"The Phantom of Crestwood," or Toupee or Not Toupee, That Is the Question

The 1932 film "The Phantom of Crestwood" is an early example of Synergy, Great Depression Division. Hiya, little fella.

"The Phantom of Crestwood" began as a serial on NBC radio. And since NBC was a division of RCA, and since RCA was the major stockholder in RKO Radio Pictures, a showbiz shotgun marriage was arranged -- "The Phantom of Crestwood" would begin on the radio, but it would end as a movie. And there was a contest to choose the best ending to the mystery, as submitted by the great unwashed public.










The film is introduced by announcer Graham MacNamee, who was a well-known personality at the time. He was the announcer-straight man to one of radio's biggest stars, Ed Wynn, whose Tuesday night program was sponsored by Texaco. Wynn would begin each week by saying, "Tonight, Graham, the program's gonna be different." And then he would tell the same kind of jokes he told last week.

At any rate, here is a camera-shy Graham MacNamee, who definitely has a face for radio, to introduce the pitcha, with a full orchestra tremulating (a word I just now made up) in the background:



(Notice how MacNamee smoothly works in the fact that although winning story-ending entries have been chosen, they aren't being used in the movie.) 

"The Phantom of Crestwood" reminds me of another RKO film from roughly the same period -- "Thirteen Women," wherein mixed-race Myrna Loy spends the whole movie killing off a group of women who ostracized her in finishing school. "Thirteen Women" is a better film, I think, with creepier visual effects, but it's the same theme -- a vengeful woman wreaking havoc on people who done her wrong.

In this case, the VW is Jenny Wren, played by Karen Morley. A high-class lady of the evening, Jenny's client book is filled with the wealthy and the powerful.

We first see Jenny at a bank in Los Angeles. It seems that the bank president, Priam Andes (H.B. Warner), is a former client. He is amazingly wealthy -- perhaps you've heard of the family mountains? The Andes fortune was made on those little chocolate mints in the green wrapper. Andes is wearing a hairpiece, so we will call him Toupee #1.

Jenny has a favor to ask of Toupee #1 -- to throw a big party for her at Crestwood, his family's ancestral home, a ranch located upstate. And she asks him to invite a bunch of his friends, who happen to be her old clients. And she's kinda sorta blackmailing him, so he says yes.

Meanwhile, a mysterious man is following Jenny. He is played by Ricardo Cortez -- or, as I like to refer to him, 1930s Stanley Tucci.

Meanwhile also, Jenny's niece (Anita Louise) has just graduated from finishing school and is coming to town with her fiancee, who also happens to be Priam Andes's nephew. Jenny invites them to the party at Crestwood.

Niece: All right, but I need some new clothes.

Jenny: You can wear some of mine.

Niece: I don't like those black things you wear.

Jenny: What a shame -- a lot of other people have IN MY PREVIOUS LIFE AS A PROSTITUTE. (I made up that last part.)

Meanwhile also also, when Jenny first visits Priam at the bank, we see Toupee #2, a fellow known as Mr. Vayne. He stares at Jenny as though he was obsessed with her. He ends up at Crestwood as well.

So now we're at Crestwood, where everyone is having jolly fun playing darts. Since this takes place in the days before safety regulations and liability laws, the darts are roughly the size of zeppelins and are tipped with icepicks.

Oh -- and Priam Andes's sister, the mannish Faith (Pauline Frederick), has also shown up. She is upset because her nephew wants to marry Jenny's sister. Like most people obsessed with family/racial/ethnic purity, she is insane.

Jenny meets with the men, all her old clients. They include rich wastrel Eddie (Skeets Gallagher) and Toupee #3, aka Senator Walcott (Robert McWade, seen at right). Jenny has called them together to announce her retirement.

Jenny: You didn't know that you'd all been gambling on the same green, did you? Didn't know you'd been putting your chips on the same number. Didn't know you'd been shooting craps with same dice. Didn't know you'd been playing roulette with the same ball. Didn't know you'd been playing blackjack with the same deck. The same worn, torn, dilapidated deck, smelling of smoke and covered with fingerprints and ... (Sorry, made up most of that stuff again.)

Anyway, Jenny has called them together to blackmail them, and to let them know how much each of them owes her, blackmail-wise:

Jenny is taking their money and going to Europe. And why is the Wren leaving the nest? Because of a traumatic experience with a young lover. She was after him for his money, and he told her he would give up the family fortune to be with her. Jenny told him not to bother because she only wanted the cash, and he jumped off a mountain.

Outside, the wind is whipping and a storm is brewing. Jenny goes to her room and then steps onto the balcony, where she sees something weird and otherworldly -- one of her old customers in his BVDs? No, even weirder -- it is the image of the dead young lover!



And then, before you can say "Jenny Wren gets it in the neck with a dart," Jenny Wren gets it in the neck with a dart. She has been killed in a house full of suspects -- just about everyone there had reason to wish her dead, dead, dead!

Enter Ricardo Cortez with sidekicks played by Sam Hardy and George E. Stone. Turns out that he's a private dick, hired by another one of Jenny's clients to collect some incriminating letters. So he becomes the default murder investigator:



The resulting investigation and capture of the murderer is pretty standard B-movie stuff, involving hidden passageways and thunderstorms and rooms suddenly plunging into darkness. And you can't really say that the performances are all that memorable. If "The Phantom of Crestwood" stands out at all, it's because of its unique connection with a radio serial. The moral of the story: Jenny Wren tries to make bank from the wages of sin, but instead there's hell toupee.

"The Mask of Fu Manchu," or Khan You Dig It?

The 1932 film "The Mask of Fu Manchu" begins in London, where Smith of the Secret Service (Lewis Stone) calls in explorer Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant).

Smith: The British government is asking you to risk your life again.

Barton: Oh, very well.

Barton's mission: To lead an expedition to China to find Genghis Khan's tomb and bring the artifacts back to England. What, you think they'd leave them with the "savages"? Preposterous!

Barton goes to the British Museum to get his team together, but on his way out he's taken hostage by bad guys dressed as mummies, except that they have pleated pants. And before you can say "yellow peril," Sir Lionel is face-to-face with the evil Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff).

Barton: You're Fu Manchu, arent you?

Fu Manchu: I am a doctor of philosophy from Edinburgh. I am a doctor of law from Christ College. I am a doctor of medicine from Harvard. My friends, out of courtesy, call me doctor.

Barton: All right, "doctor."

"The Mask of Fu Manchu" -- the film as well as the character created by Sax Rohmer -- is built on a foundation of pro-colonial sentiment (this is 1932, after all). But beyond that, the movie has classic cliffhanger action (if the people behind "Raiders of the Lost Ark" didn't see this movie, I'll eat my shoe), steamy torture scenes and Myrna Loy in one of her last faux-Asian roles as Fu's daughter. The idea is that Fu Manchu wants the scimitar and death mask of Khan so that he can proclaim himself the warrior's reincarnation.

Like Loy, Karloff is done up in heavy-duty makeup and costuming. Here's the first glance we get of him:



Meanwhile, the British team has come to China looking for Barton, including Barton's daughter (Karen Morley), her fiancee Terry (Charles Starrett) and a professor played by Jean Hersholt. The team finds the tomb:



Then Terry visits Fu Manchu in an effort to obtain Barton's release, but all he gets is goo-goo eyes from Fu Manchu's daughter. Soon he is held hostage, too, and injected with a special brainwashing serum while daughter smokes some opium and looks on longingly:


Fu Manchu then captures everyone else, and gets a chance to use all of his cool torture devices:



In the best tradition of movie villains, Fu Manchu's lair is ultramodern and fully staffed -- hey, those hydraulically-operated spiked walls aren't going to oil themselves!

As was the case in "Thirteen Women," Loy's character is much more interesting than the other woman in the film, the explorer's daughter played by Morley. And, as in most of his films, Karloff's character exists to be killed. Or IS he?!? And by the way, for a guy who specialized in monstrous types, Karloff had a very endearing lisp.

Here are full cast and credits for "The Mask of Fu Manchu," and a little about the character's history in books and other media.

"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.