Jim Lane's Cinedrome

Lost and Found: Miss Tatlock's Millions

2012-01-23T03:19:00.000-08:00

I interrupt my consideration of The Magnificent
Ambersons for this entry in the Classic Movie
Blog Association's Comedy Classics Blogathon.
For other posts in the blogathon, click on the
link; you'll find my colleagues at CMBA holding
forth on comedies from City Lights to Pillow
Talk, from Ball of Fire to The Producers,
and on stars from Jean Harlow to Gene
Tierney. There are a lot of famous names
and revered titles on the agenda; trust
me to pick one you never heard of.

Miss Tatlock's Millions (1948) is another one of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal that I used to see regularly in late-night TV syndication, like Night Has a Thousand Eyes and Alias Nick Beal. That's where I discovered it in the late 1960s -- our local CBS affiliate dipped freely into the Paramount package, and after local news signed off at 11:30 p.m. it was movies every weeknight until the wee hours. Tatlock was one of the titles I used to search for every week in the Late Late Show listings as soon as we got the TV Guide home from the supermarket.

If (as it's sometimes said) Charade and Witness for the Prosecution are the best Hitchcock movies Hitchcock never made, then Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the best Preston Sturges movies Preston Sturges never made. Of course Sturges (like Hitchcock) remains peerless, and I wouldn't necessarily rank Miss Tatlock's Millions up there with The Lady Eve or Sullivan's Travels. But The Great McGinty? Christmas in July? Definitely. (And for that matter, miles ahead of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock or The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend.)

For starters, just take a gander at -- feast your eyes upon -- the roster of names on this poster. That's what I call a pretty deep bench. I'll get to all of them in time, but let's begin with the fine print way down there at the bottom.

Charles Brackett's name probably rings a bell, and well it should. He was Billy Wilder's writing partner for 13 years; they turned out scripts for other directors (Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Midnight, Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn) and, once Billy turned director, for Wilder himself (The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and their mutual masterpiece Sunset Blvd.) Brackett teamed almost as often with young Richard Breen (Breen was 30 in 1948, Brackett 56), and five years later they would share an Oscar (with Walter Reisch) for writing the first Titanic with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. Brackett and Breen came to Miss Tatlock's Millions fresh from collaborating with Wilder on A Foreign Affair. (And by the way, for info on another Brackett-Breen collaboration, hop over to Tales of the Easily Distracted and read DorianTB on Henry Hathaway's Niagara, another terrific Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn't make. But I digress.)

Miss Tatlock's Millions begins, like Sullivan's Travels, with a midnight brawl between two men, this time in a seedy room rather than on a speeding train. Also like Sullivan's Travels, the opener turns out to be a movie-within-the-movie tease. Not on the screen, but on the set: One of the two men crashes through a window, rolls across an overhang, falls on his back in the street below, and a voice shouts, "Okay, cut!" The director is Paramount ace Mitchell Leisen ("I had hoped he'd hit his head on the chimney coming down, but I guess that's the best we can get."), and the man who took the tumble is stuntman Tim Burke (John Lund), doubling for star Ray Milland. Leisen and Milland here make in-joke cameos, a favor to Brackett in return for ones he's done them: scripts for Leisen (Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own), roles -- and an Oscar -- for Milland (The Major and the Minor; Arise, My Love; The Uninvited; The Lost Weekend). (And say, check out that nameless script girl standing between them; eager to make an impression, or what?)

As he leaves the set, Burke is approached by Denno Noonan (Barry Fitzgerald), who found him through a picture file at Central Casting. Noonan is the social secretary (i.e., "keeper") for one Schuyler Tatlock, the eccentric (i.e., "barking mad") scion of the wealthy Santa Barbara Tatlocks, shipped off by his concerned (i.e., "embarrassed") family to the safe distance of the Hawaiian Islands. That is, he was Schuyler's keeper -- until two years ago, when Schuyler, indulging his weakness for matches, burned himself to death while Noonan was in the village indulging his own weakness for Irish whisky. Noonan never told the family, just stayed there enjoying the sunshine, tropical breezes, and $500-a-month allowance checks. But now Schuyler's grandparents have both died, and Noonan must produce him for the reading of the will; he wants to hire Burke to impersonate Schuyler, "a thousand dollars in 48 hours and no physical discomfort whatsoever." Noonan insists the family won't know the difference -- "They haven't seen him in ten years and they didn't look at him then." Looking at a snapshot, Burke admits there is a strong resemblance. Of course, he'll have to darken his blonde hair, adopt the glasses Schuyler always wore...

...and put the proper expression on his face.

Burke is still dubious, but as Noonan wisely points out, it beats falling off buildings for 150 bucks a pop, so before long they're motoring up the Coast Highway toward Santa Barbara. That's where Burke gets his first glimpse of the Tatlock estate. "Just a sweet little family cottage," Noonan explains, "with 22 bathrooms." "How come they didn't buy the Pacific Ocean too?" asks Burke. "They would've," Noonan says, "only they couldn't landscape the other side."

In that sweet little cottage up there, the heirs of Grandfather and Grandmother Tatlock have started to gather. Already there is Schuyler's younger sister Nancy (Wanda Hendrix), who lived with her grandparents, joined by her uncles Gifford (Dan Tobin) and Miles (Monty Woolley) and Miles's wife Emily (Dorothy Stickney). Emily is sweetly engrossed in her embroidery, but the two brothers are already licking their chops. Miles calculates that after all the assorted taxes and fees, their parents' estate will come to "only" about $6 million. "As a practicing communist, you should be pleased." "Gifford's not a communist, Miles dear," Emily says; "he just likes to see his name on letterheads." "Oh, I admit you're not one by conviction," says Miles. "You just haven't the guts to face being a rich man." Nancy is appalled at their naked greed and goes for a walk in the vast garden (with its $900-a-month watering bill).

Noonan comes in with the ersatz

Schuyler, announcing that Schuyler

is "a turtle" today, and he refuses

to talk to anybody but

other turtles...

...so Miles, Gifford and Emily have

no choice but to follow suit -- only

to have "Schuyler" change the game

and guffaw at their silly poses.

Next to arrive is Nicky Van Alen

(Robert Stack), Schuyler and Nancy's

cousin. He's a shallow, conceited Polo

Lounge Lothario who's never given a

second's thought to anything but himself

-- but he's the first one to notice that

there's something different about

Schuyler.

Finally, Burke/Schuyler meets 19-year-old Nancy, who greets him affectionately and remembers how he was "so sweet to me when I was little." Burke is speechless, not sure how to respond, and Nancy turns dolefully to Noonan. "He's worse, isn't he?" Nancy is beautiful, fetching and open-hearted, and it's a real effort for Burke to maintain Schuyler's idiot grin. This job is getting more complicated by the minute.

The last relative to arrive is imperious Cassie Van Alen

(Ilka Chase), Nicky's mother and Miles and Gifford's

sister. But when the will is finally opened and read,

there are a couple of surprises in store for the

acquisitive branches of the Tatlock-Van Alen clan.

Grandfather Tatlock, after a few small bequests to

the servants, left his entire estate to "my beloved

wife Annette Tatlock, for distribution to our heirs"

-- never suspecting that she would outlive him by

only an hour. And what nobody suspected until

now is that Grandmother Annette left a hand-written

holographic will leaving "everything I possess" to her

unfortunate grandson Schuyler -- and as things turned

out, everything she possessed at her death consisted

of the entire Tatlock estate, lock, stock and barrel.

Schuyler gets absolutely everything.

The next morning at breakfast, Miles, Cassie and Gifford fawn over their new favorite nephew, then ignore him as he climbs under the patio table, complacently sure that their conversation will go over his head -- literally and figuratively. From his perch at their feet, Burke hears the three siblings cut a deal: Miles and Gifford will have themselves made Schuyler's trustees, and will then settle a generous allowance -- "Say, $100,000 a year for life" -- on Nancy, which Cassie will gain control of by marrying Nancy off to Nicky.

Once Cassie has explained the facts of life to Nicky, he turns on the oily charm to Nancy, nurturing the crush she has had on him since childhood. "It just hit me all of a sudden," he preens, "I haven't been giving you a break. Did a miracle happen overnight? You've stepped right up into my class. I could show you around with a lot of pleasure."

That night after dinner, Nicky turns up the heat over candlelight and cocktails in the greenhouse. Meanwhile, Burke prowls protectively (and jealously) in the trees overhead, keeping an eye on the snake Nicky's progress. Suddenly he slips and falls through the glass roof, landing flat on his back at Nicky and Nancy's feet, in a real-life reprise of the stunt that opens the picture. This time, however, he's injured and momentarily stunned. Before his head can clear, he speaks to Nancy, forgetting to keep up the babbling Schuyler act. Nancy is thrilled, convinced that the shock has knocked Schuyler into his right mind, and that she has "a real brother" at last.

In the days that follow, Nancy appoints herself Schuyler's personal therapist, moving him into the room next to hers, nursing him back to health, planning to take over his education and ease him into adult society. The aunt and uncles scramble to ingratiate themselves with their newly-competent nephew. And Nicky pouts and fumes that suddenly Nancy has no time for him.

Things quickly get complicated, especially for Burke, who has fallen in love with Nancy. For Nancy too, who can't imagine why all at once her lifelong crush on Nicky pales beside her affection for her "brother". (Here the script plays with sexual taboo in much the way Brackett and Wilder did in The Major and the Minor: In the earlier picture, Ray Milland was disturbed by his feelings for the "child" Ginger Rogers, and the movie got away with it because we knew she was really an adult. In the same way, we know here that "Schuyler" isn't really her brother -- but Nancy doesn't.)

Things begin to tumble out of control, just as Burke did when he fell through the greenhouse roof. Aunt Cassie finds a mysterious bottle of hair dye under the mattress in Noonan's room, which sets her thinking, and doing a little homework. She still has a few tricks up her sleeve.

Well, I think that's about as far as I want to go; mustn't spoil everything. Miss Tatlock's Millions is one of the forgotten pleasures of 1940s Hollywood. I'm told that it was a moderate success at the box office with a loyal cult following (rather similar, I imagine, to the response to the original Peter Cook-Dudley Moore Bedazzled in 1967). A quick glance at the picture's user reviews (including my own) on the IMDb testifies to the fondness for it among those who saw it, either in theaters in 1948 or (like me) later in its TV syndication.

Miss Tatlock's Millions was directed by veteran character actor Richard Haydn, who also appears (under the name "Richard Rancyd") as the family attorney who breaks the good news to "Schuyler" and the bad news to Miles, Cassie and Gifford. As Lawyer Fergel (accent on the second syllable, please), Haydn uses the patented hyper-nasal, super-enunciated voice for which he was famous, the same voice he used as the Caterpillar in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland ("Ah-whooo...aaaarrrrrre...Ah-yooo?"). Haydn could be just as memorable without the voice, most noticeably as "Uncle" Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music in 1965. (I've heard many people bemoan the fact that Christopher Plummer was passed over for an Oscar nomination in that picture, and I agree with them. But even more unjust, I think, was the failure to nominate Haydn as best supporting actor. It should have been the capstone of his career.) For Tatlock -- the first of only three pictures he directed -- Haydn adopted a style and pace less headlong and frenetic than Preston Sturges at his best, but still sprightly, giving his sterling cast plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy themselves. (Brackett and Breen's sparkling dialogue gave Monty Woolley one of his signature lines, often quoted by people with no idea of where it came from: "California, the only state in the Union where you can go to sleep under a rosebush in full bloom -- and freeze to death.")

Haydn could take considerable pride in the performance he got from John Lund. Lund's career never quite fulfilled its early promise; he seems to have spent much of it -- certainly at Paramount -- being palmed off as a taller version of Alan Ladd. Certainly, he shows here a flair for semi-slapstick comedy that was seldom given rein, and never exploited as fully as Brackett, Breen and Haydn do here. Miss Tatlock's Millions is, not to mince words, a riot, and it's largely thanks to John Lund.

Miss Tatlock's Millions is harder to find than it was in 1948, or during the 1960s and '70s on TV, but it hasn't entirely dropped off the face of the earth. It briefly appeared on VHS during the Video Stone Age. Still, it was rare enough that I considered myself lucky to score a 16mm print on eBay about six years ago. No sooner did I do that than it came out on DVD-R from Hollywood's Attic (as a general rule of thumb, if you want to ensure that a movie comes out on DVD, talk me into buying a 16mm print of it). That disc appears to have been transferred from a 16mm syndication print, but it's decent enough; the pictures in this post are frame-caps from it. But even that is out of print now, though you can still (as of this writing) find a few copies on Amazon. Miss Tatlock's Millions is long overdue for a proper DVD transfer from original elements, or at least a 35mm print -- a transfer that does justice not only to the performances, but to Victor Young's music and Charles Lang's cinematography.

How about it, Universal?

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 1

2012-01-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

It happens to be my personal opinion that Citizen Kane is Orson Welles's second greatest movie; I prefer The Magnificent Ambersons, and by a considerable margin. Maybe it's because I first discovered Ambersons on late-night TV in the early 1960s, a good four years before I first saw Kane. I hadn't yet heard all the tales and legends behind the making (and editing) of the picture, so I didn't know I was supposed to regard it with sorrowful disdain as The Great Saint Orson's might-have-been masterpiece yanked from his loving hands and mutilated by the mindless paws of lesser, crasser men. All I knew was what I saw on the screen, and I thought it was a terrific movie. I still do.

It's not my purpose here to try to dethrone Kane in favor of Ambersons; that's a fool's errand and I know it. Everybody who considers Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made -- i.e., just about everybody with an opinion on the subject -- has good and sufficient reasons for saying so, and I wouldn't dream of trying to talk them out of it. Personally, I've always found Kane ... well, dazzling, impressive, virtuosic and all that, certainly, and a singular achievement any way you cut it. But for me it's a rather cold movie that I rather coldly admire, like a display of fireworks seen from afar.

In Ambersons the fireworks are much closer and consequently quieter -- and they're very personal. The Magnificent Ambersons was a very personal picture for Orson Welles, too; quite a bit more personal, I think, than Citizen Kane had been. And I suspect that's why he took what happened to Ambersons so personally; his bitterness was palpable any time the title was mentioned during the last 43 years of his life. "They destroyed Ambersons," he often said, "and the picture destroyed me."

Pardon me, but nobody destroyed The Magnificent Ambersons. If the picture is not as great as it might have been -- and I do not concede that point -- I say Orson Welles deserves as much blame for it as anyone. I suspect that on some level he knew that, and I think his bitterness over it must have come from chagrin as much as righteous indignation -- maybe more.

But before I get too deep into barstool psychology, let's review the facts.

The Magnificent Ambersons, first of all, was a novel that
won Booth Tarkington the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in
1919 (the second came three years later for Alice Adams).
Born in 1869 in Indianapolis, Tarkington was successful right
out of the chute with his first novel, The Gentleman from
Indiana, published when he was 30. He was popular and
prolific, turning out some 53 novels, plays and nonfiction
books, including one published posthumously in 1947.
Like many of his contemporaries, he has drifted out of
fashion, but in his day he was nationally famous and
well respected; his Penrod books, idealized yarns of
mischievous childhood, gave Mark Twain's Tom and
Huck a good run for their money, and in 1922 the
Literary Digest proclaimed him "America's greatest
living writer".

Tarkington's current obscurity is undeserved. Certainly his
two Pulitzer Prize winners are as good as they ever
were. The Magnificent Ambersons was the middle
volume of a trilogy Tarkington called Growth (the
others: The Turmoil ['15] and The Midlander ['24]),
and is the only one of the three that remains in print.

Tarkington's inspiration for The Magnificent Ambersons was the town where he lived much of his adult life (and where he died in 1946): Woodruff Place, named for James O. Woodruff, who owned the 80 acres where the town sat, about a mile-and-a-half northeast of downtown Indianapolis. Woodruff Place was characterized by wide avenues designed for horse-and-buggy traffic,
multi-tiered fountains at the intersections, pseudo-European statuary posed under the magnolia and oak trees that lined the expansive streets, and stately, even pretentious upscale homes. Most stately and pretentious of all was Woodruff House itself. Here's a postcard image of the house in its heyday (it was demolished in the 1930s); anyone who has read Tarkington's novel (or seen Welles's movie) will readily recognize the prototype of the Amberson Mansion, Tarkington's

"house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches".

Woodruff Place began in 1872 as a tony suburb for the prosperous merchants of Indianapolis, a parkland refuge from the soot and smoke of the growing city. It was incorporated as a town in 1876, even as Indianapolis crept out to engulf it. (James Woodruff, meanwhile, didn't live to see the full flowering of his municipal namesake, dying at 38 of "congestion of the brain" in New York while planning an educational around-the-world cruise in 1879.)

New homes continued to rise for the rest of the 19th century, but the coming of the automobile accelerated both Indianapolis's growth -- by 1907, it was the fourth-largest manufacturer of cars in the world -- and Woodruff Place's decay. As cars made commuting more practical, residential suburbs sprouted ever farther from the city center, and by 1910 the town of Woodruff Place was surrounded on all sides by Indianapolis. Affluent citizens followed the city's spreading outskirts, the industrial inner city grew, and the grand homes of Woodruff Place were subdivided into apartments, sometimes as many as eight or ten, for the burgeoning blue-collar population. Finally, in 1962, Woodruff Place's long struggle for independence ended when it was annexed by Indianapolis. Today it is on the National Register of Historic Places and a designated preservation district by the City of Indianapolis.

Much of Woodruff Place's decline came after even Booth Tarkington was dead, but the handwriting was on the wall decades earlier as he mapped out his Growth trilogy. For this second volume, Woodruff Place became Amberson Addition (Tarkington's description is unmistakeable), while James Orton Woodruff was transformed into the leonine Major Amberson (and permitted to live to a ripe old age). Tarkington saw what was happening to Woodruff Place, and he chose to portray it as reflected in the decline of a single family through their failure to cope with the changing times. And Tarkington's symbol of that change was the automobile.

Magnificence, Tarkington writes, is always comparative; the magnificence of the Ambersons dated from 1873, when Major Amberson made his fortune, and it lasted "throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city". The Ambersons and their doings dominate the town's activities and its conversations; everybody knows what they are up to and cares what they say, think and do. Major Amberson has six offspring, but only three of them figure in Tarkington's plot: sons George and Sydney and daughter Isabel. Isabel in turn has two suitors: careful, quiet Wilbur Minafer ("a steady young businessman and a good church-goer") and George's best friend Eugene Morgan -- dashing, charming, and a little wild.

One night, Eugene gets a bit too wild. In a state of inebriation while trying to serenade Isabel, he stumbles through a bass viol, reducing it to splinters and himself to a mumbling heap. Humiliated by his "making a clown of himself in her front yard", Isabel refuses to accept his apologies or even to see him, and two weeks later announces her engagement to Wilbur. The wedding is a grand Amberson affair, the honeymoon as staid and careful as the groom, and Wilbur and Isabel move into their new house, a wedding present from the Major next door to (and almost as impressive as) his own, and they live there with Wilbur's unmarried sister Fanny.

Isabel is a good and faithful wife to Wilbur, but she doesn't really love him. A town dowager predicts that all her love will go to their children, "and she'll ruin 'em." The dowager is only partly wrong: Wilbur and Isabel don't have children, they have one child.

By the time he is ten years old, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's only grandchild and the apple of his adoring mother's eye, is a spoiled rotten brat, lording it over local citizens and strutting around town as if he owns the whole place -- which he assumes, by right of birth, he will someday. As a teenager he high-hats and bullies his supposed friends in a "secret club" they have formed when they dare to elect someone else president. The idea that he may be making enemies never enters Georgie's mind; it's other people's job to curry favor with him. He dismisses anyone not an Amberson as "riffraff". Among the solid citizens of the town, more than a few long for the day this haughty young prince will get his "come-uppance" ("Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there!").

So much for prologue. The Magnificent Ambersons really begins when 19-year-old George Minafer, now grown into a strikingly handsome young man, comes home from school for the Christmas holiday. His parents and grandfather host an elaborate formal soiree in his honor at the Major's mansion. It is "the last of the great long-remembered dances that 'everybody talked about'" -- because, although the Ambersons may not realize it, their town is already growing too large for "everybody" to talk about anything.

At this party George comports himself according to his idea of noblesse oblige, pretending to remember people when he doesn't (and, with some of his former boyhood friends, pretending he doesn't know them when he does). One of the people he pretends to remember is none other than Eugene Morgan, now a widower with an 18-year-old daughter, returning to town for the first time since before George was born. George doesn't know the history between his mother and Eugene, of course, but there's something about the man that he doesn't quite like.

Eugene's daughter Lucy, however, is another matter. George likes her very much; he is instantly smitten. Lucy, for her part, takes a liking to him as well, despite his rather smug and grandiose airs, which, to his consternation, she finds slightly amusing.

Eugene spends the evening dancing with Isabel and George's Aunt Fanny and talking over old times with Uncle George, the Major, and his old rival Wilbur. Fanny -- who, like many young women back in the day, was quite taken with Eugene -- revels in his return, and in a quieter way, so does Isabel.

Young George's suspicions are aroused when he learns that Eugene, who left town years ago as a struggling lawyer, has turned inventor and intends to establish a factory in town manufacturing horseless carriages. George insists that those noisy, unreliable machines will never amount to anything and suspects that Eugene is trying to weasel his way into the family's graces to get the Major to invest in his fly-by-night operation. When Fanny defends Eugene, George teases her about setting her cap for him. Fanny angrily berates him for his "mean little mind", and George is amazed to realize he must have struck a nerve.

George stifles his mild dislike for Eugene as he continues to court Lucy, never quite sure where he stands with her, but finding her so much more interesting than the "silly" girls he grew up with. Eugene, meanwhile, becomes a regular visitor in the Minafer home, taking Fanny and Isabel, and sometimes Uncle George, on frequent outings in his automobile. For all of them it seems like old times, which both amuses and unsettles young George.

Some time later, the first crack in Major Amberson's vast fortune appears when Uncle Sydney and his wife Amelia -- insufferable snobs -- decide that the town isn't fit for a "gentleman" to live in, and pressure the Major to give them their share of his estate now rather than make them wait to inherit it in his will. Uncle George holds that the estate can't handle being broken up so soon, and in the ensuing squabble Amelia makes catty allusions to rumors going around about Eugene and Isabel. Young George, his latent antipathy aroused, is alarmed, but Aunt Fanny, herself infatuated with Morgan, pooh-poohs the idea, while Uncle George dismisses it as the idle gabble of the malicious and greedy Amelia.

During young George's senior year at college, Wilbur Minafer dies, the victim of a listless constitution and his worries about a business that died just before he did, taking all the Minafer money with it. Wilbur's death therefore leaves Fanny penniless and at the mercy of her Amberson in-laws. Isabel and George agree that Fanny should continue to live with them, and they assign Wilbur's life insurance money to her to give her something of a nest-egg. Still, she remains bereft, insecure and emotionally fragile; when Georgie returns home after graduation and teases her anew about Eugene Morgan, she is quickly driven to tears.

Also on his return from college, George is appalled to discover that the broad lawn between the Amberson Mansion and his and Isabel's house has been subdivided by the Major to build five smaller houses as rental properties. George's aesthetic sensibilities are offended; even more offensive is the idea of strangers -- riffraff -- interloping on Amberson property. Uncle George fails to impress on his nephew the idea that perhaps the Major needs the money. Later, when George asks his grandfather to buy a larger two-horse carriage, or even a four-in-hand, the Major temporizes, then mumbles something about helping George get through law school. George fails to make the obvious connection; he worries that the Major is getting senile.

Eugene Morgan continues a frequent visitor at the Amberson and Minafer homes, taking Isabel and Fanny -- sometimes the Major, or Uncle George, or young George too, but always Isabel -- for drives in his motorcar. Georgie, for his part, prefers buggy rides with Lucy, but his courtship is not going well. Whenever he presses her to become engaged, she sadly parries his advances. Finally George gets her to admit that she is concerned for her father's approval and uneasy about George's reluctance to "make something of himself". George is affronted; why should he make something of himself when he's already an Amberson? The very suggestion that he enter some profession insults him. He becomes quarrelsome, and he and Lucy are estranged.

That same evening, on their front porch, as Fanny and Isabel chat, George daydreams of Lucy begging his forgiveness, promising she will never listen to her father again, that she now dislikes him just as much as George does. This is followed by another, less pleasant fantasy: He imagines Lucy surrounded by young men -- the same ones he bullied and dominated when they were boys -- and laughing gaily, giving no thought to him. Riffraff! George continues to stew over his foundering romance with Lucy, and what he sees as Eugene's meddling in his personal life. (Everything is always about George Amberson Minafer.)

One night, when Eugene comes to dinner --
without Lucy -- George's resentment boils
over. As Eugene and the Major chat about
Eugene's flourishing automobile factory,
George blurts out that automobiles are a
useless nuisance; they'll never amount to
anything and had no business being invented.
In the awkward silence that follows, the Major
chides George for his tactlessness. Eugene's
answer is worth quoting because it has become
-- partly due to the abbreviated version of it
that appears in Orson Welles's movie -- the
most famous passage from the novel:

"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

Eugene excuses himself and leaves, while Isabel, Fanny and the Major wonder at George's rudeness. Isabel asks George why he dislikes Eugene so, but he denies disliking him -- or liking him, for that matter. He affects a pose of lofty indifference, although he is slightly perplexed when Aunt Fanny hastily whispers to him that he has "struck just the right treatment to adopt".

Some time later, when George, still brooding over his break with Lucy, again snubs Eugene, Fanny sees it and comes to George's room to congratulate him. She knows exactly what he's doing, she says, but she doesn't. In fact, she has let her own frustrated dreams of marrying Eugene Morgan poison her, and the poison festers as she sees long-buried feelings blossoming again between Eugene and Isabel. Now, misunderstanding George's motives, she says she understands that he's only trying to protect his mother's reputation, that he'd give up Lucy in a minute if it was a matter of Isabel's good name.

George is thunderstruck. In his self-absorption he hasn't given a thought to Eugene and Isabel, but now, badgering the sputtering Fanny, he learns that Aunt Amelia was right, there has been talk about them, and it has only increased since Wilbur's death. Fanny thought he already knew, but in fact she's the one who has told him. Now she tries to restrain him, but he flies into a fury.

George storms across the street to confront Fanny's friend Mrs. Johnson, a notorious gossip. Imperious as always, he demands to know who has been slandering his mother's name, but she indignantly orders him out of her house. When George turns to his uncle, Uncle George is appalled at what George has done. Doesn't he realize that he's only thrown fuel on the fire? Gossip is never fatal until it's denied, he says. Worse yet, in his nephew's eyes, he appears unperturbed at the thought of Eugene and Isabel marrying; why shouldn't they, he says, if they're both free and care about each other? Young George calls the idea "monstrous".

It is clear to Georgie that it's up to him to defend his mother's good name -- the Amberson name -- not to mention the memory of his father (whom he barely noticed when he was alive). When Eugene comes to the door to take Isabel driving, George intercepts him, refuses to let him in, tells him he is no longer welcome, and slams the door in his face.

Isabel waits in vain all afternoon for Eugene to come for her. Instead, late that evening, her brother George arrives, takes her into the parlor and closes the door. Fanny stops Georgie from barging in on them; She knows Uncle George is telling Isabel what her son has done. Too late, Fanny realizes the damage she has done, and is aghast. She realizes that she's been a fool; she never had a chance with Morgan, and wouldn't have had, even if Wilbur had lived. She was only letting off steam, and now look what she's done.

Uncle George has brought a letter from Eugene pleading with Isabel to stand up to her son for the sake of their happiness. But George remains adamant, and the heartbroken Isabel can't bring herself to go against his wishes. She breaks it off with Eugene once again. "This time," he laments, "I've not deserved it."

The next day George encounters Lucy downtown. It is clear she doesn't yet know about the scene with Eugene. She is friendly and cordial, but she keeps the conversation light and trivial, which frustrates George. He had thought losing Lucy would be "no great sacrifice", but now that he sees her, and she offers no hint of their former intimacy, he knows otherwise. Reminding him of their quarrel, she says since they can't "play nicely", they'd best not play at all. He tells her that he and Isabel are going away soon -- indefinitely, perhaps permanently -- and he may never see her again. She expresses casual regret but wishes him "ever so jolly a time". Stung, he stalks off. Only when he is gone does Lucy show her true feelings, nearly swooning inside a nearby shop. When she gets home, she finds Fanny Minafer waiting for her, and at last she hears about what George has done to her father. Immediately after Fanny leaves, Lucy burns George's pictures and all his letters.

The next day George and his mother leave on a round-the-world tour. Fanny has warned George that Isabel's health is not good, but he refuses to believe it, says she's the healthiest person he knows. In their absence, real estate values in Amberson Addition decline sharply, so much that the Major is unable to rent all of the new houses he had built.

One evening, relaxing on the veranda, Fanny and Uncle George fall to talking about money-making opportunities in the face of the dwindling Amberson fortune. Old Frank Bronson, the Major's lawyer, has told George about a new company planning to manufacture automobile headlights; with the proliferation of motorcars like Eugene Morgan's, this could prove to be a lucrative investment. Fanny and George agree to consider putting some money into the company, agreeing also not to invest more than they can afford to lose.

They ask Eugene's opinion, and he advises caution, but by then Fanny and George have "the fever" and see the headlight company as a sure-fire way to get rich quick. They both "plunge" on the company, forgetting their resolve not to invest too much. It's a decision that will have serious consequences.

Eugene Morgan's factory continues to prosper. Soon he and Lucy are able to move from the modest house they have been renting into a luxurious new mansion which Eugene has built in a new suburb of the city, farther from the center of town and less vulnerable to the urban smoke and soot that have blighted Amberson Addition. George Amberson comes to see them after a visit to Paris where Isabel and young George are staying. The elder George tells them he was alarmed at the evident decline in Isabel's health; he tells them also that his nephew refuses to see it. He says he sensed that Isabel wants to come home, but that Georgie, without actually using force, refuses to let her. One night, Amberson says, Isabel expressed a wish to see her father once more, and it struck him that his sister was more worried about the state of her own health than about the Major's.

Finally, after nearly a year and a half abroad, even young George can see that they must return home now if his mother is ever to withstand the journey. As it is, the trip home is so arduous that by the time they arrive Isabel is too weak to walk a step, and George has to carry up to her room. A doctor and nurse have been summoned and are waiting. Fanny, Uncle George and the Major are desolate, understanding -- as young George does not, quite -- that Isabel is on her deathbed.

Eugene Morgan hears, and comes to see Isabel, but George again refuses to let him in; if it weren't for Morgan, he says, none of this would have happened. When Isabel learns that Eugene has been there, she whispers that she would have liked to see him -- just once. The next morning she is dead.

Young George is dazed and devastated; he had been clinging to the forlorn hope that she might get better. Even a month later, he is still answering the unspoken reproaches he imagines coming from Uncle George and Aunt Fanny. "What else could I have done?" Before long, his question becomes, "If I was wrong, couldn't someone have stopped me?" Fanny tells him, bleakly, that no, nobody could stop him; he was too strong, and Isabel loved him too much.

On some level, George seems to understand that his mother died of a broken heart, and that it was he and not Eugene Morgan who broke it. And even in his wretched grief and denial, he certainly knows this: He refused his mother's dying wish to see Eugene one last time.

With Isabel's death, the fall of the House of Amberson gathers a terrible momentum. Major Amberson withdraws into his own private contemplation of mortality, where his son and grandson can no longer reach him. The headlight company where Uncle George and Fanny put so much money fails, never having resolved the technical flaws in the product. No one can find a clear title to Isabel's house, the wedding present from the Major so many years ago; it seems the Major neglected to transfer the deed to Isabel or to register it with the county land office. Nor is the Major any help; his mind seems elsewhere. The two Georges hesitate to question him on the matter, but they hesitate too long; one morning a servant finds the Major dead in the easy chair by his bedroom window.

Between the money Uncle George invested in the headlight company and the share that Sydney and Amelia took (which turns out to have been the only share that was really worth anything), the Major has died virtually penniless. Sydney and Amelia, now living like royalty in their Italian villa, decline to help.

Young George loses his mother's house and land, and is able to clear only about $600 from the sale of Isabel's furniture and clothes. Uncle George, thanks to his political connections, lands a minor consulship in South America, but even then he must borrow $200 from his nephew to make the trip to his new home. At their last meeting, before boarding his train, uncle tells nephew that he's always been fond of him -- hasn't always liked him, but always been fond. You've had some hard blows lately, he says, and you've taken them like a man. There may be others in this town who are fond of you too; don't be too proud to turn to them. And with that he is gone; both men know that they'll probably never see each other again.

George's only prospect now is an $8-a-week job as law clerk to Frank Bronson, with the prospect of on-the-job training, eventually to become a lawyer himself. He and Fanny must vacate the Minafer home, and Fanny has found a place for them in a boarding house across town where some of her old acquaintances are living. But when Fanny and George look closely at their finances, they find that, for all intents and purposes, they have none. Fanny had in fact, despite her assurances to the contrary, invested every penny she had in the headlight company, and now it's gone; she has only $28 left to her name. George, after dismissing the servants and staking his uncle, has only about $200 left. The boarding house is going to cost, at a minimum, $100 a month. And George will be making $32.

George tells Frank Bronson that he can't take the job, and he hasn't time to wait to become a lawyer. He needs something that pays well right away. Bronson protests, but George explains that, well, he has much to atone for in his life, and he can't really make it up to the people he owes it to. The next best thing is to behave decently to poor Fanny, whom he has never really treated very well. Now George has heard that there are well-paying jobs for men in dangerous professions -- handling chemicals or explosives, things like that. Bronson reluctantly agrees to help George find such a job: "You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met!"

All this time, Lucy still has feelings for George, and she indirectly admits as much to her father. He doesn't tell her that he has learned that George has found a job handling nitroglycerine at a chemical plant -- a job with a high mortality rate. An old friend tells Eugene that George seems to be trying to do the decent thing for "old Fanny", and he hints that he (Eugene) might find a safer job for George. Eugene is in fact a silent partner in that chemical plant, and could arrange something without George ever knowing. But Eugene, still bitter, is unwilling to do George any favors.

On one of his Sunday walks, while Fanny is at church, George takes a melancholy stroll through Amberson Addition. The once-stately houses are now rundown, soot-stained and seedy, converted into apartment buildings, boarding houses, shops, lodge halls and the like -- or, like the Amberson Mansion and Isabel and Wilbur's old house, demolished, waiting for the rubble to be carted away. Even the newer houses the Major built as rental properties have been pulled down. The fountains at the intersections are dry and crumbling, the statues lining the streets corroded and pitted. All that's left of the family name, he muses, is the name of Amberson Boulevard itself. But a corner streetsign disabuses him: Amberson Boulevard has been changed to Tenth Street.

Returning to the boarding house, George remembers a book he saw in the parlor, a municipal tome chronicling the 500 most prominent families in the history of the city. He takes the book down, opens to the index, and looks over the names listed there: Abbett, Abbott, Abrams, Adam, Adams, Adler, Akers, Albertsmeyer, Alexander, Allen, Ambrose, Ambuhl, Anderson...

George stares a long time at the page. Five hundred families, and there's nothing between "Allen" and "Ambrose". He puts the book back on the shelf. Something has happened that has been a long time coming: Georgie Minafer has had his come-uppance -- "three times filled and running over." But all those people who so longed for it are not there to see it. "Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

In the end, it's not the nitroglycerine that gets George. Of all things, it's an automobile. One Sunday, walking downtown, he remembers seeing a young lady stepping into an expensive motorcar. He thought at the time that it might be Lucy, but he couldn't be sure. Now, standing in the street, he remembers back to that day, and while he's standing there thinking about the auto in his memory, another auto in the here-and-now runs him down, breaking both his legs. As George lies there in a haze of agony, the driver jumps out of his car and begins jabbering to police that it wasn't his fault; he's sorry for George but it wasn't his fault, and he has a witness. As George lies there dusty and bloodied, waiting for the ambulance, he mutters, "Riffraff!"

Eugene Morgan reads about George's accident in the paper while on his way to New York on business. His bitterness toward George is unchanged by the young man's misfortune, but somehow in his reverie he senses the presence of Isabel, and can see her wistful eyes, more than at any time since her death. In New York, on an impulse, he goes to see a spiritual medium, a woman he had visited once before and dismissed as a fake. Now, however, the woman gives him an ambiguous reading that faintly suggests a message from Isabel: A beautiful lady, she says, wants him to "be kind".

Has Eugene subconsciously fed cues to the woman that enabled her to lead him on this way, or was she really in touch with Isabel? Eugene can't be sure, but when he returns home he goes straight from the station to the hospital where George is convalescing. He isn't surprised to find Lucy already there.

Nor is George surprised to see Eugene. "You must have known my mother wanted you to come, so that I could ask you to -- to forgive me."

Eugene takes George's hand, and Tarkington's novel ends thus:

But for Eugene another radiance filled the room. He knew that he had been true at last to his true love, and that through him she had brought her boy under shelter again. Her eyes would look wistful no more.

* * *

That, in a large nutshell, is the novel Orson Welles undertook to film in the autumn of 1941. It was not the first screen adaptation of Tarkington's book; there was Pampered Youth from Vitagraph in 1925, with a title change that suggests they were trying to lure the Clara Bow and Colleen Moore fan clubs. The picture evidently survives only in fragments, two of which you can see here and here on YouTube. The letter and spirit of the novel were evidently low priorities for writer Jay Pilcher and director David Smith; the picture climaxes with Eugene Morgan saving Isabel from a burning building, resulting in reconciliation with George and happily-ever-after all around.

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre took a different tack. I have illustrated this post with pictures from Welles's movie, but the synopsis is of the original novel. I have gone into considerable detail for reasons that I think will become clear as we discuss what happened when Welles brought his version to the screen. We'll move on to that in Part 2.

To be continued...

Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships

2011-12-10T00:31:00.000-08:00

(NOTE: I feel terribly guilty about letting the Cinedrome lie fallow for so long. Between Christmas shopping and nine performances a week of A Christmas Carol at the Sacramento Theatre Co. I haven't had the time I would like to devote to researching and writing my next post (on The Magnificent Ambersons). Soon, I promise! Until then, here's an earlier post on one of my favorite movies, for those who may not have seen it when I put it up a year ago. -- jl)

In 1949 Henry Hathaway made one of the best movies of his long career. In it, his three stars, Richard Widmark, Lionel Barrymore and Dean Stockwell (and for that matter, most of the supporting cast) each gave one of his own best performances. Down to the Sea in Ships is in fact one of the finest movies ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system, and almost nobody has ever heard of it.

I know I run the risk of overselling the product here, but I simply don't understand why Down to the Sea in Ships isn't one of the best-loved movies of all time. When the talk turns to the great seafaring stories of the screen -- Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, Captains Courageous, Moby Dick et al. -- it's a mystery to me why Down to the Sea in Ships never comes up. If there are such things as flawless movies, and there surely are, Henry Hathaway's Down to the Sea in Ships is one of them.

I say "Henry Hathaway's" to distinguish this picture from the other Down to the Sea in Ships, from 1922. That one made a star out of Clara Bow, and curiously enough, it's available on home video -- no doubt because it's in the public domain, while Hathaway's picture is still under copyright and quarantined in the 20th Century Fox vault. In the 1960s and '70s it was the other way around: Down to the Sea in Ships (1922) was gone and long forgotten, but if your local TV station had a decent film library and you were willing to stay up till two or three in the morning, you could count on seeing Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) two or three times a year.

Before we leave the subject of Clara Bow's breakout vehicle for good, let's get one point clear: Wikipedia says that the 1922 picture "was remade by Twentieth Century Fox in 1949," but -- well, that's Wikipedia for you. (Whoever wrote the article didn't even know that it's "20th Century Fox," not "Twentieth.") In fact, there is no connection whatsoever between the two pictures -- other than the fact that they both deal with whaling ships out of New Bedford, Mass., and they both take their title from Psalm 107:23 ("They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters..."). These aren't two versions of the same story, they're two different movies with the same title; henceforth, when I use the title, I'll be talking about only one of them.

Fox chief Darryl Zanuck first set out to produce Down to the Sea in Ships in 1939 -- if not this picture precisely, at least one with this title and setting. Things got as far as sending a second unit crew into the waters of the Gulf of California to shoot background footage. But when World War II made it impossible to shoot on the open sea, or even in California's harbors, the picture went on a back burner.

After the war, Zanuck reactivated the project and handed it over to producer Louis D. ("Buddy") Lighton and director Hathaway. Both men were working for Fox now, but they had been paired before in the 1930s at Paramount: Lighton had produced the
Shirley Temple vehicle Now and Forever, The Lives of a Bengal
Lancer, and Peter Ibbetson, all of which Hathaway directed.

The first draft of the script was by Sy Bartlett -- that's him at right -- born
Sacha Baraniev in Russia (now Ukraine) in 1900 but raised in America from
the age of four. Originally a newspaper reporter, he became a screenwriter
for various studios in the '30s, but he was noted more for hobnobbing
in Hollywood society, hosting Sunday barbecues, and the occasional
gossip-column appearance. He served with the U.S. Army Air Corps
during World War II, then returned to Hollywood and a job at Fox.
At the time that he took his first cut at Down to the Sea in Ships,
Bartlett's most memorable work was still ahead of him: he later
turned his wartime experience into the novel and screenplay
Twelve O'Clock High (1949) for director Henry King
and star Gergory Peck.

Music historian Jon Burlingame (in his notes for the movie's soundtrack CD) says Bartlett's script underwent a rewrite by John Lee Mahin -- shown here (on the left) in a rare acting stint in Hell Below (1933) with Robert Montgomery. Like Bartlett a reporter-turned-screenwriter, Mahin already had a number of major credits on his resume, many of them -- including Red Dust, Treasure Island (1934), Test Pilot, Captains Courageous and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) -- for Hathaway's mentor Victor Fleming.

Without access to what records might be in the 20th Century Fox archives, it's impossible for me to say exactly how credit for Down to the Sea's script should shake out -- which is a pity, because the script is a truly masterful piece of work; if the picture ever gets the kind of attention it has deserved for over 60 years, maybe someone will shed some light on the subject. The writing credit on screen reads "Screen Play by John Lee Mahin and Sy Bartlett; From a Story by Sy Bartlett," which matches the general drift of the two writers' careers: story was Bartlett's long suit, dialogue Mahin's. Making an educated guess, I'd say Bartlett was responsible for Down to the Sea's distinctive blend of rousing adventure and psychological acuity, Mahin for the unerring cadence and vocabulary of the speech of 19th century New England whalermen. Or it may have been more complicated than that; Mahin gets top billing on screen, which suggests that his rewrite probably amounted to more than just touching up the dialogue.

Down to the Sea in Ships opens in New Bedford in the summer of 1887. The whaling ship Pride of New Bedford returns from a four-year voyage under the command of Capt. Bering Joy (Lionel Barrymore), the best whaler on the New England coast. He's just about the oldest, too, though he shows no signs of being ready to retire from the sea. The reason for that is his 11-year-old grandson Jed (Dean Stockwell), the youngest in a line of the whaling Joy family that extends back "mighty nigh two hundred years." Capt. Joy, though still on crutches from an injury that kept him bunk-ridden for much of the voyage, is unwilling to retire, at least until Jed is thoroughly brought up in the ways of the sea and can continue the family tradition. Jed himself is (if you'll pardon the expression) entirely on board with this; he loves the seafaring life, the only life he's ever known. He's spent the last four years -- nearly half his life -- as his grandfather's cabin boy, and is now eager to ship out again as an apprentice member of the fo'c'sle crew.

Unfortunately, the decision may be taken out of both their hands. The whaling firm's insurance company refuses to cover Capt. Joy; moreover, Massachusetts law will not allow Jed to return to sea unless he can pass an exam covering the four years of schooling he missed while he was away. Fortunately, a sympathetic school superintendent (Gene Lockhart, in a warmhearted cameo) fudges Jed's test results rather than disappoint the captain.

And a tentative compromise is reached on the insurance issue when Capt. Joy is persuaded to sign Dan Lunceford (Richard Widmark) as first mate. The firm's president (Paul Harvey) says Lunceford is a promising young seaman who only needs some experience under a master mariner like Capt. Joy, but the captain isn't fooled: he realizes that Lunceford, who has a master's license, is being foisted on him at the insurance company's behest, to be in a position to take command of the Pride of New Bedford if age or infirmity should overcome the old man.

For his part, Dan Lunceford doesn't care much for the look of Capt. Joy, nor for his sneering at Lunceford's "book-learnin'" and his college degree in marine biology; only a sweetening of his percentage of the voyage's profits persuades the younger man to ship out with Capt. Joy after all.

Once the Pride of New Bedford is out to sea, Capt. Joy plays his trump card. He tells Lunceford that he sees "the hand of Providence" in Lunceford's presence on board. Jed was allowed to ship out, he says, only on the condition that his studies be continued, and Capt. Joy is hereby assigning Lunceford, in addition to his regular duties as first mate, to be Jed's tutor during his off-duty hours. In this way, the crafty old mariner intends to kill two birds with one stone: he'll see to Jed's education, and he'll keep Lunceford too busy to undermine his authority.

Lunceford has no choice but to accept the assignment, but he does so with ill grace. Resentful at what he regards as essentially a babysitting chore, he is impatient, sarcastic and dismissive. Resentful in turn, Jed is obstreperous and uncooperative. Lunceford decides Jed is just as ornery and pigheaded as his grandfather, and he give up the lessons as a waste of his time.

Stung, Jed applies himself and in time surprises Lunceford with answers to all the questions that had stumped him before. Lunceford suddenly approaches his duties as tutor in earnest, tailoring lessons more carefully to Jed's quick and lively but unsophisticated intelligence. As the friendship grows between Jed and Lunceford, Capt. Joy begins -- rightly or wrongly -- to fear that his grandson's respect and affection are drifting away from himself and attaching themselves to Lunceford; he responds to the unexpected competition by looking more carefully at Lunceford's ideas, which he had formerly dismissed as not worth his attention. All this happens even as the Pride of New Bedford roams the waters of the South Atlantic, stalking and taking whales.

That's about as much of the plot as I care to go into here; better that you should discover the rest for yourself. Down to the Sea in Ships isn't available on home video, but it does surface (pun intended) from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel, and it's worth seeking out to discover how the three-generation, three-way relationship of Capt. Joy, Jed and Dan Lunceford plays itself out against the background of a perilous voyage contending with the forces of nature and the leviathans of the deep. Each of the three discovers qualities of strength and character in the others that he either never suspected or did not properly value at first. Each brings out the best in the other two, and allows the other two to bring out the best in him.

All this, mind you, while the movie does not skimp on action and high adventure. There are scenes of whale chases and boats lost at sea, suspenseful and beautifully shot (Joe MacDonald) and edited (Dorothy Spencer), with excellent special effects (Fred Sersen and Ray Kellogg). Capping it all is a climactic sequence in which the Pride of New Bedford runs aground on an iceberg in the fog near the horn of South America...

...with the crew desperately struggling to free themselves and repair the damage before the sea pounds their ship to splinters against the unforgiving ice. Not to mince words, it's an absolutely brilliant action/suspense set piece. Amazingly enough, it was shot entirely in a soundstage tank on the Fox lot, but it's spectacularly convincing and harrowing for all that.

Down to the Sea in Ships was Lionel Barrymore's last
starring role, on loan from MGM. Once, when introducing
Barrymore on a 1939 radio broadcast, Orson Welles
referred to him as "the most beloved actor of our time."
It was probably an exaggeration, but not by much;
Barrymore's stock in trade was playing cantankerous
old codgers with hearts of gold. Ironic, then, that the
only role for which he's widely remembered today is
Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, one of the most
thoroughly heartless characters in the history of movies.
In his own day Barrymore was more closely identified
with wise old Dr. Gillespie in MGM's Dr. Kildare series,
and with his annual holiday performances as Ebenezer
Scrooge on radio. In fact, Barrymore had been slated to
play Scrooge in MGM's A Christmas Carol (1938) until
he broke his hip in an auto accident. That injury landed him
in a wheelchair, then advancing arthritis kept him there for
the rest of his career -- until Down to the Sea in Ships.

Henry Hathaway remembered, at first, a testy working relationship with Barrymore. As he told interviewer Polly Platt:

He had everything wrong with him, most of it in his head...I said, "You're not sick, you're just destroying yourself...I have no sympathy for you. You're a glutton, you drink too much...You want to destroy yourself, you're really doing it."

Is this callousness or tough love? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Hathaway had a reputation for being tough on actors. His side of it was simply that he refused to mollycoddle them; he expected actors to report to the set ready to work. He also remembered the day they finished shooting Barrymore's scenes:

We finish the picture, he walked off the set. No wheelchair. No crutches. And he came to me and said, "Mr. Hathaway, I want to tell you, you did more for me and for my life on this picture than ever happened to me before. From my father or my mother, or from anybody. I was just simply sitting there and waiting to die."

Hathaway went on to say that they remained friends for the rest of Barrymore's life. In any case, whatever the validity of Hathaway's recollection, the evidence is there on screen: Barrymore responded -- whether out of spite or chagrin -- by giving one of his strongest performances in years. For once he's not merely being wheeled around the set acting crusty (although in his more physically active shots he was often doubled by assistant director Richard Talmadge).

I don't mean to minimize the genuine pain Barrymore surely suffered, but that wheelchair must have been a real convenience for a man who had never been all that crazy about being an actor to begin with. In youth, his real interests were in painting, writing, and composing music, but the pressure to enter the family trade (and the money to be made from it) kept him on stage, screen and radio for nearly sixty years. The role of Capt. Bering Joy was a recognizable "Lionel Barrymore type," but it was also a complex and vigorous character betrayed by age and ill health, and Barrymore the self-described ham connected with it on a more profound level than almost any part he ever played. He deserves to be remembered for this performance as much as -- indeed, more than -- for the unalloyed wickedness of Henry Potter.

Down to the Sea in Ships was Richard Widmark's fifth movie, after his sensational debut as the giggling psycho killer Tommy Udo in Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947). In the intervening three pictures, Widmark played a woman-beating gang lord (The Street with No Name), a murderously jealous bar owner (Road House) and an underhanded western outlaw (Yellow Sky). The studio realized he was in danger of being typecast as a succession of nutjobs, sleazeballs and unsavories (because he played them so well), when what the studio really needed was another leading man. Casting him as Dan Lunceford was a conscious effort to help him segue into more sympathetic roles. It worked. Widmark went on to be one of Fox's most stalwart leading men, playing good guys (Slattery's Hurricane, Panic in the Streets), bad guys (No Way Out, O. Henry's Full House) and guys in between (Pickup on South Street, Don't Bother to Knock) -- until, like many other stars, he went free-agent in the mid-1950s.

In Down to the Sea, Widmark is top-billed, although he doesn't appear until half an hour in. His Dan Lunceford is the character who goes through the most self-surprising changes in the course of the picture. After all, Jed is an adolescent coming of age, and changes are to be expected, while Capt. Joy, though seemingly set in his ways and defiantly so, proves to be flexible, open to change, and willing to learn -- when he thinks nobody is watching and he can do it without losing face.

Capt. Joy blusters, but it's Dan Lunceford who is most nearly arrogant at the outset; part of the reason the captain scoffs at Lunceford's education is that he senses Lunceford is more than a little puffed-up about it. For his part, Lunceford treats Capt. Joy with an exaggerated politeness that stops just short of insolent sarcasm. (Capt. Joy: "You may have noticed that most of my crew generally sign on again." Lunceford [drily]: "Out of affection no doubt, sir.") His sarcasm towards Jed's lessons, on the other hand, is undisguised -- at first. In time, he comes to realize he has misjudged them both, especially the captain. By the end he's telling Jed that his grandfather is "more of a man than you or I could ever hope to be." It's an admission Lunceford could hardly have imagined making when the voyage began.

And then there's Dean Stockwell. Stockwell's first screen role came in 1945, when he was eight years old, and he's still working today -- which means that his career has now lasted longer than Lionel Barrymore's or Richard Widmark's. When I screened my print of Down to the Sea in Ships for some friends, one of them said, "Dean Stockwell was a revelation!" She was familiar with Stockwell as an adult actor, and knew he had started as a child star, but had no inkling he was ever as good as he is here. ("He was marvelous," remembered Hathaway, "just a great actor. Intense little guy.") My friend was right: Dean Stockwell's performance here is a revelation, easily (at the age of twelve) the best of his career -- and for an actor whose resume includes Gentleman's Agreement, The Boy with Green Hair, Compulsion, Long Day's Journey into Night, Blue Velvet, and the TV series Quantum Leap, that's saying something. Jed Joy is the fulcrum upon which the plot of Down to the Sea in Ships pivots, and in Stockwell's performance we see him grow from an uncertain, sometimes petulant child into the makings of a fine, strong young man -- he seems even to grow taller as the story progresses (and it's all in his acting; the shooting schedule wasn't that protracted).

Jon Burlingame says that Down to the Sea cost $2.5 million, one of Fox's most expensive pictures of 1949, and that despite good reviews and high expectations ("...so engrossingly done that the box-office appeal should be sturdy," said Variety, "...dotted with tremendously moving scenes that will stick in the memory."), it failed to break even. Not an unfamiliar story in the history of Hollywood.

I've been dancing all around something here, and I might as well come right out and say it: Down to the Sea in Ships is a masterpiece. It's not one of those "miracle pictures" I've talked about before, like Peter Ibbetson or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Making it was no departure for the Hollywood studio system; on the contrary, pictures like this were right up Hollywood's alley. If there's a miracle here, it isn't that it was made in the first place, but that it turned out so well in the end.

Henry Hathaway never worked with a better script; for that matter, neither has anyone else. Whether the credit goes mainly to John Lee Mahin or to Sy Bartlett -- or some magical, once-in-a- lifetime chemistry between the two -- Down to the Sea's script is nothing less than a work of genius. It's a rousing sea adventure, a sharp-eyed psychological study, a near- documentary reconstruction of the 19th century whaling trade, and a subtle examination of the customs and dynamics of a shipboard community in the age of sails. Nearly every line is memorable, every scene layered with nuances that reward repeated viewings. Even the name of the ship -- Pride of New Bedford -- is pregnant with symbolism: the many facets of pride, as both virtue and vice, is a major theme that runs through the story and all three of the central characters. This superb text inspired everyone who touched it -- Hathaway, his actors, photographer Joe McDonald, editor Dorothy Spencer, composer Alfred Newman, everyone -- to give it the best of their considerable abilities. The result of their efforts is (I say it again) a flawless movie. Not a work of art, perhaps -- perhaps -- but of such a high order of craftsmanship that it's all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

If you ever get the chance to see Down to the Sea in Ships, don't pass it up. I've never shown it to anyone who didn't love it. I guarantee it: this is one of the greatest movies you never heard of.

For my other posts on director Henry Hathaway, see:
"A Genial Hack," Part 1
"A Genial Hack," Part 2: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
"A Genial Hack, Part 3: Peter Ibbetson
Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills

Remembering the Night

2011-11-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

This post is adapted and expanded from an article I wrote for the November 22, 2007 issue of the Sacramento News & Review.

I always dread this time of year, when the holiday movies are trotted out. You can't turn around without hearing some jackass bitch about how much he hates It's a Wonderful Life. He can't get enough of "I am your father, Luke" or "I'm King o' the World!", but Zuzu's petals once a year is just more than he can bear.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when I had It's a Wonderful Life all to myself (and yes, there was such a time). Well, almost to myself, anyhow. Certainly everybody else who knew and loved Frank Capra's picture had my own last name. Back about 1974 or so, in college, I had two friends who made a nightly ritual of staying up to watch car dealer Jay Brown's all-night movies on Channel 36 out of San Jose. One day -- and it was nowhere near Christmas -- they rushed up to me bubbling with enthusiasm for this great Jimmy Stewart movie they'd seen the night before. They figured if anyone would know about it, I would, and they were right. That was -- for me, anyhow -- the beginning of the revival of It's a Wonderful Life. And the beginning of the end for my family and me having the memory of It's a Wonderful Life all to ourselves. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad the picture finally came into its own, and I thank a merciful Providence that Capra, Stewart and Donna Reed all lived to see it. But then again, when people like that hypothetical (but all too credible) killjoy I mentioned above feel free to rag on it, sometimes I'm not so sure.

So I almost hesitate to mention Remember the Night. Maybe I wouldn't, but the cat seems to be getting out of the bag. When I wrote about Remember the Night in 2007, it was available only on out-of-print used VHS or bootleg copies of an AMC broadcast from the 1990s. Things are different now; the movie's available in an above-board (and beautiful) DVD from the TCM Web site (and as usual, there's an even better deal at Amazon), and I figure it's only a matter of time before someone runs up to me bubbling with enthusiasm about this great Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck movie they saw the other night. I want to be able to say I'm way ahead of them.

Most of the reason for Remember the Night's resurgency -- I mean in artistic terms, independent of the arcane ins and outs of who owns a film and who decides there's a market for it -- is its writer, Preston Sturges. This was the last script he ever wrote for somebody else to direct, the somebody in this case being Mitchell Leisen, then second only to his mentor Cecil B. DeMille as the alpha dog among Paramount directors (a position he would soon cede to -- or at least share with -- Sturges himself). Leisen's star has slipped a bit since his heyday in the '30s and '40s, alleviated somewhat by an excellent biography, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director by David Chierichetti, originally published in 1973 (the year after Leisen died), then revised and expanded in 1995. I'll have more to say about some of Leisen's pictures later.

Right now I'm talking about Remember the Night. The version of Sturges' script published in Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges is a facsimile of Sturges' actual typescript, dated June 15, 1939 and bearing the title The Amazing Marriage. Written in by hand on the title page is "Remember the Night[,] Or". Obviously, neither Sturges nor producer-director Leisen ever came up with a really good title. The Amazing Marriage at least has some slight connection to a line from the script, albeit one Leisen cut during shooting. The picture's final title, though, is so generic as to be meaningless.

If the title is generic, however, it's the only thing about Remember the Night that is. Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a hardboiled, tough cookie who gets busted in New York for lifting a diamond bracelet from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. MacMurray is assistant D.A. Jack Sargent, about to leave town to drive to his mother's farm in Indiana for Christmas when his boss yanks him in to prosecute Lee. Disgruntled and eager to get on the road, he takes advantage of a legal technicality and gets the case continued until after New Year's. Then he begins feeling guilty about leaving Lee in jail over the holidays and arranges to get her bailed out. To his surprise and discomfort, the bail bondsman remands Lee to his custody, and the surprise is compounded when, despite the fact that he was prosecuting her only that afternoon, the two find themselves taking a liking to one another. They even learn that they grew

up about fifty miles from each other in the same part of Indiana. So, still feeling responsible for Lee, Jack decides to take her home to spend Christmas with his mother (Beulah Bondi) and aunt (Elizabeth Patterson) and their hired hand (Sterling Holloway).

At the humble Sargent farm outside Wabash, Ind., Lee's hard shell begins to soften and melt in the glow of a household suffused by warmth, affection and mutual support -- the kind of nurturing family atmosphere that was completely missing from her own upbringing just a few towns away. This idyll of a Hoosier holiday brims with lovely moments, from Sterling Holloway leading the family in singing "The End of a Perfect Day" around the Christmas tree to the always-delightful Elizabeth Patterson (here at her sweetest) ruefully musing about her own youthful brush with romance ("I twiddled around with the idea one summer; was all right again by fall.").

Patterson's Aunt Emma sees clearly what we do: Love -- the other kind of love -- is beginning to bloom between Lee and Jack, and they allow themselves to forget -- almost -- that she's a repeat offender, and come January 3 he's going to have to try to send her to jail for a long time.

Remember the Night wasn't marketed as a holiday movie -- it was released January 19, 1940, and besides, such a thing was almost unheard of then -- but it's one of the best and least-known. It was a hit in 1940, with Stanwyck and MacMurray already showing the sexy chemistry that would play to more sinister effect four years later in Double Indemnity. The picture was visible on TV through the 1960s and into the '70s, but was out of circulation for decades. Now that Turner Classic Movies and Universal (which owns the pre-1948 Paramount library) have partnered up to issue it on DVD, it surely won't be long before it becomes as popular and beloved as It's a Wonderful Life. Well, okay, maybe not entirely as much -- Wonderful Life has a mighty powerful mystique -- but I'm betting it won't be far behind.

Now that the Thanksgiving leftovers have all been nestled snug in their Tupperware beds in the fridge, and as it begins to look a lot like Christmas, if you're casting about for a new movie to add to your list of holiday favorites, consider giving Remember the Night a try. There's still plenty of time to order your copy

Oh, and one more thing. Don't come around in 2037 moaning about how you're sick and tired of Remember the Night. I won't want to hear it.

Returning to Lost London

2011-10-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

Halloween Season has come round again, and I think this is a good time to repost my four-part series on the lost Lon Chaney picture London After Midnight (1927), and on Marie Coolidge-Rask's novelization of Tod Browning and Waldemar Young's scenario. I've picked up some new readers since these posts ran a year ago (and very welcome you all are!), so, my new friends, this is for you, and I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to read the posts in order so you don't get ahead of the plot.

Have a fun and safely spooky Halloween, everybody!

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The 11-Oscar Mistake

2011-10-06T01:13:00.000-07:00

The 50th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition of Ben-Hur is out. Mine arrived last week, number 13,192 of 125,000 -- so be warned: If you want your own copy, you've got only 111,808 more chances to buy it. As 50th Anniversary Editions go, this one is a little tardy, by nearly 22 months; the picture premiered in New York (at the Loew's State on Broadway) on November 18, 1959.

New York had a lot more daily newspapers in those days, and movie reviews were a lot more important, especially to a roadshow attraction like this that couldn't count on a big ten-jillion-screen opening weekend to make most of its money. A picture like Ben-Hur had to have "legs", and for that the New York critics were as important as they were to any first night on a Broadway stage. If the suits at MGM had been worried about the critics, they were breathing a lot easier by the afternoon of November 19. The chorus of praise was deafening: "a remarkably intelligent and engrossing human drama" (New York Times); "squirms with energy" (Tribune); "a classic peak" (Post); "stupendous" (Daily News); "extraordinary cinematic stature" (Journal-American); "massive splendor in overwhelming force roars from the screen" (World-Telegram).

If you agree with all these encomia, you might want to read no further, because I don't agree and I never have. As far as I'm concerned, of all the lousy movies that have won the Oscar for best picture (a very crowded field), Ben-Hur may be the lousiest of the lot. ("Well, if you feel that way about it, why did you shell out 45 smackers for a deluxe boxed Blu-ray?" Good question; all I can say is, just as not every good movie is important, not every important movie is good.)

Let me remind you (if you're old enough to remember) or tell you (if you're not) how moviegoing has changed in 50 years. Forget home theaters, forget cable or satellite TV, forget Tivo or Internet streaming, forget even multiplexes. What they now call "platforming" wasn't a rare distribution strategy in those days, it was how all movies were handled. A movie would open in the big cities first -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, maybe San Francisco, Atlanta, Washington DC, St. Louis and a few others. Maybe in two or three theaters in the big cities, but probably in only one (and all theaters had only one screen). After its first run, the movie would filter down to smaller theaters in the big markets and bigger theaters in the smaller markets. If your hometown was small enough and far enough from a major market, you could have months of mounting anticipation before you had a chance to see the movie everybody you didn't know was talking about.

And absolutely forget about waiting till a movie turned up on HBO or Netflix. You'd have one chance to see it; even then it might play only three or four days and be gone. If you couldn't catch it those days, you could hope it would be held over or brought back. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. If not, you could watch for it at your local drive-in or theaters in a neighboring town, maybe in vain. That was moviegoing in the 1950s.

This dynamic was intensified in the case of roadshow attractions. I don't mean just the Cinerama movies, which were a special case all to themselves. I mean movies like Oklahoma!, Around the World in 80 Days, The Ten Commandments, South Pacific; they might play a year or more in metropolitan areas before going into general release ("Now at popular prices!"). Where we lived in Northern California, the nearest big city was San Francisco; I had friends whose parents took them down there to see Oklahoma! and Around the World, but my family never went in for that; I just had to wait. (I didn't see Oklahoma!, for example, until 1961, and only then because we moved to Sacramento in the summer of 1960.)

If we hadn't made that move, it might have been at least another year before I got to see Ben-Hur -- that's the kind of business it was doing; general release still looked a long way off. But voila! -- Ben-Hur was playing at Sacramento's most opulent picture palace, the Alhambra. By that time, as I've written here and here, Ben-Hur was more than a movie; it permeated the culture -- every newspaper, every magazine, every comedy routine, every conversation. Myself, I had already gotten a set of four toy Ben-Hur chariots for Christmas and played them to pieces. I had even found time to read the book -- no small undertaking for a kid, believe you me. One of the Alhambra's ticket outlets was the Sears Roebuck credit office, and they had a 6-foot-tall cutout of this logo mounted over the counter. That cutout alone was awesome, breathtaking; it was like gazing up at a cardboard Mt. Rushmore. (I wonder if any of those cutouts survive.) I wheedled the astronomical $3.00 admission price from my parents, and one Sunday in

September I finally took my seat to have (as the posters promised) The Entertainment Experience of a Lifetime.

Well.

As it turned out, this milestone in the march of Western Art was only a movie after all. And to my bewildered surprise, as I sat there in the throng -- the Alhambra held 2,500 and it was jam-packed to the last row of the balcony -- I found a startling thought running unbidden through my head: "This movie...isn't...very...good."

The first stirrings of disappointment came during the pre-title sequence showing the birth of Jesus, with the Wise Men tromping up and plopping their gifts down. It looked as awkward to me as a Nativity Scene enacted by a Sunday School kindergarten...

...with a Star of Bethlehem as tacky as a dimestore Christmas card or the picture on a gas station calendar. I didn't really know the meaning of the word "sublime" at that age, but I understood the concept, and I knew that just about everybody had promised me something like that in Ben-Hur. Well, it hadn't really started yet; maybe things would get better.

They didn't. By the time of the "great sea battle" -- nearly an hour and a half later -- I had about decided somebody was pulling a fast one. I was twelve years old and thinking, "How fake!" Maybe it was the huge screen, but these boats looked like bathtub toys. Howard Lydecker (though I didn't know his name at the time) had done a better job on Sink the Bismarck!, and with probably one-tenth the money MGM spent on this.

I wish now I had thought to eavesdrop on the lobby-talk at intermission, but I didn't, so I don't know how Ben-Hur was going over by the halfway (actually, about two-thirds) mark. But I remember what I was thinking: "Are they really falling for this?" I felt like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen suddenly blurting out that the emperor had no clothes. But I didn't blurt anything; I kept my thoughts to myself. I was just a kid, what the heck did I know?

I left the Alhambra Theatre that evening sadder, wiser, and four hours older, with a valuable lesson: Don't believe everything you hear.

Seeing the picture again and again over the years brought into focus things that I hadn't specifically noticed the first time, but that I could see had added to my general disappointment, like the solemn, leaden pace, with pregnant pauses between and during the speeches, each pause several weeks more pregnant than the last. Or the dull non-performance of Haya Harareet as Esther, Judah Ben-Hur's love interest. Harareet had little screen presence and less chemistry with Charlton Heston (for contrast, see Heston and Sophia Loren in El Cid), and after Ben-Hur Harareet's career went precisely nowhere. (For that matter, that's where it went even during Ben-Hur.)

On a related side-note, we've all heard Gore Vidal's story about how he saved the Ben-Hur script by writing in a homoerotic subtext between Heston's Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd's Messala, a story Vidal continues to tell despite on-the-record denials from both Heston and director William Wyler before they died. Well, maybe it's there and maybe it isn't; by the time Vidal started talking about it, Stephen Boyd was no longer around to give his take on it. More obvious to me -- now, I mean, not in 1960 -- is the same subtext between Ben-Hur and the Roman soldier Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins) during the rowing drill in the galley; Arrius gazes intently through hooded eyes at the half-naked Judah as the hortator steps up the drumbeat and Judah strokes, strokes, strokes, faster and faster. Maybe Vidal wrote that too, and maybe Hawkins played it, I don't know. My point is that all this talk about real or imagined homoerotic undercurrents in Ben-Hur is possible at least in part because plainly, there's absolutely nothing going on between Charlton Heston and Haya Harareet.

But back to my train of thought. When I saw Ben-Hur in September 1960, I had already read and enjoyed the book, so I never for a minute believed that the movie had simply gone over my 12-year-old head. Here was a picture that, as I saw it, was mediocre at best, yet it had critics everywhere flying into transports of ecstasy. Even the reliably hypercritical Time Magazine said that the script "sometimes sing[s] with good rhetoric and quiet poetry." (Really? Somebody quote me a line or two of that singing, quiet poetry. I dare you.)

To me it was a paradox, one I mulled over intermittently for years. Finally I came up with...I can't really call it a theory, exactly; it's more a hypothesis. No doubt it's a gross over-simplification, but I think it's worth trotting out and looking at.

And now this brings me to what I mean by the title of this post: "The 11-Oscar Mistake". I don't mean to say that giving Ben-Hur 11 Oscars was a mistake (although I think it was). What I mean is that there was a serendipitous mistake in the picture itself that wound up making it a huge hit and winning it 11 Oscars.

The mistake happened during shooting of the one sequence where Ben-Hur unquestionably delivers the goods: the chariot race. It's 8 min. 38 sec. of pure visceral excitement, and to get the full pulse-pounding impact of it you really had to see it in a huge theater on an 80-foot screen with 2,499 other people who were just as edge-of-the-seat excited as you were. (When was the last time you saw any movie with thousands of strangers? I'll bet it's been a while.)

The chariot race was the work of second unit directors Enos Edward "Yakima" Canutt and Andrew Marton (finally assembled by editors John D. Dunning and Ralph E. Winters). Yakima Canutt is far and away the greatest and most famous stuntman who ever lived, with a career spanning 60 years from Foreman of Z Bar Ranch in 1915 to Breakheart Pass in 1975 (when he was 80). He all but invented the craft of movie stunt work, and he literally invented any number of safety devices to minimize the inherent dangers of the job. As either stunt performer, stunt coordinator, second unit director, producer or actor (sometimes wearing more than one hat on the same picture) he racked up nearly 500 titles in his filmography. (He also has the distinction of being the first man to go before the cameras in Gone With the Wind, doubling Clark Gable in the burning-of-Atlanta sequence.) For Ben-Hur Canutt selected and trained both the horses and drivers for the race.

Andrew Marton's career was almost as long as
Canutt's (from 1927 to '77), most often as director
(King Solomon's Mines ['50], The Longest Day,
Crack in the World, Clarence the Cross-Eyed
Lion) but also as second unit director on many
major pictures (The Red Badge of Courage,
A Farewell to Arms ['57], Cleopatra ['63],
Catch-22, The Day of the Jackal). On Ben-Hur
Marton was in charge of the crew behind the
camera while Canutt handled the human and
animal crews in front of it.

Doubling for Charlton Heston in the race's more hazardous shots was Yakima Canutt's 21-year-old son Joe (shown here in a 1994 interview). Heston had worked for weeks with the second unit crew to master driving his own chariot, adding one horse at a time until he was driving a full team of four. By the time it came to shooting, Joe Canutt said, Heston was as good a charioteer "as any man in the business", and he's in the chariot for quite a bit of the race. But as ever the case in Hollywood, MGM wasn't about to let their star take any foolish chances, and that's where Joe came in.

It was during this training that one of Heston's best-known anecdotes happened. You've probably heard it, but it bears repeating here in light of how things turned out. One day Heston turned to Yakima Canutt and said, "Y'know, Yak, I feel pretty comfortable running this team now, but we're all alone here. We start shooting this sucker in ten days. I'm not so sure I can cut it with seven other teams out there." "Chuck," said Canutt, "you just make sure y'stay in the chariot. I guarantee yuh gonna win the damn race."

Keeping Judah Ben-Hur in the chariot turned out to be a pretty near-run thing. Canutt senior had worked out a number of "gags" to punctuate the race with excitement -- wheels disintegrating, chariots crashing, Roman guards and chariot drivers (actually dummies) getting trampled and run over, and so forth. One of them called for Joe Canutt, doubling Heston, to drive his chariot over the wreckage of two others -- actually a short ramp placed in his path and blocked from camera sight by one pile of debris. In concept it was a pretty simple stunt, not particularly designed to stand out in the mayhem.

Joe worked long and carefully with his team before the shoot. He took the horses up and over the ramp one at a time, then in pairs harnessed together, then threes, then all four, then the four harnessed to an empty chariot, and finally all four, the chariot and Joe. At last everybody, human and equine, was comfortable with the stunt.

Here's how the sequence was planned, shot by shot -- each shot, obviously, filmed separately, even on different days, to be assembled later, rather than as one continuous action:

First a shot of slaves scurrying to clear the wreckage and horses of two chariots before the racers come round again.

Messala, knowing what's just around the bend, crowds Ben-Hur's chariot (with Heston at the reins) hard against the spina as they come around the turn.

As Messala and Ben-Hur gallop into the straightaway...

...the Roman continues to hem Ben-Hur against the spina, so close that guards on the spina have to leap onto the narrow curb to avoid being trampled (one doesn't make it)...

...and the wreckage looms directly and unavoidably in Ben-Hur's path as the slaves dash away to safety.

I draw on two sources to describe what happened when the next shot was filmed. One is Charlton Heston's autobiography In the Arena; the other is an account I read years ago but can't remember where, and I can quote it now only from memory. Heston says that Yakima Canutt attached a safety chain between his son and the chariot before the shot, but Joe disconnected it after Yak walked away. Heston never learned why; he speculates that maybe Joe didn't want to be shackled to the wreckage if anything went wrong. I think it's also possible that Joe had rehearsed his team thoroughly enough that he simply didn't think the chain was needed. In addition, Yak cautioned Joe to keep the chariot under 35 miles per hour to avoid being bounced out when he went over the ramp.

Marton called "Action!" and the two chariots came round the bend, Joe pacing himself to Messala's chariot galloping beside him. Yak and Marton reflexively yelled "You're going too fast!" -- but of course it was pointless; Joe couldn't have heard them over all the noise at that distance.

Joe's chariot hit the ramp. In this frame you can see that the horses are just leaping clear on the other side. (You can also clearly see, with the frame frozen, that it's not Charlton Heston driving.)

An instant later the team is safely clear and galloping away, but Joe's trouble is just beginning.

The chariot begins to descend and Joe goes into free fall, hanging for dear life onto the front rail.

The heavy chariot is still coming down and Joe is almost perfectly perpendicular.

Now his feet are over, putting him in a back-bend. He's a heartbeat away from either being crushed by the half-ton chariot or having the meat ripped from his bones by the bolts studding the underside. (And hey, look over to the right; see that? Yep, it's one of Andrew Marton's cameras. I'll bet even the editors never saw it. The camera is on screen for eight frames, one-third of a second -- just long enough to notice if you look that way. But of course nobody ever has.)

It was in this nanosecond that Joe Canutt displayed the combination of quick thinking and athletic prowess that marks the difference between a great stuntman and a dead one. It beggars belief, but here's what he did: just before his body toppled completely over, he let go his grip on the front rail of the chariot, dropped to a handstand on the tongue just behind the horses' flying hooves, and pushed himself to the side and clear away. Now I've never done a handspring off the tongue of a chariot at a full gallop, but I'm guessing it's not the kind of thing you can practice for; either you can do it when you have to or you can't. Joe Canutt could do it.

He didn't escape entirely uscathed, though. Something on the passing chariot clipped him on the chin, requiring four stitches. He was back at work after half an hour.

Joe Canutt, against all odds, was alive and well, but the shot itself was a dead loss, and after seeing his son go halfway to glory and back again, Yakima Canutt was in no mood to try it again. But according to Heston, at the screening of the dailies the normally detached William Wyler nearly choked when he saw the shot. "Jee-zuss!" he cried. "We have to use that!"

Yakima Canutt balked. "Don't see how y' gonna do that. I promised Chuck he'd win this race. I don't believe he can catch that team on foot."

But Wyler knew just how to salvage the shot. Neither Yak nor Heston was crazy about the idea but they did it:

With the chariot running at full speed, Heston faked the end of Joe Canutt's tumble by clinging to the front of the chariot...

...then, "in about three blinks of an eye", he clambered back in place and seized the reins once again. "It's a scary shot," Heston wrote, "-- it scared me, anyway." No doubt those three eye-blinks taught Charlton Heston a new respect for Joe Canutt, if any new respect were needed. (UPDATE: Wyler biographer Jan Herman gives a different account of how this solution was arrived at, but I'm going with Heston, who was there.)

Now let's go back to the Alhambra Theatre in September 1960. Judah Ben-Hur's flying header out of that chariot got a reaction from those 2,500 patrons unlike anything I've ever heard in a movie theater -- or anywhere else, for that matter. Men bellowed. Women screamed. Not a soul in the house -- and I include myself -- could believe we saw what we were seeing. And again, remember that 80-foot screen. This wasn't an image captured in a few thousand pixels on an HDTV. It was MGM Camera65, projected on a screen that looked like it covered two acres. When Joe Canutt's body went sailing into the air, you had to move your head to follow it.

And when Charlton Heston climbed back into that chariot and gathered up the reins to race on, the joyful roar from that audience all but drowned out the Alhambra's seven-channel sound system. It was like...oh, I don't know. Imagine Babe Ruth hitting a grand-slam homer in Yankee Stadium with two men out in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series and the Yankees down by three runs. The way those Yankee fans would have responded -- that's what that audience did for the rest of the chariot race after that stunt. They cheered, they stomped, they whistled, they bounced in their seats shouting "Go! Go! Go!" Myself, I sat there wide-eyed, taking in the whole experience -- what was happening on screen, and what was happening around me. It didn't change my feelings about the rest of the picture, but it's something I'll never forget.

By finding a way to salvage Joe Canutt's stunt-gone-wrong, William Wyler gave Ben-Hur something nobody knew it was missing -- probably not even Wyler himself. He gave it a moment -- a split-second, a heartbeat-and-a-half -- when it actually looked like Judah Ben-Hur might not win the race after all. In art both high and low, there are certain givens that everybody knows going in. Oedipus will blind himself, Scrooge will reform, Anna Karenina will throw herself under the train, Luke will destroy the Death Star. And Ben-Hur will win the chariot race. When Joe Canutt was thrown out of his chariot, and when William Wyler figured out a way to keep the shot in the picture after all, the audience's expectations were instantly upended, as surely as Joe Canutt had been.

Tristan Bernard once said, "Audiences want to be surprised, but by something they expect." Joe Canutt (by accident) and William Wyler (by design) created a moment that achieved the near-impossible: it made Judah Ben-Hur winning the chariot race -- which everybody expected -- a genuine surprise.

For all the New York Times's puffing about engrossing human drama, or Time Magazine's mooning over lines of quiet poetry, I say Ben-Hur (1959) really pretty much boils down to the chariot race -- and the chariot race boils down to that somersault Joe Canutt took on a miscalculated stunt. Don't get me wrong, the whole race is brilliantly staged, shot and edited, but that moment makes it an emotional as well as a visceral experience. At that point, the chariot race still has nearly three minutes to run, and the picture itself nearly 50. But that's the emotional climax of the race, and of the whole movie.

I admit, this hypothesis is something I concocted about a movie I didn't like very much, to try to understand why so many people did. As I said, it's no doubt an over-simplification. And yet, and yet -- I can never prove it, but I'll always suspect that some of those 11 Oscars, maybe even best picture itself, would have gone home with somebody else if Joe Canutt had been a little more cautious as he pointed his team toward that ramp.

The Rubaiyat of Eugene O'Neill

2011-09-23T02:27:00.000-07:00

An interesting artifact has come into my hands on loan from an old friend. It's an early draft of the screenplay for MGM's 1935 movie of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! by the husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

It's a very early draft, in fact -- labeled both TEMPORARY and INCOMPLETE and dated January 18, 1935. The picture's premiere (in Worcester, Mass.) wasn't until December 6, and it didn't open in New York until Christmas Day. I don't know when it opened in Los Angeles, but Variety's review (and they were always very prompt) finally appeared January 1, 1936 -- nearly a full year after this draft started making the rounds at the Culver City studio.

Exactly what rounds did it make? Well, obviously it never made it back to the Script Dept., despite the request on the cover. The names "Oliver" and (smaller, more faintly) "Harry Oliver" are pencilled on the cover. Harry Oliver worked as an art director in Hollywood in the '20s and '30s, including (but not exclusively) at MGM; his IMDb page lists credits with Fox before the 20th Century merger (two of which, 7th Heaven and Street Angel, garnered him Oscar nominations), with Harold Lloyd, and with independent producer Sol Lesser. He's not among the names credited on Ah, Wilderness!, but that doesn't mean he didn't work on it; MGM was all one big family in those days, and crafts technicians didn't get credit for every lick of work they did. My guess is that when Ah, Wilderness! was in pre-production, the Art Department got a number of scripts for budget estimating purposes, and Harry Oliver got one of them to look over and offer input. How it got out of his hands (Oliver died in 1973) and wound up in my friend's wife's friend's uncle's box of mementos is anybody's guess.

The "600" stamped on the label isn't the number of this individual script, it's the picture's production number -- meaning this was the six-hundredth feature initiated since the founding of MGM in 1924. The "Incomplete" stamp is literal: the last page of the script, p. 93, ends at a point where the finished film still has 32 of its 97 minutes left to run. The "Temporary" stamp means "Tentative"; there are many minor and two major differences between what the Hacketts had written by January 18 and what eventually turned up on the screen.

The first major difference is in the treatment of Wallace Beery's role. Beery (left) gets top billing in the picture, playing Sid, the brother of Spring Byington's Essie Miller and the brother-in-law of Essie's husband Nat (second-billed Lionel Barrymore, right). O'Neill's play all takes place on one day -- July 4, 1906 -- but the Hacketts had expanded the time frame to open a week or two earlier ("late June"), before Sid enters the action (he comes back to the Miller household after being fired for drunkenness from his newspaper job in a neighboring town). So in this January 18 draft, Sid doesn't show up until page 40 (of 93), on the morning of the Fourth. This would hardly do for a star of Beery's standing at the time (I wouldn't put it past him to have griped about it himself, loud and long), so a scene was added showing him going off with high hopes -- for both his new job and his newfound sobriety -- at the end of June, before slinking back to the Millers in time for the holiday. ("Ma! Pa! Uncle Sid's come to spend the Fourth!" To which Sid mutters under his breath: "The Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ad infinitum.")

As for the second major difference, it's another scene that doesn't appear in O'Neill's play -- a major one, just over 15 minutes long. I don't know when it was inserted into the script, but God bless the Hacketts for writing it, and Clarence Brown for directing it so beautifully, because it's one of the best and funniest scenes in the whole movie. Most of it takes place during the graduation ceremony at the high school in this small Connecticut city, where Nat and Essie Miller's middle son Richard (Eric Linden) will be the valedictorian. Before Richard's speech, however, we're treated to a generous sampling of the commencement program: the school glee club singing "The Blue Danube", an earnest young student reciting Mark Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar; a more nervous youngster offering Poe's "The Bells" ("...of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells...") and studiously counting every "bells" off on his fingers; a girl student's how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation travelogue about her family's visit to the Swiss Alps; and my favorite, this young lady (I wish I knew her name) struggling doggedly through a clarinet solo, darting irritated glances toward her piano accompanist at every real and imagined mistake.

When it opened on Broadway in October 1933, the sweetly sunny Ah, Wilderness! stood out as the most uncharacteristic play the somber, brooding O'Neill had ever written -- a distinction it retains to this day. Like his searing, tortured masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night, it grew out of his family's life in New London, Conn. (pop. in 1900: 17,548), which the O'Neills made their summer home from 1884 (four years before Eugene was born) until the future playwright was well out of his teens. Both plays take place in virtually the same house -- the stage directions to both Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey describe the same room in almost every detail -- but the families that populate them couldn't be more different. The Tyrones of Long Day's Journey are unmistakeably Eugene, his penny-pinching actor father, his morphine-addicted mother and his alcoholic older brother. The Millers of Ah, Wilderness!, however, were modeled on the O'Neills' friends and neighbors John and Evelyn McGinley and their large brood of seven children; both Eugene and his father James admired and envied the McGinleys' jovial domesticity and unforced affection for one another. If Long Day's Journey into Night (making allowances for dramatic license) represents Eugene O'Neill's memory of his unhappy, dysfunctional family, then Ah, Wilderness! (making the same allowances) gives us the youth and family life O'Neill wished he had had. The Miller clan has its conflicts and crises, but they are character-building rather than soul-destroying, and there's nothing that can't be handled with love and common sense.

In their adaptation, the Hacketts emphasized the one slim

thread of plot in O'Neill's nostalgic reverie of a youth he

never had: the emotional growing pains of the Millers' middle

son Richard, from his jejune flirtation with radical politics to

his blossoming romance with neighbor girl Muriel McComber

(Cecilia Parker) and the mean-spirited oppostion of her father.

In so doing, the Hacketts handed 25-year-old Eric Linden the

opportunity to give the performance of his career -- and he

delivered in style. Never mind that he gets no better than

fourth billing; Ah, Wilderness! is Eric Linden's picture from

beginning to end. And never mind that he was a good

decade too old for the role; his boyishness made him look

not a day over 16, and his performance did the rest. Linden

had a busy career in the 1930s -- mostly in B-pictures for

RKO, Warners and MGM -- without ever really becoming

a star; this was his only chance to carry an A-picture on his

own. After this it was back to Bs at Metro and on loan to

various studios and independent producers. But before he

finally closed out his career in 1943 with Criminals Within

(for lowly Producers Releasing Corporation, the skid row

flophouse of Hollywood studios), he would give one more

performance that I'm sure everyone who ever saw it

will remember to their dying day:

He was the Confederate soldier in Gone With the Wind

who has just learned from Harry Davenport's Dr. Meade

that his leg will have to be amputated. He is on screen

for less than three seconds, but his desperate cries

("Don't cut! Don't! -- cut! Ple-e-e-e-ease!!") have

curdled the blood of millions of moviegoers for over

70 years. Oh yes, I'll just bet you remember

Eric Linden, all right.

The Hacketts deftly tinkered with the letter of O'Neill, but Ah, Wilderness!
remained stoutly faithful to the play's spirit, and for that, a good share of
the credit should go to director Clarence Brown. Brown's career and work
deserve more attention than they've gotten, and maybe someday I'll have
more to say about him. For now, I'll simply observe that in his 53 pictures
between 1920 and 1952 he directed a striking number of performers to
their best-ever performances: Eric Linden here, Elizabeth Taylor in National
Velvet, Claude Jarman Jr. in The Yearling, Juano Hernandez in Intruder in
the Dust, George Brent in The Rains Came, Marie Dressler in Emma, and
so on. An equally striking number gave their near-best for him: Garbo and
Basil Rathbone in Anna Karenina, Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan in The
Human Comedy, Charles Boyer in Conquest, Paul Douglas in Angels in
the Outfield -- well, you get the idea. I could do a whole post just on
Brown's contribution to Ah, Wilderness!, but my topic here is what
the picture's success led to for MGM and Hollywood -- consequences
beyond what anyone could have expected. Clarence Brown had
a lot to do with that success; let's just leave it at that.

Ah, Wilderness! was a critical and financial hit for MGM, though it was somewhat overshadowed (at the time and ever since) by some of the studio's other pictures of 1935 (Mutiny on the Bounty, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina) and '36 (The Great Ziegfeld, Libeled Lady, San Francisco, Romeo and Juliet). Still, people noticed, and the chemistry of Ah, Wilderness! was tried again in the B-picture unit: Lionel Barrymore, Spring Byington and Eric Linden were reunited as parents and son in The Voice of Bugle Ann, another (albeit lesser) piece of nostalgic Americana, set in the Missouri hills, from a novel by MacKinlay Kantor.

Later in 1936, Sam Marx of MGM's story department got the brainstorm that would take the legacy of Ah, Wilderness! in a whole new, yet oddly congruent, direction. He remembered a play he'd seen that ran a little over a year on Broadway in the late '20s. It was called Skidding by Aurania Rouverol, about a small-town judge who has to preside over a political hot-potato case in the middle of his campaign for reelection; the play centered on the judge's case of conscience and (as a sidelight) the way it affected his family. Marx got Lucien Hubbard, head of the studio's B unit, to buy the screen rights, but it wasn't easy. "I practically had to get him down on the floor with my knees in his neck to make him buy the play," Marx recalled.

When the picture went into production in the fall of 1936,
Aurania Rouverol's Skidding had a new title, A Family
Affair; George B. Seitz was directing, from a script by Kay
Van Riper. It reunited a hefty chunk of the cast from Ah,
Wilderness!: Lionel Barrymore, Spring Byington, Mickey
Rooney, Charles Grapewin. Also back were Eric Linden
and Cecilia Parker, romantically paired once again -- only
this time she was the one in the family and he was the
neighboring sweetheart. The picture was shot on the same
backlot "New England Street" that had been built for
Ah, Wilderness!, and the new family "lived" in the same
house. If you have any lingering doubt that this new
picture was designed to evoke pleasant memories of the
earlier one, here's the title frame from Ah, Wilderness!...

...and here's the same frame from A Family Affair. The new
picture took place in the "present day" (i.e., 1936) instead of
a rose-colored turn of the century, but otherwise it followed
the benevolent formula laid down by Eugene O'Neill in his
change-of-pace comedy: the friendly, cozy big-small-town
where everybody knew everybody else, the close-knit family
bound by ties of affection and respect, the periodic heart-
to-heart talks between father and son. The family of
newspaper publisher Nat Miller in Ah, Wilderness! were the
clear progenitors of Judge James K. Hardy and his clan --
at least, by the time MGM had brought the Hardys to the
screen. (In fact, ironically, Aurania Rouverol's play had
beaten O'Neill's to Broadway by nearly five-and-a-half
years; Skidding had a longer run, too.)

A Family Affair was an unexpected hit, particularly for a B picture, and exhibitors besieged MGM with requests for more, especially more of Mickey Rooney, who played Judge Hardy's teenage son Andy -- the equivalent, if you will, of Eric Linden's Richard Miller in Ah, Wilderness! By the time the studio could get a sequel underway, Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington had moved on to other projects and were unavailable. They were replaced by Lewis Stone and Fay Holden as Judge and Mrs. Hardy, and You're Only Young Once became, officially, the first installment of the series -- and the only one not to have the name "Hardy" in the title.

The Andy Hardy pictures, 14 of them between 1937 and 1946, became the most successful series in movie history before the James Bond movies -- and in fact, if we think of it in terms of percent of profit for cost of production, they may still hold the record. There's no telling how many of MGM's expensive, prestigious failures had their fingers pulled out of the financial fire by the Hardy family. The series served as a training ground for future MGM stars -- Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson, Donna Reed, and of course Judy Garland -- who one way or another would cross Andy Hardy's path. It made Mickey Rooney the number-one box office star in America for three years running. It was pointed to by Louis B. Mayer as his proudest achievement. It won MGM a special Academy Award (certificate) in 1942 for "representing the American way of life". In 1941 Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron proclaimed the Hardys "the first family of Hollywood", commemorated by a plaque in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

By the way, don't go looking for that plaque; it isn't there any more. The Andy Hardy pictures have long gone (unjustly) out of vogue. A few were issued on VHS years ago, but only one (so far) has made it to DVD, and that from the bargain-basement Warner Archive. (It's Love Finds Andy Hardy, and it's available, no doubt, only because Judy Garland co-stars with Mickey.) (UPDATE 12/23/11: The Warner Archive has begun to rectify this; they've just issued The Andy Hardy Collection, Vol. 1 with six of the early titles.)

Mickey Rooney had an interesting take on the series: "Creating this New England utopia was all part of L.B. Mayer's master plan to reinvent America. In most of his movies that came under his control, Mr. Mayer knew that he was 'confecting, not reflecting' America...The Andy Hardy movies didn't tell it 'like it is.' They told it the way we'd like it to be, describing an ideal that needs constant reinvention."

In 1946, the year of the last regular Andy Hardy picture (Love Laughs at Andy Hardy), there was a sort of closing of the circle on Ah, Wilderness! Producer Arthur Freed, still flush from his rousing success with Meet Me in St. Louis (which itself was a very close cousin to Ah, Wilderness!) conceived the idea of turning O'Neill's play into a musical. So the Hardys moved out of their comfy white house and the Millers moved back in (and painted it yellow for Technicolor), and the result was Summer Holiday. This time Andy Hardy himself, Mickey Rooney (who had played the youngest Miller boy in Ah, Wilderness!), was promoted into the role of Richard Miller, and Richard and his Muriel (Gloria DeHaven) got the top billing (thanks to the Hacketts' tweakings of O'Neill, here preserved and enhanced) that Eric Linden and Cecilia Parker had deserved but been denied in 1935.

Summer Holiday was completed by mid-October 1946 but wasn't released until April 1948, and it's not hard to understand why: it's a bit of a dog. Not Arthur Freed's worst musical by any means (Till the Clouds Roll By, anyone?), but not all that far behind. The movie has a higher regard today in some quarters thanks to director Rouben Mamoulian's latter-day reputation, but it's pretty flat and charmless when stood beside Clarence Brown's 1935 picture. Part of the problem is the rather colorless score by Harry Warren and Ralph Blane; except for the movie's one hit, "The Stanley Steamer" (an ode to the Millers' newfangled automobile, first inserted by the Hacketts), the songs are probably the most forgettable score Warren ever wrote, and Blane's rhyming dialogue just forces the cast to burst into doggerel from time to time. Then there's the Richard/Muriel romance; sincere and comically poignant in 1935, it's rather arch and hammy here (Rooney was a dynamic talent in those days, but arch hamminess was always his Achilles' heel). In any event, audiences didn't respond as they had to Ah, Wilderness!; Summer Holiday lost nearly $1.5 million.

So Freed and Mamoulian's new, improved Ah, Wilderness! failed, and by the time it was released the last Andy Hardy movie was already two years old. (In 1958 MGM got the Hardy family back together -- all except Lewis Stone, who had died in 1953 -- for a reunion movie, Andy Hardy Comes Home. Alas, Andy learned that Thomas Wolfe was right; the movie was a flop.)

Even by 1948, the "reinventions" Mickey Rooney talked about had begun to outstrip Andy Hardy, but Andy cast a long shadow for decades after the series itself ebbed. Sometimes the influence was direct and deliberate, as with the Archie comics that started in 1941 in blatant imitation of Andy Hardy and are still around today. Sometimes it was indirect but distinct, as in TV sitcoms from Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, through The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, to Eight Is Enough and The Cosby Show. In them all, we can still discern the basic template with which L.B. Mayer "confected" small-town American life, in MGM's conscious imitation of the way Eugene O'Neill had "confected" an imaginary youth for himself in New London, Conn.; the shadow of Andy Hardy is really the shadow of Ah, Wilderness! (And let's not forget Meet Me in St. Louis and the Technicolor musicals inspired by it, like Centennial Summer, State Fair, and yes, Summer Holiday, all with a clear kinship to O'Neill's comedy.) With all due respect to the titanic power of plays like Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and Mourning Becomes Electra, it just may be that Ah, Wilderness! was in fact the most influential play Eugene O'Neill ever wrote.

Crazy and Crazier, Part 4

2011-08-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

The 1960s were, in a literal if not a figurative sense, a golden age for movie musicals; they made more money (a total of over $250 million, real money back then) and won more awards (four best picture Oscars, plus a more-than-respectable smattering of acting awards) than they ever had before or would again. There were West Side Story, Gypsy, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Funny Girl, Oliver!...

But there were also Star!; Doctor Dolittle; Camelot; Hello, Dolly!; Paint Your Wagon...huge (even bloated), expensive productions that contributed to that quarter-billion box office, but not enough to turn a profit for themselves.

There were other signs that, literal golden age or not, the figurative Golden Age (the real one) had passed. The industry had spent the entire 1950s staggering from the double blows of the advent of television and the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust suit that broke up Hollywood's efficient production/ distribution/exhibition system. Desperate to balance the books, studios sharply curtailed or even eliminated the infrastructure that made musicals (always an expensive proposition) at least viable on a regular basis: music departments, rosters of contract players, in-house writers, orchestrators and dance directors. At MGM, for example, the Arthur Freed, Jack Cummings and Joe Pasternak units all withered on the vine. Freed produced his last musical, Bells Are Ringing, in 1960, and it barely broke even; after two more pictures (The Subterraneans and Light in the Piazza) he had pretty much retired. (He nursed a forlorn hope through the late '40s, '50s and early '60s of producing Say It With Music, an epic biopic of Irving Berlin's life and songs, to no avail.)

Tastes in popular music had also changed, and Hollywood's old guard, though game to try, was ill-equipped to cope. In a metaphorical but very real sense, Hollywood was torn between West Side Story and The Sound of Music on one hand, and Jailhouse Rock and A Hard Day's Night on the other.

It was in this atmosphere, right smack in the middle of the decade,

that Girl Crazy emerged in its third and final screen incarnation.

It was planned as a vehicle for pop chanteuse Connie Francis. Her

popularity was just beginning to wane under the onslaught of the

Beatles-led British Invasion, but we can see that only in retrospect;

at the time she seemed as popular as ever. And she was very popular

indeed -- the first female to have two consecutive number one hits

("Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "My Heart Has a Mind of

Its Own" in 1960) and the youngest entertainer to headline in Las

Vegas and at New York's Copacabana (that same year).

Also in 1960, Francis made her screen debut in MGM's Where the Boys Are (and had another big hit with the title tune). It was the custom in those days, when a singer had a hit song, to make the follow-up single as much like the hit as possible, so MGM and Francis followed Where the Boys Are with Follow the Boys. And that's why, when the studio decided to revamp Girl Crazy for Connie Francis, the show got a new title (and a new song for Connie to croon): When the Boys Meet the Girls.

Connie's co-star was Harve Presnell, a veteran of the opera and concert stage who had made a splash on Broadway in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, then won a Golden Globe for the movie version opposite Debbie Reynolds. At that stage of his career he was tall and handsome, with a lush baritone voice -- a slightly younger, blonde version of Howard Keel. But his timing couldn't have been worse: By 1965 not even Keel was getting enough work to keep him busy; he hadn't made a musical since Kismet in 1955, and had segued into straight acting roles. Presnell would have a tougher time of that; as a screen actor he was a little stiff, without Keel's comfort in front of a camera. He made one more major movie, stealing Paint Your Wagon from Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin with his rendition of "They Call the Wind Maria", then it was back to regional theater and Broadway tours until he returned to movies as a character actor in his 60s and 70s. Things worked better for him then; the stiffness that had looked a bit wooden in his youth seemed more like patrician dignity in his senior years, and he had a distinguished second career in movies (Fargo, Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers, Evan Almighty) before dying of pancreatic cancer at 75 in 2009.

But all that was still decades in the future in 1965. For now he was Danny Churchill, following in the shallow footsteps of Eddie Quillan and the the much heftier ones of Mickey Rooney. Danny is a grad student this time (Presnell was 31, after all) at an all-male eastern college, and he creates a scandal by smuggling a troupe of spangled showgirls into the annual college show. Banished to Cody College near Reno, Nev., he meets and falls for postmistress Ginger Gray (Francis) and hatches a plot to turn her property into "a dude ranch for divorcees" as a way of keeping Ginger's ne'er-do-well father (Frank Faylen) too busy to blow the family savings at Reno's crap tables.

On balance, When the Boys Meet the Girls isn't really a hopelessly bad movie. Personally, I find it easier to take than 1932's Girl Crazy, though someone with a higher tolerance for Wheeler and Woolsey might disagree. But its handful of pleasures are fortuitous, not deliberate. The picture is undone -- or more precisely, much of it is left undone -- by two major factors in its production.

First of all, there was what we shall charitably call the movie's "creative team". They were, almost to a man, a gaggle of second-rate hacks -- from producer Sam Katzman through director Alvin Ganzer and writer Robert E. Kent to musical director Fred Karger. Katzman has a handful of memorable "B" titles (It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers), some low-camp legends (Rock Around the Clock, Cha-Cha-Cha Boom!) and a couple of lesser Elvis Presley vehicles on his shoddy resume, but by and large, we're slumming even to mention his name. Ganzer directed only two features besides this one -- The Girls of Pleasure Island ('53) and Three Bites of the Apple ('67) -- in a career devoted almost exclusively to undistinguished piecework on this or that TV series.

In addition to the mediocrity of the men in charge -- and perhaps because of it -- When the Boys Meet the Girls has the air of a movie that simply doesn't know why it is being made, who its target audience is, or even what it is selling. For example, compare the three posters with which I began my post on each Girl Crazy picture:

The poster for Girl Crazy (1932)
knows exactly what it's selling:
For better or for worse (and it
seemed like a good idea at the
time) the big draw is Wheeler
and Woolsey; their faces and
names dominate the graphics
completely, suggesting
hilarity unrestrained.

It's the same with Girl Crazy
(1943): Mickey Rooney, Judy
Garland, and a bonus plug for
Tommy Dorsey and his band,
with a cartoon bucking cow
(a cow??) offering the
promise of a barrel of
rollicking fun.

Now When the Boys Meet
the Girls. I've reproduced
each poster small, deliberately,
to show that for the '32 and
'43 posters the main idea still
comes through. But with this
one you can barely even make
out the title.

Now give your eyes a break and scroll back up to the larger version of the When the Boys poster. Can you even guess what that poster is selling? Herman's Hermits? Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? Or what? Connie and Harve get top billing under the title, and two figures meant to represent them dominate the poster, more or less, but only in closed-off profiles that barely resemble them; Presnell's image doesn't look like him at all.

And say, how about that lineup of featured acts? Did you ever imagine you'd see them all together in one place? Besides Connie and Harve to carry the boy-meets-wins-loses-and-wins-girl-back plot, you have...

...Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs at the beginning of their brief mid-'60s vogue, here singing "Monkey See, Monkey Do" (not one of their hits) at the college show, flanked by two of Danny Churchill's buddies dolled up as the ugliest go-go dancers in history...

...Herman's Hermits, with special "Also Starring" billing, no less. Here they're singing "Listen, People", which was one of their hits, and the only hit to come out of the movie that wasn't already a Gershwin standard. Peter Noone ("Herman") even had a few lines of dialogue, and the Hermits also delivered "Bidin' My Time". But more on that later; for now, back to the lineup...

...Louis Armstrong, supposedly headlining at the bad guys' casino in Reno. Here he's performing one of his own compositions, "Throw It Out Your Mind". Satchmo's always a pleasure, of course, but it's a pity he doesn't give us something by Gershwin -- Merman's old number "Sam and Delilah", for example; he would have had fun with that. Anyhow, moving right along, we come to...

...Davis and Reese. (Who????) That's Pepper Davis (left) and Tony Reese, one of those cocktail lounge comic-and-crooner duos that hooked up in those days hoping to duplicate whatever it was that made Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis the kings of showbiz for a while. Here, they're doing an interview-the-punch-drunk-boxer routine that was stale even before they cribbed it from Allen and Rossi. Davis and Reese did a few TV spots but never really went anywhere; this was probably the pinnacle of their joint career...

...and finally (drum roll, please), Liberace! No, he doesn't play "Rhapsody in Blue" or reprise the Mickey Rooney/Arthur Schutt solo on "Fascinating Rhythm". He performs "Aruba Liberace", his own Latin-beat concoction sampling Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody" (and probably other classical pieces that I couldn't identify). Say what you will about old Lee, he knew how to put on a show ("Well, look me over; I didn't get dressed like this to go unnoticed."). He has fun at the keyboard, and he shares it with the audience.

What a roster, eh? To think poor Mickey and Judy had to content themselves with just Tommy Dorsey.

Seriously, can't you just smell the sweaty desperation behind this kind of programming? This isn't a vaudeville or a variety show, it's Sam Katzman and his henchmen throwing everything they can think of at the screen, all the while hoping to God someting will stick.

Does any of it stick? Well, Liberace is a hoot, for starters. But there are other rewards on hand. Both Harve Presnell and Connie Francis have a quite creditable go at "Embraceable You" -- starting with Harve, on the occasion of Danny Churchill first setting eyes on the winsome Ginger...

...then later Connie, on a moonlit night after Ginger has gotten to know Danny and started to fall for him.

Later still, after the inevitable misunderstanding -- prompted this time by the arrival of Danny's gold-digging ex-girlfriend Tess Raleigh (Sue Ane Langdon) -- Harve and Connie do very nicely indeed on "But Not for Me". It's a sort of separate duet with each taking a verse, first Ginger in her bedroom, then Danny in his, then the two together, joined by a split screen -- the movie's one creative use of the Panavision frame. True, Connie Francis and Harve Presnell don't measure up to Judy Garland on either of these songs, but there's no shame in that -- nobody could. On both numbers, Connie and Harve are in their element and entirely at ease; as a result, their performances of the songs are simple, heartfelt and effective. Liberace's number may be the most fun in When the Boys Meet the Girls, but "Embraceable You" and "But Not for Me" are the most Gershwin. If you saw only the clips of these two songs, you would come away with the impression that When the Boys Meet the Girls is a lot better than it really is.

Things are a little rockier on "I Got Rhythm", here as in 1932, the movie's one major production number. Once again, they sing "I've Got Rhythm" -- an annoyance, but a recurring one where this song is concerned. More troublesome this time is the pace and style of the number, a laid-back, casual approach that tries for a kind of ring-a-ding hipster cool, like Frank Sinatra in his finger-snapping-loose-collar-narrow-tie-sportcoat-slung-over-the-shoulder phase. No disrespect to Old Blue Eyes, but it doesn't exactly make for an energetic musical delivery:

"I've [beat! beat!] got rhy-[beat!]-thm [beat! beat!]..."

When the number moves to the construction site where Danny and the Cody College students are building their dude ranch, Connie and Harve make an awkward dance couple; she doesn't even come up to his shoulders (a problem Mickey and Judy never had to deal with).

So naturally the boys...

...and the girls take over the dancing chores. There's nothing wrong with all this, exactly, but it's too self-consciously smooth and loosey-goosey to whip up any excitement on the wide screen. The number is like something pulled together in a few days to back up a guest star on The Andy Williams Show. You find yourself longing to hear Tommy Dorsey and his blaring, driving brass and to see Busby Berkeley's caffeinated choristers with their whips, guns and stomping military precision.

This lackadaisical rendition of "I Got Rhythm" brings us to the man who was probably the most resolutely second-rate personage involved with When the Boys Meet the Girls. His name was Fred Karger, and his on-screen credit is "Music Scored and Conducted By". Karger had spent years in the music department at Columbia Pictures making hardly a ripple; his biggest coup to date had been writing the tune for "Gidget". On When the Boys Meet the Girls, besides scoring and conducting, he wrote the song "Mail Call" (with Ben Weisman and Sid Wayne), which did not add to Connie Francis's string of hits.

It's safe to assume that Sam the Sham, Louis Armstrong and Liberace all handled their own music without any interference, so Karger's work here probably boils down to the treatment of the five Gershwin songs. He neither helped nor hindered Connie and Harve with his arrangements of "Embraceable You" and "But Not for Me", and his pointless rewriting of "Treat Me Rough" didn't keep Sue Ane Langdon from squeezing a little fun out of it with her kitten-with-a-whip delivery. Otherwise, Karger was careless, even downright sloppy.

I've already mentioned Karger's mushy, low-watt arrangement of "I Got Rhythm", which offered scant inspiration to choreographer Earl Barton and his dancers. Karger was also careless with Ira Gershwin's lyrics, beyond the addition of that "ve" to the title of "I Got Rhythm"; he fiddled with almost every line Ira wrote, either killing the rhyme ("There's no regrettin'/When I'm set-ting") or killing the sense (changing "Although I can't dismiss" to "And yet I can't dismiss" in "But Not for Me") time and time again -- then repeating the mistake, as if to prove he did it on purpose.

But one of Karger's bright ideas really goes beyond the pale, and that's in his treatment of "Bidin' My Time". The number is given to Herman's Hermits, sitting on and around a flatbed truck while the rest of the young cast gets busy building Ginger's dude ranch. At first things seem to go well with the song: it's an almost witty idea, handing this lazy cowboy lullaby to these slightly nerdy lads from Manchester. Peter Noone's wispy tenor voice slides nicely into the verse, then the refrain moves into a ricky-ticky soft-samba rhythm similar to the Beatles' version of "Till There Was You". Then, trouble. Now as just about everybody but Fred Karger and Peter Noone knew by 1965, the song is supposed to go like this:

"I'm bidin' my ti--ime
'Cause that's the kinda guy I--I'm..."

But no. Instead we get:

"I'm biding my ti--ime
'Cause that's the kind of guy I...am..."

If there is such a thing as lyrical tone-deafness, this is surely it. It not only kills the rhyme, it kills the whole joke of the song. It's like that old comedy routine of the clueless singer tackling the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" for the first time: "You say ee-ther, and I say ee-ther / You say nee-ther, and I say nee-ther..." Only here it is, so to speak, with a straight face. After that clunker, nothing Herman or the Hermits can do will save the song; we just have to cringe our way through to the end. Fred Karger was about as far from Roger Edens and Georgie Stoll as anyone could get and still be able to read music; this proves it.

On that sour note I'll close this look at When the Boys Meet the Girls. As I said, the picture's not a total loss, thanks to the talents of Connie Francis and Harve Presnell, plus a certain amount of blind monkeys-and-typewriters luck. Twenty years earlier, both Connie and Harve might have left a stronger legacy. Especially Connie; with the guidance of a Roger Edens, and with more directors like Henry Levin and Richard Thorpe (on her first two pictures) and fewer like Alvin Ganzer (on this one), she might have had the nurturing that Doris Day got over at Warner Bros., and might have made more than the four movies she did (When the Boys Meet the Girls was her last). Harve would still have had to contend with Howard Keel, but there was room for a deep talent pool at MGM in the '40s and early '50s. By the time Harve showed up in 1964, or even Connie in 1960, the support system just wasn't there.

* * *

Well, friends, there you have it, just as I promised at the beginning of this series -- the full arc of the Golden Age of the Hollywood Musical, encapsulated in the fortunes of one legendary Broadway show:

Girl Crazy (1932) was the product of a time
when musicals looked passe, so the deathless
Gershwin score was shouldered aside to make
room for a brand of verbal comedy that looked
like the coming thing. But the musical was poised
on the cusp of a Great Revival; the talent was
present and in good working order, though it
hadn't found its footing yet, and the techniques
that would make the Hollywood musical something
distinctly different from its Broadway cousin were
still being discovered and developed.

A scant third-of-a-century later came When the Boys Meet the Girls -- a movie not without talent, but with a vacuum at the top occupied by humdurm nonentities who simply didn't know what they were doing -- and at mighty MGM, no less. It was as if Arthur Freed, Roger Edens, Jack Cummings and Joe Pasternak had cleaned out their offices, tucking the studio's only copies of How to Make a Movie Musical into their briefcases before turning out the lights.

But in between those two -- that was a whole other story. The stars (in every sense of the word) were perfectly aligned, and the final product could hardly miss because it was designed not to miss. Designed by producer Arthur Freed, who had come to movies with sound and stretched his producer's muscles first on The Wizard of Oz; designed by Roger Edens and Georgie Stoll, who had been with the show on Broadway and knew in their bones and fingertips the vitality of the Gershwin score; designed by Busby Berkeley, who had jump-started the Golden Age and still knew a trick or two, whether Roger Edens liked it or not. And it was designed for Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, just about the most talented individuals who ever faced a camera. Girl Crazy (1943) was what happened when the factory's mechanisms were all in place and well-tended:
the vehicle came off the line humming like a top, and if it had to fly, it soared.

Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown

2011-08-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I first published this post on August 12, 2010. I post it again today

in honor of the 99th birthday of Gene Kelly.

* * * * *

(With Apologies to Betty Comden and Adolph Green)

I'm not at liberty to disclose how the following documents came into my possession. I think they pretty much speak for themselves.

Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1928

Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1928

Crazy and Crazier, Part 3

2011-08-21T03:33:00.000-07:00

By the time Girl Crazy came to the screen again, Hollywood's attitude toward musicals had changed diametrically, and with a will. A look at Clive Hirschhorn's comprehensive coffee-table book The Hollywood Musical tells the tale: 10 musicals in 1932, when the first woebegone movie of Girl Crazy came out, versus 50 of them in 1942, the year MGM decided to do it again, and 75 in 1943, when MGM's Girl Crazy was released. By now, musicals had become the jewels in Hollywood's crown. Even Universal's remake of The Phantom of the Opera had more opera and less phantom than the original silent version with Lon Chaney (sound gave Universal some wiggle room, and they decided to fill it with singing).

MGM bought the rights to Girl Crazy from RKO in 1939 at the behest of producer Jack Cummings. Cummings's original idea was to remake the movie as a vehicle for Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, which presumably would have shifted the emphasis back to the songs and been more in keeping with the original show. Anyhow, nothing ever came of that, but Cummings held onto the property for several years. In the meantime, his MGM colleague Arthur Freed had produced a number of successful musicals, including three teaming Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland: Babes in Arms ('39), Strike Up the Band ('40) and Babes on Broadway ('41).

In mid-1942, Freed had designer-director John Murray Anderson, musical director Johnny Green, costumer Irene Sharaff and swimming starlet Esther Williams all under contract to develop a vehicle for Williams, but a workable script had never materialized and the project remained on a back burner. So Freed went to Cummings and proposed a swap: the whole Esther Williams package for the rights to Girl Crazy as a vehicle for Mickey and Judy. Cummings liked the idea, so did Louis B. Mayer, and the thing was done. (Cummings later produced Bathing Beauty, Esther Williams's first starring picture.) Girl Crazy went into production in January 1943 with Busby Berkeley (who had directed the three previous Mickey-and-Judy musicals) directing.

Today, Arthur Freed is considered synonymous with "MGM musicals", as if he were the only musical producer on the lot. Not so; there were also Cummings and Joe Pasternak (who had moved over from Universal, where he built his name on Deanna Durbin's pictures), and both got their share of the glory at the time. Still, Freed's unit was an awfully well-oiled machine, and Freed had a knack for attracting the best talent and getting the best out of it. His production of Girl Crazy reunited two men with a nostalgic stake in doing the thing right: Roger Edens and Georgie Stoll, both of whom had come far since their days in the orchestra pit of Girl Crazy on Broadway. Stoll is credited as musical director on the picture; Edens's credit reads "Musical Adaptation", but that hardly scratches the surface of what Edens really did. As I said before, he was Freed's right-hand man, much more than a "musical adaptor", and on Girl Crazy he was virtually what would later be called a line producer -- the guy actually on the set keeping an eye on things for the man in charge (i.e., Freed). And there was trouble almost immediately.

The first sequence Berkeley shot was the "I Got Rhythm" production number, which was originally planned to come about three-fourths of the way through the picture, and Edens didn't like what he saw. "I'd written an arrangement of 'I Got Rhythm' for Judy," Edens recalled, "and we disagreed basically about its presentation. I wanted it rhythmic and simply staged, but Berkeley got his big ensembles and trick cameras into it again, plus a lot of girls in Western outfits with fringed skirts and people cracking whips and firing guns all over my arrangement and Judy's voice. Well, we shouted at each other and I said there wasn't enough room on the lot for both of us." (Edens exaggerated somewhat; there were no gunshots going off over Garland's vocals. Otherwise, he has a point; the number begins to sound like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.)

Berkeley's working relationship with Judy Garland was unraveling as well. This was the fifth movie he directed her in -- there had been For Me and My Gal ('42) in addition to the three with Rooney -- and under his martinet bullying her attitude had gone from "I don't know what I'd do without him" (on For Me and My Gal) to "I used to feel he had a big black bullwhip and was lashing me with it" (in conversation with Hedda Hopper, reported in Hopper's autobiography). Judy was close to hysterics on the set of "I Got Rhythm", her nervousness heightened by a stunt Berkeley designed in which she and Mickey were hoisted aloft by the ankles. The bit terrified Judy, just as a similar hoisting had when Berkeley put her through it in the "Minnie from Trinidad" number in Ziegfeld Girl ('40) -- this time, making things worse for her, the bit was accompanied by dozens of pistols firing over and over again around her. After "I Got Rhythm" was in the can, Judy's personal physician ordered her not to dance for three weeks.

To put the icing on the cake, Berkeley took nine days to shoot the number instead of the scheduled five, and he ran $60,000 over its budget.

So let's recap: After less than two weeks, Girl Crazy was behind schedule

and over budget. Judy Garland was frazzled, Roger Edens was furious.

Obviously, Berkeley had to go. Freed removed him from the picture
and replaced him with Norman Taurog.

Taurog hasn't made it into any of the history books, but his was a long

and useful career in Hollywood. He directed over 170 shorts and features

between 1920 and 1968. In 1931, age 32, he became the youngest director

to win an Academy Award (for Skippy, starring his nephew Jackie Cooper)

-- a record he still holds. Among his pictures at the time he took over Girl

Crazy were David O. Selznick's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Boys

Town (which got Spencer Tracy his second Oscar), Broadway Melody

of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, Young Tom Edison with

Mickey Rooney, and Little Nellie Kelly with Judy Garland. Plus, remember,
he had directed Selznick's retakes on the first Girl Crazy. Now he was the
director of record for the new Girl Crazy, while the deposed Berkeley would
get screen credit for directing the "I Got Rhythm" number. (With Berkeley
gone, the remaining dances would be handled by Charles Walters.)

Things went more smoothly after that, though the shoot was arduous enough; Rooney and Garland were two of MGM's top stars, individually as well as together, and the studio kept them busy. Girl Crazy ('43) used six of the songs from the show, with a few others ("Sam and Delilah", "Bronco Busters", "Barbary Coast", etc.) either present in the incidental score or played by guest artists Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra. In addition, "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!", "When It's Cactus Time in Arizona" and "The Lonesome Cowboy" were originally slated to be used, but they were eliminated in rewrites of Fred Finkelhoffe's script. Early plans to interpolate "I've Got a Crush on You" were also abandoned; in the end the only interpolation was an instrumental rendition of "Fascinating Rhythm" by the Dorsey band (more about that later).

The movie dispensed with all that nonsense about the $742.30 cab ride, but it still had playboy Danny Churchill (Rooney) making a spectacle of himself in New York. "Treat Me Rough" was the song used, performed by Tommy Dorsey's band and sung by June Allyson. (Allyson was an MGM newcomer, simultaneously filming this one-shot while recreating her Broadway role in the studio's movie of Best Foot Forward. By the time Girl Crazy was released, she had already made her splash in Best Foot Forward and was on her way to major stardom.)

This time, Danny's a college student as well as a tycoon's playboy son, and Dad (Henry O'Neill) cancels his return to Yale and sends him to his own alma mater "out west" (Cody College, the state unspecified). There, under the eye of Cody's dean (Guy Kibbee), he is the usual fish out of water, smitten with the dean's grandaughter, postmistress Ginger Gray (Judy). (I wonder: was the changing of the heroine's first name a wink to Broadway's original Molly, Ginger Rogers? How could it not be?)

From there Girl Crazy becomes a variation on the hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show formula that framed all the Mickey-and-Judy musicals, the variation this time being hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-rodeo-and-save-the-school-from-closing. The plot is within hailing distance (just barely) of Bolton and McGowan's original book, but it's beside the point anyway, as it was on Broadway. In 1943, with Hollywood in general, and the Freed Unit at MGM in particular, operating at an all-time peak of efficiency and self-confidence, Girl Crazy was then what it remains today: an exhilarating series of musical highlights, one after another, bathing the screen in an embarrassment of riches. Clive Hirschhorn's succinct appraisal is oft-quoted because it's the plain truth: "Gershwin never had it so good."

At the risk of becoming monotonous, let us count the ways. First, of course, is that rambunctious version of "Treat Me Rough", which June Allyson invests with an innocent tomboy eroticism (she's like a less obnoxious Betty Hutton) that must have had the Hays Office wondering if this sort of thing was really okay, then shrugging and deciding it was all just good clean fun after all.

Judy's first number is "Bidin' My Time", which begins as the same lazy lope it was on Broadway (in one wry and witty touch, Judy steps away from her guitar for a moment and the instrument doesn't even have the energy to fall down). From there the song blooms into a rousing western hoedown, complete with one of Cody College's students (I wish I could identify him) doing a spirited cowboy two-step on a hot campfire griddle.

The quirky love-hate duet "Could You Use Me?" was something that Eddie Quillan and Arline Judge actually might have handled pretty well if RKO had deigned to include it in 1932. But they didn't, and it was left to Mickey and Judy to bring it to the screen. Filmed in punishing 112-degree heat on location on a desert road outside Palm Springs (with pickup shots in the relative comfort of a soundstage back in Culver City), it's a cheerful charmer in which Judy manages to suggest that Ginger's resistance to Danny's brash advances is already beginning to melt.

"Embraceable You" is presented at a party for Ginger, which includes the movie's only non-Gershwin interpolation: a chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" from Cody College's assembled student body. Judy sings to the boys, then dances with them all, one by one and in groups, with an extended pas de deux with dance director Charles Walters. Later, after graduating to full direction himself, Walters helmed Judy in Easter Parade ('48), Summer

Stock ('50), and her triumphant one-woman show at Broadway's

Palace Theatre in 1951.

When Danny Churchill attends a party at the Governor's Mansion to lobby against the closing of Cody, he meets up with his old pal Tommy Dorsey, and that sets the stage for a nifty piece of Big Band Era history: Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra in a marvelous pop-concert rendition of "Fascinating Rhythm". It's a jumpin' arrangement, and features a solo by "Danny Churchill" on piano. In fact, Mickey Rooney's playing was dubbed by Arthur Schutt; still, as his keyboard fingering in the scene makes clear, Rooney was an accomplished pianist himself, and he still speaks of the thrill of getting to perform "Fascinating Rhythm" with Dorsey and his band. (No doubt, even though the number had been prerecorded on MGM's music stage, the band -- including guest soloist Rooney -- played for real on the set.)

That party leads to the inevitable misunderstanding when Ginger believes Danny has returned to his girl-crazy ways with the governor's daughter (Frances Rafferty). It all gets sorted out in time for a happy ending, natch, but not before Judy Garland gets the opportunity -- hallelujah! -- to redeem the tawdry vandalism of "But Not for Me" back in 1932. This is not only the high point of Girl Crazy -- it's the high point of Judy Garland's entire career. With all due respect to "Over the Rainbow", "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "The Man That Got Away" or anything else you care to name, this is Judy's best. Co-star Gil Stratton talked about watching the number being shot and said "it was something you ought to have paid admission to see." The simplicity of Taurog's staging, the delicate cinematography of William Daniels, and the combined artistry of Judy and and the Gershwin brothers all fuse into the kind of magic that the Hollywood of 1943 had led audiences to take for granted. Judy Garland was as good as it got, then or ever after, and here's the proof.

Originally, Girl Crazy was to end with a reprise of "Embraceable You", Mickey and Judy surrounded by the rest of the cast as the orchestra swells up and out. But Busby Berkeley's flamboyant staging of "I Got Rhythm", scheduled to come almost 20 minutes before the end, threatened to turn anything that followed into a dribbling anticlimax. There was some hurried reshuffling of the script and music, and Girl Crazy as it was released on November 26 ended with "I Got Rhythm". It must have positively galled Roger Edens; he'd gotten his way and had Berkeley canned from the picture, and now here was Berkeley literally getting the last word -- cracking whips, firing guns and all. But it was the right call, and, however grudgingly, he probably had to admit it.

The number, over the top as it is, is a slam-bang wow, with none of the strains and stresses on the set visible on screen. If we've been denied a permanent record of Ethel Merman singing "I Got Rhythm" in 1932, then at least having Judy Garland singing it in 1943, and dancing it with Mickey Rooney, is certainly a fair trade.

Inevitably, Girl Crazy was a boffo hit, the most profitable (as well as the last) of their four starring vehicles. It's also arguably their best (although I don't think the point is arguable at all; it absolutely is). A pity it wasn't made in Technicolor, but ah well -- at MGM in those days, Technicolor was still regarded as an expensive gimmick that the Mickey-and-Judy musicals didn't need; they were money in the bank no matter what. (Their only Technicolor appearance would be a specialty number in 1948's Words and Music; Judy played herself, Mickey played lyricist Lorenz Hart in a duet to "I Wish I Were in Love Again".) Girl Crazy is the product of the Hollywood factory at its smoothest and most assured, with two stars at the peak of their youth, charm, energy and mutual affection. Who could ask for anything more?

The next time Girl Crazy came to the screen, it would have the color (Metro-, not Techni-) that this version lacked, but that's about all. Still, considering the chaotic and uncertain atmosphere abroad in Hollywood at the time, it's remarkable that the third outing didn't turn out even worse than it did.

To be concluded...

Crazy and Crazier, Part 2

2011-08-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

I have this fantasy in which I imagine that a scout from RKO Radio Pictures early in 1931 is told to go see Girl Crazy on Broadway and to report back about its potential as a movie. In his report, does he say, "The score is amazing; George and Ira Gershwin have written some songs that will be sung as long as singers sing"? Or "This Ethel Merman is dynamite; she electrifies an audience and she can put a song over like an artillery barrage"? Or "Ginger Rogers is a real charmer who has already shown that she photographs well; with care she could be groomed into a major star"? Does he say any of this? He does not. Instead, this brilliant showbiz oracle tells the front office, "This might make a good vehicle for Wheeler and Woolsey."

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey -- unlike, say, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or the Marx Brothers -- are largely forgotten today, but they still have their fans among film buffs even now. So perhaps I should let you know right up front that Wheeler and Woolsey are my personal nominees for the worst comedy team in movie history. But no matter what I think, they were hugely popular in the 1930s. Their output alone shows that audiences could hardly get enough. The Marx Brothers, for example, made 13 pictures in their entire career, from 1929 to '49. Wheeler and Woolsey made 22 features -- plus one short of their own and guest appearances in five others -- just between 1929 and '37. And they only stopped then because of Woolsey's failing health (he died of kidney failure at 50 in 1938).

Wheeler and Woolsey were never a team in the standard showbiz sense of the day, as Woolsey was careful to point out when the two split up (briefly) after the release of Girl Crazy: "I wish it understood that Wheeler and I never really formed a team at any time. He had his manager and attorney and I had mine." Wheeler had started in vaudeville with an act that, in retrospect, sounds like a forerunner of Andy Kaufman's schtick: he would come out on stage with a joke book and announce that he was going to read some jokes from it, then proceed to read one corny joke after another, in such a manner that the audience would wind up roaring with laughter. Woolsey, who stood just under five foot six, had started out as a jockey and exercise boy, but when he broke his leg in a fall from a horse his racing career was over. The horse, Pink Star, went on to win the Kentucky Derby in 1907; Woolsey went into show business.

Bringing the two together was Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.'s idea; he cast them as comic supports to Ethelind Terry and J. Harold Murray in his 1927 musical extravaganza Rio Rita. When RKO bought the movie rights to Rita, they replaced the stars with John Boles and Bebe Daniels, but they brought Wheeler and Woolsey west to recreate their stage roles. Already the team dynamic was in place, and it would vary little in their following match-ups: wide-eyed naif Wheeler is bamboozled and manipulated by the fast-talking, cigar-chomping Woolsey. The two made such a hit in Rita that RKO teamed them up again (The Cuckoos) and again (Dixiana), over and over -- a new picture, on average, every three months. ("They were pretty bad," Wheeler later recalled, "but they all made money.") Girl Crazy was their tenth, in two-and-a-half years.

Almost a third member of the (not really a) team

was diminutive Dorothy Lee; she appeared in 16 of

Wheeler and Woolsey's pictures. A good physical

match for Wheeler (he was five foot four, she five

foot exactly), Lee served as a romantic partner

for him, giving Wheeler (and the audience) a little

relief from the obnoxious blowhard Woolsey always

played. So it was in Girl Crazy, in which Wheeler

took the role played on Broadway by Willie Howard

(whose intransigence had killed the show before

its time). The cabbie's name was de-ethnicized

from Gieber Goldfarb to Jimmy Deegan, the

character divested of the comic Yiddish persona

that was Howard's stock in trade, and Lee

brought in as Patsy, "the gal of the golden

west", to duet with Wheeler in one of only
four musical numbers in the movie.

Musicals, a novelty in the late '20s, had worn out their welcome by 1932 and become a drug on the market; theater owners were known to reassure audiences in ads and posters that their current offering was "Not a Musical!" (The big revival with 42nd Street was still a year away.) In this atmosphere, no one at RKO was in a mood to look twice at the Gershwins' songs in Girl Crazy. Instead, taking their cue from Willie Howard and William Kent's being the ones with star billing on Broadway, the studio jettisoned most of the score and refashioned the book -- the weakest thing about the show -- to suit their hot new team. So it is that in the movie, it isn't Eddie Quillan's Danny Churchill who takes a taxi from Manhattan to Arizona, it's the gambler Slick (new surname: Foster) who hops into Jimmy Deegan's cab for the trip out west. (The lady in the back seat with Woolsey is Kitty Kelly, playing what's left of Ethel Merman's role.) Two huge chunks of the picture's modest 74-minute running time are eaten up by (1) Wheeler and Woolsey's misadventures on the road to Arizona and (2) further misadventures later, when the action adjourns to Mexico.

As for those four songs, only three were from the show. The movie opens promisingly with an amusing, if abbreviated, rendition of "Bidin' My Time", with four singing cowboys moseyin' along on the back of the same overburdened horse, while the camera moves through the Custerville cemetery from the grave of one luckless sheriff to the next, and the next.

After a cursory introduction of Danny Churchill and Molly Gray (Arline Judge), the scene switches to Wheeler and Woolsey as they set out for Custerville. Much later (or so it seems), at about the one-third mark, Girl Crazy springs briefly and unexpectedly to musical life with Kitty Kelly's game rendition of "I Got Rhythm", the picture's only real production number. Like every other human being ever born, Kelly doesn't have Merman's voice -- the idea of her repeating Merman's feat of holding that C-above-middle-C for a full 16 bars while the orchestra rips through an entire chorus is clearly out of the question. But she belts out the song with real pizzazz (though she insists on singing "I've Got Rhythm") and has an infectiously good time with it. Then the audience in the dude ranch night club joins in (oddly enough, they sing the title line correctly) for another rousing dash through the song as spotlights sweep the room back, forth, up and down. And the audience aren't the only ones joining in: before the number is over, everything within earshot is fervidly bobbing and swaying to the music. And I mean everything -- a buffalo head mounted on the wall, the bartender's toupee, an owl in a tree, the cacti in the desert outside. Exactly who is responsible for this sequence remains a mystery that I'll explore a little further down the page. In any case, for these 2 minutes and 47 seconds, Girl Crazy gives a tantalizing hint of the movie we might have had if things had gone...well...very differently.

A few minutes later comes "You've Got What Gets Me" a new song by George and Ira written for the movie. (In point of fact, it wasn't entirely new; it was a reworking of another song, "Your Eyes, Your Smile", which had been cut from the Broadway production of Funny Face before it opened in 1927.) This is a light romantic duet between Wheeler and Dorothy Lee (already a staple of their pictures together), followed by a sprightly tapdance in which they're joined by little Mitzi Green as Wheeler's pesky sister. Toward the end of her life, Dorothy Lee remembered Girl Crazy with bitter disgust as the movie where they photographed her behind a post ("I saw it once," she said. "I couldn't look at it again."), and this frame from the dance shows she wasn't being hypersensitive -- you can just about make out her elbows (she's dancing to the left of Wheeler). Why would anybody bother to stage a tapdance on a set dominated by an enormous vine-covered wishing well right in the middle of the floor (and seemingly taking up half of it)? It's hard to comprehend -- but then, the songs simply weren't a priority.

The absolute nadir of RKO's Girl Crazy -- lower than any of Wheeler and Woolsey's comedy -- comes with the disgraceful treatment accorded "But Not for Me". What on Broadway had been a wistful solo of lost love by Ginger Rogers was revamped as a trio for Eddie Quillan as Danny, Arline Judge as Molly, and Mitzi Green trying to patch things up between them. Ira's lyric was twisted around to say the exact opposite of what he wrote ("Beatrice Fairfax, don't you dare/Ever tell me he won't care..."), and George's tempo was speeded up until the song sounded like a merry-go-round hurdy-gurdy. Quillan and Judge were hardly singers (which may explain the breakneck tempo, always easier for non-singers to handle), and they rush through the song as if they have to be someplace; Quillan darts off-camera before the music even tinkles to a stop. The song comes off like a playground argument between two petulant kids. It's followed by a reprise in which Green tries to cheer Judge up by using the song to do impressions (and pretty good ones, too) of Bing Crosby, Roscoe Ates, George Arliss and Edna May Oliver. This plays oddly today, especially with audiences who never heard of Ates, Arliss or Oliver, but at least it had a counterpart in the original show: Willie Howard was famous for his impressions, and the book incorporated them by having the cabbie try to cheer Ginger Rogers' Molly with a reprise a la Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier -- but only after Ginger had already given the song its full soulful due. This movie never bothers to do that.

That, with 16 minutes left to run, is the end of the road for the score of Girl Crazy; there are no more songs -- in fact, no music at all -- until a brief reprise of "I Got Rhythm" under the closing credits. "Embraceable You" was reportedly filmed (with Quillan and Judge? Really??) but didn't make the final cut.

As it happened, the final cut wasn't final after all. Girl Crazy had begun under the regime of RKO studio chief William LeBaron; by the time it finished shooting, LeBaron was gone (though he retained screen credit), replaced by David O. Selznick. The picture's first preview in Glendale was not well received, and Selznick ordered retakes -- enough to add another $200,000 to the $300,000 already spent. Exactly what was reshot isn't clear, but the figures alone suggest a full two-thirds of the picture as it stood. In any case, director William A. Seiter wasn't available, so the retakes were directed (without credit) by Norman Taurog.

And this is where we run into the mystery of the "I Got Rhythm" number. Selznick may have ordered the reshooting of the song, in whole or in part (the paper trail isn't clear), and the sequence may have been staged and directed by Busby Berkeley, who was already at RKO to stage the native dances for Bird of Paradise. Berkeley himself never said anything about it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything -- after all, Dorothy Lee didn't like to talk about Girl Crazy either, and she's on screen. On the strength of what we can see, my own opinion is that "I Got Rhythm" is Busby Berkeley's work lock, stock and barrel. Later, after Berkeley had made his name over at Warner Bros., dance directors at other studios would prove that Berkeley's style was easier to recognize than to imitate, and "I Got Rhythm" is his style to a "T"; there are images and motifs that would reappear in some of his most famous routines at Warners. Besides, this number is by far the most elaborate and complex sequence in the entire picture, and could easily account for much of that extra 200 grand. Until someone shows me conclusive evidence to the contrary, I'll continue to believe that "I Got Rhythm" is Busby Berkeley at work. Whatever the case, Berkeley, like Taurog, got no screen credit for the retakes Selznick had ordered.

The retakes didn't help, and may have hurt; Girl Crazy failed to turn a profit. After Selznick's tinkering, it had cost nearly twice as much as the typical Wheeler and Woolsey picture (and almost as much as King Kong); it never had a chance. It probably never had an artistic chance either; coming at exactly the moment when even mentioning a musical around Hollywood was in bad taste, Girl Crazy was a movie that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It waffled a little, then came down on what looked like the safe side as a straight cornball comedy. RKO decided to play up the one feature of the show (the book) that Broadway audiences had tolerated only for the sake of what came with it, leaving just a skeleton crew of songs that were either inconsequential, mishandled, or too little too late.

The following year would come the game-changer: Warner Bros. (and Busby Berkeley) with the spectacular hat trick of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade to put musicals back in vogue again, where they would remain for decades -- even Poverty Row studios like Republic, Monogram and PRC would regularly try their hands at them. But all that came too late to help RKO's Girl Crazy. It was born before its time; the studio didn't appreciate the property it had, and didn't have the wit, confidence or foresight to do what should have been done with it.

All was not lost, however. Better times were coming for Girl Crazy, though it would take another 11 years. Oddly enough, Norman Taurog and Busby Berkeley would be back. And this time they'd get screen credit.

To be continued...

Crazy and Crazier, Part 1

2011-08-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

This post has grown in the planning, to the point where I'm putting it up in two parts (maybe more; we'll see how things shake out). I have an epic tale to tell, nothing less than the rise and fall of the Hollywood musical, as reflected in the screen career of a single property: Girl Crazy, the 1930 Broadway hit with songs by George and Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and John McGowan.

Girl Crazy has been made into a movie more times than any other Broadway musical. There's a remake of My Fair Lady in the works even now, and talk of remaking Gypsy with Barbra Streisand. Musical remakes have never been entirely unheard of, especially with early sound titles as talkie technology inproved (Good News 1930 and '47; The Vagabond King '30 and '56) or when a studio like MGM couldn't think of anything better to do with its talent pool (Rose Marie '36 and '54, The Merry Widow '34 and '52 -- that one with Lana Turner, no less). Plus, of course, there have been any number of TV versions of musicals -- live, taped and filmed -- over the decades. Still, in Hollywood one-musical-one-movie has pretty much been the hard-and-fast rule. In that environment, Girl Crazy is unique -- three movies, at three distinct stages of Hollywood musical history. I'll come to each one in turn, but first a few words about the show itself.

Girl Crazy opened on Broadway on October 14, 1930 and was an immediate smash; the buzz had been terrific ever since its out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia. Much of the buzz -- and nearly all of it after the New York opening -- was about a 22-year-old stenographer-turned-cabaret singer from Queens making her Broadway debut in one of the show's secondary roles: Ethel Merman (that's her with William Kent, who played her gambler husband). Merman didn't sing a note for most of the first act, and the audience had about decided she was just a comic support with good timing and a way with a snappy line. Then in the last scene of Act I she came out and launched into "Sam and Delilah", the Gershwins' bluesy pastiche riff on "Frankie and Johnny". The audience was knocked back in their seats. Then almost immediately she hit them again with a song George and Ira might almost have written with her voice in mind (though they didn't): "I Got Rhythm". That one set the crowd roaring loud enough to bring down the ceiling of the Alvin Theatre. There was an encore, then another, and another -- more than anyone would be able to remember later. It was one of the most amazing one-two punches in Broadway history. By intermission that first night, Ethel Merman was the new queen of the American musical, a position she wouldn't relinquish for 36 years.

Merman's debut alone was enough to make Girl Crazy's opening a Broadway landmark, but there was more. Others present that night wouldn't make it big until later, but the fact that they were there at all is enough to make you pray for time travel. For starters, there was the man who put together the pit orchestra: Ernest Loring "Red" Nichols, age 25, one of the busiest musicians in town. He was an accomplished cornetist who could play equally well "hot" and "straight", and he had already made hundreds of Dixieland recordings for Brunswick Records, usually with an ad hoc band billed as Red Nichols and his Five Pennies.

Nichols was a good judge of talent, too, and was well-suited to the jazz-flavored music George Gershwin was writing for Broadway. Nichols had found the musicians to play the previous Gershwin show, Strike Up the Band, and he did the same for Girl Crazy. In the pit on opening night under George Gershwin's baton (standing in that one night for conductor Earl Busby) were, among others, Nichols and Charlie Teagarden on trumpet, Georgie Stoll and Glenn Miller on trombone, Benny Goodman and Larry Binyon on sax, and Gene Krupa on drums. Midway through Girl Crazy's run, Goodman had a falling-out with Nichols and was fired, replaced by Jimmy Dorsey. All these men would be in demand, even famous, during the Big Band Era -- Goodman and Miller would become legendary. Georgie Stoll went on to become a key man in the MGM music department (winning an Oscar in 1945 for Anchors Aweigh). So did Roger Edens, who moved from the pit to the role of Ethel Merman's on-stage pianist when her keyboard man Al Siegel became ill on opening night and had to drop out of the show. Later, at MGM, Edens would be producer Arthur Freed's right-hand man and a formative influence on the great MGM musicals of the '30s, '40s and '50s.

Record producer Warran Scholl attended Girl Crazy several times, not only to see the show, but to hear the orchestra jam between acts. "During the intermissions," he recalled, "they'd really turn the band loose, and you should have heard the hot stuff they played. It wasn't like a regular pit band -- more like an act within an act."

Playing Girl Crazy's lead was 19-year-old Ginger Rogers, fresh from making her Broadway debut in Top Speed and creating a sensation purring "Cigarette me, big boy" in her first movie, Young Man of Manhattan. She had two of Girl Crazy's most enduring songs, "Embraceable You" and "But Not for Me", and by all accounts handled them quite nicely. But lacking what Cole Porter later called Ethel Merman's "golden foghorn" voice, she had to stand helplessly by while Ethel stole her thunder night after night; it would take the intimacy of the movie camera to coax her star into full bloom. (And here's a fun fact: During rehearsals one of her dance numbers was not working exactly right, so producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley asked a dancing star they knew to step in and refine the choreography as a favor, and he coached Ginger on the routine in the lobby of the Alvin during rehearsals. Yep, it was Fred Astaire.)

Rounding out the principal cast of Girl Crazy were its two nominal stars, comedians Willie Howard and William Kent, and juvenile lead Allen Kearns. (Understand, "juvenile" was a relative term in the theater of the day, denoting a romantic character type rather than age; think Dick Powell with Ruby Keeler. In fact, Kearns was 37).

With George and Ira Gershwin providing the songs; Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers and 35 beautiful chorus girls on stage; and Red Nichols, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Roger Edens et al. supplying the music, Girl Crazy -- over and above the hit it made with audiences at the time -- represents to us looking back an almost mind-boggling nexus of the burgeoning American pop music scene. If anyone ever does invent that time machine, the Alvin Theatre between October 14, 1930 and June 6, 1931 (when Girl Crazy closed) is liable to wind up bulging with millions of time-travelling buffs eager to experience the magic for themselves.

The magic act did have its flat spots, mainly in the form of the book by Guy Bolton and John McGowan -- a weakness recognized at the time by even the most rhapsodic reviewers. The "integrated" musical, where the songs grow out of a show's plot and characters, wasn't unheard of then (e.g., Show Boat), but it was far from the gold standard it would become in the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein (and remain ever after). More common was the musical comedy, where the book consisted mainly of a series of elaborate, even labored, set-ups for the next song. So it was with Girl Crazy: the music presents one show, the book another, in which (as historian Ethan Mordden aptly put it) "songs drop in like guests at an open house." In 1991, when Broadway director Mike Ockrent undertook a revival of the show, he found the book so irrelevant (and by then so dated) that a new one was commissioned from playwright Ken Ludwig. Then, figuring that since they were writing a new book they might as well embellish the score as well, they imported a raft of other Gershwin songs and came up with a whole "new" show, Crazy for You. It was another smash, running just short of four years.

Ockrent and Ludwig could afford to ignore Girl Crazy's book, but I can't; you'll need a grasp of the show's original plot (such as it was) before we fall to discussing the various tweaks and prods it got once it went to Hollywood. So, as quick-and- painless as I can make it, here goes:

Act I opens in the sleepy village of Custerville, Arizona, where the only excitement comes when somebody shoots the sheriff, which happens about every other week. Into this rides New York playboy Danny Churchill (Allen Kearns), in a taxicab driven by Gieber Goldfarb (Willie Howard) with $742.30 on the meter. Danny's tycoon father, appalled at his girl-crazy Manhattan hijinks, has banished him to Custerville, where there isn't a woman for 50 miles; Danny is to stay out of trouble by managing Buzzards, the family ranch. But there is a woman in town: Molly Gray (Ginger Rogers), the local postmistress, and Danny falls for her on sight. Homesick for the fast life, he decides to turn Buzzards into a dude ranch, and soon it's a hot spot; among the tourists it attracts are gambler Slick Fothergill (William Kent) and his wife Kate (Ethel Merman). But it also brings Tess Harding, Danny's old girlfriend, and Sam Mason, the guy Danny beat out for Tess's affections. Sam decides to get Danny back by wooing Molly away, which, after the typical misunderstandings, he does, persuading her to go over the border with him to San Luz, Mexico. Meanwhile, another sheriff has been assassinated, and Gieber Goldfarb runs for the vacant office against local tough Lank Sanders. When he wins, he opts to decamp to San Luz himself to flee Lank's wrath; Slick joins him, bringing two visiting girls along to keep them company. The Act I finale finds Danny dejected at his rift with Molly, Kate consoling him (not yet knowing that her husband has gone philandering to Mexico), and everybody else on their way to San Luz.

Act II finds half the population of Custerville in San Luz. Danny finds Molly, bids her farewell and wishes her all the best with Sam; only after he leaves does she realize her true feelings for him, and now she fears the knowledge has come too late. But when she learns that Sam has registered them at the local hotel as husband and wife, she realizes what a cad he is and runs to Danny's arms. Outraged, Danny blurts a threat against Sam that returns to bite him when Sam is assaulted and robbed and Danny is accused of the crime. Meanwhile, Kate confronts her cheating husband. Eventually -- jeez, let's cut to the chase -- Gieber exposes Lank and his henchman Pete as the men who robbed Sam, Kate and Slick reconcile, Danny and Molly are reunited, and everybody presumably lives happily ever after back in Custerville.

Girl Crazy was still going strong when it closed on June 6, 1931; producers Aarons and Freedley had been unable to persuade Willie Howard (who for some reason they considered indispensible) to sign on for a second season. In the meantime, the movie rights to the show had been sold to RKO Radio Pictures for $33,000.

And I think that's about enough to digest for one session. When we come back, we'll look at what happened when the show, like Danny Churchill himself, went west -- not to sleepy Arizona, but all the way to the bustling environs of Tinsel Town.

To be continued...

Liebster Blog Award

2011-08-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled posts to announce that Cinedrome has become the proud recipient of a Liebster Blog Award, presented by my blogospheric friend and neighbor Dorian over at Tales of the Easily Distracted. You can learn more about Dorian and her blog on the Cinedrome Links and Resources page, but better yet, hop on over to TotED itself and experience this woman's (and her husband Vinnie's) cleverness and erudition first-hand. Many thanks, Dorian, for the award -- and for your frequent and welcome comments here at Cinedrome; I'll do my best never to disappoint you.

A condition of accepting the award is to pass it on to at least three other bloggers whom you frequent, value and admire, and I'm delighted to do so (although I'm sure my awardees are already familiar to Cinedrome readers):

Greenbriar Picture Shows I suppose everybody reads Greenbriar, but if they don't they certainly should.

Laura's Miscellaneous Musings Again, hardly an unknown, but I stop by there at least once a day, if only to keep up with Laura's Herculean viewing schedule.

Walt Disney's Story of Robin Hood Disney's 1952 version stands in the shadow of the Errol Flynn classic (what movie wouldn't?), but also in the shadow of the 1973 animated version, which for my money...well, stinks, and that's just not fair. Clement of the Glen goes far to correct things on this blog about his favorite movie, and I love it.

And finally, just for the record, I'd also have given a Liebster to Dorian at Tales of the Easily Distracted if she hadn't already given one to me.

Catching Some Rays

2011-08-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

For my share of the Monster Movie Blogathon I've chosen
to honor a man whose movies (like Henry Hathaway's)
I loved even before I knew his name. By now everybody
knows his name (at least everybody who's likely to be
reading Cinedrome or a blogathon about 1950s monster
movies): Ray Harryhausen.

I knew about Ray Harryhausen myself at a pretty early
age -- before Hathaway, in fact -- thanks to the late great
Forrest J. Ackerman. Forry praised Harryhausen loud, long
and often in the pages of Famous Mosters of Filmland,
which I read religiously whenever I could find it. By the time
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island ('61)
and Jason and the Argonauts ('63) came out, oh yes indeed,
I knew who Ray Harryhausen was.

But when I saw The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I didn't. In those days they
were just two movies I loved; I never had any idea they
were made by the same guy. I picked these two for the
blogathon because they were important for me, but they
they were also important for Harryhausen himself: Beast
was the first feature where he got sole credit for the
special effects, while Sinbad was his first feature in color.

My brothers, our friends and I weren't the only kids of the 1950s (or, for that matter, the '60s, '70s and '80s) who were profoundly impressed by Ray Harryhausen's movies. Nowadays, when it sometimes seems as if fantasy, monster and alien movies are the only kind Hollywood (or anybody else) ever makes, there isn't a person working in any area of visual effects who doesn't revere Harryhausen's name -- who didn't grow up wanting to do the things and make the kinds of movies he did. Ray Harryhausen is probably one of the most influential filmmakers of the last sixty years, yet his pictures have almost always flown under history's radar. He's never even been nominated for an Academy Award -- although in 1991 he did get a special Oscar, the Gordon E. Sawyer award given to individuals "whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry."

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was already a few years old by the time I saw it, at a Saturday kiddie matinee at the Stamm Theatre in Antioch, Calif. I don't remember exactly when that was, but I do know I saw it at least three or four times, all of them well before The 7th Voyage of Sinbad came to the same theater in early 1959. (I also know it was after I saw King Kong on its 1956 reissue, so that narrows things down a little.)

Consider this: what's the classic 1950s monster movie formula (non-extraterrestrial division)? Isn't it the creature unleashed by humanity's meddling with nature, usually in the form of unrestricted nuclear weapons testing? Men go settting off enormous bombs and before you can say Run for your lives! some gigantic this-or-that is stomping around putting us puny little creatures in our place, right? Well, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is the original, the "onlie begetter". I'd call it the granddaddy of them all -- except that its offspring began proliferating when it was barely a year old, too young to be a grandfather.

When I revisited the picture in prep for this post (the first time I'd seen it in at least 40 years), I was a little apprehensive about what I might find; it wouldn't be the first childhood favorite to decompose before my startled eyes, like a clumsy piece of taxidermy. I needn't have worried; Beast is as fresh and vigorous today as it was when I first saw it -- back when I would hardly have thought to use words like "fresh and vigorous" (I probably said something more along the lines of "keen" and "neat-o"). It's a lesson we can't relearn too often: the cliches don't pull you down when you invented them in the first place.

Beast was independently produced by B-movie specialist Jack Dietz, who had made his name cranking out East Side Kids programmers with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall on Poverty Row in the '40s. Ray Harryhausen says the negative cost was $200,000 -- neither lavish nor shoestring in those days, just a decent, respectable B budget. ("Today," Harryhausen says, "you can hardly buy a costume for $200,000.") Dietz stretched his budget by hiring Eugene Lourie to direct. The IMDb says Lourie also served as production designer, though on screen he's credited only as director. If Lourie did do double duty, it would make sense; the bulk of his career was as an art director, first in France, then in Hollywood (his last credit was Clint Eastwood's Broncho Billy). This would also explain how Dietz, between Lourie's design sense and the deft use of stock footage, managed to get an A-picture look on a B-picture budget.

The picture begins literally with a bang: an atomic test north of the Arctic Circle that frees the creature from suspended animation in the polar ice (audiences never tire of these stock shots of atomic explosions; they're as fascinating now as they were half a century ago). The first man to see the beast is one of the attending scientists (Ross Elliott, in the designated role of First Expendable Victim). The second witness is the other scientist, our hero Tom Nesbitt (Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid, under the anglicized name of Paul Christian), and the movie's first act follows Nesbitt's crusade to prove to the skeptics around him -- his military pal Col. Jack Evans (The Thing from Another World's Kenneth Tobey), paleontologist Dr. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and Elson's assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) -- that he saw what he saw. Meanwhile there are a number of unexplained occurences, including the sinking of a fishing boat whose sole survivor is dismissed as a deranged crackpot when he claims it was the work of a "sea serpent" (the sailor is played by John Ford regular Jack Pennick, his grotesque teeth either straightened or, more likely, replace by dentures).

Another of these occurences is the destruction of a lighthouse on the coast of Maine, an episode straight from the Ray Bradbury short story that (according to the credits) "suggested" Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger's screenplay. And this is as good a place as any to discuss the movie's origins.

The story first appeared in the June 23, 1951 issue of the Saturday Evening Post as "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms". It was later antholgized in Bradbury's collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, its title changed to "The Fog Horn", and it is by that name that it's been known ever since. My guess is that "The Fog Horn" was Bradbury's original title and that the Post editors gave it the other one; it sounds about like the magazine's style in those days. Since the movie's original working title was Monster from the Deep, I'm also guessing that Dietz first hired Harryhausen for the project, then came across Bradbury's story and decided to incorporate it, and to appropriate its title, as an afterthought. If so, then it must have been a pretty early afterthought, because the movie adopted not only the title...

...but, with modifications, the look of the monster itself, as you can see by comparing the frame from the movie above with this illustration from the magazine. In the movie the beast is identified as a "rhedosaurus", a species that does not exist in the annals of paleontology. It's fun to believe that the first two letters of the beast's name stand for the "RH" of Ray Harryhausen (Harryhausen denies it, but I think perhaps he doth protest too much).

And doesn't the title The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms have a great ring to it? Much better than Monster from the Deep. Scientifically, it's nonsense; a fathom is a measure of nautical depth, six feet -- or, at the rate of 20,000, 22.7 miles. The beast from 22.7 miles down, in an ocean (the Arctic) that never gets deeper than 3.4 miles? Even the deepest spot on earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, is only 6.9 miles. But never mind, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms sounds awe-inspiring, primeval, almost Shakespearean; kudos to that Saturday Evening Post editor for coming up with it.

The Beast's money scene is the monster's invasion of New York (not far, Kellaway's Dr. Elson tells us, from where the only rhedosaurus fossils have ever been found), and the Big Apple hasn't had it so bad since King Kong came to town. In fact, compared to the rhedosaurus, Kong's rampage looks comparatively benign: a quick shot of newspaper headlines tells us there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and damages estimated at $300,000,000 (and that's in Eisenhower dollars; add a zero or two to get a current equivalent). "The worst disaster in New York's history!" shouts a radio newsman, as the National Guard is trucked into town, hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed, and New Yorkers cower behind their doors, afraid even to look out the window.

This sequence includes a moment that nobody who

saw it in the 1950s has ever forgotten. An unbilled

Steve Mitchell, playing an NYPD patrolman, bravely

stands his ground, even advances on the beast,

using nothing but his .38 caliber police revolver...

...only to be plucked screaming off his feet in the

monster's teeth and downed in one quick gulp.

It's a grisly death Harryhausen had practiced on

a classmate in one of his experimental films as a

teenager, and I'm sure Steven Spielberg had it in

mind 40 years later when he had that T-rex snatch

the cowering lawyer off the toilet in Jurassic Park.

But in Beast it's a moment of noble sacrifice (the

cop is not made to look reckless or foolish), and

our sad knowledge of September 11 makes it even

more poignant when viewed today.

As the rhedosaurus wreaks its havoc on Manhattan,

Harryhausen manages to fit in a nice little tribute to his

mentor Willis O'Brien. As the beast claws at this

building, ultimately reducing it to rubble (and annihilating

an unlucky group of extras in the alley beyond)...

...the shot mirrors this one from The Lost World

('25), in which O'Brien's brontosaurus deals out

the same fate to a building in London (albeit with

less explicit loss of life).

Ultimately, the rhedosaurus is cornered at Coney Island, wounded and enraged by a lucky shot earlier in the evening from a National Guard bazooka. Worse, the nuclear test that freed it from its icy tomb seems to have turned it into a carrier of some virulent radiation sickness; soldiers exposed to the manhole-size drops of blood falling from its wound have been keeling over without warning left and right. Tom Nesbitt announces that (for reasons the script doesn't slow down to explain) the only way to stop the creature is to shoot a radioactive isotope into its wound "and destroy all that diseased tissue." So Nesbitt and an Army marksman (an amazingly youthful Lee Van Cleef) don their haz-mat suits and ride to the top of the rollercoaster for a clear shot, and at last the monster's number is up.

But not without a fight. Before the monster's death throes have run their course, the rollercoaster becomes an inferno of flames (Nesbitt and the marksman make it safely to the ground), and the rhedosaurus gets a funeral pyre to match its gargantuan size. Harryhausen says that Eugene Lourie once accused him of having his monsters die "like a tenor in an opera", and that's what this one does:

Once The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was in the can, Jack Dietz tucked it under his arm and went shopping for a distributor. Eventually, he sold it to Warner Bros. for (according to Harryhausen) about $450,000. That represents a very tidy profit over his original investment, but with a fly in the ointment: Harryhausen says the picture went on to make "millions" for Warners -- $5,000,000, as a matter of fact, at a time when that was real money; nearly twice as much, for example, as Bwana Devil, the surprise hit of '53 that kicked off the first short-lived 3-D craze. More, too, than other 3-D hits of the year, like Charge at Feather River, It Came from Outer Space and Kiss Me, Kate (not quite as much as House of Wax, though, but pretty close, and without the novelty of 3-D).

Warner Bros. profited from Beast in another way as well. Barely a year (in fact, 371 days) later, the studio released its own homemade variation: Them! Warners knew a good thing when they had it, and they stuck close to the formula. Once again, nuclear testing unleashed a horrible freak of nature (this time, giant mutant ants), a major city came under attack (Los Angeles), and a beloved old character actor was along to play the movie's senior scientist (Edmund Gwenn, in a role very much like Cecil Kellaway's in The Beast). Other animals, insects, arachnids, even humans, would stumble into the atomic oven and thunder out their warnings of Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle In, and plenty of them are on view in this blogathon. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms led the way, and proved there was gold in them thar radioactive hills.

After The Beast, Ray Harryhausen was on a roll: It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. But in 1958 he, producer Charles Schneer and director Nathan Juran made a picture that represented an orders-of-magnitude leap forward on the keen-and-neat-o scale.

Partly because it was in georgeous, eye-popping Technicolor. But there was also the sheer volume of its visual effects. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms runs an economical 79 minutes, and its effects shots add up to (surprisingly) only 7 minutes 5 seconds -- or 8.9 percent of the running time. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad runs 88 minutes, with 17 minutes 27 seconds of effects -- 19.8 percent. More monster-time, but more monsters, too; more, in fact, than all Harryhausen's previous pictures put together. The Beast, It Came from Beneath the Sea and 20 Million Miles to Earth each had a single animated creature. But Sinbad had more than you could shake a scimitar at.

This one, for example. It's the first beast we see,

not seven minutes in -- the collossal Cyclops,

encountered when Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews)

and his crew make an unscheduled stop at the

uncharted island of (appropriately) Colossa.

Sinbad has been blown off his course as he

sailed home to Bagdad after a diplomatic

mission to the Sultan of Chandra. There he

not only averted war between Bagdad and

Chandra, but wooed and won the hand of

Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), daughter

of the Sultan.

As Sinbad and his crew come ashore seeking

food and water, the Cyclops appears suddenly,

pursuing a man in a black gown who is calling

for help. This is the magician Sokurah (Torin

Thatcher), a crafty and devious man who, once

they are all safely back aboard the ship,

arouses Sinbad's suspicions.

Sokurah tries to bribe Sinbad to return at once

to Colossa, to retrieve a magic lamp that the

Cyclops has stolen from him. He appeals to

Sinbad's greed, telling him that the Cyclops is

a hoarder of treasure, not only Sokurah's lamp,

and that Sinbad and his crew can claim any

amount of the treasure as plunder -- once

Sokurah has his lamp back. But Sinbad's first

duty is to his Caliph, and to keep the Princess

safe from harm -- not only for the sake of his

love for her, but for the sake of peace between

Bagdad and Chandra.

In Bagdad, Sokurah performs wonders for the Caliph and the visiting Sultan of Chandra, including (briefly) joining the Princess's serving woman and a serpent into this amazing, sinuous creature before returning the servant (and presumably the snake) back to their original bodies. Sokurah attempts to wheedle the Caliph into fitting out an expedition to return him to Colossa, but the Caliph remains firm; his mind is not to be changed even by such clever tricks as these. Perhaps, Sokurah mutters ominously, an even greater demonstration of my powers is called for.

The next morning, Sokurah has done his work. Princess Parisa is discovered in her bedchamber, alive and well but shrunken to the size of a tiny doll. The Sultan, outraged and grieving, vows to reduce Bagdad to ashes to avenge this insult to his daughter. His hand is stayed only when Sinbad seeks out Sokurah and gets the sorcerer to admit that he can return the Princess to her normal size -- but only with a potion using the eggshell of the giant bird, the Roc, which is found (of course) only on Colossa. So the magician has at last extorted his expedition after all, to be led by Sinbad himself. But Sinbad fears -- knows -- that Sokurah can't be trusted, and that he will have to be kept a wary eye on.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was part of a movie vogue that was petering out by the time it went into production in 1957: the Arabian Nights adventure. The genre -- at least this incarnation of it -- had begun in 1940 with the phenomenal success of the marvelous, magical The Thief of Bagdad from Alexander Korda's London Films. It spurred a flood of similarly-themed adventures throughout the '40s -- most noticeably in a series of campy Technicolor romps from Universal starring Jon Hall and Maria Montez ("the King and Queen of Technicolor"), but cropping up in other unexpected places, like MGM's Kismet (1944) with Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich, and Warner Bros.' update of The Desert Song (1943), with Dennis Morgan as a burnoose-clad freedom fighter battling Nazis in war-torn Morocco.

It was during this time that Ray Harryhausen first conceived the idea of a Sinbad adventure, and he drew a series of preliminary sketches of the kind of thing he had in mind. There had been Sinbad the Sailor in '47, but that was a conventional swashbuckler with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Maureen O'Hara; Fairbanks spoke of battling Rocs and Cyclops and dragons, but what the movie showed was far more mundane. Harryhausen's idea was to make a movie filled with the things Fairbanks's Sinbad only talked about.

Unfortunately for him, in 1955, RKO Radio Pictures mogul Howard Hughes, while he was in the process of running his studio into the ground, produced Son of Sinbad with Dale Robertson, which rightly laid a Roc-sized egg at the box office. Wherever Harryhausen turned, the answer was the same: "sailor pictures" are dead, just look at what happened to Son of Sinbad.

But producer Charles H. Schneer -- with whom Harryhausen had already made It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth -- believed. He even wanted to shoot in color, about which Harryhausen was dubious. Harryhausen had just developed a process -- later dubbed Dynamation -- with which he could combine live action and special effects animation on the same strip of film negative without having to resort to costly and time-consuming matching of negatives in the lab (the animation alone was costly and time-consuming enough), and he wasn't sure it would work for color as well as for black-and-white. But Schneer had him shoot some tests to make sure, and they were on their way.

The picture was shot in Spain (another point on which Schneer and Harryhausen were pioneers; in the 1960s many Hollywood epics, and Sergio Leone's Italian spaghetti westerns, would also be shooting there), and Schneer was as resourceful with a budget as Jack Dietz had been. He even secured permission to shoot in the Alhambra in Granada, giving him and director Nathan Juran access to lavish sets at a fraction of the cost of building them. (Later crews were less respectful than Sinbad's, and now the Alhambra is off-limits to movie production.)

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a movie of endless wonders, thrills and delights. Time and again, Sinbad and his crew (and the tiny Parisa, helpless in her little doll's cabinet) have barely vanquished or escaped from one fantastic creature before they are set upon by another -- like this angry two-headed Roc, who takes exception to Sinbad plundering her eggs for the shell that will help restore the Princess...

...or the Cyclops again, preparing to barbecue Sinbad's friend Harufa (Afred Brown) for his dinner...

...or the fire-breathing dragon guarding Sokurah's underground castle, where Sinbad goes to rescue Parisa after Sokurah has betrayed them all and spirited the Princess away...

...or most awe-inspiring of all, the skeleton Sokurah brings to life and arms with sword and shield to duel Sinbad to the death. This scene was such a tour de force that Harryhausen couldn't resist outdoing it five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, when the hero and his friends battle a cadre of no fewer than seven deadly skeletons.

The Arabian Nights adventure came in in a blaze of glory with The Thief of Bagdad, and after years of diminishing returns it went out in a blaze of glory with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There would be other movies in the genre -- Harryhausen himself would make sequels, and pretty good ones, in 1973 and '77 -- but these two movies, each in its own distinct way, are the unassailable peaks of the form, never equalled, much less surpassed.

The secret to the success of both movies, of course, is that they aren't really "Arabian" at all. What they are, in fact, is Arabesque -- an elaborate fantasia on the mere idea of the tales of Scheherezade, decorated with the filigree of genies, evil wizards, fabulous monsters, dauntless heroes and pure, chaste maidens in mortal peril.

Oh, and let's say a word about that genie, Barani -- the

one in the magic lamp so desperately coveted by the wicked

Sokurah. He's played by 12-year-old Richard Eyer, one of the

most ubiquitous child actors of the 1950s, who had already

made his mark in such movies as Come Next Spring, The

Desperate Hours and Friendly Persuasion, and on countless

television series. His talent wasn't spectacular, but it was real,

and he brought a down-to-earth conviction to any role he played;

he was a real kid, not a show-off Hollywood brat. And even though

he was about as "Arabian" as a Fourth of July picnic, casting him in

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was an act of sublime genius. Here, right

in the middle of all these monsters and wizards and princesses, was

a boy just like you or me -- only he could do magic! I've never seen

this commented on before, but I think Richard Eyer's presence is

crucial to the success of Sinbad, as much as Torin Thatcher's ability

to embody pure wickedness or Kerwin Mathews's uncanny way of

really seeing all the creatures that won't be tipped into the scene with

him until months after shooting has wrapped. Richard Eyer gives the

kids in the audience -- like my brothers, our friends and me -- something

they can identify with and hold on to amid the wonders going on before

their wide and staring eyes. Richard Eyer had a very special place in my

heart after I saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

The Museum That Never Was, Part 2

2011-07-22T02:45:00.000-07:00

The good news about the Debbie Reynolds Auction is that there was an auction at all. She saved all these items from oblivion, and now they're around for us to see. Debbie's main interest was in the costumes, but there's plenty of other stuff in her collection, like this concept painting from the 1963 Cleopatra. Just to illustrate how things can change from the early concept stages to final production...

...here's how the battle of Actium looked on screen. The painting has a dramatic grandeur that contrasts sharply with the frame from the movie, which looks rather stodgy and pedestrian -- and which, as it happens, is pretty much how the battle scene plays out in the movie itself. The same is true of other Cleopatra paintings on display in the catalogue; they show an energy and drive that survives only sporadically (and sometimes not at all) in the picture as it finally played in theaters.

My point is: It's thanks to Debbie Reynolds that I'm even able to make this comparison. Maybe 20th Century Fox would have preserved these paintings and sketches. Maybe. But they didn't. In 1971, reeling from the financial debacles of white elephants like Dr. Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! (and for that matter, Cleopatra, which eventually turned a decent profit, but too late to do any good), and with Star Wars still six years in the unseeable future, I'm sure Fox was only too happy to pick up a little spare change by getting rid of things like this. And Debbie Reynolds was there to take them for safe-keeping.

Now that Debbie is relinquishing her stewardship, we can reasonably assume that, whoever may wind up with this or that individual piece, the collection as a whole is safe for the forseeable future; nobody pays $5 million for a dress if they're planning to leave it wadded up on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, or set it out on the curb next time the Salvation Army truck comes around. But where are the pieces going, and what precisely is going to become of them? Collectors can be a secretive and territorial bunch, not always quick to share. (And who can blame them? There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there; see here for a mention of the mysterious fate of Marcel Delgado's production photos from The Lost World ['25] and King Kong ['33].) In the auction catalogue from Profiles in History, there's a special plea from London's Victoria and Albert Museum, asking for the loan of certain items in the collection for an exhibit on Hollywood costumes planned for October 2012 through January 2013. Debbie had promised curator Deborah Nadoolman Landis the use of any costumes she wanted -- until the need to sell torpedoed the arrangement; it'll be interesting to see if any of the new owners come through for the V&A.

So the Debbie Reynolds Collection existed in the first place, and it's (most likely) safe now; that's the good news. The bad news is that it won't be a collection anymore. True, last month's auction was only 587 lots out of whatever (5,000? 10,000?) is the total. Does Debbie intend to sell only enough to pay her outstanding debts, then start again at Square One with what's left? Perhaps, but she certainly sounds as if she's in the process of washing her hands of the whole kit and kaboodle. That's perfectly understandable, but it's still a shame.

I'll miss having the opportunity to wander
through the halls of the Debbie Reynolds
Hollywood Movie Museum, and to go back
as often as time and resources would allow;
I suspect a single day wouldn't have been
enough to see it all. It's comforting to know
that these things are in the hands of people
who'll appreciate them, but having them all
together in one place would have made the
museum so much greater than the sum of
its parts. As Virginia Postrel says, "To
understand the past you need a large
sample. Only then can you separate
idiosyncratic variation from broad trends."
I hinted at this idea in Part 1, when I
suggested mix-and-matching a Cleopatra
costume from the 1930s, '40s and '60s.
How instructive it would have been to
compare costumes from the 1925 and
'59 versions of Ben-Hur; or Mutiny on
the Bounty '35 and '62; or how Adrian
dressed Charles Boyer as Napoleon in
Conquest ('37) vs. how Rene Hubert
and Charles LeMaire dressed Marlon
Brando in Desiree.

Or take this shot of Katharine Hepburn
as Mary of Scotland (1936). You can
see Mary of Scotland any time you like,
and maybe you have. But while you were
taking in the lavish settings and costumes
captured by Joseph August's richly
atmospheric, deeply shadowed black-and-
white cinematography, did it ever occur
to you that the gown Kate is wearing here...

...really looked like this? We enter so completely into the world of any black-and-white movie (and arguably, Mary of Scotland is not one of the best) that we tend to forget that anyone ever thought of them in terms of color. We think, perhaps, that the studios wouldn't spend money on something the camera wouldn't see. But think that one through: The actors would see it. If Katharine Hepburn's costume had really been composed of the shades of black and gray that we see on screen and in the picture above, she would surely have acted differently than she did in this sumptuous red and gold
garment. And the camera would certainly have seen that.

This is one of the things I most noticed in looking through
the costumes in the catalogue, the striking variety of color
in costumes and set pieces built for black-and-white movies.
That gold gown from DeMille's Cleopatra is another example;
it may look silver on screen, but no, it was gold.

Here's yet another. It's Tallulah Bankhead as Catherine

the Great in A Royal Scandal (1945, begun by Ernst

Lubitsch, who became ill during production and handed

the direction off to Otto Preminger)...

...and here's the dress she's wearing, a "cognac silk velvet two-piece period gown heavily jeweled with gold and white stones." Talk about your Scarlet Empress! If you Ctrl-click on the picture to open it in a new tab, then "plus" it up to full size, you can see the exquisite detail in the jeweling, which probably went all but unnoticed by audiences at the time. (You can, alas, also see that time has visited its ravages on the gown -- mostly, no doubt, between 1945 and '71, when Debbie acquired it from 20th Century Fox.) Bidding on this one started at $3,000 and it sold for $7,000 plus another $1,610 for the house commission and sales taxes.

(And by the way, I said in Part 1 that I had no idea how

much those Cleopatra costume pieces finally sold for.

Well, now I know, thanks to the icollector.com Web

site: Cleopatra ['34] gown, $40,000; Cleopatra ['63]

headdress, $100,000; Caesar and Cleopatra wig and

headband, $4,250. Maybe those "duelling Cleopatras"

showed up after all. Also, Debbie's How the West Was

Won gown brought $11,000. All prices are before

20 percent "buyer's premium" and sales tax.)

I could go on like this all day, but I'll just give a few

more examples, all from the same picture: Marie

Antoinette (1938), Irving Thalberg's last project,

a vehicle for his wife Norma Shearer that was

eventually released nearly two years after Thalberg's

death. Because it was Thalberg, and because he

was doing it for Norma, no expense was spared.

For starters, here's a silk brocade jacket and vest

with breeches (a pair of pink-and-brown ribboned

shoes came with) for John Barrymore as King

Louis XV...

...and here's a wool coat with black velvet

buttons for Tyrone Power as Count Axel de

Fersen, the would-be rescuer of the doomed

Louis XVI (Robert Morley) and his queen...

...while here's a tunic worn by a servant

attending the king at a royal ball. This

costume, mind you, worn by a nameless

extra whose own mother probably didn't

notice or recognize him.

These three samples alone -- and the

catalogue has eight more from the

same picture -- bear witness to the fact

that the set of Marie Antoinette must

have been an absolutely intoxicating riot

of color. It makes us wonder what the

movie might have looked like if Technicolor

had been available (well, technically it was,

but MGM was still timid about using it).

Even more than that, it makes me (at

least) think what an absolute Wonderland

the set of Marie Antoinette must have

been. Can you imagine? Well, you'll

have to, because you'll probably

never see these costumes all

together in the same place again.

That, again, is the bad news of the Debbie Reynolds Auction: the opportunity to browse through these exhibits is in all likelihood slipping away from us forever. They're all safe enough from outright destruction, no doubt, but they've been spirited away God knows where, to some private mansion or mountaintop retreat or private hall or atrium or display case, to be shared, if at all, with only a small circle of friends.

That's why I'm glad I ordered my own copy of Profiles in History's catalogue, even though my vague ideas about going to the auction or putting in some bids never went anywhere. And it's why I plan to get a copy of the next edition in December (who knows, by then I may even be able to bid on something). The catalogue is like a souvenir book from the gift shop of the Museum That Never Was, a memento of the last time these exhibits were all under one roof -- something I can leaf through at my leisure and pretend that I actually spent a day or two in the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Movie Museum and saw all this myself first-hand.

If you're interested in a catalogue of your own, you can (at least as of this date) order it here from Profiles in History. If you don't want to pay the $39.95 -- and don't mind not getting the quality high-gloss paper it's printed on -- you can even download the catalogue for free on PDF. But be warned: It's 312 pages and will probably take quite a while to download (and even longer to print), and it'll probably take up quite a chunk of your hard drive when it gets there.

The Museum That Never Was, Part 1

2011-07-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

When I bought the catalog for the Debbie Reynolds Auction
from the Profiles in History auction house, I admit it was with
the thought that I just might be able to get down to L.A. for
the event itself on June 18. Well, family plans closer to home
made that idea a non-starter, but there was still the possibility
that I might be able to bid on something by phone or on line.
Then a 16mm print came up for auction on eBay that I set
my cap for, and it wound up costing more than I expected,
though less than I was willing to pay. (Not that you asked,
but it's a kinescope of a 1956 live TV dramatization of Jim
Bishop's The Day Lincoln Was Shot starring Raymond
Massey, Lillian Gish and Jack Lemmon.)

So what with one thing and another, my hopes of getting to
the auction or of taking home anything from it were not to be.

Not that I could have afforded much -- that became

clear as I started leafing through the catalogue. Take

this little number, for example. It's the ivory colored

rayon crepe dress Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven

Year Itch as she stood over that subway grate and

let the updraft send the skirt billowing up around her 22-inch waist. The catalogue describes it as "the most recognized costume in film history." Well, I don't know about that; seems to me Scarlett O'Hara's green

portiere gown would give it some competition (to say nothing of Darth Vader's cape and helmet). But never mind, this simple halter-top dress is recognizable
enough, and it carries a frisson of furtive 1950s
voyeurism that Scarlett and Darth never could.
(By the way, Profiles in History said that that
green dress would also be up for sale, but
it doesn't appear in the catalogue.)

Debbie says she paid $200 for this dress when she
bought it from 20th Century Fox in 1971 -- along
with the rest of Marilyn's extant wardrobe -- at the
pre-sale before the studio put what was left on the
block. Profiles in History figured it would go for
between one and two million dollars. They were
too timid. By the time the gavel banged shut on it,
the bidding had climbed to $4.6 million. When you
figure in the auction house's 20 percent cut, which
is added to (not taken from) the sale price, that
means somebody shelled out something like
$5.52 million for this stylish summer frock.

Marilyn's "subway" dress was the top money-
maker at the auction -- in fact, it shattered the
previous record for a single dress ($1.4 million
in 1999, for another one of hers). And her red
sequined gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
came close to that '99 record, going for $1.2 million.

Other pieces in the Reynolds collection drew similarly

fabulous sums. These ruby slippers, for example.

Do I really need to tell you what movie they're from?

Although actually, to be precise, they're not really
"from" The Wizard of Oz...

...and neither is this outfit. Both were worn by

Judy Garland (with duplicates for her stand-

in/double Bobbie Koshay) during the first two

weeks of shooting. But when director Richard

Thorpe was taken off the project, Dorothy Gale

underwent a complete makeover from head

(Garland's blonde wig was out) to toes (which

didn't turn up on the slippers she eventually

wore). The catalogue describes these two lots

as "test" items; "rejects" would be closer to the

truth. Nevertheless, the slippers went for

$910,000, the dress and blouse for $510,00

to the same buyer (rumored to be representing

Saudi oil money). That adds up to $1.42 million --

and let's not forget the 20 percent bump (another

$284,000) for the house. Not bad for a cast-off

ensemble that wound up never appearing on screen.

That's a pretty penny to shell out for a set of Judy

Garland's sweat stains, even at the rate two weeks of

Technicolor lighting would have been bringing them on.

If you were in the mood to dress up as Cleopatra next Halloween, you might have mix-and-matched your costume from the auction, beginning with this gold lame boudoir gown from Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 take on the doomed Egyptian siren. Of course, you would have had to
be ready to start the bidding at
20 grand, not to mention fitting into a garment cut to Claudette Colbert's 18-inch waist.

Then you could have accessorized with this headdress,

worn 29 years later by Elizabeth Taylor for Cleo's

miles-over-the-top entrance into Rome. On the
other hand, if you were daunted by the
$30,000 opening bid, or by the headdress's
fragile condition...

...there was this three-piece wig and silver-beaded

headband worn by Vivien Leigh in Caesar and

Cleopatra, starting at a more modest $800 to

$1,200. If you still wanted to shop around, there

were clothes and accessories from a number of

other pictures that might have suited you: The

Egyptian, The Ten Commandments, even Quo

Vadis, Ben-Hur or Julius Caesar might have

done in a pinch.

Bear in mind that all the prices I'm quoting on this

hypothetical Cleopatra ensemble are just the opening

bids as they appear in the catalogue. I have no idea

what the articles eventually sold for. It would take

only two duelling Cleopatras with deep pockets

and indomitable wills to send the bidding sky-high.

Not everything at the auction required the resources of an Arab oil sheik or a Japanese electronics magnate. There were props, furniture, lobby cards, posters, letters, and other items -- all a tad high-end, price-wise, for most collectors but not entirely out of the question. I cast a covetous eye on a six-sheet poster for How the West Was Won (my all-time favorite movie, and the one in which Debbie Reynolds herself gave the performance of her career), but at eight feet square, where would I keep it? More reasonable, and in the same price range ($300 - $500), was this one-sheet from Kiss Me, Kate autographed by Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel (notice that Keel, perfectly in character for his Petruchio/Fred Graham role, placed his signature right in the middle of Grayson's pert little behind). Before The Day Lincoln

Was Shot diverted my attention and resources, I was

thinking I just might be able to follow this item

for a bid or two -- maybe more, if the

competition wasn't too stiff.

While I sent for the catalogue in good faith (from the auction house's point of view) and with nebulous dreams of getting some piece of the collection for my own, perusing the book once it arrived sent me off on a whole other train of thought. Like most movie buffs, I've known for decades that Debbie Reynolds was amassing this collection (she began in earnest in 1970, when MGM auctioned off everything but the studio's real estate) with the idea of establishing a Hollywood museum. But until I actually started thumbing through the catalogue, I never quite grasped what a monumental collection she had managed to put together. And this seems to be only the tip of the iceberg -- some 587 items, with Part 2 of the auction scheduled for next December. I read somewhere (and I can't remember where now, so I can't confirm it) that her full collection extends to over 5,000 pieces -- meaning that this hefty two-pound catalogue represents barely the tenth part of the museum she hoped
to set up. Truly, Debbie Reynolds is (or, alas, was) the
Smithsonian Institution of historical Hollywood.

Evidently, James Smithson had less trouble persuading the United States to accept his endowment than Debbie has had with Hollywood. According to Virginia Postrel, writing on Bloomberg.com, the auction became necessary when Debbie's most recent attempt to establish her museum collapsed in 2009. The museum was going to be part of a tourist attraction called Belle Island in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; apparently, when the Belle Island project went bankrupt it took Debbie's museum down with it, leaving her with a lot of bills to pay.

This begs the question: Why on earth did Debbie Reynolds have to go all the way to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to find a home for her museum? Is L.A. that crowded? Just to take one obvious example, doesn't the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cherish the hope of someday establishing a museum as a "year-round Hollywood attraction"? That's what they say on their Web site, anyhow. I don't know why Debbie and the Academy couldn't come to some agreement (for the past 40 years); maybe she was too married to the idea of the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Movie Museum while they were dead set on the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. But that doesn't explain why the Academy didn't even try to bid on anything at the auction. (Way to go, Academy; you let a lot of choice exhibits slip through your fingers last month, and I suppose you'll do it again in December. But then, if you weren't interested when you could have had Marilyn's subway dress for $200, why bother now? Maybe the revenue from the Oscar broadcast isn't what it used to be.)

I'm not sure what Debbie's vision for her museum was; myself, I'd have loved to see something like the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum -- now known as the Autry National Center -- in Griffith Park. (And by the way, if you thought a "Gene Autry Museum" would amount to little more than a collection of Gene's old guitars and posters from his movies, think again. It's a world-class facility honoring every facet of America's western heritage, and belongs at the top of your must-see list if you're ever in Los Angeles.) Whatever Debbie's ideas were, they've come to naught, while she's spent half her life (and apparently all her money) acquiring and properly storing and maintaining umpteen thousand pieces of Hollywood history -- and trying to find a home for them.

Frankly, if I were Debbie Reynolds, I'd be mad enough to bite the bumper off a truck. In an interview about the auction with Idaho TV station KIDK, she said, with an air of philosophical resignation, "I'm a fan of all of these great stars and I wanted to save their moment for a museum for the future. I didn't reach that goal, which makes me sad, but these things will be shared with people that love the stars as much as I do." In another interview she sounded a little more like I'd probably feel (i.e., testier): "I am really sick and tired of it. I feel that I must call it a day now. Over the years, I have literally spent millions of dollars protecting it and taking care of it. If you were me, wouldn't you give up after 35 years? There is no other road. I need a little rest from the responsibility of trying to do something it seems that nobody else wants to do. Hopefully everyone will have a good time with their piece."

All those years haven't completely gone to waste. The day-to-day operations of Golden Age Hollywood are as over and done as the haggling in an Etruscan marketplace. We may still have the movies -- and that ain't exactly nothin' -- but it won't do to lose sight of the nuts and bolts that went into building them. Being able to see and study these artifacts (like this gown Debbie wore as she crooned "A Home in the Meadow" in How the West Was Won) gives them a real-world texture and solidity that the movies alone, even HTWWW in all its 7-channel Cinerama glory, could never do.

Without Debbie Reynolds, the items in her collection -- Charlie Chaplin's derby, Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes Inverness cape, Audrey Hepburn's black-and-white Ascot dress (and Rex Harrison's clash-matching brown suit), Barbra Streisand's entire Funny Girl wardrobe, the kids' drapery outfits and Julie Andrews's guitar from The Sound of Music, Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra sedan chair, palace decorations and Yul Brynner's whip from The King and I, Bette Davis's throne from The Virgin Queen, Empress Josephine's royal bed from Desiree, Clifton Webb's Boy Scout uniform from Mr. Scoutmaster, Howard Keel's rifle from Annie Get Your Gun (or Clark Gable's from Mogambo), the 20-foot miniature warships from The Winds of War, the Ark of the Covenant from David and Bathsheba -- all might well be long-moldering somewhere in Los Angeles County's bulging landfills. As frustrated and disappointed as Debbie might be, she can claim victory in (and we can thank her for) having shepherded all these things past the point where they were simply junk.

I'll have more to say on this in Part 2...

Our Mr. Webb

2011-06-17T02:30:00.000-07:00

Clifton Webb is unique among movie stars. There are other (albeit lesser) tough guys than Humphrey Bogart; other blonde sex symbols than Marilyn Monroe; other western heroes than John Wayne; other Latin lovers than Rudolph Valentino. But there was nobody like Clifton Webb before his belated screen debut at 54 in Laura, and there has been nobody like him since.

Actually, strictly speaking, Laura wasn't his debut. He appeared in a thin smattering of silents and a single 1930 talking short immortalizing a stage sketch he'd performed with Fred Allen. There was also an 18-month period in 1935-36 when he was under contract to MGM (Metro had vague ideas of making him their answer to Fred Astaire), but nothing ever came of that. For all intents and purposes, Laura was the beginning of Clifton Webb As We Know Him. For many movie buffs today, I suspect their knowledge of Webb begins and ends with that 1944 noir classic. Or it may extend to the other two pictures for which he got Academy Award nominations, The Razor's Edge ('46) and Sitting Pretty ('48).

That last title, in fact, is the one my friend Dave Smith has chosen for his book on Clifton Webb: Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb. Amazingly, it's the first full-length biography of Webb; even more amazing is the fact that it was written at least in part by Clifton Webb himself. He had started writing his autobiography and made it through six chapters before putting the project aside. (Webb's proposed title was Mabelle and Me -- Mabelle being his mother; like Cornell Woolrich, Webb lived with his mother for her entire life and didn't survive her by much. The resemblance between the two men, however, most emphatically ends there.)

Dave Smith has retrieved Webb's manuscript from (and with the kind permission of) the collectors who came into possession of Webb's papers and memorabilia after his death in 1966. In addition to those six chapters, there were extensive -- though often undated -- notes for the remainder of the autobiography, and Dave makes use of them, and his own tireless research, in picking up Webb's story where he left it at the Broadway opening of the musical Dancing Around in 1914.

Nineteen-fourteen!?! Yes, Clifton Webb's autobiography cuts off a full 30 years before where most of us think his career even began. In fact, the movies from Laura to Satan Never Sleeps ('62) were his second career, the first having lasted on stage throughout the 'teens, '20s and '30s. It was sometime during these years that he painted the self-portrait here (the date is unknown, but my guess is it's from sometime in the mid-1920s). Webb was a super-elegant song-and-dance man, famous and sought-after for his ballroom skills and, later, his musical comedy abilities (among the songs he introduced on Broadway were "I've Got a Crush on You", "At Long Last Love", "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans" and "Easter Parade").

It's almost startling to read Webb's chapters on his early days in New York after his mother married (her second time) into the high society of the turn of the 20th century. Startling to realize that he spent his childhood and adolescence in the Manhattan of Edith Wharton and Diamond Jim Brady ("...completely settled only as far north as 72nd Street"), rose to his first fame on the Broadway of Jerome Kern and Charles Frohman, and went on to make his last stage appearance just off the gaudy Times Square of Damon Runyon (by which time, snob that he was, he found New York much diminished by the changing years).

For me, these early chapters are particularly fun reading because they are in Webb's own voice, and we can hear him speaking them. Webb was a shameless name-dropper, and reading his roll call of the famous people he rubbed elbows with in the 1910s and '20s is heady stuff. Better still, his writing gives a bracing whiff of what everyone who knew him says: that he was a wonderful conversationalist. (A favorite passage of mine is Webb talking about his mother's pregnancy, almost as if he remembered it: "Mabelle has always sworn that the first sign of life I evidenced was a good hard kick when she was in the act of applauding the eminent Francis Wilson, and she floated home convinced that she was to be the mother of a great actor. Nobody to this day, I confide with a grave sense of responsibility, has disabused her of the notion.")

That kicking baby was born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in Indianapolis in 1889. As a child actor young Webb used his stepfather's name and was billed as Webb Raum. When Mabelle sent the elder Raum packing (not a minute too soon, by Webb's lights), her son cast about for another stage name. He liked Webb well enough, and decided "Clifton" had the right ring of patrician dignity. Mother became Mabelle Webb and called her son "Webb" to the end of her life -- naturally enough, since it was in fact his first name. He always called her Mabelle, and eventually they would be known as the happiest couple in Hollywood. Myrna Loy always said Mabelle "looked like Clifton in drag", and this picture proves Myrna wasn't exaggerating.

There's a story -- a legend, maybe -- that when Otto Preminger (having taken over the direction of Laura from Rouben Mamoulian) wanted Webb for the vicious Waldo Lydecker, he was told, "You can't cast Webb -- he flies!" Meaning to say, he's a flaming queen, too flagrantly swishy ever to pass for any kind of heterosexual. Whoever said that, if anybody really did, underestimated Webb. As he said himself, "I have destroyed the formula completely. I'm not young. I don't get the girl in the end and I don't swallow her tonsils, but I have become a national figure."

Clearly, Clifton Webb didn't believe in false modesty (or any other kind), but he had a point. By the time he said that, he had become a national figure. Webb's big splash in Laura might have been only a fluke if it hadn't been for one thing: Darryl Zanuck liked him and sensed a unique screen persona that, with proper care, could be developed into a valuable property for 20th Century Fox. Webb's next picture was The Dark Corner for Henry Hathaway, playing a coldly calculating art dealer not far removed from Laura's Waldo. Then came The Razor's Edge and another Oscar nomination as Somerset Maugham's snobbish expatriate Elliott Templeton.

Those first three pictures made Clifton Webb's reputation as a character actor, but it was Sitting Pretty that made him a star (and got him his third Oscar nomination) playing Lynn Belvedere, a prissy intellectual novelist who takes a position as live-in babysitter for parents Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara. Critics and film noir historians have glommed onto the scene in Laura where Webb talks to detective Dana Andrews from a bathtub, but in Webb's own lifetime this was probably the most famous scene in his career, where he dumps a bowl of oatmeal over the head of a misbehaving baby. (In real life the kid, 18-month-old Roddy McCaskill, was delighted at all the mess, and having a high old time; they had to dub the sound of crying in post-production.)

My own favorite Clifton Webb moment comes just before this. First the set-up: The Kings (Young and O'Hara) think they've hired a college co-ed to sit their kids while they both take jobs to make ends meet -- after all, "her" name is Lynn Belvedere. Instead, they get this humorless middle-aged bachelor with his nose in the air. This first morning at the breakfast table it begins to dawn on them that he's liable to be as much a handful as their own brood. Webb has a long speech in which he explains to Mr. and Mrs. King the terms on which he will agree to work for them; I can't remember exactly what-all he says but it goes on for quite a while, telling them what hours he will work, what evenings he demands off, when he expects breakfast, lunch and dinner, how long his eggs must be cooked, and so on and on. In the finished picture, precisely as Mr. Belvedere concludes his long-winded ultimatum, little Roddy McCaskill sneezes. Without batting an eye, Webb glances at the toddler and barks, "Gezundheit!" It's obviously unscripted -- there's no way to get an 18-month-old to sneeze on cue -- but perfectly in character all around, and Webb's "gezundheit" deftly snatches our attention back from the adorable tot and turns that sneeze into an exclamation point to Webb's own speech. It's a hilarious moment and an example of Clifton Webb's amazing presence of mind. (Kudos too to Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara for keeping straight faces and not spoiling the take.)

After Sitting Pretty -- and two more Belvedere sequels -- Clifton Webb was a major box-office star, and he remained so for much of the rest of his career. If movies like Cheaper by the Dozen and Stars and Stripes Forever (a largely fictitious biopic in which Webb was nevertheless ideally cast as John Philip Sousa) are less highly regarded today than Laura or The Razor's Edge -- well, that's only natural, I suppose, and probably correct. But they don't deserve to be forgotten altogether. Webb had a marvelous flair for comedy -- and not just the bitch-wit of Waldo Lydecker or Elliott Templeton -- and movies like these are worth seeing for it. So is the all-but-forgotten Dreamboat ('52), in which Webb plays a staid college professor mortified when the new medium of television unexpectedly resurrects his previous career as a silent movie heartthrob.

Sitting Pretty (that is, Dave Smith's book) grows unavoidably cheerless in its closing pages as it recounts Webb's utter failure to cope with the death of his mother (in 1961, at the age of 91). He was disconsolate and maudlin at what was after all the natural order of things -- people are supposed to bury their parents -- and his incessant grief, not only for Mabelle but for other friends and intimates already gone, sorely tested the patience of those who were still around (Noel Coward snapped, "It must be hard to be orphaned at seventy-one."). Well, that's part of the story too, if not the best part. For most of his life Clifton Webb was great fun to be around. His movies remind us of that, and so does Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb; it brings the man back in his own words, and we can once again bask in the pleasure of his company.

Auditioning for Immortality

2011-05-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

I ordered the Warner Archive's Vitaphone Varieties collection because the transition to sound is one of two periods in movie history that particularly fascinate me (the other is the early "outlaw" years circa 1888-1912 with its patent wars, jockeying for supremacy and feverish experimentation). I also hoped that this new batch of 60 shorts would provide the grist for a post or two, like the MGM shorts package I wrote about here and here.

I got half a loaf. I found the collection interesting, but I don't know if anyone else would agree if they don't already share my penchant for the period.

Scott Eyman's The Speed of Sound (perfect title!) chronicles the dizzy suddenness with which silents went out and talkies came in, even as many Hollywood insiders said it was only a passing fad. Only in hindsight do they look to us like dodos standing neck-deep in water shouting "There isn't going to be any flood!" And only in hindsight does it look like it happened overnight; there were three long and confused years before silents finally bit the dust.

That's the period covered by this collection, and it's actually a little less than claimed at the WA site. There are no shorts from 1926, the earliest in the collection being the first, The Revelers (from April 1927, six months before The Jazz Singer). And truth be told, this batch of shorts is a little drab compared to an earlier 6-disc set, Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts. That one covered nearly a full decade, 1931-38, with more familiar names than you'll find in this one. The new collection has a lot of seven-to-ten-minute turns by vaudevillians that I for one had never heard of, and whom I couldn't find in any of my vaudeville references.

They're not all strangers. An amazingly young-looking Jay C. Flippen shows up in The Ham What Am from 1928. Still years from his character-actor heyday in pictures like Brute Force, Winchester '73 or They Live by Night, or singing that the farmer and the cowman should be friends in Oklahoma!, Flippen regales us -- from the usual incongruous Vitaphone parlor set -- with a couple of songs and a lot of jokes, all while flashing a toothy, Joker-size smile and brandishing a cigar the size of a horse's leg.

And here was a surprise: the husband-and-wife vaudeville team of (Frank) Orth and (Ann) Codee. According to Joe Laurie Jr.'s chatty history Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace, written when many of the people he chatted about were still alive and working, Orth and Codee played their act all over the world in five different languages (she was Belgian-born). Like George Burns and Gracie Allen, she started out as straight-man to him, but he wound up playing straight-man to her. When the vaude circuits dried up, they both stepped easily into character work in movies, often uncredited. Orth's stock in trade was cab drivers, waiters, bartenders (or barflies), and newsmen. If the face is familiar but you can't quite place it, try this: he was Duffy, Cary Grant's beleaguered assistant in His Girl Friday.

Codee may be harder to place from this picture, but her accent and dignified look kept her busy as Madame This or That: Mme. Borodin, the owner of Margaret O'Brien's ballet academy in The Unfinished Dance; Mme. Bouget in That Midnight Kiss, and so on. Any sci-fi fan will especially remember her, as I do...

...as Dr. Duprey, one of Gene Barry's

scientific colleagues in George Pal's The

War of the Worlds (shown here with

Sandro Giglio as Dr. Bilderbeck,

seeking refuge in a church during

the destruction of L.A.).

There are a few more familiar names and faces -- comedian Joe Frisco, character actors Montagu Love, Franklin Pangborn and Henry B. Walthall -- but they're not plentiful. For the most part, what the entertainers in this collection have in common more than anything else is their utter and absolute obscurity, then and now.

Who are these people? Some of them seem to have based their act on the premise that they have no talent whatsoever. Like Jack Born and Elmer Lawrence here, using floppy shoes, a Jew's harp, and a sad-sack dead-pan delivery in a vain effort to make themselves (and their jokes) funnier than they are. Did they ever really connect with an audience? We can't know because the audience is, by and large, as gone as they are. Nothing ages like comedy, which is why when we find someone who's still funny -- a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Groucho Marx, even a Moe or Curly Howard -- it tells us something. All we know for sure about Born and Lawrence is that they're not funny now. (Neither, for example, is one Charles "Slim" Timblin, dolled up as a blackface preacher in Revival Day [1930]. Here we have confirmation that at least some people at the time weren't amused: Sitting in Rev. Timblin's congregation are a number of bona fide African Americans, and they don't think he's funny; rather, they look sullen and disgusted at the thought of what they must put up with for -- what, a measly five bucks a day?)

For some reason, during this young lady's nine-minute Cycle of Songs ('28) I had something of an epiphany. Her name is Florence Brady, and she's just one of literally dozens of people in Vitaphone Varieties whom I, who have been studying vaudeville history for nearly 40 years, have never heard of. She's nothing particularly special, but she's not bad; she has pep and a nice voice, and she presents herself well to a camera that is not entirely hostile (she's like a young Rosie O'Donnell who can sing, and without the overweening anger). But I wondered: Did she make this short (and one other earlier in the year) because she was a name in vaudeville, or because she hoped to become a name in vaudeville?

Thousands of vaudevillians were thrown out of work when the two-a-day went belly-up, done in by the one-two punch of talkies and commercial radio. Some of them -- the smart, the quick and the lucky, the Frank Orths and Ann Codees, the William Demarests and Jack Bennys and George Burnses and Bob Hopes -- rolled with it and found work where the new money was. But for every one of them, there must have been many who struggled to sell themselves in a drying-up market until it was too late, then wound up teaching school or clerking in a bank or selling candy at Woolworth's -- and counted themselves lucky to get that. Maybe Florence Brady was one of those, along with Slim Timblin and Born and Lawrence, and Oklahoma Bob Albright, Carlena Diamond, Harpist Supreme, and Frank Whitman That Surprising Fiddler.

Or maybe not. Maybe these shorts aren't really acts but auditions -- a gig in a novelty medium, the Vitaphone short, that they hoped would get them some attention and a season's contract with Alexander Pantages or B.F. Keith. Even as late as 1930 only the farsighted could see that vaudeville was dying -- it had been around for over half a century, after all -- so it could have looked like a smart career move in a competitive biz. (They just didn't know how competitive it was about to become.) Unless somebody out there remembers these people (and surely somebody might) and fills us in, I guess we'll never know.

A recent 16mm acquisition confirms that these kinds of auditions didn't die with vaudeville -- and, not incidentally, restores my faith in Warner Bros. shorts, so badly shaken by Vitaphone Varieties. It's Toyland Casino from 1938, another Vitaphone short (although by this time, of course, "Vitaphone" was an in-name-only thing). The premise is short and simple -- a bunch of pesky kids annoy a hotel manager with their playing around in the lobby, so they compromise by having the kids stage a night club revue to entertain the guests. The picture gets that out of the way in a quick 45 seconds or so; the rest of the 20 minutes is devoted to song, dance, or both from every kid Warner Bros. could find who wanted -- or whose parents wanted them -- to become the next Shirley Temple or Jackie Cooper. The kids give it their best respective shots, with varying degrees of success, but for most of them there would be this one short and then -- at least according to the IMDb -- nothing more.

But not all. Take five-year-old Francine

Lassman, for example. Born Abigail

Francine, she dropped the first name

for this appearance -- where she looks

and sounds like Our Gang's Darla Hood,

singing "Five and Ten Cent Soldiers on
Parade" before a phalanx of tap-dancing
kids in satin uniforms -- and for childhood

appearances on radio. In time, though,

she would drop "Francine" and rework

"Abigail Lassman" to become...

Abbe Lane, the sultry songstress and

wife (1952-64) of bandleader Xavier

Cugat. Lane once boasted that she was

considered "too sexy for Italy" -- hard

to imagine unless you've seen pictures

like this.

Then there's 13-year-old Bobby Hastings. He shows up in 19th century garb a la Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott singing "In the Gloaming" with a sweet old-fashioned lilt. Hastings would go on to a pretty amazing run. He shortened his name to "Bob" and in the late 1940s played teen comics hero Archie Andrews on radio. There followed a long career as a journeyman actor in which he appeared in an astonishing range of TV series in the 1950s, '60s, '70s and '80s: The Phil Silvers Show, The Untouchables, The Donna Reed Show, Ben Casey, Dennis the Menace, The Twilight Zone, Emergency, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, All in the Family, General Hospital, Lou Grant, The Dukes of Hazzard -- you name it. If you remember the original McHale's Navy, you might recognize him...

...as Lt. Elroy Carpenter, perennial suck-up to Joe Flynn's Capt. Binghamton.

I'm pleased to report that both Abbe Lane and Bob Hastings are still with us, 78 and 86 respectively at this writing. Continued good health to them both.

Right about the two-thirds mark Toyland Casino pops a real surprise -- the Moylan Sisters, Peggy Joan (6) and Marianne (8), ride out on carousel horses and sing a close-harmony version of "My Little Buckaroo" that ties the whole short up in a ribbon and sets it in our laps. They sing with the sort of joined-at-the-hip sibling harmony that would later distinguish the Everly Brothers (without the rock-n-roll, of course). There are quite a few talented kids in Toyland Casino, but the Moylans are stars -- and they know it. The other kids are doing their best to sell themselves, but Peggy Joan and Marianne are already beyond that -- they're selling the song.

The Moylan Sisters made it to stardom for a while, but not in movies (they made only four shorts like this one). Starting in 1939 they had their own 15-minute radio show Sunday afternoons on the NBC Blue Network. They continued at it through World War II and dropped out of show-biz about 1951. You can learn more, and hear samples of their singing, here. I understand that Marianne passed away in the early 1990s, but as far as I've been able to learn, Peggy Joan is still with us. If so, and if she reads this, I'd be delighted to hear from her.

I'm going to close with a real treat. Of all the auditions for immortality in Vitaphone Varieties and Toyland Casino, I think the Moylan Sisters deserved the best shot at it, so here's a YouTube clip of their rendition of "My Little Buckaroo". The song was written by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl for Warner Bros.' 1937 The Cherokee Strip, where it was introduced by Dick Foran. It was a huge hit on record for Bing Crosby, and was covered by just about every singing cowboy from San Antonio to Gower Gulch. But I don't think the song ever got a better performance than it does here from these two little grade-schoolers from Sag Harbor, Long Island. (If M.K. Jerome's grandson R.J. happens to read this post, I'd be interested to hear his take.)

Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal

2011-05-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There's a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars -- Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell -- then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.

Alias Nick Beal is another "supernatural noir", the subgenre I mentioned in my post on Night Has a Thousand Eyes. It may be the only other example. Of all the movies with supernatural plots, I can't think of any but those two that dressed their stories so fully in the trappings of film noir. (If you know of any, please speak up; I'll gladly kick myself for not having thought of them first.)

Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a
Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow,
writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre
Bohem -- so close, in fact (the pictures
were released less than five months apart),
that I have to believe Beal was being prepared
while Night was shooting, and being shot while
Night was being readied for release. Without
access to Paramount's detailed records I can't
confirm that, but the two movies are simply
too close a match, variations on a theme of
frail little humans trapped in a web of which
they can see only the dark and shadowy outline.
The difference between them -- the variation --
is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of
sinister and mysterious forces beyond our
understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister
mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has
a name -- most of us were raised on childhood
tales of it -- but as adults, our belief in our own
sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully
refuse to see it until it's too late.

The screenplay for Alias Nick Beal was by Jonathan Latimer, from an original story by Mindret Lord. Lord's name isn't a familiar one even to movie-trivia buffs; he is sometimes misidentified as "Mildred". In fact, he was born Mindred Loeb in Chicago in 1903. His early years haven't left much trace in the permanent record, but by the late 1920s he was an aspiring writer and had embarked on a long affair with the opera singer Marguerite Namara, 15 years his senior.

In 1934 Lord met an old flame of Namara's, tenor Hardesty Johnson, and his wife Isabel, daughter of Hamlin Garland, a popular early-20th century writer whose fame would pretty much die with him in 1940. Isabel had ambitions to be a writer like her father, so she and Lord had something in common; by this time he had begun selling stories to the pulps, detective fiction to magazines like Black Mask and tales of horror and the supernatural to Weird Tales and the like ("pot boiling" he called it), and he mentored Isabel on her own writing. They began an affair that eventually finished off his liaison with Marguerite and her marriage to Hardesty. Lord and Isabel were married on December 21, 1936.

Mindret and Isabel collaborated (as "Garland Lord") on several mystery novels while he continued to boil pots for the pulps; he never really broke into the "slicks", as they were called, though he did eventually get four short-short stories (fictional anecdotes, really) into The New Yorker in 1942 and '43. By then he had contributed some sketches to New Faces of 1936 on Broadway, done some script doctoring for a wealthy Park Avenue wannabe-playwright, and picked up work writing for sundry radio series.

This got him a foothold in Hollywood (sort of), writing for independent producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy's younger, far less talented brother), who released his movies through Poverty Row's Republic Pictures. Lord began drinking heavily, his marriage fell apart, he had an affair -- though in what order, and which caused what, is anybody's guess. In 1948 and '49 he sold two stories to Paramount which became The Sainted Sisters and Nick Beal respectively. He wrote for a few second-string syndicated series in the early years of television, one last C-picture for Wilder, and finally, the script for The Virgin Queen (1955) with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and Richard Todd as Sir Walter Raleigh. Near the end of that year, Lord committed suicide at 52. It's not hard to imagine why -- his writing career had never really gone anywhere, and he died one day after what would have been his wedding anniversary -- but if anybody knows the real reason, or even how he did it, they didn't leave the information lying around where I could find it.

Jonathan Latimer, who turned Lord's story for Beal

into a screenplay, was also born in Chicago and wrote

for the detective pulps in the '30s, but he was another

case entirely -- a more successful career, a longer life,

and death from natural causes at 76 in 1983. Latimer

started out as a crime reporter for the Chicago Herald

Examiner -- and later for the Tribune -- where he

became personally acquainted with Al Capone,

Bugs Moran, and other Chicago underworld

celebrities. In the mid-'30s he turned to fiction

with a series of hardboiled, semi-comic

mysteries featuring private eye Bill Crane.

Latimer branched out into non-crime fiction and non-series mysteries. One of the latter, Solomon's Vineyard (1941) was so violent and sexy it came out only in England; it wasn't published in the U.S. until 1950 (as The Fifth Grave), and then it was heavily expurgated (Latimer's original text finally appeared in the States in 1982). It's a good solid mystery that doesn't waste a word, but it is violent, with at least a dozen killings (only about half of them offstage), and a surprising amount of hot and kinky sex, especially for 1941. It also has one of the greatest I-dare-you-to-stop-reading opening lines in the history of pulp fiction: "From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed."

At a time when The Thin Man had spearheaded a vogue for comedy/mysteries, Universal bought three of Latimer's Bill Crane books for a short-lived series starring Preston Foster: The Westland Case (from Headed for a Hearse) in 1937 and two more the following year, The Lady in the Morgue and The Last Warning (from The Dead Don't Care). Those scripts were written by others, but in 1940 Latimer tried his own hand at screenwriting, first contributing the story for Phantom Raiders (with Walter Pidgeon as detective Nick Carter), then in 1941 co-writing the script for Topper Returns.

Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won't Believe Me ('47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock ('48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes -- then, in '49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men's resumes -- there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.

Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland's one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason -- that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-'60s TV. Latimer's last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.

Alias Nick Beal is arguably the best thing Jonathan Latimer ever wrote, and it's certainly the absolute pinnacle of Mindret Lord's rather lackluster career. It takes place in an unnamed big city, one that closely resembles Lord and Latimer's native Chicago: corrupt, crime-ridden, and ruled by oily political boss Frankie Faulkner (Fred Clark), so secure and arrogant that he doesn't even bother to conceal his scheming or veil his threats.

However, Faulkner may have met his match in district attorney Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), a paragon of legal rectitude and civic virtue -- in his spare time he helps his friend Rev. Garfield (George Macready) manage an after-school recreation program for boys at risk of delinquency -- who is prosecuting Faulkner's underling Hanson on corruption and racketeering charges, hoping to bring down Faulkner's organization brick by brick. But Faulkner isn't that easily dismantled; through crocodile tears he informs the prosecutor that Hanson's books, which Foster had subpoenaed only that morning, were destroyed in a fire the night before. Foster is stymied, checkmated; he had been careful to make it appear that he wouldn't seek the books, then had sprung his subpoena at the last moment, just to forestall something like this. But Faulkner was a step ahead of him. Foster's got to nail Hanson if he wants to clean up the city, and there's nothing he won't do to get him.

That's when Foster receives a cryptic summons to a dingy dive down by the waterfront: "If you want to nail Hanson, drop around the China Coast at eight tonight." The man he meets that night (Ray Milland) is clean-shaven and dapper, impeccably groomed and dressed, cutting a figure entirely at odds with the sqalid little tavern where Foster finds him. His card reads simply: "Nicholas Beal, Agent". "Agent for what?" asks Foster. Beal grins slightly. "That depends. Possibly for you."

Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning -- Hanson's books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can't take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here's your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn't speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrent tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.

Foster decides. He tucks the books under his arm, puts out the light, and makes his way out of the cannery by the beam of a flashlight Beal left behind. In the pitch dark of the outer room, his light startles a rat on a shelf. The rat sqeaks plaintively and stares at Foster, eye to eye. We can almost read the rat's mind, as clearly as if he were speaking: Welcome to my world.

Foster gets his conviction and becomes a hero in the press.
He's still vaguely troubled about his hocus-pocus with the
warrant, but shrugs it off. Still, Beal isn't finished with him.
No sooner do representatives of the state's Independent
Party arrive, asking if Foster will allow his name to be placed
in nomination for governor, than Beal shows up in his study to collect for services already rendered. But what seems like a sly
piece of blackmail takes an odd turn when Beal offers to
contribute to his political campaign; he already knows about
the overtures from the Independent Party ("I hear things.").

That night, on the foggy boardwalk outside the China Coast, Beal takes the next step in whatever scheme he has afoot. A down-and-out slattern (Audrey Totter) gives him a come-on, but is taken aback when he knows her name, Donna Allen. He knows her history, too: a couple of years of college, ambitions to be an actress, then seduced and abandoned by an actor she called "Boysey" -- who turned out to be married. They fought, he fell down a flight of stairs. "An accident, they said." How do you know about Boysey, she asks; you a friend of his? "I met him once."

Beal leads her to an expensive penthouse apartment,

smart and stylish but somehow foreboding and

unsettling, with Daliesque frescoes painted on the

walls. It's hers, he says, along with a wardrobe of

silks and sables, diamonds and sapphires. She tries

to bolt, but the delivery boy is at the door, and

everything is just too tempting -- and it all has

her name on it. "What do I gotta do, murder?"

"Just the opposite," says Beal, "reform work.

In a boys' club."

In the next scene Donna has made herself indispensible, organizing the boys' club office and writing large checks for donations -- and coyly flirting with Foster. It's a scene she's played often since her days with Boysey, but usually only for cheap drinks, and never with such lavish sets and costumes. Men are all alike, right? Boysey was married and here's another one; this time she's wised up, and if Beal wants her to tickle his vanity she'll play along. Why should she care?

As time goes on Donna will slowly realize that neither Foster nor Beal is the kind of man she thought he was. Neither she nor Foster can see what we see: that Beal is slowly, carefully drawing his net around them both. Every step, beginning with Foster's compromise on the warrant and Donna's following Beal from the waterfront to that apartment, calls for just a slight stretch of the conscience, a tiny little disregard of misgivings, moving them off true center by degrees they simply don't notice.

We see other things the characters don't. Beal's plans involve conspiracy, duplicity, bribery, double-dealing, seduction and murder. Things come to a head as Beal prepares to spring his trap. He shows up at Donna's apartment, telling her that Foster is on his way after a fight with his wife. Beal tells her how the conversation will go -- what she's to say, what Foster will answer, what she's to say to that. She sneers at the melodrama; who would ever spout those cornball lines? Never mind, he says, just remember your part.

When Foster arrives their talk runs more or less as Beal said it would. Then, hearing her cue and hardly knowing what to expect, Donna segues into the words Beal gave her -- and so does Foster. With growing horror, she tries to stop things, and her words take on a different, more frightening meaning -- but they're still Beal's words! Try as she might, she can't not say what Beal told her to. It's a brilliantly written scene, and brilliantly played by Audrey Totter, the finest five minutes in her career.

Donna Allen becomes the first to sense the truth: Nicholas Beal isn't just some slimy, amoral political operative. He is, in literal fact, the Devil Himself.

I'm not spoiling anything here; this isn't a please-don't-reveal-the-ending mystery. We've tipped to this long before Foster or Donna or Rev. Garfield. Beal knows things before they happen. He can't stand to be touched. He refuses to read from the Bible, or even touch it. He cold-shoulders Rev. Garfield, who can't quite place where he's seen Beal's face before. ("Did anyone ever paint your portrait?" "Yes, Rembrandt in 1655.") The beauty of Alias Nick Beal isn't that Beal's character is revealed to us in a sudden, shocking whoa-didn't-see-that-coming revelation. It's that we can easily believe that the other characters can't see him for what he is. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they see but they do not observe. We're sitting watching a movie, but they're living their lives; after all, this is the 20th century, and things like that just don't happen, do they? But as Rev. Garfield finally says, "Maybe the Devil knows it's the 20th century too, Joseph."

Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he's started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: "It's not Beal, it's me."

Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland's performance, and he's superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don't try to touch him. "I don't like to be touched." He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won't like what happens when you do something he doesn't like. When Beal once flares in anger, it's over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.

Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, but I'm not sure he isn't even better here -- more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He's the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.

Alias Nick Beal is superbly directed, too, by the underrated Farrow,

whose name is more familiar now thanks to his daughter Mia's career

than to his own. He was Australian-born in 1904, naturalized American

in 1947, twice Oscar-nominated (1942 for directing Wake Island; 1956

for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days, which he won). He was also

something of a polymath -- author of plays, novels, short stories, a Tahitian-

English dictionary and biographies of Thomas More and Father Damien.

Besides the Oscar, he was also awarded an honorary Commander of the

British Empire (by Queen Elizabeth II) and a Knighthood of the Grand

Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre (by Pope Pius XI). In Nick

Beal his hand is firm but not heavy, and he doesn't overplay it. Scenes

move sinuously from one to the next (the black fog of the waterfront

becomes the back of Foster's suit as he steps away from the camera

in his study), and the story moves with the slithery grace of a serpent.

Notice too the performances of minor characters -- Donna's maid,

a railroad depot bartender, the grizzled denizens of the China Coast.

Farrow is a director who tends to the details. After all, isn't that

where the Devil is?

The phrase "banality of evil" was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, its persistence. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won't give up; he'll be back, and he's patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert's testimony: "Glory be! I've wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I've pinned his shoulders to the mat..." Beal turns ironically to Foster. "I wonder if he knows it's two falls out of three."