Revisiting By-Gone Films

(and topics practically related)

Titanic 1943/German mit English Sub-titles
by M. L. Klein

This early version of the great sea disaster has been touted in certain circles as the best movie ever filmed on the subject.  This is not true, at all. Most of the film we are wearied by German revisionism which portrays the English voyagers as cads and fools and finally victims of their own wretched excess. That is, except for heroic ship officer ‘Petersen’ who knew, practically from the start, that the White Star Line’s greatest vessel was doomed to hit an iceberg as a direct result of British ambitions in the Atlantic and their fiendish design to cross the ocean and then go back again. Such audacity paled German ambitions on land.
It’s fascinating how little difference there is between everyday German conversation and the gusto employed by this film’s condemnation of the British. There’s something about the bluster of the Germanic language, whatever the subject may be, that positions the listener as adversary.
This is true of Japanese bluster, too, and is the reason they were the bad guys in WWII. The film was rolling nicely & so was the boat when director Herbert Selpin was marched off by the Gestapo during production and brought before Goebbels to explain his objections to certain badly-behaved naval consultants on the set who consulted much less than they molested female cast members, mainly young Jewish girls on a lark from their internment camps as extras. Selpin made the mistake of thinking Goebbels was wanting of candid reports about the problems and voiced his opinions freely. It didn’t help matters that Goebbels did not much care for the tone of Selpin’s script. Selpin was found completely dead in a jail cell the next morning. In spite of hasty rewrites by the next director, who we can guess had difficulty holding pen steady to paper, the movie was banned by German censors for its scenes of panic and terror. It is a little known fact that panic and terror was not allowed during the Third Reich. It was preferred everyone remain calm while the Fatherland smashed Europe to smithereens for the second time, some twenty years after smashing it to smithereens the first time. But, the Germans are nothing if not practical, so the four million Reichmark film was not let go to waste after due thought; the consensus being it was the duty of the Nazi party to let Germany and, indeed, the world know what vicious gutter rats the English really were. At the end titles the film-makers captioned the following parting shot across the bow:
“The Deaths of 1,500 people remain unatoned; an eternal condemnation of England’s quest for profit”.
It is a small and strange solace to think that those who did not survive the RMS Titanic were, at least, spared this film.

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THE YOUNG LIONS – 1958

by M.L. Klein

The Young Lions should not be viewed because you heard it was a great wartime drama based on a great wartime novel.
Watch it, if you must, because the film does have some merits as a wartime farce.
Take the scene where German officer Brando first meets Mai Britt, the wife of his commander.
It seems there was some worry that her role as a worthless tramp might escape the audience.
Measures were taken. From the moment Britt slinks to answer her doorbell in seductress drag there is no mistaking her intentions towards Brando who, clearly, will not long be a complete stranger to her.
We know this by her sly pussycat expression & the way she all but locks the door behind him & slips the key down her plunging decolletage.
Poor Brando. The chances of his honor surviving intact are about the same chances a lame antelope has with a lion on it’s back. This does not square with his role as Germany‘s Conscience.
Well, onward and downward.
We wince through back-to-back violence; the wholesale massacre of a garrison of Americans in North Africa…
then to the wholesale savaging of Montgomery Clift by his fellow soldiers.
A little change of pace is called for and it comes as unintended humor in a scene with Brando & Schell bouncing across the Tunisian desert on a single motorcycle making their escape from British forces. They’ve just gotten away with their lives & not much else except their shared scooter. Brando, driving, is desperate for sleep. He struggles to keep his eyes open & head from dropping but he resembles a goofy drunk in the process. Schell, full of vim & brimming with vigor, gesticulates wildly from the back seat that Brando “MUST STAY AVAKE!  Ve haft only 400 kilometers to go! Das ist only 7 more hours!”  Well, Schell’s optimism is dashed all to pieces and so is he. They crash. Perhaps this was not a bad thing. It spared him realizing that the scooter was going to, unexpectedly, need more petro. We can safely assume it also spared Brando from carrying Schell piggyback the rest of the way.
Brando, safely back in Berlin (somehow), visits his badly injured commander, Schell, in the hospital. The camera prepares us for something dreadful. It is…dreadfully funny.
Schell swathed mummy-like in a full-head bandage, bears a passing resemblance to a sore thumb. Little hole, though, for a straw.
Then, there is some serious business about Schell demanding delivery of a bayonet so he can kill his room-mate but no one is surprised when he kills himself instead, having learned Britt thinks it BEST that her disfigured husband does not come home being, perhaps, BETTER that he spend the rest of his life in a veterans hospital. It could be argued that this movie is entertaining however unintentionally.

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It remained to rummage the documentary section which can be accidentally entertaining. At the same time, documentaries can impose information you just might prefer to go to your grave not knowing. On the plus side, they do not require returning until seven whole days later. This helps avoid showing up tardy and the business of explaining oneself to the librarian’s full dissatisfaction. With selection settled, off I bounced in my jalopy whose back-fires are not only a means of propulsion but serve as an annoyance to librarians. Beside me sat a documentary on the entire Cinerama-Vision history of MGM as explained to us by that Patrick-Commander-of-the-Star-Fleet fellow in two lengthy discs.
Early on we learn about Irving Thalberg, poor kid, who didn’t have long in this world. He was big-game in the bachelor dept. and was bagged by the manically ambitious Norma Shearer to whom I took an instant dislike. She may have been slightly cock-eyed but nothing escaped her cross-hairs.
Although Louis B. Mayer & Thalberg were a charmed team there was increasing tension & unfriendly competition as time wore on. Thalberg was squeezed out of power and then up & died not of a heart attack as expected but of pneumonia which surprised everyone . Among Thalberg’s last words on his first death-bed, not long before his last death-bed, were, “They knifed me”.
Dory Schary came on board and just ruined everything by keeping up with modern times and, worse yet, being a success at it. Mayer & Schary careened towards a crisis. Schary promoted films of which Mayer did not approve; he was an avowed prig who would “never make a movie he wouldn’t take his daughters to see”. Well, good for him, I say. I’m an avowed prig, too. But, Schary’s insistence on movies with gritty messages and endings insufficiently happy was the old man’s undoing. In a fit of pique, Mayer put in a call to Mr. Skenck, the real power behind MGM, upstairs in New York. In a terrible miscalculation, Mayer delivered an ultimatum. It was Schary or himself. Mayer was, shockingly, fired. That he could be fired at all was even more shocking. The very same day, before Mayer could leave for home, his fancy company car was made to disappear. Skenck never really liked the guy and felt free, now, to express contempt for the man who built his empire.
Then one by one, to the last, every grand old MGM star was fired. But, life went on and MGM had its share of successes including the last great epic of all time, Ben-Hur. Eventually, the big money-makers dwindled and Schary was fired. Then, his replacement was fired, Then, the replacement’s replacement was fired and so on. In the meantime Mayer died. His actual last words were, “Nothing matters…nothing matters”. This was a disturbing statement from a man whose body of work influenced millions of people to the good. Also, in the meantime, the federal government, having nothing better to do, decreed that MGM’s ownership of all those many Loew’s Theatres constituted a monopoly which dealt MGM’s business paradigm a death blow. Television danced on it’s grave. In time, a Kirk Kerkorian bought the studio, seemingly just to louse it up. In short order, he bull-dozed the entire 65 acres of back-lot which housed every well-kept set of about every movie MGM ever made. Nowadays, some effort would be pressed to preserve it as an historical site & a money-making one at that. Kerkorian sold it all to a big housing development project where, to this day, nobody sings in the rain. Millions of invaluable MGM artifacts, props, wardrobe, you name it, were sold at auction. Irving Thalberg’s name was removed from the Irving Thalberg Building. It’s easy to imagine the likes of Kerkorian matching the Library at Alexandria in the best interests of other business. The vandalism of Kerkorian laid waste. Finally, one day in 1986, the great MGM sign over the studio’s former metropolis in Culver City was removed by the hands of common men and replaced with something that said “Lorimar ” and the lion’s roar was no more… except at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas where Poor Old Puss is now a side-show.

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Nicholas and Alexandra – 1971

by M.L. Klein

But, drat the luck, Alexandra, the troubled grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, blundered 300 years of Romanov rule to its doom. It was not exactly single-handed. Nicholas was up to the job, as well. Shortly before the the couple were informed their services were no longer required and before either had a notion the family dynasty, never mind the good silver, would soon be up for grabs there was a scene or two conjecturing how their nerves might have frayed at wild-eyed Bolshevicks swarming the palace halls without leave; a test few marriages must pass. 

Alexandra:                                                                                               “Other men mature by 21 and can make decisions.

Doin’ the Royal Rag

by M. L. Klein

Oh, my! Princess Caroline of Monaco, of The Mixed Fortunes, has brought forth three mythically beautiful children, now grown and so dazzling onlookers reach for sunglasses.

These from her marriage to the late Stefan Casiraghi, the well-born son of an Italian industrialist who, not surprisingly, died in a speed boat accident which is the usual end for risk-takers of water sports. Before her widowhood, there had been an earlier union but easy  arguments for a church annulment had wiped the mistake called Phillippe Junot right off the face of heaven & earth. 

In Caroline’s current and less convivial marriage to Prince Ernest August Albert Paul Otto Rupprecht Oskar Berthold Friedrich-Ferdinand Christian-Ludwig, Dynastic Head of the House of Hanover and insufferable toad, she has produced another little princess, less glorious than the angelic Casiraghis but as titled as deposed royals get.
Then, there is Princess Stephanie of Monaco, The Pitiable.
Early on, she bore two illegitimate children by the same palace bodyguard who, evidently, did not take his job description seriously.

After a few years, the children pressed their parents for a last name if only for school registration, so they married to make everyone happy except themselves. They soon divorced.

It wasn’t so long after, Stephanie delivered a third child out of wedlock by a paramour she refused to identify, even on the birth certificate. However, there are clues based on the appearance of the child that the father was a corpulent Caucasian with weak knees.

Then, there was the dalliance with a convicted sex-offender but the promise of true love was dashed again over concerns for everyone’s safety.

Princess Stephanie carried on bravely to conduct one of her more illicit affairs with a married elephant trainer and went so far as to move herself and her three fatherless  children into his circus caravan in another feckless surrender to true love, everlasting this time.

But, the relationship soured over issues of one sort or another, not the least of which was the necessity of scraping dung from one’s shoes on a regular basis.

So, she returned with her assortment of off-spring to the family palace which had room enough to think clearly and air things out.
Having come to her senses, she up and married a Portuguese acrobat who was a member of the elephant trainer’s traveling ensemble but had a circus wagon that smelled better. 

In spite of the inherent dangers of jilting a trainer of large, powerful beasts and then prancing about with one of his employees, the union and they, survived most of a year.

Princess Stephanie, in all this, managed to produce children who resemble no one including their mother. Not excluded from possible paternity is Tubbie the Clown, it is whispered, who sped out of town one night in his circus cart, never to return, with Stephanie in half-clad, barefoot pursuit. So the rumor goes, and many more flimsy, as recounted in disreputable presses.

The princess’ father, Prince Rainier III, The Aghast (at philandering other than his own) all but wrote his youngest daughter out of his will, assigning her but 1% of the family’s fortune. The thing is, Stephanie is a wholly likeable woman, endearingly common, whose fall from grace might be attributed to an overly tender heart.
And finally, it was not a bit too soon for Prince Albert II of Monaco, The Marriage-Shy, to finally settle down at 52. Monegasques now gamble on the hope a legitimate off-spring may be fathered before the prince & his wife start sleeping in separate countries, or he develops prostate problems or just dies in which case he faces not only Judgment but 700 years of disappointed Grimaldi ancestors.

There does exist some unofficial sons & daughters of Albert II, on the technicality that he sired them.

It’s just that they mustn’t be paraded out or invited in lest anyone get the mistaken idea they are entitled members of the royal family.

To Albert’s scarce credit, he has quietly acknowledged out-of-wedlock issue from both an American waitress and a stewardess from Togo, whatever that is, and there remains unresolved a third paternity suit filed by a German topless model hoping to expose Albert’s part in the matter. Having since exchanged the solemn vows of matrimony with a consort nearly suitable, the sovereign of Monaco can now expect Holy Providence to bless him with a rightful heir.

But lucky Albert, come what may, there’s something about his steely Princess Charlene which suggests little could alienate her affections for the awkward and poorly-spoken prince whose personal & family net worth exceeds 2.5 billion dollars.

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The Little King

 by M. L. Klein

Now, try as they might, the Royal Family will never
dissuade me of my reservations about Prince William, heir to the throne of England, marrying a complete commoner, one Miss Catherine Middleton, but, I do concede their first issue is as darling a boy as any Windsor-Saxe-Coburg line could hope for and in spite of the Middleton family having no distinguished personage on either side – to the near exhaustion of Burkes Peerage to find one – going so far back as the Bronze age, where they found but one ancestor of historical note, an Axilthork (Middleton), the Great Bearded One, all rather desperately through a scant legend unearthed, more dusty than others, which related the multitudes of mice Axilthork suffered to nest in his facial hair.
Where was I?
Oh, yes…
Little Prince George. Isn’t he cute?