Pressbooks (Non-Horror)

RKO produced 13 Falcon films, beginning with George Sanders (first 3 movies) in the lead role, then, after he got tired of it all, his real-life brother, Tom Conway (from the 4th movie to the end of the series), took over.  I prefer Conway, as he was more fun to watch and less of a stiff upper-lipper. When I first watched the fifth movie, not having seen the fourth, the changeover surprised me. In the fourth movie, Sanders’ Falcon gets bumped off, opening the door for Conway’s Falcon. Neat, huh? By 1944, and judging by this movie, the series was running on fumes. Taking the character from his urban environment to a western one provided some interesting contrasts, but overall the story is lackluster while still watchable. Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs) does an uncredited appearance as an orchestra leader. TCM notes that Tierney didn’t work well with Quentin Tarantino, leading to some shoving, a firing, and an intervention (from Harvey Keitel) so he could finish Reservoir Dogs. Barbara Hale (unforgettable in Perry Mason) plays Marion Corday. She also appeared in The Falcon Goes to Hollywood.

Tim McCoy was a real-life homesteader, a military colonel who served in both World Wars, and an expert in Native American sign language. He also had a lightning-fast draw. On 35mm film running at 24 frames per second, film editors later clocked McCoy’s draw at a quick six frames from the moment his hand blurred to the moment smoke left his gun barrel. During the Pre-Code era (roughly 1930 to mid-1934), Columbia pushed McCoy hard. He rolled out nearly three dozen pictures. In The Western Code (1932) he plays a Texas Ranger trying to stop an illegal inheritance scam. The siblings he protects are played by Nora Lane and Dwight Frye, the Man With the Thousand Watt Stare (see him as Renfield in Dracula 1931 and The Vampire Bat 1933). Alice Cooper did The Ballad of Dwight Frye (usually while wearing a straitjacket) in homage.

[Director] Phil Karlson copes with his limited resources by concentrating on his characters’ interesting faces. With a small budget, he couldn’t compete with polished studio productions on sets or spectacle, so he pushed the camera into faces — the lazy eye of Jack Elam, Van Cleef’s angular cheekbones, Brand’s granite jaw. Close-ups become the primary tool of psychological pressure. (Trailers From Hell)

Kansas City Confidential is one of my favorite noir films because of John Payne and its gritty violence (“an uncommon level for the time,” according to the New York Times). Payne was a popular singer in the 1940s, appearing in 20th Century Fox’s musicals.  His character, Joe Rolfe (a GI Joe everyman), gets framed for a heist. The police try to beat him into a confession and his vendetta against the real robbers, to prove his innocence, sets off the action. The camera work is lively and the cast of characters, especially the criminals with their flaws that lead to their downfall, is noir at its best. The studio promoted the movie as being partly filmed in Mexico and Guatemala, but the location shooting was actually done on California’s Catalina Island, with the studio sets at Samuel Goldwyn Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard (as noted by IMDb).  Quentin Tarantino cites Kansas City Confidential as an influence for Reservoir Dogs. When you watch this one, breathe in the editing work done by director Phil Karlson, who started on Poverty Row and learned how to handle a low budget like it was a winning lottery.

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Kansas City Confidential (1952)
PressbookRead More »

The Producer’s Comments
Since I have not seen this movie since it was released, I was excited to learn that it has been included on imdb.com. The movie was suggested by Dr. Phillips, then Director of the San Diego Museum of Man, to the actor Jeffrey Hunter when they worked together on a project in Central America. It was developed as a documentary, and when completed, it was quite good. However, when we could not sell it, we sold it to a private firm, and they, in order to make it more exciting, and without our O.K. hired prostitutes from Mexico to introduce some wild scenes. These scenes were filmed in Balboa Park in San Diego. A major professional reviewer stated that he liked the documentary, but WHAT WERE THOSE HALF-NAKED WOMEN DOING IN THE FILM? Incidentally, I furnished the funds for the documentary. (IMDb entry made by Chet Sampson)

“Why in all that is sensible would you post this pressbook?” asked Zombos. He was scolding first, then withholding, second, my very savory Painkiller drink. It was late evening. I was tired, and so in need of  that rum, cream of coconut, pineapple, and orange juices concoction that Chef Machiavelli was expert at whipping up when most needed that my only thoughts were drink, bed, and late morning rise. But he did have an annoying habit of interrupting my thoughts. Often.

“I like the poster art,” I tried.

“I see,” he said, waiting for more.

Think fast, rabbit, I mouthed to myself as my arm reached for the drink. He would have none of that and stepped back a bit, out of my reach.

“There’s also an interesting story behind the movie,” I offered. He nodded a green-light. …

Attack of the Jungle Women (1959) PressbookRead More »

Alternately known as Hop-A-Long and Hop-Along Cassidy, this Western series had a long run, beginning with Paramount in 1935 and moving over to United Artists in 1943. This pressbook is United Artists’ theater promotion-push for five of Hop’s movies released in 1948.

When Paramount stopped making the films, “Boyd himself produced several more features for United Artists until the movie series finally petered out in 1948. Seeing an opportunity in television, Boyd gambled his entire savings, including mortgaging his home, and bought the rights to the character and all of the films made up to that point. He then arranged for them to be shown on TV, introducing them to a new generation of youngsters. He also started a big marketing campaign, with lunch boxes, drinking glasses, toys, etc. It made him a millionaire. Boyd then produced two years of new Hopalong Cassidy TV shows, concluding in 1954 when he retired except for occasional live appearances, which he continued until his death in 1972. After his passing, Boyd’s widow, actress Grace Bradley, continued to support and promote the Hopalong Cassidy movies until she died on her 97th birthday in 2010” (Cinema Revisited: Hopalong Cassidy (1935), James L. Neibaur).

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Hopalong Cassidy (1948) PressbookRead More »

In the earliest Ritter films the studios relied on rental horses, but Ritter wanted his own mount and bought White Flash in the hills of Skull Valley, Arizona, from horseman Jerome Eddy. He hired renowned trainer Glenn Randall—who worked with several famous movie horses—to school White Flash for films and personal appearances. The horse appeared with Tex at parades, rodeos, and stage shows, enhancing the sense that audiences were seeing the same star team from the movies. Ritter joked in an interview that fame had gone to White Flash’s head, quipping that “next, I suppose he’ll be wanting script approval,” an indication of how central the horse’s “celebrity” had become to his act. (AI-pulled from Texas History Notebook, B-Westerns).

One funny note: as I read the plot synopsis for the movie–Tex and his sidekick Stubby ride into trouble when hooded riders begin terrorizing the countryside and the local mining operation–I couldn’t stop thinking of that Woody’s Roundup episode in Toy Story 2.

Buck Jones died, tragically, from burns received during the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston, which took hundreds of lives. The club was overcrowded and exit doors were locked. The fire was accelerated by methyl chloride, which was used as a refrigerant, venting from the air conditioning. Highly flammable decorations added to the combustion. The story goes that a busboy struck a match in the dimly lit Melody Lounge to see while he screwed in a lightbulb that had been removed by a soldier wanting more privacy with his date. The busboy blew out the match, but moments later flames started appearing just below the ceiling and quickly spread to the artificial palm trees. The fire spread quickly and patrons overwhelmed the main entrance’s lone revolving door. Other possible exits were either locked or had doors that swung inward, causing deadly pileups. “Following the fire, many new laws were enacted for public establishments, including the banning of flammable decorations, a provision that emergency exits must be kept unlocked (from the inside), and that revolving doors cannot be the only exit.” (Wikipedia)

In the movie, A Christmas Story, the Daisy Red Ryder carbine-action rifle that Ralphie Parker is hoping to get as a Christmas present is actually shown to be the Buck Jones version, with a sundial and compass in the stock. Daisy discontinued the model after Buck Jones’ death.

Many noir dramas combine studio simulations with the real thing…John Farrow’s The Big Clock  opens with a panoramic view of New York at night, twinkling splendidly under the titles. After the credits, the camera pans to the right, zooming in on a particular building in the city. As the camera moves in through the window, the film shifts from the real world to one of studio fabrication. (The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, Foster Hirsch)

“Did you ever get to posting that pressbook for The Big Clock?” asked Zombos, lounging on the couch while sipping at his glass of Bicerin.

I, of course, was painstakingly working on this post. I knew deep down that he relished seeing me sweat while he sipped. It was all very annoying, I can tell you. We had been rummaging–rather, he had been stumbling while I had been rummaging–through his vast closet of things. The internet couldn’t hold a candle to it, I assure you. Amazing how many pressbooks he didn’t know he had, forgetting them as he squirreled them away years ago.

“Finishing it up now,” I said, typing away on my laptop.

“Awfully good and different noir, that one,” he said.

“Yes, the opening transition from skyline to inside the building, Charles Laughton as the quirky, stern, and murderous boss, and Elsa Lanchester providing a bit of humor while Ray Milland does that self-deprecating thing with his eyes and his smooth exterior motions as he races against time to prove his innocence while he conducts the search for himself as the guilty party, trapped within that building of cavernous space and stark art deco environs. And through it all, that huge clock, the beating heart of the building and Laughton’s stark character, nicely decked out with glowing dials and levers and buttons, like a control panel from a science fiction movie.”

“Brilliant cast too, with Maureen O’Sullivan, Harry Morgan, George Macready, and the snippet of Noel Neill as the elevator operator.” Zombos followed his comment with a sip, then continued. “Morgan’s omnipresent and sinister henchman is wonderful. Maureen O’Sullivan as the moral compass for Milland’s more questionable character is minimal but still very important. And of course we have the femme fatale played by Rita Johnson, where Milland’s character gets his edges sanded a bit.

I finished the post (obviously, as you are reading it now), and left Zombos lounging as I headed to the kitchen to get Chef Machiavelli to create another one of his Bicerin delight’s for my own lounging. He shouted after me, “after you get your drink, let us watch The Big Clock again.” I strongly recommend you seek out your own Bicerin and sip it while perusing these pressbook pages. And by all means, watch the movie too.

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The Big Clock (1948) PressbookRead More »

Glenn Strange (Henchman Pete), known to monsterkids as Universal’s Frankenstein Monster in the 1940s (House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), appears here as one of the, well, henchmen. It was Strange’s monster image that made the rounds in 1960s horror merch, not Karloff’s. I remember getting those cool Famous Monsters of Filmland binders with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Glenn Strange’s Monster, which greatly established my street cred as a bonafide monsterkid at school. This adventure was produced by Grand National, who, along with Republic and Monogram, produced saddle sore budgeted, formulaic, hour-long B movies for the bottom half of double bills. The double feature, an attraction introduced in the early 1930s to counter the Depression-era box-office slump, was the standard form of exhibition for about 15 years (Britannica AI). Tex Ritter’s films were  designed mainly for rural and small‑town circuits and sold on his country‑music name, so the commercial target was steady but modest. Ritter was a country singer from radio which led to dusty trails on the silver screen. Grand National only lasted a few years. Ritter went on to complete about 70 movies and he became a founding member of the Country Music Association. He sang the haunting ballad, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’, in the Western classic High Noon. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. He sang the song, with lyrics by Dimitri Tiomkin, at the awards ceremony.

The Secret 4 pressbook is the oldest one I have, so far, for a movie serial. Unfortunately, like many silent-era movies, this one is considered lost as no copy of the film has surfaced. There were 15 chapters of thrilling action, headed by Eddie Polo, who came from a circus family. He had trained in multiple acrobatic disciplines and toured with various circuses. His background, naturally, led to him becoming a stuntman for Universal in 1913. Stardom kicked in early due to his action-oriented appeal. He was the first man to parachute off the Eiffel Tower (IMDb). As his stardom waned with age and the advent of sound, he made due as a makeup artist and trying to get his life story onto film.

Kathleen Myers appeared in 22 movies and played the leading lady in a number of adventure productions (Wikipedia). Perhaps her most remembered role was in Go West with Buster Keaton. She also appeared a few times alongside Oliver Hardy before he teamed up with Stan Laurel.

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The Secret 4 (1921) PressbookRead More »

I caught Zombos just as he was falling backwards, thrown off balance by yet another heavy box of movie pressbooks he had squirreled away in his closet, as he lifted with his back, not his legs.

“How many of these do we have tucked away in here,” he mumbled. I disagreed with his use of the word “we.”

“You mean how many of these heavy boxes you have stashed in the closet?” I corrected him. “I’m thinking a lot. Enough to keep you busy way past my death, so there’s a positive note for you right there.”

He gave me that look of his that could peel paint, then opened the box and rummaged through it. “Oh, here it is. I have been meaning to post this one for some time.”

Again with the we.

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Flaming Frontiers (1938) PressbookRead More »