Human Fever Chart
Whether damned with faint praise or hidden away like baby cine-monsters in the attic, early talkies go largely unloved nowadays.
Is it a function of “class” (every iteration implied), this ghetto we’ve made, this undeservedly obscure and cramped compartment of moviedom?
Yes, I’ll defend the jangled rhythms and febrile mood swings of America “on the bum” merchandized, albeit unconsciously most of the time, by ‘30s Hollywood.
And later brushed aside by even more insidious machinery…
Canonical thinkers apparently haven’t any room in their social imagination for squalling. The cheapest magazine story on celluloid may suddenly evoke its Depression-era audience (unwashed bodies, injured pride, volcanic anger and all).
Genuine cynicism, meanwhile, tends to leave nonplussed film buffs in the dust.
I’m thinking of that human fever chart, Joan Blondell, under whose enormous “lamps” the whole world stands judged in stark, crummy relief.
No wonder she remains elusive to rankings (domain of momma’s boys), and to an increasingly centralized taste. Better to keep that looming collapse, our Great Manic-Depression, at bay…
An avenging conscience no séance would summon lightly, Blondell flies high above the Cultured Class and its decorous, dizzy noodle.
Even on television, where the coyness of Professor Dimples (the late Robert Osborne) has introduced a whole new audience to pre-Code, his winks and qualifiers inevitably signal “guilty pleasures”.
All Talking Pictures continue to resist dilettantism, evoking the sonic presence of slum kids who bestowed Yiddish on James Cagney. And “that unmistakable touch of the gutter” for which he publicly thanked them…
“And the names, the names, the names of my youth”.
“Picky Houlihan”… “Lagerhead Quinlavan”…“Specs Torporcer”…
Never forget the attack on ethnicity, vernacular speech and revolutionary chutzpah; never forgive the sententious old owls who vowed to eliminate “low taste” in 1934.
I’ll conclude my cry from the heart with a borrowed accent, Jimmy Durante’s Brooklynese.
“Say listen brother, they don’t bury anybody in a high hat.”
by Daniel Riccuito