with liquid Kryptonite, giving him powers that threaten even the Man of Steel.

Caniff and the creative staff of The Adventures of Superman were all pretty cool guys, willing to take a stand for their beliefs. That they had to "cheat" a little in their storytelling to do this does not speak ill of them at all--they were simply taking advantage of the only route open to them to make an important point about the dangers of Nazism and of Japanese aggression.

If you own your own movie studio, though, you have a lot more freedom about saying whatever the heck you want.

Harry Warner--head of Warner Bros. studios-was increasingly concerned with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. In 1939, he began to reflect this concern in his movies. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson, was released that year--a good six months before Germany invaded Poland. Loosely based on a real-life spy trial, it was fervently anti-Nazi.

Warner took a lot of heat for that movie. Several of his European-born stars, including Marlene Dietrich, had to decline to appear in it because they feared retaliation against relatives still living in Europe. The German government lodged an official protest and a number of Latin American countries banned the film outright.

The Warner brothers eventually landed in front of a Senate committee investigating "propaganda" and "war mongering" in movies. The Warners basically replied "Well, duh!" to these charges, reminding the committee that the movie was, after all, based on a true story. Then they went home and made more anti-Nazi pictures.

The Warners weren't alone in their overt depictions of the Nazis as villains in those last few years before we entered the war. Over at Timely (later Marvel) Comics, several of those new-fangled superheroes were doing their share of fascist-bashing. We'll take a look at this in the last post of this series.