"Hell's Highway," or Unchained Melody

The 1932 chain gang film "Hell's Highway" is not to be confused with the video game, the AC/DC album or the Michael Landon TV series "Highway to Heaven."

No, "Hell's Highway" is a neat little film filled with what every pre-code lover lives for: Those double-take "Holy crap, did I just see that?" moments -- an exchange of spicy dialogue, a stunning visual or a contemporary viewpoint that elevates the film from the hundreds of movies that studios cranked out each year.

It's not quite on the level of "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang," released about the same time. But thanks to the direction of Rowland Brown, who also co-wrote the script, "Hell's Highway" has more than its share of clever, striking set pieces.

Take this one -- it happens at the beginning at the movie, between our hero, Duke (Richard Dix) and another inmate, Matthew (Charles Middleton), also known as the preacher, who's in on bigamy charges. It's morning, and the gang members are performing their daily toilette at the local stream:



Duke: It takes a lot of ... backbone ... to keep three wives happy.

Preacher: Yea, brother. 

Like "I Am a Fugitive," "Hell's Highway" is nominally ripped from the headlines -- it's based on a series of deaths in Florida chain gangs caused by placing prisoners in sweat boxes. But Brown is more interested in telling us about the prisoners and showing us different sides of characters as opposed to reducing them to cliches.

Duke, for instance, is on the gang for bank robberies, something that would make him a hero to depression-era audiences. He has a plan to escape that includes Matthew the preacher. One of the prison guards, nicknamed Popeye, believes that Matthew is psychic, and Duke talks Matthew into telling Popeye's fortune while lifting his keys.

Matthew tells Popeye that his wife is fooling around, and sure enough when Popeye goes back to his house, the wife is there with a gentleman caller. The caller escapes out a window and Popeye shoots his wife. Duke has Popeye's keys and plans to escape, but at the same time his brother (Tom Brown) is brought to the camp and out of loyalty, Duke sticks around. Popeye's blames his wife's murder on the convicts who did escape; they are immediately captured and killed.

Now comes one of the movie's best scenes: the funeral of Popeye's wife, but seen through the eyes -- and the drawings -- of the inmates, while one of them sings "Frankie and Johnnie." Wonderful stuff:



There's other trouble afoot -- one of the convicts has stolen a spoon, which he is slowly, slowly filing into a knife. The stoolie mess steward lets the warden (C. Henry Gordon) know about it, and they share an interesting little game:



The warden isn't exactly a prince, but Brown also shows us his awkward side -- at night, all alone, he works on teaching himself how to play the violin.

The  real bad guy in "Hell's Highway" is a

"Dear Penthouse Forum: I never thought I'd be writing to you ..."

contractor named Billings, who's ruthless in his use of convict labor to complete a highway project. He's so sold on the sweat box that he writes a fan letter to the owner. If only the convicts put into it wouldn't keep dying ....








The sweat box deaths result in a state investigation that leads to another escape. Duke is fingered as the gang leader, and strapped up for a whipping:



In the end, justice is served, Duke's brother gets paroled and the sweat box is destroyed. But the inmates still have to wear those work shirts with targets on the back -- how did the Coen brothers miss including that detail in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"

"Penthouse," or Loy Meets World

I bow to no one in my admiration for, and possibly creepy love of, Myrna Loy. That little pug-nosed, round-faced, level-headed, wry-humored vixen was sexy, smart and sweetly funny -- the perfect screen wife. Who cares that in real life she was married four times -- this is why movies are awesome!

Loy's true breakthrough role came in 1934's "The Thin Man," directed by W.S. Van Dyke and with a screenplay adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Van Dyke, Hackett and Goodrich are also all on board for the 1933 film "Penthouse," so you have to wonder if Loy's performance in this film served as a kind of screen test for "The Thin Man."

In "Penthouse" Loy plays Gertie, a call girl whose roommate, Mimi (Mae Clarke), is shot in the first five minutes of the movie. Gertie wants to find the killer, and so does hotshot defense attorney Jack Durant (Warner Baxter). Durant's interest is personal -- Tom, the accused murderer, (Phillips Holmes) is in love with his ex-girlfriend Sue (Martha Sleeper, whose last name describes her performance), who has begged Durant to take the case.

As the film opens, Durant has just won acquittal for his client, mobster Tony Gazzotti (Nat Pendleton). In this case, at least, Gazzotti was genuinely not guilty, so Durant is a hero. But not to girlfriend Sue. He shows up to greet her on Long Island in his best white flannels and a pimpin' hat, but she gives him the cold shoulder:



Durant goes on a drunk, and the next day he's debriefed on the previous night's events by loyal butler Layton (Charles Butterworth):



(Charles Butterworth should be every butler in every New York City apartment in every 1930s movie.) 

Ex-girlfriend Sue then comes to Durant for help, because Tom has been accused of murdering Mimi, his old girlfriend. And Durant goes to work, with the help of Gertie. They've been introduced by Gazzotti, who adds "she's the kind you can take home to dinner, and no hard feelings if you don't stay for breakfast." Gertie is attracted to Durant, and she accompanies him to his apartment to spend the night -- her place, which she shared with the dead Mimi, gives her the heebie-jeebies. Gertie is ready for Durant to put the moves on her, and she's a little baffled when he doesn't.

Gertie: Say, are you still in love with someone, or are you just decent?

Durant: Maybe I think you're decent.

Gertie: A girl who comes into a man's apartment at night?

Durant: Well, you might have come here just to look at the Chrysler Building.

There are certain faces in 1930s movies that mean bad news from the get-go. For instance, never do business with C. Henry Gordon (aka evil Fred Astaire). Here he is mobster Crellimen, the man behind Mimi's murder. And as Gertie and Durant team up to nab Crellimen, Durant realizes he's falling in love with Gertie. This dawns on him in a scene where Baxter and Loy have a nice dialogue that echoes "The Thin Man":


 

Loy really does shine in this film -- at this stage in her career she was finally leaving behind the oriental temptress roles she played in movies like "Thirteen Women" and "The Mask of Fu Manchu" and within a few years she'd be the queen of the MGM lot -- after "The Thin Man" came such hits as "Libeled Lady" and "Test Pilot." She plays her role here simply and realistically, without the histrionics of Joan Crawford or the melancholy of Garbo.

Baxter doesn't fare quite as well -- even when he's playing a streetwise character like Durant, he can't shake his tendency toward leading-man pomposity. He looks especially uncomfortable during the romantic clinch in the final scene, when Loy musses his hair, and why any man should object to Myrna Loy mussing his hair is beyond me:


Here are the complete credits for "Penthouse," and a trailer:

"Gabriel Over the White House," or the Fascist and the Furious

In 1930, Walter Huston played Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith's biographical film, and three years later he played the President again in "Gabriel Over the White House," based on a best-selling novel of the day written anonymously.

Huston plays President Judson Hammond, and at the beginning, to paraphrase another real-life president, he's much more of a Ford than a Lincoln. He's a Warren Harding-like party hack who's packed the cabinet with all his political cronies. Sure, he's a good uncle to nephew Jimmy (Dickie Moore), who's always hanging around the office, and he commands the respect of secretary Pendie Molloy (Karen Morley) and chief aide Harley "Beek" Beekman (Franchot Tone), but he shows every sign of being a complete George W. -- er, mediocrity in office.

But desperate times call for desperate plot twists, and divine providence intervenes when the President is seriously hurt in an auto accident (he himself was driving, pushing the speedometer above 90). He's in a coma, and something strange happens:


The President Hammond who emerges from the coma is a haunted, schizoid zombie!

"I'm bad, I'm bad. You know it."

No, not really, but he is a much more forceful fellow who's driven to do the right thing, no matter who he offends. The old Hammond wouldn't meet with Bronson (David Landau), the leader of the unemployed, but after Bronson is killed Hammond bravely goes to the massive camp of marchers and proposes a "construction army" to put them back to work.

Next Hammond takes on prohibition and the gangsters who prosper from it, particularly Nick Diamond (C. Henry Gordon, whose hawk-like looks suggest an evil Fred Astaire). Hammond even invites Diamond to his office for a face-to-face meeting, but when they can't come to terms and a government liquor store is bombed, Hammond forms a "police army" and puts Tone in charge of catching the bad guys, judging their criminal trial and overseeing the firing squad in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty!:


Finally, Hammond tackles the problem of foreign debt by gathering representatives of debtor countries on a battleship and destroying two empty ships to demonstrate -- well, his point escaped me, but it worked, and everyone pledges to pay up pronto.

Having fixed all of America's problems unilaterally, without the bother of Congress or the constitution, Hammond's health starts to falter. Is this the end of his heavenly prolonged life?

Casting the U.S. President as Mister Fix-It is always an appealing idea, particularly when the country is in the kind of crisis it was in the early 1930s. The unemployed marchers are based on the real-life Bonus Army, of course, who demanded early payment of cash benefits they were promised at the end of World War I; President Herbert Hoover responded by sending an opposition army with General Douglas MacArthur in charge and setting their camps on fire. And the "construction army" that Hammond proposes is eerily similar to the kind of government programs put in place by President Franklin Roosevelt.

Humph. Financial crisis. Protests in the streets. Government stimulus programs. That's all so Great Depression-y -- it couldn't happen today.

For full credits and production info, click here.