I hope I haven't Harry Stephen Keeler'd you to death, yet. It is very easy for him and his presence to kill people--so tremendous is his bibliography, and so imposing is his prose, that cardiac arrest is usually an inevitability when trying to plow through even just one of his novels. Sure enough, there is another Keeler book on the line for the Book Club of Desolation: his ostensible magnum opus, a four-book saga called The Skull in the Box. But the next entry (or next two) will concern some non-Keeler books. After all, variety is the spice of life.
I have discovered another of these life-spices. They are incarnate in a simple fact, and in the subject of that fact. There is a Harry Stephen Keeler movie, and that is our subject--and the movie is awesome, which is the fact. Yes, it's incredible to believe, but this movie manages to preserve Keeler's idiosyncrasies onscreen, though these are translated into equally-bizarre turns of strangeness. Sing Sing Nights, based off the novel of the same name (and one of the many Keelers I haven't yet read), serves as a way to initiate people into the ways of Keeler that is not so extreme as to kill their brain immediately. And for fans of his work in any capacity, it is a treat that is offered nowhere else.
Wealthy douchebag Floyd Cooper is shot by three different men but because each of their shots would have struck a vital part of the body, only one of them--the one who fired the first shot--can be considered the murderer. In order to determine which one of them did it, Professor Varney, who cuts out paper dolls like a goddamn serial killer, uses a special kind of lie director to read the character of the men, by having them explain why they wanted to kill him. As the subsequent flashbacks reveal, Cooper was fond of ruining people's lives and stealing their significant others. All of them had equal cause to kill him, and the answer, of course, is reliant entirely on facts that the story has never seen fit to reveal before. Throughout this entire journey, we have scenes that go on for far too long, scenes that are cut far too short, an actual real-life monocle pop, and the jarring sudden appearance of "the warlord, Chung Fu." Thankfully, in the case of the latter, we are spared the brunt of Keeler's racial wrath, though it would reappear in another form as we'll see.
The first thing that clued me into how this movie worked was the scene at the beginning where the cops are talking at each other at the crime scene. While I've seen my share of Golden Age actors who maybe squared their jaws a bit too much, and, similarly, a solid share of some of the most wooden of B&W potboiler shmoes, the line delivery between these "characters" is so robotic you gotta wear a diving helmet and gorilla suit. They belt their lines out like jocks in a high school theatre class. But all throughout, there are moments that define the characters as human, albeit heavily disguised. Line flubs, weird improvisations, and bizarre faces help us buy that this is happening in real life. Even though there's no chance in Hell it could've. It is this opening scene, and the stiffness that populates it, that showed me that this was a true HSK film, even before the absurdly convoluted plot kicked. It is the only one of its kind in this regard.
But I should say that Sing Sing Nights is not the only movie bearing Keeler's name on the credits. Weirdly, Monogram chose to film Sing Sing Nights not once but twice--in the same year, no less. One of the stories told in Sing Sing Nights, featuring Keeler's ever-offensive depiction of Chinese people, was adapted into the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Mysterious Mr. Wong, featuring Lugosi in yellowface (!) in an extremely slow and generic butchering of the Keeler kraziness. Only thing entertaining about that movie is that Lugosi's Mr. Wong is clearly an inhabitant of Beijing's Hungarian neighborhood, as he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he's Bela fucking Lugosi and doesn't sound or look Asian at all. It is a painful watch, not only in its tedium and reliance on tropes decades old at its time of release, but also because it is one of the oldies that is searingly racist. There is a casualness to the way the stereotypical Irish cop drops slurs everywhere and says that all Chinese people are a bunch of lousy crooks. Sure, he's played off as an idiot, but it's in a "lovable" sort of way, that ends up being insulting to both Irish and Chinese people. Consider it Sing Sing Nights' evil twin, or a bonus feature on the DVD that Sing Sing never got. (Mysterious Mr. Wong got a DVD, though--which doesn't include Sing Sing as a special feature!)
To conclude: despite some flaws, Sing Sing Nights would be excellent even if it didn't contain a scene of one of the heroes calling his girlfriend "thoroughbred." Watch out for some dodgy race issues, and beware the occasional boredom (even if it does run less than an hour), but otherwise, this is a record showing the extent of human potential. People said that Watchmen was impossible to film (and it wasn't, at least with any degree of quality), but I argue that a Keeler book would be even harder. Lewis D. Collins did it. And he may not be alone--a film based on Keeler's short story "The Flyer Hold-Up" has been announced, with the attached cast consisting of Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner. The former's appearances range from Highlander II: The Quickening to Candyman to The Haunting in Connecticut. Gallner was also in Haunting but was much less fortunate, having also been in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and American Sniper. Whatever. I wish 'em the best of luck, and I certainly hope this isn't some shitty self-aware comedy nonsense.
Sorry, I digress all too frequently. Sing Sing Nights. Good. Watch it.
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