by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Captain
Swagger, a Pathé production from
1928 and a vehicle for Rod La Rocque (a sporadically interesting actor whose
best film was probably his performance as the “bad” brother in Cecil B.
DeMille’s silent version of The Ten Commandments in 1923, opposite Richard Dix as the “good”
brother) whose first reel is probably its best. It takes place in World War I,
and La Rocque plays Captain Hugh Drummond (presumably an American flying with
the Lafayette Escadrille since he has an Anglo name but his plane is a French
Spad), who shoots down German ace Von Stahl (Ullricht Haupt) but allows him to
live if Von Stahl will allow him to escape and fly his own plane back to the
French lines. Directed by Edward H. Griffith — a director with a spotty record but
one who made some quite compelling films (notably Next Time We Love, a Universal film from 1936 that was the first of
four teamings of Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart — Captain Swagger introduces the La Rocque character while he’s
tumbling out of a car, dead drunk, accompanied by a woman he’s obviously picked
up for the evening. Alas, after the war sequence the film flashes forward 10
years to the 1928 present, and Drummond is a Broadway playboy who’s run through
his fortune and is about to be thrown out of his suite at the Plaza Apartments.
To the shock of his comic-relief butler/sidekick Jean (Victor Potel) —
apparently we were supposed to believe he’d brought this guy back from the war
as a sort of human souvenir — Drummond announces that he’s going to get his
fortune back by using a “Chicago-style” technique, meaning he’s going to become
a modern-day highwayman and hold up passing cars.
The first passing car he
holds up — in a preposterous (even by 1928 standards!) get-up of top hat, tails
and a white mask — is occupied by unemployed dancer Sue Arnold (Sue Carol, who
later quit acting and became an agent; she’s best known for both discovering
and marrying Alan Ladd) and her sugar daddy de jour, Phil Poole (Richard Tucker). Phil is driving
their car (a Rolls-Royce with right-hand drive, which in itself establishes him
as a snooty no-goodnick) in a reckless fashion that indicates he’s drunk, and
when the car finally skids to a stop Phil puts some untoward moves on Our
Heroine that lead her to ask the bandit to rescue her. Naturally, he does so,
taking her back to his apartment — she complains that she owes one month on his
own place and is about to be thrown out onto the streets, and he shows her the
letter from his landlord, topping her by saying he owes five months — and offering to get her a job dancing at
the Viennese Club. The club’s manager (Maurice Black) notes how wretchedly
untalented they are but figures they’ll go over big as camp — especially
since Drummond is a well-known enough celebrity (one of those people who’s
famous just for being famous, sort of like a male version of the Kardashians)
people will flock to the club just to see him make an ass of himself. After his
opening number (quite impressively produced for a silent film, and likely shot
to an especially composed score since, though we weren’t watching it that way, Captain
Swagger originally came out with a
synchronized Photophone music-and-effects soundtrack) Drummond jokes to Sue
about how easy it would be for him to rob the nightclub — and just then a gang
of real crooks shows up and
actually does rob the nightclub, and the
gang turns out to be led by Drummond’s old wartime acquaintance/enemy Von
Stahl. Drummond is torn between his normal honesty, his desire to protect Sue’s
career, and his owing a favor to Von Stahl; in the end, of course, the crooks
are captured and Drummond and Sue are paired to survive God knows how.
Captain
Swagger is a mediocre movie with
elements of a good movie trying to get out; it occurred to me that it was an
attempt to do a screwball comedy about six years too early, and I couldn’t help
but wish there’d been a talkie remake in the mid-1930’s with Barbara Stanwyck
and Cary Grant — screwball was a genre that democratized movie comedy (it meant that actors with reputations
for dramatic roles could let their hair down and make comedies that could be
cast with anyone on the studio’s contract list and didn’t require specialists
like Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, Langdon or Lloyd) but so much of its humor was
driven by wisecracks it really required sound, especially since it was all
those Broadway writers like Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Charles
MacArthur, George S. Kaufman, S. J. Perelman, Jo Swerling, Robert Riskin and
the like who had come out to Hollywood in the wake of sound that supplied the
wisecracks. Still, it was a fun if rather inconsequential movie, and it was
rather oddly presented by archive.org in a print that included a score played
on both piano and organ (presumably the original Photophone soundtrack is long
since lost), and was shown in a continuous blue tint rather than either
straight black-and-white or the variegated tints and tones that quite a few
silent films were released in to make up for the lack of color. Charles and I
had seen a few films from the 1950’s on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in overall blue tints (you could tell it was the
source for the movie rather than a glitch in the program itself because the
interstital sequences with the MST3K cast looked normal) and his private-label print of the 1932 film Woman
Wanted come with an overall green
cast that made me wonder if the original had been shot in two-strip Technicolor
and what we had left was a badly faded print with pretty much just the green
dyes intact (not true), but this is the first time we’ve seen it in a
straightforward presentation of a film that wasn’t in the process of being ridiculed.
