Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 7: "Devil Girls" (1967) /"Ed Wood's Devil Girls" (1999)

Various editions of Ed Wood's 1967 female juvie classic, Devil Girls.

David C. Hayes as Rev. Steele in Devil Girls.

We may never know exactly how many books Edward D. Wood, Jr. wrote during his 15-year literary career. Some were novels, generally of a violent and/or pornographic nature. Others were pseudo-educational sex manuals or dubious reference works about the occult or various social ills. Many were written under his own name, while others were credited to pseudonyms. Over the years, Ed's published work was attributed to "Nick Jason," "Dick Trent," "Dr. T.K. Peters" and possibly dozens more.

Following in the footsteps of Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy and its extended bibliography, a book called Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2001; revised 2006), credited semi-pseudonymously to "David C. Hayes and Hayden Davis, Ph.D," attempted to catalog Ed Wood's wild and wooly literary output. Muddled Mind is perhaps of interest to Wood-ologists, as it is one of the rare guidebooks which focuses on Wood's writing rather than his filmmaking. This is quite fertile ground for study, and one hopes that other scholars will dig into Eddie's paperback novels and short stories.

By far, the man's most prolific era as a writer was the late 1960s. In 1967 and 1968 alone, he published at least 22 books, the majority for a small-time outfit called Pad Library, though Pendulum Pictorial and Viceroy Books were frequent employers as well during this time. The titles read like a summary of Ed's pet themes and career-long motifs: Drag Trade, Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History, Night Time Lez, The Perverts, Suburbia Confidential, etc.

I have already covered one of Ed's books from this hyper-productive period, the grim, fatalistic Death of a Transvestite. Today, however, I turn my attention to a novel in which Ed returned to the themes of femininity and criminality which had inspired him in the past as a screenwriter.

DEVIL GIRLS (1967)

Ed Wood in the late 1960s when he wrote most of his novels, including Devil Dolls.

Alternate titles: None.

Availability: Following the release of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, there was a British reprinting of Devil Girls (Gorse, 1995) with a rather glib introduction by UK television personality Jonathan Ross, who clearly hadn't read the book. This edition remains extremely cheap and easy to find.

Not for Ed Wood, it wasn't.

The backstory: American history now popularly records 1967 as the high point of the counterculture, a time when our nation's youths rejected the values of their parents and boldly experimented with sex, drugs, fashion, music, and social protest, particularly against the Vietnam War. The release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles that June inaugurated what has been termed the Summer of Love, and we now tend to think fondly of '67 as one of the happier years of that tumultuous decade, especially in contrast to the horrific events of 1968, which was pockmarked by riots and political assassinations. For Edward D. Wood, Jr., however, there was no Summer of Love. As he saw it, the "juvenile delinquency" scare of the 1950s, the very trend which had inspired his screenplay for The Violent Years, never ended but just mutated into something even more hideous and repugnant.

Set in the dismal Texas border town of Almanac, Devil Girls tells the story of a thrill-hungry, drug-crazed, all-female gang called the Chicks. The group includes jittery, heroin-addicted Dee, sexually voracious lesbian Babs, and newly-debauched Rhoda. Lording over them is a sleazy, small-time drug smuggler and pimp named Lark, who has craftily used heroin to keep Dee under his control. The group's ex-leader, Lila Purdue, is in prison for having murdered her own father, but escapes by killing a nurse and walking out the front door in her victim's uniform. Once free, Lila decides to head back to her hometown to kill the person who ratted her out: her mother. Back in Almanac, Lila brutally wrests control of the Chicks away from Dee and makes plans with Lark for a big score which involves using the girls to smuggle drugs into town by hiding them in their girdles, bras, and falsies.

Representing decency and order in Almanac are its overtaxed sheriff, the "ruggedly handsome" Buck Rhodes and the pious Reverend Steele, who hopes to lure Rhoda back to the flock -- a prospect which becomes much dimmer after the poor, confused girl has (more or less) accidentally shot her own mother. An unlikely ally to the sheriff and the clergyman is Jockey, the owner of an alcohol-and-drug-free burger joint which is a popular teen hangout. With the help of his hulking Indian sidekick, Chief, Jockey aids the police in their efforts to bring down Lark's crime ring and stop the influx of drugs into their small town. While many of the characters die in the book's gory finale, Sheriff Buck Rhodes reappeared in another Wood novel, Parisian Passions.

"Love and terror": Manson in Life

The reading experience: Grueling yet strangely delicious. For a man who was so intent on showing us that gender was not a binary, either-or scenario, Ed Wood took a surprisingly hardline, unambiguous stance on drug use and youthful disobedience in his works. This novel's penny-ante crime kingpin, Lark, has a group of young women under his command and can get them to commit crimes on his behalf. Of course, this presages Charles Manson, who just two years later would become the "hippie bogeyman" for whom the media and many conservatives had been praying. Little wonder that the ultra-square Life magazine would make Manson, with his grungy beard, long hair, and demonic eyes, one of its most famous cover subjects, as if to say, "You see, Middle America? This is what your kids have been up to with their pot and acid and rock 'n' roll!"

Accordingly, the two principal "good guys" in Devil Girls are the standard-bearers of traditional American morality: a cop and a reverend, both quite preachy and neither blessed with a great sense of humor. A less conventional, though still stereotypically "manly," hero is Jockey, whose colorful past gives him an air of mystery but whose core values remain rock-solid. It should be noted that Jockey's sidekick, Chief, is an obvious cognate of Tor Johnson's character, Lobo, from Bride of the Monster. While Lobo supposedly hailed from "the wilderness of Tibet" but was in no way authentically Tibetan, Chief is a supposed Native American whose crude pidgin English is embarrassingly anachronistic. A typical line of dialogue: "No swim! Me desert Indian, not water Indian."

As for the novel's female authority figures.... well, newly-arrived schoolmarm Miss O'Hara proves utterly outmatched by the ne'er-do-wells of Almanac. In this story of female degradation, men are the ones who restore justice and order to the community.

Those looking for Ed Wood's trademark obsessions and eccentricities will find plenty to enjoy in Devil Girls. Although the book's Texas setting is crucial to the plot, absolutely no one in the story seems like an authentic Texan. In fact, pretty much all the characters in Devil Girls, especially the girls themselves, talk like escapees from a 1940s Bowery Boys movie -- except with smatterings of profanity and vulgar sexual remarks. But even the profanity is weird here. Ed Wood's publishers must not have allowed him to use the word "fuck," because he chooses an eccentric euphemism: "jazz." In this book (and other Wood novels I've read), "jazz" is a transitive verb meaning "to have sex with." Example: "He jazzed me all night long." Here, too, one will find the motifs common to Ed Wood's film work.

NOTE: I am aware that the word "jazz" is used as a sexual euphemism in pulp fiction, including the novels of Jim Thompson. However, I still doubt it was ever in common parlance in American English, especially among teenage girls of the late 1960s.

In the thoughtfully-written Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Study of the Films (McFarland, 2009), author Rob Craig astutely points out that funerals are extremely common in Ed's movies, as is the theme of resurrection of the dead. Given its kill-crazy story and high body count, Devil Girls is unsurprisingly punctuated by funerals. The "resurrection" theme surfaces in odd ways, as when Lila dons the uniform of the nurse she has murdered or when Mrs. Purdue resurfaces at a crucial time, seemingly out of nowhere, after being shot and losing a lot of blood -- something which should have killed her.

Politically speaking, Devil Girls reveals Ed's deep-seated social conservatism. While heroin is the main drug of choice in Almanac, marijuana is a close second, and Ed does not mistake his utter contempt for the demon weed. The novel reads like the work of a man who believed every word of Reefer Madness and prayed to Sgt. Joe Friday each night.

Ed Wood's world was one of heavy consequences. You don't "get away" with anything here. In Plan 9, Criswell optimistically stated, "Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent." But in most of Ed's other works, both literary and cinematic, the guilty and innocent alike are punished... or at least end up depressed and downhearted by the denouement. The best an Ed Wood character can hope for is the chance to live to witness further sin and suffering and perhaps to learn from the mistakes of others. See also: The Violent Years, Jail Bait, Killer in Drag, and Death of a Transvestite.

Among Ed's novels, Devil Girls was one of those which was republished several times (despite its downbeat nature) and, thus, remained easy for fans to acquire. That is possibly why it inspired a very tardy screen adaptation more than three decades after its debut. Which brings us to...

ED WOOD'S DEVIL GIRLS (1999)

Dee, Babs, and Rhoda as they appeared in Andre Perkowski's 1999 film adaptation of Devil Girls.

Alternate title: Devil Girls

Availability: For the curious, the film is available from Amazon Instant Video for rental or purchase. If you prefer physical media, you can buy the DVD (Terminal Pictures, 2009) as well. Please know in advance that this is a burn-on-demand DVD-R.

The backstory: Filmed on the cheap near the University of Chicago and Shedd Aquarium in 1999 with a largely-unknown cast, the tiny independent feature Ed Wood's Devil Girls did not see widespread distribution for about a decade, when it did start to attract some positive media attention. Since only the infinity of the depths of a man's mind can really tell the story, I'll let the director himself, Andre Perkowski, take it from there. (And thanks to Mr. Perkowski for submitting to an online interview!)

Director Andre Perkowski

Devil Girls! A ludicrous experiment to see if I could shoot a film Ed Wood style in 4.5 days, a la the master. It turns out you can, but it also turns out that nobody particularly cares if you can shoot a film quickly. They want to be entertained! I also had only about $500 on hand for the shoot... and boy, doesn't it show? It does lend it a whirling incoherence and energy, despite not having any time to actually, say, think about things or generally tweak or guide performances. I had to trust the actors, who memorized reams of that dialogue and spat it out rat-a-tat. 

The dialogue, incidentally, is not just the novel; it's a patchwork quilt from dozens of Wood's novels and short stories. I was tracking down as many as I could find for a few years. Whenever a wonderful phrase was found, I'd add it to the script. "Automation!" There's even a bit of Criswell's books in there, but for the follow-up film, we just used the actual Criswell.

Ed Wood regular Conrad Brooks.

I was incredibly naive at the time, being 23 or so when I began the project and too foolish to realize that attempting a trilogy of unfilmed Ed Wood projects is really kind of an overly ambitious, silly thing to do. I pulled off Devil Girls, The Vampire's Tomb, and a short of To Kill a Saturday Night with Ted V. Mikels and Conrad Brooks before coming to my senses and working on my scripts, although part of me realizes that one day, I might have to shoot that adaptation of "The Ghoul Goes West" that lurks in my files... all on film, too. One of the worst aspects of the two Wood flicks is I fell for the DV [digital video] line about how revolutionary and blah blah blah it was for filmmaking. It looks hideous! Like porn. "Filmlook" was garbage, and how I wish I had scrimped and shot more film. I did do the inserts on Super-8/8mm, and that's definitely my favorite stuff in both films.

I asked Perkowski about the film's eclectic cast, including Sandra Delgado who is excellent as Lila (and who has since appeared on Law & Order SVU).

Sandra Delgado

All of them were were actual actors who auditioned, except for David Hayes [who plays both Rev. Steele and Lobo, this film's substitute for Chief], who my girlfriend at the time suggested at the last minute as a man willing to shave his head. We went for the purposeful "this guy is obviously filmed totally separately and edited in" thing to be even more confusing. I should have added more day/night mix-ups. The automation rants are from Security Risk, a fine pulpy Wood novel [a copy of which is glimpsed in the movie]. 

They were generally all Chicago theater people. I figured we had to basically do this like a filmed play if it was going to be possible in a few days. Some of that dialogue was just giant bricks of text on the page! Those poor bastards. I was floored by their ability to remember the intricacies of the mangled syntax.

Ed Wood's Devil Girls on DVD-R.

The viewing experience: A mixture of the expected and the unexpected, generally amusing and occasionally riveting. I have not, as yet, made many forays into the world of posthumous Ed Wood tribute films. (And there are more of them than you might think!) This may well have been my first time sitting through an entire such feature. I figured that Ed Wood's Devil Girls would play the material as overheated camp, with self-conscious, faux-bad technical touches like deliberately mismatched stock footage and visible microphones. And, yes, that is largely how the film plays out. Andre Perkowski condenses the plot considerably, occasionally at the expense of clarity. For newbies, it really does help to read the novel first before seeing the film. Personally, there were a couple of story points I would not have been able to suss out had I not just read the book.

The writer-director further muddies things by periodically cutting away to a faux Criswell (bewigged Rob Gorden), who blathers on hysterically about juvenile crime and the looming specter of automation. The actors, apparently left to their own devices, take a variety of approaches to the material and treat their characters with various amounts of seriousness.

A few performances stood out for me, including the aforementioned Sandra Delgado as the tough and sexy Lila, Mike Cooney as a bald and genuinely unnerving Lark, and Paul Hoffman, who gets to gnaw on some scenery as the apoplectic Sheriff Buck Rhodes. The tone of the film is lovingly parodic, and I appreciated some of the sillier touches, such as having Mrs. Purdue, a butcher's widow, carry around a salami wherever she went.

At just over 70 minutes, Ed Wood's Devil Girls does not have time to wear out its welcome. I do wish, though, that the film hadn't skipped over some of the more thrilling passages from the novel, such as Lila's shocking escape from a prison hospital. But Wood-ologists will be soothed by this film's many references to The Violent Years, Glen or Glenda?, and Bride of the Monster. If only Spanky the Gorilla from Bride and the Beast had made a cameo! If you enjoyed Ed Wood's Devil Girls, director Andre Perkowski informs me that his version of The Vampire's Tomb should be available on VOD soon.

Next week: Sometime during the mid-1960s, Ed Wood wrote the closest thing to an autobiography in his entire literary canon with his offbeat guide to his adopted hometown of Hollywood, USA. Unfortunately, it wasn't published until 20 years after he died. In seven days, you and I will make our way through Hollywood Rat Race (1998). Mark your calendars.

Mill Creek comedy classics #51: "Stan Laurel Festival" (1918-1923)

Stan Laurel stars in Mud and Sand, a parody of the bullfighting drama, Blood and Sand.

A young Stan Laurel

NOTE: This feature-length program consists of three short subjects Stan Laurel made before his days as half of the Laurel & Hardy comedy team. Born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Lancashire, England, in 1890, Stan was about 30 years old when he made these early silent films. The son of show people, he started acting on the English music hall circuit in 1910 and served as Charlie Chaplin's understudy. In fact, the two future legends of screen comedy came to the United States at the same time as part of impresario Fred Karno's theatrical troupe in the mid-1910s. 

Once established in America, Stan formed a romantic and professional partnership with actress Mae Dahlberg, who rechristened him "Stan Laurel" and herself "Mae Laurel." Together, they toured the country. In addition to his theatrical work, he began appearing in films in 1917 and was a full-time movie actor by 1924. He and Oliver Hardy, who had signed separate contracts with the Hal Roach Studio, started working as a team in 1927 and would stay that way for the rest of their careers. Stan Laurel Festival captures the comedian during his pre-fame years, already a showbiz veteran but not yet a movie star and still experimenting with his onscreen persona.

The flick: Mud and Sand (Metro Pictures, 1922) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: Gilbert Pratt (in the silent era, directed short films for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett; in the sound era, wrote for Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges)

The star: Stan Laurel (most famous for his 25-year partnership with Oliver Hardy, which yielded Sons of the Desert, The Music Box, Way Out West, and much more)

Other actors of note: Mae Dahlberg aka "Mae Laurel" (Stan's common-law wife at the time, appeared in his movies for about seven years), Julie Leonard (a regular in Eddie Boland and Stan Laurel films of the early '20s; married for 18 years to Norman Taurog, who directed many Elvis Presley films), Leona Anderson (House on Haunted Hill; recorded an LP, Music to Suffer By), Sam Kaufman (Suspense, Kismet); Wheeler Dryden (half-brother of Charles Chaplin; appeared in Chaplin's Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux)

Poster for the film.

The gist of it: In a small Spanish village, a young man named Rhubarb Vaselino (Stan Laurel) has his family worried because he's taken up the dangerous art of bullfighting, alongside his best friend Sapo. On their first day as matadors, Sapo is killed instantly, but Rhubarb proves to be a natural at fighting bulls and earns an invitation to battle the fearsome toros of Madrid. Before his departure, he marries his sweetheart Caramel (Leonard). In Madrid, Rhubarb is even more successful, becoming a major celebrity and letting the fame go to his head. He goes to a restaurant where he dances with the famous Pavaloosky aka La Paloma (Mae Laurel), but she is enraged when he accidentally spritzes her with seltzer water.

That same day, he falls under the spell of the seductive Filet de Sole (Anderson) and goes to her apartment that night. Caramel discovers Rhubarb and Filet together and leaves him. Heartbroken, Rhubarb prepares for the last bullfight of the season. He accidentally wins, thanks to a cape that has been soaked in ether by Pavaloosky. While the crowd throws their hats into the ring to honor Rhubarb, Pavaloosky throws a brick at his head and knocks him out cold. As he is immediately buried right there in the bullring, a caption tells us: "If you want to live long and be happy, cut out the bull!"

Mud and Sand parodies Valentino.

My take: Like The Villain Still Pursued Her, Mud and Sand is a parody of a specific work -- in this case, a Rudolph Valentino flick called Blood and Sand, which had come out only three months earlier and was one of the biggest box office hits of that year. "Rhubarb Vaselino" is an obvious pun on Rudolph Valentino's name, while "Caramel" and "Filet de Sole" are cognates of characters named Carmen and Doña Sol, respectively.

Not being too terribly familiar with the Valentino film, itself based on a 1909 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, I can't tell you how accurate this parody is. Audiences at the time would have known, however, which is why this story is told in such a broad, sketchy outline. It plays like the summary of a longer, more complete narrative. In one scene, for instance, Filet drops her purse on the floor and forces Rhubarb to pick it up right in front of Caramel. "My purse, slave!" says the intertitle. What's the significance of this? Well, apparently in Blood and Sand, there is a sadomasochistic element to Valentino's affair with Doña Sol.

But apart from the satirical element of the film, Mud and Sand is still a string of jokes built around the story of a bullfighter, not too different from one of the Three Stooges' bullfighting films, except with one comedian instead of three. The bulls defeated by Rhubarb go sailing over the entranceway to the arena, like the catapulted cow from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rhubarb climbs a trellis to Caramel's balcony, only to have it tip over. Rhubarb's grandmother is a salty old dame who wants to make her grandson a bootlegger. (Prohibition was still on.) And there are many, many jokes that play on the double meaning of "bull." Typical silly comedy stuff.

So how's Stan Laurel? Well, he hadn't developed his trademark "good-hearted, naive simpleton" routine yet. But this film does take good advantage of Laurel's scrawny physique and elongated, rubbery face. He obviously knew how to take a pratfall and does so several times in Mud and Sand. I'm not quite sure if I would have sensed a legend in the making from this film, but it's passable entertainment.

I should add that Mill Creek's particular print of this film adds its own soundtrack with some very catchy 1920s-style "hot" jazz. The music is not timed in any way to the action, but I enjoyed it so much I didn't really care.

Is it funny: Like I said, it's no comedic masterpiece, but I got a few laughs out of Mud and Sand. There's a pretty funny sequence with amateur bullfighters waiting outside the arena for their chance to fight. Nobody wants to go first, so they keep trading places in line. Then Rhubarb enters, and bulls start flying out of the building. He tallies them up on a chalkboard outside, then goes back in -- only to find himself flying out of the arena! But he goes back in again, and the scene ends with medics somberly taking a bull out on a stretcher.

The whole "wooing" scene is cute, too: before he climbs up to Caramel, Rhubarb sings to her from ground level, and a nearby dog starts to howl. And I liked the moment when the great bullfighter is primping before his big showdown, which includes licking a giant lollipop while servants dress him. When some men gather around to shake his hand, Rhubarb accidentally offers one of the fellows his lolly, only to quickly retrieve it and daintily dust it off with a whisk broom.

My grade: B

P.S. - While there are no African-American stereotypes on display here for obvious reasons, one could argue that the entire film consists of Spanish stereotypes. The few foreign names and phrases in the film are a weird mixture of French and Spanish. ("Mon dios!" rather than "Dios mio!") Another intertitle tells us that a certain club is frequented by matadors, toreadors, humidors, and cuspidors (which is to say, spittoons). At one point, Rhubarb gives his mother some of his winnings and tells her that this will keep her in tomatoes and garlic for two years. In another scene, Rhubarb lacquers his hair down with a shiny, greasy tar-like substance. I don't see any real racial malice here, but the film does make fun of Spain's culture and people in a way some modern viewers may find offensive.

~~~

Stan Laurel plays a suspiciously Chaplin-esque "nervy young man" in Just Rambling Along.

The second flick: Just Rambling Along (Pathé release of a Robin Films production, 1918) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: Hal Roach (legendary producer/director profiled in my review of Niagara Falls)

Bud Jamison

Other actors of note: Clarine Seymour (True Heart Susie, Scarlet Days; discovered by D.W. Griffith and seemingly destined for stardom but died suddenly during an emergency operation), Noah Young (Safety Last!, Bonnie Scotland), James Parrott aka Paul Parrott aka Jimmie Parrott (younger brother of comedian Charley Chase, extremely busy comedic actor, writer and director from the 1910s to the 1930s; worked behind the scenes on many Laurel & Hardy films including The Music Box and Way Out West but died at age 41 of a heart attack brought on by alcohol and drug addiction), Bud Jamison (Holiday Inn; Chaplin's A Dog's Life; portly character actor familiar to all fans of the Three Stooges for his many, many appearances as a comedic foil in their Columbia short subjects; a diabetic, his firm belief in Christian Science and rejection of traditional medicine shortened his life considerably), Max Hamburger (Harold Lloyd's Lonesome Luke series)

The gist of it: The print of the film I saw starts with a rather long series of educational captions explaining the movie's history and that of its star Stan Laurel. At last, the film proper begins. As the easygoing title implies, there is not much in the way of "plot" here. It's just a few minutes of gags. Laurel is a Chaplin-type freeloader who is first glimpsed fighting over a wallet with a small child... whose burly father (Young) happens to be a police officer. Stan manages to steal a little money from the kid, then joins a line of lustful men who are following a pretty young lady (Seymour) into a cafeteria-style restaurant. After scoring some free samples of food from the chef (Jamison) and buying only a ten-cent cup of coffee, the freeloader sits down with the young lady to eat, unaware that she has casually switched bills with him. He gets a nasty surprise when he reaches the checkout counter... and some nastier ones still when he tries to sneak out without paying.

AWOL Toto the Clown

My take: This brief comedy, Stan's second, is the oldest-surviving example of the comedian's film work. Considering it was made from a negative that was just about to turn to dust, it looks pretty good. At some point in its long life -- and it's now nearly a century old -- it must have wound up in the custody of a company called Blackhawk Films. They're the ones who have added the film's rather long-winded opening text, a series of title cards that tell us how Stan Laurel got his big break in movies when another comedian, Hippodrome star Toto the Clown, decided he didn't want to do any more movies and left the Pathé company desperately searching for a replacement. Enter Stan Laurel, who apparently inherited this film and its leading lady from the departed clown.

I don't know if any of that is true, but Stan does as well as any comedian could have with this slight material. It's obvious how strongly he was influenced by his former castmate, Charlie Chaplin, who had already taken the country by storm by then. Laurel very closely imitates Chaplins's facial expressions and mannerisms. If anything, the film is too brief. It seems like it ends before the story really even gets started. But as historical curios go, it's a fascinating memento.

Is it funny: It gets the job done. Let's say that. The film's best comedic set piece is the showdown between Laurel's sneaky character and Jamison's French chef, who wears the type of heavy black greasepaint mustache and eyebrows we now associate with Groucho Marx. Stan hides food in his clothes when the chef isn't looking and has the nerve to sample nearly everything on the menu -- items he won't and can't purchase. After all this, he gives the exasperated chef his order: one cup of coffee. This pairing of skinny Stan Laurel with a hefty, mustachioed foil is perhaps a harbinger of his partnership with Oliver Hardy. The opening credits make a big deal of leading lady Clarine Seymour, but she doesn't really do that much here except sit, smile, and look pretty. Whether she's funny or not, I couldn't tell you.

My grade: B

P.S. - No stereotypes that I could find.

~~~

Decades before the XTC album, Stan Laurel starred in the citrus-themed comedy Oranges and Lemons.

The third flick: Oranges and Lemons (Pathé release of a Hal Roach production, 1923) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: George Jeske (directed other 1920s Stan Laurel shorts, including Smithy and Short Kilts; in the 1910s, an actor who was an original Keystone Cop and appeared in a few Chaplin shorts such as Tango Tangles; in the 1930s, a screenwriter whose credits include The Life of the Party)

Other actors of note: Katherine Grant (Miss Los Angeles 1922; appeared in almost 50 films between 1922 and 1926); Eddie Baker (Chaplin's City Lights, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Laurel & Hardy's Sons of the Desert, W.C. Fields' It's a Gift), George Rowe (Buster Keaton's Day Dreams, Harold Lloyd's Grandma's Boy), James Finlayson (All Over Town, The Perils of Pauline) , "Tonnage" Martin Wolfkeil (appeared in Stan Laurel and Charley Chase comedies of the mid-1920s)

An ad for Sunkist oranges.

The gist of it: Clumsy, knuckleheaded Sunkist (Laurel) works in various capacities for a company that raises, picks, and then packages citrus fruits. His girlfriend, pretty Little Valencia (Grant), works on an assembly line there, too. Sunkist's ornery boss, Orange Blossom (Baker), keeps assigning him to various tasks, both indoors and outdoors, but our hero manages to cause havoc wherever he goes. Soon, Orange Blossom and some other angry men are chasing Sunkist around the place, and a full-scale war breaks out at the plant with citrus fruits often being employed as projectiles.

My take: This is another film to which Blackhawk Films has added a lengthy text preamble, this time to rhapsodize about what a great gagman Stan Laurel was, the best of the silent era and surpassing even Larry Semon. While Semon used stock gags and built scenes around them, the text tells us, Stan would start with the scenes first and then incorporate gags into them. That may be true, but neither the scenes nor the gags are terribly inspired here. I'd estimate that 40% of this film is people running on treadmills or throwing citrus fruits at each other. A person can only take so much of that.

Is it funny: Not terribly so, but I think I might have chuckled at a few of the physical gags. Again, as with Just Rambling Along, Oranges and Lemons' best scene is one that pairs Stan Laurel with a heavyset man who becomes enraged at Laurel's incompetence. In this case, it's a brawny orange-picker ("Tonnage" Wolfkeil) who foolishly asks Sunkist for help. And I liked one of the intertitles that states that Orange Blossom wouldn't hurt a mosquito "unless its back was turned." Zing!

My grade: C+

P.S. - Stereotype-free again!

OVERALL GRADE FOR STAN LAUREL FESTIVAL: B

A weird, incomprehensible new "Zomby" cartoon

Mill Creek comedy classics #50: "Flying Wild" (1941)

The East Side Kids use their wits... and big pieces of wood... to clobber some saboteurs in Flying Wild.

The flick: Flying Wild (Monogram Pictures, 1941) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.2

Herbert Rawlinson, future star of Ed Wood's Jail Bait.

Director: William West (made two other films for Monogram around this time, and that was it)

Returning series regulars: 

• Leo Gorcey

• Bobby Jordan

• Ernest "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison

• Dave O'Brien

• Donald Haines

• Eugene Francis (all in Boys of the City)

Additional series regulars: 

• David Gorcey (Leo's kid brother; series regular from 1938-1958)

• Bobby Stone (series regular from 1942-1944)

Other actors of note: 

• George Pembroke (Meet John Doe, Call Northside 777)

• Joan Barclay (Grand Hotel, 42nd Street)

• Herbert Rawlinson (Ed Wood's Jail Bait, plus Dark Victory, Follow the Fleet, much more)

Leo Gorcey as Muggs

The gist of it: Thanks to their buddy Algy (Francis), the East Side Kids all have jobs at an aircraft plant, except lazy Muggs (Leo Gorcey), who just gives his pals a lift to work every morning and spends the rest of the day snooping around the airfield. He tries to make time with pretty nurse Helen Munson (Barclay), but she only has eyes for test pilot Tom (O'Brien). 

Because of some mysterious recent accidents and thefts, plant owner Mr. Reynolds (Rawlinson) is very concerned about saboteurs, so he sends one of the more trustworthy Kids, Danny (Jordan), to deliver some decoy plans and lure the saboteurs out of hiding. Muggs accompanies Danny on this dangerous mission, and they're both tied up by thugs and dumped in an alley until being discovered by the other Kids. The plant's real saboteur is seemingly-respectable Dr. Nagel (Pembroke), who's been using his so-called "flying ambulance" (a medical transport plane) to deliver secret plans across the border. 

The situation gets more urgent when the sabotage at the plant causes a heavy airplane wing to fall on poor Peewee (David Gorcey), who then has to be airlifted to a hospital. Muggs has been suspicious of Doc Nagel from the get-go and figures out his evil plan, and together he and the other Kids team up to sabotage the saboteurs with a scheme which again involves using Danny as a decoy.

A cheapjack DVD release of the film.

My take: Well, well, well! Here we are at #50 -- halfway home! I bought this set just before Halloween last year but didn't start actually reviewing the movies until the beginning of June this year. In a way it's both appropriate and unfortunate that the fiftieth film in Mill Creek's 100 Comedy Classics is another East Side Kids adventure, since their previous outing, Boys of the City, is one of my least favorite films in this entire DVD collection. Of course, that's before I knew what true cinematic pain was. 

I'm glad to report that Flying Wild was not as unpleasant to watch as Boys of the City. It's not good, but it's not as egregiously bad as that one, even though the setting and plot are much less interesting this time around. While I'm never going to be an East Side Kids fan, I found myself less annoyed by their exaggerated New York accents, malapropisms (mostly from Leo Gorcey, who loves to substitute soundalike words in his speech), and quasi-Stooges slapstick.

William West's filmmaking career was extremely brief and unimpressive, but Flying Wild is a respectable enough effort, given the cast, budget, and script. His direction, while flat and uninspired, doesn't get in the way of the jokes at least. But this movie is not much of a calling card for West either. It's a cheapo quickie production whose too-frequent aerial sequences consist of a lot of staticky stock footage along with some highly dubious model work. Meanwhile, actors on cheap sets which supposedly depict the interior of the plane, do their best to sell the illusion by lurching back and forth like crew members on Star Trek when the Enterprise was being attacked.

It's theoretically interesting to note that Flying Wild was released about nine months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's subsequent entry into WWII. Having not been around in 1941, I can't rightly convey to you the mood of the country at that time. I suppose we felt that war might be just around the corner, hence all the talk in the script about patriotism and "the fifth column." But perhaps it was a mistake to have the East Side Kids be such obedient lackeys for the military-industrial complex. That undermines their status as cinematic rebels. Only Leo Gorcey's Muggs cannot be tamed, and I eventually came to appreciate him for that. But the maudlin subplot about Peewee, who sustains internal injuries while saving Muggs and Danny, is far too sappy for a comedy this dumb. If you want to be sentimental, you have to earn the right to do so. Flying Wild doesn't come close.

Is it funny: Well, that depends. Do you think it's funny when someone substitutes a similar-sounding word for the one he really means? If so, you might die laughing during the viewing of this film. Me, I chuckled politely once or twice out of respect to these departed actors who were giving it their all. But miraculously, several of the film's physical comedy bits do work fairly well and coaxed audible laughter from your humble reviewer. For example, the front fender of Mugg's jalopy falls off whenever he touches it, so he pulls his hand away from it and sits on the car's running board... causing the fender to fall off anyway. Okay, it's not Moliere, but what do you expect in an East Side Kids movie?

My grade: C

P.S. - In terms of racial stereotyping, Flying Wild is nearly as bad as Boys of the City, which makes it a contender for the most racist film in this entire series. In the first few minutes, I thought Ernest Morrison's character, Scruno, had been elevated  in status somewhat and now was just another interchangeable East Side Kid like all the others. Uh, nope. The racial humor takes a while to build up, but one it gets started, it really gets out of control. When all the other Kids chase after a villain in one direction, for instance, Scruno tells us that he's running in the other. Muggs gets a black eye during a fight, and Scruno gets a "white eye," i.e. a big white circle painted around his eye. In another scene, Scruno adds 2 and 2 and gets 5. In another scene, Scruno sees Danny with black oil or dirt smeared on his face and says, ""Boy, you look just like my Uncle Rochester when he had the mumps." And so on and so on.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 6: "Death of a Transvestite" (1967)

Four years after his debut novel, Ed Wood gave us a sequel, Death of a Transvestite.

"Pure determination held me by the groin."

- Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1967)

Ed Wood's standard headshot.

Ed Wood was many things, but lazy was not one of them. The man just never quit. When I think of Ed now, my image is not of a man standing behind a movie camera but rather a man hunched over a typewriter, churning out manuscripts and screenplays at a frenzied pace. In one of the innumerable documentaries about this odd auteur, actor Paul Marco ("Kelton the Cop") fondly recalled Ed typing away at a story while smoking, drinking, and carrying on conversations with friends. When asked which possessions he would save in case of an emergency, Ed selected his typewriter. What about his wife, Kathy? She could follow him, he explained. The man had ink and alcohol in his veins.

Getting the funding to make a movie is damned hard and frustrating work, and Eddie simply wasn't good at it. That's largely why his directing career evaporated after about a decade. But writing more or less eliminated the troublesome middlemen. There were no studio executives or financial backers to tell him no. It was just his brain, the typewriter, and the paper. Ed could bang out a novel and sell it to a publisher fairly quickly, and this would provide the cash he desperately needed to buy his booze and pay his rent, the former always taking precedent over the latter. But while Wood may have had a figurative gun pressed to his temple while he wrote these volumes, do not labor under the delusion that these books were soulless, mercenary endeavors.

On the contrary, there is much of the man himself in these sentences, perhaps in a form even purer or less diluted than one might find in his films. I won't say that "to read Ed Wood is to know Ed Wood," because the man was profoundly unknowable. Even his own wife, Kathy O'Hara, the woman who stayed with him for decades and was as close to him as anyone, considered her husband a "lost being on this earth" who "doesn't belong here." I will say, though, that Ed's written works give us valuable insight into this surprisingly complex man.

Fortunately, this project has finally given me an excuse to delve into the shadowy literary career of Edward D. Wood, Jr., something I've wanted to do ever since reading Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., which contains an extensive Ed Wood bibliography. In fact, the image from that book which really piqued my interest was the original 1967 cover of the novel which I'm reviewing today.

How could I not be intrigued by Death of a Transvestite? After all, the book's original cover depicts a man wearing a black bra, black panties, black garters, and fishnet stockings. He would look very much like a character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were it not for the cover's other ominous trappings. A small black rectangle, for instance, cancels out the man's eyes. And, of course, he is standing in a prison hallway which terminates in an electric chair. At the bottom of the page is the book's unforgettable tagline and tantalizing ad copy:    

LET ME DIE IN DRAG! 

The last request of a prisoner in the
death house. A revealing insight to the
"other life" of a man of action...

ADULTS ONLY

Now, at last, I get to see what was behind that arresting cover. Ah, the joys and privileges of adulthood! Incidentally, that cover photo was of actor Hugh Hooker from the movie Suburbia Confidential (1966), directed by Stephen Apostolof (aka "A.C. Stephen"), who worked with Ed many times in the 1960s and 1970s on film projects. Anyway, onto the book itself:

DEATH OF A TRANSVESTITE (1967)

Ed Wood in one of the angora sweaters over which he obsessed so fervently.

Alternate titles: Let Me Die in Drag (sometimes credited to "Woodrow Edwards"); I Want to Die in Drag (Kindle edition), Hollywood Drag; Muerte de un travesti (translated into Spanish)

Availability: The most common edition is Death of a Transvestite (Four Walls Eight Windows 1998; reprinted by Da Capo Press, 1999), but an edition with the original cover is available as well (Angora Press, 1990). Those who want the Spanish language edition can opt for Muerte de un travesti (Punto de Lectura, 2002). And those who prefer to have the novel as an e-book may purchase I Want to Die in Drag: The Transgender Classic (Amazon Digital Services, 2005).

A few of the many editions of Death of a Transvestite.
Notice how many bear Ed's own name.

The backstory: A great deal happened in America in the four years between the publication of Ed Wood's debut novel, Killer in Drag (aka Black Lace Drag), and the appearance of its bizarre sequel, Death of a Transvestite (aka Let Me Die in Drag). The country lost a whole lot of its innocence between 1963 and 1967. The president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in full view of the public. His alleged killer, too, had been gunned down in full view of the cameras. Under the leadership of hawkish new president Lyndon B. Johnson, the war in Vietnam had escalated severely and was claiming the lives of many young American men who had not volunteered for military service but instead had been drafted.

Legions of so-called "baby boomers," the children born during the prosperous, optimistic years following WWII, had started to reach their teens and twenties, and they began to form their own parallel society, separate from that of their parents, which became known as the counterculture. These young people were fiercely anti-war (after all, they were the ones expected to go fight it) and protested vigorously against it, often on college campuses. Moreover, they were tired of the strict, repressive, morality-bound world in which they had been raised and were eager to experiment with sex, drugs, art, music, and fashion.

Cultural observers began to speak of a "generation gap" emerging between the older folks and their children. Ed Wood, then 43, would have been closer in age to the parents and definitely fell on the pre-war side of the generation gap. People who know of Ed's transvestism and prodigious consumption of alcohol might have guessed that he'd be sympathetic to these adventurous young folks and their newfangled ideas. Nothing doing. As Rob Craig astutely points out in his book Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Study of the Films (McFarland Press, 2009), Ed was "a unique cross between libertine and prude." Both sides are well represented in Death of a Transvestite.

The Sunset Strip in the '60s.

Those of you who have read Killer in Drag will recall that, in that book, cross-dressing New York assassin Glen Marker (aka "Glenda Satin") was falsely accused of the murder of wealthy homosexual Dalten Van Carter and had to go on the run. He got as far as Colorado, where he purchased a small carnival and began a relationship with troubled prostitute Rose Graves. Unfortunately, the carnival only brought Glen/Glenda unforeseen new problems, and he reluctantly left Rose to go to Los Angeles. In doing so, he barely escaped from a pair of crooked cops, Mac and Ernie, who died in a wild climactic car chase. While Glen/Glenda was making his way to the West Coast, his former mob bosses from "the Syndicate" back East were dispatching another drag queen to hunt him down. That's how Killer in Drag ends.

The sequel picks up with Glen Marker on death row, having apparently been convicted of murder (we never find out precisely whose, though) and about to go to the electric chair*. He has one final wish, though: to be allowed to die in drag as his "Glenda" character. In exchange for this final courtesy, Glen agrees to tell the warden his entire story. The bulk of the novel is a series of flashbacks -- Glen's memories intermingled with those of other characters in the saga and various lawmen, waitresses, bellboys, and others who just happened to witness some of the events. The overarching narrative is of Glen Marker's attempts to establish himself in Los Angeles, while constantly being pursued by the vicious, hawk-nosed Paul/Paula, a thrill-killer turned professional assassin, who once idolized Glen and now must destroy him.

Despite this unpleasantness, Glen/Glenda manages to start a romantic relationship with rising young actress Cynthia "Cindy" Harding, who is the "kept woman" of wealthy, aging, would-be lothario Ronnie Dixon. Together, Glenda and Cindy explore the nightlife of Los Angeles, including the gay and lesbian bars of the Sunset Strip. But the Strip is being infiltrated by rowdy "teenagers" and "beatniks," attracting the unwanted attention of the police. A full-scale riot breaks out one night, providing the chaotic backdrop for the final, bloody showdown between Glen/Glenda and Paul/Paula. His story told, Glenda bravely accepts her fate in the death house, clad in an angora sweater and brown skirt borrowed from the warden's daughter.

*HISTORICAL NOTE: While capital punishment was the law in California in 1967, the electric chair has never been used in that state. Capital punishment was briefly suspended in California from 1972 to 1978. In reality, Glen Marker could have opted for lethal injection or the gas chamber.

A typical scene from Jack Webb's Dragnet 1967

The reading experience: Befuddling and compelling at once. Killer in Drag was written in a third-person omniscient voice and told its eccentric story in a basically typical pulp novel style. The plot of Death of a Transvestite unfolds in a much more disorienting, fragmented way.

In a previous entry in this series, I wrote that Ed's script for The Violent Years was clearly influenced by Jack Webb's seminal radio and TV police series of the 1950s, Dragnet, with its deadpan narration by a police officer and its supposed basis in fact. Well, more than anything, reading Death of a Transvestite is like watching an episode of Jack Webb's revival series, Dragnet 1967, only told largely from the criminal's point of view and incorporating the transvestism and wild sexual experimentation which were the hallmarks of Wood's work. Perhaps you've seen Dragnet 1967 in reruns. In it, Sgt. Joe Friday (Webb), still as straightlaced and humorless as he was in the 1950s, comes face to face with the counterculture: hippies, longhairs, acid freaks, gurus, and more. This incredible contrast between old and new, the "generation gap" neatly encapsulated, has made the revival series a longstanding camp classic.

Ideologically, Ed Wood had a surprising amount in common with super-conservative Jack Webb. The policemen in this book are the same dutiful, honest lawmen you'll find in most of Ed's work. (The crooked cops of Killer in Drag are an anomaly.) Ed's utter contempt for the youth culture, whom he amusingly misidentifies as "beatniks," a term roughly a decade past its expiration date, is plain. Remember, this is a man who eagerly joined the Marines in WWII, so he would have had no sympathy whatsoever for the anti-Vietnam movement.

What seems hypocritical to me is his condemnation of the drug scene, specifically acid and marijuana. (There is one brief reference to "the white stuff," by which he means heroin, not cocaine.) I say "hypocritical" because Ed was altering his own consciousness with alcohol whenever he could, and the characters in his novels do likewise. Booze is nearly as central a motif in Death of a Transvestite as angora.

First edition of Robert Bloch's Psycho.

Beyond this consideration, Dragnet's documentary-style approach to storytelling causes Ed to treat this novel as a factual report compiled from various confessions and eyewitness reports. One is reminded of the prologue of Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), in which Criswell insists the story is factual, "based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal." The weirdest aspect of Death of a Transvestite is the fact that the novel, despite its supposedly "official" nature,  is written in the lurid, panting, purple-prose style of any sleazy dime novel and contains sordid details and dreamy digressions which would never, ever appear in a police document. How would waitresses and airport employees even know what the main characters were thinking, unless LA is populated by psychics? It's as if the LAPD dutifully gathered its source material then turned it over to Harold Robbins, Grace Metalious, or Jacqueline Susann (or perhaps all three, taking turns) for editing.

And maybe Robert Bloch might have taken a turn spicing this material up, too, since the Paul/Paula character bears a certain resemblance to Psycho's Norman Bates. Like Norman, Paul is a cross-dressing mama's boy who kills the women who sexually excite him. The briefly-glimpsed-yet-crucial character of Paul's indulgent mother is perhaps yet another example of Ed Wood using his writing to work through some deeply-ingrained Oedipal issues.

For such a slim, slight volume, Death of a Transvestite is surprisingly heady stuff and provides the aspiring Wood-ologist with all sorts of fodder for theories and fantasies. Copies of it are plentiful and cheap. Do yourself a favor and pick one up at the earliest convenience.

Next week: Literary month continues as I tackle another one of Ed's novels from 1967. Make plans to be back here in seven days for a review of the spicy-sounding Devil Girls.

Mill Creek comedy classics #49: "Too Many Women" (1942)

Commission Gordon has a surplus of dames in Too Many Women.

Bachelorettes #1, 2, 3, and  4:
(top row) June Lang, Joyce Compton
(bottom row) Marlo Dwyer, Barbara Read

The flick: Too Many Women (PRC Pictures, 1942) [buy the set]

Current IMdb rating: 5.3

Director: Bernard B. Ray (Russian-born director and producer of 1930s and '40s "B" westerns)

Actors of note:

• Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon on TV's Batman; The Animal Kingdom)

• June Lang (Frank Capra's The Miracle Woman, Laurel & Hardy's Bonnie Scotland; married for two years to mobster Johnny Roselli)

• Joyce Compton (Country Gentlemen, The Villain Still Pursued Her, Escape to Paradise)

• Barbara Read (Make Way for Tomorrow)

• Fred Sherman (Some Like it Hot, The Tall T, Lady in the Lake)

• Marlo Dwyer (Crossfire, Footlight Parade)

• Kate MacKenna (Bus Stop, The Lemon Drop Kid)

• Maurice Cass (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, TV's Rocky Jones, Space Ranger)

The gist of it: Reformed ladies' man Richard Sutton (Hamilton) wants to marry sensible Linda Pearson (Read), his steady girlfriend, but he hasn't saved enough money to build a future for them. Worse yet, two of Richard's old girlfriends, prim Gwen (Lang) and spoiled Barbara (Compton), still think they're in a relationship with him because he can't give them the brush-off... and neither will take the hint when he keeps dodging them. Complicating things further, Richard bluffs his way out of a business proposal from a persistent salesman by saying he's just inherited $3 million from his late uncle in Brazil and doesn't need any more income.

The news of Richard's "windfall" suddenly becomes big news all across town, and Gwen and Barbara are more eager than ever to hook him. In fact, tongue-tied Richard finds himself accidentally engaged to both of them within the span of about a day. Linda, understandably, is furious and leaves him. And Richard's boss fires him, figuring a millionaire doesn't need a job. But Richard can't give up the charade because his grandmother's doctor (Cass) tells him the old woman (MacKenna) would die of shock if she knew he wasn't really a millionaire.

Against the advice of his honest friend Charlie (Sherman), Richard decides to go out on the town, get plastered, and forget his troubles. He wakes up the next morning in a strange apartment, terribly hungover, and has to confront Gwen, Barbara, and a third would-be bride, mobster's daughter Lorraine (Dwyer), all of whom to marry him -- by force if necessary. Richard and Charlie have to think fast to find a way out of this mess. Meanwhile, the last of the money Richard really does have is riding on a 50-to-1-shot horse he bet on while intoxicated.

"Get me Bob Cummings!"

My take: Neil Hamilton is so familiar to TV viewers as stiff, humorless Commissioner Gordon from the '60s Batman series that it's difficult to imagine a time when he was a romantic leading man. He's not exactly the most charismatic of actors, and at first, I thought his innate dullness was going to hamper Too Many Women. Indeed, the film gets off to quite a slow start, and many viewers will probably give up on it after a few minutes. But I'd advise people to stick with this film, especially if they like farce, because once the plot starts percolating, this becomes quite an enjoyable little bon bon of a comedy.

Truth be told, Hamilton is sort of a dreary presence at first, and he only barely manages to rise to the level of adequacy as the film progresses. Frankly, the supporting actors are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, comically speaking. Hamilton does possess a certain wry, understated detachment from the proceedings, but he feels like the understudy for some more magnetic actor. Cary Grant might have knocked this one clean out of the park. While there's no way PRC Pictures could have afforded Grant, they might have gotten Bob Cummings for this. For Too Many Women to work, you have to imagine the babes going crazy over Neil Hamilton... which is kind of a funny idea in itself, now that I think of it. Maybe he got some of Adam West and Burt Ward's leftover groupies.

Is it funny: I am happy to say, yes. For me, the first big laugh comes when Richard tries to escape from a Red Cross bazaar inconspicuously in order to avoid Gwen and Barbara, then immediately (and noisily) collides with a waiter. As I've mentioned in this blog many times, I'm a fan of farce: those comedic stories that build on miscommunications and bad timing and get crazier and crazier as they go along, generally leading to one big climactic scene that draws all (or most) of the characters together in one place.

People use the term "farce" with disdain, but it's a proud comedic tradition that includes I Love Lucy, Seinfeld, Fawlty Towers, A Fish Called Wanda, and Ruthless People, not to mention centuries of stage plays in countries around the world. I genuinely got a kick out watching Richard's life spin rapidly out of control, and since he's kind of a jerk, I didn't mind him getting punched in the face a few times. He had it coming!

My grade: B

P.S. - No stereotypes here, folks. All the more reason to like this movie.