This is part of the CMBA Fall Blogathon: Trains, Planes and Automobiles. Check out all entries!
The star of the 1934 film "The Silver Streak" isn't first-billed Sally Blane, or even male lead Charles Starrett.
It's the future.
Specifically, it's the future in the form of the Pioneer Zephyr, a streamlined diesel train here called the Silver Streak. But incidental roles in the movie are played by the Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair; by Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam), at that point the nation's largest construction project; and even by the recent development of the iron lung.
All these projects sent the same message to depression-weary America -- that prosperity was connected to innovative engineering and improved infrastructure.
As a film, "The Silver Streak" sends a much simpler message -- work hard, be handsome, develop a streamlined train, and you end up winning Loretta Young's sister. But it's a fast-moving B movie that's very much a product of its time, with lots of cool location footage of the Zephyr, the Chicago World's Fair and Boulder Dam (with real workers in bit parts).
We begin in the offices of the Stuffy Old White Guy Railroad, run by B.J. Dexter (William Farnum). Passenger revenues are off, and Dexter's assistant Allan (Hardie Albright), who is also his son, supports a plan for a new, more efficient streamlined train developed by lantern-jawed Tom Caldwell (Starrett). Caldwell pitches his idea to a skeptical board of directors:
Caldwell is thrown out by the seat of his blueprints, but he has another booster -- Dexter's daughter, Ruth (Blane, Young's real-life sister). She approaches a locomotive manufacturer on Tom's behalf, and before you can say "Amtrak," the Silver Streak is ready for its maiden run.
The elder Dexter and Ruth are on board, but things don't go as planned -- there's an engineering glitch:
(Dig that 1934 streamlined Chrysler Airflow on the road, by the way.)
Naturally, instead of spending a little more time figuring what's wrong with the Silver Streak, the decision is made to scrap the whole project and put in on display at the fair in Chicago. Tom tells off Dexter, and he and Ruth break up.
A few weeks later, Tom has figured out the engineering problem, but the railroad management would prefer to keep the train as the world's largest paperweight.
Meanwhile, Allan Dexter is leaving the family railroad because of his father's refusal to be innovative. This leads to a nice scene where the elder Dexter puffs his stogie like a locomotive and reminisces about trains of the past:
Allan Dexter goes to work at the dam in Nevada. Turns out that the men on the project are coming down with infantile paralysis, and no sooner does Allan get there than he passes out. Ruth has come to see him, but that's not enough -- he needs an iron lung immediately. Father Dexter is beside himself -- how to get an iron lung cross country toot suite? If only there was some sort of really fast train to take it!
The last third of "The Silver Streak" is all about the 100 mile-an-hour overnight race from Chicago to Las Vegas. Edgar Kennedy, God love him, steps in as an old school co-engineer and gives us several good examples of his burn takes in between thrill sequences like this:
There are lots of complications along the way, including close calls with oncoming trains, tricky curves and guys who almost don't get their handcar off the track fast enough. On board, meanwhile, Tom has to deal with hysterical passengers, an escaping murderer and, worst of all, Arthur Lake as comedy relief.
To the surprise of no one in the civilized world whatsoever, the Silver Streak makes it to Vegas, the train's future is assured, and Ruth and Tom make up.
In real life, by the way, the Pioneer Zephyr made headlines in May 1934, when it traveled from Denver to Chicago in about 13 hours, almost breaking the land speed record for that time -- and the engineer happily endorsed Camel cigarettes after his run.
Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Eddie Quillan (1907-1990) was certainly one of them.
He began in vaudeville as part of a family act called "A Little Bit of Everything," which included his parents, his sister and two brothers. He made his film debut as a teenager in 1922, but didn't really appear in movies regularly until the mid-1920s, in a series of shorts shot at Keystone, playing opposite female comics such as Alice Day. He signed a contract with Pathe in the late 1920s and stuck around when the studio was absorbed by RKO.
If you remember Quillan at all, it's probably because of his open face and boyish manner that would mark his performances even into his 70s, when he was playing small roles on TV shows like "Baretta" and "Little House on the Prairie."
In the 1931 film "Sweepstakes," Quillan plays Buddy Doyle, a successful jockey known as the "Whoop-De-Doo Kid" because that's what he says into his horse's ear to drive him down the homestretch.
Buddy lives at Mother Clancy's boarding house with all the other jockeys and his lifelong friend Sleepy (James Gleason), a trainer who handles Buddy's mounts. When the film opens, Buddy has just won another race and heads home to a surprise dinner for his 21st birthday:
Buddy is now a man, and despite Sleepy's warnings, the siren call of a nearby roadhouse and its leading attraction, singer Babe Ellis (Marion Nixon), is too much to resist. He's shy around the ladies -- "I never tried to whoop-de-doo in a girl's ear," he says -- but he gets the hang of it.
Buddy's late nights with Babe lead to problems with Sleepy, so Buddy gets hired by the shifty owner of the nightclub to ride his horses instead. This means that Buddy ends up riding in a race against his old boss and buddy, Sleepy.
Will Buddy win? Or will he sidle up to Sleepy's horse in the homestretch and whisper "whoop-de-doo" into his ear, causing the horse to win and Buddy's career to go down the crapper?
Maybe this montage will answer that question:
Even the trains are booing him! That's cold.
Buddy can't get a mount anywhere, so he ends up as a singing waiter in Tijuana. When he does a song, we get some idea of what Quillan might have been like on a vaudeville stage:
Once Sleepy and Buddy reunite, it's only a matter of time before he's riding again, and Babe is waiting in the wings.
Boooooo!
The 1934 film "Gridiron Flash" was released after the production code went into effect, so don't expect any spicy humor.
In this one, Quillan is Tommy "Cherub" Burke, a small-time hood who ends up in stir, where he becomes the star of the prison football team.
A fellow named Smith (Grant Mitchell) arranges for Tommy's release and recruits him to play for Belford College. But, even though his roommate is Grady Sutton, Tommy has a hard time fitting in. He's pugnacious and hotheaded, and his playing style is considered too rough. He's ready to leave, but the coach talks a willing co-ed named Jane (Betty Furness) into faking an interest in Tommy, and he stays.
So there's a romantic subplot as well as hard-charging football action. But the most interesting aspect of "Gridiron Flash," to me at least, is the supporting cast, which includes stalwarts like Sutton, Margaret Dumont and Edgar Kennedy, who plays Jane's dad, the campus cop. When Tommy and the cop first meet, Tommy's natural antipathy to the law comes through:
When Tommy attends a party at Jane's house, Quillan's vaudeville training comes through again when he's forced to dance as part of an initiation:
Meanwhile, Smith is not what he seems -- he wants Tommy to help him rob a wealthy matron (Dumont) and throw the big game. Tommy also finds out that Jane's interest in him was a fake, at least in the beginning. So he leaves town and leaves Belford without its star quarterback. Will he return in time to save the school's football honor? Will Jane come back? Will Grady Sutton's voice change?
Personally, I'm not as interested in the plot as I am in scenes like this, between Edgar Kennedy and Arthur Housman, who specialized in playing drunks -- in this case, a drunk who keeps Kennedy from seeing the football game. This little moment is right out of a two-reeler, and that's not a bad thing at all:
From the mid-1930s on, Quillan's career consisted mostly of small roles in big movies ("Mutiny on the Bounty," "Young Mr. Lincoln," "The Grapes of Wrath") and big roles in small movies ("The Mandarin Mystery," "Sensation Hunters"). He also appeared in a series of shorts at Columbia Pictures with Wally Vernon, including 1948's "Nobody's Home," seen here in two parts. By then, Quillan was in his late 30s, but he could still take a pratfall:
In the 1970s and '80s, Quillan made the acquaintance of Michael Landon and Robert Blake. This led to bit roles on Landon's "Little House and the Prairie" and "Highway to Heaven," and on Blake's "Baretta" and "Hell Town." Both Landon and Blake were known for their massive egos as much as their talents, but it's kind of cool that they noticed and appreciated Quillan's history and ability.
Quillan's last acting credit was a 1987 episode of "Matlock," and he passed away a couple of years later.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, if the subject of a mixed-race relationship came up, my parents had a standard response:
"I feel sorry for the children."
Why? I would ask.
"Because they won't be accepted by whites or blacks."
Who says?
"Society."
What is society?
"People."
People? People like us?
"Yes."
Then why can't we change that? I would wonder. But it didn't seem like something my parents wanted to go into. And truthfully, the conversation didn't come up very often. But I watch a movie like "Imitation of Life" today -- either the 1934 or 1959 version -- and I remember that frustratingly circular piece of ill-logic: Nothing can be done because nothing can be done.
Fannie Hurst wrote "Imitation of Life" after taking a trip or two with African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who briefly worked as Hurst's secretary, and one assumes that what Hurst saw on those trips, as well as their relationship, influenced her writing. Racism still exists in America to a frightening degree in 2013, so one can only imagine what it was like to travel as an educated African-American woman seventy years ago.
To audiences, "Imitation of Life" can be polarizing. Is the story a soapy, oversimplified look at race, played out by a
cardboard Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima? Or is it a heartbreaking story
of mother love and misplaced pride?
The story still fascinates people. I've written a syndicated TV and movie newspaper column for decades, and for years the movie I got the most questions
about was "Imitation of Life," mostly from women who saw the 1959
version as teenagers and who still had vivid memories of it.
Personally, I think watching the 1959 version of "Imitation of Life" is like drowning in satin. Ross Hunter's production is ultra-plush, all Technicolor and CinemaScope and Lana Turner's wardrobe. The movie certainly has its fans, and if you are one of them you will want to check out "Born to Be Hurt" by Sam Staggs. It's a history of/meditation on "Imitation of Life" that features slightly fawning interviews with cast and crew of the 1959 film, including Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner. One critic calls it "gloriously digressive," and it is that, no doubt.
Although neither film is totally faithful to Hurst's book, the 1934 film seems to come closer, and it's the one I prefer.
We open in the home of Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), a struggling widow who's juggling single motherhood with selling maple syrup door to door.
The paths of Bea and Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) cross when Delilah and her daughter Peola come to the house by mistake. We first see Delilah through a barrier -- Bea's screen door.
But she and Bea connect, and Delilah is so desperate for a job that she talks Bea into to hiring her in exchange for only room and board for her and her daughter. Peola and Bea's daughter Jessie become friends and Bea's household worries are solved.
When the two girls start to school, Peola's life choice becomes heartbreakingly clear-cut -- pass as white by denying your mother and your heritage, or live a life as someone who is Lesser.
"Folks just don't want Peola," Delilah tells Bea. "Her pappy was a very, very light colored man."
The fortunes of Bea and Delilah change when Bea combines the syrup she sells with Delilah's unique pancake recipe. They open a restaurant on the boardwalk, and it's successful, but customer Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks! Yay!) gives Bea a million-dollar idea -- package the pancake mix and sell it in stores.
The same day, during a rainstorm, Delilah takes a raincoat and galoshes to Peola at school. The teacher looks at Delilah quizzically as she asks to see her daughter and Peola hides behind a book. Then a murmur goes through the classroom -- Peola is black! Delilah approaches the teacher and says a line filled with double meaning.
Delilah: Teacher, has she been passing?
Teacher: Passing? Yes.
Delilah runs home in tears, and tells her mother, "I don't want to be black! I don't want to be black!" But Delilah chooses to accept society's verdict even if Peola doesn't. And that shapes her vision of what kind of life Peola will have. For instance, when Bea and Delilah fantasize about making a fortune, each of them have very different dreams for their children:
Bea: I could send Jessie away to college.
Delilah: And Peola -- she wouldn't have to do housework for nobody.
Elmer becomes the company's business manager. Delilah is given a 20 percent share of the company, and she quickly becomes very well off. But she won't leave Bea and Jessie. When Delilah builds a Manhattan mansion, Delilah lives in very nice downstairs quarters -- but when there's a party upstairs, it's kind of an unspoken rule that she and Peola aren't invited. But hey! They can stand outside and listen to the music. ("That orchestra's pretty good for a bunch of white boys," Delilah says.)
Bea's daughter Jessie (played as a young adult by Rochelle Hudson) attends an exclusive school and lives a life of parties and rich beaus. How much must it kill Peola (played as an adult by Fredi Washington) to see Jessie, someone whose privileges
she could also have except for the fact that her mother is black?
Around this time, there's a much less interesting plot element -- the romance between Bea and ichthyologist Stephen Archer (Warren William). There's a lot of labored humor about what an ichthyologist is -- including much laughter at Delilah as she struggles with the term. Then Jessie gets a crush on Stephen. Bea doesn't want to hurt the mother-daughter relationship, so she and Stephen part -- temporarily, at least. But compared to the story of Delilah and Peola it's pretty weak tea.
To please her mother, Peola attends an African-American college in Virginia, but when she drops out and runs away to work in a restaurant where she can pass as white, Bea and Delilah "rescue" her and bring her home.
Delilah: What's my baby want?
Peola: I want to be white, like I look.
Delilah: Peola!
Peola: Look at me. Am I not white? Isn't that a white girl?
Delilah tells her it's the Lord's work -- "He made you black, honey. Don't be tellin' him his business. Accept it. Do that for your mammy."
But Peola leaves for good, with instructions to her mother to ignore her if she sees her on the street. Delilah's health declines, and on her deathbed she asks to see a framed photo of her daughter. Then she says another nice line of dialogue bursting with double meaning:
Delilah (looking at photo): They never done her justice.
Then Delilah gets her only wish -- an elaborate, ornate funeral.
Delilah becomes a kind of Servant Emeritus to Bea, still talking dialect, calling her "Miss Bea" and offering to rub her feet after a hard day even though they're wealthy business partners. But through her devotion to and heartbreak over Peola, Delilah remains easily the most well-rounded role Louise Beavers ever played. Delilah still has her stereotyped side, but you can't help but remember the line attributed to African-American actress Hattie McDaniel: "I'd rather play a maid than be one."
As I watch "Imitation of Life" 70 years after its initial release, it still has the power to infuriate me. I always try to write about movies as I find them, not as I think they should be, and for better or worse "Imitation of Life" reflects relations between the races as they were in the 1930s -- and the next few decades, for that matter.
Today, as much as some people would like to deny it, we live in a more diverse age. Our sex symbols, our athletes and our heroes -- even our president -- all reflect that diversity. Like many other families, ours includes mixed-race members -- loved ones who are accepted as equals without question. To my kids, they're simply cousins. And my children will never hear or see me or my wife, or anyone else in our family, distance ourselves from them through pity.
Here are complete credits for "Imitation of Life" and a trailer for segregated audiences:
For all of his other formidable talents, playfulness did not come easily to Paul Muni.
You can tell that by watching him in the 1934 film "Hi, Nellie!" He delivers a light touch when the script calls for it, but he's more comfortable during his character's darker moments, where he upends a desk in anger or does some heavy drinking at a bar.
"Hi, Nellie!" is probably the closest Muni came to making a comedy, and probably the closest he came to making a pure genre picture. It's a by-the-book newspaper movie, the kind that Warner Bros. cranked out in the 1930s and '40s like Hershey made chocolate bars.
True, it is directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who guided Muni through the classic "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang," and true, it's got a solid cast of Warner regulars like Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks,Robert Barrat and Edward Ellis; but "Hi, Nellie!" is only average at best. The wisecracking, fast-thinking newspaperman was the province of actors like Lee Tracy ("Advice to the Lovelorn," "Blessed Event"), Pat O'Brien ("The Final Edition," "The Front Page") and Edward G. Robinson ("Five Star Final"). Muni's performance is like the movie itself -- good enough, but nothing distinctive about it.
Muni plays Samuel "Brad" Bradshaw, the managing editor of the New York Times-Star. He is the kind of guy who wears his hat in the newsroom and always has something tobacco-related in his mouth (pipe, cigar, cigarette -- I don't think he pinched snuff, but he might have snuck some in).
Brad is an all-right guy but tough when it counts, see? For instance, here's how he deals with a new reporter, straight from college and kind of smug (he doesn't even wear a hat in the newsroom), who muffs a story:
When a local bank is hit by an embezzlement and the bank president disappears, every newspaper in town connects the two events and accuses the president of pilferage. But not Brad -- he knows the guy and can't believe he would do something like that. The pompous publisher (Berton Churchill) explodes because Brad won't plaster the paper with hysterical headlines and fires him.
But Brad has an iron-clad, fireproof contract. So the publisher gives him the most humiliating job possible -- to assume the identity of Nellie Nelson, the paper's advice columnist. This comes as a great joke to the current Nellie, reporter Gerry Crayle (Farrell), and to everyone else in the newsroom:
Crayle was given the lonely hearts assignment as punishment for blowing a story, but Brad's move lets her back into the city room. (A romantic relationship between the two is hinted at, but not really demonstrated -- maybe Muni remembers how Farrell turned him in to the cops in "Fugitive.")
Brad has to cede control of the paper to his rival, Dawes (Douglas Dumbrille), and the transition to Nellie is tough for him. After a few months of frustrating work on the job he explodes and leaves the office in a huff. Gerry follows him to a bar, where she lets him have it:
From then on, Brad gets wise to himself and starts writing the column like he means it. But when it soars in popularity, he risks becoming Nellie permanently. Then an opportunity arises -- a heartthrob client has a connection to the missing bank president, and Brad and reporter Shammy (Sparks) do some investigating at a shady nightclub. This seems like a good time to introduce a Ned Sparks clip:
Anyway, Brad and Shammy uncover that the bank president was murdered and then framed for the bank embezzlement. Their scoop releases the city from control of a political machine and Brad from the clutches of the advice column, and the evil rival Dawes looms as the next Nellie.
Here are the complete credits for "Hi, Nellie!" and a trailer:
Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Joseph Cawthorn (1868-1949) was certainly one of them.
To get an idea of the wide range of roles he played, just look at the character names: Dourfuss, Kleber, Selzer, Schlemmer, Krausemeyer, Schmidt, Kruger,
Uppmann, Brokman, Speigal, Schneider, Barfuss, Schultz, Schultz and
Schultz.
All right, so he's not Daniel Day-Lewis.
Nonetheless, Cawthorn had one particular character type down cold -- the cranky-but-harmless, usually wealthy, Dutch-German businessman who said things like "You vill pay me der seventy dollahs or I vill know der reason vy!"
He vas good at it.
Cawthorn started on the stage as a child, and in a 1908 Broadway show he supposedly created an animal called the whiffenpoof while ad libbing. Some fellows from Yale were in the audience and created a song to go with the name. Thus Cawthorn is only a few degrees separated from Cary Grant, who sang "The Whiffenpoof Song" in the film "Monkey Business"!
He didn't always play to type -- Cawthorn appeared in the 1929 version of "Taming of the Shrew" with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and he was the doctor who can't understand Jeannette MacDonald's need for male, um, companionship in the 1932 film "Love Me Tonight."
In "White Zombie," released the same year and as far from "Love Me Tonight" as we are from Pluto, Cawthorn plays slightly off type as Dr. Bruner, a missionary. Dr. Bruner has been in the missionary position in Haiti for over 30 years, and boy are his hips tired. He has been called to a plantation to perform a marriage ceremony for two visitors, Neil and Madeline (John Harron and Madge Bellamy). But the evil plantation owner (Robert Frazer) wants Madeline to himself, so he visits witch doctor-zombie master-golf pro "Murder" Legendre (Bela Lugosi) for advice.
"Murder" has two distinguishing characteristics -- he is always followed around by a vulture and he has a bad hairpiece. The evil plantation owner gives the bride some zombie formula, and on her wedding night she puts a serious crimp in the honeymoon by turning cold and stiff, although to some grooms that might be the perfect aphrodisiac.
Neil thinks that Madeline is dead, and he goes to Dr. Bruner for help. Bruner says, "You vill pay me der seventy dollahs" -- no, sorry, wrong movie. Instead, in a very long take, Bruner laboriously explains to Neil that Madeline has become zombified:
The grieving groom teams with Dr. Bruner and they set out for the castle of "Murder" and his army of obedient zombies. Cawthorn is third-billed in this movie, and in the big showdown he saves Neil and Madeline by telling the zombies to take a long walk on a short cliff:
"White Zombie" is visually striking, but the script is routine and humorless. There's only one joke in the movie, and Cawthorn gets it -- he's always asking someone for a match to light his pipe. While you collapse with hilarity, we move on to Cawthorn movie #2, in which he plays a more Joseph Cawthorn-ish role.
In the 1934 film "Twenty Million Sweethearts," Cawthorn is Mr. Brokman, the head of the Carlotta Soap Company. The company sponsors a radio show with crooner Buddy Clayton (Dick Powell), who was discovered by fast-talking talent scout Rush Blake (Pat O'Brien). We first see Cawthorn when he's passing on suggestions of songs for Buddy to sing:
Conflict rears its ugly head when Buddy falls in love with radio actress Peggy (Ginger Rogers) and Brokman and the network want to keep the romance a secret so as not to alienate Buddy's female fans. Buddy ends up quitting the show and the network, and Rush orchestrates an event to bring Buddy, Brokman and the network together again:
As for Cawthorn, his last film was "The Postman Didn't Ring," released in 1942.
Here are credits for "White Zombie," and a trailer:
Here are credits for "Twenty Million Sweethearts," and a trailer:
As a film, "The Silver Streak" sends a much simpler message -- work hard, be handsome, develop a streamlined train, and you end up winning Loretta Young's sister. But it's a fast-moving B movie that's very much a product of its time, with lots of cool location footage of the Zephyr, the Chicago World's Fair and Boulder Dam (with real workers in bit parts).
