COOL FLICKS: Supernatural (1933)

The "Carole-Tennial (+3)" blogathon celebrating the 103rd birthday of Carole Lombard started October 6 and today is the last day. Leave it to me to get my contribution in under the wire. Anyone interested in furthering their knowledge of this fine actress and her brief two decades in movies should go to the Carole & Co. blog for wide selection of reviews of her films, impressions about the actress and her life, and other writings and musings.

I chose to watch her little known supernatural thriller aptly called Supernatural. While elsewhere on the internet the film has been dismissed and in some cases reviled I found it an intriguing and odd film. Of course it helps if you're an avid fan of this entire genre as well as someone who enjoys watching the acting styles of the early movies. On the whole it's a mixed bag of a movie but with a striking production design and atmospheric camera work that brings to mind a phrase coined for the musical version of Lombard's well known 20th Century. When that movie was turned into a stage production one critic jibed: "It’s ominous when an audience leaves the musical whistling the scenery." Similarly with Supernatural the sets, the cinematography and the overall look of the production are more interesting than the story or the acting.

The story is an unusual blend of science fiction, ghost story and crime film.  The opening with its three epigraphs emblazoned across the screen is spooky lettering promises us a story dealing with the dead. The delivering warnings taken from three different religious texts (Christian, Asian and Islam) about the dangers of dealing with the dead, of opening graves and "casting out unclean spirits." This is followed by a melodramatic montage composed of newspaper snippets and voice-overs informing us of the impending execution of Ruth Rogen (histrionic Vivienne Osborne), a murderess who "killed three of her lovers in a wild orgy." Shortly thereafter we're in the office of the prison warden who is in conference with Dr. Houston (H.B. Warner), a psychologist with interest in the psychic world. Houston convinces the warden to donate Rogen's body to science - specifically Houston's own experiments. He has a theory about evil being transferred from a soul at the point of death. Houston points out that there often are crime waves committed just after a criminal is executed. He believes that these imitators have been possessed by the spirit of the executed criminal. He goes on to explain his experiments with "nitrogenic rays - ultraviolet rays given off by the body" and wants to capture Ruth's evil personality to prevent it causing more harm. The Warden responds, "Hmm. Seems kind of creepy when you think of it." Sadly, this is the level of the scriptwriting throughout the movie.

Then we get to know Paul Bavian (Allan Dinehart in an unctuous performance) a phoney spiritualist who combs the newspapers looking for wealthy individuals who have recently suffered a death in the family. He preys on these wealthy people putting on his fake spook shows and draining them of their hefty bank accounts. His latest mark is Roma Courtney (Lombard), recent heir to her dead millionaire brother's fortune. Bavian has broken into the Courtney home, found where her brother's body was being kept for the wake, and made a death mask of his face for use in a fraudulent seance later in the movie. Bavian we learn was also acquainted with Rogen and was responsible for turning her into the police.

The story thus connects Ruth with Bavian who is connected to Roma. Anyone familiar with these old fashioned movies can tell exactly what is going to happen when Ruth consents to donating her body to science with dreams of reaching out from beyond the grave and carrying out a cruel vengeance. It is only a matter of time before Roma, who just happens to be a patient of Dr Houston, visits him interrupting him in his outrageous experiment just at the crucial moment.

The bulk of the movie is run-of-the-mill. Padded with sentimental scenes of Roma longing for her dead brother, lame comic relief from the gluttonous family lawyer, expository speeches that set up the supernatural elements, and the usual close-ups of newspaper articles filling in other story elements it doesn't seem like it will amount to much of anything. Hackneyed writing doesn't help matters much either. The performances -- especially Lombard who is given nothing much to do but stroll around despondently for the first half -- are mostly lackluster. Only Dinehart and Beryl Mercer as a drunken blackmailing busybody of a landlady offer anything remotely interesting. It is only when Roma visits Dr. Houston's plush penthouse equipped with glass walled laboratory and the transferal of Ruth's spirit to Roma's body takes place that the movie finally picks up.

Publicity still with Randolph Scott and Lombard for Supernatural

Paul Bavian begins to realize that Roma and Ruth have a lot in common

Lombard now having to convey the possession of a hysterical killer bent on murderous revenge shows some of her considerable acting talent here. Her bland portrayal of the doe-eyed, depressed and drippy Roma gives way to a fast talking, mean spirited vamp. The camera zooms in on close-ups of her malevolent facial expressions giving Lombard a chance to display her skill in the raised one eyebrow trick. Her scenes with Dinehart in Ruth's apartment are the best in an otherwise mediocre movie.

Bavian succumbs to the deadly charms of the possessed Roma

When the script dispenses with dialog and relies solely on the camera and the actor's faces to tell the story the movie is also at its eerie best. There is a scene following the blackmailing landlady's murder that is a good example. Bavian kills without thinking and knows that in fifteen minutes Roma and her boyfriend will be stopping by for a seance. He looks out and watches the speeding trolley cars passing by on the tracks below his hovel of an apartment. We hear nothing but the sound of the train wheels clacking on the rails as rain continues to fall steadily. A close-up of the train's sparking wheels is intercut with Bavian's leering face. He looks over his shoulder back to the room where the body lies on the couch. The scene fades out and fades back in on the clock showing a passage of fifteen minutes. the body of the landlady is nowhere in sight but we know exactly what Bavian did with it.

This is certainly is not among the best of Lombard's films, but Supernatural is not the stinker that most people make it out to be. Fans of old time movies will find a few very well done scenes to make it worth your while should be lucky enough to find a copy. The movie still is out there in VHS video format and you can probably find a used copy. A professional DVD, however, does not exist. The only DVD versions are available from a few independent online sellers. I got mine from someone who calls himself Movie Detective. It's one of the better homemade DVDs I've purchased and the print quality is exceptional - probably made from the old MCA VHS videotape. Supernatural is a curiosity for sure. For fans of these old thrillers with science fiction and supernatural elements I would say it's worth a look. Just don't expect a masterpiece.

FIRST BOOKS: In Search of Mercy - Michael Ayoob

When I learned that the winner of "Best First Novel" at this year's Shamus Awards was very much an atypical private eye novel I was a little more than intrigued. Although the dust jacket for the first edition is emblazoned with a badge that signifies In Search of Mercy as also winning the Best First Private Eye Novel in a competition sponsored by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur books, the book is not truly a private eye novel. It is more accurately labeled in its subtitle as "a mystery." And that subtitle has multiple meanings to be addressed later. True, the protagonist is offered money to do some investigative work (qualifying for the private eye genre as outlined by the Shamus Awards), but he's a former high school hockey star now working in a produce distributor's warehouse in Pittsburgh. A far cry from that cramped office on Sutter Street with dingy venetian blinds and Spade & Archer on the front door. There's a missing person, too, like three quarters of the Golden Age books of its type, but there's no murder. What? No murder? Is it possible to have a private eye novel without a real private eye and no murder? I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is indeed possible. And the book works.

Dexter Bolzjak may be young (some simple math tells me he's about 24 though it's not actually stated) but he's had more than his fair share of troubles and he's saddled with a horrid traumatic incident that continues to haunt him eight years after it happened. Where most private eyes are former alcoholics, divorced, war vets, or burned out cops, Dexter has an abusive abduction that fairly ruined him. He continues to have flashbacks and dizzy spells throughout the story. Only bits and pieces are related to us, but rest assured the nightmare he endured will be described in full detail in a harrowing scene late in the book. He refuses professional therapy. He says it's for pussies and -- my one real issue with the book -- faggots.

Faggot is the favorite slur among the characters in this book. Both men and women use it with with relish to emasculate and insult Dexter. Dexter himself uses it to beat himself up and insult his best friend. Ayoob's book is set in 2001 yet I felt like I was back in the locker room in my high school in the 1970s. Is that word really thrown around so much these days? Emasculation, oppression and abuse, what it means to be a real man are all at the heart of the story. I tried to be forgiving and to see the use of that word in the context of this dark and dirty story, but each time someone used that insult I couldn't help but wince.  I think I have my own traumas I'm still dealing with as Dexter does throughout this engrossing story.

To overcome his status as a "pussy" and finally shed his tarnished reputation as the failed hockey star who let everyone down eight years ago Dexter is given an unusual chance to prove himself worthy. Lou Kashon, the local crazy coot, hires Dexter to find his lost love. She happens to be the former movie star and film noir goddess Mercy Carnahan and no one knows if she is still alive. After becoming a sensation in the late 1940s and early 1950s she abandoned film, attempted a stage career and then suddenly and mysteriously on the opening night of her stage debut, The Crimson Kiss, renounced her life as an entertainer and disappeared. She has never been seen since. Lou wants Dexter to find her and offers him a drawer full of cash in excess of $100,000 as his reward. Dexter takes up the double duty of both discovering Lou's secret reason for needing to find Mercy and the mystery of her disappearance.

There is a lot going on in this book. It's a coming of age story and a thriller, a detective novel and a movie lover's trivia book. Ayoob uses the tropes of the traditional private eye novel to explore the idea of masculinity, failure and success, family secrets and family bonds.  It's awfully ambitious and downright impressive.

One of the most surprising scenes comes when Dexter tracks down the owner of a website devoted to the memory of Mercy Carnahan.  Prior to this scene the book is a dark noir style paying homage to the Gold Medal and Lion Library paperbacks writers of the 1950s. Dexter enters the house and suddenly he and the reader are transported into a bizarre world that echoes the weird menace stories that filled the pages of pulps magazines like Dime Detective. Deviant sex, plastic surgery experiments, and a jaw dropping shocker right off the stage of the old Grand Guignol. This portion of the book shows Ayoob's skill in creating horror but it was just too strange and very jarring in a book that seems to be more gritty realism than sensationalistic dark fantasy.

Elsewhere on the internet there are some interesting interviews from local Pittsburgh TV and radio stations in which Ayoob talks freely about his book.  I learned from one of those interviews that after reading a draft of In Search of Mercy a friend suggested that Jim Thompson must be Ayoob's favorite writer. Ayoob had never heard of him, but he admits that he tracked down a book called The Killer Inside Me and was completely entranced.  Anyone who is familiar with that book will know that Ayoob certainly picked the most chilling of all of Thompson's dark crime novels. He then dove right into the rest of Thompson's work and says that it must've influenced him a bit when rewriting his own book.

Ayoob sadly has no literary representation and his winning the contest landed him only a one book contract.  Let us hope some wise and prescient agent sees the promise of a new writer in this startlingly original and fascinating novel.  I'd read a second book, a third, and more from this fresh new voice.  The future of the private eye novel depends on young writers like Michael Ayoob.  I eagerly look forward to more from him.