HOT DOG (1930)
Article 4140 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-27-2013
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Cartoon

A car-driving dog tries to pick up girls, and finds himself arrested and on trial for abducting one.

Some of the early Fleischer talking cartoons (or Talkartoons, as they were called) weren’t really that good, but if this one is any indication, they were weird and a little racy. In this one, an early version of Bimbo the dog makes passes to women on the street (most of whom look like they’re women of the night, or at the least, not very fussy), but is repeatedly turned down. The one exception is a woman so ugly, he retreats. Eventually he abducts a woman (by having his car scoop her up in one of its seats) and begins trying to kiss her. The cops catch him and he goes to trial, where his testimony consists of a banjo solo. There’s lots of weird cartoon imagery (such as one of the women spontaneously sprouting roller skates) which, surreal as it is, is hardly funny, and the whole thing ends up more warped than fun. Still, it is interesting to see some of the touches that they would improve on over the years.

HOOLIGAN ASSISTS THE MAGICIAN (1900)
Article 4139 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-26-2013
Directed by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton
Featuring J. Stuart Blackton
Country: USA
What it is: Comic magic trick movie

Happy Hooligan comes on stage while a magician is performing a trick with barrels, and soon finds himself dealing with more than he bargained for.

Happy Hooligan was a popular comic strip character of the time, and he was featured in several movies. From what I can tell, he’s your basic clown, and most of this movie is a mixture of Melies-style magic tricks and clown shenanigans. It’s competent and mildly amusing, but nothing really special.

THE HILARIOUS POSTERS (1906)
aka Les affiches en goguette
Article 4138 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-24-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Comic trick film

The characters in a wall of posters come to life and torment some local policemen.

I get the impression from the title that this is supposed to be one of Melies’s funnier shorts. Sadly, it doesn’t really work all that well on that level; the comic bits are dull, unfocused and vague. Quite frankly, I find the special effects the highlight here, especially when the posters first come to life; the way the various posters look like they would have to inhabit the spaces of the other posters in order for the actors to fit into them makes for a bit of an interesting puzzle in trying to figure out how the effects were done. It might be a bit more amusing if you can read the French writing on the posters themselves, but I’m out of luck there. It’s not one of Melies’s best, but it has points of interest.

THE HAT WITH MANY SURPRISES (1901)
aka Le chapeau a surprises
Article 4133 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-17-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What is it: Magic film

A gentleman uses his hat to set up a fancy dinner, using it to provide tableware, chairs, and even dinner guests.

This is another of Melies’s “magic” films, but it does have a little novelty in the fact that it actually has something of a theme; rather than using the hat to produce random items, it’s actually focused on the issue of setting up a dinner. He even has to increase the size of the hat at one point so it can disgorge chairs and dinner guests, as well as a servant. Granted, it all goes to pieces during the last half minute or so, with the table vanishing and a painting coming to life, but that’s Melies for you. I’d rate this one as one of the better of this particular genre of short for him.

HARE RIBBIN’ (1944)
Cartoon
Article 4132 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-16-2013
Directed by Robert Clampett
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc and Sam Wolfe
Country: USA
What it is: Bugs Bunny cartoon

Bugs Bunny has to contend with a red Russian poodle who is stalking him.

Since Bugs Bunny is a talking rabbit, he falls under the classification of “fantasy” and is fair game for this series. This isn’t the best of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but it is pretty typical of the period; Bugs runs into a fairly dim character who is hunting him, and humiliates him through various means. In this one, Bugs dresses up as a mermaid and plays a game of tag with the dog; he also pretends to be a French waiter trying to make him a rabbit sandwich (which leads him to put on an Elmer Fudd accent, who does not appear in the short), and finally, tricks the dog into committing suicide; I think the latter gag is the reason the cartoon also appears on a set of banned cartoons I have. The user comments on IMDB seem mystified by the dog and his Russian accent, but I suspect he’s a parody of Bert Gordon, the Mad Russian, a comic actor of the era; he does use Gordon’s “How do you do!” catchphrase at one point.

HOT WATER (1924)
Article 4118 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-28-2012
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Featuring Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Josephine Crowell
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy

A newlywed discovers that married life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… especially when the in-laws show up.

As this movie was closing in on its last few minutes, I found myself scratching my head over what the fantastic content was, and found myself checking the Don Willis guide (which listed the movie) and the Walt Lee guide (which consigned it to the “out” list). I was just about to consign it to the land of genre false alarms when the movie, in the last four minutes, threw in all of the fantastic elements at once; there’s a resurrection from the dead, a ghost, a haunted house, and a crawling hand. Granted, they’re all misunderstandings, but at least they were finally there.

As for the movie in its entirety, I found it a highly entertaining entry in the oeuvre of Harold Lloyd. Like so many of the comedies of this type, it plays like a series of shorts, and falls roughly into three sections. In the first, Harold has to negotiate his way home while carrying a huge amount of groceries, a problem further complicated when he wins a prize turkey that is very much alive. The second section has Lloyd taking the family out for a spin in the new family car, only to have disaster follow in its wake. The final sequence has Lloyd getting drunk so he can stand up to his mother-in-law, but ends up mistakenly believing that he has inadvertently murdered her; it is the complications that follow this sequence that lead to the fantastic content. Lloyd is such a confident and likable presence that he makes it all work smoothly; my favorite sequence has him mistaking the meaning of the actions and words of several people to reinforce his fear that he has committed murder. This is a truly amusing comedy.

THE HOUSE OF FEAR (1945)
Article 4075 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-11-2012
Directed by Roy William Neill
Featuring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Aubrey Mather
Country: USA
What it is: Holmes in an old dark house

When a society known as the “Good Comrades” begins being knocked off one by one in horrible ways, an insurance investigator calls in Sherlock Holmes to look in on the case.

I thought I was done with the Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, but, for some reason, this one got lost in the shuffle and I didn’t really catch its omission at the time. That’s a shame; most of the series is pretty light on the fantastic content, but this one places Holmes in what amounts to a variation of the “old dark house” pattern, with residents in a spooky old castle being knocked off one by one. Though it is mainly a mystery, we have hints that the castle is haunted, there’s a scene of a coffin being dug up in a graveyard, there are secret passages in the house… yes, there’s a lot of horror atmosphere in this one. It’s partially based on “The Five Orange Pips”. It is one of those movies, though, that makes me appreciate why many Holmes purists can’t stand Nigel Bruce’s interpretation of Dr. Watson; he seems particularly dim in this one, though he does at least have the instinct to recognize when he’s stumbled across an important clue at one point. The mystery itself isn’t too difficult; I had a strong inkling of what was going on after the third murder. Still, this is a pretty entertaining entry in the series.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1914)
aka Der Hund von Baskerville
Article 4071 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-5-2012
Directed by Rudolf Meinert
Featuring Alwin Neuss, Friedrich Kuhne, Hanni Weisse
Country: Germany
What it is: Holmes adaptation

Sherlock Holmes is called in to solve the mystery of the hound of the Baskervilles.

The storyline on IMDB for this movie claims that it is “faithfully adapted” from the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Either somebody has a very different definition of the word “faithful” than I do, or there’s a very bizarre version of this novel floating around somewhere that I’ve not read. Between the reduction of Watson to little more than a cameo (if anything, he appears more extensively in the novel than Holmes himself does), the fact that our putative menace seems to be one of the friendliest pooches I’ve ever seen, and the fact that the story involves such bizarre plot turns as Stapleton (who is established as the villain early on) disguising himself as Holmes so he can try other methods of assassinating Henry Baskerville, I doubt that anyone would think the novel and the movie are even existing in the same universe, much less their being blood relations. In many ways, it feels much more like a Fantomas story than a Holmes story, only quite a bit sillier. Nevertheless, this version appeared to be quite popular; it yielded at least six sequels. The mind boggles.

L’HOMME QUI VENDIT SON AME (1943)
aka The Man Who Sold His Soul
Article 4009 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-21-2012
Directed by Jean-Paul Paulin
Featuring Andre Luguet, Robert Le Vigan, Michele Alfa
Country: France
What it is: Faust variation

A banker is saved from bankruptcy by the devil, but the new wealth he acquires has a price; he must use it for evil.

As the copy that I was able to acquire is in French without subtitles, I’m grateful for a few of the plot descriptions to help me get as much as I can out of it; otherwise, I would have found it very difficult to follow. Still, Faust variations were pretty common during the forties, and this seems like one of the lesser ones. There are some good things about it; the acting seems quite good, with whoever was playing the Mephistopheles character (Robert Le Vigan, maybe?) being the most striking, there’s a memorable sequence in which the banker is the sole audience member for an opera, and the events surrounding the moment where the banker discovers what will happen if he uses his money for good purposes is pretty fun. Still, the movie seems slow and uninteresting, especially if you can’t follow the language. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to give it another try with a plot description and/or subtitles to help me out. And I’m always glad to finally see a movie that had ended up on my “ones that got away” list.

THE HAUNTED MOUSE (1941)
Animated short
Article 3987 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-22-2012
Directed by Tex Avery
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc and Walter Tetley
Country: USA
What it is: Cat vs Mouse, once again

A starving cat tries to find sustenance in a ghost town, but the only mouse he finds is a ghost with a chip on his shoulder.

It looks like I’m on a run of scary rodent cartoons at the moment. This one is from my favorite cartoon studio, Warner Brothers, and is directed by one of the animation greats, Tex Avery. Still, I have to admit that Tex Avery really didn’t reach his full powers until he moved to MGM, and though his cartoons with Warners were good, they don’t have the wild abandon of the director at his best. This one is solid and entertaining, but none of the gags really stands out, and there’s nothing particularly special about this one.