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As Good As It Gets

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This is a helluva time, riotous precode stuff—perverse entertainment according to some. The Code was invented for just such a film, though thankfully not in time for it, to rob us of pleasures that someone thought would destroy the common fabric if indulged too often.It's the Depression, though the film takes place in Paris so as not to offend. The film is by the 42nd Street/Footlight Parade team, so a show about a show being staged. The entire film is one long night of song and revelry in Al Jolson's Wonder Bar.It would be far fetched to claim this as intentionally analogous to the times. In a way, however, it can be said to parse out from and abstract—in the dreamlike way of Hollywood—a certain kind of Depression-era experience.What has happened from the perspective of the commonfolk in the audience, is that whimsical gods have decided to throw a crank in the gears of the world, snapping order and mechanism—anything goes for a while. In stark reality, this means bread lines and hobo trains.Here are some of the situations that develop in the story: adultery, theft and all sorts of deceit and secret drama, what amounts to owner- sanctioned prostitution both male and female, a homosexual couple freely dance together, a man who all through the film insinuates suicide and no one bothers to stop him.. and get this, murder goes unpunished and doesn't even weigh on anybody's conscience. Instead of being made to feel horror and desperation at this snapping of order, we have a grand time. The focus is on us being entertained. This is of course not uncommon for musicals of the time, in fact it is the very engine of it—the show must go on. Here, however, we have Gold Diggers of 33 grinded out through the dionysian wringer.How about the actual show? Busby Berkeley is here, and that means gaudiness, scope and sensual razzmatazz. I so love the man, at least in those brief years when inspiration was still fresh. There are two numbers here, the first as you expect it; fresh women, body-particles which contrary to shapeless reality, up on the stage form abstract—erotic— order, vaginal molecules that swirl and shudder and blossom fruits in our imagination.Now you would expect, as was the norm in the 'backstage' mode, the big number to somehow address the situations, a kind of visual situation of situations. It's why I think this mode matters and have been surveying it, quite apart from the pleasures of frill and song.Here's where it gets really interesting.The last number once more has Jolson in blackface and was deemed so vile this one, it was excised by censors from future prints. Now Jolson has been scheming all through the film, as the proprietor, to win the affections of his star, not unkindly mind you, but it leads to some nasty turns. Jolson's character—who would be feeling pangs of guilt in normal reality—in his disguise as humble godfearing tom, goes to heaven on a mule; he is mirthfully greeted there by angels in blackface, kids playing banjo, a chorus of happy souls swirling in the clouds. God, this is great. Jolson as the great manipulator is reprieved from wrongdoing, two layers here: in his mind and imagination, as having conceived the show, secondly in the public mind, in the show being shared for the enjoyment of an audience both in and out of the film, and in its dazzle of course eclipsing in lasting impression the events of the plot.You think I'm reading too much? Keep in mind I am always observing dynamics, not deciphering intent.You will notice that the number is linked and flows out from a previous number ('Gaucho'), where reality seeps into the dance in the form of violent passion and the audience applauds, sanctifying the amoral mechanics of illusion. Dolores del Rio as the voluptuous object of desire looks ravishing, everything happens for her eyes. Imagine: she ends in the arms of meek, boring pretty-boy Dick Powell.Anything goes—a musical Mabuse of sorts, but the manipulator of cinematic illusion walks away instead of as in Fritz Lang's film, succumbing to madness and police. We applaud, blessing his powers of seduction over reason.Something to meditate upon.

ThisThis is a shocking movie. Al Jolson is not a performer who holds up well but his character eerily adumbrates the MC of "Cabaret." Isherwood's Berlin Stories hadn't been written at this time and this takes place in Paris, but the same sense of decadence reigns.Kay Francis is cuckolding her older husband with gigolo Richard Cortez. Cortez is a nasty character and the dance partner at the title establishment of Dolores Del Rio.Ms. Del Rio, one of the great beauties of movie history, is not served well by the makeup and hairstyling here. She looks like the Ann Miller of 2000. Francis is as chic as ever and has a thankfully small role -- almost a cameo.Louise Fazenda as the wife in two American couples visiting France, is hilarious, doing everything she can to attract the boys. (Not, presumably, the two whom we see dancing together.) The dance number between Cortez and Del Rio is genuinely shocking. It's called a whip dance and he cracks a whip, like a lion tamer. It doesn't touch her, but she crawls on the floor responding to it. This movie has some of the raciest scenes of any between the end of the Code and Lina Wertmuller.Alas, a scene near the end begins with Jolson in blackface and expands to include a whole group of supporting singers in blackface. This was a convention and one of specialties. I have seen it in movies made as recently as "Torch Song from the early 1950s, in which a blond Joan Crawford sings in blackface. That is risible; here, we have something grossly unappealing.

The storyline of this film is fairly ordinary: something of a "Grand Hotel" set in a Paris cabaret in the 20s. What makes it noteworthy -- besides the opportunity to watch Al Jolson in action -- is the jaw-droppingly insensitive closing number, "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule," staged by Busby Berkeley in characteristically over-the-top fashion. A blackface Jolson takes us through a version of heaven with Pork Chop Orchards and Possum Pie Groves, automatic fried chicken, dancing watermelons, and a streetcar going from the "Milky Way to Lenox Ave." And in the midst of it all, a winking Al grins over a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, just to let us all in on the joke.The number makes the Lincoln's Birthday number in "Holiday Inn" look tame. Even Stepin Fetchit suddenly appears endowed with a singular dignity. Watching it helps one to understand the unhappy history of race relations in this country.Which is why I think that the film should be seen, if only in order for younger Americans to understand just where all that racial anger comes from. This is our cultural history, and we shouldn't run from it. It ought to be screened in every cultural studies class in America!

Jolson's Al Wonder is a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else, and he's an American living in a foreign city -- Paris, in this case).Ricardo Cortez and Dolores del Rio display mannerisms typical of actors still in transition from the silent era. They both bring some magnetism to the screen, as do Kay Francis and Dick Powell. The comedy thread, featuring Guy Kibbee, Ruth Donnelly, Hugh Herbert and Louise Fazenda as two American couples determined to take advantage of the sexual exoticism of Paris, gets a little thin.It's a well made film, although clearly dated, and with some interesting moral ambiguity. Its limits as art and as entertainment are transcended during two sublime Busby Berkeley sequences: the first a typically dazzling choreographic gem emerging from a Cortez/del Rio dance routine; and the second, equally impressive, but bizarre, following Jolson in blackface going up to Heaven on a mule, during which Jolson seems to want to add Cab Calloway to his character's identikit.It's to Lloyd Bacon's (and the cast's) credit that the contrivances of the plot don't dull the film's impact too much, but it is only when BB's magic unfolds that WONDER BAR becomes exceptionally good.