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.

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…

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…

Short answer: Nope. Dead as a doornail since 101 years ago last month.

See, I can make that joke because Virginia Rappe has been dead that long, and everybody who knew her, and who might take offense at my flippancy, has followed her into that undiscovered country from which no traveler returns.

But what about when this article was published in the December 1921 issue of Screenland Magazine? When it hit the stands in November, Virginia was only two months in her grave. Did anybody in the Screenland offices, or any of her friends and acquaintances in Los Angeles, Chicago (where she was born in 1891) or San Francisco (where she lived during 1916 before moving south) — did any of them detect the tone of morbid humor in that title and cry, “Too soon! Too soon!”?

I probably don’t need to explain to most Cinedrome readers who Virginia Rappe was, but just in case, here’s a quick rundown. Born Virginia Rapp in 1891 in Chicago, her mother died when she was 11, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother (Virginia, born out of wedlock, had her mother’s surname; her biological father, allegedly a prominent and married Chicago socialite, was never in the picture). As a teenager she found work as an artist’s model, and that appears to be when she added the sounded “e” at the end of her name for an exotic touch (she also sometimes went by Virginia Rappae). It was modeling that led her to move to San Francisco, where she not only earned a comfortable living, but became engaged to a dress designer named Robert Moscovitz — until he was killed in a streetcar accident. An opportunity to enter moving pictures took her to Los Angeles, where she landed occasional work while living with — and reputedly being engaged to — producer/director Henry Lehrman. Some stories also have her living in New York for a while and gallivanting around Europe at some time or other. Maybe so.

Anyhow, it all ended for Virginia three weeks after the release of her last picture, the comedy short The Misfit Pair, when she attended a Labor Day 1921 party in the suite of superstar Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. In the ever-present defiance of Prohibition, liquor flowed freely, and exactly what happened at the party has never been clear, probably not even in the booze-fogged memories of several who were there and later testified. What is known for sure is that sometime around 3:00 p.m. that Monday, Virginia became violently ill and began tearing at her clothes. Several of those present tried to soothe her with various home remedies, and finally the hotel doctor was summoned. He diagnosed a case of extreme intoxication, and he — or maybe somebody else; like so much of the story, that detail isn’t clear — administered a shot of morphine for her pain. She was moved to another room at Arbuckle’s expense; assured that she would be all right in a day or two, Arbuckle checked out on Tuesday and went home to Hollywood. This picture of the party suite offers mute testimony that today’s hotel-trashing rock musicians have nothing on partying Prohibition movie stars — although to be fair, we don’t know who took the picture, or when, or whether any of the damage happened after the party broke up.

Virginia, alas, did not get better. By Thursday she had been hospitalized at the private Wakefield Sanitarium in San Francisco, and by Friday she was dead, age 30, done in by a ruptured bladder and resulting peritonitis (a serious killer in those pre-antibiotic days). It later came out that Virginia had suffered from a chronic bladder condition since at least 1913, possibly — though not necessarily — from one or more illegal abortions she had undergone over the years.

So much for the undisputed facts. At this point, two real-piece-of-work characters enter the story — three, if you count William Randolph Hearst, who sensationalized the case as a way of exploiting Hollywood’s “immorality” while diverting attention from his own relationship with Marion Davies. The first piece of work was a woman named Bambina “Maude” Delmont, who came to the party with Virginia. Early on, already drunk, she disappeared into a bedroom with Arbuckle’s suite-mate Lowell Sherman, locking the door. She didn’t emerge until after Virginia fell ill, but then she stayed with her to the end, after which she swore out a complaint accusing Arbuckle of raping and murdering Virginia.

The second was San Francisco District Attorney Matthew A. Brady. Intensely — even unscrupulously — ambitious, Brady believed he could ride the Arbuckle case all the way to the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. Early on, he hit a few snags. For one thing, a post-mortem examination of poor Virginia by doctors at the sanitarium was inconclusive as to whether she had been assaulted, physically or sexually. Worse, Maude Delmont, Brady’s accusing witness, had testified before the San Francisco Coroner’s Court, leading to Arbuckle’s indictment, but she was useless as a trial witness. She had a police record for prostitution, extortion and blackmail, running “the old Badger Game”, setting up marks (the more famous the better) in compromising situations, then shaking them down to keep the story quiet. She had even wired two lawyers in L.A. and San Diego as soon as Virginia died, crowing that she had Arbuckle “in a hole here[,] chance to make some money out of him”.  Brady was in a spot; in those days, police and prosecutors didn’t feel the need to use words like “suspect”, “alleged” or “accused” when discussing cases, and he had shot his big mouth off about Arbuckle’s guilt; he couldn’t back down now. While he didn’t hesitate to bully witnesses, suborn perjury, and even — perhaps — falsify fingerprint evidence, he didn’t dare put Delmont on the stand; her background was too unsavory, and there were too many discrepancies between the complaint she’d sworn out with the cops and the one time she did testify at the coroner’s inquest. Brady knew she wouldn’t last five minutes under cross-examination.

Incredible as it sounds to us today, when high-profile trials can drag on for years, even decades, Arbuckle stood trial three times between November 1921 and April ’22. After two hung juries, the third jury deliberated six minutes before acquitting him — five of which were spent drafting an unprecedented apology that he had ever been charged in the first place. Nonetheless, Arbuckle’s career was wrecked. Like later blacklisted celebrities, he eked out a living off-screen under an alias throughout the ’20s, and he was on the verge  of a comeback in 1933 when a heart attack carried him off in his sleep at 46. (On a side note, the scoundrel Brady’s career didn’t exactly flourish. He stalled out at D.A. of San Francisco, the poster boy for malicious prosecution and misconduct. In a delicious irony, he never made it to the Governor’s Mansion, but the man who finally unseated him in 1943, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, did.)

So there, in a hasty six paragraphs, is a summary of why Virginia Rappe’s name was a headline in the December 1921 issue of Screenland Magazine: “Is Virginia Rappe Still Alive?” Beyond that, I’m not going to rehash the case here; it’s fascinating but way too complicated, fascinating and complicated enough to have provided fodder for several books; go to Amazon and run a search in Books for “Fatty Arbuckle Case” and you’ll find several examples (I can personally recommend The Day the Laughter Stopped by David Yallop [1976]; it’s out of print but still available used or on Kindle. Others, more recent, look interesting, but I haven’t read them). My subject today isn’t the case, but the Screenland article, illustrating as it does a peculiar intersection of spiritualism, yellow journalism, and celebrity culture.

Here, just to show that it was a headline inside and out, is the cover of that issue of Screenland, featuring that same question about Virginia’s survival that spreads across pp. 20-21 inside. The question, which hit the stands midway through Roscoe Arbuckle’s first trial, is deliberately provocative, slyly hinting that Virginia may be hiding out somewhere, watching from a distance as Roscoe squirms in the dock.

But no, it’s just a come-on, designed to get readers browsing the newsstand or drugstore magazine rack to plunk down their dimes. The “survival” implied was spiritual, not physical. The article is reproduced above in its entirety; depending on the size and resolution of your monitor, you may be able to read it. In case you can’t, here’s a rundown of what it says:

Under the sub-head “The Most Amazing Message Ever Published”, the article reprints a letter to Screenland editor Myron Zobel from one Roy Jefferson, Secretary of the International Psychical Research Society (IPRS), located at State and Randolph Streets in Chicago. Mr. Jefferson is writing in response to an article in the previous month’s Screenland about the Arbuckle case, written by Gouverneur Morris.

Now here, a sidebar. Having read that much, I assumed that “Gouverneur Morris” must be a pseudonym adopted by some employee of the magazine, a cub reporter or intern (or whatever they called office interns in the 1920s). But no, he was a real person — actually, Gouverneur Morris IV (1876-1953), great-grandson of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a prolific writer of pulp novels and short stories, several of which were filmed over the years. Morris was about 45 in 1921. It would be interesting to know what he wrote about the Arbuckle case at that early date, but unfortunately my digital Screenland archive doesn’t include that particular issue.

Anyhow, whatever Morris wrote, it was interesting enough to prompt Roy Jefferson to write, and to assert that Roscoe Arbuckle was innocent. Now remember, this was barely two months after the party at the St. Francis; Roscoe was being denounced from every pulpit in America and vilified in every newspaper in the world. It took a certain amount of nerve to stand against that tsunami of public opinion, so let’s give credit where it’s due. Roy Jefferson was firm in his faith in Roscoe’s innocence, and no wonder: He claimed that he heard it from Virginia Rappe herself, and that she wanted justice to be done. This happened, he said, at a meeting of the IPRS, facilitated by the “psychic” Elizabeth Allen Tomson (they preferred the word “psychic” to “medium”, Jefferson wrote, because self-described mediums were often frauds, while psychics were serious researchers).

When the Screenland editors followed up by mail, they got a reply from Halma Tomson, Mrs. Tomson’s daughter and secretary, confirming what Jefferson had written — Virginia manifested herself on October 2 at a meeting of the IPRS attended by some 450 people. Mrs. Tomson, having stripped to the skin and been examined for any fakery by a committee of six ladies, was “placed in an enclosure which was examined and built by six gentlemen [sic] investigators.”

“Shortly after the meeting had started and during a violin solo Virginia Rappe appeared as in a beautiful cloud. She gradually became a materialized form and was recognized by many. We were all astonished as she had not even been spoken of by anyone present. She was visible to all and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by many:

“‘Roscoe Arbuckle is not guilty and I want justice done.’

“…My mother is in a state of coma inside the enclosure during these experiments and does not realize what transpires. But I act as her secretary and was present when she heard the story. She was more surprised, if possible, than the spectators.”

I’m sure she was. And what a lucky coincidence that in Virginia’s native city, where she hadn’t lived since at least 1913, there were “many” people in the audience who were able to confirm her identity.

When a person materializes from The Other Side in front of an audience of 450, through a “psychic” who has been privately examined nude by six women (proving that she has, ahem, nothing up her sleeve) and placed in a cabinet that has been assembled and examined for any trickery by six other volunteers — and all this accompanied by a violin solo, no less — we’re not talking about your usual séance, much less an actual scientific “experiment”. What we have here is a magic show — what magicians to this day call “the spirit cabinet”.

Is it possible that the showbiz-savvy editors of Screenland didn’t see through these vaudeville monkeyshines? They must have done, and no doubt knowing a great hook when they saw it, decided to play it for all it was worth. Anyhow, play it they did. They hired the W.J. Burns International Detective Agency to send an operative to investigate. The unnamed detective reported in a telegram to Screenland that he attended a meeting of the IPRS with about 150 others and was among those who inspected the cabinet Mrs. Tomson entered. He witnessed the emergence from the cabinet of “a white robed figure” who did not speak to him; another man on the platform asked the detective if he recognized the figure as Virginia Rappe. In his report the detective didn’t say one way or the other, but he said that was the only time Virginia’s name was mentioned. He said that Mrs. Tomson ‘s daughter Halma and Dr. Lawrence H. Rowell, president of the IPRS, told him of an earlier séance, attended by about 250, in which Virginia emerged from the cabinet onstage “in a bright blue light, wearing beautiful pure, white flowing robes [with] wonderful dark brown eyes and hair which hung over her shoulders” (per a related telegram to Screenland from Halma herself). She (Virginia) strode to the edge of the stage and addressed a newspaperwoman in the front row: “I am Virginia Rappe and must say that Roscoe Arbuckle is absolutely innocent of causing my death,” whereupon she “returned to the cabinet and faded away.”

Notwithstanding all the references to Mrs. Tomson’s “cabinet”, daughter Halma called it an “enclosure”, and described what sounds more like a kiosk than a cabinet: “…made of two sides and a top of one thickness of half inch wood securely fastened together and absolutely void of any traps or trickery. It is six feet high, about four and a half feet deep and four feet wide. The front is closed with one thickness of gray French velour drapery in which nothing could be concealed, with an opening in the center where the apparitions appear.” Halma then provided the names and (astonishingly, to 21st century readers) addresses of 11 men and women (“eye and ear witnesses”) whom she said comprised “the committee” — whether the committee of women who privately examined the nude Mrs. Tomson, or of men who examined the cabinet/enclosure, or both, or neither, is unclear.  

Maybe I’ve seen The Front Page once too often, but I can’t help imagining gales of laughter echoing through the offices of Screenland Magazine as this article was passed around before going off to the printer — this, mind you, while Virginia Rappe was barely cold in her grave and Roscoe Arbuckle’s career and character were being assassinated in a San Francisco courtroom.

How far did the editors take it? Did they bother contacting any of those committee members? Mrs. J.K. Moorehead of 632 Maryland St., Gary, IN? Mrs. Jane Brooks in Room 1244 of Chicago’s Morrison Hotel? Mrs. Edna Bacon of Blackwell, OK? Surely not; communication was slower and more expensive in 1921. But if any Cinedrome readers can make out the list in the article that opens this post, and if you care to comb the 1920 US Census, knock yourselves out.

I didn’t bother with that, but I did do a little poking around, beginning with the International Psychical Research Society. No luck, though I found several similarly-named organizations, especially in Great Britain, where the vogue for spiritualism, always pretty strong, burgeoned in the years right after World War I. But of the IPRS itself I could find no trace.

It was a different story, however, with the IPRS’s address at State and Randolph Streets in Chicago. That was a major intersection in downtown Chicago in 1921, and it still is today. Here are two recent views from the middle of State St. looking down Randolph to the east (above) and west (below). The only corner of the intersection that is reasonably intact from 1921 is the southeast corner, the site of Marshall Field’s, Chicago’s legendary upscale department store. Marshall Field’s is no more, having been bought out by Macy’s in 2005, but the Marshall Field — er, Macy’s — building at State and Randolph is a designated Chicago Landmark, as well as being on the National Register of Historic Places. So the building, with its “Marshall Field and Company” bronze plate and iconic green clock, is intact from the day construction was finished in 1906. A time traveler from 1921 would recognize it on sight.

The other corners, probably not so much. Presumably the IPRS was housed in one of those; if the Society had had an office in the Marshall Field Building, their letterhead would surely have said so. Personally, I vote for the northwest (Old Navy) corner, if only for the proximity of the Nederlander Theatre a few doors down; I like to fancy that the theater was rented by the Society to stage their “experiments”. Of course, it wasn’t the Nederlander then; it wasn’t even the same building, though there’s been a theater on the site since 1903. From 1905 to 1924 it was the Colonial, then it was torn down and replaced with the Oriental, renamed the Nederlander in 2019. Before 1905 it had borne the most notorious name of all American theaters: Iroquois. The Iroquois Theatre opened on November 23, 1903; one month and one week later, at a holiday matinee packed with some 2,200 patrons (many of them women and children), errant sparks from an arc light ignited a blaze that mushroomed within minutes into the deadliest single-building fire in American history, with at least 602 dead from burns, smoke inhalation, and trampling in the panic to escape. There’s a morbid fascination to the idea of Elizabeth Allen Tomson communing with spirits of the departed in such a building, but it probably didn’t happen there — if it had, there could have been over 600 ghosts elbowing Virginia Rappe aside, vying for Mrs. Tomson’s attention.

As for the personalities identified by name in the Screenland article, as I said, I didn’t bother scouring the 1920 Census for traces of that 11-person “committee”. Likewise, with Roy Jefferson, secretary of the IPRS, Googling such an ordinary name struck me as a futile exercise. But with Elizabeth Allen Tomson, much to my surprise, I hit paydirt.

It turns out Mrs. Tomson and her family had been running this spirit cabinet game for at least a year. Thanks to a Spanish-language blog, SurvivalAfterDeath | Psychic Sciences, I even found this 1920 photo of Mrs. Tomson in action. Well, more or less in action; the picture is obviously posed for the camera, with none of the lighting effects described in the Screenland article. But at least it gives us faces to go with the names. Mrs. Tomson is seated at center, beaming at someone draped in white, standing in for the ectoplasmic apparitions that were no doubt enacted by Mrs. Tomson herself in performance. At right is her husband/manager/spokesman Clarence, and at left is their daughter Halma. (I wonder if Halma herself didn’t contrive to stand in for Virginia; she seems a lot more age-appropriate.)

The Tomsons popped up once more in the historical record — at least in that portion of it that I was able to uncover. This story comes to us through the efforts of Sarah Quick of the Brooklyn Public Library’s Web site.

In 1922, the magazine Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize to anyone who could offer proof of spiritual or psychic phenomena, and the Tomson family decided to go for it. Almost exactly two years after Elizabeth Allen Tomson channeled the ghost of Virginia Rappe to exonerate Roscoe Arbuckle, they descended on New York with all their paraphernalia and presented a series of séances in homes around the city. This caught the attention of another medium, one Lillian C. Briton of the Church of Spiritual Illumination in Brooklyn. Exactly how sincere a medium Miss Briton was, Sarah Quick doesn’t say, but she was convinced Mrs. Tomson was a fraud, and was determined to save Scientific American the trouble of debunking her. So Miss Briton invited Mrs. Tomson to perform a séance at her church, before an audience which (unbeknownst to the Tomsons) was laced with Miss Briton’s own “ghost breakers”, who would turn on the lights and grab the Tomsons at Briton’s arranged signal. All was going as planned, with the usual dim blue light and soft music (the violin solo replaced by a phonograph playing “Rock of Ages”), when Dick Gallagher, one of Briton’s agents, jumped the gun. Invited to peek in the cabinet to see, Gallagher was standing with Halma Tomson holding his hands (ostensibly to strengthen the psychic bond, but probably just to keep his hands from grabbing anything they shouldn’t). He found himself confronted with what purported to be his deceased grandmother, who leaned out of the cabinet and tried to embrace him. With his hands pinioned by Halma, and moved either by panic or calculation, Gallagher did the only thing he could: He leaned forward and bit the ghost as hard as he could: “I bit my Grandmother and it was Mrs. Tomson,” he recalled. Mrs. Tomson burst out the back of the cabinet in her bathrobe and ran upstairs, where she fainted. Gallagher had bitten the “ghost” so hard that the silken cloud-like cloth she wore became lodged in his teeth. The next day the Tomsons slunk back to Chicago, with Clarence Tomson blustering about severed spiritual connections and unworthy motives, and demanding the return of their silk cloth. In the end, Scientific American monitored over 100 séances but never had to pay up. The Tomsons never even got a hearing.

Thus do Elizabeth, Clarence, and Halma Tomson disappear from history, at least as far as I could ascertain; read Sarah Quick’s post at the link above for the full hilarious details of their Brooklyn Waterloo. But let’s try not to judge them too harshly. I like the approach of the Screenland staff: However cynically they may have regarded the assertions of the International Psychical Research Society, they were gracious enough to keep a straight face in print, and they gave the Society a fair hearing. And too, let’s give credit where it’s due: Whether or not Mrs. Tomson had the endorsement of Virginia Rappe’s Testimony from Beyond, she was right. Roscoe Arbuckle was railroaded, guilty of nothing worse than partying hearty with illegal liquor. We know that now, and Elizabeth Allen Tomson said so before most people.

I have an acquaintance who is a collector/dealer of movie memorabilia and ephemera. I’ve known this fellow for 54 years — or rather, let me rephrase that: I knew him 54 years ago, when his younger brother and I were roommates at Sacramento State College (now CSU Sacramento). The collector/dealer’s path and mine have crossed once or twice since then, but the brother, my former roommate, and I have remained reasonably in touch over the years.

We met for lunch recently, and he shared this photo with me. As he told it to me over our sandwiches, these fragments were included in a bookcase-load of material that his older brother acquired last year from the estate of producer Jerry Wald. The bookcase’s contents mainly consisted of leather-bound copies of scripts to pictures Wald had produced (Peyton Place, Wild in the Country, Sons and Lovers, An Affair to Remember, etc.), but there were also these pieces of paper. They were from a single oversize sheet of parchment that had been cut up, cutting carefully around signatures, so that they could be put into a standard-size manila folder.

Unfortunately, as we can clearly see, the roster hasn’t survived intact. My friend tells me there are 100 signatures on what we have; I haven’t counted myself, but looking at it, that sounds about right. And they’re real signatures too, not reproductions, written in ink on parchment. No telling how many more there may have been; my own guess would be somewhere between 20 and 40.

Since that day at lunch, my friend has IM’d me with a correction. It turns out this incomplete jigsaw puzzle wasn’t among that recently-acquired Jerry Wald collection after all. On the contrary, the collector brother told him he’s had this for at least thirty years. So long, he says, that he’s no longer sure exactly where he got it — but he thinks it was among a large batch of film ephemera he bought from another dealer in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a batch that included scripts and business documents from the Hal Roach Studios. 

On that narrow thread, I ran the picture by historian Richard M. Roberts, who specializes in silent comedy and knows more about Hal Roach’s career than Roach himself ever did. Richard didn’t know of any possible connection to Roach; he speculated only that the occasion was some sort of event at Paramount, since many (if not most) of the names here were Paramount employees at the time; beyond that he couldn’t say, though he did allow as how it was “an interesting bunch of autographs.”

It is indeed. And by the way, what do we mean by “at the time”? Well, as it happens, we can date this paper pretty narrowly based on internal evidence. At the due east point on the paper is the signature of Gale Sondergaard. Her first picture, Warner Bros.’ Anthony Adverse, was released in August 1936; it’s a cinch she wouldn’t have found herself in such illustrious company before then, and probably not till some time after, when she’d had a chance to make a splash with her showcase performance (she went on to win an Oscar for it). At the other end of the time-window, the southeast quadrant has the signature of composer Hugo Riesenfeld; he died on September 10, 1939 after a severe and lengthy illness. I don’t know how severe or lengthy that illness was, but let’s say it lasted most of 1939; let’s also say Gale Sondergaard didn’t break into the A-List until at least January 1937. Allowing that, it’s reasonable to say this roster is from sometime during 1937 or ’38. 

But what was the occasion? At the center of the sheet there’s a wide gap, but we can glimpse the remnants of printed red letters that look like they may have formed the word “welcome”. Under the final “e” of “welcome” there’s another trace of red ink that suggests there were additional words, or perhaps a name, under that, and then there’s a third row consisting of white dots. This gap in the puzzle is what creates the mystery; if that weren’t missing, the purpose of this sheet of signatures might be crystal clear.

Even as it stands, there are interesting points to be gleaned from these signatures. Just under the w-e-l of “welcome” is a trio of noted German expatriate directors: Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, and none other than that era’s supreme genius of the stage, Max Reinhardt himself. Two names below Reinhardt is Rouben Mamoulian (who directed High, Wide and Handsome at Paramount in 1937), but between them is what looks like someone named Maria Solvez. Who in the world could that be? For that matter, who are Nick Carter, Guillermo Areos, Manny Wolfe, Ralph Wilk, and several others whose handwriting is — to me at least — illegible?

Walter James Westmore of the Westmore makeup dynasty may have been billed as “Wally” in his 463 screen credits, but he signed this sheet “Wallie” (east of center, next to the big gap in the middle). Similarly, Cecil B. DeMille may have billed himself with an uppercase “D”, but here (across that gap from Wallie Westmore) he spells his last name “deMille”, just like brother William, niece Agnes, and the rest of their family always did. And in the southeast quadrant, between casting director Fred Schuessler (Gone With the Wind, Christopher Strong, King Kong [’33]) and costume designer Ali Hubert (The Life of Emile Zola, The Merry Widow [’34]), actor Joseph Schildkraut (who won an Oscar the same year as Gale Sondergaard) spells his first name “Josef”, the way his parents did when they named their newborn son in Vienna in 1896. And the Oscar-winning cinematographer we know as Tony Gaudio signs here (southwest, fourth row from bottom) with his given name of Gaetano.

Adding to the mystery of it all is the fact that Hollywood people, then as now, didn’t as a rule go around collecting each other’s autographs, except on checks and contracts. So who collected all these, and why? The only clue I can offer is this — another collection of celebrity signatures on parchment, although here they’re lithographic reproductions, not the real McCoy. There’s no mystery to this parchment; it was an insert in the souvenir program for The House of Rothschild (1934) starring George Arliss, Loretta Young, Robert Young and Boris Karloff. As you can see, it’s a sort of birthday card, congratulating Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck on the first anniversary of 20th Century Pictures and the release of Rothschild. From the top row (Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Marie Dressler) to the bottom (Johnny Weissmuller, Adrienne Ames, Toby Wing, Randolph Scott, Jeanette MacDonald), it’s an impressive roster. (And about to become two less: When Rothschild premiered on April 7, 1934, Marie Dressler had only three-and-a-half months left; she would die of cancer on July 28. Later, in September, 26-year-old crooner Russ Columbo [fourth row from bottom] would be shot to death in a freak accident with an antique dueling pistol.)

Clearly, I think, the parchment above was something along the lines of this, wishing somebody or something welcome the way this wishes happy birthday and congratulations. But who, why, and when…? Barring some lucky miracle, I guess we’ll never know. Pretty much everybody who signed it had left us by the end of the 1980s; actor Fritz Feld (southwest quadrant) made it to 1993, but he died of dementia, so who knows how much he would have remembered that late? I don’t know when my friend’s collector brother acquired the chart (neither, evidently, does he for sure), but by the time he did, there was probably nobody left to ask about it.

As Hollywood mysteries go, this one is comparatively trivial — but that doesn’t make it any less of a mystery. So I offer it here for study and speculation. Comments, hypotheses, ruminations are welcome. Meanwhile, I look forward to the day that some unexpected revelation, some offhand comment in some history, memoir or oral-history interview sheds light on what happened at Paramount (or wherever) in 1937 (or whenever) to make all those people write their names on a sheet of parchment to prove they were there.

UPDATE 9/20/22:

My friend Blair Leatherwood, who has access to a number of newspaper archives as part of his genealogical research, has been able to fill in a few gaps in our knowledge of these signatories:

Maria Solveg (not “Solvez”) was, like the three names above her — Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, Max Reinhardt — a German expatriate. She and her husband Ernst Matray (Maria sometimes billed herself under her married name) first came to America with Reinhardt’s company in 1927, performing as a dance team and, in her case, actress. In 1933 the Matrays joined the exodus of German Jews who had the foresight and good fortune to flee Nazi Germany while the getting was good, first to France, then Great Britain, and finally the U.S. Significantly for our purposes, in August and September 1938 she was in Los Angeles working as Reinhardt’s assistant director on a production of Faust at the Pilgrimage Outdoor Theatre (today, the John Anson Ford Theatre) in the Hollywood Hills; that may narrow down even further the dating of this jigsaw puzzle. At some point, probably in 1940, Maria became a U.S. citizen and, in the words of Reinhardt’s son and biographer Gottfried, the Master’s “highly efficient assistant on Broadway”. Also a dancer and choreographer, she worked in some capacity (according to her Trivia page on the IMDb) on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Pride and Prejudice (’40), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (’41), White Cargo, Random Harvest (both ’42), Swing Fever (’43), Step Lively (’44), Murder in the Music Hall (’46) and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (’47), among others. Whatever she did, she was not credited on most of those, either on screen or on the IMDb. By the late 1950s she was back in West Germany, the country having been safely de-Nazified, and she reclaimed her German citizenship in 1960. By then she had segued into screenwriting, and she worked steadily at that until 1992. She died in Munich in 1993, age 86.

Ralph Wilk (southwest quadrant, above Torben Meyer and Gaetano Gaudio) was born in Minneapolis in 1894 and lived in Los Angeles from 1927 until his death on June 9, 1949, age 55. According to his obituary in the L.A. Times, he was “West Coast manager of Film Trade”, but that was the result of either sloppy obituary writing or faulty information supplied to the paper; in fact, Ralph Wilk was the L.A. representative for Film Daily, a daily trade paper that published from 1918 to 1970.

Manny Wolfe (top left corner) was, from July 1932 to May ’39, head of the Paramount story department. Before that, he had been story editor at First National Pictures. From September 1928, First National was a subsidiary of Warner Bros.; flush with profits from The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, the Bros. had purchased a 58 percent share of First National to gain access to FN’s theater chain and Burbank studio complex (which remains the Warner Bros. Studio to this day). Warners eventually acquired a total of 87.5 percent, and First National became a wholly-owned subsidiary, with pictures released under both FN and Warners banners until 1936, when First National was dissolved. This is all necessary background to the following: While Manny Wolfe was at First National, across the lot at Warner Bros. there was a press agent and aspiring playwright named Norman Krasna. Krasna’s first produced play was Louder, Please, about two Hollywood publicity men who fake the disappearance of a movie star, with characters reportedly based on easily recognized persons around the Warners-First National lot. The play opened on Broadway on November 12, 1931 and ran for 68 performances. The Louder, Please playbill bears the credit, “A.L. JONES (By arrangement with Manny Wolfe) PRESENTS…” My guess is that Wolfe and Krasna knew each other at the studio, Krasna showed Wolfe his script, and Wolfe hustled it around New York, acting as Krasna’s unofficial agent and wangling an associate-producer credit on the production (not to mention pocketing a tidy sum in that “arrangement” with A.L. Jones). The play made enough of a splash that Krasna landed a writing gig at Columbia in 1932; it may have gotten Wolfe the job at Paramount as well. Whatever the case, Wolfe stayed at Paramount until May 1939, when he left “to assume a producer’s post at another studio.” What that studio was is not known, but Wolfe never seems to have earned a producer credit — or a writer’s for that matter. For all we know, he did fine work as a story editor, but that’s the kind of administrative position that leaves little trace except in a studio’s corporate records. Krasna, on the other hand, went on to a long and distinguished career on Broadway and in Hollywood as both writer and director, earning an Oscar for writing Princess O’Rourke (1943) and three other nominations before his death in 1984. What ever became of Manny Wolfe after 1939, I haven’t been able to ascertain.

Guillermo Arcos (not “Areos”; due west, under Robert Florey and Melvyn Douglas) was born in Spain in 1880. He is, according to Blair, “listed on various documents (border crossing, WW II draft registration card, etc.) as an artist and as a jeweler. He also appears to have been a classical guitarist of some note.” At first I thought that, since Arcos would have been 60 in 1940, that draft card could not have been his (maybe a son, or even grandson) — but no, the card gives his birth date as July 8, 1880 (check!) and his “present” age as 62 (double check!). On IMDb, he has a handful of Spanish-language acting credits, plus uncredited (and probably non-dialogue) bits in A Message to Garcia and Ramona (both 1936). This photo is from his “Declaration of Intent”, a step in applying for U.S. citizenship, dated January 5, 1949. Also, an undated newspaper item from sometime in 1951-53 mentions him having given a guitar concert in Carnegie Hall “33 years ago” and credits him with having played incidental music for Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951). Coming at this from another angle, on FindAGrave.com I found a listing for Pilar Arcos, born in Havana, Cuba in 1893. She was an actress and operatic soprano, and according to the listing, in 1917, while studying at the Conservatory of Madrid, she “married a guitar teacher/actor Guillermo Arcos.” (In early 1917 Guillermo would have been 36, Pilar 23. There may have been some urgency to their nuptials: Their first child, a boy William, was born October 28, 1917 in Houston, Texas.) In 1935, Pilar traveled to Spain to continue her singing career, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War drove her back to North America. Were she and Guillermo still together by then? Perhaps, or perhaps they had already separated. In any case, they were divorced in December 1939; on May 6, 1941 Guillermo married his second wife, Concepción. Guillermo died at 78 in 1959. Pilar outlived him by over 30 years; she died in 1990, age 96. Both died in Los Angeles, but they are not buried together. Pilar rests in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, beside her and Guillermo’s daughter Helen (1919-73), whom she outlived by 16 years. Guillermo’s resting place I was unable to locate.

If any other information comes to light about the less-familiar names on the parchment, I’ll post another update — and another, and another, as needed. Watch this space!