Where Bootlegs are Best #1

 

Boots: The Rider of Death Valley and The Trial of Vivienne Ware

Call them bootleg, black market (discreetly “grey”), stuff of illicit circulation but circulating widely nonetheless. This once was what film collecting was all about. Anyone not dealing contraband was not dealing movies, at least movies collectors wanted. Best brigands in the business are passed now. A number got busted when the FBI was handmaiden to studios. Feds that cleaned out one dealer’s house even took his Castle films, fact those were legit mattering not a whit. Few dealers were stopped by regulations, like Cagney and Robinson flipping Prohibition the bird. Film companies finally realized they could do better joining rather than beating collectors. My first 16mm print in 1972 was Mutiny on the Bounty, the 1935 version, which I got from a vendor who appropriately lived in Death Valley, apropos to today’s topic. Buying unsanctioned discs is Ebay commonplace, and look at what springs up on You Tube hourly. Pirates never had it better, nor viewers to relish their bounty. Such seems an only route to much of what fans long to see, devotees fated to dwell in moral twilight. Where Boots Are Best thus debuts as a series, today’s entry its inaugural.

Lost in a Desert Hell --- Could You Trust Tom To Get You Out?

THE RIDER OF DEATH VALLEY (1932) --- Let’s agree that Tom Mix line readings are … eccentric? Most don’t know Tom from talkies, or at all for that matter. I can think of no bigger star so forgot since his prime, except virtually all of western names once revered by young and old, none more so than Mix, who made enormous money when money was still real money. My back door disc of The Rider of Death Valley came from heaven knows what “liberated” print that for all I know was a same one William K. Everson used for his 2-11-80 NYU class. Everson knew how lucky he was to score that as I am for the DVD slipped my way at a cowboy show back when they still had cowboy shows (all gone, as in not a one left, and if I’m wrong, do brighten my day by telling me so). To whom will it matter that The Rider of Death Valley is lauded best of nine Mix talkies plus his 1935 serial, The Miracle Rider. I’ve written of Mix before, radical gestures considering how obscure he’s become. There are corners of the Internet, and Facebook, to celebrate him. Old-timers I knew, long gone now, waxed eloquent on him. Nobody rode like Mix … that we know … but something about his performing shifts to highest gear once Rider chips go down. He growls lines and acquits like a cobra, his voice dry dust raspy and authentic for one of his wives having shot Tom in the throat (had he left the cap off their toothpaste?). Threshold question then: Is The Rider of Death Valley a good western? I argue yes, and more so would if only Kino came out with a Mix Blu box (all nine of the Universals --- imagine!). Rider begins in town then shifts to title valley for as stark an account of water deprivation and slow death in the sun as any movie made to then or since. Mix starts off like Randolph Scott in The Tall T, jolly and jokey, until landscape closes in, then he’s determined, intense, utter conviction pouring off him like desert sweat. Water runs out and villain ride-alongs will trade their gold for a sip, but no, Tom has the canteens plus knowing human nature, that is, humans being no d—n good.

He's Stern As Here, and Won't Buckle Under a Punishing Sun

Fun if overdue is seeing bully and badman Fred Kohler in tears chasing after a lake mirage and getting a mouthful of sand, vultures circling over him and waiting their turn. Powerful image is Mix beating beloved Tony to make the horse go back to his ranch for help, for which Lois Wilson chides Tom till he tells her it’s the first time he ever struck Tony and it’s breaking his heart, but there’s no other way to save their lives. Here’s as intense a desert trek as I ever saw in a film. You wonder if they’ll ever get out of this. Location work looks miserable as convincingly cracked lips on the cast. Kids should have got purple hearts for getting through The Rider of Death Valley, being raw steak even for 1932 and for adults same as youngsters. Mix takes customary punishment for a man past fifty who’d had his body busted in a hundred ruining ways. Cue the Schine’s Palace in Lockport (but what state?) giving away a Beautiful Live Pony to a lucky kid whoever he/she was, until he/she gets home to Dad who’s just come off a twelve-hour shift at the railroad yard with barely enough poke to feed a wife and five other kids. How do you suppose he’d react to Junior leading his free nag up to the door? (nag probably accurate, it unlikely the Schine would be giving away Seabiscuit or his equivalent) Schine management doubtless took a terrific cussing that day along with return of the animal. Then what? Long since spent milk, but I could wonder how many unwanted pets were handed out at matinees to cause no end of complication at home. You fret for the poor, unwanted beasts gone from pillar to post and no one to finally claim them. Hope this horse was finally a rescue for some person or entity other than glue works. There’s a two-and-a-half-minute segment from The Rider of Death Valley on You Tube that looks better than woebegone boot I have, so maybe there’s hope for improved quality to eventually show up. In the meantime, we make do like Tom with his drying canteen.

Neither a Glowing Prospect, So What's Precode Pin-Up Lillian Bond To Do?

THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE (1932) --- Long been a hound for You Tube, it being all the television I care to watch anymore. Others seem in accord if statistics are any guide. Celebration of sensation and tabloid style media is timeless theme at YT, it evoking The Trial of Vivienne Ware, humdinger of a precode dug from Fox catacombs years back (late 60’s) by archivist Alex Gordon and put barely into circulation, ignored thanks to barely part. William K. Everson had a 16mm print, ran it at his NYU class, where many a classic was born then regrettably forgot because studios cared too little to share with a wider public. Word of Vivienne worth spread via collector tom-toms and renegade discs spread at shows at which I scored one off a dealer since gathered to reward. The Trial of Vivienne Ware thrills … no … exhilarates, as few of 30’s kin can. What I said about YT and tabloids --- and cue hackneyed the more things change, the more they stay, etc. You Tube videos on any/all topics routinely grab us via clickbait “preview” clips and visual cues outlandish as any front page of the New York Mirror in heady days, The Trial of Vivienne Ware reminding me more of now than then that was 1932. Vivienne Ware is about Joan Bennett put on a fry pan for murder, sharkish radio broadcasters on the scene, mere sheet of glass separating them from courtroom proceedings. Did this go on during the early thirties? I seem to remember Bruno Hauptmann tried publicly. Anyway, there’s footage of him on the witness stand, and at You Tube appropriately. The Trial of Vivienne Ware conducts hearings we’d much enjoy if reality served them so raw, knives thrown at testifiers, witnesses on a verge of exposing a killer shot dead in open court, all stuff of anarchic dreams and reported breathlessly by wireless press. What a circus radio must have been if Vivienne is any guide.

Watch Zasu Here and Realize What a Consummate Actress She Could Be

Skeets Gallagher is the on-air shouter, what we wish modern hosts could more be, while Zazu Pitts is in/out doing sob-sister duty. Her jail cell interview with J. Bennett is about the best scene I ever saw Zazu play, her perfectly capturing what evil media-folk do, but how pleasingly she does it. Zazu surely got her cues from listening lots to everyday radio and giving interpretation the gas. So were her arrows accurate aimed? Don’t fully know cause so little of radio survives from the early thirties, let alone radio capturing other than biggest news of the day, darn little even of that. Listening by 1932 was way of everybody’s life, more so frankly than movies thanks to it being free and baleful preview of strip-mine TV to come. Studios wisely joined this enemy they could not overcome, tie-ins plus investment in the format a result, as look at RKO doing The Phantom of Crestwood after radio set the table, broadcasts essential to the film making sense. Then there was Paramount putting large money into CBS, using personalities from there to garland music and patter comedy revues, International House sterling sample of same. Should I ever get to go back in time, first priority will be to switch on home crystal and hear what wide, wild world of radio was daily about. Till then, there is The Trial of Vivienne Ware to at least suggest power and hold the devil’s box had. Maybe I should be glad to have been reared on television despite numbing overall effect of a lifetime exposed to that. And now it’s scanning, streaming, Artificial Intelligence --- is it misnomer to call any intelligence artificial? What there is of human intellect we’d like to think is real, but if we’re all so subject to being fooled by AI, well … the future looks uncertain indeed. And here I am wondering when someone will rescue Vivienne Ware and put her before a wider viewership. Might as well stay vested in trivialities and let an alarming world go by. I sing praise for The Trial of Vivienne Ware because hang it all, this should be seen and is, in event you know the right outlaws or shadier avenues online. Not that owners care to protect such piddling asset, and besides, in a couple years it will be Public Domain.