The Passing Scene Unreviewed Movies

There are the films that are never reviewed, that no one has ever seen or heard of except the customers of the dingy back-street movie houses. I remember just before World War II the colored westerns I saw in New Orleans. But for the duskiness of the cowboys they were just like the white westerns, set in the unalterable canyon country with the same unalterable plot. There was the familiar Bar-X Ranch complete with sheriff, good guys, bad guys, heroine in crinolines, and then the final ominous walkdown where the guns blaze and the hero plugs the suede-shoed villain—everything the same except that all the actors were Negroes.

Such variations on a national myth were never as bizarre, however, as the American films I would sometimes see in Grenoble with dubbedin French. To watch the climax of a walkdown where villain and hero call each other out in the argot of Marseilles was to reach the limits. These revamped westerns always seemed to have their cowboys speak with a Midi accent. Even stranger to the ear was a Laurel and Hardy picture I once saw in Berlin in which the voices were not dubbed but the two comedians actually spoke German, their astonishing accents making the film even funnier. I suppose the director must have made a regular film in English and shot a second German version of each scene as he went along. What the English version was called I still do not know, but the title of the German was Hinter Schloss und Riegel (Behind Lock and Bar).

FR

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Francis Russell

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There are the films that are never reviewed, that no one has ever seen or heard of except the customers of the dingy back-street movie houses. I remember just before World War II the colored westerns I saw in New Orleans. But for the duskiness of the cowboys they were just like the white westerns, set in the unalterable canyon country with the same unalterable plot. There was the familiar Bar-X Ranch complete with sheriff, good guys, bad guys, heroine in crinolines, and then the final ominous walkdown where the guns blaze and the hero plugs the suede-shoed villain—everything the same except that all the actors were Negroes.

Such variations on a national myth were never as bizarre, however, as the American films I would sometimes see in Grenoble with dubbedin French. To watch the climax of a walkdown where villain and hero call each other out in the argot of Marseilles was to reach the limits. These revamped westerns always seemed to have their cowboys speak with a Midi accent. Even stranger to the ear was a Laurel and Hardy picture I once saw in Berlin in which the voices were not dubbed but the two comedians actually spoke German, their astonishing accents making the film even funnier. I suppose the director must have made a regular film in English and shot a second German version of each scene as he went along. What the English version was called I still do not know, but the title of the German was Hinter Schloss und Riegel (Behind Lock and Bar).