Danger Lights - 1930 - National Train Day

 

“Danger Lights” (1930) is an offbeat amalgam of an Arthurian love triangle and a nuts-and-bolts industrial film.  Never before, or again, I suppose, has a gritty steam locomotive or grimy rail yard lit up the silver screen with such erotic passion. 

This Saturday, May 11, 2013, marks Amtrak's National Train Day here in the U.S., and this is our annual tribute to the iron horse in the movies.

To be sure, the train is the star in this show, but it’s supporting players, mere mortals, round out the cast nicely.  Louis Wolheim plays the manager of a Midwest train yard, a great bear of a man who barks orders, beats up hoboes, but with a gentle side he shows to those in trouble.  Unless they’re hoboes.

Robert Armstrong, who we love in “King Kong” (1933) here,and I think last saw in “Dive Bomber” (1941), plays a smart-aleck ex-engineer down on his luck, currently riding the rails with the hoboes.  He’s a feisty troublemaker, but Mr. Wolheim, after punching Mr. Armstrong’s lights out, gives him a job in these early Depression days, and puts him on the road to redemption.  And romance with his girl.

Wolheim’s girl is the much younger Jean Arthur, fresh-faced and lovely as the doting daughter of a railroad man who can no longer work because of an injury.  Louis Wolheim took them in and looked after them when Jean was a growing girl, and now that she’s grown, he intends to marry her.  Until Robert Armstrong complicates matters.

Frank Sheridan is Jean’s da, who is more in love with his benefactor Wolheim than is shy and diffident Jean.  Mr. Sheridan praises Wolheim to the skies, constantly hammers into Jean what they owe to him, and practically prostitutes his daughter for the sake of paying an old debt.

Hugh Herbert has a small but memorable role as a hobo with delusions of grandeur.

We start the movie with a shot of the engine face-on, barreling towards us.  Many shots have us placed on top of the locomotive or on the coal car facing forward, looking over the locomotive to the track ahead of us as if we are riding the shoulders of a great beast.  We enjoy the sensation of movement in this film, the thrill of a fast ride, over narrow trestles placed across deep river gorges, snaking around hillsides and cutting through winding valleys.  It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s poem, I like to see it lap the miles:

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.

The movie was shot on location in the upper Midwest, much of it at Miles City, Montana, and also in Chicago.

Louis Wolheim was about 50 when this film was released (he died the following year), and was known for his beat-up mug that got bashed in when he played college football.  The story has it that Lionel Barrymore helped him out and advised him to try theater, that his ugly mug—or rather, his face would be his fortune, as they say.  He was a success on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape among other hits, and when Hollywood called, this urbane, multilingual former college math teacher made a career of playing Neanderthal palookas.

It’s an interesting aspect of old movies that the real age of the actors is often ignored, as it is in the case of Jean Arthur, who here plays a much younger woman.  In real life, she was 29 years old with already probably 50 or 60 silent films under her belt.  Robert Armstrong is 40 in real life, hardly the up-and-coming hotshot youth he’s playing.  However, Wolheim’s age, in real life 21 years older than Jean, is brought to our attention and is used truthfully and most poignantly in scenes where we see her discomfort at being pressured into a love match with man to whom she is very grateful, but does not love.

Jean Arthur, far from the sassy roles that would be her trademark in the coming decade, here delicately plays a troubled woman caught in painful dilemma.  She is passive, but no less gutsy for being quiet about it, and she grabs our attention for her very stillness in scenes where Wolheim is blustering, Armstrong is chewing the scenery, and Sheridan is making with the silent movie techniques of agony expressed in a claw-like hand clench.  She is the still waters running deep.

Wolheim’s character is presented to us in ways that keep us off balance.  First, he is a work-obsessed tyrant in the rail yard, “We got to keep the trains moving.  That’s our religion.”  He clobbers people who are slow to do what he tells them.  We may grow tired of Papa Sheridan’s constant praising Wolheim to Herculean status, particularly as we see Jean beaten down by that praise, flinching with guilt because she doesn’t love him.  Wolheim’s tenderness comes out when comforting a fellow railroad man whose wife has just died.  It’s a fine scene, and though we may suffer for Jean, we cannot deny that Wolheim is a good man.  A man everyone looks up to, but whose own love for Jean, though certainly genuine, is expressed with all the passion of patting a dog on the head. 

But Wolheim unwittingly keeps putting Robert Armstrong and Jean Arthur together.  He sends Jean down to the roundhouse with a message for Armstrong, where she meets him for the first time.  A lovely shot where Armstrong watches her walk away, delicately stepping across tracks, from the darkness of the roundhouse to the light-filled rail yard. 

Wolheim invites Armstrong to dinner at the house he shares with Jean and her father, and there is a meet cute with Jean bringing the squalling Armstrong a towel when he has soap in his eyes.  Wolheim is unable to take Jean to a company picnic, so he directs Armstrong to do it.  Finally, at the house party where he announces his upcoming wedding to Jean (Jean looks surprised and slightly sick), Wolheim pushes Armstrong to dance with her.

Robert Armstrong and Jean Arthur begin to fall for each other, but knowing the arrangement with Wolheim, each is careful not to express their love, both feel guilty, both owing something to Wolheim, and both miserable.

That the railroad is part of their forbidden courtship, used as a kind of metaphor to illustrate their passion, is fascinating.  At the company picnic, a nighttime affair, Jean and Armstrong watch breathlessly, awed, in the crowd as two locomotives have a kind of tug of war demonstration to see which is the more powerful.  Plumes of steam huff from the engines and sparks light up the night.

When he walks her home, they take a route through the countryside that brings them across a narrow train trestle perched high above a gorge.  The breeze billows her dress as they walk, stepping gingerly over the railroad ties.  It is a leisurely, adventuresome stroll, testing each other’s company.  Then, horror at a moment’s notice, they hear an approaching train whistle and see a light piercing the tunnel ahead of them.  Armstrong pulls Jean to the side where there is a outcropping platform for just such emergencies.  The train barrels past them, inches away, and the wake of night air whips Jean’s dress and her hair.  Mr. Armstrong’s hair stays nicely put, but then that is what a gallon of Brilliantine will do.

The power, the rumble of the train makes the trestle shake beneath their feet, and they suddenly, passionately kiss.  Such is the orgasmic excitement when a speeding train passes within 18 inches of you.  So it would seem.

When the train has passed and all is quiet, Armstrong pulls away from her and walks quickly away, leaving her there, bewildered and breathless.  We see he feels like a heel.

These scenes, by the way, are all location shooting.  The realism is stunning in an era where we are used to seeing more storybook-type controlled environments.

Another great romantic train shot is when Armstrong, at the controls of a train, glances out the window.  We see from our vantage point on the roof of the locomotive, that it slides by a few old houses built near the tracks.  (As Emily Dickinson might say: "And, supercilious, peer in shanties by the sides of roads...")  One is the house where Jean and her father live.  Next, we are inside the house, and Jean is silhouetted against the open windows facing the track.  Again, the train creates a breeze, even from this distance, sifts through her hair and, quietly captivated, she watches the train slide by.  Armstrong blows his whistle, like a mating call.

 

By the way, he’s pulling a dynamometer car, which is a maintenance car used for measuring a locomotive’s power and speed, etc., and it’s been noted on IMDb and Wikipedia that this is likely the only film in existence of a dynamometer car  for a steam locomotive of this era.

If you’re not as thrilled by that as I am, I don’t want to talk to you.

Mr. Armstrong and Miss Arthur eventually get around to spilling their guts and telling each other how much in love they are, but in the most miserable and guilty fashion.  (They are both half-lying across her bed when this scene takes place, a little pre-Code teasing.)

 

When a track washout pulls Wolheim away from their engagement party, Armstrong and Jean decide to run away.

It’s raining, pouring, like a Capra movie (only the director here is George B. Seitz and I love how beautifully he films this movie).  Jean and Armstrong, pummeled by the torrent, trudge along the tracks (apparently it never occurs to them to walk on a sidewalk), their raincoats shiny in the warning lights along the track.  Danger Lights.

Armstrong gets his foot caught in a rail switch, and wouldn’t you know it?  A train is coming.

There’s a few frantic moments, and then Wolheim catches up to them.  Jean’s da discovered their hanky-panky and squeals to Wolheim, who has arrived with the intention of killing Armstrong.  No need of course, the oncoming train will do that in a matter of moments.

But as we said previously, Wolheim is really a good guy underneath, and he wrestles Armstrong out of the way in time, only to be hit by the train himself.  Or rather, the dummy dressed to look like him is graphically plowed over.

If you’re not squeamish about that, then you’re surely not squeamish about spoilers.  It’s a little late for that anyway.

However, I’ll spare you the ending, except to say that it involves a high-speed mission of mercy to get Wolheim to the medical specialists in Chicago in time.  Armstrong drives the train, and we get a breakneck ride ourselves.  It’s a real treat to find ourselves tearing all over the Milwaukee Road until we at last pull into the yard at Chicago, and even get a few nice interior shots of Union Station.

I’ve been to Union Station in Chicago.  It’s swell.

It you want to see how the operation turns out, “Danger Lights” is now in the public domain and offered here as a free download on the InternetArchive website.

Let me end with a reminder that train travel is the most economic and environmentally friendly way to move people across this great nation of ours.  Make your next trip by train.  Maybe Robert Armstrong will be at the controls.

For more information on National Train Day, have a look at this website.

 

 

***

 

I'll be speaking at the Chicopee Historical Society, meeting at the Chicopee Public Library, Chicopee, Massachusetts on Thursday, May 16th with a PowerPoint presentation about topics from my recently published States of Mind: New England. That book will be available for sale at this event.  Also available in paperback here from CreateSpace.

 

 

Dive Bomber - 1941

“Dive Bomber” (1941) is a pretty, pretty movie.

The dainty mix of its color schemes and the rather feminine sensibility of its Technicolor palette is a strange but pleasing contrast to the macho world of naval pilots putting themselves in great danger.

So, too, is the interesting, although I’m sure coincidental use, of cigarette smoking as a male bonding ritual. Usually in classic films we’ve come to view the sharing of cigarettes, the dramatic pause in the middle of dialogue to light up, the smoke that curls from one’s lips and over the shoulders of one’s partner as a kind of foreplay between a romantic couple. Here, it’s all part of being one of the guys. It shows comradeship, good will, a "safe" way to demonstrate (or mask) deeper emotions.  Ultimately, a cigarette case, as trophy and mark of identity becomes heartfelt tribute.

And this is such a pretty, pretty movie.

It's also going to be a long post.  Please keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.

This is a buddy picture, but the pairing of buddies changes like partners in a square dance throughout the film. First we have Fred MacMurray, Louis Jean Heydt, and Regis Toomey as three veteran naval fliers who are so skilled that the Navy sometimes sends them on promotional tours such as at the famous Akron air speed races.  They are known as the three top hats. At the very beginning of the movie we start our male bonding with cigarettes as the three of them take out their smokes from identical gold cigarette cases with a graphic of a black top hat on them. They are stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii and their training squadron has black top hats painted on the fuselage of their airplanes.

According to the AFI website the movie was filmed between March and May of 1941. The United States would not enter World War II until the end of that year, but the war was already a year and a half old. There are only a couple of small references to the war raging in the rest of the world, but there is still that underlying tension to the shenanigans of the peacetime pilots with their devil-may-care attitude towards war and women and the dangers of flying.

Of course, all this is more deeply sensed today than it was by audiences in 1941. Many Americans back then felt it was likely we would go to war, but did not know when. We know now what, when, where, and how awful it was, and that it began for us only three months after this movie premiered in August 1941.

Much like our look here in this previous post at “Navy Blues” (1941), which shows an even more lighthearted frolicking among gunnery trainees, yet there is still a sense of foreboding for us.

Part of what gives “Dive Bomber” an edge over other films of this sort, is the very realistic and at times quite magnificent aerial photography shot in cooperation with the U.S. Navy. The actual ships we see are the USS Enterprise and the USS Saratoga. These were two of only three aircraft carriers that survived the war. The Enterprise would be the highest decorated US ship in WWII, earning 20 battle stars. It was steaming from Midway to Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked.

We see shots of Honolulu and of the naval air base at San Diego. There is official footage, all in color, of planes landing on the aircraft carrier deck and the deck crew guiding them in. Some of this provides background in later rear-screen projection shots.

The film begins with a military review, planes flying in formation with Busby Berkeley-like precision. This film was directed by Michael Curtiz. It is shot beautifully. The flying sequences are leisurely and long, nothing is rushed. Perhaps the omnipresent drone of the plane engines might irritate you after awhile, but it’s a visually pleasing film. Planes with bright yellow wings and shiny fuselages, and many of them actually biplanes. They look like those model airplanes you might remember from childhood from Revell kits. They look so much like shiny toys.  (Do kids still make plastic model kits, or was that a Boomer thing?)

Airplanes with yellow wings, floating in an azure sky, the rich chocolate brown bomber jackets, and the myriad of Easter egg pastels that will parade later on in civilian dress…one pretty movie.

In this opening flyover, Louis Jean Heydt’s plane crashes. First on the ground to come to his aid is Navy doctor Errol Flynn, who may be the prettiest thing in this movie. Unlike some of his other swashbuckling roles, where not only is Flynn’s physical prowess displayed but he gets to exhibit a dashing and extroverted personality, here he is an earnest and humble man, passionate only about research into the problem of high altitude sickness and pilots’ blackouts. He takes the brunt of criticism from the men in the ranks, and his superiors in the lab, and we might feel sorry for him for most of the movie.

Flynn muses to his assistant, and everybody’s habitual sidekick, Allen Jenkins, “We represent the uncertainty of life for those pilots. No wonder they don’t love us.”

When he reaches Mr. Heydt, he gets him into an ambulance and, like a good doctor, offers him a cigarette. When Heydt dies on the operating table Mr. MacMurray and Mr. Toomey blame Errol, and they spend the rest of the movie insulting him.

They are all transferred to the naval air base in San Diego, where Toomey and MacMurray are assigned the job of teaching Flynn to fly. More harassment. Add to this Ralph Bellamy, who plays a curmudgeonly research physician. Flynn becomes his assistant and receives his sarcasm, which he returns in kind.

They train in pretty yellow biplanes, the engines of which have to be hand cranked. Hard to believe we’re going to go up against Messerschmitts and Japanese “zeros” pretty soon isn’t it?

Ralph Bellamy is especially good in his role. A commanding presence, he seems genuine and mature where some of the other men in their roles merely seem cocksure. Eventually Flynn and Bellamy become allies and we know this because they share a cigarette together. One offers a match, the other cups his hands around the other’s hand to receive the flame.

Some of the other pilot trainees and grounds crewmen you may spot in this movie, although I admit I didn’t, are DeWolf Hopper, and Alan Hale, Jr. - the future skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”, and Creighton Hale.  Herbert Anderson has a few lines, he later went on to a featured role opposite the wonderful Ann Sheridan in the above-mentioned “Navy Blues.”

Charles B. Smith who we might remember from “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) in this previous post here plays a bellboy.

Another young man who had made a handful of B movies would be enjoying a small role in this film, his first major movie, was Craig Stevens. Look at this shot of him. Isn’t he pretty?

When he first arrives as a civilian, he and Errol Flynn have a minor fender-bender car accident that evolves into a fistfight. Later on in the film Stevens becomes one of the handful of guinea pigs for the experiments conducted by Ralph Bellamy and Mr. Flynn. Apparently, according to IMDb, so did Gig Young, but I missed him.

Likewise another newcomer to the Warner Brothers studio, who had made a handful of walk-ons in B movies, would be enjoying her first featured role in a major movie was Alexis Smith. Miss Smith and Mr. Stevens had no scenes together in this movie -- the movie was actually completely filmed when the producers decided they needed a girl. Her scenes were added afterwards.  They also each appeared in bit parts in "Affectionately Yours" early that year.  "Dive Bomber" was huge leap up to the big leagues for Smith and Stevens.  After this movie was shot, they were paired in another B movie (back to the minors) called “Steel Against the Sky” (1941) with Lloyd Nolan, but this time in starring roles and playing characters who fell in love.  Third time's the charm, so to speak. They became engaged a year later, and were married from 1944 until her death in 1993.

One might add that Alexis Smith is also, like the yellow airplanes, and the bomber jackets, and Errol Flynn, and Craig Stevens, very pretty. I was struck by these Technicolor shots of her in her suit and hat at a house party, because they look very much like some old Kodachrome slides a shutterbug uncle of mine took during the war. We sometimes muse on the outrageous outfits of actresses in classic films, but here she looks very much like several of my female relatives of that era.  She could be my mother. (I really like the house party scene.  It's quite brief, not necessary to the plot, but there's something so in-the-moment about it, so 1941.  There is a sense of well, here we all are, but where are we going now?)

In this shot, her first close-up in the big leagues, she is immediately thrust into the role of the sophisticate, a part she would play for the rest of her life.  In reality, she is just a girl of 19. That jug-eared bellboy is older than she is.

It was also her first romantic pairing of four with Errol Flynn, some 12 years her senior. She caused a minor stir in the press for refusing to kiss Errol in this movie.  The story made the rounds, but here it is from The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington) , April 25, 1942:

"...she was supposed to jump up from a table, rush forward joyously and buss Mr. Flynn's astonished mouth.

"'That won't do at all.' she told the director, 'It's not in character.'  And she argued so convincingly, the scene was cut."  This from a girl who refused to start her contract at Warners until she completed her last college course.  And would not allow the studio to change her unusual first name and all-too-common last name.  This girl was trouble in an upsweep hairdo.

Here’s that previous post on the tall girl.  Again.

Another character actor fun to see is Robert Armstrong. You will remember him from these previous posts of “The Most Dangerous Game” (1932), and “King Kong” (1933). The rascal of the 1930s here is the more knowing and somewhat more tired middle-aged man. He plays an engineer whose job is to help redesign and refit aircraft to match the specifications that are the result of Ralph Bellamy’s research. Robert Armstrong and Ralph Bellamy may not be terribly pretty like just about everybody else, but it’s great to see him.

I have to mention when all the pilots graduate in a ceremony at San Diego, I wondered why the band played “Semper Paratus”, which is the Coast Guard march, not the Navy’s?

Eventually Fred MacMurray and Regis Toomey help out in the experiments to solve the problem of blackouts, partly as a tribute to their deceased friend. A crisis arises when Regis Toomey is found to have pilot fatigue. Ralph Bellamy and Errol Flynn ground him. Toomey is not happy about this, and quits the Navy. He joins the Royal Air Force, and while there are small references to the big job going on in Europe, the main reason for his joining the RAF is for the money. He cannot afford to be grounded, and there’s a great deal to be made in ferrying planes across the Atlantic from Canada to Great Britain.

Toomey visits the men, landing in San Diego in a British fighter plane (I wonder how likely this is?). The other men tease and congratulate him over his new blue uniform, with his rakish overseas cap (I believe the Brits and Canadians called it a "wedge cap"), and silk scarf tied in a dashing Ascot.  Someone calls to him “Aren’t you pretty?”

He is. He is very pretty. But, he’s still got pilot fatigue even though he’s trying to hide it, and when he leaves to fly his British plane to Canada, he crashes. MacMurray, in a moving scene - he looks as though he has been crying - volunteers as a guinea pig for Bellamy’s tests. We get to watch what seem to be very primitive experiments, but no less frightening because of their apparent technological crudeness.

The men are put in a chamber that will replicate the low pressure of high altitude and the lack of oxygen. Errol Flynn listens to their heartbeats. Craig Stevens, suffering oxygen deprivation, actually looks as if his skin turns slightly bluish. It is an amazing color in this Technicolor film, though I must say it is not pretty.

Some electronic gadget with a neon blinking sign that looks like it belongs in Frankenstein’s lab illustrates their irregular heartbeats. There is no EKG. They all receive x-rays of their knees and elbows to look for gas bubbles in the joints, open x-rays with no protection against radiation to anyone around them.

They still haven’t found the problem of how to fly very high and not suffer illness. The men and the doctors are severely stressed.

To break up the leaden atmosphere -- and the conflict in the script which by nature does not involve a lot of physical action even if it does involve physical daring do -- we have a few comedy relief moments to lighten up the plot. Allen Jenkins’ wife, played by Dennie Moore, keeps showing up for her allotment checks and he keeps trying to avoid her, aided by double-talking Cliff Nazarro. MacMurray and Flynn take some time to socialize, and we see that in these pre-war days servicemen are allowed to wear civilian clothing off base.

Though many civilians at this time might have privately felt or wondered if time was running out for them, peacetime that is, still this scene seems to illustrate that the spring of 1941 was a leisurely respite, a calm before the storm. Yellow flowers, a pink dress. A nightclub with mauve walls, and the girl singer Jane Randolph singing the new hit, “What’s New”, a lazy, romantic song of wistful parting that somehow does not foreshadow all the partings that would come in the months ahead.

Look at the outfits of the ladies, muted peach and blues, the turquoise, lime green, cream-colored shirts.  You could show this as an Easter movie if there weren't so many gol-darned plane crashes.  Pretty.

MacMurray and Flynn ignore their dates Alexis Smith and Ann Doran. They are instead preoccupied with a new idea for a pressurized suit to wear in an airplane, something like what a deep-sea diver would wear. They draw plans on the tablecloth. They smoke.

In a way it reminds me of the movie “Apollo 13” (1995) where the crisis of the space capsule being unable to return to earth must be solved by the men on the ground with very rudimentary methods. All solutions begin in the human mind.

And by drawing on the tablecloth. And playing with Alexis’ lipstick.

Errol and Fred are really excited about the lipstick screw function. More male bonding. Not usually done over lipstick, but I like to think I’m open-minded.

The lipstick is a very pretty shade of red.

Both Flynn and MacMurray take to the air in some very scary dive sequences. Fred MacMurray eventually succumbs to pilot fatigue and he is grounded. He is consoled in what is one of the few foreshadowing moments of our involvement in the war, “Kind of tough to be yanked out of a ring when the main event may be about to start.”

But, one more test must be performed before their invention can be approved. MacMurray takes it on himself to fly the test.

MacMurray performs his test successfully, but crash lands and is killed. (Yeah, spoiler-schmoiler.) In the final scene we see Errol Flynn flying off to join a squadron with the Pacific Fleet. We know he is going to Pearl Harbor, and we know what will happen there. It is with poignancy and sadness that we realize he does not.

In tribute to his pal, he drops MacMurray’s gold cigarette case, which he retrieved from the crash, into the ocean, tossing it out of the cockpit of his airplane.

The last shot of the squadron flying towards the rays of the sun is brilliant enough to make you want to shield your own eyes.

Who says macho can’t be pretty?