The Last Days of Pompeii: Great F/X, Bad History

The Last Days Of Pompeii
Warner Bros. // 1935 // 96 Minutes // Not Rated


Reviewed by Steve Evans

“A sky ablaze in flame and ash!” ~ From the promotional poster.

Opening shot…
The producer, director, screenwriter, and special-effects maestro who brought the original King Kong to life re-teamed two years later for this historical spectacle. This slow-moving melodrama accelerates in the final reel with a wild climax of destruction and chaos, engineered by one of the earliest — and greatest — special effects technicians in Hollywood.

A bit of plot…
In the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, peaceful blacksmith Marcus (Preston Foster, My Friend Flicka) refuses to fight as a gladiator no matter how much money he’s offered. Marcus prefers the quiet family life with his wife and infant son. But when his wife dies for lack of proper medical care, Marcus picks up a sword and begins to kill for a fistful of gold coins. Violent death and shady business deals pay well, and soon Marcus is the wealthiest man in Pompeii. His son Flavius (John Wood, Luck of the Navy) grows to manhood and chooses a different path. Having encountered Jesus on the road to Judea, Flavius turns toward Christianity and quickly discovers that his beliefs in peace and equality clash with his father’s avaricious values. Flavius vows to free the slaves of Pompeii. In Jerusalem, Marcus visits Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone, The Adventures of Robin Hood), who plots his political schemes and “washes his hands” of the Messiah’s fate. As Jesus faces crucifixion, Marcus barely escapes the rioting in Jerusalem with his friend Burbix (sturdy contract player Alan Hale, who would also appear in The Adventures of Robin Hood as Little John, opposite Rathbone and Errol Flynn). Returning to Pompeii, Marcus learns his son has joined the slave rebellion. As the skies darken with volcanic ash, Mt. Vesuvius rumbles ominously outside the city.

Historical significance and context…
This picture was made by famed producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest Schoedsack and stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O’Brien after they stunned the world with King Kong. Like the classic, giant-monkey film, this tale of the Roman Empire was penned by Ruth Rose, Schoedsack’s wife and longtime collaborator. The Last Days of Pompeii delivers solid production values (and dubious history), while serving up spectacular destruction when Vesuvius inevitably erupts as it must. Until then, there is plenty of talk to pad the running time. Even the arena battles are rather pedestrian. Schoedsack relies heavily on montage, symbolism and portentous dialogue to propel the plot. And there's the problem. The basic story of financial hardship and family values clashing in a moral conundrum is spun from thin fabric. There's just not enough narrative cloth to drape across a feature-length film, especially a picture that exists mainly as a showcase for O’Brien’s special effects genius. His talents with miniatures and optical trickery remain impressive 70 years on — if we look at the film in the context of pre-computer technology.

Although computer-generated imagery may be more convincing, film connoisseurs should take time to savor the craftsmanship that went into these early spectacles at the dawn of the sound era. True, there's not much of O’Brien's signature stop-motion work in this picture. But his skill in combining miniatures, artificial lava and full-scale sets with hundreds of stampeding actors is proof that O’Brien (above, right) was expert at much more than manipulating rubber dinosaur puppets a frame at a time. In Pompeii, his effects are more convincing than Foster and especially Rathbone, whose acting in this picture makes a wooden Indian look positively dynamic.

What’s on the Disc, Steve?
I’ll tell ya. DVD video and audio are as good as the 70-year-old source materials. No restoration effort appears to have been made, as the film is pocked with scratches, blemishes, and apparent flecks of dirt on a faded print. No extras on the disc; not even a trailer, which is disappointing, given the film’s pedigree.

Composer Roy Webb receives credit for the original music score, but there's more going on here than meets the ear. There’s no question that large portions of the score, particularly during the climax, were lifted directly from Max Steiner’s classic score for the original King Kong, another RKO Radio Pictures property. Such uncredited appropriations were common under the old studio system, when everyone worked under contract and the major production companies controlled everything.

This practice of musical cribbing continues today. Just for fun, listen during the trailer for the Disney picture Chicken Little (2005) and you’ll hear snippets of the 1994 score for Roland Emmerich's Stargate. Disney also got a lot of mileage out of The Rocketeer (1991) soundtrack, which was reused in dozens of trailers throughout the 1990s. James Horner’s score for Aliens (1986) would be reused countless times – most notably whole sections in the final scenes of Die Hard (1988).

But let’s return to the audio for Pompeii. Careful listeners will realize that the foley artist also reused some of the old Kong sound effects, most memorably the awful screams of sailors plunging to their doom from the log bridge and, in an earlier scene, the poor fellow picked off a tree and devoured by an Apatosaurus. Those hideous yodels and yelps are heard again and again in ancient Pompeii, as extras are pulverized under tumbling temples and crumbling statues. Obsessive film historians might wonder how long it took a studio like RKO to amortize the cost of a reel of sound effects across the budgets for half a dozen or more films.

Coda
The Last Days of Pompeii was released on DVD the same day as a trio of Cooper’s more famous films (all featuring O’Brien’s animated apes) — King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young. Warner probably did this as a housecleaning measure — dust off and release an obscure title by one of the fathers of epic filmmaking on the same day as its more famous siblings. Good marketing ploy, since the primary audience for this picture will be O’Brien’s fans and special effects enthusiasts. Like his other, lesser-known films, such as The Black Scorpion, O’Brien’s special effects in The Last Days of Pompeii are more interesting than the actors reacting in front of them.

Inducing restlessness until the mighty Vesuvius climax, The Last Days of Pompeii only comes to life when most of the characters meet violent death. For the grimly effective climax, I applauds O’Brien’s masterful techniques as the work of a true effects innovator. Sadly, his efforts went virtually unrecognized by film lovers until long after his death in 1963. Even a 1949 special effects Oscar for Mighty Joe Young seems inadequate compensation for a man who devoted his life to conjuring non-stop wonders on a movie screen via the painstaking process of stop-motion animation.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.

White Heat: Film Noir to Scorch the Screen

White Heat was the last, great film noir of the 1940s, a picture that has lost none of its power to astonish and amaze.

James Cagney stars as Cody Jarrett, a mama-obsessed psychopath on a rampage of robbery and murder. White Heat ranks among the greatest films of the genre, unfolding with shocking violence (for its day), incredible dialogue, and a story lifted from Sophocles.

A bit of plot
Jarrett and his gang stage a daring daylight train robbery, murdering the railroad employees as they seize the loot. One of Jarrett's gang is mortally wounded in a freak accident during the raid. Decamping to their hideout, the robbers mull over what to do with their dying colleague. Jarrett's bug-eyed psychosis becomes obvious as he suffers a crippling seizure while arguing with an underling. But his devoted Ma (Margaret Wycherly, The Yearling), who is almost as dangerous as her grown son, comforts Cody and makes sure the gang does not see him in this compromised state. Any sign of weakness could lead to a power grab by Jarrett's associates: thieves and killers all.

Jarrett decides to take it on the lam with his sultry but duplicitous wife (Virginia Mayo, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and calculating mother. As the cops close in, he hatches a plan to take the rap for a lesser crime committed by a hood in another state so he can avoid a death sentence for the railroad caper. His psychosis worsens in prison as undercover cop Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien) joins the inmates in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Jarrett and finagle a confession out of this killer. (Side note: A versatile character actor, O'Brien played Gringoire in the definitive 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He worked steadily during a 40-year career, collaborating with such cinematic luminaries as Cecil B. DeMille and John Frankenheimer.)

The men escape prison and plot a final heist as Jarrett creeps around town, settling scores with the double-crossers in his old gang. But stupid blunders by his colleagues, and even his aging mother, allow the police to triangulate Jarrett's position and corner the gang at an oil refinery for the justly famous, climactic confrontation.

Under the taut direction of Raoul Walsh (High Sierra), Cagney and the rest of the cast create an indelible portrait of criminals whose honor and trust exist only at gunpoint. Today the film is best remembered for Cagney's harrowing performance as a crazed psychotic, quick with a crude quip and a volatile temper that finds release only in murder. Cagney was a three-time best-actor Oscar nominee, winning for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1943. That film and White Heat represent his most enduring work, followed by The Public Enemy (1931), a positively feral film in which Cagney famously mashes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face.

As Cody’s morally flexible wife Verna, Virginia Mayo isn't quite a femme fatale in the classic mold, although her shifty opportunism keeps viewers guessing about her motives and schemes. Margaret Wycherly's performance as Ma Jarrett is a small treasure of the cinema. Her beady eyes, practically shimmering with madness, provide the first of many clues that Cody’s own deranged state has its origins in heredity. It is a stunning performance, every bit the equal of Cagney’s work. Wycherly had won an Academy Award in 1941 for another maternal role, that of Gary Cooper’s kindly mother in Sergeant York – the very antithesis of her work as Ma Jarrett in this classic gangster flick.

White Heat offers much more to amaze the first-time viewer. The violence is outrageous for a film made during the censorial reign of the Hays Code. Dialogue drips with venomous sarcasm. And in the 60 years since the film's release, no other mainstream movie has explored madness and unpleasant Oedipal obsession with such grim relentlessness. White Heat weaves the stuff of Greek tragedy into the hardest noir of the 1940s.

The screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts was inspired by crime writer Virginia Kellogg's short story. She earned an Academy Award nod for Best Story, the film's lone nomination (it's unclear why Goff and Roberts were omitted). And what fabulous writing it is: Characters bristle and bark at each other in spectacular torrents of verbiage that was simply unheard-of in 1949 and remains amazing today. A taste of that dialogue:

Gangster (voice trembling): “You wouldn't kill me in cold blood, would ya?”
Jarrett (sneering as he pulls the trigger): “Naw; I'll let ya warm up a little.”

At a fast-paced 113 minutes, fans might wish White Heat would unspool for another hour or more.

Thoughts on the DVD
Warner Bros., the studio from Hollywood's Golden Age that specialized in violent gangster pictures, unleashes White Heat with a superb set of disc extras:

Film critic Leonard Maltin introduces "Warner Night at the Movies 1949," an enjoyable time capsule featuring a newsreel, a comedy short, a Bugs Bunny cartoon (“Homeless Hare”), theatrical trailers, and White Heat, our feature presentation. Like the Night at the Movies features on other Warner discs, these selections can be played individually or in succession, which approximates the theatrical experience more than half a century ago when a ticket cost 25 cents, audiences actually got their money's worth, and they didn’t have to sit through asinine commercials.

Film historian Drew Casper delivers an insightful, feature-length commentary on an alternate track, dishing on all manner of production information and trivia for the true fan.

There's also a 17-minute featurette, White Heat: Top of the World, exploring the historic importance of the film, with insights from Martin Scorsese and other filmmakers who speculate on what was wrong with Cody Jarrett. Migraines? Epilepsy? Full-blown psychosis? Whatever his affliction, this short feature is informative and entertaining.

Coda
White Heat is a genuine noir classic. The print and sound on this DVD are pristine, the quality extras are comprehensive, and Warner packages the disc in a smart-looking case at an attractive price.

As for Cody Jarrett, his fate is sealed in film immortality: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”

Ka-boom.

Copyright © 2009 by Steve Evans // dba Cinema Uprising. All rights reserved.