The Skeins

The Silver Screen Oasis Is Back & Sassy

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:57:00 +0000

The Silver Screen Oasis went offline as of noon on Monday, Feb. 11th, 2013. We are aware that this concerns everyone who enjoys the site on a daily basis and apologize for any inconvenience. As soon as we can verify the issues surrounding this event, and arrange for a new, fitter squirrel to get on the treadmill that appears to operate our server at times we hope to relay some more cheerful news to you.

UPDATE!

The Silver Screen Oasis is back online. Joy. Happiness. Bliss. Laissez les bon temps rouler, cinephiles.

Thank you for your patience.

Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954): Bad Movies I Love

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 18:10:00 +0000

20th Century Fox's Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) is not a bad movie I love.

It is a bad movie that is a triumph of entertainment over history. Aired on TCM the other evening, I had not seen it in a few decades, though this movie seemed to be one of those flicks that the NYC area's Million Dollar Movie unspooled five times a week regularly when I was a kid. The movie has some of the following:

Sacred vs Profane Love! Lions vs. Christians, The Debauched vs. The Virginal, An Invisible Heaven vs. An Earthly Garden of Delights, Good Actors vs. Movie Stars! Actually, it has it all--including a sweaty, crowd-pleasing desperation and gargantuan cinematic case of Acromegaly that overcame the studio system as their grip on the American imagination began to slip thanks to television and myriad other distractions.

The tale of Demetrius and friends is ostensibly a sequel to the solemn (if subversively amusing) introductory CinemaScopic chariot ride through The New Testament known as The Robe (1953). Suggested by the popular novel by the Rev. Lloyd Douglas (Magnificent Obsession, White Banners, Green Light) that inspired The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators is more fun than the straitlaced, starchy herd scenes of MGM's Quo Vadis? (1951), and not nearly as classy as Spartacus (1960)--though the latter film seems to have used Demetrius and pals as a template for that tale of liberation spun without the inclusion of an off-screen divine Messiah.

In The Robe, the searing effect of the cloak acquired by that brooding--if undeniably dishy--Roman centurion Richard Burton at the base of The Cross drove the narrative, leading the Welsh actor and lovely Jean Simmons toward a martyrs' epiphany. Along the way, they met some pretty interesting heathens, including craggy Richard Boone as Pontius Pilate (who had marital trouble), that ol' fossil Ernest Thesiger as Emperor Tiberius (with just a touch of the weirdness he brought to The Bride of Dracula), and that malevolent fresh face to film, Jay Robinson as Caligula--all under the guiding hand of Henry Koster, a good director whose best work usually featured Deanna Durbin or told gentle stories with a strong streak of whimsy (Harvey, Come to the Stable, The Luck of the Irish).

However, under the burly guidance of the underrated director, Delmer Daves, this sequel picks up real steam, telling the jam-packed, fast-paced story centered around one of my favorite alleged non-actors, Victor Mature, who had been a relatively minor character in the pre-quel, though he was the one character a viewer could identify with in the supporting cast. Vic had previously played Richard Burton's former Corinthian-born slave turned convert in The Robe. His plebeian roots gave him an instinctive understanding of the message of Christ that was lost on those more patrician cast members--allowing the audience to get an eyeful of '50s style decadence in some scenes. Moving to Rome, Demetrius bills himself as a potter, though he is regarded with some awe by others since he is the unofficial "keeper of the robe," a red cloth once worn by J.C. and now regarded with reverence by the persecuted early Christians. The community of true believers, living in a kind of suspiciously communistic subsistence community (I suppose this was a daring feature for a film made in '53), share their meager worldly goods but the legend of their founder's life and miracles soon draws the attention of the increasingly mad Emperor Caligula and his guards, who are seeking the robe and ensnare the still hot-headed Demetrius in one of their raids.

Newly converted to Christianity, Mature, who once famously claimed "I'm no actor, and I've got 64 pictures to prove it," struggles to convey the internal spiritual anguish of one newly minted, toga-wearing boy scout trying to survive in a racily hedonistic world. Given the fact that Mature's disarming frankness of his acting chops ignored the quality of his work with good directors in Kiss of Death, Cry of the City, Easy Living, and My Darling Clementine, I found his performance in this movie very endearing and highly entertaining, if lacking in nuanced subtlety. Even though he must look a bit prissy and superior at times, and asked to deliver some impossibly overripe dialogue (i.e. "We need no gods, you and I--we have each other", he sighs as he and Messalina embrace passionately), the actor still makes Demetrius a likable if misguided fellow. Even Ernie Borgnine as head of the gladiator school seems puzzled by his reluctance to defend himself. A frustrated fellow warrior and captive king forced into the arena, the Pre-Blacula William Marshall, whose magnificent presence and rich speaking voice give his noble Nubian gladiator a resonance that is not in the script, finds Demetrius a likable, instant pal as well.

Above: Victor Mature as Demetrius between a rock (Ernest Borgnine as Strabo, the Gladiator Drill Instructor) and a soft place (Susan Hayward as Messalina the Lustful).

As Christians have learned repeatedly for the last two thousand years, Demetrius finds that emulating Christ and turning that other cheek is heavy sledding in this world, though the struggle to follow this ideal may be more important than the destination, as this movie implies several times. The flawed hero's noble impulses toward chastity and a desire for eternal peace are undone--for a time--by Demetrius' capture and introduction to the world of gladiatorial hijinks, which include witnessing the soiling of the virtue and the demise of Demetrius' pure gal pal (Debra Paget) at the hands of [s]mumbles[/s] Richard Egan (that boy was working out in those days--though his diction still needed help).

Above: Debra Paget struggling to keep her virtue at the hands of Richard Egan's Gladiator

he reluctant gladiator learns the nuts, bolts and killing techniques of the bread and circuses game from a hulking but affable, earring-wearing Ernest Borgnine (two years before Marty). Demetrius even finds himself very close to some very nubile near occasions of sin, including an unrecognizable, chicken-munching Anne Bancroft, as a gladiator good-time girl who seems to hail from that Roman suburb, The Bronx. I had the impression that Annie came to the orgies preceding the gladiator matches because she had a yen for the chicken wings and dip, not necessarily the wholesale canoodling. The loss of his pure sweetheart at the hands of his taunting fellow gladiator, after he prays to his God for her deliverance plunges Demetrius into despair and rage. Bitter and angry, Demetrius' sorrow does wonders for his performance skills in the Circus Maximus, where he becomes a killing machine taking on men and beasts. [FYI: The man vs. tiger scenes in the coliseum are much better than the scenes in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, when sharp-eyed viewers could practically see the sawdust seeping out of the stuffed lion that Victor Mature wrassled in that 1949 epic.]

Above: Jay Robinson (center), spreading the joy as Caligula, and demonstrating the after-effects from sipping from those lead-lined chalices with Barry Jones as Claudius and Susan Hayward's dubious looking Messalina.

The erosion of the pacifism Demetrius espouses energizes the Roman hordes, especially those debauched and enervated Romans in the court of the Emperor Caligula, played once again by Jay Robinson, whose sibilant-spraying speeches really lay it on with a trowel this go-round. One of the leaders of the pack of sybaritic pagans this go-round is Susan Hayward as the notorious Messalina, who never met a fella she didn't like. Believing that sex equals power, her extracurricular activities include testing the mettle of each season's crop of [s]boy toys[/s] gladiators, despite being the wife of the seemingly dim but highly civilized Roman Senator Claudius (played by Barry Jones). Jones appears to have been imported from the UK to play a series of slightly befuddled, conscience-stricken darlings in a series of American pics (Plymouth Adventure, Prince Valiant) after his fine performance in 1950's Seven Days to Noon), a career peak that deserves to be better known. Claudius, as portrayed by Jones, is the Roman equivalent of "the good German" who crops up in movies of this same period. Educated, perhaps ham-strung by a degree of refinement, but able to strike a small (ineffectual) blow for the human race on occasion, Claudius represents the best of our Greco-Roman heritage, which I suspect the filmmakers wanted to highlight to counterbalance the psalm-singing aspects of the story. As screenwriter Philip Dunne described it to film historian Patrick McGilligan in Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age (Univ of CA Press, 1986), one of 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck's flaws was that "he thought all kings, emperors, and nobility should be played by English actors. That was class, you see..."

Above: Victor Mature, expressing anxiety and guilt (or is it indigestion?), while Michael Rennie as Saint Peter tweaks his conscience further.

That observation explains the presence of Michael Rennie as Peter the Fisherman, whose preternatural calm and ascetic face is just made for a holy card--though his character here is mostly a combo of wet blanket, spiritual traffic cop, and guardian angel on earth to the wayward Demetrius. Peter's arrival at the seaside villa of Messalina marks the sudden end of Demetrius' summer of love. After sinking into an abyss of self-indulgence during a summer by the sea with La Hayward, even Demetrius seems a bit weary of Messalina-Susan's patented shtick: the flaring of her nostrils, the tossing of her red mane, and her expression of a throaty lust for life, especially if that life is coursing through the muscular bod of the former slave turned reluctant gladiator. All Rennie's Peter has to do is show up for five minutes, get wine splashed in his face, and listen to Demetrius' frenzied denial of shared faith passively.

Presto-chango, Messalina loses her playmate, Demetrius returns to Rome as a centurion appointed by Caligula (who is going off the deep end, believing the Christian-held robe has magical powers of life and death). Long story short, the robe turns up in an unexpected way that renews Demetrius' faith, though the movie stops short of investing a physical object with spiritual significance at this point, making the message of this film interestingly ambivalent. With the demise of the leading baddie in the cast, it even seems to indicate that the world might be big enough to hold both pagans and believers in some kind of wary harmony...though if anyone believes that jazz that Messalina spouts near The End, I have some swamp land in the Okefenokee where you could build your dream house.

Above: Barry Jones, as the newly minted Emperor Claudius apparently wondering if the paycheck has cleared yet, appears as the spouse of Susan Hayward, playing Messalina for all she's worth.

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In an effort to share the wealth of enjoyment to be found in this bad movie, Demetrius and the Gladiators is posted below:

Bad Movies I Love: Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 21:39:00 +0000

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) is to producer John Houseman, director Vincente Minnelli and actor Kirk Douglas' earlier film, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) what a hot dog with everything is to a cordon bleu meal, and it is being aired on TCM at 4 AM (ET) on Sunday, Dec. 16th.

I really like this movie, based on one of Irwin Shaw's many novels about Americans amid the Eurotrash in the decade after the immediate postwar period when things really started to spin out of control ethically, artistically, and literally, based on several whirling scenes in this flick. At the height of his post-Spartacus power, Kirk Douglas plays "Jack Andrus" a former big movie star in the biz. We know he was on the A list once since Minnelli inserts an actual clip from the earlier gem, The Bad and the Beautiful into the action, giving this movie one of those metatexts that film theorists swoon for. There's only one problem: Jack is only just coming out of his shell after a whale of a nervous collapse caused him to tumble from the top of the heap. Now, the doctors think his touch of manic-depression, murderous rages, alcoholism and occasional hallucinations have all been ironed out, along with the kinks in his famous ego. He's ready for the world again. But is the world ready for him? The answer seems to be "maybe not."

His ol' pal director Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) throws him a bone from Rome, asking him to join him there for a possible job on his most recent international epic. That movie, it turns out, is in trouble, thanks to hissy fits among the cast, foul-ups among a non-English speaking crew, a shady producer, and an understandably tired director (Robinson). Waiting for his flight toward a fresh start, Jack is accosted by a former business associate (George McCready), who rebuffs the actor's greeting with the news that Jack was an arrogant crud when he was on top, except now he can tell him what he thinks. Slap! After a flight that allowed him to brood about his past once more, Jack arrives on the Roman film set to see two stars feigning passion during a scene--only to end it with more hearty slaps. Oh, so it's going to be that kind of picture.

The stressed-out Kruger keeps trying to keep up a brave front, but the veteran director is either beset by schlocky Italian producers (think Dino De Laurentiis without the occasional moments of class), or an American reporter (played by the ever-sleazy James Gregory) whose idea of integrity is to tell Kruger that "he used to tell the public the truth," but now "he lies to himself, which is worse." At home things are even more ulcer-inducing. When Kruger comes home ten minutes late to his wife (Claire Trevor, who seems to play all her scenes at mach speed), the harridan reminds him that she has a vault full of evidence of adultery against him, and she'll use it one of these days. Not surprisingly, the poor schmo has a heart attack, just to get a night's rest. Fortunately, Jack is suddenly the unlikely party to pull his ailing mentor's chestnuts out of the fire, though he expected "a chance to live again" by acting aka "making love to the camera," not helping with dubbing. Ah, but Fate is not done toying with ~~Mr. Intensity~~ Kirk Douglas.

If you are into drinking games, every time a scene in this baroque movie reminds you of La Dolce Vita you could down a shot in honor of Fellini (these "where have I seen this before?" moments include numerous decadent parties, strolls down the Via Veneto, rambling speeches about the emptiness of all that glitters). Despite its derivative nature and knowing its bad for you, it is delicious fun...especially when Cyd Charisse is around as Kirk's castrating ex-wife.

Above: Cyd Charisse & Kirk Douglas on a ride down memory lane in Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).

Don't go for a car ride with this twosome, especially if you remember Lana Turner's epic meltdown behind the wheel in TBATB. Cyd's character, most generously described as "a professional beauty," seems to embody every aspect of womankind that justifiably frightens the menfolk, though she probably has her reasons for being a manipulative succubus who haunts Kirk's feverish dreams. Cyd is beautifully dressed by Walter Plunkett, but her character's motivation is as blurry as the vaseline-smeared medium shots she appears in throughout much of the movie, perhaps reflecting her former husband's distorted perception of her?

Above: The elegant Cyd Charisse in full plumage as "Carlotta," the succubus/ex-wife of Kirk Douglas' character. For those unfamiliar with this term: "Succubus [suhk-yuh-buh s]: In myths and folklore going back to ancient Greece, a succubus (plural succubi) was a female demon or supernatural entity that appears in men's dreams. She takes the form of a human woman in order to seduce men, draining them of their life force and souls, usually through sexual intercourse. The male counterpart is the incubus."

Rosanna Schiaffino also appears as an Italian star with a foul temperament and small brain who only responds best when kicked in the backside. The stunning Daliah Lavi also appears as a compliant innocent (earthy variety) though she receives not ONE real close-up in this film. Her character has the spine of generous, sexually alluring jellyfish, aiding the needy men around her with helpings of her "don't worry, be happy" warmth. Unfortunately, one suspects that her character has the intellect of a jellyfish too. However, she is the balm for Kirk's washed-up actor soul as he tries to cope with all the demands of assuming a mantle of God's gift to the cinema, even though he is still recovering from a mental breakdown.

Above: Kirk Douglas contemplating a life in the movies in Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).

There are lots of good elements here--the satire on Hollywood's then-novel shift to Rome, Edward G. Robinson as a fading creative figure, an over-wound Claire Trevor as a harpie who could have made one of Strindberg's more demonic married women look like a turtle dove by comparison, Kirk's fragile psyche and shaky driving skills, and George Hamilton's bad boy interpretation of James Dean. I like to think that George drew his "crazy, mixed up kid" bit from his study of George Peppard in his more sullen Methody funks on the set of Home From the Hill (1960). As one wag pointed out in an IMDb review, George Hamilton doesn't even seem capable of playing a bad actor.

Above: George Hamilton acting out (or is it up?) as "Davey Drew," bad boy actor in
Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).

Speaking of bad actors, I love Kirk in this movie. He is NOT a bad actor, but he plays one very, very well. I've always admired the way that Douglas appears to have had a "take no prisoners" approach to his roles. Despite what I suspect were often good intentions, his spectacular, larger-than-life presence sometimes overwhelms his actor's belief in being true to his character's nature, despite his valiant efforts to tamp down his inner grandstander. Despite this career-long inner struggle, Kirk often seems to have chosen roles for their ability to dramatize something about human nature, whether or not that makes his character appear dislikable or admirable. Alas, his character in this film, as written in the Charles Schnee script, makes the most abrupt transitions between moods (Were there some studio cuts in this one?). He spouts off in one scene like someone who still has scorch marks from his last shock treatment, and in the next he is coolly taking the helm of a "major motion picture," albeit without realizing that his best efforts are likely to bring out the knives among his Hollywood colleagues (particularly Claire Trevor, who doesn't seem to have any redeeming features here, including restraint). Good thing that the stalwart character actor Vito Scotti is on hand to translate and goose a scene along with his gift for miming exasperation.

Above: Claire Trevor & Edward G. Robinson as longtime marrieds in Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).

On the upside, this movie is photographed in Rome in rich color by Milton Krasner (All About Eve, Three Coins in the Fountain, A Certain Smile) and features Minnelli's usual wealth of expressionistic touches with color, lush settings and gliding camera movement. Too bad Vincente seemed to be going through a rough patch when he made this one. His usual compassion for female characters is largely absent. Also, the film, which has a lush score courtesy of composer David Raksin (Laura, The Bad and the Beautiful), almost cries out for an operatic score worthy of a Verdi to accompany the dramatic arias of the characters. Despite the film's foibles and missteps, there are very erudite cinephiles who regard Two Weeks in Another Town as a worthy companion piece to Godard's Contempt, Fellini's 8 1/2, and other navel-gazing movies about movies. I just ain't one of those who thinks the problems of these people are worth telling. But they are fun--as long as it isn't happening to you.

Below is the trailer for Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), which is available as a DVD MOD from WB and other sites, may be downloaded at Amazon, and appears on the TCM schedule from time to time:

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If you are as foolish as the author about "Bad Movies You Love" please feel free to view more entries in this series of blog postings here.

TCM Remembers

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Turner Classic Movies puts together one of their very best features each December in honor of those filmmakers in front of and behind the camera who have passed away in the previous twelve months. 2012 includes many visually eloquent moments in tribute to all those who have died, leaving a legacy for us on screen and off. This year, when so many people died who created 20th Century cinema left us, from the quietly good Phyllis Thaxter to the supremely imaginative Ray Bradbury to the solid, seemingly eternal Ernest Borgnine and many more, it seems more than ever as though "a friend of the family" has gone away.

Since many readers have asked me how they can see certain years, I thought it might be helpful to compile those that are currently available online via the TCM website, Youtube and other sources. I have tried to put these videos in one posting here on this blog for those who enjoy them. Below are the video tributes from 2000 and from 2003-2012 with the identification of what is, optimistically, the correct music and performer for the music used in each year, whenever available. I have not been able to find any other years for posting here.

Many of the beautifully done separate TCM Remembers spots broadcast just after the death of an individual film notable are available for viewing on youtube here.

Of interest to those connoisseurs of these gems:
Many, though not all, of the spots seen on TCM over the years have been created by Raygun, a media marketing firm whose work for Turner Classic Movies (and others) can be seen here. There are, of course, other ad firms which have contributed to the collection of exceptionally interesting, touching and entertaining interstitials seen on TCM over the years. Some examples of their work can be seen here. If TCM ever decides to market a DVD collection of these TCM Remembers memorials or any of their best spots, I think they might be pleasantly surprised to realize how many people would welcome such an idea.

Requiescat in Pace to all of those included and especially those who may have been overlooked.

TCM Remembers 2012:
(Please note: The music is "Wait" by M83)

TCM Remembers 2011:

The song that plays throughout this video is "Before You Go" by OK Sweetheart, with the lilting voice of Erin Austin evoking so much yearning and affection for those who have gone before us.

Earlier TCM Remembers Tributes Below...

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TCM Remembers 2010:

The accompanying song for the 2010 tribute is "Headlights," written and performed by Sophie Hunger. Felt a definite pang when they showed Jean Simmons, John Forsythe and many of the other familiar faces and those who worked behind the scenes.

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TCM Remembers 2009:

The music is Steve Earle's "To Live Is to Fly" sung by Townes Van Zandt

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TCM Remembers 2008:

The accompaniment is the song "God Only Knows" by Joe Henry.

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TCM Remembers 2007:

The music for this video is "Promises" sung by Badly Drawn Boy.

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TCM Remembers 2006:

The song for this year is "Press On" by Robinella.

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TCM Remembers 2005:

The song is "Flesh and Blood" sung by Joe Henry.

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TCM Remembers 2004:

The music accompanying this is "Goodnight Hollywood Boulevard" sung by Ryan Adams.

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TCM Remembers 2003:

The music for this video is Sarah McLachlan singing "I Will Remember You."

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TCM Remembers 2000:

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(Please note: No infringement of copyright of any images or videos is intended by this posting or on this blog. If anything needs to be amended or removed, please contact me and I will be glad to comply.)

Dana Andrews' Biographer to Visit The Silver Screen Oasis in December

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Here's more reason to be of good cheer in the next few weeks.

The Q & A thread devoted to a discussion with Carl Rollyson about this book is now open at The Silver Screen Oasis. It can be seen by clicking here.

Think of the high points of America film in the 1940s for a moment. Titles such as The Ox-Bow Incident, Laura, Fallen Angel, The Best Years of Our Lives, Where the Sidewalk Ends and more are likely to come to mind. One of the crucial elements that made these films classics was the expressive, often wordless eloquence of Dana Andrews. His screen presence gave these movies a depth and naturalism that was all the more remarkable for the seamlessness of his gifted acting. Andrews made memorable contributions to cinematic storytelling in film noir, classic westerns, and definitive examinations of the impact of war on the breakable human spirit. Yet few of us may know much more about this very private individual whose talent and longevity should have made him a much bigger star.

Fortunately for us, journalism professor and biographer Carl Rollyson, the author of the recently published Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) will be visiting The Silver Screen Oasis on the weekend of December 8th and 9th. Carl will share his unique perspective on this actor, drawing on background gleaned from the actor's family, his friends, and Dana Andrews' own deeply personal journals and letters. This book, which was chosen as TCM's September Book of the Month, was reviewed favorably by film historian Jeanine Basinger in a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal. She described the actor this way: "At his best, Andrews embodied an era, the contemporary audience's concept of a 1940s man." Basinger added that this long-overdue biography "teaches us to appreciate an actor whose standing in the Hollywood pantheon should clearly be reassessed. As Mr. Rollyson clearly understands, Dana Andrews has nowhere to go but up."

After reading the book, which analyzes the actor's seemingly artless technique in his on-screen roles as well as his restive struggles in private, I found the story of this actor quite moving. The portrait of Dana Andrews that Mr. Rollyson paints reveals the actor as a complex, quite remarkable person, with little or nothing to do with Hollywood glamour, but much to do with a talent and a drive for excellence that came out of a bare bones boyhood in Texas. As his friend and fellow actor Norman Lloyd described him, Andrews comes alive on the pages of this book as a complex individual who was also "one of nature's noblemen." Thanks to the writing ability of the even-handed Mr. Rollyson, the nuanced central figure in this Hollywood story can still inspire compassion and respect even in those of us who only know him from his work.

Please plan on joining us at the Oasis on Dec. 8th & 9th to explore the life and career of Dana Andrews during the Q & A with Carl Rollyson.

Links to Explore in Anticipation of this Visit:

The Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews Facebook Pag e

Reviews of Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews

Carl Rollyson's Website

The Christmas Album: Claire Trevor

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Our third foray into Yuletides past, Hollywood-style, takes us back to the early '30s when a twenty-something girl from Brooklyn had recently begun climbing the Hollywood tree. That's Claire Trevor (1909-2000) brandishing a mischievous grin and what appears to be a plushly upholstered heart--all while showing the expected bit of leg. This sort of still was de rigueur for the studio period, especially when a young contract player was an unknown quantity. It's a good thing that the actress kept her own appraisal of her assets to herself back then. "The only thing I knew how to do was act," Trevor later said bluntly, "and at that point, I didn't even know much about that."

At the time, Claire Wemlinger, aka Claire Trevor, needed the work. During the Depression, her father's Fifth Avenue clothing store went under, and a regular paycheck was most appealing, even though her proper family was somewhat taken aback by her decision to pursue the stage and screen. After training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the neophyte actress appeared in some Broadway plays, earning some critical praise, catching the eye of Fox Studios, but learning that a brief run in a few plays rarely paid the rent for long.

Eventually the beautiful, possibly talented girl with satin and smoke in her voice evolved into a clear-eyed realist. An ability to project haughtiness and toughness as well as a gift for versatility enabled Trevor to build a film career that spanned six decades. "I always thought of the movies as a temporary arrangement," she reflected in the late '40s. "I had always thought of myself as a stage actress. But I had a few flings at the stage and I decided I like pictures better." During five years at 20th Century Fox, studio head Darryl Zanuck seemed unenthusiastic about her potential, only loaning her out for some decent parts while relegating Claire to a flurry of programmers at her home studio. On the up-side of this situation, the actress did have a chance to play opposite and learn from a vast number of actors, including Spencer Tracy, from whom she said she "stole" his naturalistic way of "throwing away a line" after appearing with him in The Mad Game (1933) and Dante's Inferno (1935).

The majority of pictures were most often flicks that "nobody knows about," according to the actress. "I don't even know how many pictures I made. It must have been 150! I played every kind of girl you could name: newspaper reporter, nurse, a Navy wife." [For the record, IMDb credits Claire Trevor with 87 acting appearances in movies and on television]. In her own succinct take on this early phase of her career: "I either played the dashing girl reporter who cleaned up the town or the leader of a pack of gangsters." After that experience, she became one of those rare screen actors in the studio era who generally kept her independence, playing occasional leads but more often nailing juicy supporting parts in a seamlessly skilled manner.

This shift came after she "played fallen women in Dead End (1937) and Stagecoach (1939) That did it," Trevor claimed in an interview in the 1980s. Working with fine directors such as William Wyler and John Ford and being part of a skilled ensemble cast, Claire Trevor had discovered that she could "get more dimension into the role when you're not playing the lead. The censors don't care so much about character parts, but they're strict about the hero and heroine."

These roles enabled her to move to a higher branch on the path to success in the film colony, bringing her a well-deserved Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her brief, searing moments as a diseased prostitute, "Francey," on screen in Dead End. [Trevor would be nominated twice more, for Key Largo (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). She won an Oscar for her turn as the painfully anguished alcoholic in Key Largo].

Despite this insight into this aspect of a career, the status of "featured actress" was not always entirely comfortable for her. While she never brooded openly about "the parts that got away," Claire acknowledged that she lost out many parts to more high profile actresses, particularly Barbara Stanwyck, whose roles in Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) were both ones that Trevor ached to play.

Trevor felt particularly awkward in a supporting role at MGM in 1941, when she appeared in Honky Tonk opposite Clark Gable. "I was his old girl," Claire explained, " then Lana [Turner] came along and that was the end of me. I remember I went to the preview and I started to cry. Lana and I looked a lot alike then, and they made me put brown powder in my hair so I wouldn't be as blonde as she. I thought my hair looked awful, and I thought that was the end of my career. I really felt stepped on in that." Seeing the film on television years later, the veteran actress then wondered why she had been bothered since she found her role considerably more interesting than the leading lady's innocent role.

Perhaps that gradual realization on her part is one reason why the actress was increasingly drawn to steely characters whose beauty and sharp-eyed perceptions seemed to make them ideal for her noir-tinged gifts. Murder, My Sweet (1944), Born to Kill (1947), and Raw Deal (1948) gave her a chance to play women coping with power, sex, money, and men in frank ways that suggested a ferocious id and a lively if amoral mind in one well-dressed package. These unapologetic women she portrayed never seemed particularly hemmed in by Production Code strictures either. As her character in Murder, My Sweet sighed wearily when grilled by someone with the hubris to think he could truly understand her POV, "It's a long story, and not very pretty."

As she matured, Trevor created a series of characters who blended poignancy with a self-revelation that was without vanity. She was particularly adept at portraying vividly individuals whose bitter sense of life's injustices ran just beneath the surface--until events caused emotions to boil over. In the melodramatic tale of the theater, The Velvet Touch (1948), Trevor played a rival/victim of Rosalind Russell's narcissistic leading lady in a nuanced manner. Creating a believable woman hopelessly in love with a man that Russell has dallied with in the past, Claire reveals her character's vulnerability and strength in a series of confrontations with the star (and steals every scene in my book). Another complex portrayal enlivened by Trevor's talent was the lonely, bitter wife of a farmer she played in William Wellman's My Man and I (1952). Fancying herself attracted to a hired migrant laborer played by Ricardo Montalban, the actress could have drawn a caricature of lust and frustration with a few broad strokes. Instead, Trevor's loneliness, racism, self-loathing and caustic manner jockey uneasily to create something readily true-to-life.

Despite her memorable way with these dark dames, the roles that first garnered this movie lover's attention were more conventional, yet forceful women. Claire Trevor's mothers, are really unusual for the period: in Ida Lupino's Hard, Fast, and Beautiful (1951) she is antsy with roiling ambition for her daughter, a tennis star played by Sally Forrest. In Marjorie Morningstar (1958), the actress's 'Rose Morgenstern' at first seems to be a nagging, interfering Jewish mother, fretting endlessly over her daughter's choices in life. Gradually, the fear and love the mother feels for her daughter emerges. At a dinner with the girl and her glamorous ne'er do well, Noel Airman (Gene Kelly), Mrs. Morgenstern's sometimes blunt ambition and protectiveness of her daughter clearly comes out of a lifetime of concern and past experience.

The way that Trevor plays this scene, it becomes clear that this controlling woman has seen the world's harshness, absorbing some of it into her own personality and made even more astringent because on some level, 'Rose Morgenstern' knows that it will not deter her daughter for even a moment. Perhaps the honesty of these portrayals came out of her own experiences. Married twice for a few years before settling down happily with real estate man and producer Milton H. Bren from 1948 until his death in 1979, the actress, who was the mother of one boy and stepmother of two boys, learned that life didn't begin or end on a movie set. "I have always been careless about my career," she later claimed. "I never worked hard with the publicity department which, I realized later, I should have. I loved working, loved that part of it. All the other thing, I sort of let slide."

In his memoirs, her friend, actor Robert Wagner recalled fondly how Claire Trevor helped him learn to live outside of the Hollywood bubble. At one time, he believed that if "I lost a gig it was the end of the world." After getting to know people like Trevor and her husband, he realized that "I could always stand in a river with a fishing rod or play golf. My life now is not show business; it was when I was young, but the deeper I got into it, the more time I spent with people like David Niven, Claire Trevor, and Sterling Hayden, the more I realized how important it is to have something else in your life, something that can fuel your acting."

When Trevor died in 2000 at the age of ninety, she left several friends a gift of money in her will. Robert Wagner was one of those friends who received such a legacy, "what she called 'a hug and a kiss' that she was unable to deliver in person. Since Claire was partially responsible for my appreciation of art," Wagner wrote, "I used some of the money to buy two sculptures from nature: a bear, which I have in my bedroom, and a pair of owls. With what was left over, the next time I was in Paris I went to a caviar bar that she had introduced me to, ordered some fine caviar and a bottle of champagne, and drank a toast to a great, great lady."

For the rest of us, who only knew her from her movies, Claire Trevor left a lifetime of highly entertaining, no-nonsense, portrayals laced with an honest intelligence and considerable insight into human behavior.

Above: Claire Trevor looking like a savvy Sugar Plum Fairy in the late '40s. ''I didn't know,'' Claire Trevor once said, ''that to make a real career in Hollywood you have to become a 'personality,' have to cultivate publicity departments and become known as 'The Ear' or even 'The Toe.'''

Please click here to see upcoming Claire Trevor movies scheduled for TCM.

For Past Entries in The Christmas Album on this blog, please click here.

Sources:

"Acclaimed Actress Claire Trevor Dies," (AP), The Eugene Register Guard, April 9, 2000.

"Claire Trevor's Kin Ask Why She Doesn't Play Nice Girl Roles," (AP), The Miami News, April 30, 1953.

Parker, Jerry, "Shady Lady Claire Trevor Moves Uptown in 'Kiss Me Goodbye,'" Anchorage Daily News, February 23, 1983.

Thomas, Bob, Stardom Sought by Claire Trevor At This Late Date, The Evening Independent, Aug. 16, 1948.

Wagner, Robert, Eyman, Scott, Pieces of My Heart: A Life, HarperCollins, 2009.

The Christmas Album: Tom Mix

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Day Two of our holiday jaunt takes us into the cinematic sagebrush. Even if you've never seen this man before, his theatrical mien makes him memorable. With that immaculately white ten gallon hat, beautifully tailored duster, splendidly decorated boots, and dazzling smile, could this outlandish figure be anyone other than a movie cowboy from a child's dreams? And wouldn't Tom Mix be surprised that decades later, his lasting impact restored the blush in the unlikely cheek of someone who had crossed paths with him just once long ago?

Attending the annual holiday event sponsored by The Los Angeles Examiner in the movie capital, the fifty-two year old cowboy star Tom Mix is pictured as he arrived backstage at the Shriners' Auditorium in the hard-bitten December of 1932. The petite lady next to him swathed in fur is the fifth Mrs. Mix (née Mabel Hubbell Ward). The broadly smiling Mix was nearing the end of his time in pictures. During this last decade of his life, he returned to his early show-biz roots, appearing in circuses run by him and others, even as that peripatetic form of entertainment was waning. By the middle of this decade, Mix, who had been a great star in the '20s, made his last film, The Miracle Rider, a Mascot serial, in 1935.

After a lifetime of stunts (and the inevitable injuries that accompanied them), he knew that time was no longer on his side, though in public his high-living style sense masked any self-doubt nicely. The irrepressible showman's duds are actually rather restrained in this image. No rhinestones can be detected (though I bet those boots gleamed as brightly as his teeth). Tom appears to have left his legendary purple tuxedo at home and isn't wearing (or driving) anything adorned with a set of actual long horns as he did in real life. In his day, Mix's flamboyant presence on the screen had a razzle-dazzle that was in striking contrast to the silent cinema's other iconic cowpoke: that grounded, powerfully austere, yet sometimes puritanical Western wraith, William S. Hart. Separated by a vast generational gulf as well as style, both early cowboy stars were born in New York and Pennsylvania--not The Wild West. The flinty, paternal Hart often taught audiences a moral lesson, but Mix seems to have been a somewhat rascally uncle, showing off and sharing escapist fun with his viewers as he gave miscreants a drubbing. He managed to draw the line between good and bad guys without the starch of Victorian stuffiness.

It would be easy to mock the kind of fantasy cowboy that Tom Mix played on screen in hundreds of films from 1909 on, as he evolved into one of the highest paid movie star in the 1920s. Unfortunately, all but nine of his movies were silents and most are now lost (*sigh*). The glimpses that remain remind me of film's ability to transport us to an open-hearted world with chances for adventure and hope as vast as the prairie. As film historian Jeanine Basinger described the cowboy star's showmanship and dazzling stunt work, Mix seemed to dash "through his slam-bang adventures as if his pants were on fire."

His was a career that bloomed under the hot house conflation of early studio flacks, who claimed at various times that Mix was born in El Paso county in Texas, had been a rough rider with Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba (Mix rode in a parade with TR once), had upheld America's "place in the sun" during the uprising in The Philippines, defended Western civilization during The Boxer Rebellion in China, and fought with the Brits during the Boer War in South Africa (even though Mix never went overseas during his tour of duty in the army).

In reality, Mix had learned to love horses from his father in rural Pennsylvania, a genuine, lifelong skill that enhanced his later career. He had earned his show biz spurs in Wild West Shows and had been a genuine rodeo champion after knocking around with traveling circuses. He had also been a deputy sheriff and a marshal for a time. The compliant Mix understood that his fans wanted to believe in his larger-than-life persona and it was good for business to exaggerate his exploits, (so good that when he died, the U.S. Army felt obliged to give the actor a full military funeral after he died in a car accident in 1940, despite the fact that he had actually been technically AWOL since 1902).

Today, if Mix's movies are remembered, they are often cited as the precursor to the highly popular flicks of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers from the '30s through the '50s, which also dressed frontier tales in tinsel, sometimes setting stories in contemporary times, complete with streamlined convertibles and villains who wore snap brim hats, pin-striped suits and gats alongside the Westerners in chaps, pistols and Stetsons. Mix's characters had never smoked, drank alcohol or used his gun in anything except self-defense or the defense of another, though alcohol was a part of his life for many years in private. In a revealing comment made to a journalist in the Yuletide season during The Great Depression, the cowboy hero expressed his wish that children might have a Happy Christmas, adding "I hope their parents [and] guardians take an interest in them too, and bring them up to be better citizens than we are. We've made our mistakes."

Mix's extravagant bravura reached an army of children and he took his influence on them seriously. Among those who could be transported back to a moment when he left his brand on the imagination of myriad boys and girls was Peter Cushing, the elegant British actor noted for his intelligent (and subversively amusing) portrayals in numerous Hammer Studio films from the '50s on. Cushing often reflected on his own re-enactments of Tom Mix adventures in his family's garden when he was a boy. On one notable occasion, the distinguished actor recalled how one of his imitations of his cowboy idol nearly led to the wiry boy's accidental hanging. Something involving leaping off an imaginary horse onto a tree branch, no doubt?

Even though I was born years after Tom Mix left the world, some decades ago his then unknown-to-me name came up in an unexpected setting. This small event taught me that I can never really know diddly about what goes on inside the people around me. On one of those warm days in May when being in high school is an insult to our inner siren call, a stork-like nun named Sister Sardo was given the unlucky assignment of hammering some English Lit into the dull skulls of pubescent girls. This nun was unusually tall for her era, with glasses and a dry, high voice probably earned from years of speaking to the often intellectually deaf herds of students. There were nuns in that generation who came up to my shoulder when I was in fourth grade (and I am only 5'3" now), but she towered over everyone.

She could have been aged anywhere from fifty to seventy-five years old, but you could never be sure when they wore a habit, hiding their hair and masking much of their humanity. (It was always exciting when some poor nun, sweating on a warm day or whisking along on a blustery one, momentarily had to readjust her wimple or veil, sometimes revealing for a fraction of a second some actual hair). The old habit that some Sisters of Mercy still clung to back then also gave them an air of mystery, considerable authority, and some deadly weapons, as I witnessed during my long career in Catholic institutions. Seeing a few loafers being gently garroted with the heavy three foot rosary that hung from their thick, black belt could really put the fear of God (or his earthly reps) into a student. But Sardo (as we called her when her back was turned and we felt "bold") wasn't likely to commit mayhem. Her weapons were more often sarcasm or an occasional pointer between the shoulder blades to get a lollygagger or a whisperer's attention.

On this particular afternoon, one minute she was nattering about the wizened spirit of a character in Silas Marner. In the next moment something happened to her. Her eyes glowed, her voice softened and (thankfully) she put down the pointer. The teacher had been describing what an epiphany was and how it can occur when something unexpected and wonderful might come into our lives when we least expect it. It was startling to note that there was something nearly rhapsodic was about the way that Sister Sardo went on to describe a day when a train arrived in town when she was a girl. A reference to pre-convent days, much less girlhood, was highly unusual coming from a nun, so my ears perked up.

The nun's rigid posture relaxed, she moved toward her desk and sat on the edge of it while her words seemed to tumble out of her. Next to the railroad, Sister Sardo (what was her real name back then, I wondered d?) and her friends hadgathered as the last boxcar eased to a stop on a late summer day. The door of the freight car slid open. From the shadowy interior, a splendidly attired horse and rider alighted, wearing black and silver regalia and moving fluidly toward her and the other children present--it was Tom Mix riding Tony, the Wonder Horse. This man and his steed, neither of whom we had never heard of before, was something special to her, she explained. The years and the weight of her vows seemed to fall away as she described this smiling man and the way that Tony reared with Mix on his back while the horse's hooves waved through the air in greeting. Even more unlikely, she said, Tom Mix climbed down from the horse and spoke to each of the children clustered around him. None had money to visit the show he was scheduled to give that evening. Yet, the cowboy star encouraged the small girl who had grown up to be a nun to pet the velvety white nose of the highly intelligent Tony, a mixed breed horse who had been purchased for $18 and whose hoof prints appeared next to Mix's at Grauman's Chinese Theater.

There wasn't any profit to be made for Mix by sharing a few moments with a passel of ragamuffins during a tour of a failing circus. Yet, here we were, more than forty years later, reflecting on this precious memory and learning that the most improbable individuals have had their lives brightened by just such a seemingly trivial incident. The moment passed, the nun straightened up, and returned to asking us to consider the random power of incident in fiction and in reality in her customary erudite manner. The cowboy image had faded from movie screens, but clearly, not from her heart, as she proceeded to grill us about imagery, plot, themes and metaphors in George Eliot's novels.

But it was too late. We'd glimpsed the girl inside her all over again. Just as Tom Mix, who once slid inadvertently across a highly polished marble floor on his keester after entering a mansion wearing high heeled cowboy boots: "Go on and laugh. I'm just trying to be entertaining."

Sources:

Basinger, Jeanne, Silent Stars, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2000.
Jensen, Richard D., The Amazing Tom Mix: The Most Famous Cowboy of the Movies, iUniverse, 2005.
"Tom Mix-Twentieth Century Knight of Adventure," The San Jose News, Dec. 1, 1931.

Some Tom Mix Films and Clips online can be seen here.

For past entries in The Christmas Album on this blog, please click here.

The Christmas Album: Ava

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

The fire is out, the wind is cold. What better time to warm ourselves with the memory of Ava Gardner, as we raise a toast to the actress whose often crowded life began on December 24th, 1922 as a Christmas Eve baby? The youngest of seven children born on a tobacco farm in Grabtown, North Carolina, as she grew up it was a bit of a shock to the girl that it "appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that."

Despite that early brush with blasphemy and display of innately irreverent humor, Gardner's destiny seemed charmed. Her unvarnished natural beauty on display in a New York photographer's window caught the eye of someone with ties to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, leading to a contract with the studio in 1941. The kind of work she did there involved softening a pronounced Southern accent, learning to blend seductiveness and purpose under the tutelage of Lillian Burns, and posing for pictures like the one above, for all the holidays, some of which graced the walls of garages and barber shops throughout the land. Many walk-on parts and a couple of missteps down the marital path later (Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw), the writer-producer Mark Hellinger spotted her in the low budget Whistle Stop (1946), and he just knew--this was "Kitty O'Shea."

With that heart-shaped face, cleft chin, green eyes, lithe form and instinctive sensuality, in earlier times she might have been Helen of Troy, Dido of Carthage, Boadicea of the Iceni, Nell Gwynne, or Emma Hamilton, but she was definitely perfect casting for the femme fatale in The Killers (1946). A star was born, even though it would take a few years of living before she observed that "stardom...gave me everything I never wanted."

Later, she was a glorious lost soul in The Great Sinner (1949), even better as the star-crossed Julie in Show Boat (1951), superbly mythic in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), hauntingly human in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and a jet set gamine with an aching heart in Mogambo (1953). Yet, this great beauty, losing some of her luster, became more touching, funny and despite her denials, a damn good actress in later films such as On the Beach (1959), Seven Days in May (1964), and The Night of the Iguana (1964). (Heck, I even liked the Spanish Civil War movie The Angel Wore Red where her ragged bar girl lit up the screen opposite the daunting and talented Dirk Bogarde).

And her own assessment of her life work? She claimed that she was "never an actress – none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at....[most of the time the] answer I usually gave was 'For the loot, honey, always for the loot,' and there was more truth than poetry in that remark. I had to do something and I didn't know how to do anything else."

The worldly elbowed each other for most of her sixty-seven years to gaze on her on the screen and in the street, all eager to see what an empty-hearted publicity hack labeled "the world's most beautiful animal." International headlines dogged her throughout her final tangled marriage to Frank Sinatra and through all the subsequent sordid and sad episodes with a parade of men who strutted through her hectic days. Eventually after Spain, movies, and a few television appearances, the actress found a quiet home in London with her dogs, her memories and occasional encounters with old friends (reportedly even Sinatra, who helped pay the bills and quietly carried a torch to the end). As her robust health ebbed away, she simply commented wryly, "There comes a moment when every woman has to face up to being an old broad."

In the years after she left home, Gardner would often return to North Carolina claiming, "I am pathologically shy. I was a country girl and I still have a country girl's rather simple ordinary values." Fittingly, that is where she rests since 1990, near her family and her roots. She was better than she knew.

Above: One of the images of a 17-year-old Ava Gardner ascribed to photographer Larry Tarr. The display of this startling beauty in his New York studio window in 1939 drew the attention of Hollywood--eventually.

Sources:

Allan, William, Ava Gardner 'Country Girl', The Pittsburgh Press, Dec. 26, 1982.
Gardner Ava, Ava: My Story, Thorndike Press, 1992.
Server, Lee, Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing, .Macmillan, 2007

For past entries in The Christmas Album on this blog, please click here.

Me? A Guest Programmer at TCM...Well, it's a long story...

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 03:14:00 +0000

As many of you undoubtedly know by now, several of the Movie Morlocks bloggers were asked to participate in a night of Guest Programming at TCM that is being broadcast on November 30th. I still can't believe that this has happened. Here are my impressions of the events surrounding this milestone...My Adventures in TCM land are detailed beginning below:

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” - Henry James

Those words keep echoing in my mind whenever I think of my trip to TCM a few months ago. I was asked to be one of the Morlocks who appeared as a guest programmer on the evening of Friday, November 30th earlier this year. Saying “Yes” to this experience was transformative. I used to just be a hardcore fan of old movies. After this visit, I am also a fan of the people who work at Turner Classic Movies--and with good reason.

Getting to know the people who make Turner Classic Movies the network that inspires so much intense joy among its viewers has been a long learning experience. That the network does this by continuously striving to offer a feast of classic films to a world starved for storytelling that speaks directly to the human experience is key to the network’s success. The overwhelming kindness of the individuals associated with the network both in person and online has brightened a life that has taken more than a few hairpin turns in the last few years.

Of course the initial excitement, terror and “who, me?” quality of the whole thing was pretty overwhelming. It became even more surreal after a series of medical emergencies almost led me to miss this opportunity. I had originally been scheduled to visit Atlanta with my fellow Morlocks, Susan Doll, Richard Harland Smith, and Pablo Kjolseth, who will be seen with Robert Osborne this evening introducing three films they cherish: The Locket (1946), Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and Five Million Years to Earth (1968)...

...More on the TCM Movie Morlocks Blog

The Lew Ayres Event at The Silver Screen Oasis

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:31:00 +0000

The Q & A thread devoted to a discussion of the life and career of actor and pacifist Lew Ayres is now open on The Silver Screen Oasis. All are welcome to ask questions of his biographer Lesley L. Coffin between Oct. 26th-Oct. 29th at the link below. The book, Lew Ayres: Hollywood's Conscientious Objector (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), which is featured on TCM's Movie News this month, will be available from book sellers on November 4th. More highlights from Ayres' film career can be seen here and the discussion begins at the link below:

All About Ayres: The Q & A with Lew Ayres' Biographer

Jerry Beck on TCM with Rare Animated Films on 10-21-12

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:34:00 +0000

I hope that others are watching the special program on TCM this Sunday evening, Oct. 21st, with Jerry Beck, the cartoon historian and author of fifteen books on the subject.

Above: Robert Osborne & Jerry Beck on TCM on Sunday, October 21st. [photo courtesy of TCM]

I had the pleasure of meeting Jerry when I visited TCM this summer (more about that at a later date). I was delighted to discuss his work with him for some time prior to his appearance with Robert Osborne. His knowledge of his subject and his love for classic animation is so infectious. Hats off to Jerry, who has posted some great links to historical material associated with tonight's lineup on TCM at the link below on his terrific website on animation that he maintains with his colleague, Amid Amidi. CartoonBrew.com's account of Jerry's visit with TCM is linked here:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/rare-animation-on-tcm-gullivers-travels-71920.html

I recommend The Tell-Tale Heart in particular. James Mason did the narration in this beautifully made (and little known) adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe tale. I am particularly interested in the 1920 cartoon, The Bomb Idea since it deals with the then "ripped-from-the-headlines" theme of Bolshevik bomb-throwers, (an unusual subject for a cartoon, eh?). You can see more about each film on tonight's schedule here

Here's a rundown of the schedule for tonight (all times shown are ET):

8:00 PM
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1939)
A human doctor washes ashore on an island inhabited by little people locked in a foolish war.
Dir: Dave Fleischer Cast: Jessica Dragonette , Lanny Ross ,
C-76 mins, TV-G, CC,

9:30 PM
MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN (1941)
A grasshopper tries to find a new home for his fellow insects.
Dir: Dave Fleischer Cast: Kenny Gardner , Gwen Williams , Jack Mercer .
C-78 mins, TV-G,

11:00 PM
FUDGET'S BUDGET (1954)
George Fudget tries to get his family to economize.
Dir: Robert Cannon
BW-7 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format

11:00 PM
UNICORN IN THE GARDEN, THE (1953)
Dir: William T Hurtz
BW-7 mins, TV-PG,

11:00 PM
GERALD MCBOING BOING (1951)
Dir: Robert Cannon
BW-7 mins, TV-G,

11:00 PM
ROOTY TOOT TOOT (1951)
On trial for killing a faithless lover, Frankie tries to spin the story in her favor.
Dir: John Hubley
C-8 mins, TV-G, CC,

11:00 PM
TELL-TALE HEART, THE (1953)
Dir: Ted Parmelle
BW-8 mins, TV-14,

11:00 PM
CHRISTOPHER CRUMPET (1953)
A little boy turns into a chicken whenever he doesn't get his way.
Dir: Robert Cannon
BW-7 mins, TV-G,

11:00 PM
RAGTIME BEAR, THE (1949)
Dir: John Hubley
BW-7 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
SCENTS AND NONSENSE (1926)
Krazy Kat tries to help a furrier catch animals to skin.
BW-6 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
DOWN ON PHONEY FARM (1915)
In his rare, recently rediscovered debut appearance, Paul Terry's Farmer Al Falfa develops a plant that grows beer, then tests the product on his cow.
BW-3 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
SPRINGTIME (1923)
Farmer Al Falfa flirts with cute girls at the beach.
BW-5 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
INKWELL - TRIP TO MARS (1924)
BW-6 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
ARTIST'S DREAM (1913)
An animated dachshund fools his live-action creator by eating the sausages he has drawn.
BW-4 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
FARMERETTE, THE (1932)
All the animals on Farmer Goat's farm are lazy and unproductive until a visiting flapper introduces them to jazz.
BW-7 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
FIREMAN SAVE MY CHILD (1919)
Firemen Mutt and Jeff are called to a burning hotel, where Mutt must rescue a rich lady's "baby" while avoiding a monster dog.
BW-6 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
BOMB IDEA, THE (1920)
A railroad porter and his boss get a premature Red Scare when a strange visitor seems to be carrying a Bolshevik bomb.
BW-3 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
HAUNTED HOTEL (1907)
A big-nosed man spends the night in a ghostly inn, where enchanted silverware fixes dinner and a terrible troll swallows unwary sleepers.
BW-5 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
BOBBY BUMPS STARTS FOR SCHOOL (1917)
Mischievous schoolboy Bobby disobeys his teacher and swings on a dangerous giant school bell.
BW-5 mins, TV-G,

12:00 AM
LIGHTNING SKETCHES (1907)
J. Stuart Blackton, one of the earliest screen cartoonists, draws some ethnic caricatures and an animated bottle of wine.
BW-2 mins, TV-G,

1:15 AM
ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, THE (1927)
This silent silhouetted animation is based on the Arabian Nights' tales.
Dir: Lotte Reiniger
BW-66 mins, TV-G,

All About Ayres: Lesley L. Coffin, Biographer of Lew Ayres, at the Silver Screen Oasis in October

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Please Note: The Q & A thread devoted to Lew Ayres is now open at the SSO and biographer Lesley Coffin will be answering your questions from Friday, Oct. 26th - Monday, Oct. 29th.

Lew Ayres did it all during his long career. From silent film to classic sit-coms; he expressed his boyish passion for Greta Garbo in her last silent The Kiss (1929); played the doomed protagonist in the shattering film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), described as "a landmark of world cinema," did an unexpectedly brilliant, bittersweet turn in Holiday (1937); found great fame as Dr. Kildare; appeared in the outlandishly entertaining sci-fi, Donovan's Brain (1953); made a few movies that were barely "B's", and made two documentaries that reflected his lifelong search for spiritual values.

From Friday, Oct. 26th through Monday Oct. 29th we welcome the opportunity to learn more about Ayres during a visit at The Silver Screen Oasis by Lesley L. Coffin, the author of the upcoming biography, Lew Ayres: Hollywood's Conscientious Objector (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). This first full length biography of the Oscar-nominated actor was written by Ms. Coffin using previously untapped oral histories from the TCM Archives at The University of Georgia-Athens, the Hollywood Film Oral History Project at Columbia University in NYC, and the comments of friends of Mr. Ayres throughout his life. Perhaps best of all, the actor's unpublished autobiography and the memories of the actor's son, Dr. Justin Ayres, who practices medicine in Los Angeles, helped to fill in much of the story.

Often remembered best off-screen for his principled stand during World War II as a conscientious objector, Ayres had what has been described as a "quiet dignity, constantly searching for the right way to live his life and torn between the public world of Hollywood and secluded life of spiritual introspection." He was also a part of the rise and transformation of the film industry in three eras (silents, sound, and television); was married to three vital-sounding women: actresses Lola Lane, Ginger Rogers, and a lasting 32 year marriage to "civilian" Diana Hall, with whom Ayres became a father for the first time two days shy of his sixtieth birthday.

Below you can see a brief trailer from Lesley Coffin with lovely images promoting this book:

A serious biographer blessed with a sense of humor as well as a gift for research, the personable Lesley L. Coffin describes herself as "a midwesterner at heart, who happens to reside in New York City (by way of Queens). I come from the hometown of John Hughes (yes, I went to Ferris Bueller’s high school and we did have Saturday detention), went to college at Ball State University (that place David Letterman always talks about giving money to) and completed a Masters degree at New York University. I try to write books about film and Hollywood (I have one coming out and two in the works) and think both seriously and humorously about the world of film, television, and Hollywood. Even as a kid I tended to want to analyze anything and everything I watched, a character trait I still have and channel into my creative pursuits to avoid driving friends and family crazy. My taste in movies are all over the place, but I love interesting films and the film world."

Please plan on stopping by The Silver Screen Oasis from 10/26/12 to 10/30/12 to post and read the Q & A about this book. We'll be honored to share your company!

You can read more about this biography, the author, her other published writing and her future projects at her website below. Lesley can also be heard on her Classic Comedy Film Podcast at the link below.

http://www.lesleycoffin.com

http://lesleycoffin.podomatic.com/

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You can see an earlier post on this blog on Lew Ayres here: Lew Ayres: The Road Less Traveled

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945): A Cast Member Remembers

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:49:00 +0000

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) is on tonight on TCM at 8pm ET. In the past, I've written about this film several times on this blog, particularly when assessing the gifted Dorothy McGuire, but the intensity of the film's impact came back to me as I read the words below.

The following is a verbatim transcription of an interview I read with Ted Donaldson who played Neeley in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) based on Betty Smith's novel. This passage was found in Growing Up on the Set: Interviews With 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television by Tom Goldrup, Jim Goldrup, which was published by McFarland in 2002. Ted Donaldson recalled the events surrounding the filming this way when he and his cast mates began working with first-time film director Elia Kazan:

"Kazan sat us around a huge oaken table that you could imagine the Vikings having a banquet on. He sat at the head of the table and talked about the script, and for three days he established the relationships of the Nolan family. We read the script. We read it again and worked on the different scenes, and on the fourth day of we started shooting. And it was not only the relationships, but the place. The atmosphere, the furniture. Early in the film Peggy Ann Garner and I come into the kitchen. We had come upstairs with pails of water, and Dorothy McGuire is at the sink washing dishes. Years later I was stunned by it when I watched it on television, I thought, 'By God, I know that sink, we know what that floor feels like, we lived there. This is our place.' That's something you sense more in a stage performance because it is alive.

"I think A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of the greatest pieces of ensemble acting in the history of American film. Peggy Ann Garner's performance as Francie Nolan was one of the tow or three greatest child performances ever given. I have always liked Dorothy McGuire, but I think her Katie Nolan was the best thing she ever did on film. Joan Blondell was always terrific, but this film gave her a chance to show a much more vulnerable side, and she really rose to the occasion. She really makes me cry in this film. James Dunn won the Oscar for best supporting actor. It was a beautiful performance. It was the role of his life. The scene in which he sings 'Annie Laurie,' Francie and Neeley are very affected by their father singing that, and so is Katie because she hears heim, comes in from another room, stands at the doorway and recalls older times, times of more promise. There is a big closeup of Johnny singing that breaks your heart. It was the first time that I have ever heard this song. I've got to say that the expression you see on Peggy Ann's face and mine--we kept within the confines of the scene and the characters but that was Peggy and me reacting to James Dunn singing 'Annie Laurie.' We were supposed to be terribly moved by it. And we were. But we were affected as Peggy and as Ted. I'd never quite had that experience before.

"Yes, we were good. Damn right we were good. But that was Kazan. And that's why he produced a film--apart from Leon Shamroy's gorgeous black-and-white photography--where from the first frame on you are back in 1912. You are absolutely there all the way through and it never falters, not for a second. That is why it is a very beautiful and satisfying film."

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An earlier post on Dorothy McGuire's career can be seen here:
Dorothy McGuire's Quiet Power

Shannon Clute To Visit the Silver Screen Oasis

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Searching for another fix of film noir?

Great news! Film noir author and TCM brand manager, Shannon Clute, will be visiting The Silver Screen Oasis crowd from Friday, Sept. 28th through Sunday, Sept. 30th. The thread devoted to a Q & A with Shannon Clute can be found here:

Welcome to Shannon Clute, Our Guest Star for September

Shannon is the co-author of The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press, 2011) and the co-creator of three popular podcast series: Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir, a film history and analysis program; Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed, an author interview show; and Yaddocast, the official podcast of the prestigious artists' retreat Yaddo—all with Richard Edwards.
You can visit their website by clicking on the link below--

The Noircast Blog

Here is an interview about Clute & Edwards' investigations into film noir:

Out of the Past was recently selected by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for national radio transmission as part of their Top of The Pods series, and Yaddocast received mention in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Shannon Clute

A former professor who holds a PhD from Cornell University, Clute has been invited to speak on film noir at such institutions as the George Eastman House and WXXI public radio. He is also a scholar and writer of hard-boiled fiction, and his first novel was one of ten semi-finalists in the inaugural Court TV "Search for the Next Great Crime Writer" contest. He works as a brand manager for Turner Classic Movies in Atlanta.

As part of his job at TCM, he oversees the publication of the yearly TCM Film Festival program among other duties.

More can be seen on this book here.

Please join us at The Silver Screen Oasis with your questions for Shannon Clute starting this Friday, Sept. 28th-Sunday, Sept. 30th., won't you?

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(The above engraving is "Night Shadows" etched by Edward Hopper in 1921. You can read more about this art work here).

Where Love Has Gone (1964): Bad Movies I Love

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 02:14:00 +0000

TCM is featuring a slew of good movies directed by the under-rated Edward Dmytryk tomorrow on his birthday, Sept. 4th, as you can see here, but one of them must be seen to be believed. Where Love Has Gone (1964), scheduled for broadcast at 3:30pm (ET), was described by the man who made it as "a dismal failure, both from the critics' point of view and mine."

Eddie, Eddie, how can you say such things about this glittering tale? It has all the hallmarks of a really big, bad movie:

Above: Michael Connors, Joey Heatherton, Susan Hayward, Bette Davis in Where Love Has Gone 1964).

A Large Budget:

Publicity maintained that this movie was budgeted at the then huge amount of $3million, but with wardrobe and hair eating up at least 65% of the cost, another 20% for lavish but often strangely ugly sets, that leaves at least 15% for the cast and crew, right? However, with Joseph E. Levine as the exec on this movie, who knows how much moolah was really spent on anything? About those sets--the neurotic borderline Nympho-Sculptor heroine (Susan Hayward) lives in a modern apartment that looks like a cocktail lounge in a small rural airport, circa 1960. Bette Davis, who plays Hayward's frosty grande dame Mom, lives in a cavernous Telegraph Hill mansion that probably came with a moat (though Bette is the only crocodile who would swim in it).

Above: Susan Hayward and Bette Davis played daughter and mother, respectively. They were only separated by ten years in age. They did not--reportedly--bond well during this production.

An Important...(or do I mean Self-Important?) Cast:

The cast is led by Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, Mike Connors (how did he get in here?), Jane Greer (sorry, gang, Jane was not so very fatale in this one), the indispensable George McCready (he was ubiquitous in this era), and DeForest Kelley (pre-Trek days & glad of the work, even if his effete character does little more than wear ascots and raise an eyebrow). All of the adults swirl around the pouting, simpering, and prematurely trashy--Joey Heatherton, an actress I used to confuse with Tuesday Weld, but now that I realize that Joey's the one with the go-go boots and lack of self-awareness, she has become one of my favorite bad girls.

A Talented Bunch Behind the Camera Taking Home a Nice Chunk of Change:

Edward Dmytryk (seen at left), of course, but John Michael Hayes as screenwriter had his work cut out for him. After tackling Grace Metalious' impossible to adapt Peyton Place and making it into a cinematic silk purse (well, okay, a synthetic silk purse), the man must have been regarded as a miracle worker. His background included working with Hitchcock for several years on such classic films as The Trouble with Harry, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, but by the early '60s, Hayes found himself tailoring his skills to the more open (and sordid) times, teaming up with Dmytryk twice: once on the hugely successful adaptation of a previous Harold Robbins novel, The Carpetbaggers (1964) and this movie in the same year. The movie also has Edith Head's costumes (lots of mink, sable, pill box hats and chiffon scarves), Joseph MacDonald's cinematography with beautiful scenes in San Francisco, and the production design of Hal Pereira and Walter Tyler--though I think that Hal was warming up for The Oscar's orgy of bad taste a couple of years later when he worked on this movie. There are no ubiquitous round beds or Rembrandt reproductions everywhere in this flick, but everything looks completely and carefully artificial in this film, just like the later epic.

A Lurid Connection to a Real World Scandal that tiptoes thisclose to libel:

The Cheryl Crane murder case in which Lana Turner's daughter killed Turner's mob-connected lover--though in this version no one is involved in the hurly-burly of the silver screen. Bette Davis plays a grande dame of San Francisco society whose goal in life is manipulating Susan Hayward as her driven, sculptor-daughter. Mike Connors plays a struggling architect-war hero who almost loses his soul during his marriage to the overbearing Hayward, (he actually made me long for the more cuddly blandness of George Brent) and Joey Heatherton is their trampy, screwed-up but needy kid whom they have each used as an emotional football. Joey has uncharacteristically brown tresses in this movie, her second film, a follow-up to her delightfully amusing work in Twilight of Honor, only a year before this film. As you can see, Joey, as all actresses in this film did, had her crowning glory encased in enough hair spray to punch a hole in the ozone, and blown up with a bicycle pump. If only that package that Mike Connors' is wielding contained a gift certificate for acting lessons...but what am I saying? That might spoil the naturalism:

A Really Bad Novel by a Legendarily Awful Writer as Inspiration:

Harold Robbins, who prompted critics to pull their skirts aside at the time but who kept cranking them out successfully for many years. He didn't start as a hack (A Stone for Danny Fisher isn't really a bad book--but once Harold hit upon the money-making formula that began with The Carpetbaggers, he continued writing in that crushed velvet vein). One critic writing in Time Magazine (and probably envious of Robbins' sales, if not his prose) carped that the author was "the new lord of the garbage heap...He picks a public personage who has figured in lurid headlines, changes his name and a few unimportant details, and writes the novel around him...leaving [the person] as difficult to identify as Liz Taylor in a false beard." And then sell a kajillion copies. And then sell the movie rights for another kajillion dollars ($275k, actually, but the dollar was worth more in the sixties).

A Producer Who Never Went Broke Underestimating the Public's Desire to See Gorgeous but Emotionally Conflicted Dames Suffer:

Joseph E. Levine (above), an interesting and very colorful guy seems to have been part-hustler, part-adventurer, with a touch of the poet. He built his initial fortune with names like "Godzilla," "Hercules" and "Attila" in the titles, giving audiences ''musclemen, broads and a shipwreck and a dragon for the kids,'' but also occasionally fine films such as Two Women and A Lion in Winter. As he described his feelings about what he did for a living once: ''I love this business which is not really a business. The film industry is composed of an indescribable collection of dreamers and schemers, geniuses and phonies, sharpshooters and lunatics. It's action on the screen and off. I hope that when my time is up, it'll happen not in bed, but in that suite in Rome, or on a plane, or on the back lot of a studio in Hollywood, Paris or London.'' If only we still had his ilk around now.

Things to Enjoy in this Movie:

1.) The fact that they went to the trouble of doing some location shooting in a gloriously Technicolor San Francisco, but somehow found a way to still make sure that there are oodles of poorly executed process shots scattered throughout the picture, as you can see fairly clearly below.

2.) The film's idea of how modern artists live and work, which leads Susan H. to don goggles and make with the blow torch. The implication, of course, is that she herself is a blow torch...inside. Hayward's artistic bent means that she is also prone to pursuits of fleshier type. She loves 'em and leaves 'em, in part because she feels that her hubby's alcoholism has emasculated him, (um, have you looked in the mirror lately, Susan?) but also in revenge for his neglecting her. As she phrases it so neatly at one point, "So, it's already been decided. I'm an unfit mother, an ungrateful daughter and an irresponsible wife" ...Passive-aggressive, thy name is Valerie Hayden Miller (Susan Hayward).

3.) The way that Bette Davis jumps a good line like a starving cougar on a rabbit. She may have looked back in anger on her years at Warner Brothers, but man, they gave her more to chew on there too. As the actress says in character at one point: "Somewhere along the line the world has lost all its standards and all its tastes!" I couldn't help but wonder--was she thinking of her former co-workers Gale Sondergaard or Fay Bainter as she played this character? Or was she really thinking about the way that Gladys Cooper would have played such a role, as a friend pointed out. She certainly had a good performance to draw on remembering Dame Glad in Now, Voyager?:

4.) The way that you welcome supporting cast members' appearances like a spring rain in the desert, bringing to life their few brief scenes with a certain amount of skill and humanity that is in stark contrast to the central cast members. Look for familiar reliables Anthony Caruso, Ann Doran, Whit Bissell, Lisa Seagram, and Jay Adler among others in the cast, though my favorite was the little-known Anne Seymour as a court-appointed shrink. Seymour is one of those faces we all know, but her name, her performances, and her quiet intelligence are always deserving of note.

Above: Anne Seymour

5.) The ending of this film, ironically, was changed from the novel, which emphasized the cleansing effect that a burst of violence and sexually charged catharsis might have on the protagonists. Unfortunately, Harold Robbins' masterpiece was tampered with artistically due to the persistent, though waning influence of the Production Code in the early '60s. The good Freudians and the Bluenoses united behind the scenes and chose to have Ms. Hayward's character "pay" for her transgressions. At least Hayward, who seemed to specialize in rage scenes, had a chance to pop her cork and take her frustrations out on a portrait of Mummy (Bette Davis), as seen below. Btw, Bette Davis apparently made this film primarily to pay for the wedding of her daughter, B.D., which went off swimmingly...at least until B.D. felt obliged to share her critique of her mother's parenting skills with the world at large. Poor Bette!:

6.) As with many films of this era, there is a theme song, bleated this go-round by Jack Jones (I actually like his voice, sometimes). This tune, with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and (ghastly) lyrics by Sammy Cahn
may interest some musical archeologists.

Sources:

Chandler, Charlotte, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography, Hal Leonard Corp., 2007.

Dmytryk, Edward, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten, SIU Press, 1996.

Robertson, Nan, "Joseph E. Levine, A Towering Figure in Movie Making, Is Dead," The New York Times, August 1, 1987.

Wilson, Andrew, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

Nazi Agent (1942): Reflections on Working with Conrad Veidt

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 21:40:00 +0000

I am currently reading the book Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist edited by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (St. Martin's Press, 1997), which features interviews with many Hollywood figures whose careers were touched by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations in the late '40s and '50s. Director Jules Dassin (Thieves' Highway, Rififi, Night and the City, Never on Sunday) was interviewed by film historian Patrick McGilligan for this collection.

In the book, McGilligan asked Dassin about his first cinematic efforts, most of which the director dismissed as "hopelessly superficial." After arriving in Hollywood in the early 1940s after experience with The Federal Theatre and Artef, a Yiddish theater group in New York, Jules Dassin was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The contrast between his former working conditions and that at the "Tiffany of movie studios" could not have been more dramatic.

The first film that Dassin was assigned to was a B movie that was a propaganda piece about a pair of identical twin brothers, one of whom, Baron Hugo Von Detner, was a prominent Nazi in the diplomatic service in the U.S. just before the war. The other brother was a gentle bibliophile called Otto Becker, who had left Germany when the Nazis came into power and became an American citizen. The "good" brother is content with running a small antique book store and sharing his quarters above the shop with a sweet-voiced canary--who, significantly, stops singing one evening.


Click on the above image to see more about this book.

The reason for the silence becomes obvious when Otto suddenly realizes he is not alone, but has been joined by his brother. The brother, cruelly using his brother's respectability and relatively low profile, begins to use the shop as a conduit for espionage. From this occasion spins a tangled tale of fifth columnists, blackmail, intrigue, just the hint of a bittersweet romance with MGM starlet Ann Ayars, and enough derring-do to fill a movie running only 83 minutes (this movie was clearly intended for one half of a double bill).

This movie was enhanced by an excellent supporting cast as well, especially among the antagonists, with Martin Kosleck as the Baron's aide (the poor man never got away from those Nazi roles), Marc Lawrence and Sidney Blackmer. Character actor William Tannen as Ludwig makes a warm-hearted person out of an underwritten role. The film is, not surprisingly, hinged on the humanity that Veidt breathes into the Baron as well as the gentle bookworm. In the midst of the war, the actor conveys the mixed feelings of the twin brothers, and perhaps his own mixed feelings about his former country (by this time Veidt was a British citizen. With the outbreak of war, he put his personal fortune at the disposal of the British government). As children, the twins in this film, they say, could only be identified correctly by looking for the book in one child's hand and the wooden sword in that of the more aggressive sibling. In case a viewer is thinking, "oh, no--not the evil twin's bit" in this movie, it would be helpful to remember the level of artistry of the leading man, which lifts the movie from a simple programmer in several scenes.

The tormented Baron with his gentle brother in the background in an excellent process shot from this MGM film.

The Baron is a Nazi, but he is never less than a human being as well. Veidt never allows him to slip into caricature, but does justice to his sensibility. Otto is staunchly loyal to his quiet life and his new country (even when it is revealed that he entered America illegally). Just as committed, but perhaps for more practical reasons (in the Baron's view), his brother has found that Nazism allows him to live according to his own sense of fitness. With some poignancy, the Nazi reveals to his brother that he has been able to restore their childhood home to its former splendor--thanks to the wealth that he gained access to through the Party. Touched to think of their former home, Otto is clearly moved, though a later revelation about a family friend's betrayal of his own father chills the beleaguered bookstore owner. It is only then that Otto is roused to action. Tired of living with the constant tension of his untenable position as an unwilling prisoner in his own life, the gentle brother and his dark doppelganger are finally forced to confront the evil between them. Otto's actions lead him on a remarkable adventure that I won't spoil for anyone who has yet to see this film.

Veidt as Otto, the gentle brother, appalled by what he has done.

The ending is muted but beautifully done by Veidt, (the man finds a way to make even his back eloquently expressive as he gazes out at New York harbor). The skill and restraint with which this is done blends sacrifice and heroism into something hard to forget. For the 21st century viewer this sequence is shot through with wistful regret that the actor did not live to see Nazism destroyed. Conrad Veidt died in 1943, a year and a half after filming this role.

Ann Ayars with Conrad Veidt.

Dassin regarded the plot as hackneyed and he found the well-oiled machine atmosphere of MGM discomfiting. The director said that he never met John Maheen, Jr., the man who wrote the script of his first movie, (along with Paul Gangelin & Lothar Mendes). The director was also disappointed that he never worked with the editor of the film. The smooth special effects in this film were quite impressive and credit should be given to cinematographer Harry Stradling and editor Frank E. Hull for this achievement. For Veidt, this marks the last time he would play a double role, which was a kind of theme about human nature throughout his career. Please see Der Januskopf (1920), Mysteries of India Part I: Truth (1921), Die Brüder Schellenberg (1926), and Der Student von Prag (1926) for other examples of this leitmotif in this accomplished actor's work.

In later years, Jules Dassin generally forbade the inclusion of his MGM films in any career retrospectives, which is a shame, because some of them, in particular his first movie at Metro, Nazi Agent (1942) and two charmers featuring Marsha Hunt, The Affairs of Martha (1942) charmer called A Letter for Evie (1946) are quite entertaining, if not world-shaking achievements in celluloid.

Below is some of what Dassin told McGilligan about his first days in Culver City:

Jules Dassin

[Jules Dassin told Patrick McGilligan:] "The first job I was ever offered at MGM--I never knew I'd be so thrilled--was a film with Conrad Veidt [Nazi Agent, 1941]. I remembered as a youth sitting in a theater in New York watching Conrad Veidt...This first job ws a typical MGM masterpiece, with Nazis and anti-Nazis, and Conrad Veidt playing two parts--the good German and the bad Nazi. I remember when I was introduced to Veidt. I had this problme of always looking very young, much younger than I was, even when I was young. I was brought to the executive office, and in came Veidt--a tall, tall, beautiful guy with these gray eyes. They said, 'This is your director.' And he looked down at me, said 'Nein,' turned and left.[Laughs] He was persuaded to try it for one day.

He was happy after one day?

I owed that happiness to a man named Harry Stradling. Harry was a great lighting cameraman--if somewhat inarticulate, nevertheless a brilliant artist. Fortunately, he knew Conrad Veidt. They had worked together in Europe. [Stradling had photographed Veidt previously in Dark Journey (1937) in Britain & The Men in Her Life (1941) at Columbia Pictures as well.] So there I was with Conrad Veidt, with Harry Stradling, and I knew nothing. And I had just that one day to prove I knew nothing.

Conrad Veidt as the "good" German, Otto Becker.

So I start with a shot--an insert of a glass. Then three or four such shots. And one simple long shot of Veidt reading a book. This gets met to about eleven o'clock. Harry Stradling asks, 'What's the next shot?' I just look at him dumbly. Veidt comes over. 'And now, Herr Director...and now?' For answer I say, 'Lunch.' He looks at his watch, then at me with a mixture of pity and scorn. He repeats, 'Lunch,' and goes.

Harry Stradling puts a friendly hand on my shoulder. I'm determined not to cry. 'Harry, I don't know what I'm doing. And this guy paralyzes me.' Harry, gently: 'Tell me what's the next scene.' I tell him: 'It's when he suddenly feels a presence. He looks up and there is his brother, the Nazi.' Harry says, 'Here's what you do. Lay down a long track. When Veidt realizes who it is, you rush into a big close-up.'

Conrad Veidt as the Nazi, Baron Hugo Von Detner

Veidt comes back from lunch. He looks down at the long track with interest. 'Ah?' I quote Harry word for word. Veidt says, 'Ah,' again--but this time it seems to mean, 'Perhaps I underestimated you.' We make the shot. Veidt is pleased. And I pass."

The film that was Jules Dassin's introduction to movies and to the gentle art of team work on film set begins below and can be seen in its entirety on youtube. This movie also appears on the TCM schedule occasionally.

For more posts on Conrad Veidt on this blog, please click here.

Please click here to see upcoming Veidt movies scheduled to appear on Turner Classic Movies.

Denny Miller, Actor, Author and Activist to Visit the Silver Screen Oasis

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 20:22:00 +0000

"Life is what happens to you while you're on your way to do something else," says veteran actor and fitness activist Denny Miller, and he certainly did do something else. George Cukor directed his screen test for a MGM contract. He is reportedly an extra in Sunset Boulevard and Some Came Running marked his introduction to movies in a small part. He was among the last groups of contractees to be trained in the studio era at MGM and Universal-International. He was one of the youngest actors to ever play Tarzan in the movies. On television, he appeared in 110 episodes of the television program, Wagon Train.

Denny Miller is an actor whose long career has included time sharing the screen with everyone from Robert Ryan to Natalie Schaefer to Bette Davis to Bob Hope. Actor, author, and physical fitness advocate Denny Miller, a genial, walking encyclopedia of Hollywood history, is the visiting Guest Author at the Silver Screen Oasis for the weekend of July 27th-29th!

A veteran performer appearing in 237 television programs and 20 films, Miller has been an advocate of healthy living for most of his life. Earning a degree in physical education from UCLA has helped the former Duke Shannon of Wagon Train fame advocate for active lifestyles, and inspired his book, Toxic Waist...Get to Know Sweat! Miller also penned a compilation of his memories in the 2005 text entitled Didn't You Used To Be What's His Name?, and is preparing to release his next venture entitled Me Tarzan, You Train! to help aging Baby Boomers learn how to exercise, have fun, and avoid injury.

In August, as the oldest living actor to appear as Tarzan on the big screen, Miller will attend the U.S. Postal Service ceremony in Tarzana when it formally issues an Edgar Rice Burroughs /Tarzan U.S. Stamp to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the first publication of Tarzan.

In Didn't You Used to Be What's His Name, Miller reveals that his father, Dr. Ben Miller, Professor Emeritus at U.C.L.A. for 28 years, was one of his heroes, and was on the President's Council For Physical Fitness under President Eisenhower and President Kennedy. When Miller earned a scholarship to U.C.L.A. as a basketball player coached by the famous John Wooden, he pursued his dreams of being a professional ball player, but that wasn't in the cards for Miller. He was discovered delivering furniture to a talent agency while working his part-time job, and during the course of unloading furniture at the agency, he was given several cards from agents who encouraged him to call. One agent, Robert Raison, was unusually persistent, and became Miller's representative for fourteen years.

He has worked with an acting Valhalla: Cornel Wilde, Lee Majors, Jack Lord, Tom Selleck, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Joan Rivers, Bette Davis, Dennis Weaver, Rock Hudson, Stephanie Powers, Robert Wagner, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Michael Douglas, Robert Fuller, Bill Smith, and many others. As a regular cast member of Wagon Train from 1961 to 1964, he was able to work and learn from some of Hollywood's greatest actors. Some of his directors include Sydney Pollack, George Cukor, Vincente Minelli, and Sidney Poitier.

As a veteran of more than 200 commercials, Miller most recently has been popular as the Gorton's Fisherman, and has written and directed his own relaxation video. Mr. Miller also maintains his own website where you can read more about his adventures in Hollywood as well as see his upcoming schedule of appearances:

http://denny-miller.com/

If you have ever wondered what it was like to work in film or television, please join us for an opportunity to ask questions of this actor and author this coming weekend. We'd love to have your company as well as Denny's anytime. Below is a link to the Q & A with our guest:

The Denny Miller Q & A on The Silver Screen Oasis

Author Steve Bingen at the Silver Screen Oasis in July

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 01:46:00 +0000

The Silver Screen Oasis is pleased to announce that Steve Bingen, co-author of the popular MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot and Warner Bros.: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of will be the July Guest Star visiting the site and answering your questions for the weekend of July 20th-July 22nd. The thread devoted to the Q & A with Mr. Bingen can be seen at the thread posted below.If you would like, you are welcome to register and post your own question there or just enjoy reading the exchanges with Mr. Bingen, beginning tomorrow, Friday, July 20th.

http://silverscreenoasis.com/oasis3/viewforum.php?f=84

M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot is the illustrated history of the soundstages and outdoor sets where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the premier Hollywood dream factory, produced many of the world’s most famous films. During its Golden Age, the studio employed the likes of Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and Clark Gable, and produced innumerable iconic pieces of cinema such as The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and Ben-Hur.

The sprawling studio is located not in Hollywood but the bustling suburb of Culver City. Of all the dream factories, MGM had one of the most prolific and largest backlots. It was home to Tarzan’s Africa, Andy Hardy’s neighborhood, the turn of the century town of Meet Me in St. Louis, the Cotton Blossom of Showboat drifted down the backlot’s river and the Paris of American in Paris, along with countless other films that are considered classic films.

It is estimated that a fifth of all films made in the United States prior to the 1970s were shot at MGM studios, meaning that the gigantic property was responsible for hundreds of iconic sets and stages, often utilizing and transforming minimal spaces and previously used props, to create some of the most recognizable and identifiable landscapes of modern movie culture.

All of this happened behind closed doors, the backlot shut off from the public in a veil of secrecy and movie magic. M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot highlights this fascinating film treasure by recounting the history, popularity, and success of the MGM company through a tour of its physical property. The book is filled with never before seen images of the studio and the backlot.

Our guest, Steven Bingen has also written Warner Bros.: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of and has contributed to numerous books, documentaries, and magazines. He holds a staff position at Warner Bros. Corporate Archive, aiding in the preservation and management of the studio’s legend and legacy. With Steven Sylvester, who explored the backlot back in the 1968 and 1975 before it was developed into housing tracts, and Michael Troyan, the author of A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Films of Greer Garson, they worked together to produce this book which takes its readers behind that veil of secrecy and explores the history of one of the most beloved studios in the history of Hollywood.

We hope you are as excited about his upcoming visit as we are! So, start thinking of the questions you want answered about that most fabled of dream factories and join us beginning Friday, July 20th for a weekend of studio and film archival history.

Above: Another of archivist Steve Bingen's books.

REVIEWS:

“The first ten films I made for MGM changed my life. Now you can go back in time—as I have—in the pages of this remarkable book, learning how and where the ‘Land of Make Believe’ became real. Once you take the journey, you, too, will be transported.”
— Angela Lansbury

“For anyone who has ever dreamed what it was like to live in the Golden Age of Hollywood, this visit to my grandfather’s studio will vividly re-create the experience. From hometown USA to eighteenth century France to medieval England to a village in China, the memories of all the great films that were made there will spring back to life.” —Daniel Mayer Selznick

You may enjoy the website at the link below that was set up by the authors for this book:

http://www.mgmbacklot.info/

The Innocent Turned Imperialist: Shirley Temple & John Ford by David Meuel

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:49:00 +0000

This week I'm pleased to welcome a guest post from a gifted writer on a fine actress, Shirley Temple. Her acting career may have peaked well before she was an adult, but she remains surprisingly under-appreciated by many classic cinephiles, both for her childhood and young adult roles. All you really need to know was that Shirley was good enough for John Ford--twice! The author of this interesting analysis of this unique actress in the Fordian canon is David Meuel. David is a lifelong film enthusiast with a special fondness for the visual poetry and emotional power of John Ford's work. While David would prefer to live in Monument Valley, he lives in Silicon Valley -- San Jose, California, to be exact -- where he also works as a freelance writer for several high-tech companies. You can reach him at david@davidmeuel.com. At the end of this post, links to other articles and some brilliant short fiction by him will be posted. I hope you will enjoy discovering his work, and re-discovering the powerful young lady who is the subject of this piece. - Moira Finnie

The Innocent Turned Imperialist: Shirley Temple in John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie and Fort Apache by David Meuel

Shirley Temple and John Ford? The pairing seems surreal. After all, she’s the precocious child star who won our hearts by singing The Good Ship Lollipop, and he’s the tyrannical film director who could make John Wayne cry. Yet, the pair made two very good films together, 1937’s Wee Willie Winkie and 1948’s Fort Apache. And one intriguing element the two films share is Ford’s use of Temple the child and then Temple the young woman. In both, she is a sweet, openhearted innocent who accompanies her one living parent to a remote military outpost in an alien land inhabited by “savage” Indians. Initially, she questions traditions and systems that are fundamentally imperialist, racist, and repressive. In the process, she has a humanizing effect on those around her. Ultimately, though, she becomes a part of these systems. The innocent—now transformed by the values of the societies in which she now lives—becomes an active participant in those societies and supporter of those values.

Philadelphia just after her arrival at Fort Apache

Temple’s characters, Priscilla in Wee Willie Winkie and Philadelphia in Fort Apache, are both highly curious individuals. And often their curiosity taps into key issues in the films. Before Priscilla arrives at the remote British outpost in India her grandfather commands she asks her mother that, if her grandfather were English, “why doesn’t he live in England?” One answer of course would be that, if England weren’t a colonial power, then, yes, he probably would live in England. Philadelphia has her share of questions too. She constantly asks what her role as “the colonel’s lady” should be and what she needs to do to play it correctly. Of the two Temple characters, it’s interesting that little Priscilla asks the bigger questions, questions about war and peace, questions that get to the heart of the story’s core conflicts. In contrast, Philadelphia’s main focus is domestic: she is angry that her father (Henry Fonda’s Colonel Thursday) doesn’t approve of her and Lieutenant O’Rourke (played by Temple’s then real-life husband John Agar) and openly questions and occasionally defies fatherly judgments based on classism and prejudice.

Mixing It Up: Priscilla talks with the imprisoned “enemy,” Khoda Khan, and Philadelphia goes riding with Lieutenant O’Rourke, much to her father’s chagrin.

Because they are genuinely kind and caring as well as inquisitive people, Priscilla and Philadelphia both do much to humanize their communities. Much has been written about Priscilla’s relationship with the gruff but lovable Sergeant McDuff (Victor McLaglen) in Wee Willie Winkie. But Priscilla also has a great humanizing effect on her equally gruff grandfather, Colonel Williams (C. Aubrey Smith). She charms him by telling him that the men call him “Old Boots,” nudges him into taking her widowed mother to a dance, and gets him to change some of his assumptions about the native peoples under his jurisdiction. Her act of kindness to the “enemy” leader Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), returning a talisman to him, has a major impact on his attitude toward the British. Little Priscilla is remarkable at seeing through stereotypes and helping others to do the same, and her ability to transform both her grandfather and Khoda Khan directly results in the conflict’s positive resolution. In Fort Apache, Philadelphia plays a similar role but nowhere near as successfully. From the beginning of the film she wins the hearts of Lieutenant O’Rourke and just about everyone else at the fort. Even before she reaches the fort—when she lets an old frontier women try on her big-city hat—we see how her kindness touches people. She is also the only one who can get beneath her stern father’s hard shell. The scene when she shows Colonel Thursday how she has fixed up their quarters and he awkwardly kisses her on the forehead is both painful and moving. Yes, this arrogant, bigoted, self-centered man does have a tender side, and Philadelphia, it seems, is the only one who can bring it out. Sadly, though, Colonel Thursday is not nearly as balanced or reasonable as Colonel Williams. Try as she might, Philadelphia can’t get her father to accept Lieutenant O’Rourke as a potential son-in-law, O’Rourke’s lower-class background, or even his Irish heritage (let alone accept Apaches). Here the ability to humanize is profoundly limited because her father adheres so fiercely to a rigid set of classist, racist, imperialist values. And the great tragedy at the film’s end is inevitable.

Colonel Williams (C. Aubrey Smith) and Priscilla join in a salute.

Despite their shared ability to question and sometimes challenge the systems they must live within, however, both Priscilla and Philadelphia succumb to those systems. This for me is part of the essential—and very disturbing—irony at the heart of both films. At the end of Wee Willie Winkie, Priscilla now has her own soldier’s uniform and toy rifle and, in a display of classic Temple cuteness, is marching around, enthusiastically embracing her new role.

And at the end of Fort Apache, Philadelphia has fully made the transition to by-the-book military wife and mother. The spirited young woman, once so oblivious to the military’s rigidity and the way it can stifle self-determination, has now been fully integrated into the system. Her hair is tightly (almost unpleasantly) wound around her head. She doesn’t smile. She is all duty. Here, she is so different from the way she is at the non-commissioned officers’ dance that immediately precedes the last tragic battle. There, almost everyone dances with incredible stiffness, grimfaced and determined. This is more a march than a dance. The exception is Philadelphia. Her movements are livelier, looser, easier. She smiles and seems endlessly curious. She is actually enjoying herself. And she seems light years away from the fully initiated military wife we see in her last scene.

Duty Above All: Fort Apache’s women (Irene Rich and Anna Lee along with Temple) watch their men leave before the climatic battle.

While quite different in tone, both Wee Willie Winkie and Fort Apache astutely examine the consequences of imperialist mindsets, showing how empire extracts an enormous human toll on the oppressors as well as the oppressed. We see this most obviously in all the deaths that occur in both films. But we also see this in the people who remain, including Priscilla and Philadelphia. To survive in imperial systems, they must sacrifice something good and true of themselves. Especially in these remote outposts where options are few, there is little else these people can do.

Yes, Shirley Temple and John Ford make a true odd couple. But in both these films their collaborations work extremely well. Temple has called Wee Willie Winkie her favorite among the 40+ feature films she made. And, in Fort Apache, Ford’s casting of Temple—no longer box office gold by 1948 but still in full possession of the Temple persona of innocence, integrity, kindness, curious intelligence, and boundless spunk (the Temple “brand,” if you will)—is inspired. This helps to make Philadelphia’s change at the film’s end to stiff, dutiful military wife all the more startling to watch.

Both Wee Willie Winkie and Fort Apache are available on DVD.

More of David Meuel's work can be read at the following websites:

Non-fiction:

From the indispensable resource at the blog, DirectedbyJohnFord.com

The Female Ethan Edwards

Not a Bad Jail: John Ford’s Delightfully Subversive Up the River (1930)

Fiction:

www.davidmeuelstories.com

Life Noir by David Meuel

One Lucky Dog by David Meuel

Deep Valley (1947): A Montage

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 20:14:00 +0000

Here's an attempt by me at a montage in tribute to the affecting Deep Valley (1947), a powerful Warner Brothers movie with great performances all around from Ida Lupino, Dane Clark, Fay Bainter, Henry Hull. One of director Jean Negulesco's best collaborators, cinematographer Ted McCord (the pair would also make Johnny Belinda the following year), is behind the camera on this one too--reminding me of the joys of black and white film.

There's a slight hesitation on the audio track that I am trying to correct and for that I apologize.

Ida Lupino's Sizzling Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:41:00 +0000

June is more than teen idols and huddled masses on TCM--a Skeins fave Ida Lupino is popping up several times on the schedule, [You can see earlier posts on this blog devoted to this actress here]. The times and dates of the Lupino films scheduled to appear on Turner Classic Movies are posted below, but there's news on several fronts about Ida.

Woman in Hiding (1950) is now on DVD as part of the four disc set labeled Women in Danger: The 1950s . Other films in this set are Female on the Beach (1955) with Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler, The Ungaurded Moment (1956) with Esther Williams, and The Price of Fear (1956) with Merle Oberon. I've seen and enjoyed all but the Lupino film and the Merle Oberon movie. Sometimes these less well known films are among the more surprisingly good ones. Woman in Hiding intrigues me because it is directed by Michael Gordon, whose other films, especially An Act of Murder, The Lady Gambles and The Secret of Convict Lake are often quite well done, tackling controversial subjects and familiar circumstances from fresh angles. Gordon, whose career was thwarted by the McCarthy era blacklists, never regarded Woman in Hiding as particularly distinguished, though his fond memories of Lupino were quite evident when he spoke to Ronald L. Davis for his Just Making Movies: Company Directors on the Studio System. While Gordon felt that the movie, which also featured Howard Duff and Stephen McNally, was one that he "enjoyed less than many I've made." Working with Ida was clearly a satisfying experience, and he was able to help her prepare for her first direction of a feature film when they were making this melodrama. Giving her the benefit of his experience, Gordon helped her break down the shooting preparations, consulting on editing and even visiting with her on location during the filming.

Above: Director Michael Gordon working with Ida Lupino and Stephen McNally on the set of Woman in Hiding (1950) [photo courtesy of filmnoirphotos.blogspot.co m]

Making Woman in Hiding--despite any reservations that the director may have had about the script, proved to be very pleasant, with Gordon finding the caliber of Lupino's acting made up for everything. The director simply "gave her a start and let her go." This was also the first film that Lupino made with Howard Duff, an actor whom she found conceited and egotistical when she had met him previously. However, cast in a role as a stranger who comes to the aid of a bride threatened by her spouse, Duff charmed the actress, causing Ida to melt when he left a bouquet of white orchids in her dressing room with a note reportedly reading: "From Howard Duff to Ida Lupino--whether you hate me or not." What followed changed the lives of everyone involved and opening another chapter in their marital histories.

Life Begins at 8:30 (1942), with Monty Woolle y and Ida Lupino as a former great actor and his introverted daughter in a theatrical setting, is being issued through the newly established MOD program, The Fox Cinema Archives, beginning in June. Most titles in this series are expected to go for $19.95. You can see more details about this and other new releases here. Btw, posters who have not seen this movie are categorizing it as a comedy.

Having seen this movie several times as a girl, I recall liking it and being moved by some of the story's points about where the line of responsibility for those we love begins and ends. I would like to view it as an adult to see how cotton-headed I may have been as a lass. Memories of the film tell me that it certainly has light-hearted moments, but the movie is more of a domestic drama under actor-turned-director Irving Pichel, giving Monty Woolley one of his best roles and Ida an opportunity to display her quicksilver way of expressing bitterness and vulnerability in her role as his deeply loyal daughter. The film also gave a disappointed Olympic fencer, Cornel Wilde, one of his early screen roles as well.

The film, produced at 20th Century Fox, a studio that may have allowed Lupino to relax a bit more than the chronically tense atmosphere at Warner Brothers, brought out the best in both leading actors. Establishing an excellent rapport with Monty Woolley, which enhanced the conspiratorial air of their bond on screen as two against the world, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and a modicum of dignity and good humor--even when the dyspeptic Woolley's boozing character is compelled to play Santa Claus to make a few shekels. For those who knew her well, Lupino's absorption in her part was intense.

Those who saw her script realized how meticulously she prepared for her roles, building her characterization of the club-footed character from within. In her script, Lupino friend, the actress-dancer Diane Meredith, reportedly saw that Ida had written the notes that "This girl is crippled. She had been crippled since birth; however, she wold walk in a way that does not indicate she is aware of it. It has become part of her daily life. Her limp is therefore ignored." During the month of production, the tiny Ida wore an orthopedic boot to enhance the onscreen impression of a halting gait for her character, leaving the delicate actress chronically sore. Coming from a legendary theatrical family in Britain, the actress understood the transitory glory of the theatrical arts, with insecurity, seedy digs, and a very tough hide required to survive. I suspect my anticipation of this movie will be justified after seeing this movie.

Later this summer we can all see director Don Siegel's Private Hell 36 (1954) with Ida appearing with Steve Cochran and Howard Duff in a slightly rancid cops-gone-bad film noir. This movie is being brought out on regular DVD and Blu-Ray by Olive Films on 8/21/12. Currently Private Hell 36 can also be seen streaming online at Netflix as well.

Cochran goes from everyday cop to damn fool and Duff from a caring family man to a desperate thief in the course of this movie, which Siegel dismissed in his autobiography since he found the cast pretty much uncontrollable and the story incomprehensible (just between you and me, he had a point). I won't say that anyone is at their best in this movie, but for those of us who like the way that Lupino croaks out a song, it's a must-see. Fans might want to check out Road House (1948) and The Man I Love (1946) for other instances of her style as a chanteuse of sorts--which is unique, even when she is being dubbed by someone else. As Celeste Holm's character comments in Road House, "She does more without a voice than anybody I've ever heard...If you like the sound of gravel..."] Note: You can see Bridget Duff, Ida's only child with her then-husband Howard Duff in this movie. The baby plays the toddler daughter of Duff and Dorothy Malone in the film.

The following films are scheduled for Thursday, June 21st and Friday, June 29th on TCM (all times shown are ET):

Thursday June 21, 2012

6:00 AM
THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (1943)
An Eddie Cantor look-alike organizes an all-star show to help the war effort.
Dir: David Butler Cast: Humphrey Bogart , Eddie Cantor , Bette Davis.
BW-127 mins, TV-G, CC,

8:15 AM
PILLOW TO POST (1945)
A girl pretends to be a war bride to get a hotel room in Washington.
Dir: Vincent Sherman Cast: Ida Lupino , Sydney Greenstreet , William Prince.
BW-92 mins, TV-G, CC,

10:00 AM
THE MAN I LOVE (1947)
A night-club singer gets involved with a mobster.
Dir: Raoul Walsh Cast: Ida Lupino , Robert Alda , Andrea King.
BW-90 mins, TV-G, CC,

11:45 AM
DEEP VALLEY (1947)
A farmer’s daughter helps an escaped convict.
Dir: Jean Negulesco Cast: Ida Lupino , Dane Clark , Wayne Morris.
BW-106 mins, TV-PG, CC

1:30 PM
ESCAPE ME NEVER (1947)
A composer forsakes his innocent bride to romance his brother’s fiancee.
Dir: Peter Godfrey Cast: Errol Flynn , Ida Lupino , Eleanor Parker.
BW-104 mins, TV-G, CC,

3:15 PM
ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1951)
A tough cop sent to help in a mountain manhunt falls for the quarry’s blind sister.
Dir: Nicholas Ray Cast: Ida Lupino , Robert Ryan , Ward Bond.
BW-82 mins, TV-PG, CC,

4:45 PM
THE BIGAMIST (1953)
A woman discovers her husband has another family in another city.
Dir: Ida Lupino Cast: Joan Fontaine , Ida Lupino , Edmund Gwenn.
BW-79 mins, TV-PG,

6:15 PM
WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956)
Reporters compete to catch a serial killer.
Dir: Fritz Lang Cast: Dana Andrews , Rhonda Fleming , George Sanders.
BW-100 mins, TV-PG, CC,

Friday June 29, 2012

7:45 AM
HIGH SIERRA (1941)
An aging ex-con sets out to pull one more big heist.
Dir: Raoul Walsh Cast: Ida Lupino , Humphrey Bogart , Alan Curtis.
BW-100 mins, TV-G, CC,

8:00 PM
WOMAN IN HIDING (1950)
Dir: Michael Gordon Cast: Ida Lupino , Stephen McNally , Howard Duff.
BW-92 mins,

It is especially great to see The Man I Love (1947-Raoul Walsh) on the schedule again.

This movie has been described as a "film noir musical," a postwar splash of cold water on the face of film noir with a tart feminist twist. If you have never seen Ida Lupino in full flower, this is the movie you ought to see. Adapting Martita Wolff's controversial novel Night Shift to the movies, Warner Brothers found itself making several compromises to placate the Production Code office, removing allegedly "unacceptable" references to slot machines, locker rooms in seamy settings, and references to infidelity among blue collar defense workers.

The script, ascribed to Jo Pagano, Catherine Turney and an uncredited W.R. Burnett surprises people with its sentimentality--but if you know Raoul Walsh's rambunctious films of the '30s such as Me and My Gal (1932) and The Bowery (1933), the raffish milieu and the impulsive figures who people the movie will seem familiar. On the set, Walsh and his leading lady reminded one eyewitness, Andrea King (who played Ida's sister) of father and daughter. As described by Lupino biographer William Donati, "Walsh was all business on the set, but after the day's last scene, he relaxed. 'Cut! Print!' he would shout. 'Now it's time for some cooking sherry.' [As Andrea King recalled] 'I didn't know what that meant until I was invited for a glass,'...[and] King was amazed by Ida's artistry and felt she had 'a magic glow.'"

Above: Ida Lupino with her friend, mentor and director, Raoul Walsh.

In the opening scenes of the movie, the high life is humming along as Ida appears to be grooving on the flashy atmosphere and jazzy music in a night club--though her tendency to pull away from the hands of her companion (an oily Robert Alda, who really should have played more slick bad guys), Her ambivalence about the life she lives and the one she longs for is clear from this moment, as she has arrived in this time and place for a holiday visit with her relatives.

Coming home to see how her family is faring, the wandering chanteuse Lupino plays "Petey" Brown, a glamorous, pragmatic, and secretly tender-hearted Miss Fix-It who knows that everything changes, even if we want to hang on to the past for just a moment longer. It's Christmas, the war is winding down, and the social upheaval of the last few years has left its mark on everyone, even the hard scrabble siblings of Ida's character, who live in a part of Los Angeles without the manicured lawns and dazzling exteriors. There is dirty linen to be aired and dishes in the sink that need scrubbing and Ida is all over it.

Above: Ida Lupino and Bruce Bennett in The Man I Love (1947).

Sure, the movie is partly a domestic drama, but it has a bracing dose of real life occasionally, as Ida tries to help her troubled family (Andrea King plays her sister) around Christmas while also holding down a job at the overbearing Robert Alda's crummy nightclub. She has a romance on the side with a piano-playing tumbleweed played by Bruce Bennett. The latter actor may be playing a role that John Garfield was born to play, (in Garfield's wounded idealist, world-weary mode), but the soft-spoken Bennett's casting in this movie allows the viewer to see his natural diffidence in a new light--as an inarticulate artist who can only express himself adequately through music. One of the ways that this movie avoided the expected conclusion is Petey's stoic acceptance of his personality, something that she understands well, since wanderlust and swimming upstream against life's tide is also part of her own steely code.

With all this turmoil and no man by her side, does Ida sing too? Yeah, but it's actually Peg LaCentra, who sounds just like the actress. On-screen it is Ida who puts across Gershwin's title tune, while evergreen numbers like Kern's Why Was I Born?, Bill, and Body and Soul all pop up on that evocative sound track. I'm not really saying that this is a great movie, but it is one of Raoul Walsh's better later flicks. Any time Ida gets a chance to be a strong and tender, wounded warrior who takes no guff and no pity on screen is worth my time. She also gets to look great too in some Milo Anderson duds that shine in this movie, as you can see in the above image.

The Man I Love is on DVD via the Warner Archive. Look for some fine musicians in this film, including jazz guitarist Tony Romano singing and strumming and the drummer Nick Fatool in these first few minutes of the movie--and just try to resist the swelling music over the credits:

Sources:

Just Making Movies: Company Directors on the Studio System by Ronald B. Davis, (University Press of MS, 2005), Ida Lupino: A Biography by William Donati, (The University Press of KY, 1996).

Time for a Change

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 16:12:00 +0000

To adapt to the changes in viewing the internet as technology advances, this blog is undergoing some cosmetic changes. Here's hoping that these streamlining tweaks will help the visibility of this blog's posts on iPads, Kindles, iPhones, Androids, and whatever else the tech world whips up in the next few years. Now if there were only some way to get me to post more often?

If you like what you see or especially if you do not, please let me know. Thanks!

Alexis Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:47:00 +0000

Today is the birthday of Alexis Smith (1921-1993), an actress whose seamless work in films of the forties that I have seen since childhood made her an enduring, polished presence in scads of beloved Warner Brothers movies. Her very real abilities as a dramatic actress of the period made her films far richer--though only recently have I begun to appreciate her skill as an actor, (why was she always playing "Miss Frosty" I now wonder?). TCM has assembled a day's worth of her movies from this period. If you would like to read a unique insight into her character and her career, Jacqueline Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog has written an exceptional post about her on- and off-screen friendship with Errol Flynn.

Below you can see the complete schedule with links to more about each film. (All times shown are ET)

6:00 AM
The Smiling Ghost (1941)

7:15 AM
Dive Bomber (1941)

9:30 AM
The Constant Nymph (1943)

11:30 AM
The Horn Blows At Midnight (1945)

1:00 PM
Conflict (1945)

2:30 PM
Of Human Bondage (1946)

4:30 PM
Stallion Road (1947)

6:15 PM
Montana (1950)

Past posts on this blog related to Alexis Smith's career can be seen here.

For upcoming Alexis Smith movies on Turner Classic Movies click here.

(The above images of a natural looking but still elegant Alexis Smith were based on photographs by Gjon Mili for Life Magazine in October, 1942. No copyright infringement is intended.).

In the Spotlight: Shoe Shine Boy (1943)

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:25:00 +0000

Tonight, May 29th, 2012, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting a a night devoted to the feature films of the talented, beautiful and tragic Dorothy Dandridge, which include Carmen Jones, Bright Road, The Decks Ran Red, and Tarzan's Peril. You can see more about those films here.

The purpose of this post is to draw your attention to a brief, rarely screened little movie scheduled between Bright Road (1953) and The Harlem Globetrotters (1951) at 11:12 PM (ET). Shoe Shine Boy (1943) is the name of the musical featurette, which gives us a peek at some dark social history and the presence of a real talent who came along at a tough time in movies--despite everything. I think it deserves to be seen.

Shoe Shine Boy (1943) is a wartime period film made at MGM with some flag-waving and painfully unconscious but inescapable racism that was all too common at the time, but it is notable for the earnestness of the leading man, Melvin C. Bryant (1924–2001), whose apparently remarkable talent on the trumpet kicks this little movie into a class by itself.

Above: Mel Bryant in his brief moment in the spotlight.

This short is ostensibly about an African-American youth seeking $2 so that he can get a horn out of a pawn shop. In the course of working for the money he shines shoes for character actors Walter Catlett & Sam Levene, who play two competitive, but down-on-their-luck show biz agents. Once this pair hears him play, they--and everyone else--stop to hear him. Even the chef and dishwashers come out to join the throng who hear him play in the dive where he first proves his mettle, prompting the vaudeville-era sharpies to recognize his talent and offer him a contract. After hearing him play veteran songsmith Phil Moore's "Trumpet Lament," they duel verbally over which of them has the right to describe the polite and unpretentious "boy" as "my property," as they envision a $1million future for the phenomenal musician.

In the end--thank heavens, since we all know how well musicians are often treated by management--the youth only wants that horn for the pleasure it brings him to play it and a chance to serve his country in the service during the war. In some ways this is a simple-minded curio from a time well past. It may be worth seeing for the strangeness of it and for Mr. Bryant's jaw-dropping musical expressiveness on the trumpet. I might also watch it again to note the musician's quietly expressed sense of self, which neither of the characters who saw him as a money-maker could ever fully understand.

I have tried to do some research on Mel Bryant since first seeing this, but I have learned only a little. Most of all, I wanted to know if that young man was actually playing the trumpet or was he dubbed? From the info I've discovered so far, I think the answer is that he did play that well and he was probably the trumpeter in that short.

Apparently, his career went no where--though the war may have interfered with that. IMDb shows that he appeared in only one other movie, an uncredited role in RKO's Riverboat Rhythm (1946), which also had Walter Catlett in a supporting role. Between 1973-1980, Bryant also appeared on some television shows such as Sanford and Son, Archie Bunker's Place and Cannon, but his credits ended after 1980 and the end of his life in 2001. Film historian Donald Bogle's history of African-Americans in show biz in LA, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood revealed that Mel Bryant was an actor-singer-musician in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Other sources indicate that his family, including an older brother, Frederick and a younger sister, Clora, grew up in Denison, Texas in the '20s-'40s under the nurturing guidance of a single father, who was a very intelligent man despite his own lack of a formal education. Their father, Charles Bryant, "always thought [his children] were talented."

Clora Bryant in her musical prime

Mr. Bryant's sister, Clora Bryant, became a major talent as a jazz trumpeter who had to contend with racial as well as gender discrimination throughout her career. Clora Bryant, who is still active today, developed into an influential musician, helping other female jazz artists, and holding her own with contemporaries such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Now 84, Ms. Bryant has written a bit about her remarkable family's journey from Denison, Texas to LA in a book she edited, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles and in an interview she did with Stephen L. Isoardi entitled Central Avenue Sounds: Clora Bryant, which is part of the Dept. of Special Collections at UCLA online and can be seen here.
Clora Bryant, Mel Bryant's sister, in her prime.

In these published accounts, Clora recalled her awe at the exciting urban world that unfolded before her when she arrived in LA at Union Station with her father in 1944, a year after her brother Mel made Shoeshine Boy. Her brothers and father all encouraged her to study the trumpet seriously, and Mel even signed his paycheck over to his sister in 1944 when he was serving in the Marines to enable her to continue her musical studies in college. I have not been able to find out more about Mel Bryant's later career on stage or [perhaps uncredited] screen appearances, though in the course of a 50 year career, it seems that the impetus behind his and his sister's interest in show business and music began early.

His sister recalled that as children, "We'd go to see the movies, mostly musicals, come home and imitate the singing and dancing. Then, you had the black movies and black theaters, and you couldn't go to the white theaters. They would always have good black movies to show."

"...At the movies," [Clora and her brother Mel] would fantasize about the movies that we'd see in the afternoon on a Saturday or cowboy movies, Buck Rogers, space serials, etc., Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson. During the summer, Dad would let us go to the movies during the week. But there were always a lot of good musicals on, especially when the war came on. MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] had some fantastic musicals...My brother Mel...and I would always go, and we'd sit there until we'd absorbed it like osmosis, everything that they were doing. My brother and I and another girl [Ollie Mae Bailey] at school were the Andrews Sisters. [sings] "I'll be with you in apple blossom time" or "Bei mir bist du schön, please let me explain." And those stupid songs they had— Harry Babbit was on— Whose show was that? "Down in the meadow, in an itty-bitty pool, fam fee itty-bitty fishes and the mudder fitty too," you know, all those stupid songs! [she laughed as she described these songs that she and her brother used to sing with their friend]."

If anyone knows more about Mel Bryant and his later career, I'd be very grateful if you would share it here. Thanks.

If you miss tonight's short, you can see a grainy copy of it at the link below--though the original one usually aired by TCM is in near pristine condition:

Shoe Shine Boy-1943 by redhotjazz

Sources:
Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood by Donald Bogle, (Random House, 2006), Jazzwomen: Conversations With Twenty-One Musicians, Volume 1 by Wayne Enstice & Janis Stockhouse, (Inidiana Univ. Press, 2004), Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles edited by Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steve Isoardi and Marl Young (Univ. of California Press, 1999).

This Love of Ours (1945)

noreply@blogger.com (Moira Finnie) — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:44:00 +0000

Thanks to an alert friend I recently had a chance to see a rarely aired Claude Rains movie, This Love of Ours (1945), which I really enjoyed more than I expected. Even though Rains, (one of my favorite actors) has a smaller than usual but key role, he appeared to be having a wonderful time. His character seemed to blend a quietly bittersweet charm with Mr. Jordan's other-worldly wisdom, Dr. Jacquith's monumental patience and just a dark hint of Hollenius' possessiveness as he strove to help Merle Oberon come to terms with her past. I particularly liked seeing Rains interact with the children in the brightest scenes in the movie at the cathartic birthday party that climaxed the film. While watching it, I repeatedly thought of the actor's own warm relationship with his only child, his daughter, the actress and author, Jessica (née Jennifer) Rains.

*Mild Spoiler Alert*Mild Spoiler Alert*Mild Spoiler Alert*

Rains and Carl Esmond bolster an exceptional cast led by Merle Oberon and Charles Korvin very well. The supporting players gave the film's plot a needed goose with their good-natured presence and a dose of common sense whenever the movie threatens to bog down in bathos. The plot line that includes more than one medical miracle, attempted murder and suicide, an unnatural and morbid fixation on the dead, too much quality time between father and daughter to the detriment of the girl's social skills, and more. These proceedings sorely needed the lighter touch provided by Rains and Esmond, along with veteran character actors Harry Davenport and Helen Thimig (aka Mrs. Max Reinhardt, and a fine actress in her own right).

The movie was also greatly enhanced by an Oscar-nominated score Universal's house composer, Hans J. Salter, who conveyed the eeriness and the lyrical qualities of the story through his orchestral music, giving it a cohesion and polish in several scenes when characters are not helped by the script, which was derived from a play by Pirandello (!), and was credited to screenwriters Bruce Manning, John Klorer, and Leonard Lee.

Claude Rains, Charles Korvin, Merle Oberon and Sue England on the set of This Love of Ours (1945).

The romantic drama had some contrived plot points, but thanks largely to the truly outstanding work of Oberon and Claude Rains under Dieterle's direction, the film becomes credible and moving by the finale. Rains plays a genteelly bohemian artist who works with a pianist (played by a sultry-looking Oberon) in a nightclub with the uninspiring name of "Hinky Joe's." Wandering from table to table, Claude flatters, deflates, and soothes the egos of the people he meets and caricatures, adopting a veiled air of superiority (a Rains specialty, don't you think?) and a kind of philosophical shrug toward his audience, while hovering a bit too protectively over the fragile Oberon's shopworn angel.

Right: Merle Oberon with her second husband, cinematographer Lucien Ballard on the set of This Love of Ours (1945). [Source: A Certain Cinema]

We learn in flashback that Oberon, who was photographed exquisitely by her second husband, cinematographer Lucien Ballard in this movie, plays an itinerant musical performer whose twisted ankle prompts a visit backstage from a handsome French doctor (this was the Hungarian-born Korvin's second American film). After becoming transfixed while wrapping the ankle in a bandage, Korvin's Doctor Michel Touzac finds himself laughing along with Oberon's Karin at the distracted way that he has continued to swaddle her beautiful leg in the cloth up to her thigh! 'Soon the pair are married, with Oberon giving birth to a child that seals their almost-too-perfect happiness. In order to finance the good doctor's continued research, Karin proves herself a competent money manager as well as an angelic companion and affectionate mother. A misunderstanding and out-of-the-blue suggestion of infidelity leads to a sudden (and frankly, weird) break between the couple, prompting the doctor to throw over his practice, pack up his little girl and decamp for America, where he becomes a big wheel in medical research circles.

Oberon, who is rarely given credit for much expressiveness as an actress, brings some indefinable quality of elegant sadness and real regret to this role, which transcends her somewhat stiff image as she conveys more than usual with her dark eyes and half-smile, particularly in the nightclub scene when we first meet her character. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that the films in which I liked this actress best (The Dark Angel, Wuthering Heights, 'Til We Meet Again, Night Song) all share something of this essential quality. In them, she often played characters who are haunted by some longed-for ideal of happiness, and whose shared moments of affinity with another person in the past approaches a spiritual level of romance that few actresses could convey convincingly.

Merle Oberon as Karin, during the years when her character is separated from her husband and child.

Perhaps this is the result of her porcelain doll appearance, typecasting or the times when she ascended to stardom, but I do think Oberon expressed this well, as she did her character's despair. I wonder if it was considered "daring" for the 34-year-old leading lady to play the mother of a teenage girl? Sue England as Suzette conveys the intensity of her adolescent character's roiling emotions, though there are moments when a viewer might want to slap the girl, but one can't help feeling some pang for her situation--none of which was really of her own making thanks to her father's own psychological quirks and highly emotional reaction to his separation from his wife. England, who was only about 16 or 17 when this movie was made went on to have a career in movies and television until the 1970s.

After Suzette's father returns suddenly from a Chicago business trip toting a "new" wife, the adolescent young woman is understandably confused and resentful yet Oberon's handling of her scenes with the girl express both the mother's heartache and her own sense of guilt, especially in one scene when, longing to touch the bristling girl, the mother curls her hair, almost surreptitiously, trying to avoid confrontation but satisfying her desire for closeness to her offspring. If the actress were not so adept at expressing these mixed emotions, such moments would be laughable instead of touching.

Left: Claude Rains as Joseph Targel in This Love of Ours (1945).

Rains hovers in the background for much of the movie, imbuing "Joseph Targel" with a philosophical warmth that often makes him the brightest character in the movie. If this is a soap opera as many reviewers on IMDb have asserted, it is delicately played by the displaced Oberon and Rains, whose performance prompted a contemporary reviewer at The New York Times in 1945 to write that "Claude Rains as a philosophizing cafe caricaturist is altogether delightful and contributes some mildly amusing moments to an otherwise doggedly tragic drama."

Director William Dieterle, despite his skilled work on such classics of romance as Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie and September Affair in the 1940s, almost never appears to receive credit for his handling of intimate and delicate scenes conveying an emotional affinity between characters. In this film, he weaves a colorful but believable tapestry out of some outlandish elements, allowing a viewer to accept the reconciliation of a couple with some serious communication problems. He even lets us believe that the dawning realization of her mother's true existence (thanks to Claude's gifted artist) could heal the psychologically traumatized teenager enough to banish the girl's confusion, resentment and justifiable fear of a woman she barely knows. Despite the fact that I have always found Charles Korvin's over-ripe looks and manner a bit off-putting, he is also believably pompous, hurt and chastened here expressing his characters' emotions in a sincere manner in this movie.

Director William Dieterle (wearing his signature white gloves) directing Charles Korvin, Merle Oberon and Sue England on the set of This Love of Ours (1945).

Btw, if the basic plot of this movie sounds familiar, it may be because it was remade in 1956 as Never Say Goodbye by director Jerry Hopper. That version starred Rock Hudson and Cornell Borchers (remember her?) and had an Iron Curtain backdrop. I believe that George Sanders played a role similar to that filled by Rains in the earlier movie. I suspect that Universal may have put this earlier version on the shelf when they produced that potboiler in the fifties, hoping it would help audiences embrace the more "modern and colorful" edition of the story. Too bad the cast was not nearly as skilled as they were in the Claude Rains one, as you can see for yourself beginning below:

Sources: Claude Rains: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference by John T. Soister & JoAnna Wioskowski (McFarland, 1999), Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice by David Skal with Jessica Rains (Univ. of KY, 2008),

Past blog postings on this site featuring Claude Rains:

Claude Rains: The Virtuoso
The Appreciation of Claude: Jessica Rains and Richard Chamberlain
Claude Rains Appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents