FANTASIA OBSCURA: Everybody Must Get Stoned?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you need to deviate from the source material, as the original story shouldn’t be placed on a pedestal…
Night Life of the Gods (1935)
Distributed by: Universal
Directed by: Lowell Sherman
Usually, when you hear about rediscovered statues, it tends to revolve around stolen antiquities being repatriated or archeologists discovering statues in odd places.
You don’t get any statue stories like that in cinema, though there was this one time…
Please note that there will be spoilers here for the film and its source material.
We open with an aerial shot of a large house that after a few seconds has an explosion that blows out the windows. The folks in the main part of the house are more perturbed than panicked; this includes Alice Lambert (Theresa Maxwell Conover), her husband Alfred (Phillips Smalley), her son Alfred Jr. (Wesley Barry), and her father-in-law (Richard Carle). They only start to react when the butler, Betts (Gilbert Emery), informs them that not only was there an explosion, but that this one was quite serious.
This actually thrills this group, as we discover that the family is actually living here because they had nowhere else to go after the Depression hit. We soon figure out that they don’t get along with the master of the house, Hunter Hawk (Alan Mowbray), Alice’s brother; he thinks they’re freeloaders and bores (all true), save for his niece Daphne, aka “Daffy” (Peggy Shannon), and they consider Hawk’s eccentricities and at home science experiments to be embarrassing and keeping them from being social climbers considered acceptable people.
As for the explosion, it gets the Lamberts’ hopes raised when they think they might inherit Hawk’s property, but he disappoints them by being alive. He not only survives the experiment, he’s made a breakthrough: He has discovered a means by which he can petrify and un-petrify people, turning flesh to stone and vice-versa.
If this were a serious genre pic, there are a lot of possible applications this discovery would have been put to use for. Stabilizing patients to get them from the field to the hospital, suspended animation for long space voyages, all sorts of good things. But no, Hawk has decided he wants to use it to get back at these pains in his ass!
Soon, he enjoys the peace and quiet, now that his relatives are trying to do an imitation of “The Burghers of Calais”. With only Daphne and Betts talking to him (and able to), Hawks seems a lot be more at ease, enough so that he takes a walk after dinner with two bottles of wine, one in each hand, as company. While out, he encounters his gardener, Old Man Turner (Ferdinand Gottschalk), who reveals to him that he is, actually, a leprechaun (no, not one of those…), which allows the film to wallow in some horrible Irish stereotyping…
The wee person brings Hawk home to meet his daughter, Meg (Florine McKinney), whose anger at her pa for bringing home some stranger soon turns to lust as she gets to know him better over a few drinks. (Sure, it sounds unrealistic, but then the Twenty-First Amendment had only just gone online before the film was made, so…)
Spurred on by the little lusty hellion, Hawk goes out dancing with her, to a place where the gin is cold, the piano’s hot, and everyone soon turns to stone because, reasons? With so many townsfolk becoming stone folk, our “silly Sthneo” goes on the run from the cops and the crazed Meg, only one of which he manages to avoid for a little while…
Having surrendered to Meg, the two become inseparable and make for a self-destructive Beatty and Dunaway for the 1930s. They decide to up the mayhem a bit, using the reverse ray at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to turn the statues of the gods there into flesh, to really get the party started.
Soon, the merry pranksters include Mercury (Paul Kaye in his last role), Bacchus (George Hassel), Hebe (Geneva Mitchell), Apollo (Ray “Crash” Corrigan, under the name ‘Raymond Benard’), Perseus (Pat DiCicco in his only role), Diana (Irene Ware), Neptune (Robert Warwick), and Venus (Marda Deering in her only credit). Together, the hosts of Olympus have one hell of a night…
And if this sounds wearing just reading it, imagine watching this take place. Most screwball comedies don’t come over the plate this fast; the normally outrageous plot devices in those films seem staid, as though hit with a petrification ray. And with such an outrageous device, the characters involved with it have to be even crazier than one normally finds in such movies in order to keep abreast of it.
It was inevitable that there be so much, maybe too much, going on in the film. Based on the 1931 novel of the same name by Thorne Smith, a writer who’s been forgotten today but during his life had many of his works turned into films such as Topper and I Married a Witch, the source material was loaded with lots of excessive drink and sex, which were the usual plot points in Smith’s works. And while the script by Barry Trivers had to have a few variations (like changing Meg to a leprechaun as opposed to being Megaera, the one and only Erinyes herself, as well as her keeping her clothes on), the adaptation is fairly faithful to the novel.
One of the biggest derivations, however, comes at the end. In the novel, the gods resume their positions at the museum, more or less, and their flesh becomes stone. Fed up with the world, Meg and Hawk disrobe and stand close to each other (very close, ifyoukowwhatImean…) as they turn the ring on themselves, becoming a new statue for the museum.
The film finds the gods taking their places, and Meg and Hawk keeping on their clothes as they self-petrify, but Hawkes soon awakens from his dream. It ends up the whole experience was something going on in his head after an accident in the lab. After all the mayhem and the twists of the script that Sherman and his cast could barely keep up with or sell well, we are left with what feels a cop-out with a tacked-on ending.
And in all likelihood, it was tacked on. Carl Laemmle, Jr., head of Universal and captain of a leaky ship (he and his father would be forced off the lot two years later by the studio’s board of directors), had a film based on a ribald fantasy coming out just as the Hayes Code was being adopted in Hollywood. Anxious to keep the pipeline flowing, he most likely ordered the ending be slapped on so that the film could get released and try and earn back its costs. Which, it being a Universal picture he produced, probably didn’t happen anyway.
Because “Junior” had feet of clay, unable to give fans of the source material what they wanted and then undercutting that with the ‘dream cop-out,’ the picture certainly seemed to be an embarrassment for the studio. After its theatrical release, it quietly disappeared, never to get a TV or home video window. It was assumed lost until a print was donated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive during the 1980s.
There was nothing to keep this film, imperfect as it was, from ever showing up again. It’s not like there were any statue-story rules they had to follow…
We’re coming up on a new year, a time when the word “resolutions” get bandied about, with people talking about what they’re going to do differently.
The thing is, “resolution” is a word that also means ending…
It’s been a wild ride, and a lot of fun doing these, but even the longest films do end. Sure, it takes Fanny and Alexander five hours, O.J.: Made in America over seven and a half, and they found a way to make The Hobbit run for nearly nine damn hours end-to-end, but, end they all do.
So, reading what will be 188 columns by the end shouldn’t feel that bad, should it…?
And yes, I said “what will be.” Consider this my two week notice as we stick around juuust a little longer, as
NEXT TIME: We look at a film that’s as uneven as the current distribution of wealth in our society, which is actually apropos…
