Hot Pepper

I watched this because of Victor McLaglen who I knew best from "the Informer" and "Gunga Din." He was as delightful as was in these movies. I didn't know any of the other actors, but I found a host of wonderful ones here: Edmund Lowe, Lupe Velez, El Brendel, and Lilian Bond.

Edmund Lowe is a wonderful, handsome and witty leading man in the Cary Grant style. He has a great rapport with McLaglen. This was apparently the fifth movie where he played the character of Harry Quirt and McLaglen played the character of Jim Flagg. They make a great comedy team. Both like to insult each other and one-up each other, but underneath, there's a lot of affection. It reminded me of the relationship of Michael Caine and Steve Martin in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," which was a remake of the Marlin Brando-David Niven comedy "Bedtime Story." This movie seems to be a source for the comedy in those two movies. There are a couple of jokes between them that would later be part of Abbott and Costello routines, including the "ever ride a jack-ass,no, well get onto yourself" quip.

Lupe Velez is hilarious as a sexy Mexican woman. She makes lots of references to her irresistible sexuality. She's closest to Mae West in her self knowledge of her sex appeal. El Brendel plays a Swedish character named Olsen that he played throughout his career. He reminds me of Roman Polanski in "The Vampire Killers." He is shy and has a sweet disposition. When Lupe Velez tells him that she will love him until she kills him, he answers simply, "That's fair." Lilian Bond has a smart and sophisticated gold-digger style like Joan Blondell.

This is a smart and sexy pre-code comedy with lots of pretty women in their underwear or less. It is fast paced and delightful. I will have to find the other movies in the series, and look out for more movies with Edmund Lowe, Lupe Velez, El Brendel and Lilian Bond.

I confess I liked this one probably more than I should have. It's not really because of the two male leads, a couple of characters named Flagg and Quirt who are together for the last of four movies in this series from 1926 to 1933. They're tiresome, often buffoonish, and rarely funny. One of them is awfully handsy with women, and says disturbing things like "You're a no girl with a yes smile." It's tedious to even describe the plot, but in a nutshell, Quirt (Edmund Lowe) is a master at cheating others, including Flagg (Victor MacLaglen), using trick dice, fake police badges, and his wits to talk himself out of situations. Flagg is a bit of dunce, but has somehow amassed a large number of nightclubs in the era of Prohibition, and on one of the ships bringing in rum for him from South America, he finds out that a young woman (Lupe Vélez) has stowed away. While she's initially a nuisance, eventually the two become rivals for her affection.

The reason for watching the film is Vélez, and its pre-code banter. The film doesn't have moments that are erotic, but it is suggestive throughout, and it's so silly that I ended up being somewhat mesmerized. It's probably the feeling people get who like cult or B-movies, knowing they're bad, and yet somehow liking them to some extent anyway.

Some examples are with Lilian Bond, who is in a supporting role. When she says "I'm not feeling myself tonight," Quirt replies, "Don't worry ... I'll take care of that later." She also drops the shoulder down on her blouse as a signal intended to help Quirt cheat at poker. The film is really Lupe Vélez's though. She really lets loose in her fight scenes, showing great physicality and a very natural flow to her lines. In one scene, she wields a knife and tells a group of sailors that if they move, she'll stick it where it belongs. Later during a melee she tries to pick up a big table over her head to throw it, only to be pulled over backwards. These are comedic moments but there is also a realism to them. As with other films from the era, she gets spanked briefly, which seems to have been a go-to Hollywood move, delivering a little male domination to a sassy woman, putting her in her place as if she were a child, while at the same time titillating the audience. It's wrong of course, but as in other pre-code films, the female character actually asserts herself and has a degree of power. Vélez uses her sex appeal, in one scene removing her clothing item by item as she goes upstairs to avoid being thrown out of Flagg's house, and later shaking her hips to the beat of a musical number she performs. Unfortunately the directing and editing is pretty awful, with angles and cuts that aren't all that flattering.

It's nice that Vélez doesn't let herself get pushed around, and in a very nice little moment, she lets Quirt and Flagg have it for thinking that they can arbitrarily decide who she'll be with, when it's her decision. I wasn't wild about an odd scene in China tacked on at the end, showing the boys still up to their hijinks in chasing 'exotic' women, continuing their rivalry, and having difficulty shouting orders to Chinese troops. However, it includes a nice moment when they ask a Chinese-American to help translate, and he says in perfect English "Sorry Sir, I don't know Chinese." Definitely a mixed bag.

With so many movies out there numbering in the tens of thousands, and so many I want to watch, there's only so much time I'm willing to waste on a movie. And I've wasted more time than I care to think about watching movies not worth a kernel of popcorn. I didn't think "Hot Pepper" would be one of them because of Lupe Velez.

I really like Lupe Velez. I like her vigor, her vibe, her energy, and her roles. And I really like the diversity she brought for that era. Yet and still, "Hot Pepper" was hard to get into because of the two main characters: Harry Quirt (Edmund Lowe) and Jim Flagg (Victor McLaglen).

Harry and Jim were perhaps frenemies, or maybe they were genuine enemies, either way their relationship was a one-sided Tom & Jerry type of affair, and I was never a fan of Tom & Jerry. If you don't know what I mean: one individual always gets the better of the other individual no matter what. In this case Harry was always getting over on Jim. Jim was bigger and uglier which meant he was perfect for being made fun of because that's what we do as a society.

Jim was constantly getting worked over by Harry. Even after he was aware of being taking advantage of he'd spout out hot air and empty threats which, clearly, Harry took no stock in. Jim's gorilla act was so useless he would've been better off silently taking his licks like the sucker he was. Jim would make a threat and Harry would respond with another insult then continue to play Jim for the fool.

If Harry had played Jim once then was on the run for the rest of the movie, I could go for that because then there'd be some drama and it would mean Jim messed over the wrong man. Except Harry continued to trick or con Jim up until he conned him out of $10,000. After that I thought surely Harry would steer clear of Jim.

Nope. Harry was right back in Jim's face ignoring all of his macho talk and making a fool out of him again. I suppose it was supposed to be funny, but it was anything but.

To this point (a little over halfway) Lupe Velez had a small part in this flop. She was a stowaway on Jim Flagg's bootleg boat and she was looking to stay on U. S. soil. She would fight or flirt her way into staying if that's what it took. Lupe was great, the movie was not.

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Quirt and Flagg return for yet another go around. This time they're mustered out of the marines. Flagg becomes a speakeasy magnate, Quirt cons him and others out of money and the two of them have a series of go-arounds in which McLaglen constantly threatens Lowe like Ralph Kramden threatening Alice. and Lowe comes up with another tired-sounding wisecrack -- not quite that bad, but they provide very little comic energy and that little is sapped by El Brendel, the unfunniest comedian before Paulie Shore.

Then enters Lupe Velez, and she is funny, energetic and beautiful. And she makes this movie move, to the extent that it does, both in terms of plot and comedy. Miss Velez's career in American pictures should have been killed by the talkies, but she was too great a comedienne to let it stop her. Alas, she killed herself in the early 1940s. But she does save this picture.