What a small world the film world is. Last night I went to our newly expanded art museum, the Chazen to see The President Vanishes, a little known Paramount film made in 1934. The Cinemathique was showing it as part of its New Deal Cinema series, in conjunction with the Chazen's new exhibit: A New Deal for Artists.
The film is interesting as an artifact of its time. The plot, basically, is that the President fakes his own kidnapping in order to keep Congress from approving of entering a war which has just started in Europe. He must do this because the villains of the piece are conspiring to brainwash the yokels into war fever. And who are these villains? This is where the film is quite daring, for its time, or any other. They are a lobbyist, a big banker, a munitions magnate, an oil baron, a newspaper baron, and a judge. Originally, the judge was to be a Senator, a la the corrupt Senator Payne (Claude Rains) in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. However, the Production Code Administration would have nothing to do with that.
The villains' conversation in a smoke filled room at the beginning of the picture is the highlight. They need to convince the yokels to go to war in order to guarantee their profits. In addition, the oil baron is running a fascist organization called the "gray shirts" who break up workers meetings and beat the hell out of any dissenters. Pretty amazing stuff. The film is played much more harshly than the Capra populist pictures (in particular, Meet John Doe) that came along later. Capra without the corn. That's because the Director, William Wellman, harbored no illusions about fascism, the social failings of Capitalism, or the dark side of human nature (see his The Ox Bow Incident
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036244/
The Public Enemy
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022286/
or Wild Boys of the Road
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024772/
for more with regard to those issues.
This picture lacks some of the very basics in terms of what the film gurus would call "production values." The acting, with the exception of the always excellent Edward Arnold and a surprisingly strong Rosalind Russell (in a small part), is terrible, and the writing melodramatic, oversimplified, and overwrought. But it's hard to argue with Wellman's credentials as movie maker. The camera moves all over the place and Wellman can hold his own with anyone when it comes to montage or super-imposition. So this one is attractive to watch in spite of its weaknesses.
While I was watching, I took particular notice of a character part (personal bodyguard of the President). The actor looked familiar, but I couldn't place him until the end credits identified him. His name was Paul Kelly. I had an aha! moment but wasn't sure until I got home and pulled out Hollywood Babylon II, by Kenneth Anger. HB II is the sequel (written in the mid-1980s) to a much better Anger volume, Hollywood Babylon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Babylon
(Pay no attention to the criticism in the article. While it is mostly true, it takes nothing away from the entertainment value of the book). See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/aug/22/fiction.features6
for a more nuanced vision of Anger.
There it was, the first chapter of HBII, devoted entirely to Paul Kelly. It seems that Paul Kelly was having an affair with the wife of stage actor Ray Raymond. Raymond objected to this and they got into a drunken brawl. Kelly ended up beating Raymond to death. Both he and Raymond's wife ended up in San Quentin for a couple of years. Both were model prisoners and Kelly ended up with a long film and stage career after his release. The President Vanishes is one of the first movies he made after his release.
Small world.
