Another Old Movie Blog

Cowboy Canteen - 1944

2012-02-23T07:36:00.000-05:00

“Cowboy Canteen” (1944) is Columbia’s answer to the Warner’s Bros. wartime all-star revues “Hollywood Canteen” and “Stage Door Canteen”. We can have a look at the latter two at another time, as “Cowboy Canteen” really doesn’t compare much.

It’s a short, fun look at cowboy swing in an era when it was just beginning to take off in popular music, but the plot of this movie is paper thin. Charles Starrett, who played in about a zillion B-movies, mostly Westerns, and mostly as guys named “Steve”, is the boss of a ranch. However, he and his sidekick played by Guinn “Big Boy” Williams are off to give Hitler what-for, so they need people to step in and run the ranch for them while they’re in the Army.

A troupe of entertainers takes up the job, including Jane Frazee, Max Terhune as the ventriloquist of the bunch, and Vera Vague (in real life, Barbara Jo Allen), the stock man-chasing comedienne. Look for Dub Taylor as “Cannonball”, a comedy relief character he also played in a zillion B-movies.

Starrett and “Big Boy” are assigned by the C.O. to organize a camp show, so there we are. One funny bit, so brief you miss it if you blink, is when Vera, struggling with her purse and a heavy suitcase, hands a big galoot her luggage. He grabs her purse instead, tucking it under his arm and walking away.

What makes this B-movie fun are a few of the featured acts, including the great Tex Ritter, he of the mournful ballads of A-Westerns, like “High Noon” (1951) and “Trooper Hook” (1957), reviewed here.

The Mills Brothers make an appearance, but they seem a little too polished and classy for this crowd, with “Up a Lazy River” and “Paper Doll”, which were huge hits for them.

I really get a kick out of Roy Acuff, “The King of Country Music”, performing “Wait for the Light to Shine” and “Night Train to Memphis”. The Smoky Mountain Boys and Girls accompany him. Their sound is special, completely genuine, raw and spirited music, free of any Hollywood gloss. Their rollicking hillbilly hymn is a joyous reminder that war or no war, people were still having fun somewhere.

Abraham Lincoln - 1930

2012-02-20T07:33:00.000-05:00

“Abraham Lincoln” (1930) plays out like fragmented memory, in this case the collective memory of a nation’s lore -- but with the unmistakable imprint of its director, D.W. Griffith. As is the case with most movies dealing with history, this film tells us as much or more about the era in which it was filmed rather than the era it depicts.

We celebrate Presidents Day with a look at a figure so wrapped up in folklore that his true nature, thoughts, accomplishments and legacy have been so long diminished in the bright glare of his legend. President Abraham Lincoln, and D. W. Griffith, both.

The movie is rich in folklore and is, like all of Mr. Griffith’s films, a huge project made even bigger by his reverence for the subject. In this case, his reverence is magnanimous considering his own father was a colonel in the Confederate army and Mr. Griffith grew up in an atmosphere of reverence for the Lost Cause. His family heritage and his Southern heritage influences his most famous, or infamous, film, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). Perhaps his film covering the life of Lincoln is an attempt to balance the scales in his tarnished reputation where racial stereotypes and promotion of the then Southern viewpoint are concerned. “Abraham Lincoln” certainly carries an impressive pedigree unique for films of that era -- first, the subject matter; second, the great director who influenced a generation of filmmakers and established the artistry of the flickers; and third, the writer of the screenplay.

This is Stephen Vincent Benet, the poet who only the year before, in 1929, won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem “John Brown’s Body”. Mr. Griffith was careful to add literary legitimacy to the movie, which was to be his first sound film.

Most interesting about “Abraham Lincoln” is not its subject matter or artistic cache, but that it is filmed like a silent movie. In view of this, it’s even more ironic that, due to scenes or sound tracks being missing, in the new restoration of this film, the opening scene has no sound. The restoration team added subtitles to give us the dialogue. There are a couple of other scenes in the movie where this also occurs. Therefore, when the film starts, we are on familiar ground with D.W. Griffith, settling into his usual brand of storytelling. When the restored sound finally begins some minutes into the film, it comes almost as a jolt.

As much of a jolt as the sound era was to prove to Mr. Griffith’s artistic sensibilities and his career.

Griffith added sound to his film, but seemed to do little else to adapt to the new era in filmmaking. His scenes are sketched out as historical vignettes, almost tableau at times. His actors, not allowing for the intimacy that sound movies would create between the actors and the audience, are still mouthing starch-stiff platitudes and over-emoting, at times veering into the old pantomime style. Griffith apparently did not discourage them from this because he knew no other way.

Walter Huston plays Abraham Lincoln, and for most part does quite well. He is a strong actor, looks like Lincoln, and is particularly impressive in showing how Lincoln ages through the years, in appearance and manner. At first we see him a robust frontier youth, “wrassling” in a tavern and courting Ann Rutledge (where his lip makeup could be toned down a little. Too much silent movie image here. Heck, too much Pola Negri here.), and through the years, his grief and his burdens age him prematurely. As, unfortunately, they do most Presidents.

Una Merkel has her first major role in films as Ann Rutledge. We’re used to seeing her as the wisecracking sidekick of the Great Depression, so this is an interesting turn for her in her brief scenes as Lincoln’s first love. Her death scene is melodramatic, but again, that is D. W. Griffith’s sensibilities at work here. For more on Una Merkel's hometown tribute, have a look at this previous post.

Kay Hammond is good as Mary Todd, and Ian Keith plays a very over-the-top John Wilkes Booth, but anytime we see him on film he is over-the-top. He is always the frustrated actor-as-assassin. Have a look here for John Derek as Booth in this previous post on "The Prince of Players".

Lincoln has his archetype, too. He is Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, the rail-splitter, the frontier lawyer who entertains his audience and exacerbates his opponents with homespun witticisms. Griffith makes a valiant attempt to cover pretty much all of his life, which may have been too much to bite off. We see that Mr. Griffith, typical of his generation and of that era, is of the school that history is the product of great men. His Lincoln is the old-time schoolroom copybook saint. Lincoln was not seen this way even in 1865 at the time of his murder. By 1909 we had a penny stamped with his likeness and grand temple of a monument, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1922, only eight years before this movie was made.

These days we are more apt to pay less attention to great men of history in favor of the average fellow, who may not have made history but certainly got in the way. Perhaps this makes us uneasy these days producing films about historic figures, to the point where so-called revisionist history endeavors to bury old folklore. Neither method of biography is perfect, but the pendulum swings back and forth in fashion, as it will.

D.W. Griffith was meticulous in his settings, his reenactment of the assassination in Ford’s Theater, just as he did with “The Birth of a Nation”, is as realistic as we know the event to be. This being a sound film, we also get to hear the lines from the play “Our American Cousin” that Lincoln was watching from his box. Remarkably, it lends an eeriness to the scene, another layer to the tragedy to come that could not be portrayed in a silent film.

This is not to say that all his historical facts in this movie are always right on the button; they’re not. They’re not too hard to pick out, either, so I won’t bother.

Although, I must say, the actors look the part. One of my favorite things about watching historical films is to see if the actors look like the real-life people they are portraying. This film does that pretty well, from General Ulysses S. Grant, to General Winfield Scott. General Robert E. Lee is close enough. I was surprised at Booth’s fellow conspirators -- one actor looks very much like George Atzerodt.

As regards Mr. Griffith’s expunging his reputation for using racial stereotypes, his success here is a mixed bag. The opening scenes, those silent ones mentioned earlier, take place on a slave ship where we see the misery of the slaves in chains below decks. They appear to be played by African-Americans in a realistic setting with a sympathetic message.

However, much later on in the film there is a scene where a group of white Southerners, John Wilkes Booth among them, gather to express their shock over John Brown’s capture of the Harper’s Ferry arsenal and his intended revolt. A single black man among them affirms that he wants no part of John Brown’s raid, and says he threw away the gun he was given. He is a “good” black. He is also a white man wearing blackface makeup.

Mr. Griffith was evidently not able to take one step forward without taking two steps back.

But, Abraham Lincoln fares well in his hands. He is given his due as a great man of history, and at his passing, the movie ends with a chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and then a very moving, if artificial-looking, camera pan across the woodland childhood home, the log cabin model, and then to another set designer’s model of the Lincoln Memorial. These are the bookends to his life, the log cabin and the classical shrine.

D. W. Griffith made only one more movie after this, a financial flop, and then he retired from filmmaking still only in his mid-fifties. Hollywood had finished with him. One can see why the great stories of ages past appealed to Mr. Griffith. They brought comfort to him, and do to many for whom the present is an even greater struggle.

What made Abraham Lincoln one of our greatest Presidents, I think, was his present-mindedness. He did not lean too heavily on the past as a crutch. Nor did he fear the future, except perhaps for the famous premonitions of his own tragic end.

“Abraham Lincoln” is now in the public domain. You can see the movie here in its entirety on YouTube.

Sing and Like It - 1934

2012-02-16T08:19:00.000-05:00

“Sing and Like It” (1934) is one of the best examples of parody in an era probably remembered more for melodrama, serious social commentary, gangster flicks, and the beginning of the Production Code. A few Busby Berkeley chorus numbers may have turned our heads with either suggestiveness or silliness, but most movies of the day were products of an industry that took itself pretty seriously. In “Sing and Like It”, we see a movie of unexpected sophistication in the way it gently mocks the movies’ most treasured lead characters.

The wonderful Zasu Pitts heads the cast of players all who parody some type or other. Directed by William A. Seiter, the movie blends a gangster theme with the world of theater, tackled with tongue-in-cheek silliness. It is not the kind of very demonstrative humor that tries too hard to be funny, not screwball or slapstick (although there are some elements of this as well). It’s wry rather than witty, personified in the way Zasu Pitts plays her role, Annie Snodgrass, a bank teller who, after work is the leading lady of the Union Bank Little Theater Players.

She of the Olive Oyl demeanor takes herself utterly seriously. She casts her large eyes to the heavens, wrings her fluttery hands, and declares her passion for the art of acting.

“No woman that has known the triumph that I knew when I played Lady Windermere’s Fan in the Fall River High School Senior Play can ever get theatre out of her blood.”

First of all, what a choice for a high school play.

Zasu is self-absorbed in a way that is more serene than obnoxious. No one can puncture her dream world or rattle her self confidence. She is sweet, and pathetic, blissfully unaware of how untalented she is, and we love her for it, perhaps even envying her peace of mind.

John Qualen, that terrific character actor we once discussed here, plays her shy, but devoted fiancé. He wants to take her away from the sordidness of life as an actress in the Union Bank Little Theater Players (I love that name). He plans a quiet life growing tomatoes.

But, she must see her dream through, first. She gets help from an unlikely source.

Nat Pendleton plays a mobster, who is about to rob the said Union Bank with his gang, which includes the cigar-chomping sarcastic Ned Sparks. Sparks also serves as Pendleton’s interpreter when the less than eloquent mob boss needs an explanation. “He says ‘Nerts!’”

Just as they are about to blow the vault in the bank, they hear rehearsal going on, and Zasu singing her song about mother love. She gives it her all in that anemic manner (and sings the song several times in the movie, so you’ll have it down pat by the end).

Pendleton listens, and tears form in his eyes and roll down his mobster cheeks. Da song is jus’ be-oo-ti-ful.

He decides the world must hear this voice and this song. He threatens theatrical producer Edward Everett Horton to put Zasu in the lead of his newest production. Or else.

Mr. Horton is not his usual squirming, befuddled and helpless creature here. He’s fed up, angry, and barks at people. He is used to being in control. A theatrical producer with numerous photos of stars on his office wall, but a photo of himself on his desk.

Meanwhile, Pendleton’s moll, played by Pert Kelton, also has designs on the stage, but he refuses to allow her a career. He places Zasu in her care, and the jealous Miss Kelton would like to scratch her eyes out for getting the opportunity she wants.

If you’ve only seen an older Pert Kelton in “The Music Man” as the Widow Paroo, tossing around her lusty Irish accent while little lisping Ronny Howard spits at her, you may find her sexy, other-side-of-the-tracks routine here as quite a shock. And funny as heck.

She tosses verbal hand grenades to Zasu, but is ineffectual against the protective wall of Zasu’s own marvelous stupidity. Zasu imagines that Pert is jealous of her beauty and talent, fearful of having the gangster boyfriend lured away. Zasu is a parody of the worldly actress.

“If I were an ordinary woman, I wouldn’t come between you, but I am an actress and I must…I’ll try not to lead him so far away that he cannot find his way home. Try not to hate me too much.”

Pert sees the only way to communicate with Zasu is to join her in her fantasyland. She delivers the capitulation Zasu expects in a flat voice and a kind of sarcasm Zasu will never understand, “You’re a voluptuous siren and an artist, but deep underneath somewhere, I know there’s a good woman. Yes, Annie, I understand.”

This movie must have been such fun to do. There are a lot of very wry, funny lines, a little racy here and there, and bits of business, that it takes at least a couple of viewings to catch it all.

Pert Kelton gets herself appointed Zasu’s understudy, and of course tries to do her in, finally resulting to kidnapping. John Qualen is a faithful, stubborn, swain, and Pendleton has a heart underneath the gun in his inside coat pocket.

To ensure his leading lady is a success (in a play that has been rewritten by one of his goons who thinks he’s funny), Pendleton has his boys threaten the town’s leading theatre critic with a gun during the performance, making him laugh in all the right places.

Except for Zasu’s mother song, which leaves the gangster sobbing once again.

When the performance is over and Zasu is the toast of the town, she feels obligated to the gangster, and as perfunctorily as if she were paying a bill announces to the mobster, “Come take me, I am yours.”

He is shocked in a rather Puritan, un-gangster-like way. “I ain’t that kind of heel. What I done was for art!”

Some cute bits include Pendleton’s complaining of Pert Kelton always chewing gum and leaving her old gum stuck all over the place. Once she kisses him and he is startled to find her gum transferred to his mouth. At the end of the film when he makes up with her (after a couple of un-PC but very funny black eyes he has given her), he takes out a stick of gum, breaks it in half for them to share. He pops hers into her mouth.

They’re all having fun with “types”, teasing the way the movie industry usually presented these types. Good parody always has a ring of truth to it.

It is purely a matter of coincidence, I’m sure, that Miss Pitts’ character’s home town of Fall River (Massachusetts), established its own little theater two years after this movie was made, in 1936. The Little Theater of Fall River is still going strong, even without the help of Zasu’s warbling of “Your Mother”.

Romance at the Drugstore

2012-02-13T08:44:00.000-05:00

In a nod to Valentine's Day tomorrow, we pay tribute to that most romantic location...the drugstore.

Oh, my, how we've seen time and again that first flush of passion amid the nostrums and patent medicine, and comic books, and tuna melt sandwiches at the lunch counter.

Only recently we were witness to the lusty scene of forbidden love over the costmetics counter in Richard Basehart's drugstore in "Tension" (1949). Here, in that sexy white coat, he woos Cyd Charisse with acne cream. Or something.

Dana Andrews, again in that sexy white coat, which is bona fide chick magnet, seduces Teresa Wright in the drugstore with perfume in "The Best Years of our Lives" (1946).

Even the very young are not immune to the romance of the drugstore. Puberty strikes young George Bailey and young Mary Hatch pretty hard in "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946).

She whispers into his deaf ear as he prepares a sundae for her, "I"ll love you 'til the day I die." Garbo never uttered more sultry words.

The drugstore is a place not only for romance, but for romantic rivalries. No nightclub was ever so rife with players in the game of love.

Makes you want to slip out for some Vick's Vap-O-Rub or disposable razors, doesn't it? Better doll up a little. You never know what chance meeting may occur in the prostetics aisle to change your life.

Happy Valentine's Day.

This Happy Feeling - 1958

2012-02-09T07:28:00.000-05:00

“This Happy Feeling” (1958) is a slight comedy, but viewed from a certain perspective, reflects a watershed in the careers of some its cast. The most curious aspect of a screen actor’s career must be that weird immortality granted by one’s image preserved on film. As much a curse as it is a blessing: most actors have a film or two they’d like to forget. Would they look back in hindsight upon this pleasant, though weak film with a sense of wonderment about what happened next in their careers and their lives?

The answer to Monday’s picture trivia about the trio taking the stage bow are: Troy Donahue, Curt Jürgens, and Alexis Smith. This curtain call happens at the end of the movie.

The movie may be slight, but this post is still going to be long. You should have left in the first paragraph. Now it would be just too socially awkward to leave.

Curt Jürgens and Alexis Smith are veterans of the New York stage, and casual lovers. We begin with Mr. Jürgens meeting Miss Smith for lunch at a fashionable New York City restaurant, where he spies young Mr. Donahue, an up and coming actor, mobbed by fans. This sets up the simple message of the film: a generation gap. The old usurped by the young, both professionally in the theatre at this time, and personally.

Mr. Jürgens has given up the stage for a quieter life breeding horses on his Connecticut farm, much to the consternation of Alexis Smith and agent Hayden Rorke. Rorke began his film career, as more than a few men of his generation did, as an extra in “This Is the Army” -- have a look at this previous post. You may remember him as the Colonel in “I Dream of Jeannie” on TV in the late 1960s.

Rorke and Miss Smith try to entice Jürgens with new play in which he will portray Troy Donahue’s father. Talk about salt on a wound.

Rorke and Smith down their cocktails anxiously when Jürgens asks about his part in the play.

Debbie Reynolds is the star of the movie. Even so, and even with the company of Troy Donahue and a very handsome (and very natural actor) John Saxon, the generation gap of this movie is told mainly through the viewpoint of Curt Jürgens, which is unexpected, considering this is a Debbie Reynolds vehicle. He is at times curmudgeonly, at times displays a more virile screen image than the younger men. He has some very intelligent lines to say about the matter of aging.

I also find the presence of Alexis Smith, and Mary Astor as John Saxon’s mother, punctuates the generation gap message in this movie in ways that went far beyond the script, and I think, the intention of the director. The four principal ladies of “This Happy Feeling” tell a lot about Hollywood and the aging process. More about that later.

The director, and writer of the screenplay, is Blake Edwards, long before his fame from the series of “Pink Panther” movies. He’s given us a script (based on a stage play) that has many good lines, but some conflict happens off screen, which only weakens the story, and there are many moments where dramatic intensity builds only to fizzle out. They refer to “Carol” the playwright, but we never meet her. There are also a lot of one-sided phone conversations, which can be a problem. The movie was shot in CinemaScope. Some nice angles, but also some sloppy shots with actors obstructed by table lamps. Few closeups, which is maddening. Closeups didn't always look good in CinemaScope.

In this shot, you see Alexis Smith and Mary Astor seated at a café table outdoors, and the center of our attention is the pole between them holding up the umbrella. A composition problem not entirely due to pan and scan -- though the print I’ve seen, and these screen caps, are from a “pan and scan”, and that really does account for some of the awkward images, obviously not the director’s or cinematographer’s fault. I’d like to see what it looks like reissued in letterbox. Don’t know if that will ever happen. I don’t think it’s on DVD.

I think CinemaScope was more wide perspective than we needed for a movie that takes place mostly in bedrooms.

Speaking of bedrooms, this movie seems like one big pajama party. Curt in his jammies.

Debbie in Curt’s jammies (see our post here on Women in Men’s Jammies).

John Saxon talking on the phone in his own jammies.

Debbie in her own jammies, later on a nightgown.

Okay. Enough stalling. Here’s the plot. (“Now with 10% more spoilers!”)

Debbie, a receptionist for a dentist, is taken to a house party by her boss, played by Joe Flynn. (Like Hayden Rorke noted above, a 1960s TV military man -- you probably best remember him as Captain Binghamton on “McHale’s Navy”.) He’s had too much to drink and starts to paw her in the library. This is one of those movie sets where a living room looks as large as a museum gallery.

John Saxon, a strapping lad, is also a guest at this party. He lives down the street. He comes to Debbie’s rescue when she asks him to drive her to the train station so she can go back home to Brooklyn.

I like how he refers to the train not as “the train”, but as “The Hartford, New Haven and New York”. Grand old railroad. You see the logo on the side of the passenger car in another scene when Curt Jürgens takes her to the train. This part, at least, must have been filmed in Connecticut.

It is pouring rain, and when Saxon suggests she get out of her wet clothes, she goes berserk, jumps out of the car, runs around screaming, falls in a brook, and ends up a couple doors down at Curt Jürgens’ place.

“You are staining my beautiful carpet as no dog would dare to stain it!” He also suggests she get out of her wet clothes, and she goes berserk some more. Eventually, she is calmed by brandy, and spends the night in his guest room.

He invites her to become his secretary and live here at his horse farm. Her living at the farm is the talk of the neighborhood. We are told. We never actually see scenes of malicious gossip, so it doesn’t really have as much punch as it should. Debbie Reynolds begins the movie in such a shrill, overly dramatic way that she seems only annoying and we lose sympathy for her. She has to fight to get it back, but since the generation gap story is told from Jürgens’ viewpoint, he really becomes more sympathetic than she.

Jürgens and Saxon, who are neighbors, have a nice father-son relationship that becomes adversarial when they both pursue Miss Reynolds.

Continually hammered at both as an actor and as a man about his age, he begins to consider the idea of the pretty, young Miss Reynolds as a romantic partner. She has a crush on him, so it wouldn’t take much to woo her. However, at the 11th hour, Curt decides that the whole thing is inappropriate, and he discourages her from any romantic notions with a cute scene wherein he recites lines from a play he has done. She has no idea that his “goodbye” is a well-rehearsed performance.

So pleased with his success, after he leaves her he takes a ceremonious actor’s bow, and seems to hear applause in his imagination. We want to pat him on the back, too.

He decides to return to the theatre and play Troy Donahue’s father. That he leaves Debbie Reynolds to John Saxon and goes back to the worldly Alexis Smith is probably the best thing about this movie. So many films of the late 1950s give us the rather icky scenario of aging Hollywood actors paired with ingénues, and it seems for a while it’s going to happen again here. A pleasant surprise.

A few good scenes:

When Curt Jürgens dismisses the new generation Method actors, he spits invective, “I just don’t dig it.”

He complains, “The theatre has changed…This is the age of dirty T-shirts and motorcycle jackets. It’s a whole new breed of cat. An entirely new set of requirements. If you don’t know Method or the intricacies of a new role, psycho-schizoid personality, and how to mumble, slouch, and pick your nose, you haven’t got a chance.”

(I’ve long wanted to do a post on actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age working in 1960s films, but I’m still gathering suspects. Maybe later on this year.)

Estelle Winwood plays Mr. Jürgens’ housekeeper, who wanders around slightly intoxicated, cigarette dangling from her mouth. A seagull, which she has mistakenly shot, follows her around with slavish devotion. He frequently eavesdrops on the conversations of the other actors.

Lots of pretty stuff to look at. Cocktail parties with squared-off handkerchiefs in the breast pocket. Smoking jackets, and breakfast on the terrace. A black tie country club dance. (Where one of those Connecticut clubwomen who talks between clenched teeth in that supposedly upper crust manner compliments Jürgens’ rhumba as “wicked”. Good Massachusetts girl than I am, I must correct this line. It should be “wicked good”.)

A running gag on Jürgens throwing out his back. Miss Winwood vigorously employs some torturous chiropractic maneuvers to cure him (while he is in his jammies), which leads to a reference to the Mau Mau Rebellion going on in Kenya at that time. I was pleased, as I always am, to find a topical reference in the movie -- but I was disappointed they did not cut to a shot of the Mau Mau rebels talking on telephones, wearing Curt Jürgens’ pajamas. Felt like I was led down the garden path on that one.

Jürgens’ home, even though placed in Connecticut does not, for once, look like a Hollywood version of a cutesy “colonial farmhouse.” There are some equestrian trophies around the place, but it’s mostly modern furnishings and architecture. It looks like a 1960s TV sitcom home. I love his great, big, burgundy convertible. Anybody know what model car this is? John Saxon calls it a “$10,000 buggy.”

A good shot is when Alexis Smith opens the door to leave Jürgens’ house, and the seagull pops in. I wonder how many times this had to be done in order for her to say her line “On a day like this, why aren’t you at the beach?” while he waddles around her and hits his mark directly in the foreground. Good timing. Pros, both of them.

As they await their curtain call, Alexis Smith invites Jürgens to a private “bacchanalia” at her apartment after the show. He accepts with a pat to her bum just as the curtain opens. Then they become different people, both more humble and more superior, taking their bows with all the dignity due to an actor on stage. Even Estelle Winwood instantly assumes that pretend dignity when taking a bow -- caught onstage trying to retrieve her wandering gull.

Now to the real-life generation gap, though perhaps not a gap as much as a series of cracks that eventually swallows careers. Unless one can leap over them.

According to the American Film Institute website, this movie was shot from September to November 1957, released in June 1958. Debbie Reynolds was pregnant during the filming, her son born February 1958. One may assume it was a good time for her, a new baby, a flourishing film career, her song “Tammy” from the film of the year before, “Tammy and the Bachelor” soared up the charts as the number one hit.

By the end of 1958, however, she and her husband, Eddie Fisher would separate. They divorced the next year over his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, all conducted in a most painfully public manner.

She had played ingénues for years. Twenty-five at the time of this movie, she was probably too old to continue convincing us of her innocence. In the movie, she coyly asks Jürgens to guess her age. He needles her by suggesting she is 30, or 32.

“It’s a lie!” she bristles. Kiss of death, to be sure.

"Seems odd to note that Debbie Reynolds in 'This Happy Feeling" will be supported by such veteran actresses as Mary Astor, Alexis Smith and Estelle Winwood..." wrote columnist Danton Walker just before the film's release (Reading Eagle April 11, 1958).

Alexis Smith, some 11 years her senior, but still only 36 during “This Happy Feeling”, is plunged prematurely into that awkward abyss between starring roles and character roles. However, as was typical with Miss Smith, she outshines the lead, and makes her handful of minutes in this movie count. When Debbie Reynolds becomes smitten with Curt, Alexis assumes the jealous other woman part, but her jealously is tinged with bemusement. Her sexuality is adult, and classy. She is more playful than competitive, and always far more riveting.

She has a brief scene on the phone, talking to Jürgens (not the Mau Mau rebels, dang). She tries to entice him to come to her apartment.

“I built a fire and I’m sort of glowing,” a purr wrapped around a giggle, lying on throw pillows strewn before the fireplace. She’s a volcano in color-coordinated chiffon neck scarves. Ice princess? I should say not.

Another scene where she meets Debbie for the first time: Debbie, in Jürgens’ pajamas (of course), is greeted archly, with suspicion by Alexis, seated on the couch. When the interaction between them becomes more prickly, Alexis stands, unfolding herself to her full height, towering over the petite Miss Reynolds.

It’s a comical image, (I wonder if more funny than the director intended?) but though Debbie looks her usual adorable self in oversized pajamas, striving for dignity among these sarcastic theatre types, she really loses out in the contest. Alexis, just by standing up, looks superior, emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Positioned between Jürgens and Smith, Debbie Reynolds seems like a little girl, their daughter, and represents more a problem child than a romantic rival.

Another funny Smith scene, for its unexpectedness, takes place at an equestrian competition. (How Reynolds could fail to notice dashing John Saxon in those riding clothes is beyond me. A fine broth of a boy.) Debbie sees Alexis standing among the audience, and politely nods to her.

The camera cuts to Alexis sticking her tongue out at Debbie. So much for classy, but it’s a hoot.

Alexis’ next turn at bat on screen would be an even smaller role in “The Young Philadelphians” the following year. She would not return to the movies until the 1970s, after a stint on Broadway made her a star again. Wait for it….see this previous post.

Though Curt Jürgens owns this film, we might say it did more for the career of another gentleman not even in the movie. This is Craig Stevens, the husband of Alexis Smith. He visited her on set, and met director Blake Edwards. When Edwards cast his hit TV show that debuted in 1958, “Peter Gunn”, he offered Mr. Stevens the lead role as the suave private eye. It lifted Stevens’ B-movie career out of the doldrums.

Troy Donahue, the heartthrob in this movie, has no lines. He’s just an ornament to represent the New Actor. His career was definitely on the ascendant; his day would come. Soon.

Debbie Reynolds made only one film in the 1970s, as the voice of Charlotte in the animated feature “Charlotte’s Web” (1973). However, like Alexis, she also had some good luck with Broadway. The fading 25-year old ingénue and the fading 36-year-old actress in her prime of 1957 would come to have more in common professionally than either realized at the time. So it is -- with either carefully, or clumsily-woven acting careers -- it doesn’t matter. The clock ticks on.

Mary Astor, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1941, is the most poignant example of the generation gap played out by the ladies of “This Happy Feeling.” She was 51 when this movie was filmed, but seems like a dowager in her brief scenes. In her day, she had played both ingénue and sexy mature other woman; now looking older than her years, heavier, and somewhat lost among the smart alecks around her. Estelle Winwood, her senior by 23 years, creates a bigger bang.

Miss Astor was busier these days writing. In 1959, she published her autobiography, “My Story”, which frankly discussed her tumultuous private life, though not a lot about her career. She made that one telling, now famous, observation:

“There are five stages in the life of an actor: Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor Type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor?”

Along with her autobiography, she penned several novels. In 1971, the year Alexis Smith conquered Broadway in the musical, “Follies”, Mary Astor published her second volume of memoirs, "A Life On Film".

Who's Mary Astor? She more than answered the question.

In that same year, she went to the Motion Picture & Television Country House, a retirement home for members of the film and television industry. She was 65 years old, frail from a heart condition. She spent the rest of her life there.

Estelle Winwood, who played oddballs more often than not, broke the mold in real life, too. After a stage career on London’s West End, she began in films in her 50s, and was 74 years old at the time of this movie. She was still making movies in the 1970s. She died in 1984 at 101 years old.

It’s good to have an anomaly from time to time. It keeps the usual familiar statistics about loss of appeal, loss of prestige, loss of health, loss of earning power as we age at arms’ length. Where they belong.

Then again, as someone who spent “This Happy Feeling” being trailed by a seagull, Miss Winwood, like a lot of screen actors, may have felt that immortality was for the birds.

Curtain Up, Light the Lights

2012-02-06T07:45:00.000-05:00

Can you name these three actors and this move? We'll be talking about it on Thursday.

See you then. (Applause, applause, applause.)

Tension - 1949

2012-02-02T07:42:00.000-05:00

“Tension” (1949) stretches the limit of tolerance in the rocky marriage of a mousy pharmacist, and becomes the plaything of a savvy detective solving a murder.

Actually, it’s the rubber band that’s the plaything of Barry Sullivan as the detective. He uses one as a visual aid in the first few moments of the film, breaking the fourth wall, speaking to us directly. He tells us that by manipulating tension, he breaks down criminals.

“Everybody’s got a breaking point.” At several points in the film, he takes out another trusty rubber band and stretches it in his fingers to remind us.

Plausibility is stretched, too, at times, but it’s a fun movie as a post-War period piece, and for the careful, deliberate way we see a one man walk to the precipice of doom, and then make a choice. This is Richard Basehart, a really fine actor especially adept at fragile, sensitive men struggling with inner turmoil. The first half of the movie belongs to him. We don’t even see Barry Sullivan again until the second half. The first half sets up the crime, or what we think is going to be the crime, and the second half follows Mr. Sullivan’s actions to solve it.

Mr. Basehart is Warren Quimby, a mousy name for a mousy guy. He works the night shift at the all-night drugstore in a post-war southern California where suburban sprawl is pulling highways after it like a loose thread unraveling. Where Malibu beach houses are inevitably the scenes of trysts, and murder.

Basehart is married to Audrey Totter, whose bread and butter in those days was B-noir bad dames. She sulks, she pouts, and holds out for what she wants, which is always more. She goes to the movies at night while her husband works, and gets picked up by guys with flashy cars, and by one guy in particular. He is Lloyd Gough, a liquor salesman in a pinstripe suit and a perpetual cigar clamped in a plastic tip between his teeth. She calls him a big man, and he thinks he is.

Mr. Basehart worries about his wife being alone -- or rather, not being alone -- while he is working. Calls the movie theater to see when the show ended, checking up on her. Fears that when he goes upstairs to their little apartment she won’t be there some night. We might think him a fool and deride his obsession with a woman so unworthy of him. But, that is because we are the audience and we are omniscient. When she enters a room, we hear the blaring, bluesy saxophone music that is her signature. In old movies, a sax equals sex, and a saxophone follows her everywhere.

She flirts with her husband’s employee, played by Tom D’Andrea, a stalwart palooka who mans the lunch counter at the drug store. Though he always respectfully refers to Basehart as Mr. Quimby, we might conclude he is his only friend. Mr. D’Andrea has no use for the boss’s wife. He sees her for what she is, a woman who does not finish her hamburger, and pushes it aside for pie with whipped cream on it instead.

Nice girls finish their supper before they have dessert.

But Basehart dotes on her. His puppy dog devotion is tested constantly, and only once does he seem to bristle under her rudeness. This comes when he surprises her with a ride to a housing development where he has put a down payment on a tract home. The treeless, orderly suburban subdivision is dotted with identical modern ranch homes. His handsome, boyish face beams as if he is offering her Shangri La. She won’t even get out of the car. When he counts off the selling points, including a dishwasher, she leans on the car horn over his talking, like a petulant teenager who refuses to listen to what she does not want to hear.

For a moment he turns and glares back at her, and we wonder if he finally sees how contemptible she is.

But, obsessions make us helpless. He shuts up and gets dutifully back in the car. He has lost our respect. He never had hers.

One night all that’s left on their bed in the apartment above the drugstore is her doll with the frozen expression on her porcelain face, much like Audrey Totter’s perpetual scowl is chiseled on her pretty pale, porcelain countenance.

When she returns, it is only to pack. She and her dolly go to live in the liquor salesman’s beach house.

But Richard Basehart can’t let go. He goes to the beach, stomping in his loafers on the sand to ask her to return. He is such an annoying pest -- even we have to admit it -- that Liquor Salesman Lloyd punches him from here to next Tuesday. When Basehart retreats, his glasses broken, the “big man” calls him a four-eyed punk.

By the way, if you don’t want spoilers, you should have gotten off at that last exit.

Mr. Basehart goes to the eye doctor and gets a new pair of spectacles. They cost $5.

Five dollars. In a word, cripes.

Then Basehart begins to work on a germ of an idea of killing Liquor Salesman Lloyd for humiliating him in front of his wife.

It’s a plan worked out carefully, with us in on his thought processes. He decides to create a fake identity, and have that fake person do the killing, and then fade away into nothing. He goes back to the eye doc for a set of contact lenses, because he has seen a poster there that announces contact lenses will make him a new man.

He chooses a fake name, a fake profession as traveling salesman, and rents a furnished apartment in another part of town. He will live there only on weekends to lay down an alibi. It’s a logical process, and it’s interesting that his crime of passion can be so purposeful and practical. It says a lot about his character, a little man who plods along, works hard, and plans his future with precision. His passion now isn’t really for her; that’s dimming fast. His passion is for taking his methodical personality and using it for one big showy deed.

But his plan begins to unravel, like the miles of California highway, but the unforeseen complications turn out to be a good thing. He doesn’t see it at first, but eventually he will.

Foremost among the unforeseen complications is his new neighbor, played by Cyd Charisse in a non-dancing role. She is quite literally the girl next door, wholesome, winsome, elegant in her very fresh-faced appearance, and falling fast for the quiet little guy in contact lenses. He wishes for, more than succumbs to, the idea of a life with her. He holds himself a little aloof because he has a nasty job to do, and he thinks maybe he still loves his wife. He is afraid of getting too close to the lovely Cyd, and does not want to involve her in what he is beginning to see is a real mess.

But Basehart is a man who finishes what he starts, so he finally picks the day to go kill Liquor Salesman Lloyd.

A very dramatic scene, and nicely played out, is when he slips into the darkened beach house at night and finds Lloyd Gough asleep in a chair. He is alone. Perfect. About to impale him with an implement from the outdoor barbecue (which Lloyd had threatened him with earlier -- Basehart is keen on the fine details of revenge) -- Basehart suddenly notices Audrey Totter’s dolly on the table.

Audrey isn’t here.

Audrey isn’t here.

The scales fall from his eyes, and Richard Basehart sees she has taken a night off from Liquor Salesman Lloyd to pursue, or be pursued by, another “big man”.

Lloyd wakes, stunned to see Basehart about to jab him with a very large pointy thing. Basehart gets his revenge, but in a way he never expected. Like the old saying, the best revenge is living well.

“I must have been crazy. She’s not worth it. If it hadn’t have been you, it’d be some other guy.”

He gloats over Lloyd, who we see is clearly humiliated that she’s bored with him already.

“She’s all yours,” Basehart says with a sneer, and we can sense the weight off his shoulders and the rejoicing in his soul now that he is emotionally and psychologically free of that rude woman who doesn’t finish her hamburgers. Now he is free to love Cyd and start his life over.

Until the moment he’s shaving the next day, and Audrey Totter shows up in his bathroom mirror. We can hear the sax.

She is loving, contrite, and wants him to take her back.

Liquor Salesman Lloyd has been found murdered. Mr. Basehart’s nightmare is only beginning.

Barry Sullivan, and his rubber band collection, finally returns -- we had forgotten about him -- and he brings his partner, William Conrad, to solve the crime. Always fun to see William Conrad.

The rest of the movie is his show. We saw the crime plotted in the first half of the movie, and Sullivan dismantles the scenario in the second half. It’s a very interesting telling of a story, if a little hard to swallow here and there, including Sullivan’s phoney romancing of Audrey Totter to trick her and keep her off balance.

Some things I like:

First of all, the drugstore. I know the exteriors were shot in and around Culver City and Malibu, but I don’t know where. Film locations are Robby Cress’ specialty. If you haven’t seen his blog, check out Dear Old Hollywood here.

I don’t know about the interior of this drugstore set. My gut feeling is it’s a real store, because it is so wonderfully packed to the gills with everything a drugstore sold at that time, with the lunch counter and the somewhat worn-looking diamond pattern of floor tile. It almost seems too detailed for a set on a soundstage. But I don’t know.

I like how when Basehart is searching for a fake name for his new identity, he picks the surname Sothern, because he sees Ann Sothern on the cover of “Screen Digest” magazine.

A young boy of Asian ancestry, and a pretty young African-American woman are among the patrons having their prescriptions filled by Basehart. They are minor roles, but these two individuals should be noted for their not being stereotypes. Also, William Conrad’s name is Edgar Gonzales; we see a police detective with a Spanish surname, also not stereotyped. These three characters are presented naturally, as being all-American, and that is perhaps what is most effective.

Note when his friendly and ever-talkative counter man sidles up to Basehart with the newspaper, commenting on the news, “They’re still at it, trying to figure out who owns Germany, who owns the atom bombs…” See our series on “Uneasy Victors” about America’s involvement in post-War Germany as seen through the movies -- “A Foreign Affair”, “The Big Lift”, and “Judgment at Nuremberg”.

Most especially, I love the scene where Barry Sullivan takes Cyd Charisse to Basehart’s drugstore. She still thinks he is her Paul Sothern - neighbor, and prospective husband. She does not yet know he is Warren Quimby, murder suspect. When her sweetie seemed to disappear into thin air, she notified Missing Persons and gave them a photo. Through that action, the police were able to identify Warren Quimby as Paul Sothern, the man they were looking for in the murder of Liquor Salesman Lloyd.

Basehart’s not arrested yet, but he knows he’s being watched. It’s a wonderfully tense scene when Barry Sullivan, who just loves messing with people and causing TENSION, “introduces” Cyd to Basehart under the pretense of stopping in for coffee at the lunch counter. Both are shocked to see each other, Cyd is even more shocked to see him wearing his $5 glasses as Warren Quimby, Pharmacist and Murder Suspect.

But neither acknowledges they know each other. They pretend to be strangers while Sullivan plays them like a fiddle, also pretending not to know they are connected. Miss Charisse and Mr. Basehart want to protect each other, and struggle with their emotions. Sullivan needles them both a bit, especially Cyd, when he rapturously talks about Basehart’s gorgeous wife.

We wait for Cyd Charisse to lose it, hurt or outraged to learn that her boyfriend is already married -- which is even more insulting than being a murderer, too.

But, she’s too much a lady. She swallows her distress, and play acts disinterest.

At one point Cyd, deeply offended by Sullivan’s manipulation, tells him off without ever admitting she knows Basehart. Then in a rising voice as she’s about to stomp out of the place, she turns to Basehart,

“And you do make wonderful coffee!” What she means is I’ll never betray you no matter what, but that’s what comes out of her mouth. Exquisite.

Another fun scene is when Barry Sullivan pulls a similar trick on Audrey Totter. He brings her to Basehart’s furnished apartment and tells her Basehart’s been romancing the neighbor lady. Audrey is no Cyd, and she blows her top in an instant, furious at the thought that the husband she had been two-timing was two-timing her.

“Why that four-eyed little pill pusher!” She is deliciously jealous. She tells Sullivan all about how Basehart murdered Liquor Salesman Lloyd.

Now Sullivan has everyone where he wants them, and pulls one final stunt to unmask the murderer, because so far all he has is hearsay and his gut instincts.

Audrey Totter’s final exit is accompanied by the sultry notes of a sax.

A saxophone never plays like that when I enter or exit a room. I wish it would sometimes.

I have only two questions about this movie. One, the reason for the murder is never really explained, or else I missed it.

And how does Audrey Totter manage to keep such a slim, tiny figure with all those burgers and wedges of pie with whipped cream on them? There’s a shot of her in those high-waisted trousers of the day that is quite stunning.

Maybe it’s because she doesn’t finish her burger.

Running Board Answers

2012-01-30T07:38:00.000-05:00

Thanks so much for those who wracked their brains to come up with some answers for our look at running boards last Thursday, and well done.

Yes, the publicity photo is Joan Crawford back in the early days of her career.

A - “Conflict” with Alexis Smith and Charles Drake (I can never fool Caftan Woman). This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, only because they are both sitting on opposite running boards. Yes, I am that easily pleased. Have a look here for our previous post on “Conflict.”

B - The Three Stooges in “How High is Up” (1940). This was one of my favorites in childhood because they lived under their car. Yes, I am that easily pleased. They are tinkers by trade, but find themselves accidentally hired to work as riveters on a construction site. Only if you are a fan of the Stooges will this make any sense.

C - This one wasn’t quite fair of me. I don’t know the actor sitting in frustration on the running board, but it’s from the Laurel and Hardy short “Highway Havoc”. The unknown gentleman and his companions are only a few of many motorists in a highway traffic jam made worse by the boys. If anyone had actually been able to answer this one, I would have turned over the keys to this blog.

D -Fred MacMurray in “Remember the Night” (1940). Must have been a good year for running boards. Have a look at our previous post here.

On Running Boards

2012-01-26T07:46:00.000-05:00

Oh, running boards, how wonderful they were. How stylish, and yet functional. The above photo is not from a movie, but is a publicity shot. Can you name the actress?

And while we're at it, name the following actors and actresses, and films, in which these famous running boards appear. There are so many things you can do on a running board....

Proposing marriage on dual running boards. Is there anything in the world so romantic?

You can have your pals help you take off your sweater while you are sitting on a running board.

You can express consternation and your profound disillusionment with life while sitting on a running board.

Or, you can just milk a cow.

Truly, the possibilities are endless.

More Than a Secretary - 1936

2012-01-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

“More Than a Secretary” (1936) is like a time travel adventure. It is impossible to watch this movie about the editor of a fitness magazine without being reminded of the all-pervasive diet industry and social consciousness about health today. The setting is1930s screwball patter, and man-crazy dumb blondes who connive to marry (or be kept by) their bosses. We travel back and forth through time in every scene, reevaluating our perspective, old and new.

Today’s post is part of the Comedy Classics Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Have a look here for a schedule of the other participating blogs.

January, typically a month for resolutions about changing one’s life, and being deluged with diet and fitness ads and infomercials, is an especially fitting time to watch Jean Arthur try to change herself. She runs up against the extremely high standards of George Brent.

Mr. Brent plays the editor of “Body and Brain” magazine, who runs his office and his personal life with the discipline of a professional health guru. In 1936, however, when this movie was made, he is seen as a freak. Much of the comedy is derived by sensible Jean Arthur’s bewildered reactions to his diet and exercise regimen. He pulls raw carrots out of his desk drawer and chomps on them like Bugs Bunny.

Jean is the co-owner (along with reliable sidekick Ruth Donnelly) of a secretarial school. We first see them in their classrooms droning repetitious typing dictation for their students, who pound away at clunky black manual typewriters the size of Buicks. I must confess, I view this scene with some fondness. It is how I learned to type. That quick brown fox and lazy dog are old pals of mine.

In fact, considering how much I type and have typed through the decades since, that one semester of Typing 101 in high school was probably the most beneficial and practical class I ever took.

And working for so many years (ago) on a manual typewriter, I have fingers like Hercules. I continually wear out flimsy plastic computer keyboards. I run through them like Kleenex. I could crush you like a bug.

But Jean’s and Ruth’s students, or at least some of them, do not envision decades of typing, or any career at all. They are there to learn the skills that will get them jobs as executive secretaries to rich businessmen, and then marry them. Or be kept as mistresses.

This is student Dorothea Kent’s objective.

Dorothea Kent comes pretty close to stealing this movie.

She had a less than stellar career in B-movies as the dumb friend, but here her “Maisie” character, despite the high-pitched whine and clueless attitude, is really quite street-smart and self-sufficient. She knows what she wants, and she goes out and gets it. Also, coloring her dumb blonde act is a biting nastiness that makes her fascinating, even as you want to club her for her blatant rudeness to Jean. Her supposedly obtuse double entendres are perfectly executed. She blithely but with a spin of sophistication talks of the corporate head to whom she finally becomes…indispensible. “You’ll never know how he leans on me.”

Charles Halton plays the head man who eventually gets Miss Kent on a rent-to-own basis. He had a long career on screen as a fussy, humorless, officious type, but he began on the New York stage and had trained at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Ruth Donnelly, too, had spent her earlier years on Broadway, but came west as did so many when the Depression hit and movies became less demeaning to those on the “legitimate” stage. The two of them would spend their careers as bit players in a studio system which would guarantee them work as “types” but rarely challenge them.

For Jean Arthur, 1936 was a busy year. In this one year she did five movies. Along with this one there was “The Plainsman” (see our previous post here), “The Ex-Mrs. Bradford”, “Adventure in Manhattan” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”. Each role was different, and we see that though the studio system could be something like a conveyor belt of sameness in roles for many actors and actresses, Jean refused to cooperate with studio head Harry Cohn enough times to forge her own mark on her career.

Here her portrayal is of the career businesswoman who falls for the boss -- exactly what she cautions her students against, preferring that they take the honorable tack of learning proper business skills. She seems a more somber character than what we are used to seeing in her screwball roles.

It is as if she is still working through the transition of so many earlier roles where she played the sad but forthright heroine seeking love (“Danger Signals” 1930) or justice (“Party Wire” - 1935) to the working girl whose delightful sense of irony is her self-preservation (“Public Hero #1” - 1935) and (“If You Could Only Cook” - 1935).

The further along in her career she got, the more of the world’s troubles she took on her shoulders and she became the moral compass of screwball comedies. “Mr. Deeds” and “Mr. Smith” were ahead of her, but by then she would be ready for them.

Here she has George Brent, who might not seem like the answer to this frustrated businesswoman’s prayers. We last saw Mr. Brent here in "My Reputation". I think I really prefer him in light comedy to drama. He has nice touch with slightly absurd characters. Here, his delightfully serious naiveté, despite the science of his health beliefs, both maddens and appeals to her.

She visits his office because he has fired so many of her graduates. He is very demanding. He is pleased by her business suit and spectacles, thinking she is brainy and serious. People who wear glasses are usually very brainy and also quite glamorous.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. George. Jean. He mistakes her for another applicant, and brusquely runs her through a quick job interview. Intrigued, she decides to play along and take the job, and see what this weirdo is all about.

Much to the consternation of her business partner, Ruth Donnelly, who wonders why she would leave her business to take a lousy $25 a week job.

We see, before Ruth does, before Jean does, that she is smitten with George Brent.

He has a good role here, and plays it most charmingly. He is intelligent and disciplined, two qualities which Jean admires, being both herself, but he is also a little out of touch with the real world, and this is what mystifies and intrigues her. Soon, he grows dependent on her capability in the office, which compliments his own need for order. It is not until very late in the movie that he realizes he loves her.

Jean has to jump through a lot of hoops before that happens. First, there is his confounding health regimen which he imposes on his staff. His right-hand man, Lionel Stander, a body builder straight from the gym, puts the office workers through morning calisthenics. Brent opens the windows and breathes deeply, ordering Jean to follow along with deep knee bends and provocative lunges.

He treats to her a lunch of a bran muffin, and a vegetarian supper. I think my favorite line is when, half-starved she buys groceries on the way home and, tired about hearing how her regular diet is bad for her, plucks an enormous raw steak out of her shopping bag. Just before dropping it in the frying pan, gives it an enthusiastic kiss,

“Steak, come kill mama!”

Much of George Brent’s health regimen is used for comic effect, too ridiculous in 1936 to be taken seriously. Today, in a US where obesity has become common, many people watching this film now probably are on diet restrictions for various medical concerns. What was once freakish became fad, and now has become a matter of life or death for a lot of people.

Another facet of George Brent’s rigid outlook is his refusal to use images in his magazine that are sexual. He is a proponent of bodily grace and physical perfection, but the idea of using cheesecake to illustrate his articles is abhorrent to him. Jean has to turn him around on this one and convince him that a little glamour will sell more magazines.

Today, our magazines images (as well as articles) are examples as to how sex sells. Poor George would be aghast.

But George’s modern ideas on health and Victorian ideas on how to sell it are only the least of Jean’s problems. Dorothea Kent comes back into her life with a vengeance.

Her boss, whose wife is returning from Europe, must get rid of her for a while, and palms her off on the unwitting George Brent. Mr. Brent hasn’t the sophistication to deal with so avid a man-chaser and so inept a secretary as our Dorothea. He is overwhelmed by her, and hasn’t the mettle to send her packing.

He succumbs to her…charms.

He makes Jean his assistant editor to keep both ladies happy, and Jean makes good at this new challenge, but is crushed that he now spends his days, and nights, with Dorothea. Dorothea has another good scene where she insults Jean through the sheerest gauze of innocence, “And you actually thinking you had a chance with him,” she laughs. You want to sock her.

Jean is more angry at herself for not being able to compete with such fluff. In her way, she is very much like George Brent, a lover of order and routine, a hard worker, and a social misfit. She quits, and there are layers to her disgusted remark to Brent, “You’re such a fool.”

Here George finally figures out he loves her and wants her back. He pushes the ambitious Dorothea Kent onto the big boss, Charles Halton.

A couple of fun period items in this movie - Brent’s Art Deco office furniture, and the trailer or “land yacht” Jean and Ruth buy to travel and start over.

Ruth exclaims, “If I’d known how much fun it was to quick work, I wouldn’t have slaved the last 18 years without a vacation.”

Jean shows us how not to park a car with a land yacht attached to the back of it.

I love George Brent’s look when Dorothea Kent returns unexpectedly just as Jean is about to come back into his life. It is a priceless expression of horror and dread. All he needs is one of Curly’s “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah” groans of anxiety to complete it.

The scene where, brooking no more nonsense, Jean (“The time has come.”) spanks Dorothea like the naughty child she is, and tells her that, “I can’t bear looking at you!” -- is a resounding moment of screwball retribution.

A cute ending, and one in which Jean finally gets to shed her somber mood, is when she’s about to explode and cut into Brent, but the morning calisthenics interrupt her. Like the other office automatons, when given the order by Lionel Stander to inhale and begin the stretching exercises, she unthinkingly extends her arms. Brent grabs her in a cuddle, and her “exhale” position is to wrap her arms around him.

See? Exercise is good for you. It makes you feel better.

Don’t forget to check out the other great posts in the Comedy Classics Blogathon.

Off Topic - Book Sale

2012-01-21T08:15:00.000-05:00

This is to announce that TODAY and TOMORROW only, my time-travel adventure novel MYTHS OF THE MODERN MAN will be FREE exclusively on Amazon.com. This is an ebook, which can be downloaded to your Kindle or your computer via Kindle PC software (which is also free from Amazon). Read a couple reviews here at the Library Thing website.

Comedy Classics Blogathon

2012-01-19T07:42:00.000-05:00

This is to announce next week's "comedy classics" blogathon, sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association.

On Monday, we're going to take on "More Than a Secretary" (1936) with Jean Arthur, George Brent, Ruth Donnelly, Dorothea Kent, and Lionel Stander. Jean plays the owner of a secretarial school who becomes the secretary of the editor of a health magazine. It's typical 1930s screwball, and yet curiously far-seeing when we get a load of editor George Brent's healthy lifestyle.

Visit the Classic Movie Blog Association website here for a list of the other participating blogs.

Two-Gun Man from Harlem - 1938

2012-01-16T07:38:00.000-05:00

“Two-Gun Man from Harlem” (1938) creates a world for us that is both strange and familiar, an image placed over another image. We see a separate world, but it is our world and we are at home here, even if we are not cowboys, even if we are not black, even if we are not white.

This movie is one of a handful of B-westerns starring Herb Jeffries, and the first of a series of three featuring him playing the cowboy called Bob Blake. We discussed Mr. Jeffries in this previous post, how his stature as The Bronze Buckaroo, the Singing Cowboy of the Black Cinema in the 1930s put him on par with the likes of Gene Autry and a posse of others who were all white and all more famous.

The Bronze Buckaroo traveled in somewhat different circles. He rode the range in movie houses that played to African-American audiences. General audiences, i.e. theaters where patrons were either mostly white, or, as in the South, all white, were not shown these films.

They missed out on something big, those white patrons. A simple message a lot of them would have to wait another 20 or 30 years to hear, and under much more turbulent circumstances. If they had only seen Herb Jeffries riding into town on his white horse to save the day, heard him sing “I’m a Happy Cowboy”, one wonders if the battles for social justice fought in the streets and on the back of the bus, and at the lunch counter would have been necessary.

Not that “Two-Gun Man from Harlem” was the greatest movie in the world. It wasn’t even the greatest movie in the small neighborhood movie houses where it played. It was typical B-western.

That is its charm, and the very magic of its power.

Herb Jeffries is the hero. We know that because he’s jaw-droppingly handsome, he’s taller than everybody else, and he wears a white hat. He’s no great actor - none of the singing cowboys were, although in this movie he gets to play a dual role. As the gunfighter “The Deacon” he looks like he’s having a blast.

Manton Moreland is his shorter, funnier brother. He is sly and loyal, and a lot smarter than most cowboy sidekicks. He tells a story to divert the bad guys, about Lot’s wife. Only in his rambling version, Salt Lake City is the result of the biblical curse.

Mae Turner is the ranch owner’s wife, who is unfaithful and tries to lure our Herb. Failing that, she frames him for murder. Unlike most of the other awkward and wooden performances here, Miss Turner had stage training at the University of California, and played Lady Macbeth among her professional roles. She knew how to do evil ladies.

Spencer Williams, who would go on to write and produce in Black Cinema, played Butch, the bad guy who did the bidding, for a hefty fee, of Clarence Brooks. He gives a quite natural performance and has great screen presence.

Mr. Brooks played the head bad guy, a man of means and just plain mean. He tries to buy the love of the beautiful young ingénue, played by Marguerite Whitten. He is as oily as Snidely Whiplash.

Miss Whitten is the guardian of her younger brother, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, who you’ll recognize as one of the Little Rascals. Here, he’s a funny, talkative, know-it-all kid who hero-worships Herb Jeffries.

And who wouldn’t?

That’s all pretty standard for a B-western. The writing is stilted and corny. The acting isn’t the best. The production values are distinctly low budget. Even the fight scenes are funny because they lack proper choreography, and the sound effect of the punching sounds a lot somebody slapping a tennis ball against a garage wall.

But look again. Jess “Jesse” Lee Brooks, one of the finest actors and singers of his generation (see this previous post with a clip of his “Let My People Go” in “Sullivan’s Travels”), plays the sheriff.

He is a man of authority, no-nonsense, steely-eyed, but fair. You can put your life in his hands. He always gets his man.

Films exhibited for “general” audiences did not show dark-skinned sheriffs. Nor dark-skinned rapacious landowners paying off henchmen. Nor dark-skinned cowboy heroes.

Which is why when offered a chance to “pass” in the movies, light-skinned Herb Jeffries, who was of mixed African and European heritage on his father’s side, and Irish on his mother’s side, refused. He did one better and wore darker makeup on screen. Mr. Jeffries reasoning was:

"In those days, my driving force was being a hero to children who didn't have any heroes to identify with," Jeffries says in a quote from his website. "I felt that dark-skinned children could identify with me and, in The Bronze Buckaroo they could have a hero. Many people don't realize (to this very day) that in the Old West, one out of every three cowboys was a Black... and there were many Mexican cowboys, too."

The familiar image of the B-western types: the hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy, and the loyal sidekick, they are all played out here by black people. African-American audiences could enjoy the same storybook sagebrush fare as the “general” audiences without fear of being demeaned or stereotyped, this time.

White audiences, however, missed out on a revelation. The hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy were all people they knew very well. They saw them all the time at the movies. The only difference -- the only difference -- was skin color.

About ten minutes into the movie, one sees that is no difference at all.

Powerful stuff, and not what some people wanted to hear.

For more on Herb Jeffries, have a look at his website.

Wishing you a meaningful Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

California Conquest - 1952

2012-01-12T06:12:00.000-05:00

“California Conquest” (1952) features Teresa Wright as a pants-wearing, deadeye shot in the days before California’s annexation to the U.S. This may be the movie’s chief delight as the delicately feminine heroine of 1940s Hollywood took that precarious turn into 1950s longsuffering wife/neurotic spinster roles. Here, as an interlude between those eras in her career, she rides, shoots, and saves Cornel Wilde from whipping by shooting dead the bad guy.

This is nothing if not refreshing.

Most of the movie, however, belongs to Cornel Wilde as the dashing nobleman of Mexican heritage who runs guns and organizes a movement for California to become part of the U.S. The people of Mexican ancestry are all called Californians here, to distinguish them from Mexicans who live below the Rio Grande, the part of Mexico we didn’t snatch in the Mexican War. Teresa Wright is called an American here. She is not a Californian, though she lives here with her gunsmith father, who sells guns to Cornel Wilde’s political movement.

The “good” Californians want to be Americans. The “bad” ones want to stay part of Mexico, or, failing that, to become part of the territorial designs of Imperial Russia, which also has settlements here. Got that, class?

John Dehner plays the head bad guy, a bad Californian who wants his brother to be Governor. Graft is so much easier when you’ve got a relative in power.

The two lead “Californians” then are played by Wilde and Dehner, neither of which in real life are of Spanish/Mexican heritage. A large cast of Spanish-speaking actors play minor, mostly nameless characters, with the exception of Alfonso Bedoya, who plays Jose Martinez, the head goon of John Dehner.

Hollywood casted movies by its own caste system. We’ve seen it before. In one scene, Teresa Wright watches a street fight, standing behind two stoic Indians, also watching. Were they Modocs or Washoes? Shoshonis or Yokuts? Who knows, they are not considered Californians, either.

The movie attempts to be a lot of things: a swashbuckling adventure, an historical picture, and to be sure, gets off on the right foot with the title exposed by a man’s hand swiping a glittering blanket of gold coins off the table. A vivid storybook-ish image. In parts, the movie has all the panache of a Saturday kiddie matinee adventure flick.

But we’ve got a lead actress of Teresa Wright’s caliber, so she can’t just sit around twisting a hanky in her hands. This film, to its credit, give her lots of action, too. When her gunsmith father is murdered, she joins Wilde to go after the killer. Wilde is distressed at her men’s attire, which he calls “horrible”, but seems to be unruffled by her gun fighting skills, which seem to be better than his.

The villains are one-dimensional, and the interesting story of the rivalry of three powers - US, Russian, and Mexican all converging in this rich land is pretty much lost in characters spitting out simplistic facts as plot exposition at convenient moments. Maybe the movie attempts too much, or maybe not enough.

Teresa Wright says to Wilde, “I wonder if we Americans will ever understand you people.” To which Wilde replies, “You don’t have to. It’s more important that we understand you.”

Placards of official dogma make for an easy, and lazy, explanation of why the characters are going from point A to point B, but they do nothing to flesh out even the characters’ motivations, let alone the complexities of political reality.

It is easier to focus on the beautiful rugged terrain, which we see much of behind swarms of hard-riding Californians chasing each other on horseback. We see the elaborate Spanish dress of the nobles at the ball, where a specialty act performs a beautiful, passionate dance.

Mantillas and ruffled shirts, and sword fighting out on the red-tiled patio among the potted yucca plants. The guy in tight burgundy pants slays the guy in tight purple pants. No blood. Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn did it better.

The ball brings Mr. Wilde and Miss Wright together again, and he marvels with relief that she looks more like a girl in her virginal white ball dress. There’s no romance yet; that doesn’t happen until they’ve been on the trail a few days, looking for the bad guys, and stop to rest in a hayloft. She’s back to a skirt for this scene, and well, there’s just something about haylofts. Instantly they are in love and planning a future life together.

But first, they trick the gang of bandits into leading them to the stolen guns, and John Dehner, and a Russian Count and Princess who are agents of the Czar. When the Princess balks at this pants-wearing female pointing a gun at her, Miss Wright, with absolutely no vestige of Peggy Stephenson left in her, remarks: “Lady, this gun will shoot anybody. It’s not particular.”

I love that line and her world-weary delivery.

Wilde is an almost too-cheerful hero, as if he is Robin Hood instead of a revolutionary, but since this movie drifts along on the mood of a kiddie matinee, his happy bravado is suitable, and the stereotype villains are serviceable, and the action is all we need to kill time.

It’s Teresa Wright who doesn’t quite fit, and not because she wears pants and a gun holster (which was probably a selling point for her to take this role). She’s too troubled for these shallow types around her, on a higher plane (and not the hayloft), where the deeper issues of California’s annexation await her consideration, figuring out what all this really means for her. She’s far too intelligent an actress to be stuck in this pop-up book.

Explorer John Fremont, the only real historical figure, shows up at the ball, despite the bandits that overturn his stagecoach, and tells the “good” Californians that the US will not annex California because Mexico is a neighbor and friend.

The Mexican War, from which we snagged a good chunk of Mexico, including California, would seem to contradict his assertion. Did anybody at the kiddie matinee catch that? Or did the kids in their red felt cowboy hats just knock back another handful of jujubes and cheer for the hard riding “good” Californians who, like they in school, pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and dreamed of cementing their heroism by pointing a gun in a haughty Russian’s face? Ah, 1952. Gotta love it.

The Chicago Theatre

2012-01-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Theatre, so grand and magnificent a building it was dubbed “the Wonder Theatre of the World” at its opening in 1921. The first of its kind, it became a prototype for a generation of “movie palace” theater construction. It stands today as a reminder of that era of remarkably beautiful buildings.

French Baroque, the theater features murals, a replica of the Arc de Triomphe sculpted on its State Street side. The grand lobby, five stories high, is modeled after the Royal Chapel at Versailles. The grand staircase is reminiscent of the Paris Opera House. One wonders if anything on stage could be half so diverting as the venue?

Movies were the order of the day, and “The Sign on the Door” was the debut flicker with Norma Talmadge on October 26, 1921, accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra in the pit, and a thundering Wurlitzer pipe organ.

A showcase not just for movies, live entertainment shared the auditorium with bands such as Duke Ellington’s and Benny Goodman’s.

Then, as we have noted with so many of these theater histories, the 1970s came. Then the 1980s. They brought disuse, decay, but this theater managed to escape the third D - demolition. The Chicago Theatre was restored and reopened in 1986. Frank Sinatra performed at the gala reopening, and the future for this theater finally seemed as bright as its past.

For more on the Chicago Theatre, including detail and photos on its spectacular interior, have a look at this website.

Meet Me in Las Vegas - 1956

2012-01-05T07:46:00.000-05:00

“Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956) is a fun and frothy pastiche uniting the two themes upon which the reputation of that town is built: gambling, and nightclub acts. We get a little of the first, and a lot of the second.

Today we wrap up a two-post trip to Las Vegas. Have a look here at Monday’s post on “Las Vegas Story” (1952). From that black and white crime story we move on to color, lots and lots of colors.

Dan Dailey is a happy-go-lucky rancher who drives his coral convertible, with the matching horse trailer, to visit the casinos. Where he is not lucky at all. He is well known and well liked for being a good loser, and only a loser. But a swell guy.

His career in big movie musicals of the 1940s and 1950s puts Dan Dailey somewhere in the same universe, though in a lesser orbit, as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I don’t know where his dancing puts him against those gentlemen; I think he’s a swell hoofer, and I particularly like the “Gal with the Yaller Shoes” number in this movie where he performs with Cyd Charisse and the male ensemble to Hermes Pan’s vigorous and playful choreography.

But what sets Mr. Dailey apart is not his dancing; it’s his screen personality. Astaire and Kelly were both famous for playing confident wise guys who turned out to be nice underneath the wisecracking. Dan Dailey always seemed more sensitive, even troubled, a guy who really wasn’t that confident, but whose tenderness was never hidden. He is never a card sharp or gamester on the make in this movie. He’s a frequently obtuse stumblebum, something Astaire and Kelly never played.

Cyd Charisse is a ballerina appearing at the casino where Mr. Dailey is losing his money. She’s a fish out of water here, just trying to make some dough herself in a world about which she knows nothing. She has several opportunities to dance in this movie, ballet, a jazzy “Frankie and Johnny” routine (narrated and sung by Sammy Davis, Jr.), and a very funny impromptu venture into burlesque. Having had too much to drink, she invades a parade of lady hoofers dressed in gaudy costumes representing “lucky charms”.

The plot is about as simple as they get. Dan Dailey, who believes in luck even though he doesn’t have any, grabs the hands of passing ladies, in lieu of a rabbit’s foot, while the roulette wheel spins. The only time it works is when he lunges for the hand of a passing Cyd Charisse. He insists she is his lucky charm.

She thinks he’s loony and angrily tries to discourage him, but when she relents to give the experiment a try, they discover that, yes, every time at any game he plays, if he’s holding her hand, he wins.

They start winning all over the place, up and down The Strip. Miss Charisse, at first attracted by the money, is secondly attracted by this new world she’s discovering outside the rehearsal hall. Her life thus far has been very disciplined, with no time for play. Now she sees how the other half lives, and she likes it. I like her line when, seated in a restaurant with him, a couple of huge steaks in front of them, she’s too excited to eat, even though as a dancer on a perpetual diet, she marvels, “I’ve been hungry for ten years.”

She is thirdly attracted by Dan Dailey, and it is to get his attention that she joins the burlesque kick line. His drooling over Cara Williams makes her jealous. Miss Williams belts out “I Refuse to Rock and Roll” (which was just beginning to beat down the drawbridge of popular music and storm the castle).

Sultry Lena Horne also sings, as does Frankie Laine. One of the fun things about the movie is the shameless name dropping. The Four Aces start the movie. We have cameos by Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Vic Damone, Peter Lorre, Tony Martin (Cyd Charisse’s husband).

Paul Henried also has a minor role, and Jim Backus as the hotel manager gets to briefly bluster, and Jerry Colonna rips his otherworldly tenor on "Lucky Charm".

The marquees on the casinos -- many of the same ones we mentioned in Monday’s post on “Las Vegas Story”, give us a snapshot of the big names of the 1950s: Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Marge and Gower Champion, Danny Thomas, the Mills Brothers, Johnnie Ray, Donald O’Connor.

Dan Dailey finally notices more than just Cyd’s hand, particularly after a brief ballet (which features a game of volleyball in the middle of it), “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He takes her home to his ranch to meet Mother, who is played by Agnes Moorehead. It’s always good see her in any movie, though there’s not much for her to do here. She’s feisty, opinionated, and likes the cut of Cyd’s jib because Cyd is a career woman with no intention of giving up her career.

I found myself distracted by Miss Moorehead’s hair color, a cross between tomato soup and the fires of hell. I guess when you use Technicolor, you have to shoot the works. Might explain the coral-colored convertible, too. Most of the film is painted in a rainbow of soft, lush colors.

The lucky couple’s luck continues at the ranch, where as they stroll around holding hands, the barren chickens lay eggs, and the cow gives birth, and a new oil well gushes forth black gold.

But we know the old axiom “lucky at cards, unlucky at love”. So, too here. When they fall in love, their luck at gambling leaves them. Will they stay together anyway? You can probably figure that out yourself. It’s refreshing that they compromise to spend six months in her world of dance and six months on the ranch.

Except for a couple of numbers, most of the songs performed in this movie are staged as nightclub acts, so there isn’t that jolting of reality for people who dislike musicals for that reason.

But I’ve never quite understood that. “People don’t burst into song in real life,” the movie musical curmudgeon might complain.

Sure they do. They’re called entertainers.

Las Vegas Story - 1952

2012-01-02T08:24:00.000-05:00

“Las Vegas Story” (1952) is like the seductively slow Mona Lisa smile of its star, Jane Russell: both sly and simple, secretive and open. It’s a noir that loses a lot of its noir shadows in the bleached, unblinking sunshine of the desert. Like the city for which it’s named, this movie does its own thing in its own way.

This week we adventure in Las Vegas -- with Jane Russell and Victor Mature today, and on Thursday we’ll have Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956). I hope it proves to be a lucky start to a lucky year. By the way, we once featured publicity for this movie at this previous post.

“Las Vegas Story” is a crime drama. Jane Russell is the wife of Vincent Price, a suave, well-heeled businessman from the east out here on a pleasure trip to try his luck. The couple are followed by a very handsome pest played by Brad Dexter, who though obviously attracted to Miss Russell, is even more attracted to the gaudy diamond necklace she wears.

The necklace will figure prominently in a murder.

There are a few subplots to the story that keep us entertained while we’re waiting for the crime to happen. So entertained that, in fact, the crime story seems almost like an afterthought. First, there is the back story about Jane Russell, who during the War was a singer in one of the casinos here. She’s here not to gamble, but to come to grips with her past.

“I have a feeling I interrupted a conversation between you and the desert,” Vincent Price tells her in what I think might be my favorite line from the movie. Perhaps it’s just his charming, sensitive delivery. He has broken away from the gaming tables briefly to notice she has wandered off by herself, alone outside on the terrace. They appear to have a comfortable, affectionate relationship, but something is nagging each of them that has nothing to do with the other.

Vincent Price, too focused on gambling to pay much attention to her anyway, indulgently allows her to sort out a few old ghosts, and suggests she go off on her own to explore the Strip.

“Go ahead. Get it out of your system,” he tells her.

She heads for her old hangout, a casino called The Last Chance. There’s Hoagy Carmichael at the piano, playing “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” I love when Hoagy’s at the piano when we walk in the door.

This is an exquisite scene. Jane Russell stands some distance away from where Hoagy is seated at his piano. He doesn't know she's there. At once we see she is remembering days gone by. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flashback done with such sensitivity and such style. In a close-up on her face, we see her eyes wander around the room and then lock on a small table with an empty chair. From the chair, we go back to a close-up of her face, and her eyes gently move to something beyond the piano. We hear the echo of a woman’s voice singing. In another moment the camera shows us…

…she is watching herself. A younger, happier woman, with longer 1940s style hair. The room is full of GIs, and a large flag hangs on a back wall. Victor Mature is seated at the empty chair, dressed in an Army uniform, adoring her.

We go back to Jane’s expression as she remembers. Her face registers the wonder of recognition, the co-mingling pleasure and pain of memory. Usually in a flashback scene, we are dropped into the past, and when the scene is over, we get wrenched back to the present. Here, the camera keeps shifting from the scene to her face watching it. We never completely enter the flashback; we always have one foot in the present, just as she is firmly rooted in the present but cannot let go of the past. She is stuck between two worlds emotionally, and in this scene, literally. This marvelous tactic makes the memory seem like real-time.

What Jane Russell does just with her eyes, and with the slightest flicker of sublte expression is so impressive. This scene is a skillful union between a starlet who rose to fame on her voluptuous figure but who clearly really could act, and a director, Robert Stevenson, who with admirable delicacy, pays more attention to her face than her chest.

The movie was produced by Howard Hughes, second to none for his famous appreciation and promotion of her décolleté. While we have the obligatory costuming and camera angles that showcase Miss Russell’s physical attributes (including a gratuitous shower scene, and the demonstration that she wears nothing but heavy makeup to bed), there is still more even more here about her broken heart.

Victor Mature, and his perpetual grimace, is the tough police detective whose beat is the Strip. We gather Jane was supposed to wait for him until he came back from the War, but didn’t. They are equally delighted and distressed to see each other again, and Mature becomes particularly bitter. He also reflects on his former self:

“That guy was a chump. He believed that if he left his hat or his girl at a table they’d be there when he got back.”

A couple of subplots on Mr. Mature’s side include the teenaged would-be bride and groom he has to hold in detention until the parents show up to stop the quickie wedding. There is also the playful antagonism with his boss, the sheriff played as his comic foil by Jay C. Flippen.

The Last Chance, where Jane used to sing during the War also keeps a couple of side stories on the back burner for us: Hoagy and his pal, played by Will Wright. Mr. Wright, the hangdog proprietor/house detective of other movies here plays a floorwalker who used own The Last Chance, but lost it in a bad business move. The stern new owner, played by Robert J. Wilke, comes down hard on his staff. Hoagy hates him, and Wright chokes on his humiliation.

Which is something we have to consider when this same new owner ends up dead.

Vincent Price has the most dramatic reason to kill him. Mr. Price is an embezzler, wanted back east, and takes his wife’s necklace to buy himself credit at the gaming tables. When he loses big at The Last Chance, Mr. Wilke takes no pity on him.

But what of Brad Dexter, perpetually tailing Miss Russell in and out of cocktail lounges and swimming pools? He turns out to be an insurance investigator, and maybe Jane and Vincent have something cooking between them to scam The City of Second Chances?

Lots of suspects, and an unresolved love story in the middle of them.

The movie is capped by a nifty chase scene between an old woody station wagon and a helicopter.

The car is not unlike the old woody rumbling through the Nevada desert in “Split Second” (1953) seen in this post, and another reminder of that film is the abandoned military installation where the final confrontation between helicopter and car occurs. I don’t know if any atomic testing went on here, too, but it’s deadly eerie.

Victor Mature is in the helicopter, which buzzes the car and follows it right through an empty hangar. The murderer has taken a hostage, and tries to escape in a cat and mouse game with the dogged Mr. Mature, in an abandoned wooden control tower. There is no dialogue in this exciting scene, just the sound of footsteps, gunfire, and the howling wind from the desert. A tumbleweed rudely bounces off the head of a slain figure in the dust.

The crime story may have not a lot of depth to it, but at times this is a visually stunning film. Along with the desert, and miles of footage of Jane Russell, we get the obligatory shots of the neon casino signs embroidering the night sky: The Golden Nugget, The Pioneer Club, a montage of all the old casinos and hotels. The Thunderbird, the Flamingo. The sign at the Union Pacific station where Jane Russell and Vincent Price arrive in town, not to be outdone, tells us Las Vegas is the “streamlined city of the west.”

The movie ends on an upbeat note with another of Hoagy’s songs. Not very noir, but Vegas makes its own rules.

Come back for more Vegas and more songs on Thursday in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” with Dan Dailey as a most unlucky gambler, until he grasps the delicate hand of dancer Cyd Charisse.

Happy New Year

2011-12-26T07:42:00.000-05:00

I hope the holidays are going well for one and all, and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy New Year, as I won't be posting the rest of this week. Thank you most sincerely for the pleasure of your company this year.

We'll start the new year off next week with a visit to Las Vegas, with two very different movies: "Las Vegas Story" (1952) a crime drama featuring Jane Russell, Victor Mature, and Vincent Price. Then we'll take it on the lighter side with the musical "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956) with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse. I hope you can join us. I'll meet you by the slot machines.

For now, a final holiday offering from a very jazzy cartoon Ella Fitzgerald. Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page to mute the Christmas music so you can hear the video.

See you next week.

Remember the Night - 1940

2011-12-22T07:47:00.000-05:00

“Remember the Night” (1940) is a polar opposite to “My Reputation” (1946), covered here in Monday’s post. The latter film feels darker in tone and in cinematography. It featured flashes of noir. The characters were well-to-do upper crust. It was wartime. Conversely, “Remember the Night” brings us out of the Depression, among simpler, homespun people. It is screwball comedy when it’s not frankly sentimental, and is a much lighter film in tone as well as on the set. The linchpin between the two movies is Barbara Stanwyck, who with ease can be either a shy upper class widow, or a petty thief from the streets.

There’s a lot to recommend the film, the Preston Sturges script with its absurdities, Fred MacMurray’s average-joe-as-hero, and especially Beulah Bondi. She played mothers most often, and she had a transcendent quality on screen, at the same time utterly realistic. She had this in common with Barbara Stanwyck. The emotional electricity each was able to bring to her work is even greater in their scenes together.

Because Miss Bondi played mothers so often, and was so recognizable a character actress, and had that trademark quiver to her voice, it might be easy to dismiss her, unless you watch her carefully. Especially those large, expressive eyes. Her years of stage work (she came to the movies in her early 40s) shows in her ability to play off her scene partner rather than the camera -- which is what a lot of movie stars did who did not have theater experience. Spring Byington, who also had a career of playing mothers, had a lighter, more comic touch, and she could be accused of sometimes playing a stereotype. That’s because comedy is often born of parody.

But Beulah Bondi is entirely genuine. You see her in this film and recognize the mother she is supposed to be, fluttering in the kitchen and fussing over her son. She is a woman of hard work, restlessness, tension. She snaps at the hired boy. She bends over backwards to make the stranger Barbara Stanwyck welcome in her home, and when her son Fred MacMurray plays the piano and sings the wrong line in “Suwannee River”, she mouths the correct word and shakes her head with disapproval, not angry, but embarrassed that her boy and his $14.00 worth of piano lessons has let her down in front of company, all the while adoring him at the same time.

You have the sense that she has lived a very hard life, but managed to keep a good outlook in spite of it.

Preston Sturges reportedly was not entirely happy with the film. He felt that his screwball comedy was turned into sentimental schmaltz, and at times it was. But “Remember the Night” has become for us, in a more cynical era, a wonderful holiday tradition. It could not be so without the sentiment. That it is equal parts screwball only makes it better.

We are coming out of the Depression in 1940. The war is going on in Europe and Asia, but you’d never know it from this movie. When Stanwyck and MacMurray travel cross-country by car, they encounter a WPA sign announcing yet another road construction project -- that never seems to be completed. But it was such projects that helped to drag us out of the depths of the Depression some seven years earlier.

Barbara Stanwyck has her own way of dealing with hard times. She’s a thief, and has walked out of a jewelry store with a diamond bracelet on her arm. She’s caught, and Fred MacMurray is the prosecutor in court.

Her defense attorney, played by Willard Robertson (who had really been a lawyer in younger days), engages in some magnificent and utterly pompous courtroom theatrics, which much have been a blast for him. He contends she was hypnotized by the sparkle in the jewels and forgot what she was doing, which in modern medical terms is called schizophrenia. Yeah, sure it is. He makes P.T. Barnum look like a Presbyterian minister.

The case, which is tried on Christmas Eve, is postponed until early January. Since she has no money and can’t raise bail, she’s doomed to spend Christmas in the hoosegow. Good guy Fred feels bad, and pays Fat Mike the bail bondsmen to get her out for the holiday.

He thinks his good Samaritan deed ends there, but it does not. Oh, but it’s a tricky world full of people with dirty minds. Such is the case with Fat Mike, who thinks Fred wanted Miss Stanwyck free so he can receive sexual favors. (“He’s got a mind like a sewer,” Fred says.) When Fat Mike drags her to Fred’s apartment, she thinks the same.

Fred “Snowflake” Toones is Mr. MacMurray’s dimwitted houseman, not a great role but unfortunately typical leavings for Snowflake. His role as a cowboy in Gene Autry’s “The Singing Cowboy” discussed here was better.

Snowflake’s packing up Fred’s stuff and trying to hustle him out of the apartment because Fred’s supposed to drive to Indiana to visit his mother for Christmas. Stumped with what to do with Stanwyck, who is more amused than relieved that he has no designs on her, Fred takes her to a supper club for a bite to eat while they figure out where she can go.

He requests the orchestra play “Back Home Again in Indiana” and she and Fred dance to the really lovely rendition by a female vocalist unknown to me, backed by a male quartet. Stanwyck is also from Indiana, and the thought that she might be lying when she announces this is quickly dismissed by her excitement. Barbara Stanwyck really owned a scene and could make you believe anything.

It has been years since she’s seen her mother -- she ran away when a teen -- and Fred suggests he drop her off at her mother’s house for the holiday and pick her up on the drive back. She’s flustered by the idea, and there is a wondrous expression, anxiety mixed with longing, in her dark eyes.

I guess songs about our home states do that to us. Look how Jean Arthur completely lost it during her tipsy rendition of “The Iowa Corn Song” in “A Foreign Affair”, discussed here.

Doah! You can just sense a future trivia post about state songs in the movies, can’t you? This stream of consciousness writing is going to be the end of me one of these days.

I’m pretty sure “All Hail to Massachusetts” has never been in a movie.

Mr. MacMurray and Miss Stanwyck take the car across a handful of states without any national highway system at all -- that didn’t come until the 1950s -- and study the paper map when they get lost. See how much fun life was before GPS? I admit, I’m still a map person. I got a kick out of the scene where they have to pull up to a general store/post office to read the name of the town on the building so they can find out where they are.

I was on a train once, traveling through a dark upper New York State night, when, half asleep in my berth, I felt the train stop. I looked out the window to read the name off the train depot to see where we were, but we had not stopped at a depot. All was dark. All except a distant enormous red KODAK in block letters. Ah, I thought to myself. Rochester.

GPS? I spit on your GPS.

However, much as I admire the freewheeling adventure of our two travelers, I am invariably made freezing when I watch this movie because they travel for hundreds of miles in the winter with their car windows rolled down. Now, I know this was filmed on a nice toasty Hollywood soundstage, but jeez-louise. I have driven short distances with no heat and it’s a challenge to the soul. Several hundred miles would be a feat, I fear, beyond my endurance. You see, we here in the northern climes do not go to the trouble and expense of heating our homes for the ambience. We do it to keep from dying. Hypothermia also occurs in cars driving 700-plus miles in freezing temperatures with the windows open.

Especially when they get lost, tired, and decide to sleep in the car. With the windows open.

It’s a cozy shot as they wake up to a cow’s big old face in their faces. At least the cow had a nice warm barn full of other cows in which to spend the night.

The farmer hauls them before the local judge for trespassing and destruction of property, and when they flee justice and become fugitives, MacMurray gets a taste of what life has been like for Stanwyck -- always ducking, living by her wits, and even enjoying the taste of rebellion

The visit at Stanwyck’s mother’s house brings the merriment to a screeching halt and explains why she came to a wayward end. It’s a good set-up scene where she and MacMurray stand on the steps of the home of her mother and stepfather. They rap at the door and hear dogs barking, and then a light goes on. We see her mother only as an eerie dark figure, lit from behind. When we first see her stony face, we can appreciate Stanwyck’s nervousness.

Her mother, a cold, hard woman, well played by Georgia Caine, revives old complaints and resentments against her daughter, who never measured up to her rigid standards. Fred gets Barbara out of there in a most gallant way, and takes her to spend Christmas with his family.

It’s a different story at his mom’s house. Here the idealized home and hearth kicks any rebellion out of Stanwyck and she is transformed by the kindness shown her, and by the gentleness of these country kinfolk. Along with Mother Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson (another stage-trained actress you might remember as Mrs. Trumbull on “I Love Lucy”) plays Fred’s spinster aunt.

The mop-haired Sterling Holloway plays the dimwitted hired boy, Willie. You may still think of the voice of Winnie the Pooh when you hear him. We get to hear his mellow tenor on the old chestnut, “A Perfect Day”.

They do all the things Stanwyck would roll her eyes over and ridicule with a cutting remark if she were telling the story, but she’s not telling it. She’s living it, and we see her shy disbelief, almost as if she senses she’s entered a happy Twilight Zone. When Fred plays the piano, we see Stanwyck sitting very still, but rolling her eyes over Fred, and the room where the ladies and Willie are an audience as they string a popcorn chain for the tree. Stanwyck is drinking in the scene around her, like a person removed from it, but astounded to discover she is really part of it.

This still, silent, powerful acting is reprised when she is taken to her room. After Miss Bondi has left her alone, Stanwyck leans over her suitcase on the bed and sinks her chin into her shoulder, looking all around the room pensively, curiously, with almost a note of humor we think, until we see there are tears in her eyes.

Fred, being a square shooter, tells his mother what kind of person Stanwyck really is, and Beulah Bondi, the forgiving type, makes being extra nice to Barbara her new project. This includes gift giving the next morning around the tree. Stanwyck is part of the family by the end of the week.

A cute scene that again, turns unexpectedly tender, when Aunt Elizabeth Patterson hog-ties Stanwyck into a corset (having fun with the Scarlett O’Hara scene of a year before?), and lets her wear a long gown of what was supposed to be part of her own wedding trousseau. We see a stack of letters tied with a ribbon packed away with the dress, and we see that the spinster aunt has been disappointed in love.

Barbara spent New Year’s Eve in a fancy big city hotel ballroom in “My Reputation”. Here it’s a barn dance, and when the band leader/square dance caller checks his pocket watch and sees that it’s midnight, the fiddlers and such launch into “Auld Lang Syne” with the best of them, and paper streamers float down from the hayloft.

I love how Sterling Holloway leaps into the arms of a very tall girl to get his kiss.

Mother Bondi sees the attraction between her boy and the petty thief houseguest, whose romance is egged on by her Cupid-playing sister. She tries to gently put a stop to what might be the end of her good boy’s career if he gets tangled up with a bad girl.

It’s a good scene when she levels with Stanwyck. Barbara is first embarrassed that Beulah Bondi knows the truth about her. Stanwyck, always on the ball, gets the message and reassures Miss Bondi. Look at the shot where Bondi stands behind Stanwyck, who stands at her mirror. Stanwyck conveys with a comb touched, as if frozen there, to her cheek, her awkwardness, her shame, and her sorrow to find that she really has no future. Not with Fred, not with any nice guy. Bondi leans over her with a hug, equally agonized.

One the ride home they drive through Canada.

I know they joked about not wanting to drive through Pennsylvania again because that’s where they took it on the lam from the farmer with the shotgun and the judge, but really? That’s a heck of a detour to make. Through a much colder country. Lake-effect snow. With the car windows rolled down.

Nice shot of them by icy Niagara Falls though. We talked about Niagara Falls in the movies in this previous post. And a lovely ambiguous remark by Stanwyck when MacMurray, who wants to marry her says he’ll take her to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon.

“But we’re there now, Darling.”

Fade to black. Quick, before the censors find out what she means.

Of course, another reason for Canada is that Fred suggests since they are out of the US, she could jump bail and he practically invites her to become a fugitive. She wants to go back and face the music. Then when the trial resumes, he tries to throw it, but she won’t let him to that, either. She pleads guilty.

We don’t know what her sentence is going to be, but they’re both pretty sure they won’t be seeing each other for a while. We’re also pretty sure Fred will wait for her.

“Will you stand beside me and hold my hand when they sentence me?” Barbara asks, and again, it is a kind of Christmas miracle that we believe her helpless anxiety, this woman who could be so tough in other movies.

Christmas is a lovely illusion, and is probably best appreciated when we let it be. Reality is for January.

Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, and Sterling Holloway reprised their roles in the Lux Radio Theater presentation of this movie March 25, 1940. Have a listen here at the Internet Archive, now in public domain, or download it free to your computer. Scroll down to “Remember the Night”.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and may the peace of the season be yours.

My Reputation - 1946

2011-12-19T06:05:00.001-05:00

This week we have A Barbara Stanwyck Christmas with “My Reputation” (1946) and “Remember the Night” (1940). When you count in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945), which we previously covered here, it seems Miss Stanwyck became one of the leaders in the Christmas movie genre.

A young relative of mine, 10 years old to be exact, in between mouthfuls of chocolate cake, informed me quite solemnly that new Christmas movies were not as good as “classic movies”. She was so firm in her opinion I could not help but agree (she doesn’t know anything about this blog), pleased with the flourish in her use of the word “classic.” She is as familiar with “It’s a Wonderful Life” as any old movie buff.

She could not, however, precisely tell me why old Christmas movies are better, though in time she will likely come up with several reasons. She’s a rather analytical type of person. Don’t know where she gets it.

For my part, I think one of the chief reasons “classic” Christmas movies are so powerful is that, ironically, they are not all about Christmas. Christmas is only the backdrop to a collage of story lines, subplots, and images, sometimes only a scene or two in a movie that otherwise deals with non-holiday drama.

To be sure, Christmas comes with its own drama, which is why many people are stressed out this time of year. It is a checklist of tasks we must accomplish. It is a recurring nightmare of family feuds. Annually, we seem to fail to measure up to a goal of spiritual, and temporal completeness.

I think modern Christmas movies, TV-movies, etc. are less powerful and satisfying than classic films because they tend to put this holiday frenzy as the crux of the story, instead of allowing it to be the backdrop. As every classic film fan can tell you, we notice the backdrops. We study them. They are important just where they are. Bedford Falls is the backdrop; James Stewart and his stupendous meltdown and the reasons for it are the story. But through the telling, we know all about Bedford Falls, and it becomes a character in the movie. The Christmas climax is fitting because Christmas is not the nightmare; it’s just the time the nightmare occurs.

Another way to look at it: let’s say Christmas is the painted backdrop of a stage set. The actors perform in front of it. However, if you make Christmas the focus of the story, i.e., it’s like moving the backdrop downstage closer to the audience. The actors are now performing behind it and we never see them.

By keeping Christmas in the background, the classic Christmas movie becomes so much more meaningful than the trite “finding the true meaning of Christmas” or having “the best Christmas ever” stories we have today. The classic Christmas film is about life and death, prison and sickness, lies and deceit, and never getting what you really want. Then the Christmas scene -- like the thunderous ringing of church bells or the clash of symbols that accompany it, makes us feel triumphant in a colossal way, because we have discovered again we are human and survived being human, and have forgiven others for being human.

Christmas movies made during the early 1940s have a special tension to them. World War II was, shall we say, a rather bigger impediment to holiday serenity than standing in a long checkout line. We know, just as the characters know, this may be their last Christmas together. Ever. Or, maybe not. Depending on the role of the dice. There is no way for us to replicate that dramatic tension today.

I guess it’s about time I got to the movie.

“My Reputation” deals with a woman’s adjustment to widowhood and then opening herself up to a new romantic relationship. Christmas slides in at the end of the movie like a runner rounding third base and stealing home.

Barbara Stanwyck plays a new widow with two sons, ages 12 and 14, played by Scotty Beckett with his customary easy charm, and Billy Cooper. Cooper made only a handful of films, but his portrayal of the sensitive older son is quite nice. The boys have little idea of the horrors of their father’s longtime illness or their mother’s devoted care giving. They will be equally ignorant of how lonely she is, and how lost she is now that her social position seems to have changed with her husband’s passing.

Her mother hammers this home to her. Played with her usual frank, thoroughness of character, Lucille Watson is the dragon lady, Miss Stanwyck’s upper crust mother to whom duty and honor are substitutes for joy and happiness. She has been a professional widow for 25 years, and has worn black every day like a uniform. She expects Barbara to do the same now.

Note the hanky Miss Watson sniffles into. Even that is edged in black.

Miss Watson gets a wry, comic scene where she describes a friend’s fight with the local ration board about getting a larger gasoline allotment because her luxury car only gets 9 miles to the gallon. Her indignant friend, another woman from “good society” complains, “They’re just doing everything they can to break our spirits. It’s pure class prejudice.”

Ah, the rich resenting calls for equity put on them by a democratic society in wartime, calling it class prejudice. Sound familiar?

“Stick to your rights,” Lucille Watson tells her, “This is still America.” Yes, but whose?

Another footnote to the war is the scene where Stanwyck shops at the local market with her ration book. In this post last year about “Love Letters” (1945), we noted that not a lot of wartime movies showed the omnipresent ration books, but here we get to see Stanwyck flipping through hers. $1.38 for a pound of bologna, plus 24 points. You could have all the money in the world, but if you didn’t have 24 points, either in the form of stamps or little round fiber-celluloid tokens (like game pieces, red for meat and fats, blue for processed foods), you went home empty. (Note, this movie was made during the war, but not released until 1946.)

Stanwyck shrinks from the horror of her bossy mother’s code of behavior. With her sons about to leave for boarding school, she suffers from the anxiety of being nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother, with her only role left of being her mother’s dutiful, and dutifully spiritless, daughter.

Barbara Stanwyck plays, or rather underplays, this woman with impressive sensitivity. Her long career showcased the enormous range of her talent, but strong women became her forte. When she had to, she could chew scenery with the best of them. This role required a different tone, and she demonstrates her intelligent reading of a character, her tasteful delineation of what is appropriate.

She gently plays a gentle woman, and hits all the right notes. A scene early in the film where she reads a letter written to her by her deceased husband is particularly moving. She exhibits a lot of control in her shaky voice, as well as through the movie when she has moments of nearly breaking down. It is never forced, it is always genuine.

Luckily for her, Eve Arden is her pal. She tries to buck her up and encourages her to stand up to her mother, but it’s a long, slow learning curve for the emotionally brittle Stanwyck. Miss Arden provides her customary sensible support, but there’s not a lot of wisecracking for her in the film.

Jerome Cowan, however, who we saw in “Beloved Enemy” here, leaps off the screen in a small role as the husband of a friend who makes passes at Stanwyck. He’s the smarmy fellow who can’t keep his hands off her when his wife isn’t looking, and when he offers to drive her home, we can foresee better than Stanwyck does that he means her no good. A brief tussle in the front seat, she gets away from him, but there’s no comeuppance for this creep. Cowan plays him with the right sort of grinning lust and self confidence.

Thoroughly shaken, Miss Stanwyck is more upset by the prospect of being alone than being assaulted by a friend because she is now “a woman on the loose.” Soon, she will have a new worry: how to be open to a new love when he shows up.

This turns out to be George Brent, who meets her on the ski slope. Eve Arden and her husband have taken Stanwyck to Lake Tahoe. The foursome get along swell, but the twosome is harder to evolve. Stanwyck is reticent to take up so soon with another man, despite her loneliness, and Brent is too much of a free-spirited bachelor to want to be tied to anyone, especially a woman who requires such deft wooing. Wooing is not Mr. Brent’s forte. He comes from the grab-them-and-plant-a-forceful-kiss school of romance. And if she is so insulting as to struggle, ridicule her for her childishness.

Some have criticized Brent for being wooden, not just in this role but period. I can’t really fault him for this performance, though, because we don’t get too much of his side of the story of this relationship. The movie isn’t really about them, it’s about her. At the end of the film, when Brent decides he wants to make a commitment, he’s not really believable. It seems too sudden a transformation. I don’t think Brent can be entirely blamed for a script that doesn’t let us see his struggle.

One scene between them doesn’t work at all. They have known each other for a while, and she comes to visit him in the apartment he is using while a friend is away. They sit on the couch and he attempts to seduce her with an unwanted martini and Jerome Cowan’s patented pawing technique. This does nothing for Brent’s role as the designated hero in this film.

Contrast it with the famous and astounding erotic scene between Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur in “The More the Merrier”, discussed here. He has his hands all over her, but she is not unwilling as Stanwyck is in this scene; rather she is only awkward. She is a reserved and prudish woman awakening to the wonderful world of sexual arousal, and McCrea’s perseverance is softened by the comedy accompanying the wooing. In the scene between Brent and Stanwyck, we have none of that, and it’s a shame, because Stanwyck had a similar quality to Miss Arthur’s ability to play both drama and comedy at the very same time.

A funny note about Eve Arden’s relationship with her husband, however -- I think this is the only time I can remember seeing a man and woman lying prone in bed together in a film of this era. Granted, she’s bundled up because of the freezing cold of their mountain cabin, and he is reading and giving her only minimal attention. Also, he calls her “my pet”, which is about as romantic a term of endearment as calling her “you pinhead”, in my book. Still, there are four legs in that bed, not one of them on the floor. Chalk that up to some kind of record.

The climax of the movie comes at Christmastime, when our everyday lives become suddenly more intense due to the enormity of tradition, and the ties that bind.

Stanwyck invites Brent to her home to meet her boys and share in the festivities, which features Eve Arden and her husband, the sassy housekeeper played by Esther Dale, the family friend and attorney played by Warner Anderson -- who is barracking to be the new man in Stanwyck’s life, and her disapproving mother.

When they gather around the piano to sing carols, George Brent is the odd man out, watching them and not even trying to fit in. More could be done with this scene, but we get the point.

Stanwyck gets serious that whirlwind week between Christmas and New Year’s, but when the boys, home from school, hear gossip about their mother at a party, we see that Lucille Watson’s warnings about her reputation have come back to haunt her. She has a nice scene where she confronts her so-called friends.

Janis Wilson and Ann Todd play friends of the boys. Young Miss Wilson only made a handful of films, but she was terrific in her debut film “Now Voyager”. Young Miss Todd had a longer career, and we saw her in “Roughly Speaking” here. The inevitable Bess Flowers also plays one of the society friends at the party, but then she always shows up everywhere. I think we’ve mentioned before she has the biggest “walk-on” career of just about anybody.

I think I ran into her at the grocery store the other day.

At their own New Year’s Eve party, Stanwyck and Brent get the paper streamer treatment, the conga line, and the champagne, and when he drops the bad news that’s he’s being sent overseas, she wants to follow him to his point of embarkation, New York City, to spend all the time she can with him. Her mother, in a sensible and reconciling gesture, takes responsibility for her sons when they run away because their mother is a floozy, and Stanwyck comes down to earth, content to wave to Brent on the train platform and not go with him.

A nice touch to the end is when the train pulls out and a group of sailors hanging out the train windows whistle at her. It may do more for her morale about getting back in circulation than anything Brent has done the entire movie. She gives them a shy salute. Her sense of humor, and her sense of control, are back now.

Have a look here at Laura’s recent take on this movie at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings. Come back Thursday for Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as a crook about to be reformed by Fred MacMurray one Christmas week in “Remember the Night.”

Off Topic - Blog Tour

2011-12-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

Update on my blog tour for my novel "Beside the Still Waters" - a few more stops here:

Interview at Blogher here.

Interview at Broowaha here.

Guest blog post - How to Write by the Seat of Your Pants - at AllVoices here.

World Without Blow Dryers - Answers

2011-12-15T07:32:00.000-05:00

The answers to our screen caps in Monday’s post “In a World Without Blow Dryers” -

1. - That’s Cary Grant toweling Rita Hayworth’s tresses in “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), which we discussed here.

2. That’s Bing Crosby toweling Alexis Smith’s tresses in “Here Comes the Groom” (1951), which we discussed here.

3. That’s Ruth Donnelly (the perennial wisecracking best pal) toweling Jean Arthur’s tresses in “More Than a Secretary” (1936), which I hope to cover sometime in the new year.

4. That Jessica “Jessie” Grayson scrubbing Teresa Wright’s scalp in “The Little Foxes” (1941). I always loved this scene. She does such a mercilessly thorough job. It’s fun to watch. Miss Wright may have been half drowned by the end of it, but she had very clean hair. For the rest of her life, probably.

In a World Without Blow Dryers

2011-12-12T06:14:00.000-05:00

Time for more inane screen cap trivia. Who in these scenes has the wet hair, and who is doing the towel-drying of same? From what movie?

Answers on Thursday. Now go wash your hair and get somebody else to towel dry it for you. It's the movie star way.

Or if you're too lazy to wash it yourself, you can always get somebody to do that, too:

Off Topic - Blog Tour

2011-12-10T08:16:00.000-05:00

This is just a brief update on a blog tour I've undertaken this week for my novel, "Beside the Still Waters."

I have a guest post up here at "All the Days Of" blog.

And interviews here at: Blogcritics,

Review from Here,

And Examiner.com.

The blog tour will continue this coming week.

Also, anyone who signs up for my mailing list this month - see the sidebar - will receive a coupon code for a free copy of my ebook "Myths of the Modern Man" from Smashwords.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Uneasy Victors PT 4 - "Judgment at Nuremberg" - 1961

2011-12-08T06:32:00.000-05:00

“Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961) is a perfect union of script, stage, and screen. In few other films is dialogue so completely depended upon to move the action, tell the back story, and dramatize the events. That is this is accomplished with such graceful simplicity in this movie is its most astonishing and crowning achievement.

This is our last entry in our series on “Uneasy Victors” in which we examine Hollywood films tackling American involvement, and American mood, in Occupied Germany after World War II. Our intro to this series is here. We discuss “A Foreign Affair” (1948) here, and “The Big Lift” (1950) here. Yesterday, we marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought our entry into World War II, and our eventual role as uneasy victors.

The startling beginning to this film serves as a metaphor for the movie and our series: the German martial tune “Wenn wir marshieren” is sung by a male chorus, of whom we might imagine to be soldiers. Then the footage showing the concrete swastika on the Nuremberg stadium being exploded to nothing.

But the regime we had defeated, and the people who lived in that world, did not vanish into nothing. They were before us now, real, alive, and carrying more baggage from the recent terrible past than most of them wanted to admit. And we find ourselves at a sudden full stop. The warrior's drive it took to win the war must be muted to a stateman's diplomacy.

As in the two other movies we discussed, rubble plays a big part in our discovery of Occupied Germany. Spencer Tracy’s first line in the movie, as he is being driven through Nuremberg says, “I didn’t know it was so bad.”

Spencer Tracy is a semi-retired American judge from Maine, who is assigned to head the tribunal in the Judges Trial phase of the Nuremberg Trials which served to try and punish Nazi officials. All the big names and the higher-ups have had their day in court, and this new trial before us focuses on lesser figures. They are smaller fish.

The Germans, the Europeans, and the Americans back home are growing weary of the trials and losing interest. There is something at stake, however, we come to understand, in just letting bygones be bygones. As prosecuting attorney Richard Widmark sarcastically retorts to rumblings that he should just drop the case, “What was the war all about?”

There is also a danger in proceeding with this trial. One of the accused men is a famous German judge who worked diligently for democracy in the Weimar Republic before Hitler took power. Played by Burt Lancaster with enigmatic dignity, he has a long career of distinguished and honorable work, and is a hero to his people. It will not be easy to try and convict him.

In the middle of the trial, we hear that the Russians, our allies in World War II, have blockaded Berlin in an attempt to get the allies to relinquish the capitol to their control. The Berlin Airlift is about to begin -- which takes us back to “The Big Lift”. We are undecided as to the wisdom of continuing to punish the Germans -- we may need them in a new war against the Soviet Union.

This movie, then, is about compromise. When do to it. When not to. What are the consequences? There are always consequences.

The ensemble cast is well chosen and effective in every minute detail, right down to Tracy’s household butler and housekeeper, played by Ben Wright and Virginia Christine. They are a husband and wife, humble, slightly nervous about pleasing “Your Honor”, because without this job they would starve. They represent the average German citizen who has lost much in the war, who are not responsible for Nazi atrocities -- but who are not entirely convinced that the atrocities are as bad as everyone says they are.

A young William Shatner plays Tracy’s aide during the trial, who swears in the witnesses. One is struck by his ease and his strong screen presence, even in playing scenes with the magnificent veteran Tracy.

Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift play victims called to give testimony. Both give the performances of their careers.

Marlene Dietrich plays a role completely opposite to the sneering cabaret singer of “A Foreign Affair”. Here she is an aristocrat, proud, dignified, but bitter that she and her kind should be held on the same level as Nazis.

Most especially powerful is the Oscar-winning performance of Maximillian Schell as the defense attorney. He is young, intelligent, impassioned, and desperately tries to save his hero -- Burt Lancaster, from disgrace and dishonor and a prison sentence, in any way he can.

But most evident through this film, though we do not see them, are the director, Stanley Kramer, and the writer, Abby Mann. Mann’s script was originally produced on TV in the acclaimed series “Playhouse 90”, which we discussed in this previous post. “Playhouse 90” also gave us “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “The Miracle Worker”, and never was television so good.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that this film is a union of script and stage, and when I say stage in this case I mean stagecraft. The “Playhouse 90” version (Maximillian Schell and Werner Klemperer reprise their roles here), because of the restrictions of early television was very much like a stage play in the sense that the action was static, one set with simple camera placement.

Though there are some scenes outside the courtroom, the Director Kramer wisely chose to keep this television-style tightness to his movie. It shows up with profound effect even in the smallest scenes. There is a scene where Richard Widmark visits the apartment of Judy Garland and her husband to plead for her to testify. She is reluctant. There are many old ghosts haunting her. As Widmark and Miss Garland -- he in his officer’s uniform and she looking like a bedraggled hausfrau in her bathrobe and unkempt hair -- stand in heated discussion -- in the foreground we have her husband facing us, his back to them. We see his tortured expression. The trio is an artists’ composition for the camera.

What were restrictions on television became style in this movie, and used to extremely dramatic effect. Though most of the action takes place in the courtroom in an exchange of dialogue between the witness and the attorney, the camera is always, always moving. We slide in a slow, graceful dance around the courtroom, as the camera probes the many uniformed personnel. The translators, the guards, the gallery of observers, the stony-faced defendants, and nervous testifiers in the witness stand.

We travel 360 degrees all around the flinching expression of a confused, distressed Montgomery Clift -- who seems like a completely different man to how he appeared in “The Big Lift” 11 years before -- before his disfiguring car accident and years of drug and alcohol abuse. Truly, he was a different man.

We travel all around the chiseled features of Burt Lancaster, moved at last to speak though through much of the trial sits in silent protest. The stage play sets him in his witness box, delivering his lines with his precise speech, but the movie camera compliments the stagecraft and lets us get in really close to see the flashing of his haunted eyes.

It would be a good lesson for young filmmakers who these days seem to have almost uniformly adopted the quick edited, jerky camera habit to see what mature and elegant cinematography looks like.

The most magnificent CGI or special effect is not more dramatic than a slow, intimate close-up on human tears.

We see each person with a headset, all intently listening and pausing before they respond, because we do not understand each other.

There are four defendants in this trial, all German judges who are accused of crimes against humanity. Two particular cases are presented before us: one in which Montgomery Clift was forcibly sterilized in retaliation because his father was a member of the Communist Party and his family did not support Hitler, and his brothers beat up a bunch of Brown Shirts harassing them.

The other case is about Judy Garland’s friendship with an elderly Jewish man, a friend of her family. When she was a girl on her own after her parents died, he continued to visit her and bring her gifts and comfort, and advice. She was sentenced to prison for breaking the law that said a German (Christian) girl could have no intimate relations with a Jewish man. Her defense was that her relations with him were not intimate, and that he was only like a kind uncle to her. The law in Germany at the time stipulated that any contact was forbidden. She was imprisoned, and the Jewish man was executed.

The judge at her trial was Burt Lancaster.

Maximillian Schell’s defense of the accused judges ranges from brutally tearing apart the witnesses’ claims, to an even more insidious tactic -- the time-worn defense of merely following orders. But both these tactics are brilliant and thrust to the heart of the American conscience -- our own uncomfortable conscience at being occupiers.

In the first instance, he demonstrates that Mr. Clift was sterilized not for political reasons, but for medical reasons. He was tested and judged to be mentally incompetent, and for this reason was required to be sterilized for the betterment of the state. Herr Schell points out a very similar stance in American law, in a judgment written by renown United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in an era when eugenics was popular.

The camera pauses to let us see this stick in the throats of Spencer Tracy and Richard Widmark.

In the case of Judy Garland, Schell breaks her down and twists her words to make her and her relationship with her elderly benefactor appear dirty. At this point, we watch Schell raging, barking in profile, while behind him in the shot, an outraged Burt Lancaster can take no more. He jumps to his feet and with all his authority, silences the young protégé with rebuke.

We have already been clued into Lancaster’s moral righteousness. Schell has outlined his exemplary judiciary career. But we get a personal, dramatic taste from Marlene Dietrich.

Spencer Tracy discovers that the mansion in which the US Army has billeted him during this trial was confiscated from Dietrich, the wife of a German general who was previously tried and executed. Having usurped her home, Mr. Tracy feels most intimately the role of the Uneasy Victor.

“There’s one thing about Americans,” Widmark bitterly remarks, “We’re not cut out to be occupiers. We’re new at it, and we’re not very good at it.”

Tracy and Marlene meet socially, and he is intrigued with her soignée class and intelligence. She is an aristocrat, the daughter and the wife of career military men. She invites him to a concert, proud to show another side, a cultured, genteel side of German life. Over the strains of Beethoven, Spencer Tracy looks around at the audience, wondering what is in the hearts and minds of these conquered people so bravely looking beyond their recent past to a future swept clean…by what?

Tracy is a kind of Mark Twain/Abraham Lincoln character in this movie, small town American, homespun horse sense, self deprecating, and a willingness to keep an open mind. When he meets Marlene in a charming tavern -- again, for the third time in this series we are taken out to the cabaret -- she tries harder to impress upon him the respectability of the German people, despite what their own political monsters have done to them.

To this end, she tells a story about Burt Lancaster, who in a social gathering, discovering a smarmy Hitler flirting with his wife, bravely and with disgust bestows upon The Little Corporal a rebuke no less severe than he has given to Maximillian Schell in the courtroom, and no less public.

Marlene then catapults the conversation to the ultimate question at hand and the thing that Tracy really wants to know: Do you really think we knew about the concentration camps and the murder of millions? We didn’t know.

In court, Richard Widmark has finally shown the footage of the concentration camps and what Allied soldiers, like himself, found there when they marched in and liberated them. Widmark, in his crisp, carefully enunciated speech (they had voices then) narrates the movie.

“How DARE they show us those films!” Werner Klemperer, one of the defendants shrieks.

In the tavern, we hear the soft tenor singing, “Du, du liegst mir in Herzen....”

The judges had to make their rulings based upon the laws they were given, which was based on the political influence at the time.

American judges are also influenced by politics, we see, as Tracy’s fellow judge, Ray Teal insists they must be lenient on the Germans because the Soviets are worse. He calls prosecutor Widmark “a radical” and a “protégé of FDR.” Conservatives hated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vilified him, and their political progeny continue to do the same. Ray Teal wants to know where Tracy stands.

“I’m a rock-ribbed Republican who thought Franklin Roosevelt was a great man.”

“Oh. One of those.”

Marlene sings a verse of “Lili Marleen” as Tracy walks her home, past the ruins, to her apartment. It is not as dilapidated as her flat in “A Foreign Affair”, but we can see the shabbiness in the boarded up windows, where the elegant coffee set seems to cast a refulgent glow, a reminder of the genteel past in a post-War room. Her husband’s distinguished portrait is displayed in pride of place.

“We did not know!” She insists.

Tracy, struggling with his uncertainty replies, “As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.”

She tells him, “We have to forget if we are to go on living.”

It has been reported that Marlene hated doing this scene, to play the spokeswoman for a regime she personally hated, to the point where it made her physically ill.

“As a German, I feel ashamed that such things could have taken place in my country,” Maximillian Schell, barely containing his anger responds, “But I do think it was wrong, indecent, and terribly unfair of the prosecutor to show such things….”

He pleads with Lancaster to keep silent and not take the stand, “We have to look to the future. We can’t turn back now. Do you want the Americans to stay here forever?” Besides, he says, the Americans do not have the right to judge them, and brings up Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Is that their superior morality?”

In court, Schell expertly shifts the blame for these trials from Lancaster to the world at large, who let Hitler have his way for so long.

Burt takes the stand and explains in passionate shame how a man, and a country, could use love of country as an excuse to deny rights to the individual. He is the picture of dignified self-loathing, near tears. He describes himself as a man “worse than all of them because he knew what they were and went along with them…made his life excrement because he worked with them.”

Wanting to explain personally to Tracy about the millions who were persecuted, Lancaster tells him, “I never knew it would come to that.”

Tracy replies, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

The German judges are all found guilty, and as Tracy departs the prison after his final visit with Lancaster, we hear the strains of “Wenn wir marschieren” once more, and the silent caption telling us that now, in 1961 at the time this film was made, not one single person imprisoned during the Nuremberg Trials was still serving his sentence. They had all been freed.

Another political compromise?

It’s a cynical ending to an earnest film with a passionate message. The movie had its world premiere in Berlin on December 14, 1961 -- West Berlin now, as four months before, the German Democratic Republic built the Berlin Wall. Doubtless, the audience considered that and may have been distracted by current events from this magnificent movie. Did current events render the film obsolete and irrelevant?

We’ll close this series by giving Marlene Dietrich the last word. In 1960, before this film was made, she took her cabaret act to Berlin for the first time, where she was greeted with a pained mixture of welcome, and furor by those who still resented her for “betraying” her homeland. After this movie came out, she took her act to Israel, which welcomed her as a celebrity who was well known to be anti-Nazi.

However, Marlene was advised not to sing any songs in German, as that language was taboo there at the time. Marlene broke the taboo and sang in German, and was cheered, especially for the song shown below (though this footage is from a later European concert). It is “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind.” You will recognize it as Pete Seeger’s, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?”

We may smile at her limited vocal range, and at her studied showmanship, but there is something wonderfully transcendent in this German rendition of an American anti-war song. Especially when it is sung by this German actresss. This American actress.

Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page and pause the music so you can hear the video.