The George Marshall Cult Starts Here!

They never taught the likes of George Marshall in film school, and more’s the pity they didn’t/don’t. One modern writer refers to him as the quintessential hack director. Harsh words for such a reliable all-purpose man who served the industry from 1912 to 1972, manning the helm into his eightieth year. They can’t all be Hitchcock and Ford. With seven hundred and fifty features plus heaven knows how many shorts coming off studio lines per annum, somebody had to pull plows and get routine jobs done. Marshall was among such necessary personnel. Sometimes he did better than alright. Always he was efficient, looking every inch the part of a battle seasoned Hollywood pioneer. Life experience he brought to his first movie set make contemporary directors look like bottle-sucking infants. Marshall graduated from a school of life as opposed to UCLA. A child of now two centuries back (born 1891), he went farm-to-farm selling equipment, did cub reporting, and worked railroad shifts in between. He had a pugilist's nose. Coincidental may be the fact he took up pro baseball. Yesterday’s twenty calendar years is today’s --- what? Does anybody anymore get so much adventure in life early on? Marshall was just out of his teens when he landed in Hollywood. There was extra work, bit-playing, propping --- then camera assisting, make-up application, editing, and assistant directing. In those pre-union days, it was still possible to be jack-of-a-hundred trades. Coast Guard service led to Signal Corp duties in the First World War. After that, Marshall (still not yet thirty) would direct Tom Mix and later take charge of Fox’s short comedies unit. I mention this not so much in an effort to "rediscover" George Marshall --- it’s clearly too late, and there’s been too much film scholarship published --- for any (past) Hollywood director to be so anointed. It would hardly enough to take down a few DVD’s and pay random tribute to a craftsman of his longevity and output --- surely George Marshall and those of his generation deserve more, but what a variety of shows are not seen before, and so enjoyable in the bargain. 

TCM runs Bobby Jones shorts every now and again. He’s the long-ago golf champ whose story was told in a 2004 movie called Bobby Jones: Stroke Of Genius. George Marshall dreamed up the notion of putting Jones on the links with various Hollywood stars for purposes of teaching them (and us) a few duffing moves. There is gentle ribbing and ad-libbing among major names you’d not expect to see in a sport reel. Warner Oland did one. So did W.C. Fields. Cagney and Robinson took on-screen lessons in the near-immediate wake of rat-tatting to fame in Little Caesar and Public Enemy. No matter their status, all of these stood in awe of Bobby’s mighty swing. Astonished reactions to his expertise are at least as convincing as any performance they gave in features. George Marshall was deft enough in ways of comedy to engage viewers not otherwise taken by slow-motion golf swings. I found myself quite taken both by the pro’s relaxed Georgia drawl and his near-supernatural way with a niblick. Warners did several seasons of these --- eighteen sessions at a reel apiece to make champions of us all, each a trophy winner among sport shorts.

George Marshall had sharp features and an edge in his voice that made Fred Kohler look and sound like a geranium. He could play comedy as well as direct it. An early-thirties sojourn with Hal Roach found him in charge of a new series teaming Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts. A lot of these are plain wretched. I’m not sure they ever got that formula down, despite attempts all the way to Todd’s mysterious death four years after the shorts were introduced. Marshall dropped out of them and so did Pitts. The director went over to the Laurel and Hardy unit and did several good ones. Pack Up Your Troubles was the team’s second at feature-length and Marshall had a cameo playing a vengeful army cook. His is the funniest supporting bit in the film. I’m doubtful any director exerted influence over Laurel and Hardy once Leo McCarey left. The shorts Marshall helmed --- Towed In A Hole and Their First Mistake --- are not markedly different from other L&H during 1932, Stan Laurel’s creative control complete by this time, but Roach required at least a nominal body in the director’s chair, so for this brief period, Marshall was it. He would shuttle between Culver City and Mack Sennett’s factory for several years. The Sennett talking comedies are unknown quantities for modern viewers and have been for years. Blackhawk once sold them in 16mm, but that was generations back. A handful are available on DVD from Kino. There were a tiny few made famous by Bing Crosby or W.C. Fields, but a majority (including those directed by George Marshall) featured names best remembered by stouthearted buffs. Franklin Pangborn headlined several, as did Walter Catlett, Babe Kane, and silent holdovers Ford Sterling and Mack Swain. Even then they were two-reelers on life support, minor and past prime clowns bailing and flailing against the spectre of bankruptcy that would eventually take Sennett and his studio down.

There was a collector and Alice Faye completist named Frank Moshier who possessed the alleged only surviving print of 365 Nights In Hollywood, and it was by way of his estate that the 16mm rarity came to be used as source material for VCI’s DVD release. George Marshall directed his first features for Fox Film Corporation. 365 Nights would be a musical comedy hopelessly outmatched by Busby Berkeley spectaculars at Warners and Astaire/Rogers at RKO. 365 Nights In Hollywood was a 1934 release with ideas and execution that dated back further, the sort of limp rag that justified a public’s increased demand for double features. Such failed effort to beat song-and-dance competitors at their game is less interesting than authentic feel for life at the bottom of Hollywood’s food chain. Crooked talent schools operating in drab frame houses promise stardom to rubes and chumps desperate to break into movies. 365 Nights is itself drab enough to play like a cut-rate Movietone newsreel of life among show-biz shutouts. The DVD's muddy source print lends credibility the movie may not have enjoyed in sparkling 35mm nitrate. Being a twenty-year plus industry veteran by this time, George Marshall undoubtedly knew his way around scams and their practitioners. Two Will Rogers vehicles coming in 1934 and the following year would find a larger audience (365 Nights lost $19,000). Marshall left no more of a signature upon these than David Butler, James Cruze, or other directors hog-tied by a formula now in rigor mortis. I watched the two that Marshall supervised --- Life Begins At Forty and In Old Kentucky. They float upon my memory like contents of a molasses barrel. I can’t quite recall what happened in which. Will chases jaybirds with a slingshot. Banjo music heralds title credits. Funny (they think) old Grandpa chases folks with a loaded shotgun, and it occurs to nobody to take it away from him. There are both good girls and contrasting snooty ones to compete for vacuous juveniles. Bad behavior is generally equated with having money. Why didn’t they invite D.W. Griffith to come out of involuntary retirement and direct these things? He would have been ideal. Will Rogers was himself the auteur in command, presiding over small towns so distant in memory that we’re surprised whenever an automobile is driven upon the scene. Hard to imagine that much of the country was then very like the settings depicted here. They reflected an idealized  Americana, and  rural sites so flattered would worship Will Rogers. His pictures hauled freight for a struggling Fox Film Corporation. There were five featuring Rogers in 1935, two released posthumously. Marshall’s In Old Kentucky would be the last. I wonder how long the Rogers craze would have gone had he lived. I do know they reissued his oldies into the late thirties and all were lucrative. Foreign markets never got the appeal of these. For continentals, they must have played like life on Saturn. Example: In Old Kentucky took $1.4 million in domestic rentals, but a negligible $67,000 foreign.

More to come on George Marshall.