Some brief notes about what we’re showing April 6th at the Portage.
AT THE DOG SHOW (1942)
It seems irresponsible not to introduce a film like At the Dog Show, but then again, maybe it’s the recklessness of showing it in the first place that makes it so worthwhile. Redistributed by National Telefilm Associates (it was an RCA film originally) and produced by by Fairbanks and Carlisle (we’ll assume a relation to Douglas Fairbanks here, but can’t promise anything) it’s nearly impossible to tell what the film’s target audience might have been. Presumably it was shown fairly casually in cinemas when it was released theatrically in 1942, but its appearances on television (for children at odd hours of a Saturday morning, unassuming housewives in the afternoon, the whole family before The Dick Van Dyke Show, mom and dad late at night just before bed … all situations would be equally startling occasions to see dogs with rotoscoped talking mouths) must have been quite baffling. Television was doing something right. The animation was done by George Webster Crenshaw, who was responsible for the 1962-1995 single panel comic strip Belvedare, and worked as an animator for Disney (specifically on Fantasia and Pinocchio) and recalls the strangest of George Pal’s Puppetoons.
***At the Dog Show comes to us courtesy of our friends at the Chicago Film Archives ***
The Incredible Stranger (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
The Incredible Stranger represents a body of work by Jacques Tourneur still relatively unearthed. This 1942 one-reller, made for MGM shortly before Tourneur directed Cat People for Val Lewton at RKO, is the second to last of a series of twenty-one short subjects the director made between 1936 and 1944. If they’re all this good then there’s a major section of the great Tourneur’s filmography we’ve been missing out on (though it should be noted that this short and a couple others have made brief, rare appearances on Turner Classic Movies), and if they’re half as good as The Incredible Stranger, they should still be pulled out of their respective vaults as soon as possible. We’re doing what we can, this original 16mm print comes from our own collection and was struck in 1942. Patrick Friel of Cine-File puts it best in his capsule review of the short (which was cited as “crucial viewing” on their site this week), but suffice it to say that the similarities between the short and the rest of Tourneur’s work are staggering, it’s the most emotionally resonant eleven minute film any of us have seen in a while.
THE YOUNG IN HEART (Richard Wallace, 1938)
The Young In Heart is neither rare nor terribly obscure, but for some reason this heavyhearted lightweight of a screwball comedy has slipped through the greasy fingers of auteurists and genre-files. Nevertheless Variety, Leonard Maltin, and even the grumpy Leslie Halliwell thought it was just about perfect. It’s incredibly tender, a case study of a family of con artists who get working class jobs in order to impress an elderly woman who’s possessions and real estate they’d like to inherit. This family, made up of Janet Gaynor, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Roland Young, and Billie Burke, may be a group of clueless ne’er-do-wells, but they’re also so socially inept that they’re almost sweethearted. One of the most touching exchanges in the film occurs between Fairbanks and Gaynor on a milk cart, in which he asks her if she ever heard of anyone marrying for love … they’re both perplexed. It’s a film about a rotten bunch of stray dogs, basically, but even they turn out alright (there was an alternate ending, however, explained here in the Variety review).