The Mindreader (1933) Picspam!

Warren William plays a sideshow mystic who falls in love, hits the big time and then loses it all. Good lordy, I love this movie. This is probably my favorite Warren William film so far. I could gush about William's powerful combination of roguish charm and villainous behavior, his surprisingly solid acting which leaves me feeling simultaneously attracted and repulsed. But I'll let the pictures do the talking. Just click on the pics to see the larger versions, people.

Five words to make any fan of pre-code movies swoon: Warren William in a turban.

"I've got a headache this big!"


Mick LaSalle finally realizes his dream of being on screen with Warren William.


Who's afraid of the big bad Warren?


When The Great Chandra puts his hand on his heart to show sincerity, run for cover.


Constance Cummings gives in to Chandra's charms.


Married life is the pits.


Chandra goes legit selling backscrubbers.


A fancy address, a nicer turban and our hero is ready to relieve rich patrons of their spare cash.

A blackmail scheme gone wrong ends in gunplay and Chandra flees the country, leaving the missus holding the bag. Here, he is performing in Mexico while drunk-out-of-his-mind. I think I saw this guy on a cruise ship once.


Thanks to this project, I've created a new shortcut filter for Photoshop: Warren William Scruff-- the balance of contrast and gray required to show him at his disheveled best.

Chandra begs forgiveness from his wife before turning himself in to the cops.

Like many of the best movies of this era, The Mindreader walks a thin line between farce and tragedy. Something about the times makes this combination work well.

I love this kiss. She's totally giving him crows feet.


Chandra says goodbye to his old pal Mick before heading off to jail.

Tween Angst: Kathleen (1941)

I admit it. I really like Shirley Temple movies of the 1940s. They are safe. They are predictable. They are the antithesis of the kinds of movies I normally like (pre-code or screwball with lots of subtext and edge). So sue me. I'm not consistent and I don't bloody care.

I realized a couple of things while thoroughly enjoying this slight little movie. One: Shirley Temple was a really good actress. You just don't notice her acting. Most of the time she's called on to be an adorable, precocious tween which must not have been much of a stretch. In a few scenes she may be required to do dramatic acting, as well, and she handles it like a pro. The trickiest thing she does though is to appear slightly stupider than she really was. Nothing is so difficult as playing dumb in a convincing way.

Two: many of the 1940s reproduction outfits sold to us by Stop Staring and its ilk and often modeled by women with many tattoos, are actually based on outfits that Shirley Temple wore when she was 12. If you find this fact disturbing, then you are not alone.

While Herbert Marshal was the reason I watched this movie in the first place, his performance is fairly forgettable. I did like the fact that the majority of his lines in the first 40 minutes were mostly monosyllabic grunts. "Hmmm. What? Oh hello there. Hmmm. Well. Humpf." He disappears for another 20 minutes or so, and, when he resurfaces, he is wearing a hilariously ugly plaid jacket and bow tie that I was unable to screencap because my computer is acting up. Dang. Well, anyway those are the HM highlights for Kathleen, such as they are.
















Lorraine Day gives a solid performance as Temple's only-in-the-movies, live-in psychiatrist. Day is likable, caring, and plucky, and she makes the perfect foil for Gail Patrick's vamping. Since Patrick was born to play the wicked stepmother type, it's great to see her excelling at it here. Herbert Marshall is torn between the two and reacts by grunting. Go, Herbert. You grunted your way into my heart in Riptide. There's no reason you should stop now!

The Story of Esther Costello

It's wonderfully ironic that a movie whose villains are sleazy publicity hounds had such a ridiculously trashy publicity campaign. Posters and trailers for the film bore the words, "The management of this theater sincerely believes that "The Story of Esther Costello" will not offend any emotionally mature person of either sex. We recommend it for our adult patrons and more-informed teenagers." (Well that rules out the Nipper, surely!) And the geniuses in marketing didn't stop there. About half-way through the trailer, we get this:


I was planning to discuss this film without spoilers but when the trailer pretty much gives the whole story away, I don't feel such discretion is necessary. Please don't reveal what happens in my post. Oh, wait, I want you to so that you'll bring a crowd of more-informed teenagers to my blog.

The its first hour, this film is a pretty standard, well-acted melodrama, but about halfway through, the script jumps into Lake Whatisthiscrazyshit and doesn't come up for air till the last frame. Joan Crawford plays a rich American woman, Margaret Landi, "permanently separated" from her cheating husband, who goes to Ireland to revisit her youth. Her local priest foists a charity project on her--a deaf, blind, mute girl named Esther Costello (Heather Sears). At first, Margaret resists, but she is moved by Esther's plight and takes the girl to London to see specialists. The doctors reveal that there's nothing wrong with Esther's eyes and ears: her condition was caused by an emotional trauma she suffered in an accident. A bit of a stretch, I'd say, but we aren't in Magnificent Obsession territory--yet.

A series of montages show Esther in America making slow progress at a special school. In one scene, Esther throws a tantrum and Margaret smacks her one. (Take care if you play this movie as a drinking game. Chugging every time Joan Crawford smacks someone will likely result in a blackout). After that, Esther decides she really does know her sign language after all. She becomes a superstar on the deaf-mute inspirational lecture circuit of Catholic schools in Boston. Like an indie band out on tour for the first time, she slowly builds up buzz until she draws the attention of a newspaper reporter, Harry Grant (Lee Patterson). After Harry writes an article calling Margaret a saint, Esther starts touring the country, and a foundation is created in her name. One day, 45 minutes into the movie, the foundation gets a check from Margaret's husband, Carlo (Rossano Brazzi), heretofore not seen in the film. Margaret decides to look Carlo up and the pair are reunited.

The next morning, we see Carlo and Margaret in bed together. Actually, it's two twin beds pushed fairly close together, because, after all, there is still a Production Code to be looked after. Emotional maturity was required to view the moment when Carlo, naked to the waist, is introduced to the young lady who will be his adopted daughter. She's blind, of course, but we're not. I confess I didn't make it through this awkward scene without some Beavis-and-Butthead-style giggling.

Carlo brings in a sleazy publicity agent to manage Esther's fundraising tour. They put together creepy, fascistic rallies in sports stadiums around the country, and begin skimming from the foundation. Nice. As if Carlo weren't enough of a dirt bag, he also begins to indulge inappropriate feelings for Esther. Meanwhile, she has a nice, innocent romance with the young reporter. They don't so much kiss as bump their faces together affectionately.

The story descends into familiar Mildred Pierce territory, as Carlo becomes jealous of the face bumping guy and Margaret increasingly jealous of Carlo. Here's where the crazy comes in. Margaret busts him deliberately under-reporting the take at a fundraising rally, and she does nothing. A few days later, she catches him watching Esther undress. Does she dump him immediately? No, she smacks Esther for forgetting to close her curtains, plans to send her away to college and gives Carlo no choice but to end the tour. Wait a sec! This is a guy you've already left once for cheating on you and you don't see these big red flags waving around! Nope.

Meanwhile, Harry the reporter starts to dig into the financial management of the foundation and doesn't like what he sees. His boss plans to print his story to coincide with Esther's big rally in Nuremberg-- I mean London.

While in London, Margaret has to go to Brighton to cancel an upcoming date on the tour. Carlo is supposed to go to Glasgow, but he decides to stay behind, realizing that this might be his last chance to get Esther alone. He walks around London trying to look evil but seems more like a trench coat advertisement. He goes back to the palatial rented digs, finds Esther asleep and rapes her. The scene isn't exactly graphic, but clever cutting away to a storm blowing in Esther's French doors leaves little doubt about what happens.

The next day, Esther wakes up--distraught about the assault but miraculously able to see and hear again. This is the biggest WTF moment in the whole shootin' match. Apparently, movie blind-deaf-muteness is cured much like movie amnesia--one trauma causes the condition, a second can magically fix everything. Hooray!

Harry arrives and confronts Margaret about the financial indiscretions . Having just found one of Carlo's cufflinks in Esther's bed, she gives Harry permission to take Esther away. They both find out that Esther is magically cured. Oh, that's gonna look good in the papers.

Margaret grabs a gun. Finally, I thought, she sees some sense. She's going to shoot her dirtbag husband. But no: she picks him up at the airport, shows him the cufflink, bundles him iton the car and then drives into oncoming traffic, killing them both. I guess that's easier than divorcing an Italian national in the 1950s.

Yo, baby have you heard? Sex with me cures blind-deaf-muteness.

The management of this blog recommends this campy, strange melodrama for those with a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

Dangerous (1935)

At age 27 Bette Davis won an Oscar for playing a burnt-out, drunken, embittered, middle-aged actress, Joyce Heath in this film. She is magnificent as a character so full of nervous energy that even her besotted lover (Franchot Tone) recognizes that she is only bearable if she can work off her neuroses on stage. To her fans, this character is recognizable as Davis' persona, but it's important to note that in 1935 she hadn't done anything like this before. In her must-see performance Davis creates a person who is both self-centered and vulnerable, often within the same sentence.

As glorious as she is, I can't help wishing she'd made this movie in 1948. Young Davis manages to seem world weary enough, but never the frump other characters describe. Shesprings back to youthful perfection too quickly for us to believe she has weather years of hard drinking. Imagine the older Davis in the full flower of her talent inhabiting such a juicy, glorious role. She would have drop-kicked that mofo into eternity. And what if this movie had been made just 18 months earlier, in the pre-code era? Gone would be the insipid, unconvincing ending, in which marital vows are renewed with clockwork precision.

Des,pite these failings, Dangerous is still a great movie. Tone is at his best. I've always liked Franchot Tone. If there were a Tone fan club, I'd probably join it. (And I fully expect to hear of one, as soon as I post this!) Oh, it's true he played all the same sort of wealthy gadabout roles that Roberts Montgomery and Taylor did so well, but Tone brought something unique to them. Perhaps it was that he was a wealthy gadabout in real life. He was, as Mike Connor says of C. K. Dexter Haven, "born to the purple, but still a very nice guy." In Dangerous, he plays an up-and-coming young architect who must choose between his lovely, funny, rich and well-connected fiancee and Davis' washed-up, probably bi-polar, certainly manipulative actress. This seems to be a no-brainer, of course, until Tone glimpses Davis in romantic lighting, wearing his old clothes. She does more for wearing a rope as a belt than even Ellie May Clampit. In this scene Davis has a devilish, nay Satanic, smile that takes half a dozen frames to develop. I've done my best with the screencaps but I fear I've failed. Davis is just one of those stars whom still pictures can never quite capture. Enjoy.

Mixing movies and cocktails

A friend of mine recently sent me an article from the NY Times about pairing DVDs with drinks I liked the concept and the fact that the author mentioned one of my favorite obscure British films, I Know Where I'm Going!I liked the concept, but I felt, as a classic movie buff and a cocktail maker/drinker, I had something to add. So I'm stealin' his meme, breakin' out my cocktail shaker (they don't call me the "nipper" fo' nothin'), and droppin' my "g"s all over the place.

The Thin Man/martini: How can you talk about movies and booze and not make The Thin Man the first stop in your cinematic bar crawl? This is a movie in which the main characters start drinking when they get out of bed in the morning and don't stop till the case is solved several days later. They get a little tipsy, but no one gets falling-down-drunk. Yes, I realize it's fantasy but it’s a fantasy with enough reality in it to make it a very popular escapist film. Even today, this movie can be relied on to take away all but the deepest, funkiest of blues. Perhaps it’s their old-school alcohol metabolism that keeps them afloat, but I think it’s the fact that the drinks Nick and Nora Charles imbibe are really much smaller than we are used to. It's a case of the dreadful portion-size inflation that has taken over American dining and drinking. The glasses Nick and Nora used were about a third the size of the typical "martini" glass nowadays. In one scene, Myrna Loy orders three martinis and drinks them one after another. If she were to do that with a contemporary martini (which is often not a cocktail at all but just a big, cold glass of neat gin or vodka) she would spend the second half of the film having her stomach pumped. The martini she drank in 1934 would have contained quite a bit of melted ice, vermouth and bitters, as well as a large, alcohol-displacing garnish, like olives or a lemon twist.

Nick and Nora Charles have the Best Christmas ever: booze, toy guns and a new fur coat.

Martini: Fill a shaker half full of cracked ice. I usually crack the ice in the palm of my hand with a large, heavy spoon. Some find this a bit scary, though, so an alternate method is to place ice in a plastic ziploc bag and whack it against the counter top until the ice is broken. If the ice is too small it will melt and make your drink too weak; if it is too big it won’t melt enough. Trust me: it needs to be cracked. Perfecting this technique will not only stand you in good stead not only for martinis but for most other cocktails.For each cocktail, place one room-temperature jigger of gin, a large tablespoon of room-temperature vermouth and a dash of orange bitters into the shaker. Shake or stir, whichever you prefer, Mr. Bond, and strain into small martini glasses. (Ebay is a great source of vintage cocktail glasses.)

The Public Enemy/Salty Dog You have to have at least one movie about bootleggers, and this is probably the most famous. Based on a novel named "Blood and Beer," the film appeared in 1931 and made James Cagney a star. In the movie’s most famous scene, of course, Cagney smashes a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face. That's why the drink that goes best with this movie is the delicious, refreshing "Salty Dog," whose main ingredient is grapefruit juice.

Salty Dog: Fill a tall, Tom Collins glass about half full with ice and add five ounces of grapefruit juice. This drink is mind-blowingly good with fresh-squeezed juice. Add a jigger of gin (bathtub quality is fine, since the juice covers up the flavor anyway) and a pinch of salt. Stir and serve. For a more elegant presentation, you could put the juice and gin in a shaker and use a cocktail glass whose rim has been salted. Technically, a Salty Dog is a mixed drink, as it only contains one kind of alcohol. A drink becomes a cocktail when it contains two or more spirits. Yeah, I know, you wanna smash a grapefruit in my face when I say pedantic stuff like that.

Philadelphia Story/champagne cocktail/Eye-opener: Lots of old movies celebrate champagne, but perhaps none with such devotion as Philadelphia Story. This movie really goes out of its way to make sure that you know just how drunk the main characters get on the stuff. But what really sells it to me as a necessity for a movie/booze post, is its hangover scenes. Everyone who drinks in the film feels the effects the next day, to a comic degree. Was Cary Grant ever more welcome in a movie than when he dashes in fresh as a daisy (he's a recovering alcoholic who doesn't get plastered with the others) and volunteers to make everyone an "Eye-opener that will pop the pennies off the eyelids of dead Irishmen"?

Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) manages to drink Uncle Willie under the table and then sobers up quickly to do some secretarial work for her "wandering parakeet" boyfriend. I've often rooted for Dexter and Liz to hook up, but that's just because I identify with her.

Champagne cocktail: Put a sugar cube at the bottom of a tall champagne flute. Soak the cube in bitters. Angustura is the classic and most available, but any bitters will do. I like orange bitters because the result has the flavor of a mimosa without watering down the champagne with juice. Fill the glass with champagne and enjoy. This works best with a mid-priced sparkling wine, I think. If you get real champagne at $40-plus a bottle, it's sort of a waste to put sugar in it.

Eye opener: If you have too many champagne cocktails while watching Philly Story (as is easy to do), you can enjoy this classic hangover cure. Fill a shaker half full with ice (if you are hung over, you may not want to fuss with cracking the ice). For each cocktail, add a jigger of white rum, a dash of Pernod, a dash of creme de cacao, a teaspoon of finely ground sugar and an egg yolk. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. This drink was originally made with absinthe, which has recently become available again. If you happen to have it in your bar, use it in place of Pernod. Try not to ride in any carts with Dinah and you should be fine.

Manhattan/Manhattan: A few years ago, my husband and I were in Manhattan and ducked into a fancy hotel for drinks. We ordered,--what else? A Manhattan. The bartender made the drink with rye whiskey and it completely changed my life. Bourbon Manhattans, which are more common, are sweeter and heavier. They will make you feel as if you are sleepwalking until you wake up the next day with a terrible headache. Rye Manhattans have a complex character, like the town after which they are named. I feel that Woody Allen's masterpiece Manhattan best reflects the warmth and unexpected edge of this cocktail. It's one beautiful movie, to boot.

Manhattan: Fill a shaker half full with cracked ice. For each cocktail,add a jigger of rye whiskey, a large tablespoon of sweet vermouth, and a dash of angustura bitters. Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail, garnishing with a cherry.

Platinum Blonde /White Lady: This Frank Capra comedy tells the story of a hard-boiled reporter (Robert Williams) who marries a society dame (Jean Harlow) but falls for his gal Friday (Loretta Young). Toward the end of the movie the reporter’s pals show up at his house, late at night, drunk. He continues to entertain them and winds up on a bender that lasts for days. When he sobers up, Harlow throws him out, and he moves in with Loretta Young. They live happily ever after, thanks to the non-enforcement of the Production Code. Since Platinum Blonde was made toward the end of Prohibition, it seemed appropriate to choose a gin-based cocktail, whose other components could easily hide the taste of bootleg hooch. The White Lady with it sweet and sour flavors fills the bill.

White Lady:

Fill a cocktail shaker half full with cracked ice. For each cocktail, add a jigger of gin, half a jigger of Cointreau or triple sec and a generous tablespoon of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Serve in a chilled cocktail glass with a sugared rim and garnish with a lemon slice. This is one of my favorite drinks, and I owe my knowledge of it to my mother-in-law, who once visited us in Minnesota in March, bless her soul.

Roman Holiday/Campari shakerato: Roman Holiday isn't really a boozy movie, but, as this piece progresses, I find myself thinking of my favorite cocktails, first, and then trying to come up with movies to match. When I think of Campari shakerato, I think of sunshine and walking around as a tourist, gasping for a drink. Roman Holiday celebrates both those things. Also, Campari shakerato isn't as strong as other drinks on this list, so you can enjoy a couple and still go dancing on that barge in the river later.

The only drinky scene in Roman Holiday. It looks like something stronger than shakerato!

Campari shakerato: For each cocktail, squeeze the juice of one orange (about four ounces) into a shaker with ice (no need to crack it). Add a jigger of Campari, shake and strain into a large, chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange slice.

Cinema OCD Podcast

Cinema OCD Podcast

Episode two is up and archived. Cliff and I discussed Warren William and his films Upperworld, The Match King, Three on a Match and The Mind Reader. Thirty minutes of Warren William goodness and more of the boy bursting in demanding to tell me stuff about robots. Good times.

Podcast? Well sort of

Such as it, the first episode of my CinemaOCD Podcast is now available. It's a bit rough, owing to interruptions from my son, and the fact that I had to end early when I lost a page of my script! It ends rather abruptly with no notion that this podcast might continue as regular entity. I do plan to do one next week, with Cliff from Warren William blog as my guest/co-host. Hopefully I'll manage a bit better when I'm not just yammering to myself.

Tune in next week at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time for Episode 2.