MONOGRAM LUXURIATED IN THE LOUCHE AND THE LURID
They may have been lowbudget B-movies, but some of these films are real diamonds in the rough By Dave Kehr
When Jean-Luc Godard dedicated his first feature, A bout de souffle (Breathless), to Monogram Pictures, he was thumbing his nose at the critical establishment of 1960. For most of the Anglo-American film writers of the time, it was a selfevident truth that nothing but trash could come from a cash-starved studio such as Monogram, with its constant flow of micro-budgeted genre pictures. An important movie required major stars, an acclaimed director, an epic scale and a socially significant subject, qualities conspicuously — almost aggressively — absent in Monogram productions.
Today, thanks in no small part to Godard and his colleagues at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, the pendulum has swung quite far in the opposite direction. Web-fuelled cults have sprung up around movies with even less cultural cachet and budgetary heft than the products of the Poverty Row studios. In the meantime, much of the Monogram library has dropped out of distribution, leaving todays young Godardians to wonder why the master would dedicate his freshman effort to a studio whose only accessible titles consisted largely of juvenilia — B-Westerns, forlorn Bela Lugosi vehicles, dim Bowery Boys comedies.
Although much of the studio’s earlier output has fallen into the public domain, and some titles from the 1940s have passed into the hands of MGM/UA, most of the post-1947 Monogram library is now being administered by Warner Bros. (The Warner holdings also include most of the movies made after Monogram changed its name to Allied Artists in 1953 in an attempt to reconfigure itself as a higher-end operation. After a trio of A-level productions in the early ’70s — Cabaret, Papillon and The Man Who Would Be King — Allied Artists backed away from filmmaking. The company still exists, although it is now mainly involved with music.)
Warners, however, has been doing a great job remastering Monogram films and getting them back into circulation. Warner Archive has released two volumes of Bowery Boys films, all 12 titles in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy series and no less than six volumes of B-Westerns starring Johnny Mack Brown and Jimmy Wakely. Recently it released a Charlie Chan Collection that includes amazingly good prints of four late films in the long-running detective series, one with Sidney Toler as Chan (the 1946 Shadows Over Chinatown) and three with Toler’s little-known successor in the part, Roland Winters ( Docks of New Orleans, Shanghai Chest and The Golden Eye, all from 1948).
Warner Bros has been slower getting to the nonseries Monogram films, which are clearly harder to market (with their near-absence of star names or famous characters) but often more closely embody the Poverty Row spirit Godard sought to emulate.
Where the series films were mostly designed for Saturday children’s matinees, Monogram courted teenage and adult audiences with comedies, musicals, melodramas and thrillers, often with artfully salacious titles ( The Sultan’s Daughter, Sensation Hunters) meant to suggest pleasures not available from mainstream studio releases. By way of giving an overview of Mondo Monogram, here’s a quick look at three recent Warner Archive releases:
WOMEN IN BONDAGE
Behind the lurid title lies an unusually impassioned anti-Nazi film from 1943 about the privileged wife (Gail Patrick) of a German war hero who awakens to the oppression of women in the Third Reich when she is appointed by a snarling district leader (Gertrude Michael) to instruct a company of teenage girls in their duties to the fatherland. Monogram, like its neighbouring Poverty Row studio PRC, gave work to a large number of emigre film-makers during the war; Women in Bondage represents the collaboration of the director Steve Sekeley, who as Istvan Szekely had been one of Hungary’s most prominent film-makers, and the writer Frank Bentick Wisbar, whose promising career as a director ( Fahrmann
Maria, 1936) had been cut short in Germany. WHERE ARE YOUR CHILDREN? The juvenile delinquent dramas of the 1950s that culminated in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause have their roots in socially conscious films such as this 1943 Monogram special. Gale Storm, one of the few inhouse stars Monogram managed to develop, plays a teenager whose parents are too involved in the war effort to provide proper guidance; a joyride in a stolen car ends when one of her new friends impulsively beats a petrol station attendant to death. The careful lighting and elaborate tracking shots, quite impressive given what was probably a five- or six-day shooting schedule, are the work of veteran film-maker William Nigh, who came to prominence in the 1910s. At Monogram, Nigh was perhaps the most consistently creative of several important directors of silent films (including Reginald Barker, Phil Rosen, Lambert Hillyer and Christy Cabanne) who found refuge at the studio as their fortunes declined. WIFE WANTED At Monogram, you were either at the beginning of your career or approaching its end. This 1946 production combines talent from both ends of the arc, matching former Warner star Kay Francis (ageing out of the business at all of 41) with the up-and-coming director Phil Karlson, who would hone his stripped-down style for some of the toughest noirs of the 1950s ( The Phenix City Story, The Brothers Rico). In what would prove to be her last film, Francis (who also produced) forthrightly cast herself as a declining star who accepts a job with an estate agent (the eternally slimy Paul Cavanagh), only to discover that the business is a front for an escort service. In the end, the film suggests, it’s all just acting — and really, where do you go once you’ve washed-out of Monogram? (Warner Archive Collection, Charlie Chan Collection US$39.92 [1,270 baht]; other titles $21.99 each.)
© 2013 The New York Times