The Maude Eburne Film Festival: "The Vampire Bat" and "Lonely Wives"

"I beg your pardon, young man?"

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Maude Eburne (1875-1960) was certainly one of them.

She was born in Ontario, Canada, and appeared in plays there before making her Broadway debut in 1913. The next year she made a name for herself as "Coddles" in a hit farce called "A Pair of Sixes," and appeared in plays until at least 1930.

Eburne appeared in over 100 movies, including the 1918 film version of "A Pair of Sixes." But her Hollywood career really didn't begin in earnest until 1930, when she appeared in "The Bat Whispers."

Her movie roles were usually as busybodies, kind as well as malicious. One nice little change of pace was her brief but vivid appearance in the 1933 pre-code prison film "Ladies They Talk About," wherein Barbara Stanwyck causes a stir while in stir. In this cheerfully cynical film, Eburne plays "Aunt Maggie," a former madame whose seniority in the jug is symbolized by the fact that she has a reserved rocking chair in the prison lounge. Stanwyck is introduced to her by Lillian Roth, as another inmate:

The 1933 film "The Vampire Bat" is a Grade-Z horror movie with a surprisingly big-name cast -- Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and Melvyn Douglas. Eburne is fourth-billed, as Wray's Aunt Gussie. Her main job is to provide comic relief while everyone else runs around the village of Kleinschloss trying to figure out who's killing villagers by the dozen. All of them have puncture wounds in the neck and have been emptied of blood, sucked out through what one doctor calls the "jew-gu-lahr" vein.

Atwill is a doctor who might or might not be behind the murders; Wray is his devoted assistant and Douglas is the local flatfoot. Eburne's job is to spout medical malapropisms and scream at opportune moments -- she also faints at least twice, once when she meets demented villager Herman (Dwight Frye, who else?), who carries a bat in his pocket a la Lennie in "Of Mice and Men":



Eburne shows up again at the end. The murders have been solved, but the joke's on Gussie -- Dr. Atwill has given her a dose of Epsom salts for that get up and go feeling:




"The End"! Ha! Ha!

The 1931 film "Lonely Wives," on the other hand, is no laughing matter, even though it's supposed to be a comedy. The leading man, alas, is Edward Everett Horton -- in a dual role, yet.

Now don't get me wrong -- like cilantro, Horton is perfect in smaller doses, adding spice to everything from Lubitsch films to "Fractured Fairy Tales" on "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle." But in a lead role, much less a romantic lead, that's just simply too much Edward.

Horton plays Richard Smith, a well-known attorney and ladies' man. As his butler says, "Any pretty woman can twist him around her little finger -- and the prettier they are, the more twisted he gets."

Eburne is Richard's mother-in-law, who looks askance at his slinky new secretary (Patsy Ruth Miller):  



Having mother-in-law around makes it hard for Richard to slip out for his assignations, but help comes in the form of The Great Zero (also Horton), a Vaudeville impersonator who disguises himself as Richard. All goes well until mother-in-law surprises Richard (really Zero) with his wife, who has returned early from a trip. And she's feeling very amorous. (The wife, not Eburne.)

"Lonely Wives" starts with an agreeable amount of wit and spice, but after Richard comes home and he and Zero get mistaken for each other about 75 times, things get tiresome.

As for Eburne, she chugged on through the 1930s and into the 1940s. She had the honor of playing Frank McHugh's mother in "Here Comes the Navy" and she played a supporting role in "Ruggles of Red Gap." In the late 1930s she played Mrs. Hastings the housekeeper in a series of "Dr. Christian" movies, with Jean Hersholt in his well-known radio role. (Most of them are available, in full, on YouTube.) Her final film credit was 1951's "Belle Le Grand," a western made at Republic Studios with Vera Hruba Ralston. By then Eburne was in her mid-70s.

The Eddie Quillan Film Festival: "Sweepstakes" and "Gridiron Flash"

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.