The stars of 'Corsair' give strong performances, but are let down by a flawed script

Corsair (1931)
Starring: Chester Morris, Thelma Todd (as Alison Loyd), Frank McHugh, Mayo Methot, Fred Kholer, Ned Sparks, and Emmett Corrigan
Director: Roland West
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

It's Prohibition Era America. John Hawks (Morris), a one-time college football star grows angry and disgusted with the predatory business practises of his investment banker boss (Corrigan), and the way his boss's daughter, Alison (Todd), seems to treat him like her property and possible living sex doll, he decides to turn the tables on them by becoming a predator himself: Teaming up with the mistreated and disgruntled employees (Sparks and Methot) of bootlegger Big John (Kohler), with whom the banker is secretly in business, Hawks launches a pirating operation geared toward intercepting Big John's shipments and selling the stolen booze to the investment banker, thus making him pay for the same illicit goods twice.

As the summary above might indicate, "Corsair" is a complicated story. It is full of twists and turns and reversals. Some of these are surprisingly tragic. It's also a story that's populated with great characters... but, unfortunately, the most important of these characters are not developed to their full potential--the two main characters, John Hawks and Alison Corning.

Thelma Todd is best remembered today for her roles in comedies, but she proves in "Corsair" that she could tackle dramatic roles with just as much effectiveness. Her man-eating character in this film is so cold and self-assured that she doesn't even try to hide her dark heart and lusts. While watching the film, I had the sense that Todd's character was more than just a spoiled rich girl with a wild and independent streak, but was actually a sociopath or perhaps even a psychopath.

Unfortunately, we never see enough of Todd interacting with other characters to really know if my interpretation of her is right or wrong. She comes onto Hawks, who sees her for what and who she is and rebuffs her advances again and again. This only makes her come at him harder, and it's what eventually puts her in the middle of Hawks piracy operation, and everyone in danger (including herself and her feckless fiance).

Speaking of John Hawks, as mentioned, his character is woefully underdeveloped. We know he's an ex-football star, we know he's a man of high morals and is willing to stand by those morals... but it's never made obvious why he goes to the extremes he does, becoming a pirate with the express purpose of robbing a powerful and dangerous bootlegger just so he can stick it to a rich banker who happens to have a sociopathic daughter who set her sights on him. Maybe something happened between  Alison and John during the months he worked for her father that we aren't privy to, or maybe John saw more dirty dealings on the part of his employer beyond hard-selling little old ladies on risky investments that made more money for the firm than for them? Who can say, because there's nothing in the film to give a clearer reason for why John does what he does.

This lack of depth to John and Alison, or any dimension to their relationship with each other, makes them boring lead characters, and it causes them to be overshadowed by John's "insiders" in the bootlegger's operation--a couple, Sophie and Slim (played by Mayo Methot and Ned Sparks), who help John rob their boss because their cut will allow them to escape the yoke of crime they are laboring under. Methot, for example, has a couple of really effective scenes that deftly define her character's motivation, her relationship with Sparks, as well as inspire a great deal of sympathy from the viewers. If only Todd or Morris had been given such well-crafted scenes to perform.

Aside from the underdeveloped main characters, "Corsair" is mostly an excellent film. It's a different sort of gangster movie that's beautifully and creatively filmed--with some surprisingly modern-seeming techniques given that this is a film from 1931, from a director whose career was over at this point--and it delivers tension and suspense found all-too-rarely in the B-pictures of this period.

I say "mostly excellent" because the great parts of the film are sandwiched between absolute dreck. The opening scene is dragged out and annoying because the filmmakers obviously and clumsily try to conceal Thelma Todd's identity for as long as they could--she made this film under what was supposed to be her "new stage name", so I suspect they were going for a Big Reveal and failed. And the film's finish is absolutely awful and out of step with the rest of the movie. I won't say anything more, for risk of spoiling it, but Morris and Todd's final scene together is perhaps one of the worst bits of cinema the public has ever been subjected to.

All in all, the good in "Corsair" outweighs the bad, and I think it's worth checking out for anyone who likes 1930s crime dramas. It's also worth watching for the performances given by Ned Sparks and Mayo Methot, as well as those of Chester Morris and Thelma Todd. In each case, we get to see them play types of roles that they were rarely seen in... and they get to show that they were actors with greater range than their professional pigeon-holes allowed them to show. (One can only imagine how great Morris and Todd could have been if they had been graced with the sort of material that Sparks and Methot had to work with.)




Trivia
Alison Loyd is better known as Thelma Todd. This was the one and only time she used that "stage name", reportedly at the urging of her boyfriend, director Roland West, and a numerologist who claimed it would help her career.

Also, this was the first film role for Mayo Methot. She would go onto have a minor film career that would be over by 1940, thanks to her alcoholism and bad temper. (Once, in a drunken rage during her short marriage to Humphrey Bogart, she threatened him and dinner guests with a loaded gun.)

Finally, "Corsair" was director Roland West's last movie. His career had been waning since silent movies fell out of favor, and in 1934 he went into business with Thelma Todd as co-owner of a cafe. Following her death in 1935, he broke for good with everything Hollywood related. 

Princesses of Mars, Part 29

Sometimes, a Martian Princess needs a Prince (or maybe just a man)....

By Ed Benes

By Mike Hoffman

By Thomas Yeates

By Ron Adrian

By Emanuela Lupacchino

Musical Monday: Everything She Wants

This week, it's 35 years since Wham!'s third consequetive hit song debuted in the U.S. Check out the song and the video... and don't let the monstrous mullets scare you too much!

Who is Wham! you ask? Well, it's where George Michael got his start as one half of a duo. You can read all about it by clicking here.

It's Sunday with Spider-Woman!

It's time for another visit with the original (and best) Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew! (Although it looks like she's still finishing her breakfast...)

By Tyler Kirkham

By Gary Martin

And then, Black Widow decided to ruin the peaceful day by proving that while she may know Spider-Woman, she doesn't fear her!

By George Perez

'Whispering Whoopee' is lots of fun

Whispering Whoopee (1930)
Starring: Charlie Chase, Dolores Brinkman, Anita Garvin, Thelma Todd, Eddie Dunn, Carl Stockdale, Dale Henderson, and Tennen Holz
Director: James Horne
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

Charley (Chase) hires three escorts (Brinkman, Garvin, and Todd) to service three members of the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce (Henderson, Holz, and Stockdale) to help him close a land sale. After it initially seems his plan is doomed to failure, the party gets wilder than Charley anticipated.

"Whispering Whoopee" is a straight-forward comedy with a simple plot and mostly straight-forward, simple jokes, but every one of those jokes lands perfectly, and every cast member is great in their parts. The picture was written and filmed on a very tight schedule, as it was conceived in order to keep cast and crew working, and the Hal Roach Studio's release schedule on track, when bad weather delayed filming of the many outdoor scenes in the golfing-based comedy "All Teed Up". Given the circumstances under which it was created and filmed, it's really impressive how perfect everything seems. The pinnacle of the film is a scene where all the characters are spraying each other with seltzer water, and there's a bit in there that makes fun of synchronized swimming/ice dancing that underscores the simplicity of the movie's humor but also that the exactness in its delivery makes it exceptional. 

While Charley Chase is the lead in the film, it is also very much an ensemble comedy. Each actor gets to do their own bits, or a bit with a partner. Among Chase's co-stars, Dolores Brinkman gets some of the best lines, and she shows herself to have plenty of screen presence and comedic timing. It's a shame that she never managed to propel her acting career above the level of bit parts, because, based on what I see her, she had plenty of talent. She also plays the role in this film that I would assume would have been filled by Todd if this film had not been inserted into the production schedule the way it was; Todd is seen in fewer shots than other cast members, and of the ladies in the film she has has the fewest lines; I assume she may have been going to other sets even while working on "Making Whoopee".

Getting back to Brinkman for a moment: As things would turn out, her role in "Making Whoopee" would be her final screen appearance. Interestingly, Chase's co-star in "One of the Smiths", Peggy Howard, was also a pretty actress who never "made it", and who's last credit was in a Charley Chase film. I wonder if I will find this to be pattern as I watch more of Chase's films from the early 1930s. Together with Hal Roach, Chase was in the process of turning Thelma Todd into a hugely popular comedienne... perhaps they were trying to capture that same magic with another actress? This seems like a reasonable idea to me, since, mere months after this film was made, Todd would be headlining her own series of comedic shorts. Perhaps Chase and Roach were perhaps looking ahead to fill Todd's role in the line-up of performers working with Chase? Perhaps they were looking for someone to team with Todd in the series of films that Roach was already considering--films starring the "Female Laurel & Hardy"?

I confess that I have neither the historical knowledge, nor the drive to do the research, to elevate anything in the previous paragraph past the level of speculation. Over the next few months, however, as I watch more Charley Chase and Thelma Todd films, as well as a smattering of Laurel & Hardy and other Hal Roach productions, and do my usual superficial research into the actors appearing in them, maybe I'll find something to either prove or disprove the speculation above.

All that is tangential to "Whispering Whoopee", which is a hilarious comedy that makes it easy to see why Charley Chase was second only in popularity to Laurel & Hardy when it came to Hal Roach's galaxy of stars. It's a shame that he and his work is mostly forgotten, but it's also easy to see why: His films are more rooted in the culture of the time within which they were made than the Laurel & Hardy pictures were. Comedies driven by Chase were focused more around social situations, while those with Stan Laurel's brain behind them were more about the human condition, so the latter have stood the test of time better. Nonetheless, a 90-year-old Charley Chase film is more finely crafted and funnier than many modern comedies, and I'll take a quickie production like "Whispering Whoopee" over almost any modern sit-com I've sampled in recent years.

"Whispering Whoopee" is one of 17 short films starring Charlie Chase that are included in the two DVD set Charley Chase at Hal Roach: The Talkies 1930 - 1931. Many of them also feature or co-star Thelma Todd, James Finlayson, and other popular Roach regulars.

Picture Perfect Wednesday: Real or Photoshop?

Marilyn Monore: Real or Photoshop?
Leave your opinions in the Comments Section if you want to play!

No cheers for 'Cheers of the Crowd"

Cheers of the Crowd (1935)
Starring: Russell Hopton, Harry Holman, Irene Ware, Bradley Page, John Dilson, Wade Boteler, John Quillan, Roberta Gale, and Betty Blythe
Director: Vin Moore
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

When a publicity stunt staged to save an failing Broadway show succeeds beyond his wildest imagination, Lee Adams (Hopton) exposes his boss (Dilson) to blackmail by a sleazy business manager (Page); his reporter girlfriend (Ware) to career ruin; and an old friend (Holman) to possible jail-time.

"Cheers of the Crowd" has a nice set-up, unfolds in a steady fashion with complications and stakes-raisings happening pretty much when you'd expect them to, and then wraps itself up in a happy ending for all--except the bad guy. And yet, the film doesn't work, because this very well constructed frame has been draped with half-developed story elements that the scriptwriter appears to have been afraid of taking as far as they needed to go, or which go nowhere.

The perfect storm of these flaws is embodied in the film's rather unremarkable villain. There are some really interesting story elements hinted at in his actions and references made to other characters, but they aren't developed. Even his final fate at the end of the movie is half-baked and unsatisfactory (unlike the nice wrap-ups that every other character gets).

It's a shame the film has such a shoddy script, because the actors all give nice performances... and they are especially admirable since much of the cast were at the end of their careers. (It's always sad to realize that Irene Ware, who was done in not due to a lack of talent or dedication, but due to being part of failed projects. She doesn't have much to do in this film, but she brightens every scene she's in.)

"Cheers of the Crowd" can be streamed without additional charge by Amazon Prime members. I'm not sure if it's worth you time, though. It's a generally uplifting move story-wise, but the execution is sorely lacking.

Drink Wilkins Coffee... or Else!

Meet Willkins and Wontkins, the first celebrity Muppets to be born of the mind of Jim Henson.

In 1957, Henson was approached by the Wilkins Coffee Company, which operated in the Washington D.C. area, to create a series of television ads that could run along with station identifications. This meant Henson had 6-7 seconds to capture viewers' attention and market Wilkins Coffee to them. The path he took to accomplishing this is something that needs to be seen to be believed--but suffice to say that a recurring theme of the ads is: Strange things happen to those who don't drink Wilkins Coffee... strange, terrible things!. (I've embedded a video, via YouTube, that compiles several dozen of Henson's Wilkins Coffee commercials below, for your viewing pleasure and amazement.)



Once you've watched just a few of the Willkins & Wontkins commercials, you'll fine this bit of trivia amusing: Jim Henson didn't drink coffee... he didn't even like it.

The two Muppets featured in the ads were so popular with televion viewers that Wilkins marketed and sold toys based on them in the early 1960s. The campaign was so successful that Henson was able to take the concept and puppets to other local coffee companies across the United States and re-film the ads using their brands in place of Wilkins.

Jim Henson, assisted by his wife Jill, wrote and performed the Wilkins Coffee ads from 1957 through 1961. Wilkins Coffee was eventually acquired by Maxwell House and the brand was retired.

Brands and corporations come and go, but Willkins & Wontkins (and their boss Mr. Wilkins) will live forever in our hearts and imaginations (and possibly our nightmares). You can read more information about the insane Wilkins Coffee ads by Jim and Jane Henson here.

Read the Review, Watch the Movie: 'Seven Footprints to Satan'

The subject of the following review was released to movie theaters exactly 90 years ago today! (The Year of the Hot Toddy is truly a year of happy coincidences. When I initially chose this movie from among the many Thelma Todd-featuring films I'll be writing about during 2019, to watch at this point, I didn't realize I would have the opportunity to post the review to coincide with such an anniversary!)


Seven Footprints to Satan (aka "Satan's Stairwell") (1929)
Starring: Creighton Hale, Thelma Todd, Laska Winter,  Sheldon Lewis, Sojin Kamiyama, William V. Mong, Angelo Rossitto, Nora Cecil, Dewitt Jennings, Loretta Young, and Charles Gemora
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

While he is deep in the throes of a midlife crisis (Hale) and his girlfriend (Todd) are find themselves victims of a kidnapping during an elaborate heist at an exclusive  art auction... and then things go from bad to nightmarish.

"Seven Footsteps to Satan" is one of those films that's hard to review without spoiling it. I think it really works best if you come to it cold, not knowing really what to expect... because the impact of the film revealing what it's really about and begins to spiral into fantastic and creepy weirdness is all the greater. (You THINK you're watching a crime drama, but then....)

With that in mind, all I can say about the film is that in addition to an impressive, fast-moving and twist-laden storyline, the film sports creative camera work and editing (I especially like the way wipes are used), spectacularly elaborate sets, elegant costumes (mostly evening gowns and tuxes but the other outfits that show up are really neat), excellent monster make-up jobs, and some really fine acting from the principals in the cast.

I thought the performance by star Creighton Hale, who, once again, is a bespecled and unlikely hero, was excellent. Unlike the comedic character he played in "The Cat and the Canary", here he's quite competent and extremely brave at every turn. Actress Thelma Todd, also impresses, showing that she was as good a dramatic actress as she was a comedienne.

By the way, The film has a very large supporting cast (so large, in fact, that it sometimes feels like costar Todd is just another face in the  crowd), but among them we have Loretta Young standing out with a memorable performance in one of the film's most intense and frightening scenes, and an honest-to-god Asian actor playing a sinister Oriental Mystice, Sojin Kamiyama. (Maybe someone forgot to tell the Danish director that he should use white guys in make-up for the Asian characters.)

"Seven Footprints to Satan" was one of three silent thrillers/horror films directed by Benjamin Christensen for American studios, and until just a few years ago, it was believed to be lost. Now, however, several versions are available to watch online. None are of stellar quality, but given how many of these great old movies are gone forever (or hard to access because they've not yet been digitized and released online or on DVD), lovers of this sort of material are lucky we're getting this much.

If you like silent movies, especially ones of the more "trippy" variety, you need to watch "Seven Footprints to Satan". I highly recommend the version I've embedded below: It's the complete film, it's it was digitized from filmstock that was in relatively good shape, and it features an all-new, modern musical score that adds greatly to the experience.



By the way, if there's a film that could do with a remake, it's this one. It's got all KINDS of elements that would appeal to modern audiences, especially lovers of horror films. (Hell, I think this film may even be an ancient ancestor of the Torture Porn subgenre!)

The heroes and villains of "Seven Footprints to Satan"

'Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man' is a flawed film but still lots of fun

Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
Starring: Lou Costello, Bud Abbott, Arthur Franz, William Frawley, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Adele Jurgens, Sheldon Leonard, Paul Maxey, John Day, and Syd Saylor
Director: Charles Lamont
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Tommy (Franz), a professional boxer framed for murder by a mobster (Leonard), hides from the police by using an invisibility serum. He teams up with a pair of rookie private detectives (Abbott and Costello) in a desperate gambit to prove his innocence.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Abbott & Costello made a series of comedies that incorporated Universal's classic monsters from the 1930s, like Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, and, the Invisible Man. Universal had revived the properties in a series of mostly serious sequels, several of which were crossovers with the Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, who encountered Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster while searching for a cure to his condition. (Larry Talbot's character was itself a revival of a 1930s horror character, the Wolfman of London, but it been the success of the other Universal horror films, so it was "rebooted" rather than being subject to sequels.)

Unlike some of their monster comedies, "Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man" is established as a true sequel to previous films in the series with references to the origins of the invisibility serum. For viewers familiar with "The Invisible Man" (1930) or its sequels ("The Invisible Man Returns" and "The Invisible Agent"), this tie-in lends a sense of urgency as the longer a person has the invisibility serum in their bloodstream, the more likely it is that he or she will be driven insane by it.

Unfortunately, that sense of urgency never becomes what it should be, because Tommy, our invisible man wanting to prove his innocence comes across as a total jerk and more than just a little crazy from the moment he is first introduced. There is literally not a moment where he isn't rude and abrasive to everyone he interacts with. Even in scenes where he is interacting with his girlfriend and the scientist who are risking imprisonment themselves to help him--scenes where there was an opportunity to make him more sympathetic--he is so obnoxious and paranoid that one wonders why the girlfriend even wants to be around him. (There are also a couple of plotting issues--big, gaping holes in the story that leads one to wonder if a scene or two were cut... because it's hard to imagine that any script could be so sloppily written and no one noticed as the film was being made.)

Of course the drama of whether the wrongfully accused man gets cleared of murder before the serum drives him insane or not is basically just an excuse to get us from comedy bit to comedy bit. Most of the routines in the film revolve around characters reacting to seeing--or rather NOT seeing--the invisible man, or boxing gags. The former gets a little old, with the callbacks later in the film being more tiresome than funny (although the spin-off gag involving hypnotism and half the officers and support staff at a police precinct is one of the film's comedic highlights). The latter, however, keeps getting funnier and more involved as the film unfolds, with Costello cartoonishly throwing punches that are actually being landed by the invisible pro-boxer--in a bar fight, in a boxing gym, and ultimately in a the boxing ring. Costello gets to to the physical comedy and pratfalls that he so excelled at, and he does it brilliantly. Meanwhile, Abbott is also very funny as a fundamentally self-centered and greedy huckster who wold probably sell out his own mother for a buck... but he is a charming rogue and you can't help but like him even while thinking he's being a bastard.

While this isn't the strongest of Abbott & Costello's efforts, it has enough going for it that I am giving it a very high Six rating. It might have been a low Seven if the filmmakers hadn't decided to end it on gag that's nonsensical and completely illogical and out-of-step with the rest of the movie. While the supposedly romantic lead being an unlikely jerk hurt the film, it's final 30 or so seconds nearly torpedoed it the material is so bad.