Vanity Street (Nick Grinde, 1932).
Broke and homeless, a young woman hurls a brick through the window of a drugstore, hoping to go to jail because at least “they feed you there.” Instead of arresting her, a kindly cop gets her a job as a showgirl at the theater next door; soon she’s wearing furs and fending off passes from top-hatted stage-door Johnnies. So it goes in lightning-paced B movies such as Vanity Street (1932), directed by Poverty Row maestro Nick Grinde. The plot may be flimsy, but Max Ophuls could have been proud of the long, breezy tracking shot that glides past the windows of the drugstore, packed with a motley crowd of chorus girls, costumed actors, and burlesque comedians. This casually terrific sequence is representative of the treasures that were to be found in the retrospective honoring the 2024 centenary of Columbia Pictures at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Most of the films were short. They were refreshingly free from bloat or pretension. This was not the holy grail of “pure cinema,” but it was often pure movie.
“The Lady with the Torch,” curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, brought together 44 films spanning 1929 to 1959. All, including 28 film prints and a number of restorations, were supplied by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the current owner and exemplary steward of the Columbia library; a version of the series will tour European venues this year and next. The lineup included a judicious selection of big titles such as Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), both the result of the kind of short-term or one-off deals with directors that the studio favored over long-term contracts. But the series wisely focused on deeper cuts that illustrated the richness of Columbia’s program pictures, most made on a shoestring. Retrospectives devoted to studios are relatively rare, and this one offered insight into how the system actually worked—with its complicated balance of commercial imperatives, factory-like efficiency, artistic independence, genre formulas, and star power—as well as a master class in how the necessity of low budgets became the mother of cinematic invention.
Vanity Street is a prime example of the brisk, propulsive style that characterized the studio in the 1930s, and of the way filmmakers deployed scarce resources with flamboyant style. Whip pans, high-angle shots, and noirish low-key lighting add jazzy flourishes to a story of showgirls, gigolos, blackmailers, singing Irish cops, and construction workers reading Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. The screenplay had uncredited contributions from Robert Riskin, a defining voice at the studio through the eight films he wrote for Frank Capra, the director who almost single-handedly hoisted Columbia from its Poverty Row origins to a “minor-major” that punched above its weight artistically.
If You Could Only Cook (William A. Seiter, 1935).
Another of the writers on Vanity Street was Gertrude Purcell, who also co-wrote If You Could Only Cook (William A. Seiter, 1935). Columbia churned out screwball comedies by the dozens after the surprise success of Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), including masterpieces of the genre. But the relatively unsung If You Could Only Cook captures the style’s “silly, careless rapture” (to quote Herbert Marshall in the film) at its most effortlessly charming. Jean Arthur stars as an unemployed woman who persuades a stranger she meets in the park (he’s really an automotive tycoon, but she thinks he’s a fellow job-seeker) that they should pose as a married couple to answer an ad for a cook and butler in what turns out to be the household of an affable gangster. This might sound far-fetched, but the way Arthur turns to Marshall, all wide-eyed radiance, and asks in that crackly, irresistible voice, “Say, can you buttle?” makes it easy to believe that he would, on a whim, acquiesce to the cockeyed scheme.
While Columbia had fewer stars under contract than other studios, preferring to borrow them as needed, Arthur was one of their own, and she was the first of a series of brilliant actresses—including Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, and Judy Holliday—who gave Columbia its edge in comedy. Despite studio cofounder and president Harry Cohn’s reputation as a crude and incorrigible sexual harasser, Columbia was flush with talented women; Viola Lawrence ran the editing department for more than 30 years, and writer Virginia Van Upp became—briefly—Hollywood’s first female executive producer. The essential role of funny, forceful, knockout women at the studio is honored by the cover image of the book of essays accompanying the retrospective, edited by Khoshbakht, to which I contributed an essay on Budd Boetticher: it shows Carole Lombard extending a shapely gam to land a kick on John Barrymore’s backside.
The Undercover Man (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949).
No genre is better suited to low-budget filmmaking than the crime thriller. Film noir makes a virtue of seedy surroundings; it calls for meager lighting, murky shadows, and fog, all of which conveniently disguise cheap or reused sets. Joseph H. Lewis’s The Undercover Man (1949) gains grit from the trash littering the streets in a tenement neighborhood and the authentically grimy look of a men’s room where a treasury agent meets an informant. Columbia released its share of marquee noir films (Gilda [1946], In a Lonely Place [1950], The Reckless Moment [1949]), but the retrospective instead highlighted the studio’s tradition of wedding crime to social problem dramas, supporting Khoshbakht’s compelling curatorial argument that Columbia was a home for the marginalized and for left-wing voices.
Columbia’s films were often derivative of earlier hits (other studios’ and their own), but sometimes the copies were more radical than their models, a trend thrillingly demonstrated by a day of programming devoted to “bad girls.” Girls Under 21 (Max Nosseck, 1940) is a distaff version of Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938): its gang of female delinquents, who idolize one girl’s sister for being a gangster’s moll, incessantly harp on the poverty that drives them to shoplift from cut-rate emporia and dream of landing men who can give them luxuries. They hang out on streets where vendors advertise “Stale coffee—day-old bread,” and in a hideout where the scuffed walls are papered with tabloids, one headline reading, “Girl hobo strangled.” Edward Dmytryk’s startlingly sordid Under Age (1941) echoes the Bette Davis vehicle Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon, 1937), with “hostesses” working at a series of roadside motels where they lure men to be fleeced; the organization recruits girls right out of reformatories and keeps them in line with beatings and killings, until they gang up on their oppressor. Lewis Seiler’s Women’s Prison (1955), like John Cromwell’s better-known Caged (1950), rises above genre expectations to make a searing appeal for humane treatment of the incarcerated—though it offers plenty of juicy pleasures as well in its group portrait of a loyal, wisecracking, sexy sorority rising up against a repressed, sadistic warden (Ida Lupino). In each of these examples, the earlier film was a Warner Bros. title; Columbia’s knock-offs are rougher and more pungent.
When Lupino’s warden demands to know the individuals responsible for an inmates’ strike, she is told, “They all spoke.” In Undercover Man, agents pursuing a powerful mobster are frustrated by witnesses’ refusal to testify; as in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), which shares the same star (Glenn Ford) and screenwriter (Sydney Boehm), those who finally do take the risk of speaking out are women from the margins of society, the invisible, disreputable, and despised.
Top: Women’s Prison (Lewis Seiler, 1955). Bottom: The Killer That Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950).
In 1944, Columbia released two films about the rise of Nazism that went far beyond wartime propaganda to create enduringly vital portraits of moral decay in individuals who embrace fascism. Address Unknown was based on a short story by Katharine Kressman Taylor that caused a sensation when it appeared in 1938. In the tale of two business partners whose friendship is tragically destroyed when one returns from the United States to Germany, it offers an incisive account of the seductions and terrors of Nazism, sweetened with a fiendishly clever and satisfying revenge plot. Director and production designer William Cameron Menzies and cinematographer Rudolph Maté bring the epistolary story to life with visual punch. Stylized, forced-perspective sets evoke a dark-fairy-tale vision of Germany; expressionistic lighting blacks out faces and projects distorted shadows on walls; deep-focus long shots contrast with low-angle closeups, instilling the vividness of a nightmare. Andre de Toth’s None Shall Escape is a shattering portrayal of a Polish village before and during the war; it is prophetically framed as a war crimes trial after the Allied victory, in which the town confronts a German teacher (a chilling Alexander Knox) turned Nazi officer who brutalized his former neighbors. The film was Hollywood’s first to dramatize a massacre of Jews during the Holocaust, drawing on accounts from two recent refugees from occupied Europe. Lester Cole, the credited screenwriter, and the stars Knox and Marsha Hunt would all be blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Questions of social responsibility haunt two postwar portraits of fugitives loose in New York City. The Killer That Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950) was inspired by a 1947 smallpox outbreak successfully contained by a rapid mass vaccination campaign. It traces the spread of the disease through the city’s apartment buildings, hospitals, and playgrounds, deftly balancing the heroism of dedicated public health workers with the macabre grit of an infected woman determined to stay alive long enough to track down the sleazy husband who betrayed her. In The Glass Wall (Maxwell Shane, 1953), the hunt is for a Hungarian displaced person and concentration camp survivor, played by Vittorio Gassman, who jumps ship after being refused entry to the United States. The film has some rough edges and typical B-movie shortcuts, but the lightning romance between the asylum-seeker and a broke, unemployed woman (Gloria Grahame) is a moving encounter of desperate souls, one embittered, the other still hopeful. Both films were shot largely on location, documenting the lights of Times Square, elevated tracks and subways stations, tawdry amusement arcades, burlesque theaters, and jazz clubs (The Glass Wall features the great trombonist Jack Teagarden), and the just-completed United Nations Headquarters, which appears less as an icon of hope to the refugee than as an empty promise.
The Glass Wall is not precisely a film noir—its hero is too innocent, the people he meets too starkly divided between callousness and generosity. But blurring boundaries of style and genre was a specialty of Columbia. The Walking Hills (John Sturges, 1949) not only blends noir with the western, it is also a musical, featuring the film debut of the elegant, velvet-voiced blues and folk singer Josh White. (His film career was cut short when he was blacklisted for his racial-justice activism.) When he performs, the movie stops everything to listen to him. Largely set amid the eerie, shifting sand dunes of Death Valley, it follows a band of treasure hunters nearly all of whom are on the run from the law, with several sharing complicated romantic histories. The plot may be overbaked, but the film runs on atmosphere and a terrific ensemble cast including the alluring Ella Raines and Randolph Scott, honing his laconic, no-nonsense persona, as when he slaps another man and explains, “I ran out of words.”
Gunman’s Walk (Phil Karlson, 1958).
Among the westerns included in the retrospective, the revelation was Phil Karlson’s Gunman’s Walk (1958), shown in a brand-new digital restoration from Sony that recaptures from a faded color print the film’s raking golden light and muted autumnal shades. There are echoes of Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) in the tortured father-son and fraternal conflicts, and of Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (1957) in the humane rejection of violence (both are also Columbia films); to these it adds a scathing critique of racism and western machismo.
Many westerns extoll the civilizing of the frontier, but few reserve less elegiac or romantic sentiment for the old ways of the Wild West. Lee Hackett (Van Heflin) is a ranch-owner and local legend who believes that because “the Hacketts got here before the law,” they are above it. He has raised his son Ed (Tab Hunter, relishing the chance to shed his teen-idol image) to be just like him, but his own ego won’t let him cede ground to the next generation. He competes with his son at shooting and riding, until he is finally forced to see in Ed’s violent sociopathy a warped mirror of his own arrogance, and to acknowledge the strength in his gentle son Davey (James Darren), who defies him by falling in love with a half-Sioux woman (played by white actress Kathryn Grant). Karlson gives the story both sweep and intimacy, fusing the two in a pair of majestic crane shots that capture the patriarch’s climactic agony. The camera rises up from the earth as though to grant space for his vulnerability, transfiguring his breakdown into a moral breakthrough.
The 1950s were a golden age for Columbia, but the big prestige films of the decade—adapted from award-winning literary properties, boasting major stars, and often achieved through partnerships with independent producers—were outliers in the studio’s tradition of thrifty economy. More in keeping with it were two austere, coolly minimalist crime movies from director Irving Lerner, Murder by Contract (1958) and City of Fear (1959), and the cycle of five lean, tersely poetic westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and produced by star Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown’s company, Ranown. These low-budget genre films were deeply influential for their spare grace, a world away from the fast-paced, densely packed style of the 1930s.
Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957).
Like Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959) and The Walking Hills, Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957) is about a small band traveling through the desert, their personal conflicts pushed to deadly extremes by isolation and danger. The bare outlines of the story are conventional: it’s a World War II yarn about the British fighting Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the deserts of Libya (filmed partly on location), based around the old chestnut about two men in love with the same woman who are sent off on a mission together. But Ray suffuses the film with his personal concerns, his distrust of authority and obsession with integrity versus phoniness. On its release, Bitter Victory was a critical and box office flop, chopped down by producers and released as a second feature; only the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma championed it.
If Ray hoped that working overseas would give him more freedom he was mistaken; producer Paul Graetz imposed casting decisions that changed the tenor of the story, but served the film in the end. Curd Jurgens’s limitations as an actor become the limitations of his stiff, hollow martinet Major Brand; Richard Burton (whom Ray originally wanted to play Brand), is lambent as the doomed rebel hero Captain Leith. He glows with some private knowledge, a skeptical clarity of vision, and he aims this luminous intensity at Brand so pitilessly that one feels sorry for the rigid “stuffed uniform” exposed in his cowardice and jealousy. Ray used the black-and-white CinemaScope screen not to convey the vastness of the desert but to suffocate us with a sense of hopelessness, the sand dunes choking off the horizon, faces looming in huge, asymmetrical compositions. In this emptiness, there is nothing but men watching and judging one another as they face agonizing tests of courage; as James Harvey has written, the film is all about “being trapped in the gazes of others,” which makes it less a movie about war than a movie about movies.1
Feasting on Columbia films for a week was a tonic. They carry the torch for an honest, stripped-down approach that feels all but lost today, fueled by confidence about what really moves us in movies: not spectacle but a word, a look, a gesture, a story. And when these films return to screens, that torch still burns bright.
- James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties (Knopf, 2001). ↩