#doorway to hell

[do-you-know-this-dw-story]

doorway to hell (comic: 2017)

do you know this doctor who story?

yes, i have read it

yes, i have read parts of it

i have heard of it & plan to read

i have only heard of it

no, i have never heard of it

Voting ended onFeb 2, 2025

[valentinovamp]

Lew Ayres in "Doorway to Hell" (1930)

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I was too lazy to put captions in these. I’m just here for that devil costume.

[chiseler]

ALL THE WORLD’S A NIGHT CLUB

Clocking in at 58 minutes, Night World (1932) may still hold the record for how much can be packed into an hour of celluloid. This compact tale of one night in the life of a Manhattan hot spot bursts like a Christmas cracker, spewing forth dizzy glamour, drunk humor, risqué antics, weighty melodrama, leg art, poignant tragedy, tap-dancing chorus girls, trigger-happy gangsters, adultery, tender budding love, and wisecracks zinging through the air in a free-for-all.  The pace is so accelerated, the shifts in tone so whiplashing, that it plays like one of those condensed-Shakespeare gags; yet, far from jarring, it all blends like a well-shaken cocktail. You’re not sure what you’re drinking, but it goes down easy.

An opening montage offers an apertif of bright lights, dark streets, flowing booze and floozies on the prowl; and a heavy dose of warning in a murder victim felled by a shot, a dirge-like Salvation Army parade, and a little boy saying his prayers—just to remind us that there is such a thing as innocence. Then we arrive at the entrance of Happy’s Club, a whirlpool of frivolous debauchery run by the affable yet sinister Boris Karloff, who calls everyone “big shot” and spends most of his time seething over his faithless, bitchy wife.

The irony of the club’s name is spelled out by Tim (Clarence Muse), the sage black doorman, who says that the nightly revelers are hungry, but not for food, “maybe they don’t know what for.” Inside, in the bright blur of liquor and women and jazz, they think they’re happy, but when they come out, it’s the same cold, sad world. “That’s real starving.” Despite the demeaning dialect (he says things like “I’se a philosophizer”), Tim is an example of the much greater depth and dignity allowed to racial and ethnic minorities in pre-Code Hollywood. They might be the butt of jokes, but they’re also real people; one thread running through the film is Tim’s anxiety over his wife, who is in the hospital. His continually frustrated efforts to find out how she is, and to get away to be with her, come as reminders of that cold, sad world beyond the nightclub.

It’s not a speakeasy (Happy “just serves white rock and ginger ale and hopes nobody dies on the premises”) but the guests bring plenty of their own ammunition. A fat drunk spends the whole movie looking for someone from Schenectady; a giggling, helium-voiced blonde drives her escort to despair; a flamboyant pansy responds to a chorus-girl’s come-on with a sniffy, “That’s Mister Baby to you.” The wised-up girls are always dishing out smart cracks, telling each other how they told him where to get off. George Raft at his most reptilian boasts about winning 11 G’s off “some ump-chays from Philadelphia.” A bootlegger stops in to warn Happy of the consequences of buying his stuff from the wrong supplier. Mrs. Happy slinks around dripping venom, ducking into closets to smooch the dance director.

At the center of the film is the morosely plastered Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), a poor little rich kid who sits alone, punishing himself with bad liquor because his mother shot his father in another woman’s apartment. He’s redeemed by a good angel, chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke), who takes him under her wing after Happy knocks him cold, a cure for his alcoholic jitters. She puts him to bed under a bear-skin rug, pockets his wallet so he won’t get rolled, reintroduces him to the concept of water (“Here, insult your stomach with this.”) Clarke, for once in a movie where no one drags her by the hair or slaps her with a citrus fruit, is lovely: both her beauty and her acting style have a natural, unaffected warmth that’s rare in an era of platinum hair and penciled-on eyebrows. Her goodness—not innocence—makes the dazzle of naughtiness look like cheap tinsel. She’s the glass of water you thirst for after a lot of lousy booze. She can hoof too—Clarke was dancing in nightclubs at age thirteen—and her figure in rehearsal shorts would wake any man out of a three-day drunk.

“You know, they can make it faster than you can drink it,” Ruth tells the sozzled Rand, who replies, “Yeah, but I bet I’ve got them working nights.” (A line recycled by Dan Duryea in The Great Flammarion.) Adorable, boyish and clean-cut, Lew Ayres makes a surprisingly effective, and affecting, drunk—looking forward to perhaps his best performance, as Hepburn’s wastrel brother in Holiday. Perhaps because he doesn’t overdo it: there’s a delicacy and restraint even as he is credibly woozy and sloshed. As Ned Seton, he’s the most appealing character in Holiday, with his bitter intelligence, sensitivity and mordant humor; but he’s also a man without a spine or a hope. When he tells Hepburn, as his unhappy sister, what it’s like to get drunk, she’s enticed by his account of the glow and hyper-clarity, the exciting game of navigating a world where every action is transformed into a challenge—but she’s disappointed and disgusted by his matter-of-fact admission of the final stage, when you pass out. It’s a weakness, a sloppy self-annihilation that she could never accept.

When you make your film debut kissing Garbo, it would seem there’s nowhere to go but down, and Ayres’s pretty face might have doomed him to cloying juvenile roles, but instead he had a few years of varied and surprisingly dark films, starting with the harrowing All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which instilled the pacifism for which he would later be reviled. He played a ruthless Walter Winchell-like columnist battling racketeers in Okay, America (1932); a cad who knocks up the family maid in Common Clay (1930); even an unlikely gang boss in Doorway to Hell (1930). In Night World, Ayres has two scenes that stand out as unassimilated lumps of Drama: first his encounter with his late father’s mistress, who offers a persuasive defense of adultery, and then his meeting with his mother (a mink-swathed Hedda Hopper). This latter scene is over-written and out of step with the rest of the movie, but also shocking: you don’t expect in such an otherwise lightweight film to see a young man bitterly disown his neglectful mother, and the mother admit she never loved or wanted her son. Hopper’s hard, self-satisfied face is chilling; so much for Mom and apple pie.

The developing romance between Ruth and Michael, by contrast, doesn’t feel rushed or contrived. So much has happened so fast in the film that by the time he asks her to marry him and sail for Bali the next day, it doesn’t seem like an unrealistically hasty move. In its last five minutes Night World kicks into an even higher gear: after one stabbing moment as Tim learns that his wife has died, gangsters burst in with guns blazing, and the new couple’s first kiss looks likely to be their last as they cower before a twitchy, psychotic Jack La Rue. When their lives are saved by the timely entrance of an Irish cop, they and the movie walk over the bodies of the dead for a last few giddy jokes as they set out for their new lives—in a paddywagon.

Just another night on East 53rd Street.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[that-one-dw-creeper-post]

obligatory creeper!twelve to cover up for that wrong post whoops

[designsforliving]

collecting images of Lew Ayres in The Doorway to Hell (1930) like they’re infinity stones

[mundane-stories]

I found the doorway to hell. It's at Central Station on the MBTA.

[shinyprincesspanda]

STULL CEMETERY

Number 9 of my “10 Global Hellgates” blog post.

This cemetery is located in Stull, Kansas; founded in 1857 as Deer Creek. But was renamed Stull, after its only postmaster, whose name was Sylvester Stull.

Also seen in episode of “Supernatural”. Just had to put that in there; huge fan of “Supernatural”.

Legend:The legend claims that the Devil appears or did appear, in Stull twice a year:…

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