Robin Hood of El Dorado

Another of my recent movie watches that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection is Robin Hood of El Dorado.

The movie is based on Joaquin Murrieta (played here by Warner Baxter), a legendary figure from around the time California became a US territory. Anglos are going to be coming west, a trend that's only exacerbated when gold is discovered and that gold rush is set off. A lot of the newcomers have no concern for the Mexicans and their land claims, and so it is with Joaquin. Some Anglos kill his wife, and then when he and his brother come into town, they accuse the brother of rustling and kill him!

Despite there being one good American in the form of Bill Warren (Bruce Cabot), who tries to stop all this. But he's powerless to do so. When Joaquin meets Three-Fingered Jack (J. Carrol Naish), an outlaw gangster, Joaquin decides to fall in with the gang. Joaquin's plan is to go after the Anglo newcomers and try to help the Mexicans, but the law and the Production Code aren't going to look too kindly on it all.

Robin Hood of El Dorado is an interesting little movie. In many ways it's little more than a B western, but William Wellman directed and he had already made a whole bunch of zippy social commentary movies at MGM, so he tried to make as much as he could out of this story, turning Murrieta's struggle into a question of nationalism, something which certainly enhances the movie even if we know where it's going.

Warner Baxter was past his peak when he made this but still does his best with the material, as do Cabot, Naish, and the rest of the cast. Interestingly enough, a couple of years after this movie was made, MGM enlisted Carey Wilson (of those awful Nostradamus shorts) to narrate an MGM historical short about Murrieta, and that showed up on TCM not long after the most recent airing of Robin Hood of El Dorado. I didn't get to see the short, but the feature is certainly worth a watch as a good example of Warner Bros.' B movies.

Sit down, don't cheer

Another of the movies that got pulled out of the Fox vaults recently for showing on FXM is Stand Up and Cheer!. It's going to be on again over the coming weekend and again on July 5. It's also on DVD, so since I don't have that big a backlog of recently-watched movies to blog about, I'm going to do a post on it now.

The movie was released in 1934, and the first thing you notice is that this is likely a re-release print: the 20th Century Fox fanfare starts before we see that this is from the "Fox Film Corporation", the merger between Fox and 20th Century not having come until 1935. (IMDb suggests that the original ran about a dozen minutes longer than the 68-minute version FXM ran.) On to the threadbare plot, we see Broadway producer Lawrence Cromwell (Warner Baxter) going to meet president Roosevelt (only seen from the back). With a depression on, the president thinks America's spirits need to be raised, and the best way to do that is with a Department of Amusement. Cromwell, being an important Broadway producer, is just the man to do it.

Now, my immediate thought is that a department like this would be a money pit for propaganda of the sort that the Federal Theater Project was, churning out stuff like ... One Third of a Nation...; people of political interests would try to capture the bureaucracy if only to see that the people they oppose didn't capture it first. But Stand Up and Cheer is pretty obviously pro-New Deal propaganda, so it would never suggest anything was wrong with a program like this.

There are two senators opposed to it, and a shadowy cabal behind them, but the two senators are played by guys who had a slapstick vaudeville routine, "Mitchell and Durant". Their brand of humor is unfunny. We also get treated to Stepin Fetchit, and the humor that the screenwriters forced him to do is even more unfunny, especially in the later scene with a penguin doing a Jimmy Durante impression.

In between all this, we get several musical numbers that are unrelated to the plot of the movie, and a love interest in the form of Children's Section head Miss Adams (Madge Evans). One of the numbers involves a young Shirley Temple before Bright Eyes made her a real star; she dances with James Dunn playing characters named Shirley and James probably (I'm guessing) because Shirley was still young enough that this would make it easier to remember her lines. She shows up again in the retch-inducing finale, a song with large groups of people marching in formation looking like the old Soviet military parades going through Red Square as the Great Leaders watched from Lenin's mausoleum.

Stand Up and Cheer! is terrible, although at least Shirley Temple shows she already had talent at a young age. The two DVD listings at the TCM Shop both focus on Temple, although at least in one case it's fair because it's a box set with six Temple films. I might think about getting the box set for the other five films; I certainly wouldn't bother with the standalone.

Adam Had Four Sons

Yesterday I watched Adam Had Four Sons off the eight-movie Mill Creek box set that I mentioned earlier this year when I blogged about Angels Over Broadway. (I really got the set for the Judy Holliday movies in it, The Marrying Kind and Solid Gold Cadillac.) Since the DVD set is currently selling on both the TCM Shop and Amazon for under six bucks, I have no qualms about mentioning even any crappy movies on the set. After all, you're getting at least a couple you'll like for that tiny price.

Adam Stoddard (Warner Baxter) is a stockbroker in 1907 living with his wife Molly (Fay Wray) and his four sons. Into this they bring a governess for the sons, lovely Emilie Gallatin (Ingrid Bergman). Emilie arrives and feels as though she's belonged there her whole life, and the sons take right too her. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes the family. First, Molly dies, and then a stock market panic hits, wiping Adam out. Adam's cousin Philippa (Helen Westley) is able to send the three oldest sons off to boarding school, but the fourth one has to move into a tiny apartment with Dad, and there's no room or money for a governess. Dad promises to bring Emilie back, however.

Fast forward several years. Dad is back on his feet, and does indeed bring Emilie back. Now, this makes no logical sense, since the kids are all grown up and no longer need a governess. But it's also obvious that Adam has had an emotional bond bordering on love for years based on the way Emilie helped the family through Molly's death. And Emilie feels something for Adam, despite how inappropriate all of this would be. If Emilie had been the head of all the servants, bringing her back would be one thing, but as a governess to four guys who still adore her platonically after all these years, you wonder how this got past the Production Code.

Thins are about to get a whole lot more interesting. It's World War I, and some of the sons have gone off to fight in the war effort, such as David (Johnny Downs). He was training in Canada since at the time he went of the US wasn't in the war yet, and while there he met Hester (Susan Hayward) and married her practically at first sight. Emilie sees through all this and just knows that Hester is a bad influence, and the one redeeming quality about Hester is that she's the only one who recognizes the inappropriate thoughts Adam and Emilie have but don't want to admit to. As for Hester's bad qualities, well, she hates the saintly Emilie, but worse, she's basically decided she's going to sleep her way through the family, taking up with brother Jack (Richard Denning). When Dad sees the silhouettes of Jack and Hester making out, he's loaded for bear. But wackily, Emilie intervenes so that Dad will believe Jack was with Emilie, not Hester. It's idiotic, but there you are.

And that's where I have huge problems. The actors all try their hardest, but the script is just so warped that nobody really rises above the material. Hayward probably comes off best, just because she's given the bad girl character, and that's something easier to sink one's teeth into. Helen Westley also does well in a supporting role as her character has plausible motivations. She also gets to have fun playing a quirky old woman who drinks gin straight and smokes cigars. The only thing they didn't do is dress her in tweed, but that may have been a step too far for the Production Code.

All in all, Adam Had Four Sons is a movie that's more worth watching to see where it goes wrong than for what it does well. But since it's on an ultra-cheap box set, dropping six bucks on it is no big deal.