At the opening of William Wellmann's 1931, Safe in Hell, we see a shot of a tropical paradise: palm trees, a beach, the moon shining on the limpid waters of a lagoon. Then, the title appears, the words "Safe in Hell" against a black backdrop with the lurid fires of the inferno blazing within the shapes of the letters. This is a promising start to a very peculiar pre-Code movie, one of those strange interstitial works that exist somewhere between comedy, melodrama, and horror -- Safe in Hell belongs to no genre known to me, although, perhaps, people seeing the film 90 years ago would have been able to make better sense of it. The picture is a wise-cracking, fast-talking romantic comedy, a precursor to the "screw ball" comedies made a few years later, that begins with a scene that looks like one of Piranesi's Carceri, features a man accidentally burned to death, and ends with the heroine being hanged by the neck until dead. Director Wellmann keeps things bouncing along with jaunty, blithe efficiency (the movie is only 73 minutes long) but the tone of the film, it's emotional valence, is so wildly unstable that the viewer gets whiplash trying to keep up with it.
Gilda is a call girl -- this is bluntly established in the film's first five minutes. A middle-aged procuress sets her up with a John whose wife is out of town and wants a girl to come to his apartments. (The apartments have a cavernous Richardsonian entry and stair well, a sort of grinning gargoyle of masonry with heavy piers and vertiginous steps leading up and down -- I have no theory why this set has this appearance, although I assume it was used in some other much bigger budget movie, but it looks eerily like one of Piranesi's "prison" engravings,) Gilda finds that the customer in the grandiose apartment is none other than the smarmy Piet Von Saal, a man who seduced and abandoned her a year earlier; Gilda was stalked by Piet's vengeful wife who kept her from any honest employment so, as she says, "(she) makes money the only way she can." Gilda is outraged that Piet now wants to have sex with her and she pitches a champagne bottle at him. He's knocked out and, as she flees the grotto-like apartment, some curtains light on fire (Gilda chain-smokes) and the whole place goes up in flames. Piet's apparently burned to death and Gilda is warned to go on the lam. But, just as the cops are closing in on her, Gilda's true-blue boyfriend, the merchant marine Carl shows up and, after slapping her around when he learns she's become a whore, plights his troth to her and helps her escape as a stowaway on his vessel. (She hides in a crate that is always wreathed in cigarette smoke because she can't keep from lighting up in the box.) All of this is managed in a nonchalant, casually comic manner -- although it's a bit jarring that Piet has ended up burned to a crisp. Gilda disembarks on an island in the Pacific that has no extradition treaty with the US where she agrees to loyally wait until Carl can complete his tour of duty and return to rescue her. (The plan is to return to New Orleans where the story began.) On the island the comedy kicks into high-gear. After a sober and dull wedding ceremony without the benefit of clergy in the islands deserted chapel, Gilda returns to her hotel and its nightmare occupants. The place is infested with horrible criminals and rogues -- there's a Latin American revolutionary hiding out on island "between revolutions", a toothless Brit who eats nuts and spits out the shells (although he claims he's spitting out worms), another expat who may be having a love affair with a capuchin monkey and, at one point, is implied to suggest sexual congress with a chicken, and several other grotesques, five in total, all of whom desperately court Gilda as "the only White woman on the island." These guys lounge around the hotel bar, bickering and, then, sprawling in chairs with their crotches aimed up at the hotel's stairs and landing hoping that Gilda will appear from her room. One man tries to bribe her with champagne. Another brings her a chicken so that it can peck around the floor in her room and eat up the centipedes that flourish on this barren rock in the Caribbean sea. There's a great line when Carl, before leaving the island, plans to walk with Gilda to the chapel -- someone warns, "you had best take the carriage, the centipedes are rather thick on the hills this season." The monstrous, if funny, scoundrels at the hotel all attempt to rape her from time to time, but she has no real trouble repelling their desperate, inept advances. The barkeep at the hotel, a sassy and beautiful Black woman, is also from New Orleans and she sings a smoky version of "When its Sleepy Time down South" -- blues that suggest that the movie is about to turn into some kind of musical. The African-American porter at the hotel, Newcastle, played by Clarence Muse is well-spoken, somewhat courtly, and the only decent man in sight. A more sinister figure is Mr. Bruno, a sadist and the island's executioner -- he struts around in cowboy gear with a gun and menaces everyone and it's apparent that he has a scheme to make Gilda into his sex slave. There's lots of funny dialogue about the horrors of the island -- the drinking water, in a rain barrel, is full of "wrigglers", said to be a good thing because they eat the larvae of the "yellow fever mosquitos." After a few months, Piet Von Saal shows up -- he didn't die but staged his alleged immolation to collect money on his insurance, proceeds paid to his wife whom he abandoned after stealing the cash to go on the lam to the island, apparently one of the Dry Tortugas. Mr. Bruno gives Gilda a gun so she can repel Piet's more aggressive and effective attempts at rape. Gilda kills him leading to a bizarre trial in which one of her would-be suitors argues in her defense (he's a crooked lawyer) and is about to secure an acquittal when Mr. Bruno tells the poor woman that he is going to have her convicted of a gun offense, regardless of the outcome of the trial, and sent to a "cottage" on his prison farm. This horrifies Gilda and, so, to avoid a fate worse than death, she confesses to intentionally murdering the loathsome Piet, telling Mr. Bruno that the only part of her he will ever touch is her neck when he fits the noose around her throat. At this juncture, the feckless Carl shows up again, better late than never, but Gilda refuses to tell him that she's about to be hanged for Piet's murder. (She fears Mr. Bruno will kill Carl.) Carl sails off. Mr. Bruno stares lustfully at Gilda but only sees her glowing throat, a white apparition seemingly burned into his retina. Gilda sadly lights up a cigarette and, then, is led away, among the palm trees to the gallows with Mr. Bruno shambling after her. Dorothy McKall is very good as the prostitute -- the trailer to the movie introduces her as the "girl with a naughty twinkle in her eye." Although horrible stuff happens to her, she exercises agency throughout the movie and is not a victim, but the engineer of her own fate. The creeps in the hotel are played by various Hollywood character actors including the monstrous Gustav von Seyferritz, the bad guy who menaced Mary Pickford in the 1926 Sparrows.
Presumably, Gilda as an unrepentant prostitute has to be punished for her crimes. This, perhaps, explains the ending, a denouement that is shocking to the viewer. The picture shifts wildly between outrageous sexual innuendo (particularly the scene where it is implied that one of the perverts at the hotel is going to have sex with a chicken), bizarre comedy, and sinister horror. Mr. Bruno is like a figure out of The Most Dangerous Game and the weird crew of misfits and murderers at the hotel are similar to the vicious and depraved customers confronting Gloria Swanson in the brothel in Erich von Stroheim's fantastically perverse Queen Kelly (1929) -- in fact, the movie seems to imitate Queen Kelly in several scenes. At one point, Gilda gets lonely -- she's played 2500 games of Solitaire -- comes down from her room and engages in a strange, disturbing banquet with the habitues of the hotel bar, the five rotten men who are lusting after her. She flirts with all of them and drinks until she passes out. This sequence involves mindboggling shifts in tone. The DVD of the film that I watched was crystal clear with excellent sound -- the movie looked like it was made (by Guy Maddin) yesterday.
On the DVD produced of Safe in Hell, there are several similarly disorienting short subjects. In one George Jessel dressed in a tuxedo tells jokes and, then, conducts a Russian choir, apparently real Russians wearing fur coats and caps, who leer and preen for the camera. Jessel introduces one song as a "a good old Cossack tune. The Cossacks are fine fellows although one of them shot my uncle." I have no idea if this utterly bizarre short subject is supposed to be funny or ethnographic or some combination of those qualities. There's a cartoon called "Dumb Patrol" that parodies the World War One aviation war film Dawn Patrol. In "Dumb Patrol," the protagonist (who looks a bit like Homer Simpson is black-face with huge white lips) loses his plane to artillery fire -- he seizes a dachshund, puts the dog under a bench, uses the dog's ears to rotate his head like propeller prop and, then, takes to the skies riding the bench on the flying dog. I would guess this wouldn't work in real life, but the hero with his dachshund aeroplane manages to shoot down the evil German aviator -- who looks like a burly version of the hero
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