The Weekly Gravy #132

The Big House (1930) – ***

The Big House won two Oscars, one fairly well deserved, one not so much. The first was given to Douglas Shearer for Best Sound Recording, and from the prisoners’ marching which plays over the opening credits, the film makes good use of sound, whether it’s conveying the overlapping voices in the yard or the mess hall, the roar of the machinery in the mill, the sounds of city streets on the outside, or the sound of a single bullet dropped on a hard floor, which might thwart a carefully-planned escape. Of course, during the prison riot which climaxes the film, the sounds of gunshots and voices (and even tanks) are thunderously impressive, but the film has long since proven its aural worth.

The latter went to Frances Marion for Best Writing Achievement; she alone received the Oscar, though director George Hill originated the project and Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin are credited with “additional dialogue.” But beyond the question of credit is the matter of quality, and the script, despite some good character moments (which owe as much to the acting as the writing), is too scattered and too obviously watered-down for the standards of the era, with tough-guy dialogue that rings false and a corny subplot which adds a bit of romance and allows for a sunnier ending than the film really called for.

That subplot involves Morgan (Chester Morris), a robber who was framed just before he was due to be paroled and made his escape by switching places with a corpse (!), and Anne (Leila Hyams), whom Morgan saw when she came to visit her weak-willed brother Kent (Robert Montgomery), who’s doing 10 years for manslaughter. Kent is a stool pigeon and was the one who framed Morgan, and it’s not quite clear, to us or Anne, what brings Morgan into her bookstore one evening. But it turns out to be love, and when he’s caught and sent back they share a kiss, and when he’s pardoned at the end, she’s waiting for him. It’s not much more believable here than it was 87 years later in Baby Driver, and that was a comedy!

The rest of the film, however, takes place comfortably within the prison, and works rather better, if not seamlessly. We begin with Kent being brought to the prison, processed (which is depicted in almost documentary fashion) and introduced to the warden (Lewis Stone), before being taken to his cell, which he shares with Morgan and Butch Schmidt (Wallace Beery), a gangster serving a life sentence. Kent is intimidated by the blustering Butch and not much more at ease around around Morgan, and seems a prime candidate for squealing—but we already know that the prison is dangerously overcrowded (designed to hold 1,800 men, it holds around 3,000), and as such, the question isn’t whether trouble will occur, but when.

Beery got a Best Actor nomination, and at times he’s quite good, especially when playing Butch as something of a man-child; take the scene where he listens to Morgan read a letter, and he plays with the dirt in the yard, or when he plays dumb around the guards, acting like a smart-ass schoolboy sassing the teacher. When he’s playing tough, he’s less consistently successful, but you can see why he was recognized. That said, Morris’ subtler performance holds up better, showing how Morgan is, at heart, a decent fellow, but is quite capable of holding his own in the joint (in an amusing touch, he chastises Butch for stealing Kent’s cigarettes, then pockets them himself); Montgomery, while not served incredibly well by the script, is suitably yellow, and the supporting cast includes some colorful character actors, like Roscoe Ates, he of the artfully-managed stutter.

(A couple of interesting what-ifs: Lon Chaney was originally meant to play Butch, but was terminally ill; I can only imagine what he’d have done with the role. And Anne was originally Kent’s wife—the scene where she visits him plays more like a spouse’s visit—but preview audiences objected to Morgan having a relationship with a married woman, so it was changed. Even pre-Code, there was only so much audiences would accept.)

Hill’s direction and Harold Wenstrom’s cinematography, possibly owing to the technical issues of the early sound era, is uneven, but there are genuinely effective moments and images, like the close-ups of knives or guns being covertly passed underneath a table, the crane shots during the final riot, or the stark, almost Expressionistic settings, which make the prison seem almost like it came from the future civilization of Metropolis—whose downtrodden souls similarly marched with shuffling gait and lowered heads.

The Big House was also nominated for Best Picture (or Production), losing to All Quiet on the Western Front, a choice I doubt anyone will dispute. But while it’s pretty creaky by today’s standards and has long been outstripped by the films it inspired, it’s certainly worth seeing for anyone interested in the genre or the early talkie period. Notably, the French-language version (before dubbing technology was perfected, major films would often be shot in several languages) starred Charles Boyer as Morgan, just a few years before he came—most successfully—to Hollywood.

Score: 68

Revolution (1985) – *½

On the DVD of Revolution, there’s a conversation between star Al Pacino and director Hugh Hudson about the film’s initial critical and commercial failure and the changes they made for the DVD release (which is officially titled Revolution Revisited and trims 11 minutes from the original cut). They mull over possible reasons why the film was so poorly received, noting the infamously rushed release (coming after a troubled production), Pacino’s character being less overtly heroic than audiences of the era might have liked, and Hudson being a British director tackling the story of America’s fight for independence.

Certainly the film’s being rushed into theaters for a Christmas release (only to meet with such bad reviews that the film was never given a wide release, and grossed a pathetic $358,000) did it no favors, and it’s not impossible to believe that Reagan-era Americans wouldn’t have embraced a film which depicts the Revolutionary War in rather cynical terms, as a chaotic swirl of idealism and brutality, of valiant patriots and opportunistic hooligans, seen through the eyes of a man who begins the story with no loyalty to either side, touching (more so in the original cut) on the racial tensions which would haunt this new nation (and still do).

But just as I’ve long felt that Heaven’s Gate, for all its latter-day re-evaluations, is a sour, unwieldy mess of a film whose political messaging counts for little in light of its severe dramatic shortcomings, so too is Revolution such a cluttered mess in terms of story, and so hard to connect to in terms of character, that it doesn’t matter how much it critiques the popular vision of the birth of America. 1776 did an infinitely better job showing the ideals and compromises of this chapter in history, had characters worth investing in, and had great songs to boot.

Tom Dobb (Pacino) is a Scottish-born trapper and widower who arrives in New York with his only surviving child, Ned (Sid Owen for the first two-thirds, Dexter Fletcher for the rest) as the Revolutionary War is beginning. His boat is commandeered by the Continental Army, or at least the rabble supporting them, and Ned rather foolishly joins the Army (wandering off when Ned tells him to stay put – just one example of the sloppy writing), and though Tom protests he hasn’t given his permission, he’s told he can only stay with Ned if he also enlists.

They’re drawn into the disastrous Battle of Long Island, where we first meet British Sgt. Maj. Peasy (Donald Sutherland), and where the Dobbs are properly introduced to Daisy McConnahay (Nastassja Kinski), who defies her aristocratic Loyalist family to support the Revolution. We follow these characters as they are drawn deeper into a war which goes on for years, Tom realizing why Ned and Daisy believe so strongly in this new nation, Ned growing up and falling in love, Tom and Daisy falling in love after a fashion, and Peasy…just popping up from time to time. And eventually the war is won and the movie ends.

That’s leaving a great deal out, but even so, it’s a desperately choppy film, with characters coming and going so abruptly – we’ve scarcely met Bella (Rebecca Calder) before she and Ned are married, and after appearing throughout the first act, Mrs. McConnahay (Joan Plowright) vanishes completely from the film – that it almost doesn’t matter how little we get to know them when they are around, and with many others being so poorly introduced that, when the credits roll and we see that Steven Berkoff, Richard O’Brien, Annie Lennox, Graham Greene, and Robbie Coltrane were all in the cast, we’re more likely to scratch our heads and wonder where, in all the chaos, they might have been.

In the aforesaid conversation, Hudson defends his use of handheld camerawork, arguing that he was ahead of his time, but missing the real point, which is that the disorienting imagery only amplifies how little we understand what’s going on, and how weak a grasp we have of the people we’re supposed to be following. One of the biggest changes made for the DVD was the inclusion of an extensive voiceover by Tom which attempts to fill in a lot of what the film otherwise fails to tell us about the characters and their feelings, and while it probably does make the film somewhat easier to follow, it’s not enough to compensate for the fundamental failings of Robert Dillon’s script.

It also obliges us to listen to a whole lot more of Pacino’s strange accent, which he defends as being well-researched, but which is simply unconvincing; no, I don’t know quite how a Scots-born man in colonial New York would’ve spoken, but I never felt like I was listening to anything but Pacino trying not to sound like the contemporary New Yorker he is. (I was grateful for the subtitles.) Nor did I feel like I was watching anything but Pacino in period costume, muttering the scattered dialogue and making a valiant, but doomed effort to play against type in this doomed production.

Sutherland comes the closest to giving a good performance, in part because the script actually allows Peasy some sympathetic touches, but he pops up too sporadically to have any real arc, and the makeup department saddles him with a huge hairy wart that looks more like a smear of dirt. Plowright also emerges with her dignity intact; her early exit helps.

Where The Big House earned four Oscar nominations, Revolution earned four Razzie nods, for Pacino, Hudson, Worst Picture, and Worst Score. The latter is odd, since John Corigliano’s score is actually one of the film’s few strengths; at the very least, it’s far preferable to the dialogue. It features heavily in the battle scenes, which do achieve some epic grandeur and suggest what might have been. But the film goes too wrong at too basic a level to be redeemed by any re-editing.

Score: 39

My Fat Arse and I.

How about a few shorts between features?

• Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit (1961) – At the peak of his career, Bob Godfrey was one of the big names in British animation, winning an Oscar and three BAFTAs between 1971 and 1984. This, one of his first major films, heavily anticipates what Terry Gilliam would do for Monty Python in its rapid-fire humor and gleeful skewering of cultural tropes; a faux-advertisement for the titular “kit,” it riffs on the clichés of advertising (“Whether you’re 6 or 96, you’ll have wonderful fun…if you’re any age between the two, however, you’re going to be pretty miserable, and might as well leave the cinema”) and animation; demonstrating the included sound effects, a gunshot is used in laughably inappropriate scenarios. Some of the more adult jokes seem a touch seedy and there’s a brief bit of racial stereotype, but otherwise it’s pretty damn funny (“We make it a point of honor never to keep our promises”). Score: 83 – ***½
• Kama Sutra Rides Again (1971) – Nominated for the Oscar (but not the BAFTA) was Godfrey’s short about a nude British couple – nebbishy little Stanley and pleasantly statuesque Ethel – and their erotic experiments, which Stanley explains to us with brisk good nature. Once you get the two basic jokes – they’re cartoons that fuck, and sex manuals are full of impractical positions – it starts to wear kind of thin, and the dated gender politics (Ethel doesn’t speak until the very end) don’t help much. But I chuckled once or twice. (Stanley Kubrick requested it play before A Clockwork Orange when it first played in the UK, which is funnier than anything in the film itself.) Score: 66 – ***
• My Fat Arse and I/Ja i moja gruba dupa (2021) – Changing gears with this Polish short by Yelyzaveta Pysmak about a young woman who literally gets too big for her britches, starves herself skinny (and miserable) and goes on a trip to “Slimbuttlandia” – but eventually learns to love her body the way it is. A very good message and some rather funny moments (like the video-game climax), but I found the animation – which often feels like doodles come to life – rather hard to watch. Still, let’s hope we hear more from Pysmak. Score: 73 – ***
• Alexander the Grape (1965/2009) – Alexander the Itty-Bitty, the smallest grape in the bunch, wants to be a big, tough watermelon, just like the fearsome Freddy the Fierce. Amazingly, he manages to do so (after being a plum, pear, grapefruit, and pineapple), but finds being a watermelon has its disadvantages. An odd little shaggy-grape story, a kind of gentler ancestor of Sausage Party, it was begun by Jim Henson in the 60s, and the soundtrack was completed, but the animation was not; in 2008 the film was completed using the finished (cut-out) animation and storyboards. I wonder if Henson shelved it because it doesn’t quite amount to anything (as the narrator lampshades at the end), but it’s a cute curio. Score: 71 – ***

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – ***½

I’ve had some experience with D&D. My favorite part has always been setting up the characters, because it offers the most room for sheer imagination and creativity. The actual gameplay, I confess, tends to lose me somewhat – I struggle to remember precisely what I can and cannot do, and usually end up relying on the DM to guide me through. It can, in the right circumstances, be a lot of fun, but from experience I prefer the one-off games to longer campaigns (more power to DMs, I don’t know how they keep it all straight).

To be quite sure, you don’t need to have played D&D to enjoy Honor Among Thieves. It’ll probably help you understand the rather casually tossed-off lore which crops up throughout the film (it’s apparently based on the Forgotten Realms campaign settings), but if you’ve never so much as rolled a D-20, think of it simply as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie in a high fantasy setting. And since I really like the Guardians movies, it’s not too surprising that I enjoyed this.

The story has something to do with Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine), once a Harper (something like an FBI agent for this particular world), who fell into despair after the death of his wife and, after making friends with barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), turning to a life of crime with Holga as his all-around partner. Together they raised his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) and added aspiring sorcerer Simon Aumor (Justice Smith) and roguish con man Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) to their little band.

Forge proposes a heist which will net them a great deal of treasure and a tablet with the power to resurrect the dead. Wanting to bring his wife back, Edgin agrees, and they’re assisted on the heist by Sofina (Daisy Head), a mysterious wizard. The heist goes awry, with Edgin and Holga being caught and sent to prison. They break out during a parole hearing and return to Edgin’s village to find Kira long gone. But a clue leads them to the city of Neverwinter, where Forge has established himself as lord.

He’s been raising Kira in Edgin’s absence and is still working with Sofina – and it turns out she’s a member of a malevolent sect bent on enslaving humanity, and that she and Forge set Edgin and Holga up. They attempt to do so again, but Edgin and Holga escape, determined to rescue Kira and foil Sofina’s plot. To do so, they’ll need help, and after drawing Simon back into the fold, they recruit the druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), work with the deadpan paladin Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page), consult corpses, fight dragons, and even do a bit of singing before saving the day.

Honor Among Thieves packs quite a bit into its healthy 134-minute runtime, and if it can be difficult to keep track of all the details (not helped by a fair amount of dialogue getting buried by the sound mix), the broad scope of the plot is quite easy to grasp, and the real draws in any case are the abundant humor of the script, the lavish production, and the spirited ensemble cast.

It’s quite a funny film, more so because the jokes fit the characters so well, and because the film neither takes itself too seriously or too jokily; we laugh with the characters, and we laugh at how absurd the world they live in can be – but we can still believe in it, and in them, at least to the degree the film requires. The excellent sets and costumes, the fine makeup, the generally strong visual effects (it seems to use more practical effects than most films do nowadays, and is all the better for it), and the location work in Iceland and Northern Ireland all add to the depth of spectacle on display.

But it’s the cast that really sells it, and just about everyone does delightful work. Pine balances Edgin’s quips and quick thinking with a sincere desire to do right by his loved ones. Rodriguez is lovably tough and snarky, Smith is charmingly insecure (but working on it!), Grant is wonderfully smarmy (“I know you don’t do hugs…but I need one!”), Page is superbly dry and unflappable, and Head is suitably creepy. The outlier is Lillis, who seems to have conspicuously less to work with than the others; she has solid moments, but Doric tends to be stuck playing straight-man to the others.

Frustrating, but not a fatal flaw in a film that, although it doesn’t quite transcend the modern fantasy-blockbuster mold enough to come near true greatness, is still a great deal of fun and should entertain casual viewers and nerds alike, from the first time we meet Edgin and Holga in prison (“That’s the bucket where pee freezes”) to the mid-credits call-back, from the funniest graveyard scene since Seven Psychopaths to the portliest dragon I can think of, it’s just a good time at the movies – and, if not as good, it’s a bit lighter-hearted than John Wick.

Score: 82