Blog O’ Leaps

THE MONDAY NIGHT WAR (2004)

If you owned a pro wrestling company, and you released a DVD about the greatest threat to its existence that company had ever faced, how complimentary would you be about the opponent in that struggle, and how even-handedly would the events be documented? Logically, the answers would be “Not at all” and “Not at all” respectively. Clearly you and I have never owned a pro wrestling company, and in particular World Wrestling Entertainment, where logic is often the last quality to enter into any argument.

Of course, logic is often a non-starter in any enterprise involving any entertainment company. And that’s what this DVD really is – a tale of a specific competitive situation involving two entertainment companies – the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) * and World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

From the mid-90s into the early years of this decade, the two wrestling promotions had a bitter, and often hilariously dirty, struggle for dominance of US pro wrestling – a struggle which, due to the salutary effects of direct competition, and a resultant change in the nature and direction of the product in both organisations’ cases, also led to a concurrent struggle for hearts, minds, dollars, and ratings points of a proportion of a mainstream, previously non-pro wrestling audience for a period. **

The battle’s fulcrum was “The Monday Night War” – the head-to-head programming of each promotion’s flagship show, WWF’s RAW and WCW’s Nitro, on Monday nights. Each was to garner some of cable’s biggest ratings. Each became a cable mainstay. Both broke the mold of what pro wrestling had been, and both discovered new audiences in doing so. Only one survived, and the story told in The Monday Night War is, purportedly, how and why.

A lot of people would struggle with, if not outright refute, the possibility of a valid documentary on such a struggle being produced by one of the participants in it. History is written by the victors, and all that stuff. Others would dispute the description of this as a movie – it was never released to cinemas, and made specifically for home video release – or as a documentary. There’d be a school of thought that the idea of a commercial business documenting its own activities with anything resembling impartiality is a complete nonsense, let alone the matter of the depiction of its former deadly rival.

And those are valid considerations to say the least. Unfortunately, for all the valid reasons anyone could come up with for refuting the possibilities of its existence, the only problem is that the monster exists, in living breathing colour, and The Monday Night War is that monster. ***

Despite some usefully illustrative (and fun) extras from the vaults of both TV shows, the meat of The Monday Night War is the documentary feature, clocking in at a shade under 95 minutes, in which a mix of TV footage, interviews with key (and some not-so-key) personnel, and one of those expensive-sounding movie trailer style voice-over guys illuminates on-camera, backstage, and corporate-level developments in the two companies’ struggle for dominance, which became a struggle for survival.

If one had to name a single factor which epitomised the change in approach which, for a time, allowed both promotions to catch fire, it pretty much has to be that the backstage bled through on camera, i.e. that both tensions within the companies, between the companies, between individuals working for one company, and the real-life personalities of the stars playing the characters, were encouraged to come to the fore. In a tailored way, yes, most often, in a scripted way, well, sometimes, but what was previously kept tucked away well behind the curtain was now part of the entertainment package, in a way that fans were ready for, that non-wrestling fans had never seen before and found intriguing, and that virtually no other type of television show or entertainment enterprise could do, or would even consider trying, at least to that point.

Fortunately this approach informs the manner of the documentary’s construction, which is why it’s not just a shill job for the surviving company. You get to hear plenty from the people who were there on both sides of the war. It’s not like they never soften things from the WWF perspective, and it’s not like some points aren’t a little fudged, but the key issues and highpoints are all there. It’s a story that was easy for the current WWE to tell straight, or straight-ish, in a sense, because ultimately most of the key blunders were on the other side’s tab, but WWF pulled their share of what industry analyst Rock Hudson once termed “35-foot wieners” as well, and most of them are present, correct and acknowledged right here.

Essentially, as told here, the war was between Vince McMahon’s previously all-conquering WWF and its one remaining serious opposition, the Ted Turner-owned and Eric Bischoff-administered WCW. Bischoff had Turner’s money, a competitive streak at least equal to Vince’s, and the great good fortune not to be over-burdened with anything resembling ethics. McMahon had the one business, years of experience in it, a track record of previously trampling over all traditional regional opposition, but didn’t have Turner’s bottomless wallet, and had never experienced a direct challenge like this on his home turf.

Bischoff started by signing up past stars that Vince had created, (or at least helped elevate to a level of some mainstream consciousness), including Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, then turned the heat way up in signing a couple of uncontracted current WWF players, in Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. This was where he changed the direction. Previously major wrestling companies had either barely acknowledged the opposition, and then briefly and dismissively (the WCW policy) or refused to acknowledge them at all (long-standing Vince McMahon/WWF approach).

Bischoff put Nash and Hall (and soon Hogan) on camera as invaders from another federation, - initially dubbed “The Outsiders” and then trademarked as the “nWo” – established as opposition to the WCW mainstream. They didn’t talk like traditional pro wrestlers, they didn’t respect the company’s traditions, and they offered the possibility of “inter-promotional” rivalry without the inconvenience of having to come to a creative and financial agreement with another promotion, let alone split the profits.

Bischoff went further, too. Knowing his show was live but the opposition’s taped, he reflects with undiminished glee on this DVD on how he went to the Turner execs and arranged to get Nitro to air three minutes before the hour so he could go right on air and give the opposition’s entire match results for the evening before RAW had even rolled the opening credits.

Between not knowing what Hall or Nash might say or do at any juncture, or what cracked viewpoint might be espoused about opposition programming, both committed wrestling fans and more casual viewers soon had ample reason to want to tune in to the WCW show.

When the ratings war went WCW’s way, it went that way hard, and it stayed that way for a long time. It’s freely admitted here how close Vince McMahon’s company came close to the wire during that period.

The story of how and why that turned around is an instructive one that will probably never be learned in any portion of the worldwide entertainment industry – the vast majority of which is apparently dedicated to proving continuously, in ironclad fashion yet, that “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s a multi-faceted one, but the elements are clear enough as depicted in The Monday Night Warкомпютри. The market leaders, WCW, became complacent. Backstage politicking by the stars prevented shining younger talent from moving up and having their run at the top, thus blocking the possibility of freshening up the star mix, and opening a backdoor for the WWF, where said young talent, the minute it was contractually possible ran straight over to the opposition. Many of said younger talent became stars for Vince McMahon. Competition made him both create new stars (Steve Austin, Mick Foley, The Rock) and make his product more edgy, rude, violent, and black-humoured – the WWF “Attitude” Era, as it was dubbed – and Bischoff in his money-padded ivory tower, missed the threat. Bischoff was a great guy for initial concepts, but had no idea for how to develop those concepts, and past the first rush of ideas, the cupboard was bare.

One major factor barely hinted at but not really nailed here is that both “owners” put themselves on air, and the difference in how they did so was ultimately a telling signifier of the difference between the two companies. McMahon, who had stumbled into a negative perception by the fans via circumstances depicted briefly, slightly misleadingly but clearly enough in the documentary, marched on camera with gusto in a hugely enjoyable caricature of corporate arrogance and swagger, made all the more enjoyable by the degrading come-uppances he would ultimately submit himself to on-camera. Bischoff came over (completely convincingly, it must be said, although that may fall short of being a compliment) as a greasy, smug, corporate bully type – a midlife crisis guy desperately trying to be “cool” – who never battled his enormous ego in check long enough to get any come-uppance that stuck. One apparently abused on-camera time for his own gratification, and the other made himself one of his promotion’s greatest assets as entertainer and a lead heel character. It’s not the whole story of who won and why – and no individual point emerges as such, in a well-told but complicated story – but it’s a key, and particularly indicative, factor in the WWF’s ultimate victory, and surprising that it’s not signposted more clearly as such, given the source of this release.

Bischoff features extensively in the interview material of this movie, and McMahon less so. McMahon comes across measured, considered, and revealing as to his emotions and thoughts during the struggle. Bischoff portrays himself as a largely unrepentant, unbelievably weaselly, manipulator and viciously competitive executive who enjoyed the exercise of corporate power to a degree which probably falls several feet to the other side of the line of carnality. The trap for those who aren’t familiar with this era of pro wrestling history – or any pro wrestling for that matter – would be to assume that Vince is being frank and open, and Bischoff isn’t.

From experience with the documentary features in other World Wrestling Entertainment DVD releases, and from knowledge of reliably reported history **** of the events of the time, and since, and documented reports of the personalities involved, it’s fairly safe to assume here that Vince McMahon is, at least to a significant degree, playing a role, and Eric Bischoff, as unlikely – let alone unpalatable – as it may seem, is being largely open and honest. Believe it or don’t, that’s just how he is, apparently.

The most telling comment, unsurprisingly, comes from the wrestlers who worked for both companies during the relevant period, in particular Mick Foley and Chris Jericho. What might be surprising for non wrestling fans is both how frank and how articulate they are, but thanks to them, a great deal of light is shed on the subject, and a perspective gained that The Monday Night War definitely would have otherwise lacked.

While the interviewee choices are a good mix – with the exception of at least one too many WWE corporate shill touting the company line presumably so that Vince McMahon didn’t have to carry the whole of that can – there are obvious omissions in key talent on both sides as well, and the keen mind will no doubt extrapolate for itself that the reasons for such absence involved money and/or business politics. The keen mind can give itself a gold elephant stamp, because it will be dead right too.

The reason I’ve reviewed The Monday Night War here rather than corralling it off in the wrestling section of this blobsite as I normally do, is, because on viewing it in full for yet a third time, yet, it struck me that this had some potential to entertain those who were not exclusively pro wrestling fans, yet it would probably never reach any of them, owing to being largely, if not exclusively, marketed to wrestling fans. It’s not the only one of the documentary features on the WWE home video releases which has this potential, and not even the only one that speaks, with some (perhaps unexpected) eloquence to greater verities in many matters of the entertainment industry, and competition therein, but it’s the stand-out example.

The Monday Night War is a well-constructed, ridiculously compelling, somewhat fudged and sometimes jaw-droppingly frank documentary on a fascinating minor chapter in entertainment history. It’s also about pro wrestling. If the latter doesn’t completely cancel out the former for you, you might well surprise yourself by enjoying it. It never won any documentary prize at any film festival in the world, and it never will, but there are probably plenty worse which have.

(9 out of 11 MPHOAH)

* (In, I believe, the early 2000’s, the World Wrestling Federation finally lost a pitched, extended international court battle with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature over the WWF acronym - as one Federation exec memorably summarised, “The panda had its paw raised” – and since then has changed its trading name to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and in an enforced fit of historical revisionism, rebranded all past WWF references to WWE as well. Since it was known as WWF for the vast majority of the time-frame concerned here, that’s what it’s referred to above.)

** (In terms of, but not limited to, widespread merchandise placement and sales, perception of the teen audience at least as being part of the then-current console game/’cool TV show of the minute’/current hit movie/hit-band-of-right-now media mix, and the memorably indicative week in media history when the venerable TV Guide publication sported four different covers – all wrestlers, two from each of WWF and WCW – there was a sustained but ultimately temporary window in the late 90s to early 2000s when both companies’ product crossed over to a mainstream audience, that hadn’t been previously identifiable as either regular, semi-regular or even casual wrestling fans. That this was as a direct result of “spirited” if not downright venomous competition, is a suggestion backed up by viewing figures from that time compared to since, and the effective withdrawal of the subsequent WWE to a more definable ‘wrestling market’, lacking any comparable degree of mainstream crossover, no matter how profitable it may well have remained.)

*** (As mentioned earlier in the review, wrestling companies don’t necessarily think like regular companies or other human beings to start with, let alone one controlled by Vincent K McMahon. As also hinted at, it was good business to be somewhat more frank and backstage-transparent during this era of pro wrestling, and at the time of this title’s release, while the ongoing television WWE product had pulled back from this approach, the thinking for DVD product was apparently that it was pitched at hardcore wrestling fans who wanted all the ‘reality’ detail possible, and that it was thus good business to give it to them. While they have since demonstrably also retreated from that position, the DVD releases still tend to be somewhat more frank and open in their approach to material than the flagship TV programmes now, but generally not as much as the titles from a few years ago, such as this one.)

**** (Mostly derived from Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, a weekly subscription news service of impeccable journalistic integrity, which can be fairly described as both the Variety magazine and New York Times of pro wrestling – graphical qualities notwithstanding – in that it is effectively both the industry journal and newspaper of record. I can hear the scoffing of the wrestling-challenged from here, but all I can say is, within its parameters of subject matter, there is not one publication of any nature on the planet that I trust more than the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, nor any journalist I can think of more painstaking, demonstrably fair, and diligent than Dave Meltzer. His achievement in remaining so over three decades of involvement with a tight, narrow business largely dedicated to – if not predicated on – lying and flim-flamming as a matter of course, and in which everyone knows everyone else and a lot of them aren’t especially keen on any concept of frank disclosure, substantially dwarfs any, or all, of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. In the words of the otherwise unrelated old Robert Johnson blues song, Meltzer may well be “The Last Fair Deal Gone Down”.)

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DYNAMITE (1929)

This one kicks off, and just about kicks the bucket, with an antediluvian courtroom scene of Richter Scale-destroying emotion, acted substantially slower than real time, and with a sense of legal procedure apparently derived from a close study of the famous novels of Lewis Carroll. This could well be the granddaddy of all movie cliché courtroom scenes, and they don’t miss a trick, unfortunately. All you need to know is that a taciturn miner – who sure talks a lot for a tight-lipped kind of guy, and slowly – gets convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and sentenced to death. That’s Charles Bickford, and we’ll be getting back to him later in the picture.

Next we’re in the jazz age, with flappers and floppers and possibly even a flat-foot floogie with a floy-floy, somewhere up the back of one of the more debauched ensemble scenes. This is where you become more keenly aware that our directorial host is none other than Cecil B. “Ready when you are, Mr” DeMille, who before he got around to making his famously vulgar epic movies sanctified by Biblical references apparently used to have a pretty snappy line in cheerily dirty movies of “marital complications” sanctified by a bit of sleight of hand moralisation in the tail end of the closing innings. *

We meet our outstandingly feckless heroine (Kay Johnson) as she is light-heartedly devastating the hopes of the three grim old vultures who are the executors of the trust left to her by her departed father, who must have sensed the loop-de-loop direction her life was heading in, or maybe he just marked the gin bottles at home. The vultures want her to settle down and approximate a regular human being, a point on which Fey Kay is only too keen to disillusion them, her chief ammunition being that the guy she’s in love with is already inconveniently married to someone else. We leave the old birds to fizz and pop like bottles of home-brewed beer, but not before they’ve subtly dropped a 200 kilo anchor of plot development that if KJ doesn’t get married by a certain (and, unsurprisingly, imminent) date, she loses her whole inheritance, which will go to a shelter for mad cats, or institute of advanced gopher research, or something disappointing along those lines.

We then whiz along with Kay to someone or other’s palatial estate, where we meet the straying hubby, a dashing moustachioed breadstick played by Conrad Nagel, who looks like a Conrad Nagel, and even sounds like a Conrad Nagel. But don’t ring now – there’s more. We also meet the wife (Julia Faye), a fellow society dingbat – and what a dingbat – who doesn’t seem to care that her polo-jockey hubby is fooling around with Fey Kay in plain sight, and it turns out there’s a reason for that. She’s got her own branch-line relationship, with a young hunk played by a very young Joel McCrea with his chest thrust out and an anxious air suggesting that all these society hijinx aren’t quite his area, and he’s looking around for the helmet and football field he’s misplaced.

All this fierce modernity is getting a little wearing, so Cec does the only thing that makes sense under the circumstances and cranks it up five or six notches. We meet the whole society rent-a-crowd who seem to spend most of their on-screen time urgently flouting prohibition and drinking most of the eastern seaboard dry. Every possible readymade character template is religiously exploited, right down to the comedy relief guy whose character name is actually “Life of the Party” right there in the credits.

Conrad, who is no oil painting between his high forehead and soup-strainer moustache, has such a “Top Hole! What Fun! Awfully good sport, old man!” approach to absolutely everything that he inadvertently becomes the comedy hero of the picture. However he has morals, apparently, and won’t park his polo pony in Kay Johnson’s well-maintained stable until his marriage is officially kaput. His wife – zesty and mildly insane little funster that she is – is a little flighty over putting an end-date on the pantomime marriage, so while Nagel is temporarily detained elsewhere – possibly conducting scientific tests to determine the tightest polo shirt which can be worn by human males without crushing the chest to the consistency of laundry powder – the two she-wolves calmly barter a cash price to determine his freedom, in a scene which seemingly takes us from breezy-moralled ultra-modernity into the vague area of white slavery.

Meanwhile, back in the Big House, Charles Bickford is cooling his heels, waiting patiently for the gallows to be manufactured, an activity which is being inconsiderately conducted at irritating volume directly outside his barred window. Just his luck to get sent to a prison which had never executed anyone before, and had to knock up a gallows from scratch, I guess. Even worse, there’s a guy in a nearby cell who plays guitar and sings, and just wait till you hear the dilly of a song he’s singing. If I was Bickford, I’d have asked to be put on work detail on the scaffold just to get the thing up quicker and get away from the guitar guy.

Soon Kay Johnson turns up so we can eventually weld the two halves of the movie together, and that’s probably about as much thought as went into the enterprise. She has to get married to someone who won’t stick around and get in the way, Bickford needs money so his kid sister won’t get thrown into an orphanage after his neck gets stretched, and soon we’re joined by a priest and a watchful warden and the two protagonists are hitched. This is a sequence more harrowing than virtually any in a legitimate horror picture in movie history. While Dynamite is technologically pretty advanced for an early-ish sound movie, the one problem they clearly hadn’t nailed was how to mix sound from various sources. All the sound in any scene is quite audible, but it’s all equally audible, whether it’s a vague waft of background atmosphere or featured dialogue.** So in this scene, you have a nightmarish aural tableau consisting of the two featured players, the unfortunately ultra-realistic droning tones of the priest, Guitar George nasally brutalising his way through possibly the most punishingly dreary song ever committed to film, and the relentless hammering of the unseen Keystone Kops Konstruction Krew directly outside the window – all at precisely the same level, which is, if absolutely nothing else, loud. You could conceivably use this soundtrack today, on a tape loop, to torture suspected spies into a willing and detailed confession in record time, whether or not they’d actually committed the acts of which they were accused. It may be the longest five minutes in a non art-movie, outside of the scene in The Patsy ++ where Jerry Lewis endlessly fumbles around with a few ice-cubes and pulls faces into the camera while character actors the calibre of Peter Lorre and Hans Conried have to stand around in the background trying not to look bored.

The very next day, via a sub-plot so blatantly, and cackhandedly, inserted purely for the purposes of advancing the otherwise unrelated action that the viewer may feel the need for recourse to a neck-brace, the real murderer is discovered and Bickford is set free. This initiates the odd problem for Kay Johnson, in particular that the husband she’s got isn’t one she wants, and the husband she wants is still technically someone else’s.

It also initiates the odd problem for us, in that we’re still only about one third of the way into the picture, and it turns out there’s still roughly two completely different movies to work our way through before we’re shot of the whole business.

Basically these break down into the fish-out-of-water movie where to fulfil the terms of her inheritance – there’s a late-breaking scenario development where it’s revealed that it’s not enough she was married by a certain date, she also has to be living with the guy on that date, which is around the time your suspicions are confirmed that they’re pretty much making up this tune as they’re humming along – Fey Kay has to park her hold-all in Bickford’s house in his mining hometown, and cook, clean etc for a week for a reliable, and not noticeably unpredictable, barrel of “society girl roughs it as a regular housewife” type laughs. You’ll be even less shocked when I tell you that they start to develop feelings for each other.

Then there’s movie number three, which involves all kinds of suspense, thrills, and any number of kitchen sinks as the legal team of Bickford, Johnson, and Nagel (the latter not exactly one to miss a big shindig) wind up stuck down the mine with too little oxygen, too many love interests, and the age-old problem of having plenty of dynamite to blast their way out, but a complete absence of blasting caps to set the stuff off. Hey, don’t laugh – imagine how irritating this would be if it happened to you. Anyway it’s a situation which seems entirely in place in a movie which contains a jail which has a death-row, and executes people, but inconveniently lacks a gallows with which to do so, thus requiring that one be built at the last minute. Not to mention a mine which has perpetual gas-leaks on level five and leaves a large box of dynamite down there to keep them company. And security sufficiently lax to allow two society loafers to hop the elevator down there whenever they feel like it. After a while, you get the impression that the tuxedo-clowns gargling gallons of cheap hooch in the jazz age debauch scenes weren’t the only ones on the set – apparently whoever fashioned the screenplay may also have discovered the key to the firewater cabinet.

Anyway, you’ll be relieved to know that with a bit of good ol’ American ungenuity, they hit on a solution to the dilemma, which involves hitting as the solution – someone has to take a sledgehammer and belt the dynamite, thus achieving freedom for two, and a much roomier pair of pants for the designated hitter. You get a romantic triangle, much heightened drama, a definitive resolution, and an almost impossible task left for the plucky embalmers.

Against pretty much all the odds, Dynamite is pretty giddy fun for almost the whole ramshackle ride give or take the opening mortuary of a court scene, the stuff in the prison, and yet another wayward subplot, this one concerning a young boy’s life or death struggle for survival after being run over, in which affair the results of putting the matter to a vote with modern-day viewers might be less than savoury, given the already substantial length of the artefact, and the inescapable feeling that we’ve already got quite enough subplots, if not separate movies, to be going on with.

For a 1929 movie that runs a reel or so over the two-hour mark, it moves along quite dashingly, and mostly holds the attention, sometimes out of sheer audacity in manifesting plot turns like a conjurer producing flora and fauna from various sleeves, props and trouser legs. On the subject of trouser-legs, this is a defiantly “pre-Code” movie, which means it contains concepts, and visual demonstrations thereof, racy enough to beat the band, with enough left over to also beat the orchestra leader and any music copyists in the vicinity. *** Those of a firm belief that movies of this degree of antiquity necessarily have a certain neck-to-knee prim quaintness built in may find themselves having to call Mr Antenna to retrieve their eyebrows from the roof.

Of all Mr DeMille’s many quintessential epic movie moments, recited like incantations by buffs and critics alike down lo these many, many years, none may be more epic than the somewhat less-famous featured set-piece from Dynamite, which pits a number of young ladies against each other in a unique race, consisting of them revolving, spread-eagled, while bound in some form of giant metal wheel, and wearing what looks for all the world like elaborate, matching underwear. You can have your Ben Hur chariot race and your Moses parting the waters and all that old rope – where else can you get rotating ladies on a big lawn in multi-layered lingerie? Dynamite – that’s where.

The good news for the be-cabled is that Dynamite turns up once in a blue polo chukka on Turner Classic Movies, in a print of inexplicable crispness given the passing of eight decades and any real audience for this sort of beer-bubble polka, all the better to enjoy Conrad Nagel’s moustache and the complete absence of anything resembling sound mixing. I strongly recommend that you see this bizarre entertainment given the opportunity – it brings new life and complete meaning to the adjective “sprawling”. It’s a little like a heartfelt, genuine utterance at a glittering awards show – there’s every chance you’ve never seen anything like it.

(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)

* Posterity, and a wayward sense of humour, demands yet another explanatory retelling of perhaps the greatest of all determinedly apocryphal showbiz tales. Cecil B. DeMille was filming one of his famous epics, let’s say the silent version of the The Ten Commandments. There was one scene of a particular expansive and complicated nature involving horses, chariots, and thousands of tons of human extras. DeMille lined his cameramen up and explained carefully that because of the elaborate nature of the business within the scene, the epic scale, and particularly because the ending of said sequence involved the destruction of a large portion of the main set, that there was only one opportunity to film the thing, and it was imperative that it be successfully recorded first time, or the entire film would come to naught. Having drilled all talent involved, and with three cameramen all recording the action from different angles, DeMille retired with reasonable confidence to the director’s chair and called action. Amazingly, all went to perfection. Soldiers battled, chariots rumbled, the multitudes ran, those who were meant to tumble, fall, die or whatever, did so impeccably on cue, and the set was blasted completely according to plans. As the dust died down, DeMille called cut and strode to the first of the cameramen to get the post-mortem. “Did you get it?” asked the screen great, and Cameraman #1 responded, “I’m sorry Mr DeMille, with all the sand kicked up by the horses, some got in the shutter-gate, and the film was ruined. DeMille was a little shaken, but he had two other cameras rolling, and soon recovered his stride. Heading up to the next shooter, he asked “Did you get it?”, and Cameraman #2 said with a sad shake of his head, “Sorry Mr DeMille, but a stone kicked up cracked the lens and I didn’t get any of it.”
DeMille is pretty worried by now, and runs the whole distance of the set up to the third guy. He gets there panting, and gasps to the guy “You’re my last chance. The entire film stands or falls on what’s in your camera. Now tell me, did you get it?” And Cameraman #3 turns beaming to face his boss, and pipes brightly: “Ready when you are, Mr DeMille!”

This one has been told more than some of the more popular Bible stories down the years, and has seen many variations, including to what film it pertains, let alone which sequence. Often it is referred to either the silent or sound versions of Ben Hur. The chariot race in either would appear to be a natural fit for the story, but this theory still presents something of a conundrum being that neither of them were directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It would be nice to think there’s a grain of truth in it somewhere. Regardless, it is undeniably true that as a signatory definition of the application of Murphy’s Law to showbiz (or indeed any workplace, and so many other instances in everyday life), as witnessed on a daily, if not hourly basis to this day, the principle of “Ready when you are, Mr DeMille” has long since ascended to a Greater Truth than any mere documentable fact.

** Anyone who’s ever tried to record an interview with a condenser microphone only later to discover phones ringing/workmen hammering/rain falling in the background recorded in blistering clarity but the interviewee’s voice somewhat anaemically twittering away semi-audibly in the ruck is familiar with the kind of sound-scape routinely captured with breathtaking alacrity in Dynamite. One potential claim to fame for this film should be more closely examined by movie historians: DeMille may have been the first to invent the use of over-lapping dialogue, some four decades before it was generally thought to have first achieved currency. A perfectly valid, though perhaps somewhat churlish question would be whether he MEANT to invent overlapping dialogue here, or whether it arose inevitably from the limitations of the technology. I say overlapping dialogue is overlapping dialogue, and it’s seldom been heard since with such a rigorous lack of clarity.

*** Since the term “pre-Code” still turns up a bit in scholarly, if not Eton-collared, film literature – and the Leonard Maltin movie guides – and the term itself may as well be considered IN code at this late juncture, a brief explanation may be necessary. When the film industry was copping considerable flak on account of its licentious ways on screen, not to mention off, a do-gooder and power-broker called Will Hays concocted something called the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930. It was a self-policing pre-release censorship method akin to the in-house “Standards and Practices” boards run by the major US television networks some years down the track. The idea was to get in first, and get the wowsers off the movie industry’s backs, before they could arouse popular sentiment against Hollywood and do some real damage in the box-office area. It wasn’t a purely cosmetic affair however. It was a real code, set out in some detail, which proscribed the inclusion of certain depictions, material and even approaches to characterisation. (For example, criminals couldn’t be heroes of a picture, and had to be shown to have bad things happen to them.)

Just by way of further definition, the term ‘Hays Code’ was used interchangeably with ‘Motion Picture Production Code’ and ‘The Hays Office’ was a reference to the organisation he headed on behalf of the Hollywood studios, the MPPDA - Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. Hays regime ended in 1945. The Code stayed in place until 1966. By way of further clarification, lest any eager young researchers fall pants over toupee into the obvious trap here, Will Hay (singular) was a British farce comedian who made movies in the 1930s and 40s, and had no interest one way or the other in controlling the exposure of feminine underwear in American movies. Being a British comedian his only conceivable interest in the subject matter would have been from the point of view of one of his male cast members possibly wearing it for mildly ribald comic effect.

++ I’d previously listed that movie here as The Bellboy, which it wasn’t. Peter Lorre wasn’t in The Bellboy, for one thing. Confusion on my part, probably owing to the fact that Jerry Lewis plays a bellboy in both movies.

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