“We became devoted to each other. We weren’t lovers, we eventually became more like siblings. Our relationship was unique. Oh, he sometimes gave me the macho routine when people were watching, but he changed when we were alone.
“We always used to celebrate together at the end of a picture. Clark insisted on it. Maybe we’d include the director, maybe not. It was just a kind of ritual that the two of us had. We would share a bottle of champagne while he read poetry to me, usually the sonnets of Shakespeare. He loved poetry, and read beautifully, with great sensitivity, but he wouldn’t dare let anyone else know it. He was afraid people would think him weak or effeminate and not the tough guy who liked to fish and hunt. I was the only one he trusted. He never wanted me to tell about this, and here I am giving him away, but I never mentioned it while he was alive.”
—Myrna Loy, lovingly recalling her friend Clark Gable
Gable and Loy—whom 20 million fans voted King and Queen of Hollywood in 1937—co-starred in seven films: Night Flight, Manhattan Melodrama (the movie that drove John Dillinger, a huge fan of the actress, out of hiding—which Loy said she always felt guilty about), Men in White, Wife Vs. Secretary, Parnell, Too Hot to Handle and Test Pilot. But this luminous pair is rarely mentioned when the talk turns to classic Hollywood screen pairings. Maybe that’s because, as Loy pointed out, their chemistry was more platonic than passionate. Perhaps that’s why it endured while so many others flamed out.
Here are a couple of off-the-set shots of Loy and Gable among friends. The first is from a 1941 benefit for Greek war relief, with Charles Laughton, Gable’s wife Carole Lombard and Melvyn Douglas. The second is from a birthday party for Lionel Barrymore, with Jean Harlow. Check out the way Gable looks at Loy in these pictures. He clearly adores her. And these are no lascivious leers; it’s more like, “God, I just love that dame.”
Thinking of Gail Russell today, on what would have been her 90th birthday. She had only 36 of them.
If Marilyn Monroe was a candle in the wind, Gail Russell was a matchstick in a hailstorm. That she became an actress at all was due to a twist of fate usually found only in bad movies, along with her mother’s fierce ambition. It seems that one day, Paramount’s head of casting, William Mieklejohn, picked up a couple of hitchhiking teenagers, who, upon learning who he was, began raving about a former classmate, comparing her to Hedy Lamarr. By then, Russell was enrolled in a technical college, pursuing painting, which provided the only sanctuary to the shy, often terrified girl.
“I was possessed with an agonizing kind of self-consciousness where I felt my insides tightening into a knot, where my face and hands grew clammy, where I couldn’t open my mouth, where I felt impelled to turn and run if I had to meet new people,” she would later recall in a fan magazine. “When my parents had guests, I would run, get under the piano and hide there.”
So it’s not surprising that when Mieklejohn finally tracked Russell down with the offer of a movie career, the prospect sickened her more than it thrilled her. Enter her mother Gladys, stage left. Gladys, it seemed, had once turned down a screen test herself, and was determined that her gorgeous daughter not make the same mistake. Moreover, the family was broke—even selling off the furniture to make the monthly mortgage payment.
“When I was discovered for the movies I was sleeping on the living room floor on newspapers,” Russell told one reporter. “I went for my first interview with paint all over my face—I’d been helping paint a room at the technical school. Paramount offered me a minimum salary, $50 a week, and Mom said, ‘Take it, we need the money.'”
After making it through a couple of small roles with her nerves barely intact, Russell—who had just turned 20—was cast as the ethereal Stella Meredith opposite Ray Milland in The Uninvited, a prestige picture that Paramount was placing almost entirely on her slender shoulders. She was sometimes so frightened she literally could not speak, and when she did find her gentle voice, the words were often the wrong ones. Director Lewis Allen recalled having to cobble together many scenes from single line readings. However it came to be, Russell’s performance as a fragile young woman who is tormented by family ghosts is heartbreaking and unforgettable, and she deserves far more credit than any skillful director or editor.
But her triumph came at a cost she would pay for the rest of her short life. During filming, Russell began to rely on alcohol to steady her nerves. And while she made a few more memorable films during the 1940s, including Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and The Angel and the Badman, by the time the decade was over, so, for the most part, was her career. She was 25.
In 1950, Paramount declined to renew Russell’s contract, largely due to her worsening drinking problem, which had become impossible to conceal; she had already been convicted of one DUI. Then, in 1957, she drove her convertible through the window of a coffee shop on Beverly Boulevard, injuring a night janitor. Voyeuristic photos of the actress, looking scared, dazed, and much older than her 33 years, were smeared all over the tabloids.
On August 27, 1961, Russell was found on the floor of her studio apartment in Hollywood. It is believed she’d been there for at least a day, having succumbed to alcohol-related heart and liver disease.
Even in her studio pin-up shots, her sadness is impossible to miss. She looks truly happy only when she’s painting, or playing with her dogs, or walking along the water. In other words, when she’s free. I hope she is free now, and at peace.
Lauren Bacall left us last month, just shy of her 90th birthday. She lost Bogie in 1957, and he waited another 57 years to be reunited with the love of his life. Here, Betty makes use of the gold-whistle charm her husband gave her, which paraphrases the famous line in the film on which they met, To Have and Have Not: the inscription reads, “If you want anything, just whistle.” When Bogie was laid to rest, Betty gave the charm back to him to take on his way. I wonder if he’s returned it to her now…
During one of the most shameful periods in Hollywood history, what could have been James Whale’s finest hour instead became his downfall.
As 1937 dawned, the director was huddled with writers R.C. Sherriff and Charles Kenyon in a back office at Universal, working on a film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, The Road Back. A sequel to his All Quiet on the Western Front, the book follows a group of emotionally battered ex-soldiers back to their homeland, a Germany wracked by widespread violence, hunger and misery in the years following the Great War.
Both Whale and Sherriff had survived brutal action on the Western Front—Sherriff was severely wounded and Whale was captured and held prisoner for more than a year—and they were eager to paint a realistic portrait of the war’s bleak and grim consequences, even for those lucky enough to have lived through it. They hoped the film would carry a powerful message of peace and a warning not to make the same catastrophic mistake twice.
After the success of the Oscar-winning All Quiet, Universal had optioned the rights to the second novel before it was even completed. But when the book fizzled out commercially, the studio set the film project aside. When it finally went ahead, the timing could not have been worse: As Whale and his writers toiled away on their cautionary tale, the German war machine, under Adolf Hitler, was already groaning and cranking to life once more. And the film would soon be in the hands of one of Hitler’s minions.
As a novel, The Road Back had already been banned by the Nazis, and they were none too eager to see it writ large on the big screen. In the book, Remarque describes the horrors on the homefront just as vividly as he had laid out those on the battlefield: Former comrades turn on one another in a village wracked by starvation, a returning hero’s fiancee betrays him with a profiteer, and a political activist is gunned down by his former commanding officer during a food riot. This was the very antithesis of the kind of propaganda and pablum the Nazis were feeding the faithful back home.
The movie marked the third collaboration between Whale and Sherriff, who also worked together on the film version of Sherriff’s Journey’s End, a powerful portrait of terrified, trench-bound soldiers bracing themselves for one final assault, and One More River, a searing social commentary based on John Galsworthy’s popular novel.
Echoing a practice from his London stage days, Whale cast a group of relative unknowns in key roles, with mixed results. John “Dusty” King, known mostly for his work in Westerns, fails to come fully alive. But Richard Cromwell—a gentle, sensitive actor perhaps most famous as the young man who duels with George Brent in Jezebel—picks up the emotional slack. Also featured are Andy Devine, who is truly touching even in his shtickier moments, and Slim Summerville, reprising his role as Tjaden from All Quiet. Having experienced more horror in a few short years than those back home could imagine in a lifetime, these men return from the battlefield more closely bound to one another than to their own families. And far from being welcomed as heroes, they are treated as little more than unwelcome reminders of a monstrous mistake that has left their country in ruins and its people bereft of hope or sympathy.
Having helmed such classics as Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Show Boat, Whale was Universal’s top director. And with its $1 million budget, The Road Back was expected to be the crowning achievement of his career—a prestige project that would garner serious attention.
And did it ever. But not the kind Whale or the studio were looking for.
Georg Gyssling, the Third Reich’s consul in Los Angeles, had just one real job: to bully Hollywood into portraying Germany and its political regime in the best possible light. The main weapon in his arsenal was Article 15 of his country’s film regulations, which stated that producers whose work cast aspersions on Germany, its government or its people could have their permits to show films in Germany revoked—not just for their “offending” films, but for all their films. This sent shudders through the studio bosses, who feared the loss of this highly lucrative market.
Doughy, bland and balding but supremely confident, Gyssling (below, gazing rapturously at the notorious Leni Riefenstahl) had competed for his country in the Four-Man Bobsled event at the 1932 Olympics. (Now there’s a business card: “Nazi Henchman/Bobsledder.”) He felt very much at home in his rarified surroundings, and he had reason to: Hollywood had proven to be quite pliable in the face of German threats to pull the plug on profits.
And Universal was no exception. In 1930, shortly before the studio released All Quiet in Germany, the Nazis had strengthened their political foothold. And they hated the film’s anti-war tone and its portrayal of German soldiers as human beings rather than supermen. Joseph Goebbels himself railed against the movie from a theater balcony, and at later showings, Nazis released stink bombs in the aisles. Shortly after this uproar, the movie was banned in Germany.
Panic-stricken, studio chief Carl Laemmle, himself a German Jew, agreed to make extensive cuts to the film—not just for the German market, but for worldwide distribution. He even took out ads in the German newspapers proclaiming, “I yield to no one in my love for the Fatherland.” After the government approved the new, whitewashed version, the film and Universal were welcomed back into the country.
Then came the sequel.
Having already banned The Road Back in novel form, the Nazis sent their boy Gyssling to go after the film, which was due out in the spring of 1937.His first stop: the executive offices of Charles Rogers, who had recently replaced Laemmle as head of Universal following a corporate takeover. Rogers believed he could talk Gyssling down (that’s how new he was) and suggested that the consul meet with Whale, who then invited him to his Santa Monica home to discuss the film.
One can only imagine how much it galled the director, a former POW and a passionate progressive, to serve tea on the patio to a Nazi goon while pleading for the life of his film. But for the sake of his cherished project, he did. During the meeting, Whale stressed that the screenplay was not a mirror image of the book and that the consul should reserve judgment on the film for the time being.
Gyssling lay low for a few weeks, until he saw a rough cut of the movie. Then, furious, he made a move even more thuggish than any he had made before. On April 1, 1937, he sent out letters to virtually everyone connected with the film—more than 60 people, from Whale and Rogers right on down to the wardrobe assistants—threatening to invoke the dreaded Article 15 and warning them that any future film on which they worked might be banned from the German market.
Universal’s reaction was nauseatingly predictable. After some token resistance, the studio caved in to the Nazi government’s demands, “to cultivate the good will of Germany.” Rogers yanked Whale from the project and ordered parts of the film re-shot. The remainder was extensively re-edited, with a total of 21 deep and devastating cuts. Into the ashcan went all direct or even implied references to the Nazis—including the original ending, where, much to their horror, King and Cromwell come across a group of children being schooled in dogma that could have been lifted straight out of Mein Kampf.
And here’s the kicker: After all of the studio’s appalling attempts to appease the Nazis, the film was banned in Germany anyway.
Whale was disgusted by Universal’s utter spinelessness, and his relationship with Rogers was permanently poisoned. Spitefully squandering the studio’s greatest talent, the boss banished Whale to mostly B-films for the remainder of his contract. The director enjoyed just one more major success, with 1939’s The Man in the Iron Mask. Two years later, following the failure of They Dare Not Love, a romantic drama set, ironically, against the Nazi occupation of Austria, the one-time set designer retired from films and returned to painting, one of his earlier loves. No one could force him to slash anything from his canvases.
All prints of Whale’s original cut of The Road Back were apparently destroyed. But critics and others who viewed it in previews generally liked what they saw. And even in its bastardized state, it has some striking Whale touches. The depth-of-field shots early on, where the battlefield seems to loom out endlessly before the soldiers. The delicate patterns of light and shadow. The long, fluid tracking shots that eventually peer in curiously for a closer look.
At one point in the film, those who’ve miraculously made it through the war march side by side with their ghostly comrades. That’s the image that stays with me. Because the whole movie feels a bit like a ghost—a faint, mournful reminder of Whale, of what was, and of what might have been had his career not been derailed by a studio’s craven cowardice and greed.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Hollywood’s capitulation to the Third Reich is called collaboration—a word some people find inflammatory—or appeasement. The result was the same: the German government wielded significant power over many of the major studios for a good part of the 1930s. Fearing the loss of this lucrative market, a great number of studio bosses, to their everlasting shame, handed the editing shears over to this monstrous regime with disturbing regularity. Only later in the decade, when they were faced with the greater loss of film markets in England and France, did these studios summon the “courage” to shake off the German censors and take the battle directly to the Nazis.
For many classic film fans and even some historians, this dark period in Hollywood is tough to face unflinchingly. It’s tempting to launch into denial mode and to shoot the admittedly imperfect messengers who’ve written books about it. But the archival evidence in both Germany and the U.S.—the only completely factual information we have—is overwhelming and indisputable. And the truth it reveals is an ugly one.
For much more on the life and career of James Whale, read James Curtis’s extraordinary biography, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters.
Happy Birthday, Charles Boyer! I love you beyond all reason and sanity.
This photo, taken during one of his many shifts at the Hollywood Canteen, really seems to capture him: warm, real, and totally un-movie-star-ish. Absent are the silly studio-mandated shoe lifts and toupee, which he never wore off camera—and you can see how hideously disappointed Claudette Colbert is about that. She’s like, “Oh, yeah, Gary Cooper’s here too? Whatever!”
Charles Boyer was the perfect leading man—insanely attractive, wildly romantic, with deep, limpid eyes and a voice like honey pouring over a hot toddy. Maybe too perfect for his own good, as he often wasn’t appreciated for the brilliant actor he was. Criminally overlooked at Oscar time, he was nominated for four films and went home empty-handed every time.
The year he was up for Gaslight, he lost to Bing Crosby, for God’s sake, in Going My Way. I mean, that was a sweet and touching performance, and I love me some Toora Loora Loora as much as the next Irish girl. But really? It’s like picking one color crayon instead of the box of 128. To cast Charles Boyer, who was pretty much every sane woman’s romantic ideal, as a murderous sociopath was pure genius, as was his performance—which shifted slowly and seamlessly from ardent suitor to seemingly doting husband to cruel, abusive tyrant to desperate, pleading criminal. But even as he sits helplessly tied to a chair, exposed as a murderer, a glint of arrogance still flickers across his face: he really believes he still has a shot at wooing his wife into helping him escape.
It’s just astonishing. I mean, did the Oscar voters even see his performance? Is it too late to send them the DVD?
And could this monster possibly be the bon vivant who succumbed to a shipboard romance in Love Affair just a couple of years earlier? Again, Boyer was perfect, softening the somewhat brittle Irene Dunne in a way no other actor could, without ever diminishing her. In fact she shines all the more, and they’re just fabulous together. If I could have studied this kind of chemistry in school, I would have majored in science. But there’s nothing gooey about them—they’re smart and witty and grown-up and a bit surprised at how completely besotted they are. They’re painfully aware of the hurdles they face and the risk of great heartache. But they plunge in anyway because really, what choice do they have?
But I especially love him in a slightly more obscure film, Frank Borzage’s History Is Made At Night. Mystery, melodrama, romantic comedy, this one’s got it all—even a lovely number where Jean Arthur kicks off her evening slippers while dancing with Boyer to I Get Ideas. (I’m right there with you, Jean.) Colin Clive plays a deeply crazed shipping magnate whose creepy scheme to frame his wife drives her straight into Boyer’s arms—and understandably, he’s curious as to why she married such a man. But rather than ask her directly and risk scaring her off, he playfully interrogates her by painting a little face on his hand and calling it Coco, and then cooing his questions at her in a high-pitched puppet voice.
Okay I’ll pause a moment while you read that last bit again. Suffice to say that Charles Boyer is one of about five people on the planet who could pull that off without the woman smiling awkwardly while slowly reaching for her purse and backing up toward the door. Or maybe just saying to hell with the purse and running. Honest to God, the man could do anything.
But Boyer’s best love story was the one he lived offscreen. He fell in love with his wife, Pat Paterson, at first sight. And despite his dashing reputation, he was a happy homebody who was more content curling up with a book than cuddling with a co-star. Their only, much-cherished child, Michael, lost his life when he was just 21, playing Russian roulette after breaking with his girlfriend. Heartbroken and devastated, Boyer somehow forged ahead with filming on How to Steal a Million, with a resolve that left his co-stars in awe. But when he lost Pat after 44 years together, it was one blow too many. He took his own life just two days later.
Below are a couple of pictures from my own Charles Boyer collection.
Here he is looking terribly kind and dapper as he arrives at an airport sometime in the 1950s. See the woman in the back, staring as if mesmerized? That would have been me, except I wouldn’t be in the frame because I would be unconscious on the floor.
And here he is (toupee-less as usual) treating Ingrid Bergman to lunch at the Brown Derby, in between bouts of terrorizing her and trying to drive her insane. What a guy!
Finally, if you want to see the ultimate example of a movie star entirely comfortable with himself, poking fun at his Hollywood image, here’s his classic appearance on I Love Lucy: www.hulu.com/watch/438083 Yes, Mrs. Ricardo, I would’ve stalked him too…
Happy Birthday to the fabulous and insanely underrated Van Johnson, the light, romantic leading man with hidden depths. Though actually they weren’t hidden at all—they were pretty much right there, even in his breezier roles, but especially in weightier films such as Battleground, The End of the Affair, Miracle in the Rain and A Guy Named Joe. If you’re not familiar with that Van, treat yourself to a binge some rainy Saturday.
Or ask my Aunt Ruth about him. And then get ready to catch her.
My aunt is terrified of doctors, and every year, when she has to go get her physical, she treats herself to a trip to Bloomingdale’s afterward, to pick up a perfume or a pillow, something fabulous and frivolous to smooth away the memory of cold tables and cotton hospital gowns. And one year, a miracle happened. There she was in the Linens section, fondling the fancy sheets, when she looked up and straight into the eyes of… Van Johnson, her favorite actor from the time she was 14. He was starring on Broadway in La Cage Aux Folles.
Well, oh my God. From everything she told us later, it was clear they talked for quite a while. I have this wonderful image of tall, dashing Van regaling Ruth with tales of old Hollywood. And Ruth, all five feet of her plus a few inches of bun, teetering in her pumps and hanging onto a rack of blankets to keep from fainting.
When she got home that day, she made straight for our house. She walked, or kind of wobbled, into the living room, all woozy, and threw herself across the sofa like Greta Garbo in Camille. She had just come from the doctor, so we were like, “Oh my God! It must be something horrible!”
My mother ran and got the Harvey’s Bristol Cream, pretty much the elixir of life in our house, and Ruth clung to her glass and composed herself. “What? What is it?” we asked her, as she still struggled to catch her breath. Finally she told us.
I’m a noir girl, so when I fall, I fall hard. Luckily, the objects of my affection never end up crumpled in a heap on the bedroom floor.
Well, almost never.
By the time I got through with Noir City Annual 2013, its pages were pawed, its corners were dog-eared (sometimes in both directions), and its spine was bent this way and that, utterly broken beyond repair. I loved this book to pieces.
The sixth in a series, Noir City Annual 2013 pulls together the best stories produced last year for the Film Noir Foundation’s (FNF) online magazine. And if you’ve ever dropped by their website, at http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org, you know that must have been a tough choice for FNF founder Eddie Muller, who published the book, and Donald Malcolm, who edited it. The group puts out some of the best noir writing—no, movie writing—no, just plain writing—that you’re likely to find anywhere. Crazy-smart but not pretentious, elegant but not fussy, passionate but not gooey, insanely well informed but not stuck up about it.
The latest limited-edition volume features gorgeously illustrated stories on a huge array of noir films, actors, directors, writers and even singers, including Richard Fleischer, Dan Duryea, Peter Lorre, Julie London, Peggie Castle and Jean Gabin. For some, their lives were even darker and sadder than their films. Here’s just a sampling of the articles (noirticles?) you’ll find inside:
In “The Girl They Loved to Kill,” Jake Hinkson comes to the rescue of Peggie Castle, which few people ever did in her films or her life. After taking us through her scant and mostly miserable 45 years, he closes with her pleading, desperate speech from Finger Man, a B-movie she made with Frank Lovejoy: “All my life, I’ve had dreams. Not big ones, just my share of the little things—that someone would like me, really like me, maybe even respect me… I know I’m no bargain. I’ve been around, plenty. I don’t feel sorry for myself. Only, sometimes, I get the feeling there isn’t any more time, like there isn’t going to be any tomorrow. Be nice to me. Please.”
Steve Kronenberg’s “Wandering Star” delves into the story behind the only film Peter Lorre both directed and co-wrote, Der Verlorene (The Lost One), in which he plays “a cynical Nazi physician on the run from the authorities, his former identity, and his own guilt-ridden conscience” who finally becomes his own executioner. “Lorre specialized in playing men who had lost their way in life, forced to hide behind masks, unable to control their compulsions,” notes Kronenberg. “By 1951, Lorre, too, was lost—facing bankuptcy, irrelevance in Hollywood, and an unfulfilled dream of directing his own film.” Perhaps because Germany was not yet ready to face up to the enormity of its wartime sins, Der Verlorene was a devastating failure when it opened there, and Lorre never even attempted to release it in the United States. He “returned to Hollywood disenchanted and relegated to typecasting.” But he also retained a 35mm nitrate print of his film, which cries out for restoration and recognition.
In “Her Name Was Julie,” Carl Steward celebrates the sultry stylings of Julie London and even offers a discography of her 50 best noir songs. He also reflects on the noir film career that could have been, had she not been lured away from the soundstage by her seductive set of pipes, returning years later for a handful of westerns and some wholesome family television. (I mean come on, was I the only one who slogged through reruns of “Emergency!” just hoping she’d burst into a chorus or two of “Cry Me a River”? I think not!)
Jason Ney’s “The Forgotten Man” makes a compelling case that Richard Fleischer, underrated and overlooked in his own time, should finally take his place on anyone’s list of top-tier noir directors. Covering Fleischer’s brilliant but frustrating stint at RKO, Ney points out that his breakthrough film, The Narrow Margin, was almost scrapped entirely (okay I fainted a little when I typed that). Howard Hughes loved the movie so much that he wanted to start from scratch with a bigger budget and A-list stars, possibly Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell (who are fabulous, but oh my God no). While the capricious producer dithered over his decision, the film lingered in limbo for two years until it was finally released in 1952.
“Dark Mirrors” compares original noirs with their remakes, with the genuine goods usually winning out. Of the 1993 remake of Night and the City, with Robert DeNiro tackling the role Richard Widmark nailed perfectly in 1950, Vince Keenan notes the “insurmountable gap between the thirty-something Widmark hustling alone far from home and the pushing-fifty DeNiro soaking his friends in Manhattan. The former is plausibly desperate, the latter utterly delusional.” (Then there’s my own fervently held belief that the Richard Widmark version of anything is better.) I’d mercifully forgotten that they remade D.O.A. with Dennis Quaid in 1988: “It would seem impossible not to have fun with one of the greatest set-ups in movie history… but the latest version finds a way, in Bonneville Salt Flats record time.” I would love to forget the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, especially the kitchen-table sex scene, which Keenan cheekily describes as “passionless and deeply unpleasant, not to mention unhygienic. (Do not have the bread at the Twin Oaks Tavern.)” But the author is no knee-jerk traditionalist and gives the newer films their due, singling out The Deep End—a 2001 retelling of The Reckless Moment, with Tilda Swinton in the Joan Bennett role—for special praise.
But perhaps the star of Noir City Annual 2013 is Dan Duryea, the subject of a dozen fabulous articles covering pretty much every facet of his career as well as his offscreen life as a faithful, devoted husband and doting Dad to his two boys. (When he wasn’t leading dames to wrack and ruin, he was leading a Boy Scout troop.)
The Duryea stories were were an especially guilty pleasure for me—I read them all straight through in bed one night while my husband was a hundred miles away. I really do adore this man. But finding a dozen articles devoted to Duryea in Noir City Annual 2013 made me feel like slightly less of a misfit…
Four of the six Noir City Annuals, for the years 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, are already sold out, but if you act fast, you can get your hands on the volumes covering 2012 and 2013. Here’s the link for purchase: http://www.noircity.com/noircityware.html. They’re also available on Amazon.com; just do a search for Noir City Annual.
Meanwhile, you can access the Film Noir Foundation’s fabulous online magazine for a donation of just $20—the price of a few cups of coffee, with a much better buzz for the buck. Just click the link at http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/contribute.html. Reading the e-mag will give you a jump on some of the stories that may show up in the 2014 Annual. Which I would pre-order now, sight unseen, if I could. (Hint, hint…)
Early on in Torch Song, the 1953 MGM “musical” starring Joan Crawford as an uber-diva, she’s kvetching to her producer (James Todd):
Crawford: “The script needs jokes, the music needs cutting and the staging—aaugh, it stinks!”
Todd: “You don’t think it’s going to be a flop?”
Crawford: “No show Jenny Stewart’s in is going to be a flop—if I have to pull every trick in the book to make it hang together!”
Torch Song, on the other hand, doesn’t hang together. And everyone involved with it should have hanged separately.
But let’s start with what’s good about it. (Don’t worry—it’ll only take a paragraph!) Before filming began, Crawford reportedly sashayed into director Charles Walters’ office wearing only a robe, opened it up as one might a Christmas gift, and declared, “I just want you to see what you’re getting!” Walters, who was gay, was not impresssed. But I gotta tell you, I’m a straight woman and when I saw her body in this movie, I was mesmerized. The 47-year-old Joan shows off a teeny-tiny waist and fabulous legs so trim and firm you could bounce quarters off them. If I were built like that, I’d be flashing busloads of strangers on Fifth Avenue.
When we first meet Crawford as Jenny Stewart, she’s swanning around the rehearsal hall, badgering and bullying everyone in sight. The music’s all wrong. The director’s an idiot. And her dance partner (played by director Walters, a former Broadway hoofer) is clumsily crashing into her carefully framed arc. Yes, yes, we get it: If only she had a pair of rollerskates, she could be an actual Bitch on Wheels.
After her browbeaten pianist hightails it out of town, Tye Graham (Michael Wilding), a sensitive war veteran who was blinded in battle, steps in to take his place—and immediately challenges the star about slowing down the tempo of the number they’re working on. Wilding does his best to mix it up with Crawford, but he never really stands a chance. By the early 1950s, she had morphed from being tough to being downright hard. (Were there ever two badder hombres than Joan and Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar?) Watching her spar with Wilding is like watching a bulldozer plow through a mountain of meringue. Still, we know he’s going to tame and soften her—because we’re beaten about the head with that notion pretty much from “Hello.”
“Did you ever hear of a defense mechanism?” the pipe-smoking pianist asks. “You’re scared. Women need admiration. More than food or drink, women need admiration.”
The entire plot is so telegraphed I’m not sure if it was directed by Charles Walters or Western Union.
The one actor Crawford does have chemistry with is her old friend Marjorie Rambeau, who snagged an Oscar nomination playing her earthy mother. “They don’t make beer like they did when your father was drinkin’ it. You could taste the hops!” she recalls a bit mistily after flouncing on the sofa for a snack. “And the pretzels don’t have enough salt on ‘em to make a cat thirsty!” When she leaves, you’ll find yourself plaintively calling after her, “Come back! Please, please for the love of God come back!”
Oh and poor Gig Young is floundering around in this stew as well, playing Jenny’s agent and occasional paramour—and as usual, he doesn’t get the girl and he does get drunk, early and often. But about midway through the film, he vanishes, perhaps to join some sort of Supporting Actors’ Witness Protection Program. Or maybe he’s hiding under here:
In a rare misfire, costume designer Helen Rose seems to have gone on a quest to buy up every hideous piece of cloth west of the Pecos. The sheer volume of the fabric is matched only by the glaring intensity of the colors. (I know this was the Atomic Age, but must the clothes look radioactive?) The blouses are big, stiff taffeta numbers, and the giant, swooping skirts are the type that stand on their own even with no one in them. (And if they had any shame, they would run away.) The only relief is provided by a lovely, simple pair of white cotton pajamas that seem to have wandered in from another movie. Not to be outdone for sheer godawfulness, Joan’s coiffure looks like some sort of plastered-in-place tribute to Winged Victory—over even a monsoon.
With hair and costumes this dreadful, it’s no wonder that when Joan throws a cocktail party midway through the movie, she doesn’t invite a single female guest. Who needs the (potentially well-dressed) competition?
But hey, this is an MGM musical right? So how about the music? Well, while no one would accuse Louis B. Mayer of being a progressive, he was always far ahead of the curve when it came to recycling songs. And almost every tune in this film began its life somewhere else.
The opening number, where Crawford chews out Walters, is “You’re All the World to Me,” which Fred Astaire famously danced on the ceiling to in Royal Wedding. At least they had the good grace to come up with a new arrangement for that one, which is more than they did elsewhere. India Adams, who dubs the vocals for Crawford, had done the same for Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon. And when “Two-Faced Woman” failed to make the cut in that film, they just brought the whole song over—lock, stock and embarrassment. For some reason that only the saints or perhaps Satan can understand, Crawford and the entire chorus do this number in blackface (The clip below refers to it, inexplicably, as “tropical makeup.” Oof.):
Was it done to distract (horrify?) the audience away from Crawford’s leaden footwork? Because when the one-time Charleston champion does a two-step, you can practically hear her counting to two. Her wildly joyless dancing conveys all the warmth and grace of your high school gym teacher. And when she mouths the truly awful lyrics, she heaves like she’s purging an alien from her body. Though you can hardly blame her for that.
If you miss the final scene because you’re too busy picking up what’s left of your jaw after it crashes to the floor, rest assured that Crawford and Wilding do finally succumb to their total lack of chemistry and wind up embracing in a lumpen heap on the floor of his apartment.
If you need a palate cleanser after all that, and God knows I do, take a look at these fabulous behind-the-scenes pix of Joan limbering up and stretching under the watchful eye of her poodle. If they’d had any sense (or taste!), they would have scrubbed Torch Song entirely and just shot an amazing exercise video with these two:
On June 2, director William Friedkin live-Skyped with a packed house at the Film Forum in New York for a screening of his brilliant film, Sorcerer, which is finally getting the attention it has been denied for almost four decades. “This is the best-looking print of this I’ve ever seen,” he told the crowd. “I’m a big fan of DCP [Digital Cinema Package, the digital file supplied to theatres] because it looks the way it looked to me through the camera. The colors are true, which is especially important for this picture. So you will see it the way I want it to be seen.”
During the conversation with his fans, Friedkin also praised the gorgeous new Warner Archive Blu-ray print of the film, which mercifully supplants the pan-and-scan version that had polluted the market since 2005. “What a piece of shit that was—the guy who made that ought to stand in the dock,” said the disgusted director, who also took to Twitter to warn fans away from it. “If I were in charge of the firing squad, I would drop my hand.”
But wait—there’s more! “When we were making the Blu-ray, Warner asked us if we had any behind-the-scenes footage, and I didn’t think there was any,” said Friedkin. “But then I remembered my film editor Bud Smith had shot some—and it turns out he has about 37,000 feet of 16mm footage. So we’re going to edit that and put it out in a couple of years.” And if ever a movie cried out for a peek behind the scenes, it’s Sorcerer. (I hope to write more about the disaster-plagued shoot—including hurricanes, explosions and massive bouts of gangrene and malaria—in a later post…)
Friedkin is also working on a digital print of To Live and Die in L.A., which he thinks “will probably take another three or four years, because we do it frame by frame.”
It almost sounded like sacrilege to hear the digital process spoken of so lovingly in a repertory house. But the director defended the format: “I think a lot of the complaints about digital sound like the guy who manufactured stagecoaches when the trains came along. If you light a scene well using digital, it looks great.
“And 35mm is in trouble—Technicolor is not developing it, Kodak is not making it,” he added. “On the other hand, we don’t know how long digital will last. But every 35mm is probably going to have to have a digital copy for wider use.”
But for many, digital is not always preferable—or even an option. “We treat 35mm prints like Faberge eggs,” said Bruce Goldstein, the Film Forum’s Director of Repertory Programming, who hosted the Friedkin event. “We just did a series of early Hitchcock films, and a lot of those are not on DCP.”
On a related (and kind of odd) note, a man in the audience asked why Sorcerer wasn’t shot in CinemaScope, of all things. (Short answer: This ain’t Brigadoon.) “The movie had a very claustrophobic feel, like a prison without walls,” Friedkin patiently explained. “So I didn’t want it to be a big wide-screen type of picture. We made the decision, without even discussing it really, to shoot it in 1:85 [aspect ratio]. I like a lot of films I’ve seen in Scope—but come to think of it, there’s not a single film among my favorites that’s shot in it.”
On the surface, Katharine Hepburn seems to have little in common with the working-class heroine of Alice Adams, a fumbling, insecure Midwestern girl longing to rise above her roots and rejected at almost every turn. But at the time she took the role, Hepburn could empathize with Alice much more deeply than she may have wished.
After winning an Oscar for 1933’s Morning Glory, Hepburn was trapped in a series of dismal flops that threatened to derail her career. InSpitfire, she was comically miscast as Trigger Hicks, a faith-healing hillbilly. (If you’ve ever wondered how a Bryn Mawr girl says, “I’d better go rustle up some vittles,” this is your chance.) InBreak of Hearts, she and Charles Boyer generated about as much electricity as a fuzzy slipper on a shag carpet. And inThe Little Minister, she played a noblewoman disguised as a gypsy in mid-19th-century Scotland. (No really.) Hepburn initially rejected that last one—and who can blame her—but was talked into it by her agent and then-lover, Leland Hayward. They broke up soon after.
When Hepburn briefly fled Hollywood for the theater—where she had once felt so at home—the results were even worse. Her stint on Broadway, starring inThe Lake, inspired Dorothy Parker’s famous quip, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” And that was one of the kinder comments. She returned to California with little of the self-assurance she had when she first stepped off the train just a few years earlier.
By the timeAlice Adams came calling in the spring of 1935, Hepburn was reeling from the first bout of failure and rejection she’d ever known, and craving acceptance as much as the film’s heroine was. She also longed for the safety and security of her friend George Cukor at the helm, but he was directingDavid Copperfield and suggested either William Wyler or George Stevens.
Wyler was already a name, but Stevens, while a respected cinematographer, had directed only a handful of feature films. So he set about charming the actress, who openly preferred his competitor. “Now what George said to me I don’t know, but I’m sure it was something like, ‘I think you’re the most fascinating, thrilling person in the world and I want to work with you,’” Hepburn laughed in an interview years later. She was growing fond of Stevens, but still had her eye on the prestigious Wyler.
Exasperated and anxious to get started, RKO producer Pandro S. Berman finally suggested they flip a coin to see which man would do the directing honors. “It came up Wyler,” he recalled. “And I looked at her and she looked a little bit disappointed. And I said, ‘How about again?’ and she said ‘Okay!’” The second flip sealed it for Stevens, whom Hepburn often credited with warming up her somewhat chilly persona by encouraging her to reveal a more vulnerable side she’d always been reluctant to expose. (They’d team up twice more, for Quality Street andWoman of the Year.)
(Watch Hepburn and Berman discuss Alice Adams here.)
Based on Booth Tarkington’s 1922 novel, Alice Adams centers on a factory worker’s daughter and her desperate attempts to rise through the ranks of small-town society. Hepburn’s nervous mannerisms suit Alice like a second skin, as she flutters frantically through the local country-club ball in her shopworn gown, clutching a poesy of purloined violets picked from a nearby garden. There she meets the well-heeled Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), who is charmed by her gaiety even as he glimpses the tender, fearful girl beneath the facade. MacMurray is not given an awful lot to do, and he does it beautifully. Like all of Hepburn’s best leading men, he stays solidly rooted to the ground as she flies and frets around him. (He’s also a seriously underappreciated hottie.)
When Alice finally agrees to let Arthur meet her family, the results are beyond disastrous. On a beastly-hot night, Alice and her parents (Ann Shoemaker and Fred Stone) are totted up in formal evening wear, while Arthur arrives in a simple jacket and tie. When they try to tuck into a crushingly heavy meal more suitable for Thanksgiving than mid-summer, Alice attempts to deflect the blame for the unfolding nightmare onto Malena (Hattie McDaniel), the maid they’ve hired for the evening. “Perhaps we should change le domestique, n’est-ce pas?” she coos nervously. “Excruciating” is an overused word, but here it may be an understatement. It’s actually physically difficult to watch this scene without balling up into knots inside; only Stevens’ carefully orchestrated touches of comic relief—including McDaniel’s aggressively droopy lace cap, Stone’s popping shirt buttons and a runaway Brussels sprout—make it at all bearable.
As they all settle awkwardly into their after-dinner cordials, Alice’s brother Walter (Frank Albertson) returns home with news of his latest and worst embarrassment: he’s been caught embezzling money from the plant where both he and his father work, and he may be arrested. And suddenly what had merely been a dreadful dinner party morphs into a loud and messy family meltdown.
Aware of just how awful the evening has been, Alice ushers Arthur to the front porch to bid him goodnight, all but certain it’s goodbye. Still clinging to her composure but clearly devastated, she tells him she knows he won’t come calling again. But Arthur assures her, somewhat weakly, that he’ll be back. As he disappears down the street, she reluctantly retreats to the tawdry, tumultuous domestic drama still playing out upstairs. Finally, heartbroken and overwhelmed, she breaks away and turns her face to the window, where her tears meld with the rain outside. (And those are real tears: In a rare moment of disharmony with one of her favorite directors, Hepburn wanted to throw herself onto the bed instead. She and Stevens argued bitterly about it until Hepburn gave in and began to cry—at which point he yelled, “Action!”)
The original script ended with Arthur returning to the porch to comfort Alice, declaring his love and reassuring her that nothing has changed. That was a sharp detour from the novel, which sent him scurrying politely for the door, never to return. (Poor Tarkington: RKO could never leave his bleak finales alone. A few years later, much to Orson Welles’ fury, they tacked a chirpy postscript onto The Magnificent Ambersons.) Hepburn and Stevens sought to leave it ambivalent, letting viewers decide for themselves whether the fragile romance would survive after the screen faded to black. But Berman believed that anything less than a happy ending would alienate the audience, and enlisted Cukor to plead his case with the director and star. Ultimately he won.
Aside from the ending, Alice Adams remained fairly faithful to the book and generally won praise from the critics. “What was in 1922 a shrewd and observant novel emerges in 1935 as a portrait of an era, uproariously funny and perceptive,” gushed James Agee, who was hardly a pushover. Audiences liked it too, boosting the box office for RKO. Hepburn’s losing streak—perilously long by Hollywood standards—was finally over.
Both the film and Hepburn got Oscar nods, but Mutiny on the Bounty captured Best Picture honors while Bette Davis won for Best Actress in Dangerous. Still, more than once, Davis said Hepburn should have taken home the trophy. She felt her victory was compensation for being snubbed, without so much as a nomination, for her riveting turn as the vicious, savage Mildred in Of Human Bondage a year earlier.
Not to worry, though: Hepburn would go on to win three more Academy Awards. And from 1935 on, she would carry the yearning, vulnerable spirit of Alice Adams with her through every part she played.
"Going to the fortune teller's was just as good as going to the opera, and the cost scarcely a trifle more - ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail." - Mark Twain, Letter to Orion Clemens, February 6, 1861
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