Hard Sold, Soon Forgot

 

Cain and Mabel (1936) My Notion of a Howl and a Wow

I now call upon all to pit speech skills against formidable opponent that is Clark Gable in Cain and Mabel, specifically a staccato blast he issues part way in. Trick is to peel off the salvo as quick as Gable in his fit of fury against offscreen Marion Davies, so here goes, and feel free to read/rehearse before trying the rapid recite: I’m supposed to be a fighter, and what am I doin,’ playing post office all over the front page with a dame. (his manager timidly replies that all the world loves a lover) Oh, so I’ve switched titles, have I. I’m America’s sweetheart now, am I. Well, get this. That cheap little publicity hound has got to apologize for this, or I’ll wring her neck until the newspapers won’t be able to get a word out of her without a corkscrew. Remember, speed is the goal, a faster you go, the higher you score. Few weeks ago I was telling a friend from college about a recent happening. At one point, he stopped me to say, Wait a minute, John, you’re talking too fast. Alarmed and abashed, I slowed way down. What has 30’s distraction done to me?

Hardest-Earned Depression Dollars for Lad Going Down Streets Skipping Rope. Did Local Carnivals Not Have Geek Positions Open?

Funny Folk in Support Enhance Cain and Mabel: Roscoe Karns, Ruth Donnelly, and Walter Catlett

 

Watch enough of Cain and kin and you may find yourself infected by a Walter Winchell bug. Suppose I quick-time the Gable speech (not there yet, still trying), where does that get me? We’re not living in Cain and Mabel’s world anymore. I doubt we were in 1936. There is a deluxe trailer for Cain and Mabel, over four minutes, from which above dialogue came, the 16mm reel mine in 1972 for $17.50 from Glenn Photo Supply (also on You Tube). I used to drop it into campus movie shows to baffle crowds. Suffice to say, no one asked when we would see Cain and Mabel. Such tempo, plus stops-off wiseacreage, won’t again be our dish, more's the regret. Cain and Mabel represents an aggressive line in romantic comedy made necessary by teeth Code-pulled, where couples fight rather than love, beginning in fact as enemies, or victims of prolonged misunderstanding. Was there ever such sustained sublimation of the sex urge? I don’t recall any Cary Grant character sleeping with a woman after Hot Saturday and Blonde Venus. He was too busy arguing with them. Cain and Mabel might be dogmatic at that pitch were lines and situations not so clever, and dialogue so tart. Maybe it’s me too easily impressed, but this one strikes me as funnier than a stack of others celebrated for being so. Is Cain and Mabel screwball, a category I’m less enamored of than most? Thing about 30’s repartee is our wanting to remember snappy lines we can later spring on friends, but how many friends would we have, once bombarded by someone else’s wordage of eighty-five year ago?

I looked up the screenplay credit … Laird Doyle. Had not heard the name before, then found he died within a month and a half of Cain and Mabel release, age twenty-nine, taking lessons in an airplane that stalled. He had been at Warners after graduating from Stamford. There was big audience appetite for zingy word-sling during the thirties. A lot of it dates now, like comedy from any era (save possibly the silent). Humor driven by dialogue was made for the moment. Newspapers did a Cain and Mabel contest where readers submitted “Snappy Comebacks” to a chosen moment from the film, free ducats for the snappiest. Hear enough wit in movies, let alone radio listened to night after night, and who of us would not regard him/herself an Algonquin tabler in the making? Imagine chief jesters from student newspapers aiming their verbal act at Hollywood, or again, radio, where yearn for humor was unquenchable. Laird Doyle might have been such a prodigy, him a Stamford panic too good to stay campus-confined. I remember when New Yorker magazine ran caption contests for their cartoon drawings. Create the funniest and be envied by all of elites. Who of us hasn’t looked at a print photo or drawing and figured we could come up with a funnier squib?

Once There Really Were Community Sings --- Could There Ever Be Again?

I don’t wonder that movies were thought of as ephemeral. So what if Warners ordered its warehouse to throw out Convention City after some nitrate damage was found? If not for television, little of this old stuff would exist anymore. Look what they let happen to our silent film heritage. That came of guessing it had no value for TV. Movies brand new were the stuff of headlines, at least in Amusement Sections, daily bulletins, backstage happenings of crucial interest to fans panting for a Cain and Mabel to be upon them. Winds might blow from a week to months, depending on push applied to publicity. Important projects got more grease, naturally. Looking at Cain and Mabel’s pressbook, or pages devoted to it in trades, fan mags, even mainstream periodicals, you would think this was the Treaty from Versailles, or cure for Hookworm. An always clogged pipe of distribution meant no subject could stay atop awareness. Soon as we were told to mark down and remember a Cain and Mabel, there would come another to take its front of a line place. This was the engine that drove Americans into theatres a minimum of once per week, preferably twice, or however many as purses would permit.

Back-of-camera action outlandish enough got play. If anything could happen in Hollywood, why not Clark Gable knocking cold his sparring partner, latter a “former intercollegiate champion.” Here is Gable, unversed at boxing, but being Gable, could do anything champs could in any field, just because he’s Gable. Set upon wing of publicity, the incident, bogus or not, is further embellished when Gable is supposedly offered $50,000 to enter the ring with Max Baer, a chance he demurred, because after all he's not properly trained. Was such absurdity to be believed, by anybody? I suspect if one asked Gable about all this after the “fact,” he would have no idea what they were talking about. Very real, however, was Marion Davies being billed over Clark Gable in titles and all ads for Cain and Mabel. W.R. Hearst’s money was in the "Cosmopolitan" production, also his control to large extent. Hearst policy as to Davies billing was ironclad --- she never did a talkie other than top-placed. Didn’t matter who the co-star, Gary Cooper behind her for 1934’s Operator 13, now Gable for Cain and Mabel, and he had just come off Mutiny On The Bounty, Wife vs. Secretary, and San Francisco. Certain fixes once in were not to be questioned, at least by those wanting to keep their job.

UPDATE: Scott MacGillivray sent along some caption contest samples from his Laurel-Hardy collection:

Hi, John — Your “caption contest” post sent me running to find the attached examples from 1972. The Junior Mints and Pom Poms candy brands, then based in Massachusetts, offered a Laurel & Hardy caption contest, where consumers were invited to send in their own gag lines for a $5.00 prize. 

Nice to see that Laurel & Hardy are TCM’s Stars of the Month in December. They’re drawing from most of the Laurel & Hardy library every Monday.

Best wishes — Scott