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The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on September 7, 2023 by Jim LaneSeptember 7, 2023

Introduction

At the moment, I’m in rehearsals for a stage production of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s 1813 romantic comedy of manners chronicling the romantic vicissitudes of five English sisters. The youngest and silliest of these sisters is named Lydia — which naturally put me in mind of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”. I say naturally, because once anyone has heard that song — especially as done by the Marx Brothers cavorting in a railroad car in At the Circus (1939) — it’s impossible not to think of it whenever the name “Lydia” is mentioned. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the Iron Age kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor;  Lydia Pinkham, the 19th century American purveyor of ladies’ patent medicines; St. Lydia of Thyatira; Lydia Becker, the British suffragette; Kenneth Roberts’s novel Lydia Bailey; or the youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice. No matter what, if you hear or read the name “Lydia”, you automatically fill in with “…the Tattooed Lady”. 

But not everyone has heard the song. One night during a lull in rehearsal I sang the opening lines within earshot of the actress playing the part, and her eyes went wide: “What is that song?” she marveled. So I found the song on YouTube on my phone and played it for her. Now this young lady is by no means as silly or foolish as the role she’s playing, and she even chuckled at “Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-pidia”, but halfway through the song I realized that most of the references in the song — which would have been perfectly familiar to a reasonably alert ten-year-old in 1939 — were two or three generations before her time. Aside from the fact that it’s in English, she could hardly be expected to understand a word of it. She confirmed this when we talked about it the next evening: “Social Security Number, I got that. And I know what a rhumba is…”

And that’s a pity, because “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” is one of the funniest and cleverest songs ever sung in English (interesting that it was written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg the same year they turned out “Over the Rainbow”). The song is endlessly inventive. Compare it with another amusing song — more recent, but still an oldie — “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein and a top-ten hit for Johnny Cash in 1969. Or another Silverstein song, “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone'”, which put Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in the top ten in 1972. They’re both clever, and fondly remembered, but they’re essentially one-joke songs. In “Lydia” the jokes come so thick and fast that you’re liable to miss one while you’re laughing at the one before it. Something must be done, I thought, to keep this treasure of popular culture from being banished to the darker reaches of Does-Anybody-Here-Understand-This? Land. Somebody (I further thought) should come out with The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.

Well, “somebody” turned out to be me, and here it is. Enjoy:

“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

From the MGM Picture At the Circus (1939)

Music by Harold Arlen; Lyric by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg

 

She was the most glo-o-o-rious creature under the sun,

Thaïs1, du Barry2, Garbo3 rolled into one…

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Lydia oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady!

She has eyes that folks adore so

And a torso even more so.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.

On her back is the Battle of Waterloo4,

Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus5 too,

And proudly above waves the Red, White and Blue6 .

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world

If you step up and tell her where.

For a dime you can see Kankakee7 or Paree8

Or Washington crossing the Delaware9 .

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

When her muscles start relaxin’

Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson10.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the queen of them all;

For two bits11 she will do a mazurka12 in jazz

With a view of Niag’ra13 that nobody has,

And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz14 ;

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Come along and see Buff’lo Bill15 with his lasso,

Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso16.

Here is Captain Spaulding17 exploring the Amazon18 ;

Here’s Godiva19 but with her pajamas on.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Here is Grover Whalen20 unveilin’ the Trylon21.

Over on the West Coast we have Treasure “I-lon”22.

Here’s Nijinsky23 a-doin’ the rhumba24.

Here’s her Social Security Numba25.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the champ of them all!

She once swept an admiral clear off his feet;

The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat,

And now the old boy’s in command of the fleet26

For he went and married Lydia!

I said Lydia! (He said Lydia!)

They said Lydia! (We said Lydia!)

La la!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*                         *                         *

Well, friends, there you have it, my modest effort to ensure that Arlen and Harburg’s funniest song — whose jokes, puns, and plays on words constitute an embarrassment of riches almost without precedent this side of Cole Porter and Gilbert and Sullivan — does not vanish in the benign oblivion of esoteric pop culture. Now that you’ve had a chance to explore it, I invite you to hop over to YouTube and glory in a song that fits the antic anarchy of Groucho Marx as perfectly as “Over the Rainbow” does Judy Garland, or “If I Were King of the Forest”, Bert Lahr.

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Picture Show 02 — Day 4

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on August 2, 2023 by Jim LaneAugust 6, 2023

The final day of Columbus Moving Picture Show 2023 opened, naturally enough, with the final four chapters of The Purple Monster Strikes. Our slow-on-the-uptake hero, slugging-and-shooting attorney Craig Foster (Dennis Moore) finally begins to catch on that something’s not right with “Dr. Layton” (who is in fact the Purple Monster, having murdered Dr. Layton and taken over his body). Back in Chapter 11 the Emperor of Mars sent a female underling to assist the Purple Monster by killing one of the secretaries at the “jet plane” factory and taking over her body. By the way, oddly enough, when the Purple Monster arrives on Earth, he tells his hired Earthling thug, “My name would mean nothing to you; you can call me the Purple Monster.” But the female sent to aid him is named Marcia before she takes over the body of Helen. Do only women on Mars have simple names? Or is “Marcia the Martian” an alias? If so, why didn’t the Purple Monster just call himself “Martin”, like Ray Walston on 1960s TV? Then again, Martin Strikes wouldn’t have been a very dramatic title. Well, anyhow, Marcia was a little sloppy while vacating Helen’s body, and the late Dr. Layton’s niece Sheila (Linda Stirling), feigning unconsciousness, observed her in the act. This enabled Foster finally to put two and two together and plant a camera in “Dr. Layton’s” office to see if he’s doing the same thing. But even before the film is developed, the Purple Monster makes his move, absconding with the prototype “jet plane” to be reverse-engineered back on Mars. Fortunately, Foster turns the “annihilator ray” on the escaping Purple Monster and blows him out of the sky (another nifty miniature by the Lydecker Brothers). And Chapter 15 ends with the unspoken hope that future extraterrestrial invaders will be no smarter than this one was. There would in fact be three more such invasions courtesy of Republic Pictures in the next seven years, all of them outsourcing groundwork of the invasion to local muscle: Flying Disc Man from Mars (1951), Radar Men from the Moon and Zombies of the Stratosphere (both ’52), all three featuring stock footage from Purple Monster and other Republic serials. Maybe we’ll see one or more of those at future Picture Shows.

The Unknown Soldier (1926) was one of the rash of movies about the World War (they didn’t know yet that they’d have to give them numbers) that came out during the second half of the 1920s, and which would culminate in Universal’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930. It was independently produced by Charles R. Rogers for Producers Distributing Corp. (PDC — not to be confused with PRC, the rock-bottom Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corp.) PDC was a short-lived concern that would be merged with and absorbed by other little fish, eventually to coalesce into RKO Radio Pictures. In the meantime, PDC turned out a hundred or so pictures between 1923 and ’27, their most significant asset being Cecil B. DeMille during his brief estrangement from Paramount Pictures (though only one of DeMille’s PDC pictures, 1927’s The King of Kings, actually turned a profit).

The Unknown Soldier told the story of a romance between Fred, a young worker (Charles Emmett Mack) and Mary, the boss’s daughter (Marguerite de la Motte) in defiance of her disapproving father (Henry B. Walthall, expressively stoic as ever). When America enters the Great War, they both enlist, he in the army, she in a troupe providing entertainment for the boys at the front. Reunited in France, they are married by a military chaplain before Fred’s unit moves up to the trenches. Simultaneously with learning she is pregnant, Mary also learns that the “chaplain” who married them was a deserter in disguise, and they’re not married after all. Hoping to set things right, Fred volunteers for a dangerous mission to find a lost patrol and escort them back to the town where he knows Mary and their child are recuperating from the baby’s birth. The patrol makes it to safety, but Fred goes MIA. Back home in the States, papa Walthall tells Mary she is welcome, but not her “illegitimate” child; she in turn tells him — in decorous silent-movie-intertitle euphemism — to go to hell.

Years pass. The remains of America’s first Unknown Soldier have been returned from France and are being conveyed in solemn procession to a resting place at Arlington (“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God”). In the crowd silently lining the route of the procession, father, daughter and grandchild (brought together by Mary’s aunt) are finally reconciled (their reunion cleverly intercut with newsreel footage of the actual 1921 procession). At this point, the implication is that the Unknown Soldier is in fact the missing Fred, killed on his mission to rescue the lost patrol, and now, in a strange twist of fate “known but to God”, bringing Mary, their child, and her father back together at last. This poignant dénouement appears to have been the original intent of director Renaud Hoffman and writers E. Richard Schayer and James J. Tynan. However, the producers hedged their bets by shooting an alternate ending in which Fred survives, albeit blinded and suffering from amnesia, until he regains his memory (though not his sight) in time for a tearful family reunion. PDC then offered exhibitors their choice as to which resolution they preferred. Sources differ as to which ending was more popular, but it was the “happy” ending that screened in Columbus. Obviously, this pretty much blows the whole point of calling the picture The Unknown Soldier in the first place. Without that original poignancy, the picture is basically warmed-over The Big Parade — not bad, some good moments, but nothing special, and redolent of its betters: Big Parade, What Price Glory?, Wings, Lilac Time, All Quiet, etc.

At this point — in the home stretch, as it were, and within sight of the finish line — The Picture Show was hit by a one-two punch of bad luck: The next two features on the program had to be replaced by unscheduled substitutes. First to go was I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby (1940), a Universal B-musical starring Broderick Crawford as a gangster with songwriting ambitions who kidnaps a young composer to collaborate with. I have a soft spot for Classic Era B-musicals, and for Broderick Crawford in the days when he still looked like his mother Helen Broderick, but the print arrived with an advanced case of vinegar syndrome (a “disease” that can reduce an acetate-based print to a pile of warped, brittle substance reeking of salad dressing) and had been rendered unusable. I was disappointed, but then again Clive Hirschhorn’s The Hollywood Musical dismisses the picture as “61 ludicrous minutes of non-entertainment”, so maybe we dodged a bullet. In any case, the substitute was Twelve Crowded Hours (1939), and no complaints there.

Twelve Crowded Hours — to use a line I can’t believe some reviewer didn’t use at the time — was 64 very crowded minutes. With beefy Richard Dix stuffed into a fast-talking-reporter role written for Lee Tracy, trying to clear his girlfriend Lucille Ball’s hapless brother (Allan Lane) of a murder rap, while nailing a numbers-racket kingpin (Cyrus W. Kendall) who keeps a truck-driver hit-man on retainer (he dispatches his marks by ramming their cars with his truck, which seems pretty inefficient, but we’re not given time to think about it) — anyhow, with all that, plus Donald MacBride playing one of his signature exasperated police detectives, director Lew Landers had a pretty busy juggling act on his hands, but he was up to it.

The other movie we were supposed to see but didn’t was Junior Miss (1945), from 20th Century Fox, adapted from the 1941 Broadway hit which was, in turn, based on a collection of New Yorker short stories by Sally (Meet Me in St. Louis) Benson. The picture starred the remarkable Peggy Ann Garner in a role as old as Jane Austen’s Emma and as recent as any movie starring Deanna Durbin: the mischievous teenage girl playing cupid for those around her. The movie looked promising, and Peggy Ann is always welcome, but it was not to be. Like I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, the Picture Show’s print of Junior Miss (whether due to vinegar syndrome or some other cause) was not eligible for running through a projector.

Instead we got Banjo (1947), a girl-and-her-dog B-movie starring ten-year-old Sharyn Moffett. Young Ms. Moffett was an appealing child actress who might have developed into the kind of juvenile star who justified the above-the-title billing she receives here. Unfortunately, at RKO (where the precarious studio administration always seemed to have more important things on their minds than grooming contract talent), she never had the kind of infrastructure that had served Peggy Ann Garner (and before her Shirley Temple) so well at 20th Century Fox. Today Sharyn Moffett is best remembered as the wheelchair-bound child who sets the plot in motion in Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher (1945), and as Cary Grant and Myrna Loy’s younger daughter in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48).

In Banjo young Sharyn plays Pat, a girl happily living with her widowed father and her dog Banjo on their prosperous Georgia farm. When her father is killed in a horseback riding accident, Pat is sent to live with her only relative, her wealthy aunt Elizabeth (Jacqueline White), who is living a carefree, self-centered life in Boston. There’s scarcely room in her life for a child (she’s not pleased that her trip to Bermuda must be canceled because of the girl’s arrival), and none at all for a dog. Banjo is banished to a pen in the backyard, but the pen can’t contain him, despite the ever-rising fence around it. Pat tries to please her aunt and keep Banjo with her, in which effort her only ally is a local doctor (Walter Reed), who happens also to be Aunt Elizabeth’s discarded fiancé — which prompts Pat also to try bringing her aunt and the doctor back together. Things at last come to a head: Banjo is banished again, this time all the way back to Georgia; Pat runs away to be with him, and…well, you can probably guess the rest.

Banjo is a pleasant specimen of heartwarming family entertainment, interesting not only for Sharyn Moffett, who shows she can carry a whole movie on her own small shoulders, but as only the second feature from prolific director Richard Fleischer (whose first, Child of Divorce, had also starred Sharyn Moffett). Another asset is Jacqueline White, whose innate appeal makes her likable even when Aunt Elizabeth is being most selfish and unreasonable. She is remembered today for another Richard Fleischer picture, the 1952 film noir classic The Narrow Margin, in which she played a train passenger with a secret. (And by the way, I’m pleased to report that at this writing, Ms. White is happily still with us. If her long life continues — and we should all hope it does — she will turn 101 on November 23, 2023.)

The day and the weekend wound up with Down to Earth (1917), one of Douglas Fairbanks’s pre-swashbuckling athletic/romantic comedies. O.M. Samuel’s review in Variety (Oct. 10, 1917) hailed it as Doug’s best picture to date (for a little perspective, Down to Earth was the star’s 18th feature; there would be 28 more, four of them talkies, before his screen career ended in 1937). Wherever the picture belongs in Doug’s filmography (my experience of his pre-Mark of Zorro work is not exhaustive), it’s certainly a pip. Doug plays an outgoing, hail-fellow-well-met type whose lifelong sweetheart Eileen (Ethel Forsythe) turns him down for a high-society cad (Charles K. Gerrard). But that fellow’s fast living brings on a nervous breakdown in Eileen, landing her in a sanitarium for wealthy hypochondriacs. That’s when Doug swings into action. Using a bogus smallpox scare, he spirits Eileen and her fellow inmates away to what he says is a desert island, where he sets about curing them all of their largely psychosomatic ailments while teaching them the benefits of exercise, a healthy diet, and good clean living. The story was Fairbanks’s own, worked into a scenario by him, Anita Loos, and Loos’s husband John Emerson (who also directed at the kind of pace Fairbanks loved to set). The cinematographer was the great Victor Fleming, who would go on to a stellar directing career himself, modeling his own manly persona on the star who gave him his start in pictures, and whom he so greatly admired.

And with that, 2023’s edition of The Columbus Moving Picture Show rolled to a close. As always, I urge my readers to visit The Picture Show’s site at the link, get on their mailing list if you’re not there already, and give serious thought to joining us next Memorial Day. If you do, don’t forget to say hi.

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Picture Show 02 — Day 3

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on July 28, 2023 by Jim LaneAugust 6, 2023

Day 3 of The Picture Show began with Chapters 8-11 of The Purple Monster Strikes. Things are getting a little repetitive — sometimes literally, as the two directors (Spencer Bennett, Fred C. Brannon) and six writers (do you really care?) begin stretching things by recapping earlier plot points and cliffhanger thrills. Thus does Republic turn 12 chapters into 15. Bob Bloom’s program notes, quoting movie-serial blogger Jerry Blake, tell us that (1) Purple Monster boasts a plethora of fine cliffhangers, many of them supplied by those ingeniously resourceful special-effects artists, brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker; and (2) this was one of the last Republic serials to make extensive use of the brothers’ original effects; henceforth, for the ten years or so left to Republic serials, the studio would rely more on stock footage of their earlier work.

Then it was time for The Picture Show’s annual Saturday morning animation program, curated and annotated by the worthy Stewart McKissick. And here I’m forced to make a confession that I’ve been dreading. It seems that at last year’s animation program, the schedule included Frank Tashlin’s The Tangled Angler (Columbia, 1941), and the program book reflected that. However, the supplier sent the wrong print: Tangled Travels (also Columbia, 1944) arrived instead of The Tangled Angler. The substitution came too late to change the book, and the book was what I relied on in my post. (Those cartoons do tend to blur together if you’re not careful.) In writing my post last year, I refreshed my memory (which, as it happened, was faulty) with The Tangled Angler on YouTube. Fortunately, Tangled Travels is also on YouTube, so I’ve been able to update my post from last year (I had hoped to make the change quietly with nobody the wiser, but I included an image from Angler in my cartoon collage — there it is again below, third row center — and it couldn’t be removed). Anyhow, The Tangled Angler made its belated appearance this year, and I’ve transferred my remarks from last year’s post to this one.

As for this year’s cartoons (with links to YouTube where available):

Joint Wipers (1932) (top row, left) was an example of the other Tom and Jerry, the ones — humans, not cat and mouse — produced by Van Beuren Studios between 1931 and ’33. In this one the boys are plumbers, summoned to fix some leaky pipes and only making matters worse, with an amusing song-and-dance interlude in the midst of all the water damage. The YouTube link above has a rather blurry image; the image is better at this link, albeit with a rambling commentary by one Justin Leal.

Also from 1932, Hollywood Diet was a Terrytoon about “Dr. Fathead’s House of Painless Fat Removing” — in later terms, a weight-loss clinic. The fat jokes came thick and heavy (if you’ll pardon the expression), with clients — mainly lazy, spoiled and obese Hollywood housewives — carted around on hand-trucks by sweating attendants and shoveled into moving vans for transport. Fat-shaming was alive and well in 1932, and this one is not for the sensitive. So be warned before you hop over to YouTube. 

With Down Among the Sugar Cane (top row, right) we continued to linger in 1932, for a bouncing-ball singalong from Max and Dave Fleischer. After their customary surrealistic imagery, the singing was led by winsome Lillian Roth (whose troubles with alcohol, documented in the book and movie I’ll Cry Tomorrow, were not yet generally known). Like last year’s You Try Somebody Else, the song was an unfamiliar one, but the Picture Show audience gamely warbled along. (The Fleischers were always good about planting the tune firmly in the audience’s head before asking anyone to sing.)

We left 1932 behind with Ham and Eggs (1933) (second row, right), one of Walter Lantz’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for Universal. Oswald’s back story is more interesting that any of his cartoons. He had been poached from Walt Disney in 1927, forcing Disney to come up with some other tent-pole character (the result was Mickey Mouse, and no one ever wrestled a character away from Walt Disney again). Meanwhile, at Universal, Charles Mintz and George Winkler tried to make something of Oswald; eventually the character fell into Lantz’s hands. It wasn’t until the introduction of Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker that Walter Lantz struck cartoon gold; until then, Lantz, like Mintz and Winkler before him, was unable to make Oswald anything more that what he had been all along: a dry run for Mickey Mouse. Still, Lantz’s Oswald cartoons weren’t bad, and this one was enjoyable. In it, Oswald and his girl (who looks more like a dog than a rabbit to me) run a short-order diner, dealing with a succession of querulous customers with a smile and a song. Fred “Tex” Avery, early in his career, was among the animators.

The Masque Raid (1937)  was a Krazy Kat cartoon produced by the busy Charles Mintz for Columbia. This was an example of a sub-genre of cartoon that appeared regularly in the 1930s: After hours in some commercial establishment (bookstore, food market, toy shop, newsstand, etc.), the products on the shelves come to life and cavort until the dawn’s early light. Here it was a costume shop, and Krazy is the night watchman observing the doings of various exotic garments as they spring off the racks, all while a rainstorm rages outside. Spoiler alert: Krazy has dozed off on the job, and it’s all a dream.

She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (1937) (second row, left) was my favorite cartoon on the program — as, indeed, it’s been a favorite of mine ever since it cropped up on television in the 1950s. (Alas, Warner Bros. cartoons are thin on the ground at YouTube, and I’m unable to link to this one.) This was the first color cartoon of the day — but it was a bit of a tease, as it takes place in a movie theater and much of its running time is taken up (as in the illustration) with the black-and-white films on the screen. They were fun, though; the main feature was a spoof of The Petrified Forest (“The Petrified Florist“), featuring cameo appearances by animated caricatures of Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. No Bogart, however. Bogie’s stardom was still a few years off, and odds are that even the best caricature of him (there were a number of good ones to come in the ’40s) would have gone unrecognized by 1937 audiences, while everyone knew Bette and Leslie.

The Frog Pond (1938) was directed by Ub Iwerks for Columbia during his years away from Disney. The story wanders all over the place, but pleasantly. What begins with fairly straight anthropomorphic-frog antics around a lily pond segues into the story of a sort of frog gang-lord enlisting underlings to build him a castle on a particularly roomy lily pad, then throwing himself a party at a wetland nightclub, with elaborate Busby-Berkeley-style song and dance, and finally being sent (literally) down the river to land in Croak Croak Prison (“Croak Croak”/”Sing Sing”, get it?). It ends with the Frogfather smashing rocks to spell out “Crime Does Not Pay”.

Then, at last, we got the long-delayed screening of The Tangled Angler (1941), directed by Frank Tashlin for Columbia. Last year this was planned to be a sort of companion piece to Tashlin’s live-action comedy Marry Me Again (1953) with Robert Cummings and Marie Wilson, Tashlin being the only cartoon director to transition successfully to live-action while preserving his freewheeling cartoon style. Alas, there was no Tashlin picture to go with it this year, so Angler was forced to stand on its own — which it did very nicely, thank you. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), Angler tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land. 

Dance of the Weed (1941) (bottom row, left) was produced at MGM by Rudolf Ising (during a hiatus in his partnership with Hugh Harman). Heavily influenced by Fantasia the year before, and foreshadowing Bambi to come in ’42, it was a lush pastoral ballet with dancing flora of various botanical phyla and featuring a flirtatious pas de deux between a gallumphing yellow-brown weed and a delicate green-and-orange poppy. It was gorgeously colorful, with individual images suitable for framing. Interesting sidelight: One of the cartoon’s uncredited writers was Gus Arriola, who later in 1941 left MGM’s cartoon unit to create the comic strip Gordo for United Features Syndicate; he would write and draw the strip until 1985.

SH-H-H-H-H-H (1955) (bottom row, right) was the great Tex Avery’s swan song as a writer/director of theatrical cartoons. Fired by MGM in 1953, he landed back where he started with Walter Lantz at Universal (Universal International, by then). SH-H-H-H-H-H shows him with his wit and talent undimmed. The story: A nightclub musician, his nerves jangled by the constant cacophony of the band he plays with, goes off to a resort in the Swiss Alps (“The Hush-Hush Lodge”) for rest, relaxation, and regeneration — only to be jangled anew by the guests in the room next door. Be prepared for a twist ending.

Nick Santa Maria — not only Benny Biffle of Michael Schlesinger’s 1930s-style Biffle and Shooster shorts, but also a devoted authority on Abbott and Costello — introduced the duo’s Keep ‘Em Flying from their busy year of 1941 (January: Buck Privates; May: In the Navy; August: Hold That Ghost; then this one in November — not to mention Ride ‘Em Cowboy, released in January ’42 but filmed in ’41). This completed Bud and Lou’s trilogy of service comedies begun with Buck Privates and In the Navy; they wouldn’t return to the genre until Buck Privates Come Home in 1947, which actually veered off on a non-military tangent. In the meantime, they played Blackie (Bud) and Heathcliff (Lou), sidekicks to carnival stunt pilot Jinx Roberts (Dick Foran) who become part of his ground crew when he enlists in the U.S. Army Air Corps. (By mid-1941 it was generally accepted that we’d be in that war of Hitler’s sooner or later — though nobody expected Pearl Harbor, exactly.)

Also in the cast was band singer Carol Bruce, whose movie career never really took off, but who was good enough to deserve better breaks. All through the screening I struggled to figure out why she looked so familiar, but it never came. It wasn’t until later, reading Dave Domagala’s program notes, that I got my answer: From 1978 to ’82 she had a recurring role on WKRP in Cincinnati as Lillian Carlson, the flinty station owner and mother of manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump). I would never have figured that out on my own, but now that I know, I can see it. The eyes, I think, are a bit of a giveaway.

Another female holding her own with Bud and Lou — not surprisingly — was Martha Raye, hilarious again as identical twins, one sweet, shy and demure, the other — well, more like Martha Raye. Her scenes, especially with Lou (one sister has a crush on him, the other doesn’t) and her rousing delivery of the hit song “Pig Foot Pete”, were highlights. Beyond that, Abbott and Costello are already falling into a bit of a routine formula — not surprising when you’re cranking pictures out as fast as this.

After the lunch break came Lights Out (1923). I’m sorry I didn’t see this one — took too long for lunch, then opted for the dealers’ room instead — because it sounds interesting. For one thing, it was presented in digital projection rather than the usual 16mm because it was believed lost until 2021, when a digital copy (labeled with the wrong title) was found to have been gifted to the Library of Congress by the Russian Gosfilmofond archive in 2010. The plot has to do with a couple of semi-reformed crooks who con a screenwriter into penning a movie recounting their last big heist — this as a ploy to lure their erstwhile confederate, who absconded to Brazil with all the loot, out of hiding. Joe Harvat’s program notes tell us Lights Out was a big hit, with “universally glowing” reviews — but the only review I found (Variety, Oct. 25, ’23) was a pretty merciless pan. Still, I’m sorry I missed it; I’d probably have to make an appointment with the Library of Congress to have another chance to see it. The story, based on a Broadway play that closed after two weeks in August 1922, was remade in 1938 as Crashing Hollywood with Lee Tracy.

I sure didn’t miss the next screening, and boy, am I glad, because this was another highlight of the whole weekend — for me at least, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone (witness the fact that a poster for it graced the cover of The Picture Show’s program book). The picture, introduced by author and historian James D’Arc, was Blaze of Noon (1947), a movie whose continuing obscurity is a mystery that will confound me to the end of my days. I mean, for starters, just take a gander at the names on this lobby card: Anne Baxter, William Holden, Sonny Tufts, William Bendix, Sterling Hayden, Howard da Silva, director John Farrow. Then there are the names you can’t see here. The cinematographer: William C. Mellor (A Place in the Sun, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant). The composer: Adolph Deutsch, one of Hollywood’s most underrated composers (he contributed hugely to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, among many others). The writers: Arthur Sheekman and Frank “Spig” Wead (the aviator-turned-screenwriter played by John Wayne in John Ford’s biopic The Wings of Eagles). Finally and especially, the author on whose book Wead and Sheekman’s script was based: Ernest K. Gann. Blaze of Noon was Gann’s second bestseller; his first, Island in the Sky, had made him a literary celebrity. His later books in the ’50s and ’60s (The High and the Mighty, Twilight for the Gods, Fate Is the Hunter) would make his name even bigger. 

Taken all in all, that’s one hell of a pedigree.

The story had to do with the four McDonald brothers — Roland (Tufts), Colin (Holden), Tad (Hayden) and Keith (Johnny Sands) — stunt fliers with a traveling carnival in the 1920s who all hang together when Colin decides to quit show business for a job in the burgeoning airmail industry, represented by a gruff but compassionate Howard da Silva. Anne Baxter played a nurse who marries William Holden and becomes the unwitting object of unrequited love from brother Sterling Hayden, while William Bendix was another aviator who has trouble forsaking his hell-raising barnstorming antics and knuckling down to business. Spoiler alert: the life of pioneering airmail pilots comes at a cost to the four brothers, with more than their share of heartache.

Not to mince words, Blaze of Noon is a terrific picture, one that can stand with better-known movies about early flight like Wings, I Wanted Wings, Dive Bomber and Men with Wings without hanging its head. I’m an ardent partisan of John Farrow’s pictures Night Has a Thousand Eyes (’48) and Alias Nick Beal (’49), while most movie buffs are partial to his noir classic The Big Clock (’48), but this one is fully their equal — and as a piece of sheer directorial brio may be the best of the bunch. Note, for example (if you ever get the chance to see it), the opening shot of the story proper (after a prologue singing the praises of airmail pilots): Farrow stages a long, complex tracking shot weaving through the busy carnival with its dancing girls, barkers male and female, rides, popcorn and balloon vendors, and multitude of country patrons ogling the sights and munching their hot dogs and cotton candy. The camera discovers the four brothers leaning against a game booth chitchatting, then follows them back to where the shot started, coming to rest on William Holden flirting with dancer Jean Wallace (that’s her flashing her gams on the lobby card above). It’s a real tour-de-force take that runs a full minute-and-42-seconds, establishing both the four brothers and the world they work in without calling attention to its own virtuosity — one of the highlights of Farrow’s whole career, and that of cinematographer William Mellor. And Blaze of Noon has more to come. It’s a pity that this pre-1950 Paramount languishes in the Universal vaults without a home-video release to give it the reputation it deserves. Indeed, a collector friend of mine recently tried to find a buyer for a 16mm print without success — not even other collectors had ever heard of it. (Part of the problem may be the title; it’s Ernest Gann’s own, but it gives no hint of what the movie is about. It makes it sound like a western.) If this near-classic ever does come out on video, remember: You heard about it here first.

After the dinner break it was the final Laurel and Hardy short of the weekend: Wrong Again (1929), technically a “sound” film but not a talkie; rather, it was a silent with no spoken dialogue, but with a soundtrack of music and sound effects, giving Picture Show accompanists Philip Carli and David Drazin a break for a couple of reels. (Like other studio heads, Hal Roach used this semi-sound approach to transition his studio into the era of talking pictures). In Wrong Again, The Boys played stable attendants tending to a horse named Blue Boy. When the famous Gainsborough painting of the same name is stolen and the millionaire owner offers a $5,000 reward, Stan and Ollie think he’s willing to pay that much for the horse. Imagine the possibilities.

Either Philip Carli or David Drazin — sorry, I forget which — was pressed back into service for So’s Your Old Man (1926), one of W.C. Fields’s surviving silent pictures. Like two of his others, Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and It’s the Old Army Game (’26), it was later remade as a talkie. Sally of the Sawdust became Poppy (’36), It’s the Old Army Game returned (more or less) as It’s a Gift (’34), and So’s Your Old Man was remade as You’re Telling Me! (also ’34). In both So’s Your Old Man and You’re Telling Me!, Fields plays Sam Bisbee, an eccentric small-town inventor whose social-climbing wife is ashamed of him because of the way he and his family are looked down on by the town’s “better” people. Bisbee doesn’t care what the snobs think of him, but he wants to make good for the sake of his daughter (the delightfully named Kittens Reichert), who is in love with Kenneth Murchison (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), son of the town’s snootiest grande dame. Bisbee travels to an auto manufacturers’ convention to sell his invention, a shatterproof windshield, but when someone switches his test vehicle for a regular car, his demonstration fails and he becomes a laughingstock. Returning home in disgrace, he befriends a young woman on the train (Alice Joyce) who, unbeknownst to him, is a royal princess on a goodwill tour of America, and she determines to do what she can to help him.

Fields’s silents suffer today because, unlike audiences of the 1920s, we know well his inimitable, oft-imitated voice and how much it contributed to his comedy, and we miss it in a way that viewers back then couldn’t. Still, So’s Your Old Man holds up nicely because You’re Telling Me! was later a virtual shot-for-shot remake (director Erle C. Kenton was smart enough to imitate original director Gregory La Cava slavishly) and it’s easy to hear Fields’s voice in our heads as we read the intertitles. (Practically the only difference is that in You’re Telling Me! Sam Bisbee’s invention is a puncture-proof tire rather than shatterproof glass.)

Eric Grayson’s program notes tell a fascinating, convoluted story about why So’s Your Old Man is out of circulation. Let’s see if I can make it simple. Paramount sold their 1930-50 library to Universal; that’s why things like the Marx Brothers’ pre-MGM titles, Fields’s talkies, and the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures sport the Universal Globe before the Paramount Mountain takes the screen. Paramount still theoretically owns their 1923-29 silents, but except for special cases like Wings, they don’t particularly care. On top of that, So’s Your Old Man is based on a short story by Julian Street (1879-1947), and even though both picture and story are in the public domain, Paramount is contractually obligated to compensate the Street estate for any screenings or releases of the picture. Back in the ’70s, when Street’s survivors were easier to track down, Paramount made a deal to distribute You’re Telling Me!, but So’s Your Old Man was a silent, so — I say again — they didn’t care. Nowadays, there’s more of a market for silent cinema, but who and where Street’s surviving relatives are is anybody’s guess. Fortunately, some enterprising bootlegger copied Fields’s Paramount silents, including So’s Your Old Man, for the collectors’ market on their way to whatever vault or archive they were earmarked for. How one of those prints found itself in Columbus for The Picture Show is (again) anybody’s guess.

I suspect I’ve rather garbled the story in trying to simplify it — but I’ve spent enough time on it, I think. If you can get in touch with Eric Grayson, maybe he can explain it to you better than I have.

The Turning Point (1952) was a tight, economical crime thriller from Paramount, writers Warren Duff and Horace McCoy, and director William Dieterle, whose pictures — The Life of Emile Zola, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (’39) — were usually less gritty and street-wise. Edmund O’Brien played John Conroy, a crusading special prosecutor charged with breaking up a crime syndicate in a large, Midwestern Chicago-type city masterminded by “trucking executive” Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). As his chief investigator he appoints his father, veteran straight-arrow cop Matt Conroy (Tom Tully). Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), an equally crusading newspaper reporter and John Conroy’s lifelong friend, keeps a close eye on the investigation; he’s sympathetic, but he fears Conroy is too inexperienced to take on the criminal conspiracy he’s trying to tackle. McKibbon uncovers the fact that Conroy’s father Matt is in fact a “mole” on Eichelberger’s payroll — and, making things even more uncomfortable, McKibbon is falling in love with Conroy’s assistant and paramour Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith). The picture was really strong stuff, with some shocking violence — especially for 1952 — plus several very unsettling turns of the plot before the final fade-out.

Day 3 wrapped up with Mystery of the White Room (1939), an installment of the short-lived Crime Club series from Universal. (Short-lived in duration, that is; producer Irving Starr managed to knock out 11 B-mysteries during the two years the franchise lasted. The inspiration for the series, the Crime Club imprint of Doubleday Publishers, had a more prosperous run: It lasted from 1928 to 1991 and published nearly 2,500 titles. There was a short-lived radio series too.)

The “White Room” of the title was literally that — the operating room at a big-city hospital. During a tense operation the lights go out, and during the brief darkness the hospital’s head surgeon (Addison Richards) is murdered with a scalpel to the heart. Complicating the investigation is the fact that both assisting doctors (Bruce Cabot, Roland Drew) and both nurses (Helen Mack, Constance Worth) — everybody in the room, it seems, except for the patient — had reason to bear a grudge. Not only that, but they were all wearing rubber gloves, so there are no fingerprints to enter into evidence. Bruce Cabot and Helen Mack were top-billed as doctor-and-nurse sweethearts, so the rules of 1930s B-movies suggested they’d be innocent in the end — but they came in for their share of suspicion nevertheless. It was a clever little locked-room murder mystery that sets up and resolves its mystery in a no-frills 57 minutes — although some tiresome comic relief from orderly Tom Dugan and switchboard operator Mabel Todd (whose rasping, nasal, annoying voice makes Fran Drescher sound like Angela Lansbury) makes the picture feel several minutes longer.

And that was it for Saturday’s program. Three down and one to go.

To be concluded…

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Picture Show 02 — Day 2

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on July 11, 2023 by Jim LaneAugust 3, 2023

(NOTE: Apologies for the longer-than-intended hiatus in my coverage of the Columbus Moving Picture Show 2023. Some issues arose with Cinedrome, something about the renewal of my SSL certificate; the site was knocked out for a while and I wasn’t even able to access the site to work on it. After three times contacting tech support at GoDaddy.com, my Web host, the issue seems to be resolved and I can resume coverage. I won’t go into detail about what the issue was — partly because it’s boring, and partly because I never did understand exactly what the problem was, and still don’t. Anyhow, the matter seems to be behind us — at least until my SSL certificate comes up for renewal again in August 2024. I’ll keep my fingers crossed about that.)

Day 2 of the Picture Show began with Chapters 4-7 of The Purple Monster Strikes, with Sheila and Craig — along with various bystanders, some of them ill-fated — being subjected at regular intervals to all the cliffhanger menaces six writers can concoct: an acid pit, an “Annihilator Beam”, a house booby-trapped with TNT, a truck laden with volatile rocket fuel. I think my favorite was Sheila’s peril at the end of Chapter 6, when she drops through a trapdoor in front of a scientist’s desk into a small pit that quickly fills up with water as the trapdoor closes again — an amenity presumably installed on the chance that the scientist might someday want to drown some visitors to his lab.

Bob Bloom’s notes tell us that Purple Monster was shot at a cost of $183,803, having run 14.8 percent over its budget of $160,057. Considering that the serial’s 15 chapters run a total of 201 minutes, that means Republic Pictures shelled out $914.44 per minute of screen time. (Never let it be said that Republic didn’t know how to get bang for their buck — literally.) Consider also that, correcting for inflation, Purple Monster‘s price tag in 1945 is the equivalent of $3,105,525.28 in 2023 dollars. By contrast, the latest adventure of Indiana Jones (the spiritual offspring of these Republic serials) cost $294.7 million, and it’s 47 minutes shorter. That comes to just a bit over $1.9 million per minute. Of course, there’s really no comparison. Although I guess I just made one.

This was followed by a program of three Charley Chase silent shorts, a Columbus tradition going back a goodly number of years. Charley Chase’s shorts, silent and sound both, are always funny, but with this particular trio the moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity seemed to me particularly plentiful:

Be Your Age (1926) Bank clerk Charley gets a letter from home pleading for money (“My dear Charley – You must get $10,000 for us at once. Father broke his leg trying to put out the fire … The cook started the fire after she had shot Uncle Wilbur for choking Aunt Mollie … Aunt Mollie had gone mad from a dog bite and was trying to poison the children …”). Charley’s boss may have the solution: A multi-millionaire widow is looking to remarry, and the boss wants Charley to wed the old girl and persuade her to keep her fortune with the bank. Complicating things is that the widow’s son (a pre-Laurel Oliver Hardy) has a suspicious eye for fortune hunters — plus, Charley’s heart isn’t really in it, he being more attracted to the widow’s saucy young secretary. The timeworn phrase is “hilarity ensues”, and it does.

Fluttering Hearts (1927) Wealthy papa William Burgess wants daughter Martha Sleeper to marry a rich self-made man rather than the fortune-hunting “lounge lizards” who pursue her. Charley is just the kind of go-getter Papa wants for her, but she doesn’t know that when they meet and take a shine to each other, so she wangles him a job as the family chauffeur. Like many two-reelers, the action divides neatly into halves. Part One features Charley, Martha and cop Eugene Pallette doing battle with a mob of female shoppers at a linen sale. Then Papa is blackmailed over a compromising letter he once wrote to a showgirl, and Part Two follows Charley into a speakeasy with a mannequin (men can’t enter unless accompanied by a lady and that’s the best he can do), where he tries to retrieve the incriminating missive from the blackmailer (Oliver Hardy again). A highlight of this one is Charley’s long dalliance with the mannequin, a very funny riff that might have inspired Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain if he’d seen it (he probably didn’t; he was only two in 1927).

Movie Night (1929) The title says it all, as Charley and his family (wife Eugenia Gilbert, daughter Edith Fellows and brother-in-law Spec O’Donnell) encounter comic obstacles that moviegoers from any era can recognize — at least until the manager brings up the lights for the evening’s prize drawing, a staple of movie houses that vanished decades ago. The prizes, what we see of them, are an odd lot (“A ham for Mrs. Ginsberg!”), culminating in a live duck for Charley. When Charley and his wife and daughter are ejected for disrupting the show (a glimpse of a poster tells us they missed A Woman of Affairs with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; brother-in-law Spec is apparently allowed to stay), the duck provides them with an egg to pelt the manager with. Five-year-old Edith Fellows, making her film debut as Charley’s hiccuping daughter, went on to a surprisingly durable career spanning movies, TV and Broadway and extending into the 1990s, including movies with Jackie Coogan, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, Edna May Oliver, Lionel Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Paul Muni, Claudette Colbert, Melvyn Douglas, Mary Astor, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew series at Columbia, and guest shots on Simon & Simon, St. Elsewhere, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Cagney & Lacey, and ER. She died in 2011 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Calif., age 88. Did anybody interview this woman before it was too late?

Film musical authority and historian Richard Barrios (A Song in the Dark, Dangerous Rhythm, Must-See Musicals, etc.) introduced Ladies of the Chorus (1948), a likeable, unpretentious B-musical from Columbia. Likeable, unpretentious B-musicals have been stock-in-trade at Cinevent and The Picture Show for decades; this one is particularly memorable because, like The Heart of Texas Ryan on Day 1, it had the good fortune to include a future superstar in the cast: in this case, Marilyn Monroe, second-billed to Adele Jergens and pretty clearly going places. Also like Texas Ryan, Ladies would be reissued a few years later with Marilyn promoted to the name above (and larger than) the title. I picked up a DVD in the dealers’ room from one of those reissues, bellowing “MARILYN MONROE in…” before the main title, but the print in the screening room was from 1948, where the credits ran as they do on this poster. The plot was a wispy thing: Adele and Marilyn are mother-and-daughter chorus girls in the most wholesome burlesque show in America, where not so much as a glove is ever taken off (though at one point Marilyn does toss a bracelet into the audience). Marilyn falls for rich scion Rand Brooks, which alarms Mama Adele, who remembers her own failed marriage to a wealthy Bostonian, when his horrified family drove her away and annulled the marriage before she learned she was pregnant. (Why she didn’t sue for child support, or at least hush money, is never explored; after all, we’ve only got 61 minutes and have to move on.)

Everything works out for Marilyn and Rand, naturally, and Rand’s mother (Nana Bryant) shows she’s a good sight more salt-of-the-earth than those Boston snobs who high-hatted Adele. In the meantime, director Phil Karlson keeps things moving at a moderate gallop, and the musical numbers are fun. The songs by Alan Roberts and Lester Lee may not boast any deathless standards, but they’re catchy and clever; frankly, there have been Oscars handed out (and, truth to tell, Tonys and Pulitzer Prizes) for worse songs than these. As if Roberts, Lee, and Columbia could see the future, Marilyn gets two of the best and sells them well: “Anyone Can See I Love You”, in which she urges Rand Brooks to take a chorus, and he proves he literally can’t sing a note; and “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy”, a sassy blend of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “Put the Blame on Mame” (which Alan Roberts wrote with Doris Fisher for Gilda two years earlier). Adele Jergens has a solo too, in a flashback to her ill-fated courtship, presciently titled “Crazy for You”. Richard Barrios’s notes tell us her vocal was dubbed by Virginia Rees, and while she gamely prances her way through the dance break, it seems clear that her taps were dubbed as well as her voice. For the rest, it’s ensemble numbers by the eponymous ladies of the chorus, veteran matron Nana Bryant proving her salt-of-the-earth-ness by warbling “You’re Never Too Old to Do What You Did”, and an indescribable specialty, “The Ubangi Love Song”, by something called The Bobby True Trio.

A novelty on the day’s program was a brace of Information Please shorts from 1941. Information Please (1938-51) was a radio quiz show with a twist: The contestants didn’t answer questions, they asked them. Listeners would mail in questions, often in two, three, or four parts, to be put to a panel of four experts. If their question was used on the air they would get a small cash prize, a larger one if they managed to stump the panel. Over the years the prizes varied as the show acquired different sponsors with different levels of generosity, eventually including an Encyclopædia Britannica and a $50 savings bond. The show was moderated by editor, writer and intellectual Clifton Fadiman, and the regular panelists were newspaper columnists John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams and composer/pianist Oscar Levant. (All were famous at the time for their expertise in what would one day be called “Trivia”; Kieran and Adams are largely forgotten today, while Levant remains fairly well-known thanks to his film career in such classics as Rhapsody in Blue, Romance on the High Seas, The Barkleys of Broadway, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon.) The fourth seat on the panel was taken by a different celebrity guest each week.

So popular was the show that RKO Radio filmed a number of broadcasts and released edited versions to theaters between 1939 and ’43, and a program of those was what followed after the Friday lunch break. The celebrity guests on display were the sociopolitical journalist John Gunther, and Howard Lindsay, the co-author and star of the long-running Broadway hit Life With Father. The Picture Show program book promised a third specimen with Guest Expert Boris Karloff, but that one, regrettably, was a no-show (it would have been fun to hear Karloff answer some questions about cricket, his spare-time passion). Still, the two we did get were fun, an authentic glimpse of radio-era programming that put me in mind of the quiz show Dianne Wiest wins in Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987).

Gary Cooper and Mary Brian headlined Only the Brave (1930), following up on their teaming in Paramount’s big hit The Virginian from the year before. Reading reviews in Variety (Mar. 12, ’30) and the New York Times (Mar. 6, ’30) you’d hardly guess it, but John McElwee’s program notes and director Frank Tuttle’s posthumously-published autobiography make it clear that Only the Brave is a comedy, a deadpan parody of Secret Service by the 19th century actor-manager William Gillette. (Gillette, considered a national treasure in his day, is best remembered today as the first Sherlock Holmes of stage [1899] and film [1916]. His 1916 film was believed lost for over 90 years, until a print surfaced in 2014. That print, restored and enhanced, is available in a superb Blu-ray/DVD combo from Amazon, and well worth it. Gillette’s subtle, low-key style of acting was ideal for film; a pity this was his only one.)

But back to Only the Brave. Don’t get your hopes up because of this exquisitely colored production photo; like almost every 1930 movie, it’s in black and white — and even the best 1930 Technicolor couldn’t duplicate this. Gary Cooper plays Capt. James Braydon, a Union officer during the Civil War who, home on surprise leave, finds his sweetheart (Virginia Bruce, incredibly young, almost unrecognizable) in the arms of another man. Heartbroken, he volunteers for an undercover suicide mission: He’s to infiltrate the South disguised as a Confederate officer, then be unmasked as a spy carrying papers about Union troop deployments — false papers, in a disinformation action to lure the Rebels into a trap. He’ll be condemned to hanging or a firing squad, but he no longer cares. That is, until he meets southern belle Mary Brian, daughter of his Confederate general host. She falls in love with him and, every time he tries to get himself exposed and arrested, she contrives to save and protect him. Finally he manages to foil her interference and get himself sent to a firing squad — but all ends well when the Yankees ride to the rescue, Lee surrenders at Appomattox, and our hero goes not to the firing squad but to the altar with the heroine.

Reviewers at the time remarked on how moth-eaten the story of Only the Brave was, the spoof evidently going right over their heads. Well, that’s the chance you take when your comedy is too subtle. They even compared it to Gillette’s old melodrama Secret Service, wherein (as well) a Union spy becomes romantically involved with an unsuspecting Confederate belle. But that’s the beauty of Only the Brave: You can take it as straight melodrama or as a wry send-up; either way, at 71 minutes it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and Cooper and Brian really do make a beautiful pair. (A year later, RKO would manage to wring a little more mileage out of Secret Service, with Richard Dix and Shirley Grey as the war-torn lovers, playing it straight.)

In 1969 the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition, “Stills from Lost Films” curated by Gary Carey, drawing on the museum’s vast photo archive, contemporary reviews, and archival publicity materials to try to capture the essence of movies that no longer existed. In 1970 Carey turned the exhibition into a book encompassing 30 titles — most from the exhibition, with a few substituted “for personal reasons”, and at least one, Benjamin Christensen’s The Devil’s Circus (1928), being dropped because a print had turned up.

In the 53 years since Carey’s Lost Films was published, there has been more good news. Of the 30 titles Carey described, ten are no longer entirely lost. Three have surfaced here and there, albeit missing a reel or so; the other seven are all reasonably intact. One of the latter is Man,Woman and Sin (1927). This was a picture MGM produced to please their top star John Gilbert. Gilbert, who had ambitions beyond being a matinee-idol heartthrob, had brought the studio John Masefield’s long poem The Widow in the Bye Street and asked them to buy it for him.

Among the British, John Masefield (1878-1967) is noted for being second only to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the United Kingdom’s longest-serving Poet Laureate (37 years, to Tennyson’s 42). Among Americans, however — at least those who went to high school when they still taught about poets — Masefield is most famous for “Sea Fever”, one of his shortest poems (“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,/And all I ask is tall ship and a star to steer her by…”). The Widow in the Bye Street, published in 1912 near the beginning of his writing career, tells of the widow Gurney, working day and night at menial jobs to raise her son Jimmy. Her sacrifice and protectiveness lead her to shelter her son from any contact with the female sex, with the unintended result that upon reaching the age of physical maturity he is emotionally immature and particularly susceptible to feminine charms. He falls for Anna, oblivious to the fact (though Mother tries to warn him) that she’s a local hooker being kept by Ern, a village shepherd and married man. When Ern exerts his right of “ownership” and sends the humiliated Jimmy packing, Jimmy’s life spirals off into drinking and dissipation. He loses his job, drinks more and more, until finally in a jealous drunken rage he seizes a farmer’s hand tool and attacks Ern, literally beating his brains out. From there, alas, it’s but a short trip to the gallows, leaving his mother to grieve and Anna to find another sugar daddy.

As Samantha Glasser points out in her program notes, Masefield’s poem was seriously sanitized on the way to the screen. The English village setting would never do, so the action was shifted to a Washington, DC newspaper. Factory worker Jimmy Gurney became cub reporter Albert Whitlock. The whore Anna morphed into the paper’s society editor Vera Worth (Jeanne Eagels), who was being kept not by some country shepherd but by the paper’s editor Bancroft (Marc McDermott). Anna/Vera was now more flirt than floozie, coming on to Albert to make Bancroft jealous. Albert still killed Bancroft, but exactly how wasn’t clear. (Whether this is due to poor staging and editing by director Monta Bell, or to the picture’s incomplete survival, is hard to tell at this distance in time.) In any case, Vera’s testimony at trial sends Albert to Death Row. Then, in response to the pleading of Albert’s mother (Gladys Brockwell), she recants her testimony, revealing that Bancroft’s death was a matter of self-defense. Albert is freed, to mosey home with his loving mother while Vera watches them leave the prison gates from the back seat of her chauffeured limousine.

Any lost film that turns up is cause for rejoicing, and so it is with Man, Woman and Sin. But all the “sanitizing” The Widow in the Bye Street underwent in its journey from verse to screen only served to homogenize it from a rough-hewn British working-class tragedy to a standard John Gilbert romantic melodrama, right down to the generic title change focusing on the lovers and shoving Mother aside. So much for Gilbert getting beyond the matinee-idol heartthrob label. In 1927 Man, Woman and Sin was dismissed as run-of-the-mill stuff, and it’s not hard to see why. Gilbert lays on the wide-eyed-gee-whiz routine pretty thick, and the Oedipal undertones to the story are borderline-alarming today, exacerbated by the fact (which age makeup can’t quite conceal) that Gladys Brockwell was less than three years older than her “son”. The picture’s main interest now is as an early glimpse of Jeanne Eagels, whose star quality comes across even in silence. Gilbert, Eagels and Brockwell, sadly, would all die before they were 40. In fact, after Man, Woman and Sin, Eagels and Brockwell had less than two years to live.

After the dinner break writer/director Michael Schlesinger gave a short presentation on his forthcoming comedy Rock and Doris (Try to) Write a Movie, an adaptation-cum-spoof of the old George M. Cohan chestnut Seven Keys to Baldpate (which was already a bit of a spoof, filmed at least seven times between 1916 and 1947). Schlesinger, a Cinevent/Picture Show regular already noted for his Biffle and Shooster shorts, looks to be putting his unique stamp on this new material. This was followed by a 25-minute program of Soundies. Soundies, introduced in 1941, were two-to-three-minute musical performances printed on 16mm and projected on translucent screens in refrigerator-size “Panoram” jukeboxes. James S. Petrillo’s American Federation of Musicians decreed that members could not perform live for these micro-musicals; they had to pantomime to pre-recorded playback tracks. This actually freed the makers of soundies to think outside the box and take their camera anywhere they pleased, which in turn made soundies sort of forerunners of the music videos of a later generation. The idea never really caught on for several reasons. For one thing, playing a single soundie cost ten cents, for which you could play two records on a regular jukebox. For another, you couldn’t choose what your dime would play; each machine had only eight soundies on an endless loop (changed weekly), and when you dropped your coin you just got whatever came up next. Finally (and perhaps most important), people didn’t play a jukebox so they could stand there staring at it; they wanted to dance — or at least get a little background music while they enjoyed their burger or ham-and-eggs at the diner. On top of all that, when the U.S. entered World War II the metal, wood and rubber used to build the Panoram machines became restricted to use for the war effort, and additional machines couldn’t be built. Fortunately, the various concerns involved in soundie production didn’t give up until 1946 or so,  and hundreds of the films survive. The Picture Show presented an assortment of eight or ten, including one by a youthful Lawrence Welk and his orchestra, and another featuring a young pianist with a wide toothy grin billed as “Walter Liberace”.

After that it was Let’s Go Native (1930), a choppy, haphazard, truly bizarre early musical from Paramount. The basic premise: A struggling musical revue takes the show on the road, setting sail for Buenos Aires less to entertain Argentine audiences than to elude American bill collectors. Jeanette MacDonald, in her third picture, plays the show’s harried costume designer, romanced by rivals James Hall and David Newell, two actors so indistinguishable that if they weren’t in scenes together it’d be hard to believe they were two different men. Newell is the ship’s Chief Officer, Hall a poor little rich boy trying to untangle himself from fiancée Kay Francis. So Jeanette MacDonald is torn between Newell and Hall, Hall is torn between Jeanette and Kay Francis, and Kay is torn between Hall and Jack Oakie, as a cab driver who (never mind how) comes aboard first to stoke coal in the engine room, then to wait tables in the dining salon, accompanied by a silly-ass sidekick played by William Austin. Throw in a shipwreck that strands the company (and their costumes) on a tropic isle of nubile maidens ruled by Skeets Gallagher as their Brooklyn-born king (“I told you to bring us some ersters without poils!”). Then top it all off with an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, and the whole island sinking into the sea, and you’ll find yourself wondering if there’s anything this movie won’t toss in. (A good thing the atom bomb hadn’t been developed yet, or who knows how the picture would have wound up?)

Let’s Go Native is a mess, right enough — director Leo McCarey hasn’t yet got the hang of talking pictures, and he resorts often to bits remembered from his days at Hal Roach directing Charley Chase and Laurel and Hardy — but it’s rather fun in spite of itself. The songs by Richard Whiting and George Marion Jr. aren’t their best, but they’re not bad, and Oakie, MacDonald and two platoons of leggy Pre-Code chorines make the most of them. Jeanette MacDonald appears to have had few fond memories of the picture: In her autobiography (unpublished until 2004) she mentions it only twice, along the lines of “Then I did Let’s Go Native…” and “After Let’s Go Native I made…” Truth to tell, it was too many movies like this and not enough like The Love Parade, Jeanette’s first picture (or even Clara Bow’s Love Among the Millionaires from Paramount a month earlier) that killed musicals the first time around. Four years later, Paramount (having learned their lesson) would do much better with a similar plot (and a better cast: Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, Ethel Merman, Burns and Allen, Leon Errol) in We’re Not Dressing. Still, Let’s Go Native has its pleasant surprises — among them hearing Kay Francis sing, and quite nicely, too.

The day wrapped up with Guilty Bystander (1950), a really nifty little noir thriller directed by Joseph Lerner for Laurel Films, a fly-by-night operation that, for a while, made movies on microscopic budgets wherever they could set up a camera without the cops chasing them away. Top-billed were Zachary Scott and Faye Emerson, occasional co-stars at Warner Bros., and both now on the down-slope of their careers. Scott, who had carved a niche for himself as Hollywood’s favorite pencil-neck lounge lizard, was ideally cast and gave one of his best performances — perhaps, indeed, his very best. He plays Max Thursday, a drunken ex-cop kicked off the force and reduced to working as house detective at a fleabag hotel in exchange for a room and drinking money. Suddenly his ex-wife Georgia (Emerson) barges into his shabby digs in a panic and drags him out of his alcohol haze — their son Jeff and her own ne’er-do-well brother have disappeared. Georgia has been warned not to go to the police, but she doesn’t know why they were taken, how she can get them back, or even if they’re still alive.

Like all low-budget mysteries, Guilty Bystander suffers from the fact that there aren’t enough suspects on the producers’ payroll for the ending to be much of a surprise. Still, the movie is well-plotted, and the Big Reveal, when it comes, is satisfying. Performances are excellent all around; not only Scott and Emerson, but Mary Boland (one of Hollywood’s go-to ditzy matrons in the 1930s and ’40s) cast against type in, essentially, the Marie Dressler role as the boozy proprietor of Scott’s grubby hotel; Sam Levene as a friendly-for-old-times’-sake police captain; and J. Edward Bromberg as a small-time gang lord. Plus there were surprise early appearances by such future familiar faces as Dennis Patrick, Jesse White, John Marley and Maurice Gosfield (later Pvt. Doberman on Phil Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko TV series). All this, plus the brisk pace set by director Lerner and the seedy authenticity of the mean-street locations, added up to a compact, impressive little near-classic noir.

For Boland and Bromberg, Guilty Bystander proved the end of their worthy movie careers. Boland, 68 during shooting, retired to New York, where she died at 83 in 1965. Bromberg’s end came sooner and was more turbulent. A Group Theatre Communist during the 1930s, around the time Guilty Bystander was in production he took the Fifth in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, hectoring them about their witch hunt. His defiance got him blacklisted and he decamped to England to work on the London stage. But it was too late; the stress had taken its toll and a heart attack took him off in December 1951, 19 days short of his 48th birthday.

And with the final resolution to Guilty Bystander‘s mystery, that was it for Day 2 of 2023’s Picture Show. Days 3 and 4 won’t be quite so long in coming.

 

To be continued…

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Picture Show 02 — Day 1

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on June 16, 2023 by Jim LaneJuly 31, 2023

The serial for this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show was The Purple Monster Strikes from 1945, one of the last 15-chapter productions that Republic Pictures mounted before rising costs and ebbing revenues forced the studio to downsize their serials to 12 installments. The first three chapters occupied the first hour of the first day, with four more coming on each of the succeeding days of the Picture Show.

The premise of The Purple Monster Strikes is pretty much a howler. It seems the Emperor of Mars is planning to conquer the Earth and enslave all its inhabitants. But there’s a catch: The Martians have the technology to observe everything that goes on on Earth, and even to understand and speak all Earth languages (shades of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!), but they haven’t been able to develop a spacecraft capable of making the round trip from Mars to Earth and back. Fortunately for them, though, they’ve learned that Dr. Cyrus Layton (James Craven) is working on a “jet plane” that will be able to travel both ways (according to Bob Bloom’s program notes, Republic’s lawyers insisted on calling it a “jet plane” rather than a “rocket ship” for fear of legal action from Universal, whose Flash Gordon serials had rocket ships). So the Emperor sends a scout (Roy Barcroft as the Purple Monster — he actually introduces himself that way) on a one-way voyage to Earth with orders to steal Dr. Layton’s plans. The scout crash lands near Dr. Layton’s observatory, murders him with a capsule of Martian atmosphere (“carbo-oxide gas”) fatal to Earthlings, then commandeers his body, spending the rest of the serial going back and forth between Dr. Layton’s identity and his own, depending on his needs of the moment. While he’s at it, he enlists the aid of Garrett (Bud Geary), a local thug who’s been blackmailing the doctor.

Got all that? As interplanetary invasions go, this one is a pretty slapdash operation. Even so, all that stands between the Purple Monster and success is Dr. Layton’s niece Sheila (Linda Stirling, Republic’s reigning damsel in distress) and her boyfriend, two-fisted attorney Craig Foster (Dennis Moore). Preposterous as it all is, it makes a useful framework for the near-nonstop fisticuffs (I’d love to have had the breakaway furniture concession on the production), and the array of detailed miniatures (houses, trucks, cars, rockets, etc.) built by the resourceful Lydecker Brothers to crash, explode, burn, and go sailing off cliffs.

Chapter 1, “The Man in the Meteor”, has at least one memorable line, spoken by Craig Foster after the first of his many fistfights with the Purple Monster: “There was a man in here, a weird-looking person wearing tights and a helmet. He knocked me out and must have escaped across the terrace.” (Actually, he escaped into Dr. Layton, but Craig doesn’t know that, and won’t for several more chapters yet.)

Next came a tribute to the forgotten Hal Roach comedy star Max Davidson (1875-1950). Or rather, “long-forgotten” I should say, because Davidson has been undergoing a bit of a rediscovery in recent years. Baby Boomers of a Certain Age will remember him from the Our Gang short Moan and Groan, Inc. (1929), in which the gang goes treasure-hunting in the basement of a supposedly haunted house. Max plays a homeless lunatic squatting in the derelict house; he’s harmless, but nevertheless pretty spooky, and he leads the gang and Edgar Kennedy the cop on a merry chase. I especially remember a delicious shiver as Max invites poor Farina to join him in an invisible Thanksgiving feast (“You…like…toikey?“). In fact, Max amassed quite a résumé by the time he retired in 1945; his IMDb filmography lists 200 titles, mostly uncredited bits between 1930 and 1945. But before that, in the mid-to-late 1920s, he was a popular star for Hal Roach — before his brand of “ethnic” (read “Jewish”) comedy went out of style as old-fashioned and in questionable taste. (Davidson didn’t live long enough to profit from the revival of ethnic comedy — Benny Rubin, Myron Cohen, Jack Carter, Alan King, Shelley Berman et al. — in the 1950s and ’60s.)

Three of the four shorts in the Picture Show’s tribute were from this period (the fourth, 1914’s Bill Joins the W.W.W.’s, featured Max in support of stars Tammany Young and Fay Tincher at Universal). Two of the Hal Roach three, Don’t Tell Everything and Should Second Husbands Come First? (both 1927) were directed by future Oscar winner Leo McCarey. The best of the lot was Pass the Gravy (’28), in which Max’s dimwitted son (mega-freckle-faced Spec O’Donnell) accidentally kills the neighbor’s prize-winning rooster, and the family compounds the offense by unwittingly roasting the deceased bird and serving it to the neighbor for dinner — with its “First Prize” ribbon still attached to its drumstick. Eric Grayson’s program notes call Pass the Gravy Max’s masterpiece, and I believe it; it’s a riot, and the Library of Congress evidently agrees — it was added to their National Film Registry in 1998. Alas, most of Max Davidson’s silent output is lost now, but enough has survived that the Picture Show promises more such tributes in years to come.

The first feature of the day was The Blue Veil (1951), a real two-hanky weeper. Jane Wyman stars as a young wife and mother whose husband has died in World War I and whose baby lives only a day or two. At loose ends and grieving, she takes a job as nursemaid to an infant whose mother died in childbirth. What begins as just a temporary situation to help ease her bereavement turns into a lifelong calling, and the movie becomes an episodic drama, almost an anthology film, as she moves from family to family for over thirty years, often working for parents who are, shall we say, less than wholly involved in their children’s lives.

The Blue Veil was actually a remake of a French film of the same title (Le Voile Bleu in French), produced in 1942 under the German occupation, and hence not seen in the U.S. until 1947. It got only a spotty distribution then, but it caught the eye of producer Jerry Wald, who nailed down the remake rights. Wald’s first idea was to cast Bette Davis as the heroine, or even to coax Greta Garbo out of retirement, but his cooler head prevailed and he settled on Jane Wyman, whom he had ushered to an Oscar in 1948’s Johnny Belinda. And I say “settled on“, not “settled for“, because it was an inspired choice. This came right smack in the middle of Wyman’s apotheosis years, which spanned from The Yearling in 1946 to 1954, when she made All That Heaven Allows and got her fourth and final Oscar nomination for Magnificent Obsession. She was nominated for The Blue Veil too, and might well have won had she not been up against Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Also nominated for The Blue Veil was Joan Blondell as a fading Broadway musical star whose laser focus on reviving her career threatens to forfeit the affections of daughter Natalie Wood. Joan was as good as ever, of course, but why she landed her only nomination for this over any number of her other performances — A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (’45), Nightmare Alley (’47), The Cincinnati Kid (’65) — is a bit of a mystery. Ah well, let’s not quibble, she was overdue. Anyhow, she and Wyman were just first and second among equals in the closest thing to an all-star cast that RKO Radio could field at that stage of its decline-and-fall. Just look at the thumbnail portraits on this poster surrounding Jane Wyman like a rectangular halo (from bottom left): Richard Carlson, Joan, Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Don Taylor, Audrey Totter, Cyril Cusack, Natalie, Everett Sloane. Add to them Vivian Vance, Alan Napier, Warner Anderson, Les Tremayne, Dan O’Herlihy, Harry Morgan and others, and you’ve got quite an ensemble. Led by Wyman’s resolutely unsentimental performance, The Blue Veil earns its tears honestly.

Then came Come Next Spring (1956), a rural domestic drama from the waning years of Republic Pictures (just as The Blue Veil had been from the waning years of RKO Radio). The screening was introduced by Steven C. Smith, author of Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer. Mr. Smith had expressed an interest in making the introduction because he regards Come Next Spring as one of Steiner’s best pictures of the 1950s, and the setting for one of his best scores. Come Next Spring is a particular favorite of mine too, so I was most interested in hearing Mr. Smith’s intro (having been highly gratified by what he wrote about it in his biography of the composer). Unfortunately, I dawdled a bit too long in the dealers’ room, so I missed the first minute or two of his remarks. Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard him mention my name: “For more information, I refer you to Jim Lane…” I thought he was referring to the notes I wrote for the Picture Show program book, but actually (I learned when I met him later) he was talking about my Cinedrome post from 2014, which he discovered while researching his book on Steiner. Since he was kind enough to plug my post, I’m happy to return the compliment. Click the link above and hop on over to Amazon for your own copy of Music by Max Steiner. Steiner may not be the greatest of all film composers (though I believe he is), but without him Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Dimitri Tiomkin, Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, Alfred or Randy Newman, you name ’em — none of them would have had the careers they did. And besides, the book is a marvelous read.

Now here I insert my program notes for Come Next Spring. However, those notes are adapted from my 2014 post, which you can read here. I go into a good deal more detail, plus the picture was filmed in a small California town about 35 miles from my front door, so I include a number of then-and-now photographs of the picture’s locations. So if you like, you can click over to my 2014 post and skip the next 13 paragraphs.

By the the summer of 1955, Republic Pictures was on its last legs as a movie-producing entity. It had once been prolific, cranking out horse operas, serials and hillbilly comedies for small towns, with occasional “prestige” pictures like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). Now, taking one last shot at prestige, studio boss Herbert J. Yates dispatched a unit up north to the California Gold Country town of Ione (pronounced “eye-own”). There they made Come Next Spring, arguably — with the possible exception of Orson Welles’s 1948 Macbeth — the best movie ever to come out of Republic Pictures that didn’t involve John Ford or John Wayne. (And no, I’m not forgetting Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.)

Come Next Spring was directed by R.G. (“Bud”) Springsteen, the epitome of the reliable but unexceptional studio workhorse. Actually, “plowhorse” would be more like it; by the time of Come Next Spring he had already directed over 50 features in ten years — mostly Republic programmers running about an hour. He never wasted film, time or money — a triple virtue guaranteed to please the penny-pinching Yates. It would also earn Springsteen a secure niche in television until he retired in 1970.

The secret ingredient of Come Next Spring was its writer, Montgomery Pittman. Pittman might be described as “unjustly forgotten today” — except that the sorry truth is he died before even being noticed, succumbing to throat cancer at 42 in 1962. But in his brief 11-year career he was prolific, resourceful and original, leaving a varied body of movie and TV work — and a frustrating hint of what might have been if even another ten or 15 years had been granted to him.

Born in Oklahoma in 1920, Pittman, by his own colorful account, left home while still a teenager, working with a traveling carnival as (no joke!) a snake-oil salesman. After service in World War II he landed first in New York, then Los Angeles, hoping to become an actor. But he found more work and better money writing for TV, eventually moving into directing as well. Along the way, in 1952, he married Maurita Gilbert Jackson, a widow whose ten-year-old daughter Sherry was already working as a child actress. Pittman’s relationship with his new stepdaughter would bear fruit in Come Next Spring.

In the mid-’50s Pittman was a contract writer for Warner Bros. Television on the studio’s westerns Cheyenne, Sugarfoot and Maverick, and the private-eye series 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye, often directing his own scripts. In the early ’60s, just as his time on Earth was running out, Pittman wrote and directed three episodes of Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone on CBS, making him the only person during the show’s entire run who both wrote and directed an episode — and he did it three times. Those three are among the very best episodes that weren’t written by The Twilight Zone’s “Big Three” (Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson). The titles are worth mentioning: “Two”, a post-apocalyptic drama starring Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery; “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, featuring James Best, Edgar Buchanan and Sherry Jackson from Come Next Spring; and “The Grave” with Lee Marvin as an Old West bounty hunter, plus Elen Willard as a female character named Ione — an unmistakable hat-tip to the town where Come Next Spring was filmed.

Monty Pittman’s pitch-perfect script tells an unusual yet straightforward story: Matt Ballot, a reformed alcoholic (Steve Cochran), returns to his home in 1920s Arkansas hoping to make amends to his wife Bess (Ann Sheridan), his children (Sherry Jackson, Richard Eyer), and his rural community, all of whom he abandoned in a drunken haze years before. There are strong performances all around, underscored by the great Max Steiner (including a title song written with Lenny Adelson that was a popular hit for Tony Bennett, who sings it under the credits).

When she made Come Next Spring, Ann Sheridan was several years past her glamour days as Warner Bros.’ “Oomph Girl” (a nickname she detested). Even at the height of her career, her talent never got the respect it deserved — not surprising for a studio dominated by male stars that already had Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland — but she had remarkable depth and range. All through World War II she was well-liked by co-workers, popular with audiences, and underrated by critics. That combination held right up to her untimely death at 51 in 1967 (and the “underrated” part has stayed with her ever since).

Steve Cochran, unlike Sheridan, was never underrated…exactly. But ever since his sudden death from a lung infection at 48 in 1965, the question has haunted movie buffs: Why didn’t this guy ever become a bigger star? Partly, it may have been his tabloid lifestyle of womanizing, carousing and boozing, flouting his fragile health (a heart murmur kept him out of World War II). Anyhow, he never managed to break the mold of thugs and unsavories into which he had been cast, certainly not the way actors like Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews had been able to do. Still, he never gave a bad performance even in the weakest of his 39 pictures. Matt Ballot was the role of Cochran’s life, and he knew it. When his friend Pittman brought him the script, Cochran bought it for his own company, Robert Alexander Productions (named for his real first and middle names), then sold it to Republic on the condition that he and Sherry Jackson play the parts Pittman had written for them. If Cochran had given this performance for any studio but Republic it might have made all the difference in his career. But probably no other studio would have cast him as anything but a ne’er-do-well or a hoodlum. It may even be that no other studio would have touched Come Next Spring at all. That, sad to say, was just Steve Cochran’s luck.

Sonny Tufts played Leroy Hightower, an admirer of Bess Ballot’s who resents Matt’s sudden return. Bowen Charles Tufts III is one of Hollywood’s sad cases. He was not without talent, but not talented enough to overcome some poor life and career choices. Scion of a prominent Boston family (his great-uncle founded Tufts University), he shunned the family banking business to study opera at Yale. Classified 4-F during World War II due to a college football injury, he found stardom in Hollywood when handsome leading men were scarce. Alcohol was his undoing, and his off-screen behavior became notorious. He gave probably his best performance in Come Next Spring, and a few years later he reportedly sobered up in hopes of playing Jim Bowie in John Wayne’s The Alamo. True or not, by then his name was a Hollywood punchline, and the idea was probably a non-starter. He died of pneumonia in 1970, age 58.

As if Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran, Sonny Tufts and a first-rate supporting cast were not enough, there’s another reason to see Come Next Spring, one that all by itself would more than suffice: the extraordinary performance of 13-year-old Sherry Jackson as Annie, Bess and Matt’s mute daughter. Already a veteran (coming off her second season as Danny Thomas’s oldest daughter on Make Room for Daddy), she, like Cochran, gave the performance of her life in Come Next Spring. With her enormous, expressive eyes and every tiny movement of the corners of her mouth, she makes Annie’s thoughts as plain as if she spoke them out loud — and all without uttering a sound. It is, without question, one of the greatest child performances ever put on film.

Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran, Sonny Tufts, Sherry Jackson: All of them were never better than in Come Next Spring, maybe even never as good. Hmmm. Maybe this Bud Springsteen was a better director than he ever got credit for.

And one final thing. This is a promise: The very last shot of the picture, just before it fades to “The End”, is something you’ll remember as long as you live. Mark my words.

Before we move on, here’s a funny little factoid I stumbled across while looking for images of Come Next Spring. I found the Belgian poster for the picture, which gave the title twice, once in French (Celui Qu’on N’attendait Plus) and once in Dutch (De Man die Men Niet Meer Verwachtte). Both versions translate to roughly the same thing: The Man They No Longer Expected. Well, that fits well enough, if “come next spring” is too much a regional Americanism to translate, but I wonder why they didn’t use “next spring” (Le Printemps Prochain / Volgende Lente) or “when spring comes” (Quand Vient le Printemps / Als de Lente Komt). After all, the phrase “come next spring” pops up several times in the dialogue and they must have translated that somehow. Just one of those unimportant little questions we can never know the answer to.

The first silent feature of the weekend was The Heart of Texas Ryan (1917) an early Tom Mix picture. “Early” in this case must be qualified. By this time Mix had been in movies for eight years and had 170 titles on his filmography — mostly one- and two-reel shorts. But he hadn’t become “Tom Mix” yet, the straight-arrow hero in the white ten-gallon hat. His superstardom was just around the corner, though, probably as a result of his leaving Selig Polyscope to sign with Fox Film Corp., which happened after ten more pictures, in late 1917 (his first release of 1918, Cupid’s Roundup, was for Fox). In Texas Ryan, contrary to what you might expect, he doesn’t play the title role (and Variety’s review of 2/23/17 doesn’t even mention his name). So this poster, with his name above and larger than the title, is a bit misleading. It’s not from the picture’s original release, in February ’17 from K-E-S-E (Kleine-Edison-Selig-Essanay). The poster is from a 1923 reissue (by which time Mix was the one of the biggest stars in the world) from Exclusive Features Inc., whoever they were.

Texas Ryan (played by Bessie Eyton) is actually the daughter of the rancher (George Fawcett) for whom Tom works as a cowpuncher. His character is Jack “Single-Shot” Parker (“Single-Shot” Parker was the title of another of the picture’s reissues); Parker is a rootin’-tootin’ hell-raising troublemaker who spends his weekends brawling and shooting up the nearby town of Cactus Bend. Single-Shot gets on the bad side of the local marshal “Dice” McAllister (Frank Campeau), mainly by beating the snot out of him with McAllister’s own boot. Worse, the marshal is a “dirty cop”, working in cahoots with the bandit Jose Mandero (William Ryno).

As the movie opens, Texas Ryan is returning to the wide-open spaces after two years at an eastern college. Single-Shot and Mandero both catch sight of her and are smitten. Single-Shot resolves to mend his lawless ways and be worthy of the lady’s love; Mandero resolves to abduct the lady, for purposes that (this being 1917) are left discreetly unspecified. First Single-Shot rescues Texas, then later, when Mandero kidnaps Single-Shot for revenge and plans to kill him, Texas rescues him by paying a hefty ransom. Happy ending, iris-out. 

The Heart of Texas Ryan is a fast-paced, appealing actioner, its excitement undimmed after 106 years. It is enlivened, like nearly all of Tom Mix’s surviving pictures, by his already-evident penchant for perilous, positively insane stunts. (He scorned to use a double and was frequently injured, which must have had the Fox front office tearing their hair.) At one point in Texas Ryan, as Mandero’s gang leads him on horseback with his hands tied behind his back, he escapes by leaping from the saddle and tumbling ass-over-teakettle, hands still tied, down a hill so steep it’s practically a cliff. His horse here is almost as game as he is, a dark-maned gray willing to carry him anywhere. (It would be several years before Mix teamed up with “Tony the Wonder Horse”, an intelligent Tennessee Pacer that became almost as big a star as he was.)

We returned from the dinner break for Laurel and Hardy in Come Clean (1931). The Hardys are enjoying an evening at home when an unwelcome visit from the Laurels turns things upside down. Stan wants ice cream, so he and Oliver venture out to get some, leading to a frustrating episode with an ice cream sales clerk (Charlie Hall). On the way home, they rescue a woman (Mae Busch) who has jumped into the river to kill herself. Ungrateful at being rescued, the harridan demands that they now must take care of her, presumably forever. The rest of the short details The Boys’ efforts to keep Busch hidden from their suspicious wives (Gertrude Astor, Linda Loredo) until the ironic dénouement.

Then it was Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Charles Chaplin’s black-comedy fantasia on the career of serial killer Henri Landru, who murdered somewhere between seven and 83 people between 1915 and 1919, then went to the guillotine for 11 of them in 1922. Chaplin claimed that the premise for Verdoux arose out of a negotiation with Orson Welles (who got a story credit in the finished film), but the Picture Show program notes by Chaplin and Max Linder biographer Lisa Stein Haven say Chaplin had been percolating the idea since 1921. In any event, the picture was an echoing flop in 1947 (though the French liked it) but has grown in stature over the years since Chaplin allowed it back in circulation in the 1960s, to the point where it was one of the clear headliners at this year’s Picture Show.

But not every work by a master is a masterwork, and I’ve never much cared for Monsieur Verdoux (though I like it better than the absurdly overrated The Great Dictator). I find Verdoux‘s comedy flatfooted, forced and unfunny (except for Martha Raye, hilarious as the one intended victim whom Chaplin’s Verdoux, try as he might, just can’t manage to kill). And when Chaplin shifts gears into moralizing about individual murders vs. the organized mass killing of war, his channeling of George Bernard Shaw strikes me as glib, smug and condescending. The day may well come when I revisit Monsieur Verdoux, slap my forehead and cry, “What a fool I’ve been!” But that day is not yet here. I elected to spend the two hours browsing the dealers’ room, postponing my eating crow about Chaplin’s picture to some other time.

When I was a pre- and early-teen adolescent in the late 1950s and early ’60s, my friends and I were amateur connoisseurs of the horror movies of the day — The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill (1959); 13 Ghosts and The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (’60); The Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Curse of the Werewolf (’61), and many more. In the spring of 1961, there was one that — at least in my neck of the woods — was the movie to see; it seemed that all the guys were talking about it, but for some reason I never got around to seeing it. Not then, and not as its reputation grew over the ensuing decades; not until the end of the first day of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show. This was Black Sunday (1960), the Italian import from first-time director and future horror master Mario Bava.

Originally titled La Maschera del Demonio (The Mask of the Demon), the picture underwent a major makeover when American International Pictures (AIP) acquired the U.S. distribution rights. Some violent and erotic footage was scaled back or eliminated, dialogue was re-dubbed, and the picture’s musical score by Roberto Nicolosi was replaced by one from the American Les Baxter. All in all, AIP could claim some justification for the tagline, “From the producers of House of Usher“, because more than simply distributing the movie, they had actually produced a picture that differed perceptibly from the one that had only a middling success in Italy.

In the version that cleaned up at the American box office for AIP, British actress Barbara Steele plays Asa (“Ah-zah”) Vajda, a vampire in 17th century Moldavia who, along with her vampire lover Javutich, is condemned to death for witchcraft by her brother Griabi. As she sees the bronze-spiked mask that is to be hammered onto her face, Asa howls a curse on Griabi and his descendants — and then she appears to summon a sudden storm that prevents the villagers from burning her body at the stake.

Two hundred years later, a physician and his assistant are traveling through the country on their way to a medical conference when their carriage loses a wheel. Exploring a nearby crypt while their coachman makes repairs, they unwittingly revive Asa and Javutich’s corpses, and the two vampires begin wreaking their vengeance, especially on Griabi’s multi-great-granddaughter Katia (Barbara Steele again), whom Asa believes is the reincarnation of her own wicked soul.

My friends back in 1961 were right; Black Sunday absolutely lives up to its reputation. After sixty-plus years, even in heavy-shadowed black and white with little actual blood but an atmosphere of erotic dread, the picture packs a mighty punch. I can only (and barely) imagine the impact it had in 1961. No wonder all the guys were talking about it. Frankly, I’m just as glad I had to wait; I’m not sure I could have handled it back then. Director Bava weaves his Gothic tapestry with an undercurrent of breathless sex and violence that a 13-year-old male in 1961 would have felt but scarcely understood. 

And with that we called it a day.

To be continued…

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4

  • 40th Anniversary Tour: Jesus Christ Superstar

A

  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 1
  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 2: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 3: Peter Ibbetson
  • A “Christmas Wish” Returns
  • A Cinedrome “Christmas Tradition” Returns
  • A Cinedrome Pop Quiz
  • A Hitch in the Get-Along: State Secret
  • A Holiday Treat (I Hope!) for Cinedrome Readers
  • A Jigsaw Mystery
  • A Mystery Photo
  • A Time-Travel Studio Tour
  • A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 1
  • A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 2
  • A Weekend With David O. Selznick
  • A-a-a-and We’re Back…!
  • Addio, Cinevent 42!
  • After a Brief Intermission…
  • America’s Canadian Sweetheart, 1921-2013
  • Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012
  • Auditioning for Immortality
  • Ave Atque Vale, Fairy Princess!

B

  • Bright Eyes, 1928-2014
  • Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 1
  • Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2

C

  • C.B. Gets His Due
  • Camera Beauty
  • Cary-ing On
  • Catching Some Rays
  • Catting Around
  • CHAPTER I
  • CHAPTER II
  • Cinedrome Does Its Part
  • Cinedrome Wins 2012 CMBA Award
  • Cinedrome’s Annual Holiday Treat Returns
  • Cinerama-Rama!
  • Cinevent 2016 (Continued)
  • Cinevent 2016, Concluded
  • Cinevent 2016, Part 3
  • Cinevent 2016, Part 4
  • Cinevent 2017 – No. 49 and Counting, Part 1
  • Cinevent 2017 – No. 49 and Counting, Part 4
  • Cinevent 2017 — No. 49 and Counting, Part 2
  • Cinevent 2017 — No. 49 and Counting, Part 3
  • Cinevent 42
  • Cinevent 45
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 1
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 2
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 3 (Part 2)
  • Cinevent 50 – Prelude
  • Cinevent 50 — Day 3 (Part 1)
  • Cinevent 50 — Day 4
  • Cinevent 51 – Day 1, Part 1
  • Cinevent 51 – Prelude
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 1, Part 2
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 2
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 3
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 4
  • Cinevent Turns 50
  • Cinevent, Day 2
  • Cinevent, Day 3
  • Cinevent, Day 4
  • CMBA Blogathon: Come Next Spring (1956)
  • CMBA Blogathon: Kitty (1945)
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 1
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 2
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 3
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 4

D

  • “Don’t Stay Away Too Long…”

E

  • Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

F

  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Brigham Young (1940)
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Fourteen Hours (1951)
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Prince Valiant
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills
  • First Comes the Phone Call
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood — Epilogue
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 1
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 2
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 3
  • Flo Chart

G

  • “Glamour Boys” Begins…
  • “Glamour Boys” Continues…
  • Grand Opening!

H

  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 1
  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 2
  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 3
  • Harlow in Hollywood

I

  • “Is Virginia Rappe Still Alive?”
  • Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown
  • Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown

J

  • Jigsaw Mystery — Solved?

L

  • Liebster Blog Award
  • Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal
  • Lost & Found: Night Has a Thousand Eyes
  • Lost and Found: Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948)
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 1
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 2
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 3
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 4

M

  • “MOVIE” Souvenir Playing Cards
  • Merry Christmas from Cinedrome!
  • Mickey and Judy — Together at Last
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 1
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 2
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 3
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 4
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 5
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 6
  • Movie Playing Cards: 3 of Hearts – Geraldine Farrar
  • Movie Playing Cards: 5 of Spades – George Walsh
  • Movie Playing Cards: 9 of Diamonds – Mary Miles Minter
  • Moving Right Along…
  • Mr. Stewart Goes to War

N

  • Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

O

  • Our Mr. Webb

P

  • Picture Show 02 — Day 1
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 2
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 3
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 4
  • Picture Show 02, Day 00 — Prelude at the Wex
  • Picture Show 2022 – Day 2
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 1
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 3
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 4
  • Picture Show 2022 — Prelude
  • Please Stay Tuned

R

  • R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013
  • Remembering the Night
  • Remembering the Night
  • Return of “Movie” Souvenir Playing Cards
  • Returning to Lost London
  • Returning to Lost London (Reprinted)
  • Rex the First
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange – EPILOGUE
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange, Part 1
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange, Part 2
  • RIP Dean Stockwell, 1936-2021

S

  • Say, What Ever Happened to Carman Barnes?
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 1
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 10
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 11
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 12
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 13
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 14
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 2
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 3
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 4
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 5
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 6
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 7
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 8
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 9
  • Silent Weekends
  • Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2
  • Songs in the Light, Part 1
  • Songs in the Light, Part 2
  • Songs in the Light, Part 3
  • Speak (Again) of the Devil
  • Speak of the Devil…

T

  • “The Best of Us,” Part 1
  • “The Best of Us,” Part 2
  • “The Best of Us”, Part 1
  • “The Best of Us”, Part 2
  • Ted Sierka’s Brush with Greatness
  • The 11-Oscar Mistake
  • The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”
  • The Bard of Burbank, Part 1
  • The Bard of Burbank, Part 2
  • The Could-Have-Been-Greater Moment
  • The Duke of Hollywood
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 1
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 1
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 2
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 2
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 3
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 3
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 4
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 4
  • The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 1
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 2
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 3
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 4
  • The Man Who Saved Cinerama
  • The Mark of Kane
  • The Museum That Never Was, Part 1
  • The Museum That Never Was, Part 2
  • The Return of the King
  • The Rubaiyat of Eugene O’Neill
  • The Sensible Christmas Wish
  • The Shout Heard Round the World
  • The Stainless Steel Maiden, 1916-2020
  • The Stamm
  • Tony Curtis 1925-2010
  • Tragedy in Nevada, January 1942
  • Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ‘Star’

U

  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 1
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 2
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 3
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 4
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 5
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 6

W

  • “Who Is the Tall Dark Stranger There…”
  • Wings, Again
  • Wyler and “Goldwynitis”
  • Wyler and “Goldwynitis” (reprinted)
  • Wyler Catches Fire: Hell’s Heroes
  • Wyler Catches Fire: Hell’s Heroes
  • Wyler’s Legacy
  • Wyler’s Legacy (reprinted)

Y

  • Yuletide 2018

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