A pair of fascinating but neglected films that have never appeared on any video format in the United States — indeed, have scarcely been seen here since the heyday of TV syndication for classic movies in the early ’60s — have recently been released on manufactured-on-demand DVDs by the Fox Cinema Archives.
The better known of the two is Harry Lachman’s “Dante’s Inferno,” which turns Signor Aligheri’s 14th-century epic poem in a striking and lavishly mounted melodrama about the rise and fall of a ruthless ship’s stoker (Spencer Tracy in one of his darkest roles).
The film is famous among buffs for its very elaboate fantasy sequence depicting hell with hundreds of scanity clad extras. Though publicity from the Fox Film Corporation at the time claimed a huge number of people worked on the film — released just after Fox’s 1935 merger with Century Fox Productions — there’s long been speculation this footage was repurposed from Fox’s 1924 film of the same name, or possibly a 1911 Italian version that may have been the first feature film exhibited in one sitting in the United States.
I don’t think so, but you can find the two earlier versions (the 1925 is missing a couple of reels) on YouTube. Director Lachman — best known for his later work for producer Sol Wurtzel on Twentieth’s B-movie series, including Charlie Chan — was a noted painter in Paris in the 1920s, and the film is quite an eyeful.
There are also very impressive special effects in a couple of other scenes. A huge Coney Island carnival attraction based on Dante’s vision of hell collapses — during a charity event with children — after Tracy pays off a building inspector to look the other way at flaws. The inspector kills himself off screen, and there’s another suicide on the attraction’s opening night.
Also quite striking is the film’s climactic shipboard disaster, clearly modeled on the famous fatal fire that broke out on the Morro Castle cruise liner the year before. Here it’s a Tracy-owned gambling boat where he’s again cut corners. But the film allows him an eleventh-hour chance of redemption when he used his maritime skills to steer the boat to shore after the strike-breaking crew bails.
Most likely it was this contrived ending (which seems to let his character get away with murder in violation of the Production Code and includes an improbable reconcilation with wife Claire Trevor, who perjured herself on his behalf) that prompted Tracy to label the worst film he’d ever appeared in. But he’s awfully good in what turned out to be his final film released by Fox before he moved over to MGM (which loaned him out to Fox a couple of times). Tracy and Trevor’s young son is played by Scotty Beckett, who as a young adult would gain a reputation for drinking that outstripped even that of Tracy (they died less than a year apart).
The FCA transfer of “Dante’s Inferno” is quite solid, and the best representation of Rudolph Mate’s cinematography on the film that I’ve seen. Plus there is a shipboard dance sequence featuring a young Rita Hayworth, in her pre-electrolysis days under birth name Margarita Cansino.
The other film I’m writing about is nowhere is good, but “Margin for Error” an intriguing footnote to the careers of Milton Berle and Otto Preminger. Released by TCF in February 1943, this was Preminger’s first film for the studio since Darryl F. Zanuck fired him off what would have been his third film there, “Kidnapped” (1938), which was completed by solo-credited Alfred Werker (Preminger’s second film for Fox, the bizarre screwball comedy “Love at Work,” was also recently released by FCA).
Preminger went to work on Broadway, where his most successful effort was directing “Margin for Error,” which opened in 1939 just before the start of World War II. This play by Claire Booth Luce (“The Women”) was inspired by the true story of Max Finkeltein, an NYPD police captain who was appointed by Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia to head a special squad of Jewish officers assigned to protect German diplomats in the city.
Sam Levene played Finkelstein, whose name in the play was changed to Moe after the real Max’s suicide (while facing charges of irregularites) in 1940, and Preminger himself took what was then a small part as the head of the German consulate, who is killed after skimming the books.
Fox optioned the play at the request of new contractee Ernst Lubitsch, who decided instead to do the Nazi-themed comedy classic “To Be Or Not to Be.” By the time the project was re-activated in 1942, Preminger had returned to Hollywood as a character actor, playing Nazis in Fox’s “The Pied Piper” and the Bob Hope comedy “They Got Me Covered.”
Zanuck was on military leave overseeing a war documentary in Africa, so Preminger was able to leverage Fox’s interest in using him as an actor in “Margin For Error” into a directing contract that would start with the film version. Preminger hired an uncredited Sam Fuller to brush up Lillie Hayward’s script, which moved the main action forward to just before America’s entry into World War II, bookended by a pair of sequences with star Milton Berle set on a wartime destroyer.
Berle, who gets second billing under Joan Bennett as the unhappy, not-quite-Aryan wife that Preminger is blackmailing, is miscast (and in some scenes, visibly uncomfortable) as patrolman Moe Finkelstein, who unsuccessfully tries to turn down his assigment to guard Preminger and his staff but ends up romancing a maid at the counsel.
The film is dominated by Preminger, who is very funny as a corrupt German consular official who says he supports Hitler but very much wants to avoid going back to Germany. It’s a much larger part than in the play and some of the funniest scenes involve and the buffonish head of the American bund (Howard Freeman), who also has his hand in the till.
“Margin for Error” is an odd little film with eccentric pacing, but is interesting as an example of how a real-life story involving a Jewish character got translated for the screen. Preminger complains about “Jewish agitators” picketing the embassy, but the film takes great pains to show they include protesters from many nations, including Germany.