Last week we posted an overview of Cinefest and a few of the films on offer. We conclude this week with an extended account of four more Syracuse rarities.
Not many folks seemed to like Stolen Heaven (Paramount, 1931), a shot-in-Astoria doomed romance with Nancy Carroll and Phillips Holmes as a pair of fugitives blowing through stolen bills at a posh resort, but its concentrated intensity (often confused for early talkie stiltedness) is definitely something to be reckoned with. In this respect, it recalls (but does not reach the heights of) its near contemporaries, One Way Passage and After Tomorrow; Stolen Heaven is cut from the same cloth of romantic delirium, with an integrity of time and space (but not necessarily plot) that feels particular to its period. Holmes’s anxious, ex-working stiff (lately of a radio factory) is just boyish and skittish enough to convince us that love and larceny derive from a common and unripe source. Carroll constantly and impressively modulates her dignity and exudes excited awareness of her own sexuality. While the film does not follow through on all of its chilly implications, the result is still attractively spare and effective.
The Phantom President (1932) rounded out the Paramount highlights. Perhaps not as fully realized as Hallelujah I’m a Bum, Rodgers and Hart’s urban operetta of the next year, Phantom President still succeeds as a wonderful film record of a living legend, George M. Cohan, playing the double role of a stuffed-shirt politico and his medicine show lookalike. Simultaneously topical to the point of being mercenary (released on the eve of the ’32 election) and not specific or pointed enough to divulge any partisanship or ideological commitment (beyond showbiz itself, of course), Phantom President nonetheless offers edifying, near quintessential, sketches of a broad swatch of ‘30s potentates and string-pullers, along with a library of au courant phraseology and jabber. (That Hoover would soon offer to install FDR in advance of the inauguration—a literal phantom president!—makes the Cohan Conspiracy look mild indeed.) An extended sequence at the party convention—Cohan flaunting his political wares and ‘sex appeal’ to a gaggle of regional and ethnic caricatures so broadly drawn and played as to suggest a hilarious, monomaniacal reductivism—is so good that one wishes there were more music on whole. (Paramount cut much of it, understandably anxious that singing and dancing pictures had yet to re-prove their box office worth after a spectacular burn-out months before.) An earlier blackface number will probably keep Phantom President out of circulation for a goodly long time, which is silly—no one would ever confuse this for anything but a movie of its narrow, beguiling moment and that’s the best thing about it.
