Laughter in Hell
Long assumed to be lost, Laughter in Hell has been disinterred from the Universal vaults, still potent and pungent. This quick and dirty, 70-minute tour of man’s (and woman’s) inhumanity to man had a re-premiere at San Francisco’s majestic Castro Theatre during the 2013 Noir City festival, in a setting of gilded Corinthian columns and elegant rococo murals. It will be screened again on February 26 as part of Film Forum’s series devoted to the year 1933, on a triple bill with 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and Rowland Brown’s lurid, terrific Blood Money. This program ought to come with a health warning, or perhaps with William Carlos Williams’s famous admonition to readers of “Howl”:
“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
Directed by prolific B-movie maestro Edward L. Cahn and based on a book by legendary hobo author Jim Tully (best known for Beggars of Life), Laughter in Hell is jaggedly uneven, lurching from a harsh glimpse of kids toiling in a quarry to a sentimental scene of a widower talking to his wife’s grave. The setting is the South, playing its familiar role as the American id. Pat O’Brien, sporting his best Irish brogue, is an amiable fellow named Barney Slaney who goes to work on the railroad, an event commemorated with a silver pocket watch from his proud father (Berton Churchill, taking a break from his usual heartless, blustering, corrupt tycoons.) Barney falls in love with an overripe New Orleans belle (Merna Kennedy) who marries him but guiltlessly carries on an affair with his lifelong arch-enemy, breaking away from adulterous clinches to wave at her unsuspecting husband as he goes by on his locomotive. When he catches the lovers, Barney goes ape and kills them both. A compassionate judge spares him the gallows—and the knife in the back that his honor-obsessed father has ready for him. He’s sentenced to a mere life at hard labor, on a prison farm that makes the one in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang look like a four-star hotel. The kicker? It’s run by the brother of the man Barney killed, who is awfully glad to see him.
This movie makes it easy to understand why so many men on Southern prison farms chopped off their extremities to escape. (Clyde Barrow sacrificed a big toe.) Here the prisoners are housed—to use too kind a word—in cages on wheels, packed into rows of bunks, like animals in a particularly inhumane traveling zoo. The chain gang is one of the iconic images of Depression-era movies, perhaps the deepest and darkest vision of people bound together by suffering, as well as the ultimate symbol of exploited labor. Movies as grim as this were perhaps a kind of reverse escapism for 1933 audiences: anyone’s life looks good in comparison.
When Barney and an unfortunate youngster played by Tom Brown arrive at the camp, four black inmates are due to be hanged. The other men gripe that the hymns, shouts and prayers of the condemned have been keeping them up at nights. They are all brought out to watch the hanging for their edification, and the scene is shocking even for a viewer inured to pre-Code rawness. We know nothing about the men being executed, but their delirious terror and desperate spiritual exaltation are explosive and disturbing. Just when you expect the camera to turn aside tastefully to look at shadows or dangling feet, it doesn’t. We see the men swinging from a branch—strange fruit hanging from Southern trees. Even more striking is the aftermath, when other black prisoners fall to their knees to pray over the dead men and the guards try to force them back, while the white prisoners speak up, growling, “Ah, let ‘em pray,” “Yeah, it’s their religion.” (The delivery of this line oddly implies that only the black men are Christians.) Nothing in Universal’s horror cycle is as unsettling or queasily riveting as this scene.
While for the most part the prisoners seem to self-segregate, Clarence Muse has a good role as a coolly philosophical, circumspect black prisoner who hangs out with Barney and another white cell-mate who reads Schopenhauer on his bunk. When they are all shipped out to dig graves in a town ravaged by yellow fever, Muse remarks with solemn irony that he doesn’t care for the work: “There’s no future in it.” Moments later, Tom Brown reaches the breaking point and collapses in shrieking hysteria—which seems a reasonable response under the circumstances but is startling from an actor who usually played peppy kid brother roles. The prisoners take this as a cue to riot and kill their hated overseer.
As an escapee, Barney wanders alone through a plague-stricken countryside, meeting Gloria Stuart as a young woman whose entire family has just died of the disease. She obligingly pours coal oil on Barney’s festering back, lacerated by a flogging during which he was ordered—but refused—to count the lashes. Despite an abruptly optimistic ending, Laughter in Hell lingers in the mind like an undressed wound.
by Imogen Sara Smith