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Tonight, I saw one of the strangest movies I've ever seen.
This Day and Age (1933) was directed by Cecil DeMille, and concerns what happens to a small city when racketeers and gangsters aren't brought to justice.
What happens, you ask?
Why, mobs of high school kids turn vigilante, that's what.
Herman is a kindly old Jewish tailor with a small shop across the street from North High School. He presses the boys' pants before important school events and even feeds the immigrant boys food they are pining for -- chicken cacciatore for an Italian boy, chop suey for a Chinese boy, tsimmis (that's a guess, I have no idea what the stuff was) for a Jewish kid.
Herman's apparently been under some heat from a local protection racket, and when he refuses to buckle under, even after his storefront has been firebombed, the tough-guy leader of the gang (Charles Bickford) pays him a visit. He kills Herman in cold blood and is then in the process of making it look like a burglary when Steve Smith, the student council president (he's the type, anyway, even if he hasn't be duly elected) enters the shop and sees Herman lying dead and Bickford with his hands in the till.
Bickford knocks him out and escapes, and when the case is brought to trial, a "million-dollar mouthpiece" bullies Steve on the stand and gets Bickford off scot-free.
The boys of North High aren't the types to take this lying down, however. Several of them return to the shop looking for evidence and find half a cufflink there. Figuring it must belong to Bickford, they sneak into his apartment, looking for the other half. Tipped off, Bickford walks in on them and shoots one of the boys dead. The other he frames for the killing by placing the gun in his hand to ensure his prints are on it and then calling the cops.
Now, one of the high school kids is up on murder charges, and Bickford is still free.
Up to this point in the picture, there have been references to how buggy, how convoluted, how intricate -- doggone it, how gosh-darned unfair -- our criminal justice system is. Rules of evidence, schmules of evidence!
So the other boys at the high school (which is lightly sprinkled with students of color, believe it or not) hatch a complicated scheme to kidnap Bickford and bring him to their own brand of justice. (I'll skip the details of the kidnapping -- it has to be seen to be believed -- but one element is that Gay Merrick, a swell gal whom all the boys at North are just crazy about, will distract Toledo, Bickford's bodyguard, by making herself available for an amorous encounter, so that he won't realize Bickford's been captured.)
Bickford is taken to an abandoned brickyard on the edge of town where literally hundreds of high school boys -- not just from North High School, but also East, West, and South Highs -- are waiting for him. They come darned close to hanging him on the spot, but Steve Smith insists they hold a "trial," so as to do things right.
The whole, prolonged scene is like a cross between a lynching and a pep rally.
They string Bickford up (not by the neck -- the rope goes under his arms) and place him on a platform made of planks. They ask him straightforward questions ("Did you murder Herman?"), and every time they're convinced he hasn't given them a straight answer (which is, every time they ask him anything), they remove another plank. Turns out the platform was constructed over some kind of pit.
"What's down there??" Bickford keeps screaming, frantically. But these vigilantes aren't spilling the beans.
Plank after plank is removed until finally Bickford is dangling over the pit with no support beneath him. His frantic screams grow louder and louder. "There's something ALIVE down there!"
There is, indeed. Rats. Dozens of ravenous rats, and with each passing question, Bickford's being lowered down, foot by foot.
Meantime, Toledo's gotten word of Bickford's dilemma, so he gathers the gang and a bunch of machine guns and heads full-speed for the brickyard.
But Gay, who herself was speeding toward the brickyard in a car she "borrowed" from a stranger, is stopped by a motorcycle cop. She quickly fills him in, and he calls for reinforcements.
Somehow, the sheriff and the cops arrive in time to get the drop on Toledo and the gang, and when they all enter the brickyard, they find Bickford about to sign his confession (the rats were too much for him; he has finally cracked).
The sheriff announces he made every one of those boys a deputy hours ago (it's a lie, as surprise at his announcement registers plainly on the boys' faces), and he advises the boys to get Bickford to sign the confession in front of a judge.
So the boys put a handcuffed Bickford on a horse, his gang in a police car, and they all slowly walk the several miles back to town, singing in unison at the top of their lungs all the way.
(What do they sing? A strange assortment of familiar ditties -- "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," "Oh Suzanna!", "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and the like. Why do they sing these songs? I have no idea.)
They barge into the judge's home (the same judge who let Bickford walk in his earlier trial) and rouse him from his sleep. All parties march down to the courthouse.
Out of the blue, Bickford mentions the true brains behind his operation, "The Little Man," and insists that it was he who was behind it all. We're shown one scene of the Little Man on the telephone, making arrangements to leave the country (we don't see his face), but otherwise he's a total red herring thrown in in the closing moments. And there's a scene where various other shadowy types pay a late-night visit to the mayor (whom we've also not seen until this moment) insisting he must help them -- apparently they're all "respectable" types who were all somehow in cahoots with the Little Man and Bickford.
Clearly these scenes are meant to suggest that nearly all the prominent citizens of the city are corrupt, but this info is oddly thrown in at that last possible moment. We, the viewers, don't know who any of these guys are.
Once the huge mob has arrived at the courthouse, Bickford signs the confession, the framed high school student is released, and all the boys are proclaimed American Heroes by the judge.
In the final scene, the main two rivals for Gay's affections, Steve and another boy, are seated on either side of Gay in the front seat of the car she stole (for all the right reasons, of course), which is parked in front of the police station. The man who owns the car exits the station with a patrolman, recognizes his car and the girl, and insists they be arrested.
"Did you steal this car?" the cop asks Gay.
"Why, um, yes, I did. Am I going to be arrested?"
We fully expect him to say, "Not if you're with these two young heroes, you're not. I'm sure you did it for a good reason." Something that lets her off the hook and gives us a happy ending.
But he doesn't say that at all.
"You're all under arrest," he says emphatically, as he pulls out his arrest book and begins to write them up.
Fade out.
A very strange ending to a very strange picture. The "trial" scenes at the brickyard, especially, were at once humorous and disturbing.
I'm told this is a very rare film, and I believe it. Film Forum was allowed to screen it only twice today. I hope to see it again one day, just to try to make some sense of it.
Posted by brett at 01:17 AM | TrackBack