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THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII
Produced by Merian C. Cooper
Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack
Screenplay by Ruth Rose
Chief Technician – Willis O’Brien
Music – Roy Webb
With: Preston Foster, Alan Hale, Basil Rathbone, Louis Calhern
1935 – 96 mins – RKO – DVD release by Warner Bros Home Entertainment

In the book reviewed below, Cooper is said to have regretted the terms under which he made the film because RKO a) cut the budget in half, and b) rejected his suggestion of shooting it in Technicolor. It wasn’t financially successful at the time, but he believed that had it been shot it color, it would have been.
Watching it, and seeing the early gladiatorial battles glossed over in the blink of an eye, a raid on a savage group of warriors to steal horses built up to and then not even shown, I dqn see what he was up against budgetarily. And Willis O’Brien’s contribution is an embarrassment. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii is done in an uncomplicated manner, and even so, displays painfully jerky optical moves. What the extra money could have bought we may never know, but to consider that a mere four years later, Fred Sersen would create the mind-boggling effects shots in THE RAINS CAME (FOX Home Entertainment), winning the first Academy Award for Special Effects, is really sad.

All that having been said, it should be acknowledged that the film moves with the furious pace and editing style of Cooper/Schoedsack’s other winners such as KING KONG, and the story is effective on an emotional level, presenting a mutating palate of moral dilemmas that hold one’s interest – a neat job of scripting by Ruth Rose. Preston Foster is a good-hearted brute whose fate is tossed to the winds of tragedy, and then materialism. Basil Rathbone as Pontius Pilate is colorful and engaging, though he kept reminding me of Groucho Marx without the moustache.

This is a minor film, to be sure, but perhaps a nice little treat in a Xmas package with the KONG collection. The matte paintings certainly evoke O’Brien’s work in the previous trilogy.

LIVING DANGEROUSLY: THE ADVENTURES OF MERIAN C. COOPER
By Mark Cotta Vaz. Published by Villard. Introduction by Peter Jackson

A timely release, this energetic read sports a lush jacket illustration – a famous one – of producer Cooper blowing pipe smoke into the air, inside which Kong takes shape, fighting the dinosaur over Fay Wray…only here, deep red has been added to a photograph hitherto only seen in B&W.

Merian C. Cooper, and his creative partner Ernest Schoedsack, were almost too adventurous to comprehend. We owe them an enormous cinematic debt. They pioneered documentary filmmaking (GRASS), then docu-drama (CHANG, called by Cooper ‘natural drama’, in which real peoples in ostensibly real settings were manipulated to create a story), then epic screen adventures (THE FOUR FEATHERS, KING KONG). On and on Cooper went, often without Schoedsack, all the way to 1956’s THE SEARCHERS. It was his showman’s ballyhoo, backed by a true explorer’s indefatigable zest and energy, that empowered his career (if you want to see a reasonable impersonation of him, observe Robert Armstrong in both KING KONG and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG).

Author Vaz, who appears in the exceptional documentary on the KING KONG DVD, has a dream repository of material to work with. I think he actually plays down some of Cooper’s adventures for risk of making the book appear caricatured. While in preproduction on CHANG, for instance, Cooper slapped a village Chief for not keeping a tiger captive, whereafter he partook in a stew cooked by the humiliated Chief’s wife, laced with bamboo slivers that lodged in his digestive tract and nearly killed him. That ordeal is dismissed in a light aside by Cooper during an interview, whereas in another book it might have comprised an entire chapter. (And his buddy wasn’t having a picnic either – Schoedsack suffered throughout the shoot with Malaria, often filming with 104-degree fever.)

But clearly, all roads lead to KONG, and so CHANG’s creation, though nicely handled, is succinct and serves to move us forward to the centerpiece of Cooper’s career. All of his hardships in the world’s deserts and jungles really prepared him for dealing with Hollywood. And even at that, many a battle was lost. He considered THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, for instance, to be terribly compromised, and SHE to be a complete write-off: those were Hollywood budget battles he lost.
I should mention that Cooper always felt CHANG was his best film, even taking KONG into consideration. I don’t know if I’d easily agree, though CHANG, for what it is, is clearly as good as KONG for what it is (and can be had from Milestone Film and Video and Image Entertainment.)

Some of this material is covered in the DVD doc on Cooper’s career, and in the massive KONG doc, but the book serves as a meticulous expansion of the man’s life, well laid out and a clever addition to the Xmas package.

KING KONG, SON OF KONG, and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG
Reviewed by Glenn Andreiev
LIVING DANGEROUSLY: THE ADVENTURES OF MERIAN C. COOPER
and THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII
Reviewed by Roy Frumkes

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