On March 3, 2017, Claude Jarman Jr. welcomed my friend Richard Glazier and me into his beautiful hillside home in Kentfield, Marin County, Calif., 17 miles north of San Francisco. There he sat down with us for a nice long talk about his life and Hollywood career, touching upon (among other things) his portrayals of the three characters named in the title of this post: Jody Baxter, the backwoods youth coming of age in Clarence Brown’s 1946 movie of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Pulitzer Prize novel The Yearling; Chick Mallison, a Mississippi boy confronting racism (including his own) when an African American friend is accused of murdering a white man in another Clarence Brown film, William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1949); and Trooper Jeff Yorke, a frontier horse soldier torn between his estranged parents, Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (John Wayne) and Kathleen (Maureen O’Hara) in Rio Grande (1950), the last of John Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy” (after Fort Apache [’48] and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [’49]). 

I feel certain this was the last time Mr. Jarman (who passed away on January 12 at the age of 90) sat for such an in-depth interview; indeed, I think it may have been the only time, unless he participated in a discussion with Robert Osborne or Ben Mankiewicz and an audience Q&A during one of his appearances at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood. In any event, it was a rare privilege for me — less rare for Richard, who has been diligently compiling interviews with survivors of Hollywood’s Golden Years, but just as much of a privilege. In memory of Mr. Jarman’s openness, graciousness and good humor (and with gratitude to Richard for his permission), I’m pleased to share it now with Cinedrome readers. I have made minor edits for clarity and to minimize extraneous “ums”, “ers”, and “y’knows”, and I have added explanatory notes in italicized brackets where appropriate; otherwise, this is Mr. Jarman exactly as we found him back in 2017.

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RICHARD GLAZIER (RG): Could you tell us, Claude, where you were born and just a little about your upbringing and your parents?

CLAUDE JARMAN JR. (CJ): Okay. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Grew up there, stayed there until I was 10 years old. It was that year that I was picked out of a schoolroom by Clarence Brown and shuffled off to Hollywood to be in The Yearling. Clarence, when he took on that assignment from L.B. Mayer, was determined to have a young boy who was not from Hollywood, he wanted a southern blond-haired kid to play that role, and went out on his own with his production manager to different cities in the South looking for someone to play that role, and he saw me. So he took me basically on looks alone and figured he could get the kind of role out of me, or performance…

RG: So did you have no acting experience at all?

CJ: Well, ten years old, I was in school plays and little theater, I was doing that, so I did have an interest in acting.

JIM LANE (JL): When he showed up in your classroom did you know what he was there for?

CJ: No, no. He would go into a city, he would go to the office of the superintendent, identify himself, and say, “I would like a letter that I can go into the schools in Nashville, into the grammar schools, and give this to the principal, and be able to look around the fifth and sixth grade rooms, and if I see anybody I want to talk to, I’d like to be able to do that. And if I don’t, no one ever knew I was there.” And that’s the way he operated. In doing that, he went throughout — to Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta…

RG: Are we talking about Clarence Brown?

CJ: Talking about Clarence Brown.

RG: He came himself?

CJ: He came himself. He was determined to find the boy that he was looking for. And he took it on. He was not satisfied — the talent scouts had been out to these various cities, putting an ad in the paper, if your kid is, you know, ten years old, blah blah blah. And he was getting nothing he liked. He was getting kids twenty years old showing up.

JL: How did your parents respond to this?

CJ: Well, it was kind of a shock.They didn’t believe what was gonna happen. They just said…after he saw me, two weeks later I got a call saying, “Can you come to Hollywood and make a test?” My father was working for the railroad at that time, and he took a two-week vacation, said, “We’ll go to Hollywood, and if nothing happens we’ll come back — “

JL: The worse that could happen is you get a vacation.

CJ: Exactly. That’s exactly what we did.

RG: So you did a screen test when you went to Hollywood…

CJ: You know what? I never did a screen test.

RG: So tell us about that.

CJ: Well, there were like five or six other boys that had been brought in, and we were all at the MGM school. And the only thing I ended up doing was taking a screen test with potential actresses who would play the mother. So I would do a screen test with them, ’cause they were looking for the Jane Wyman or, you know, whatever that was gonna get that role.

JL: So they wound up with Jane Wyman. Do you remember who the others were?

CJ: Well there was one named Jacqueline White who got the role. People don’t even know this, but Jackie White was the mother, she went to Florida, where we worked for three months. And when we got back to Hollywood they thought that she was really too young, she was only in her twenties, and they thought she just didn’t look mature enough to play the mother, so they replaced her with Jane Wyman. Which also meant that we had to go back and do some retakes using her instead of Jackie. [NOTE: This was news to me, and may even be a bit of a scoop. Jacqueline White — best remembered today for Richard Fleischer’s noir classic The Narrow Margin (1952) — was young indeed, only 22 when she went to Florida for The Yearling. Ms. White is still with us — she’ll be 103 next Thanksgiving — and hopefully some enterprising researcher will look her up to learn what she remembers of her work on the picture.]

JL: So you actually did two stints on location.

CJ: Yes. Although most of it —

JL: Three months the first time; how long the second time?

CJ: Well, the first time, most of the shots that we made in Florida were with the animals and with Gregory Peck. They were not with – only very few scenes [with the mother], so they really didn’t have to redo too many things to do that. But we did take two trips to Florida because we got rained out the first time.

RG: They had to pack it up and come home, didn’t they?

CJ: In August. It rained for one month.

RG: So they were just on standby, losing lots of money, so they said to come home.

CJ: Let’s go home, go back in January and do the makeup.

JL: How much, would you guess, in terms of the time you spent but also in terms of what’s in the final film, how much was shot in Florida and how much was shot back at the studio?

CJ: Well, all the interiors were shot in the studio. The scenes in the town were shot at Lake Arrowhead, and the rest, all the other outside stuff was shot in Florida. So I would say probably half.

RG: I remember you telling me that after the shoot you kind of emotionally collapsed, that you were so exhausted; was that correct? That you’d put so much energy into it.

CJ: Well, I was ten when we started and I was 12 by the time it came out, so that was a long period to deal with one particular work. It was exhausting, it really was exhausting. Clarence Brown was an exhausting director because he was a perfectionist. Whereas today, most films, you know, you take two or three takes and that’s it, I would say our average over the course of that film was at least 20. Twenty times we would do a scene. And then he would always do long shot, medium shot, close-up, over the shoulder, so you would spend a whole day doing one scene. So it was exhausting. And then you were dealing with animals, and you cannot train a deer, you’d have to wait until the deer did what it was supposed to do. And it was hard.

RG: Talk about your relationship with Clarence Brown, what that was like.

CJ: Well, he basically took over the role as my father. I mean, I was with him all the time, I was with him every night, talking about the scenes for the next day. He was my mentor and he was the person who devoted all his time to me. He didn’t worry about Gregory Peck or Jane Wyman, you know, they were professional, but he was just determined to get the performance out of me.

RG: And he was kind to you…

CJ: Oh yeah.

RG: …and nurturing…

CJ: He was nurturing, but he had a temper too, you know, he’d get upset if things didn’t go well.

RG: Did he ever lose his temper at you?

CJ: Not really, he’d just lose his temper at…[Chuckles] anything that was going on, and just get frustrated.

RG: Were you scared of him?

CJ: No. Good question!

RG: Did you feel a lot of pressure playing those scenes with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman?

CJ: No, because they were so easy to work with, I mean I was amazed at how easy, particularly, Gregory Peck was. ‘Cause he was the one I was in with more than with Jane Wyman. He was very patient. And he was young, he was just kind of coming into his own. He’d made, what, Keys of the Kingdom, and had just made Duel in the Sun, which had not come out yet. But he was just beginning to take off as a big actor. But he’s a young guy, I mean, how old was Gregory, 29, 30 at that time? He was young. [NOTE: Peck turned 29 during shooting.]

RG: Would you say you learned by watching them act? Did it make you a better actor by watching these guys?

CJ: Maybe, but I don’t think of it in those terms. I just think of trying to hold my own and be responsive.

RG: Did you have to memorize your lines and have the script all memorized?

CJ: I would say that for two or three years afterwards I could tell you every line in that film.

JL: Did you ever have to deal with rewrites or anything like that, did they ever spring new scenes on you?

CJ: No.

JL: So it was pretty much what you got at the beginning…

CJ: Pretty much.

RG: Did the authoress of The Yearling come on the set at all?

CJ: No. Marjorie Rawlings? No. I never met her. I don’t know whether she got along with Clarence. I don’t think she ever came on, I don’t think he ever went over to her. I think she was maybe involved when they first tried to make the movie in 1939, but she probably just kind of washed her hands of it after that. Unlike Intruder in the Dust where William Faulkner was on the set all the time.

RG: We’ll get to that, we want to hear all about that. Now we want to move on to The Sun Comes Up. That’s a very interesting film in that, of course, it’s the last film that Jeanette MacDonald ever did, the first score of André Previn. Can you talk a little about what it was like to work with the legendary Jeanette MacDonald?

CJ: Well, she had dropped out, I guess, of making films for quite a time and this was her return. Sun Comes Up was based on a story by Marjorie Rawlings and they were hopefully going to do a “remake of The Yearling” type thing, but to me it was not that successful. I thought it was — I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for it, I thought the director was…

RG: Richard Thorpe.

CJ: Richard Thorpe was one of these guys who finishes on time. Unlike Clarence, where you really get into a film and emotion, I didn’t feel that way at all about him. And they didn’t spend a lot of money on it. Supposed to have been, the setting was North Carolina, it was actually Santa Cruz. So you could tell they didn’t — they downsized the whole thing.

RG: What was Jeanette MacDonald like?

CJ: She was a lovely person.

RG: Was she not well during the production?

CJ: I think she seemed all right. She seemed a little fragile.

RG: What was it like working with Lassie?

CJ: Lassie bit me in the face, so I got mad.

RG: Was Rudd Weatherwax controlling, training him at the time?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: And he bit you in the face. Do you remember the scene where he bit you?

CJ: Yeah, I remember it was kind of a close up, and I was putting his neck up close and he goes [lunges forward, snaps his teeth] and everyone went, “Aaaahh!” I had to make up my cheek for the next —

RG: On the shoot did you get to meet Lewis Stone?

CJ: No.

RG: You never because he just played that little cameo at the beginning as her manager.

CJ: Right. And then there was Percy Kilbride.

RG: Oh God, what a strange character he was. He was a little bit much in that movie I think.

CJ: It was…I was never that happy with that movie for some reason.

RG: Did you feel that way even during the filming?

CJ: Yeah, I did.

RG: So you didn’t have an enthusiasm, and Richard Thorpe was just very businesslike.

CJ: Yeah. Exactly. And he made, you know, 50 movies. [NOTE: In fact, Richard Thorpe has 189 directing credits on the IMDb.]

RG: He made, like, Athena with Jane Powell…

JL: He’s like the classic studio hack.

CJ: Yeah, exactly. He was there. Here’s your schedule, finish it on time, let’s move on. That was the way it worked.

RG: But Jeanette sang some beautiful arias in the film. She was such a great star.

CJ: Yeah. But see, I never saw that, ’cause she was there, she was in the house, or she was in New York. So the only time she saw me I was in the orphanage, it wasn’t a —

RG: You played some scenes in the car with her as well.

CJ: Yeah, yeah.

RG: But it was not a successful film.

CJ: No.

RG: And I feel that André Previn made a very — He was only 18 or 19 years old at the time when he wrote the score — and it’s a very lush score. The score itself, the movie music, seems a little out of character for the film.

CJ: Oh really?

RG: I felt that anyway because it’s very lush, a very romantic kind of thing.

CJ: The MGM orchestra.

RG: Yeah, exactly. Did you meet André Previn?

CJ: Yeah, I did meet him. ‘Cause he was there a number of years, right?

RG: Oh yeah.

CJ: So I met him off and on when I was at the studio there for five years.

RG: Did you ever go into L.B.’s white office with the big white desk?

CJ: Sure.

RG: Did you ever eat in the commissary with him?

CJ: Not with him. They had a little private room off to the side that the execs would have lunch.

RG: Were you afraid of him when you were in his presence?

CJ: No.

RG: Was he nice to you?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: He didn’t curse in front of you or anything like that?

CJ: [Laughs] No. I never knew any of that till I started reading about him, reading books about him.

JL: Apparently he was great with kids.

CJ: Yeah, he was a real family-oriented guy.

RG: That’s why he loved Andy Hardy so much.

CJ: Yeah, he was — as you say, he loved kids, that was his…he was a strange, strange man, you know?

RG: Can you talk a little about the schoolhouse?

CJ:  Well…

RG: Did you have Miss McDonald, was that her name?

CJ: Miss McDonald, Mary McDonald.

RG: How about that, I remembered the teacher’s name. Margaret O’Brien told me.

CJ: Did she really?

RG: Miss McDonald.

CJ: Well, you know, Margaret — I still see her occasionally. At the MGM school when I first started there in 1945, there were maybe, I would say twelve kids, ranging from second grade to high school. And we had first-to-eighth grade was in was one room, nine-to-twelve was in another room, so we had a teacher for each room, and Miss McDonald was the principal. It was like every one, you know, a little, small school. And we all had to go to school for three hours a day, nine to twelve. That was all schooling, though. When you consider how kids go to high school, how many — you probably don’t spend more than three hours in intense work; here you spent three hours actually studying. Then after that you go, and then of course you’re making a film, and you have a tutor, you have somebody who’s working with you, and you still have to get your three hours of schooling in. Except you get it in — like on The Yearling I would get ten minutes at a time.

RG: Who was in your class?

CJ: Dean Stockwell, his brother Guy, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Powell, Anne Francis I think.

RG: Was Darryl Hickman with you?

CJ: No.

RG: He was a little bit younger than you I think.

CJ: Yeah, I think so. He was not — We had some kids who would come when they were working for, just signed for — not under contract, but just be working, and when they have a day off they’d go to school there.

RG: So when you were on a shoot — let’s say when you were making The Sun Comes Up, what was a typical day for Claude Jarman Jr. during production? What time would you get up, that kind of thing, be at the studio, makeup and all that?

CJ: Well, you still have certain time restrictions. If you were really heavily involved, had a lot to do in a film — like in The Yearling I think I was in every scene — you had to have your schoolwork done by four in the afternoon. So if you reach one o’clock and you still have two hours of school to go, they shut it down. Everything has to shut down while you go to school. So it was very hard for me to do that, because while I’m in school everyone’s getting a break, and then when four o’clock comes I gotta go to work, so I don’t get any break. So when I made those films, like Intruder and whatever, then there was always a school commitment. And I was very lucky in a number of these films, particularly the westerns that were made in the summertime so there was no school. So I looked forward to filming in the summer so you didn’t have to worry about it. But it was hard to get in three hours a day when you’re really in a lot of the scenes.

RG: And makeup? How long would it take you to get into makeup and all that?

CJ: I would say the only time I ever wore makeup was The Sun Comes Up and High Barbaree where I played Van Johnson [as a youngster] where they put freckles on my face.

RG: So it didn’t take that long.

CJ: No. You know, I had no makeup in most — Intruder in the Dust I wore no makeup.

RG: Now, after The Sun Comes Up your next film I believe was Intruder in the Dust in 1949.

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Can you tell us how that became — That was a pet project of Clarence Brown, correct? Because Clarence Brown and L.B. were very good friends, is that correct too? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong.

CJ: They were business partners and good friends.

RG: And they owned tons of land, they were both of them very wealthy. He was a land-owner, wasn’t he, Clarence Brown?

CJ: Yeah, they owned a lot of land in the San Fernando Valley and then they ended up buying a lot of land down in the Palm Springs area.

RG: So tell us about Intruder in the Dust and how it came about.  

CJ: Well, I know that Clarence was familiar with this and he really wanted to make this film. He never said this, but I’d read that he had been in Atlanta when there was some sort of a hanging or something, something that went on that upset him, and he always wanted to make that film. And he went to L.B. Mayer and L.B. Mayer said no. He said, “We’re doing all these musicals, we do all this wonderful stuff, why do we want to get involved in a film that deals with a lynching? And particularly with a black person, we’re just not ready for that.” And Clarence prevailed, he said, “I really want to do this.” And at that time Dore Schary was also at the studio, and Schary really wanted to do it also. So they said, “Okay, you can do it.” Probably, once it was finished, they didn’t know what to do with it. They really didn’t. They sort of buried it. It was getting great reviews in London, people were loving it, they thought it would be a possible nomination for an Academy Award. But in those days the studios would put forth the films that they wanted to be Academy Award projects; Fox would have one, Warner Bros. would have one, Paramount. And MGM did not want to put forth Intruder; they put forth, I think, Battleground or some war movie at that time. So the film did not make any money, and it just went away.

JL: That one looks to me like it was shot entirely on location.

CJ: It was.

JL: Did you do anything at all back at the studio?

CJ: Oh, maybe one or two things…

JL: It all looks really authentic.

RG: And wasn’t Mr. [Juano] Hernández nominated for a Golden Globe, is that correct?

CJ: Yes.

JL: Best Newcomer or something like that.

RG: Tell us about William Faulkner; he came on the set?

CJ: He would come on the set, he and Clarence would talk a lot. Faulkner had a daughter, Jill [1933-2006], who I knew, and we would go out to parties at his house. I was 15, 16, and I got to know a lot of the kids down in Oxford, and I had a great time there. And Clarence was much more relaxed than he had been on The Yearling; he wasn’t under the pressure that he was.

JL: It was a smaller film, less of a burden.

CJ: Exactly. There was nothing, we didn’t worry — And what’s interesting was, you’d appreciate this, with The Yearling we had so much difficulty getting the soundtrack, particularly in the outdoors with the snapping of tree limbs when you’d be walking around. How many times we had to keep doing it, and Clarence just got so frustrated that when he did Intruder in the Dust he said, “We’re gonna shoot this with an open camera and we’re gonna come back to the studio and we’re gonna dub the whole film.”

JL: I did notice that. So it was all, that was post-dubbed.

CJ: Yeah. And the problem was, in The Yearling, a lot of The Yearling we had to re-loop also because of the sound. He said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

RG: Too much outside noise.

CJ: Yeah. So he just said we’ll — ’cause when you’re doing, as you know, when you’re doing like a documentary type, you go into that jail in Oxford and all, you don’t need — you don’t have these huge cameras, you end up — It was more like you have cameras today. We would get in there and he would just say, “Let’s just get [it without] the soundtrack and get out of here. We’ll worry about it later.”

JL: Was it difficult post-dubbing all that dialogue?

CJ: Yeah, it is, ’cause you’re doing it one line at a time. It’s funny, ’cause he talked about, he said that Hepburn and Tracy both hated dubbing, they just thought it was terrible. He said, “Well, let me go show you a film,” and he showed them Intruder and he said, “What do you think?” They said, “Oh, it’s great, Clarence.” “This whole film was just dubbed.”

RG: They couldn’t even tell.

CJ: No.

RG: Now what kind of person was Faulkner? Was he quiet, was he — ?

CJ: [Laughing] Very quiet. He never said anything unless you said something to him.

RG: Was he shy, or just — ?

CJ: Yeah. He always smoked a pipe. I saw him at an airport maybe two years later. I was flying to California from Nashville and he’d gotten off a plane from New York. “Hi, Mr. Faulkner, how are you?” “I’m fine.” [Pause] “Well…how’s Oxford?” “Oxford’s just doing very well.” [Slightly longer pause] “Well, nice to see you, Mr. Faulkner.” “Good to see you.”

RG: And that was it.

CJ: [Chuckling] That’s it.

JL: I also heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that he did some uncredited rewrites on the script.

CJ: Could be.

JL: Do you know anything about that?

CJ: No, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some changes.

RG: Like we said, that moving, beautiful speech from when he won the Nobel Prize…

CJ: Oh yeah, yeah.

RG: It just makes you want to weep, it’s so profound.

CJ: Yes, he was a very special, special person.

RG: An American treasure, absolutely. Now did you know when you were making Intruder in the Dust that you were onto something very special there?

CJ: Yeah, I did. I thought it was — You know, growing up in the South I was used to segregation, it was just a way of life. When we made Intruder it was — Juano Hernández stayed in a private home, he could not stay in the hotel. So that’s what we were still dealing with. It was only two or three years later when they had a big riot at the University of Mississippi and somebody got killed. James Meredith got into the school and Oxford blew up. [NOTE: Actually, Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi and the notorious “Ole Miss riot” both occurred in 1962, 13 years after this.] But you did not sense that in 1949 when we were making the movie. I mean, the mayor and everybody was in the movie. 

RG: It’s so interesting to see your character, even as a teenager, transform. You had that [murder victim’s] father [played by Porter Hall] barking those terrible things at you, and then you had the uncle [David Brian] who transformed your character. It’s just very, very powerful.

CJ: And he kind of transformed his character too.

RG: Exactly.

CJ: ‘Cause he learned a lot in that story also.

RG: And it’s very interesting, in 1949 you mentioned Dore Schary. Schary wasn’t running the studio in ’49, is that correct?

CJ: No, you know, they were both running it, and that was the problem.

RG: That’s probably part of the reason, because Schary was very much a politically aware, he was liberal and he was very —

JL: A social justice warrior.

RG: I mean, Jill Schary [Dore’s daughter, 1936-2024] told me that he would’ve probably sacrificed his life in a wheelchair to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We interviewed her about Dore. He just worshiped FDR.

CJ: He was definitely of a new school as opposed to the old school in filmmaking.

RG: Then you went on to make The Outriders (1950). You were on loan for that, is that correct?

CJ: No, that was an MGM film. I think that was the last picture I made while I was at MGM. Everything else was…

RG: Can you tell us a little about that, tell us about Joel McCrea? You worked as a child with some of the greatest actors of the 20th century. I mean, my gosh the great actors — which is a tribute to your talent as well, of course.

CJ: It was — Problem with The Outriders, if you noticed, I didn’t really have a huge part of it.

RG: But still you were with James Whitmore, Ramon Navarro. What was Navarro like?

CJ: He was a very quiet kind of guy. He was very shy, came across as being that. We made it in Kanab, Utah, which is just at the upper Grand Canyon area. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful country.

RG: Arlene Dahl was so pretty in that movie, wasn’t she, with that red hair?

CJ: But it’s one of those movies, ’cause I wasn’t in it that much, I didn’t interact —

RG: Who directed that?

CJ: Was it Roy Rowland, maybe?

RG: That sounds right. I wouldn’t swear to it. But you had a bigger part in Rio Grande (1950).

CJ: Oh, I had a big part in Rio Grande.

RG: And working with John Ford. What was that like? Was that like a master class in acting?

CJ: Just great. Working with all those people. You get into that — It’s like a — He had his own group of people who made up, who were always in his movies. Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Ben Johnson. My two favorite people were Ben Johnson and “Dobie” Carey. It’s interesting because Ford always had somebody that would be his Chosen One, that he liked, and then he’d always single out somebody that he made his Whipping Boy. It’s not that he didn’t like them. And everybody knew he was gonna do that. So they would talk about it, who’s gonna be under the gun now? And in Rio Grande it was Ben Johnson. Ben couldn’t, he couldn’t do anything right. “God, Ben, get on the damn horse and just get out of here! Just forget the lines, you’re so stupid.” He’d say all these horrible things. And then, because I — he had me come into his office three weeks before we started, said, “I want you to learn how to Roman ride.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Standing on two horses and going around a ring.” I said, “Okay,” and I learned to do it. And because I was able to do that, I was, he’d always say, “This kid can do it. What are you doing?” So they would always give me a little, Dobie and Ben Johnson’d say, [elbow to the ribs gesture] “You jerk, what’re you doin’?!” Anyway, it was fun, it was a great spree that we had there, it was just a lot of fun.

RG: So that was an enjoyable shoot?

CJ: Oh, God, yeah.

RG: Did that movie do well?

CJ: Yeah. It was the third of that…series…

JL: The Cavalry Series.

CJ: The Cavalry Series, which was Fort Apache [’48], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [’49] and Rio Grande.

JL: That was at Republic?

CJ: That was at Republic.

RG: So were you loaned out by Metro?

CJ: No, I was gone. I was gone.

RG: How did that come about? Was it time to renew your contract and they said no? How did that come about, being released by MGM?

CJ: Five years.

RG: You had a five-year contract?

CJ: I had a seven-year contract, but they let it go after five years.

RG: So they just paid you off for the remaining two years?

CJ: Yeah. But see, that was a time when the studio, when TV was coming on, that’s when Hollywood was undergoing radical, radical changes.

JL: A lot of belt-tightening.

CJ: Oh my God, everyone, they were buying everybody out. ‘Cause the guys in New York were running the show. So it was not a happy time.

JL: Was it much of a shock to go from working at MGM to working at Republic?

CJ: Well, the only thing I did at Republic was Rio Grande, and with John Ford you’re working for John Ford, you’re not working for Republic.

JL: But then there was Fair Wind to Java [1953].

CJ: Fair Wind to Java, this was — [Studio boss Herbert J.] Yates was married to Very Ralston, and this was where he’s spending the money because he wanted to make Vera Ralston a big star.

RG: Didn’t happen.

CJ: [Laughing] It was so funny. They had these love scenes, and Fred MacMurray was so — He’d say to me, “God, I don’t know why I agreed to make this movie.” She was always the dancing girl, it was just a joke, the whole movie. But he [Yates] spent the money, he had all these [actors], Victor McLaglen, he spent the money to have the cast because Yates wanted his wife to be happy.

RG: Did John Ford work with you one-on-one a lot?

CJ: Sure, absolutely.

RG: Would you read a scene for him, and he would coach you, or would it be on the set, or how did it work?

CJ: Yeah, he would do it on the set. He was definitely a hands-on director, as opposed to others that weren’t. He was a very — he knew what he wanted, and he was in charge.

JL: And you were more the Chosen One than the Whipping Boy, I take it.

CJ: Exactly.

RG: That’s interesting about the Whipping Boy. It reminds me, Darryl Hickman told me, when he was making Leave Her to Heaven with Gene Tierney. John Stahl was directing the film over at 20th Century Fox, and Darryl was the Whipping Boy. He called him “Boy”, he didn’t call him by his first name, he was just nasty to him, horrible to him. So they sent the rushes to Zanuck, and Zanuck saw the rushes and he said, “This Hickman boy is the best thing in the movie.” And from then on —

CJ: He was okay.

[Laughter.]

RG: John Stahl was just fine and dandy to Hickman.

CJ: That’s funny.

RG: But he also said making Grapes of Wrath with John Ford, he stood behind the cameras and watched Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell do those scenes, and he said it was his master class in acting, watching those two work together.

CJ: That’s one of my all-time favorite movies. Grapes of Wrath is just…

RG: And then you had a chance to work with that director, my goodness.

CJ: Yeah. It’s interesting because Ford later had kind of a falling-out with both Wayne and Henry Fonda. Ford, he would be nasty to Wayne, and Wayne would say, “Look, I’m working for half what I normally get.” Just ’cause he knows Ford would want him. “I could be making a lot more money, but I’m doing this for Ford, so why do I have to take all this abuse?” And as he got older he got — and I think Fonda just ended up hating Ford as he got older.

JL: Well, they came to blows. Ford decked him.

CJ: Did he?

JL: Yeah, it was on Mister Roberts [1955].

CJ: Well, Mister Roberts was when it all fell apart.

JL: That was when it blew up. John Ford punched him in the mouth and walked off.

CJ: He’d kind of…folded, he’d kind of gotten off the deep end at that point.

RG: John Ford?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: What was Maureen O’Hara like?

CJ: Oh, she was wonderful. Now there — she could do no wrong for Ford, he loved her. He thought she was, you know, the greatest. They went on and made The Quiet Man [1952] after Rio Grande. He loved Maureen.

JL: Actually, they did Rio Grande as a condition of making The Quiet Man. ‘Cause he thought Rio Grande was gonna make the money, Yates thought Rio Grande was gonna make all the money and Quiet Man wasn’t gonna make a dime. And they both made money.

CJ: Yeah, I think Ford always — when you have the combination of John Wayne and John Ford, it’s gonna be something worth seeing.

RG: Okay, now from MGM to Republic — maybe it’s not really Republic, but John Ford actually — how does Claude Jarman Jr. wind up at Disney?

CJ: Well, I still had one other movie I made, Hangman’s Knot [1952]. At this point I was in school in Nashville. I’d come to California to make movies. That’s when I did Inside Straight [1951], I came out, Rio Grande, I was living in Nashville. And then when I made Hangman’s Knot I came to California. It was shot in 18 days. Pretty amazing. What I loved about it was it was the first time I got to know Lee Marvin. I thought he was the greatest. Oh God, he was so much fun. You know, he was a hero.

RG: Kind of a macho, a man’s man.

CJ: He was a hero, he was a man’s man. He was a marine, and you know he was funny, had a little Thunderbird, I’d drive around with him all the time. You know, I’m 17. He was fabulous. [NOTE: The Ford Thunderbird did not hit the market until 1955; the car in which Claude drove around with Lee Marvin in 1952 must therefore remain one of history’s unanswered questions.]

RG: What studio was that filmed?

CJ: Columbia, I think.

RG: That was Columbia. So now you’re gone from MGM, you’re basically on your own?

CJ: Yeah, the only other thing I did at MGM after I left was Inside Straight, was an MGM film. And that’s right after I’d left.

RG: Do you attribute a lot of your roles in your career as a young boy, did you have a good manager that helped you get these roles, or were you called for? Were you called up specifically by directors or casting directors for parts?

CJ: I had an agent while I was at MGM — actually, maybe I had him further than that — named Jules Goldstone. He was an attorney, and he was Clarence Brown’s attorney, and he was Elizabeth Taylor’s agent. But he wasn’t somebody out there promoting me.

RG: He’d just negotiate the deals for you?

CJ: He would negotiate the deals, yeah.

RG: And your parents, were they speaking for you on your behalf at that time until you were 18?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Did you have nice parents that were looking out after you?

CJ: Well, my father pretty much devoted time to me while I was at MGM. And then when I moved back to Nashville and he went to work back again, and worked for the state, people came to me, I wasn’t out looking for roles.

RG: When you were in Hollywood at MGM, were you able to support your family?

CJ: Yes. Yeah. Well, my father, they put him under contract.

RG: Oh, so they gave him a salary?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Was he the one with you on the set, then, your father?

CJ: Yes.

RG: And your mother?

CJ: No. We were — they were in California, and my sister, who’s 18 months older than I am, was…They lived in California, came back, we were making The Yearling — When we came back from Florida in August, they stayed in California until, oh maybe three years. At that point I was working all the time, I was making a movie or getting ready to make a movie, and I was always on location. So they said, “We’ll go and move back to Nashville.” So they did.

RG: So you have a sister?

CJ: I have a sister.

RG: Just two children, you and your sister?

CJ: Yeah. She lives in Atlanta.

RG: I see. Where was she during your…?

CJ: She went to the public school, I think she went to school in Westwood.

RG: So she was in California too?

CJ: Yeah, yeah.

RG: Was there a sibling rivalry because you were famous?

CJ: Never, never. It’s amazing.

RG: Never an issue.  

CJ: Never. I’ve often thought of that. We’ve always gotten along.

RG: That’s very lucky, really wonderful.

CJ: She never resented anything I did.

RG: That’s very fortunate.

CJ: Isn’t it though?

RG: Because most people aren’t like that.

CJ: I know. We just saw her a few months ago, I believe. [NOTE: Claude’s sister Mildred passed away in 2020.]

RG: What was it like at the height of your career? I mean, you were a big star at that time in the mid-to-late ’40s. What was it like to walk into a room as a kid and have people turn their heads, look at you and say, “That’s Claude Jarman.” How did that make you feel?

CJ: I guess you learn to live with it. I would hate it today with the way social media is, and those magazines. I would hate people following me around.

RG: Just poking into your private life like that?

CJ: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t that bad in those days, you know. When you were at MGM you were handled. I had my own PR person, I had my own makeup person, I had my own tutor. For the women, the stars, the women of them, they loved it, yes, Janet Leigh and these people. “What were the best days you were making movies?” They’d say, “MGM.” I bet if you asked Elizabeth Taylor she would’ve said the same, ’cause you were nurtured.

RG: Unlike you, Elizabeth Taylor had a very dysfunctional childhood, she didn’t have the nicest parents. She really — It sounds like you kind of had a childhood at one point or another.

CJ: Yeah, I did.

RG: You were not robbed of your childhood?

CJ: No. I mean, it was different, it was definitely different, I mean I didn’t — I couldn’t just — I mean I was going to a private school, I had tutors, so it wasn’t like I was going to Beverly Hills High School or something. It was a different world.

RG: Did you date Elizabeth Taylor or any of those people?

CJ: No, I was — when I was in the eighth grade she was graduating, so she was older.

RG: The schoolhouse now on the lot is an office of an independent film production company now, it’s not even recognizable. Have you been on the lot, the Sony lot? [NOTE: The former MGM studio in Culver City now belongs to the Sony Group Corp., which owns Columbia Pictures among its many holdings.]

CJ: Not in a long time. Maybe ten years ago, I don’t know. Been a long time.

RG: What would L.B. think when he sees “Columbia Pictures” on the Thalberg Building? Can you just imagine? It says “Columbia Pictures” on the Irving Thalberg Building. The Warner Bros. logo opens Singin’ in the Rain.

CJ: It’s kinda sad, isn’t it? Huh?

RG: It’s strange, isn’t it strange?

CJ: I mean MGM is, what is that? I think of the casino in Las Vegas, I don’t even think of —

JL: There’s a book out about the MGM backlot, which is a really excellent book.

RG: Oh yeah, I have that.

JL: It must have felt at the time like all this was as permanent as the pyramids.

CJ: Oh, absolutely. Even in 1949 — maybe ’48, ’49 — you could not envision that in two years that whole system was gonna collapse. It collapsed.

JL: There are these various documentaries that show Ann Rutherford, Mickey Rooney, walking around the backlot at MGM, and you can see it on their faces, they just look kind of stunned, like they’re still thinking, “Jeez, what happened?” At the time it must’ve looked like this was going to be till the end of time.

CJ: You couldn’t see it coming. Until it happened. Once it started going down it went so quickly.

RG: That was when L.B. was fired by Loew’s Inc., which just crushed him. And then Dore Schary doesn’t know anything really about running a studio, correct? I think that’s pretty much common knowledge.

CJ: The people in New York were running the show.

RG: Then just tons of movies pouring out in the ’50s with Joe Pasternak, the producer, like Richard Thorpe — they worked together, as a matter of fact — they produced these movies that were on time, they ran on budget, they came out, these cookie-cutter kinds of things. A Date with Judy, Athena, these musicals in the mid-’50s that were coming out at MGM. They even quit shooting in Technicolor because it was so expensive.

CJ: Instead of Spencer Tracy you got James Whitmore.

RG: When your contract was not renewed at Metro, was your ego wounded or did you understand what was going on? Were you bitter? How did you feel?

CJ: I was so excited! I wanted to move back to Nashville.

RG: Oh, so you were burned out on the movie business?

CJ: Yeah, I was ready to go.

RG: Really?

CJ: Yeah. ‘Cause when you look at it, I made 11 films, but I made — well, The Yearling, as I say, that was two years of my life. So that’s two of the five. And then I made High Barbaree before The Yearling even came out. They wanted to release High Barbaree before The Yearling and Clarence Brown said, “No way! You gotta do The Yearling and then you do that.” And then I continued to work, I mean I was working nonstop pretty much for the next three years. So I was kind of burned out, I was ready to take a break.

RG: You were exhausted.

CJ: Yeah.

RG: So you were happy to go back to Nashville.

CJ: I was, I was very happy to go back to Nashville. I also liked the fact that I was able to come back and make these films, and then go back. So I wasn’t sitting around waiting for my next role.

RG: When did you go into the Navy?

CJ: After I graduated from college.

RG: So that was after your movie career had ended.

CJ: Yeah. Although, wait a minute. My senior year in college — I went to Vanderbilt — I got a call from a director named [Francis D.] “Pete” Lyon, said, “I’m making this movie for Disney called The Great Locomotive Chase. We’re doing it down in Clayton, Georgia” — where they made Deliverance, by the way — and he said, “Would you like to have a role in it? It’s not a big role, but I’ve got your buddy Harry Carey Jr., you know we’ve got Fess Parker, would you like to do it?” I was a senior in college, we were on the quarter system, and I looked at it and I thought, “If I drop out of school for this quarter I still could come back and graduate; I’d have to double up a little bit in the next.” I said, “Sure, let’s do it.” So I went down and spent a month in Clayton. It was really Deliverance country, it was something, boy, something else.

RG: Did you meet Disney?

CJ: Yes, he came down.

JL: He was such a railroad enthusiast, I know he loved having that movie made. Did he spend much time on the set?

CJ: No, he just came down maybe for a few days, he didn’t stay around.

RG: You got that part because the director called you up and offered it to you?

CJ: Yeah. I’d met him a couple of times times, and we’d chatted. It wasn’t like it was a huge role, but it was…

RG: Did you go back to Burbank at all for any part of the movie?

CJ: Yeah, we went back and worked. It was about three months. It was all the fall quarter, September to the end of November. Oh! Dick Sargent, you know Dick Sargent?

RG: Of course. Bewitched, is that correct?

CJ: Yeah. He was my roommate. We were all living in this motel down in Clayton.

RG: Deliverance-land. How far is Clayton from Atlanta?

CJ: A thousand miles.

[Laughter.]

RG: In 1956 how old were you?

CJ: I was 21.

RG: So you did that probably without your parents, right?

CJ: Oh yeah.

RG: Just on your own. What was your major at Vanderbilt?

CJ: I was in pre-law, but I didn’t go to law school. Back in ’56 you still could be drafted.

RG: Korea? It was after Korea, wasn’t it?

CJ: Yes, it was right after Korea. But you either had to go into the service for two years or go through the OCS [Officers Candidate School] program and officer training and spend three years, which is what I did.

RG: And then when you came out what did you do?

CJ: Well, when I came out I’d already gotten married and had a child on the way. Two years I was in Seattle, and one year — you remember the movie Don’t Go Near the Water?

JL: Oh yeah.

CJ: Glenn Ford? About PR work with the Navy where you…

JL: You don’t go near the water.

CJ: You don’t go near the water. And that’s what I did for a year, I was Armed Forces Information Office. If you were making a movie and you needed a cruiser or a destroyer, you’d call us and we’d arrange it for you. So that was what I did for a year.

RG: And after that?

CJ: After that I moved with my wife back to Birmingham and spent two years, and then got recruited to move to San Francisco to work for an insurance company [NOTE: The John Hancock Insurance Co.].

RG: So that’s how you found your way out here to the West Coast?

CJ: I got here in 1961, which is just when everything was just breaking loose out here. And then for years I was involved in the Film Festival in San Francisco.

RG: The San Francisco Arts Commission? Or what were you, the…?

CJ: Well, I was just on the board for a while, there was Shirley Temple, myself, and some other people, and it was underwritten by the Chamber of Commerce. And then I was asked to take it over and run it, which I started in ’68 and I was the director until 1980. Which was great fun ’cause I got to bringing back all the people that I knew or I wanted to know.

RG: During that time, even now, do you miss show business?

CJ: No, I don’t. I wouldn’t want to…I don’t want to sell myself out.

RG: Put up with politics…

CJ: You gotta really want it to stay in it, particular these days.

RG: Such a difficult business, isn’t it? Ugly too. It’s dog-eat-dog.

CJ: One of my daughters still wants to do that, and she’s 22. [NOTE: Claude refers here to Sarah, one of twins — the other being Charlotte — with his third wife Katharine. Claude had five other children from two previous marriages.]

RG: She wants to be an actress?

CJ: Yeah, and she goes down for auditions. She’ll drive down to — she graduated from Santa Barbara — and so she drove down last week for an audition. She left — she’s working, and so she left at 2:00 in the afternoon, drove to L.A. and the audition, drove back the next day. I said, “You want to do it, move down there, ’cause you’re not gonna be able to — “

RG: Are your daughters — your twins, correct?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Are they, do they know your films, and proud of your legacy?

CJ: Yeah, I think so. Yeah

RG: That’s very nice.

CJ: It’s still a little distant for them, you know. I mean nowadays they’re –– kids are so different now.

JL: If we could go back to the Film Festival, could you speak a little about Albert Johnson? Personally, that was when I was going to the Festival, periodically, not very often. I was down there for some of the retrospectives on Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and so forth. Could you just talk about him? I really admired him, I liked what he was trying to do with the Festival. [NOTE: Albert Johnson (1925-98) was program director of the San Francisco International Film Festival during its formative years when Claude served as festival director, and the two sparred often over finances and other issues.]

CJ: He was a very unique guy, very difficult in many ways ’cause he knew what he wanted to do. Albert had no vision of money, that it cost money to do things. He just thought, “Well, I’m gonna — ” And then he had no vision of time restraints. Like when we had that tribute to Bette Davis, he started films at 9:00 in the morning, Bette Davis didn’t come on until 4:00 in the afternoon.

RG: So we’re talking about the International Film Festival. From then on you’ve made, basically, the Bay Area your home?

CJ: Yes, I’ve never left.

RG: And you love it here?

CJ: Yeah, I love it here. Been here 20 years, beautiful.

RG: What was it like for you to go back to the Academy Awards when they reassembled all the —

CJ: Oh, it was wonderful. I wish they’d do it again.

RG: You stood on the stage with everybody, right? It was…

CJ: They did it twice. The way they did it was great. They opened the curtain and they rolled everybody out on, like, bleachers. Do you remember seeing this?

RG, JL: Yes, oh yeah, yeah.

CJ: And it was all alphabetical.

JL: In fact I remember seeing you.

CJ: And what was really great was, you’re sitting there, you’re looking [gesturing vaguely out to “the house”], and you see all these people. There’s Harrison Ford…people who were not up here. Like, I’m up here and they’re down there. And that’s kind of like…It’s kind of neat, you know? But, well, you would see all these people, people just going crazy, clapping. It was great.

RG: And did you enjoy participating in the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival?

CJ: Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

RG: What’s it like in the moment now…Like you said they screened Intruder in the Dust in Palm Springs, correct?

CJ: Right.

RG: Did you stay in the audience to watch it?

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Tell us what that felt like and what you were thinking as you were watching that film from all those years ago, looking at yourself when you were a teenager. What was going through your mind?

CJ: Well, I guess what was going through my mind — two films, I’ve done a couple of things, I did some with Rio Grande too, down in Los Angeles, the film critics had a showing down there. In both those films, I didn’t recall that I had as big a role as I did. I mean, Rio Grande, I’m in that a lot. The whole feature is the relationship that the father and the mother, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, have fighting over the kid. So it was interesting to see that. Intruder in the Dust, what really inspired me was that I really thought that was a good film. I thought Clarence Brown just did a great job on that. He’d go into these scenes — I always remember that one scene with Juano Hernández in jail and I’m on the outside, we have our hands, we’re talking about what can we do —

JL: And you just see the eyes…

CJ: See his eyes, yeah. I mean, it was…

RG: Very powerful.

JL: Do you kinda wish Clarence Brown had lived to see that? ‘Cause it seems to me he passed away without getting the recognition he really deserved for some of the movies he made.

CJ: Well, he never did, and you know, he lived to be 90-something. He was down in Palm Springs, I used to go down and visit with him. But he made a lot of great films, he really did.

RG: He was a southerner as well, wasn’t he?

CJ: No. He went to the University of Tennessee, but he was from Boston or something, Massachusetts.

RG: Did you feel nostalgic, did you feel proud when you watched the film, or…?

CJ: Yeah, I was proud, ’cause I thought it was…I was proud to be a part of that. I thought it was an important film, it really was. And I really feel gratified that it’s finally getting the recognition that I think it’s deserved.

RG: When you watch yourself at this time also, can you look at yourself on the screen and be proud of your acting, and not criticize it necessarily, or, “I could have done this better.” Do you have any of those kinds of feelings?

CJ: Oh yeah. I can see certain scenes in Intruder that I didn’t like, that I did not like the way that I had played it. I could watch The Yearling and I could tell you — I could see scenes that I was in when I first started filming, and I could see scenes eight months later.

RG: You saw yourself getting better.

CJ: Yeah, that was better.

RG: You never had any acting lessons?

CJ: No.

JL: Pauline Kael was a great admirer of Clarence Brown’s, and she said — and I think she’s right — she said that he got Elizabeth Taylor’s best performance ever out of her in —

CJ: National Velvet.

JL: I think the same is true of you in The Yearling, especially for being such a newcomer.

CJ: Yeah, he was…There was something that was very intimate about Clarence. He was able to say, “Trust me, look at me,” and you kind of forget everything that’s going on around you.

RG: Was he quiet?

CJ: Quiet, he was quiet. He always kinda wore a coat and tie.

RG: So he was formal. He was of the old school.

CJ: Yeah.

RG: Not like Arthur Freed.

CJ: [Laughing.] No!

RG: Miserable, nasty, loudmouthed. Arthur Freed had no class. But he could recognize talent, he assembled the best talent in the world, a man that had no class or really any education.

JL: He exposed himself to Shirley Temple when she was 15.

[Claude laughs.]

RG: Did you know Gertrude Temple, the mother?

CJ: No.

RG: She’d say to Shirley, “Sparkle and shine, Shirley! Sparkle and shine!” That’s what she’d — ‘Cause Gertrude would not let…Jane Withers couldn’t play with her, nobody, the children on the lot, you did not play with Shirley Temple. She was kept away from the other children, Gertrude kept her away. She’d just say, “Sparkle and shine, Shirley!” You know who told me that? Baby Peggy. You remember — do you know Baby Peggy?

CJ: I know who she is, yeah.

JL: Diana Serra Carey.

CJ: I see Shirley’s son, Charlie Black.

RG: Oh I know. He’s a Bohemian, Charlie Black. [NOTE: That is, a member of the Bohemian Club, a private gentlemen’s club, based in San Francisco, that hosts events at the Bohemian Grove campground in Monte Rio, Sonoma County, Calif.]

CJ: I’d see him up at the Grove.

RG: Yes, I know Charlie.

CJ: I’d ask him, I’d say, “How’s your mom?” He’d say, “Well, she was…” I guess they made her have someone live in the house with her after her husband died [in 2005]. But she would lock herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t let the woman come in who was there, supposed to be taking care of her. And then she fell.

RG: The beginning of the end.

CJ: Yeah. So he was…

[Resuming later; Claude sits holding the full-size Oscar that replaced the miniature one he received in 1947.]

RG: Okay. So can you give us some memories? Do you remember receiving the award? Could you hold it up a little?   

CJ: Sure.

RG: There it is, that’s perfect. Do you remember the night you got it?

CJ: I remember the night I got it, it was at the Shrine Auditorium, I think, downtown Los Angeles. I was told that I might be getting one.

RG: Oh so you didn’t know?

CJ: I didn’t know, but I was told I might be, so I was prepared to say something. It’s funny, my wife, when I had my 75th birthday, she did a film of my life. And she had gotten my acceptance talk that I did on radio. It was pretty amazing.

RG: So the audio exists?

CJ: The audio exists. I don’t know how she found it but she got it, and it was in the film.

RG: Who presented it to you?

CJ: Shirley Temple.

RG: Shirley Temple. So you’re in the audience for the Academy Awards, and it’s 1947, and you’re sitting there as a star or whatever, and they say, “We’d like to call Claude Jarman Jr. up to the stage to receive and honorary Oscar…”

CJ: Well, she comes out, Shirley comes out and says, “We want to make a special presentation to the outstanding child actor of 1946.” And, “Claude Jarman Jr.” And then I get up…

RG: And how did you feel when you were honored like that?

CJ: You know what, it didn’t register that much for me, y’know. It was…has more significance today than it did then, let’s put it that way.

RG: Well, your parents must’ve been proud.

CJ: Oh sure, yeah, proud. I got a lot of telegrams from the governor of Tennessee and all these people.

RG: Do you still have all that stuff?

CJ: Yeah. [Chuckles] Somewhere out there.

RG: Very exciting. I just want to thank you again for opening your house up to us.

JL: Yes!

RG: And for your kindness, appreciate it so much. We have some footage here that will — You know, I’m archiving all this stuff and making a library…

CJ: Sure.

RG: …and when I make my documentaries we’ll include bits and pieces of things…

CJ: Oh, what a great idea.

RG: …and I just thank you for — We talked about this on the camp deck [at Bohemian Grove] —

CJ: Right.

RG: — if you remember, we had some nice conversations. I think I’m going to try to get up to the Grove again this summer, so I’ll see you up there.

CJ: Please do!

*                         *                    *

And there you have it, Richard’s and my afternoon with this gracious and hospitable gentleman; may his kind soul rest in peace. I know this is a long post, but I couldn’t find a comfortable spot to break it, and it seemed better to present it as a whole rather than arbitrarily shoe-horning a “To Be Continued” in for no good reason.

And another note about that long illustration above of the gathering of past and (then) present Oscar winners. That’s from the 2003 ceremony (awards for 2002), when best picture went to Chicago and acting awards to Adrien Brody (standing left) and, standing right, Chris Cooper, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and honorary award recipient Peter O’Toole. Depending on the size and resolution of your screen, you may have trouble finding Claude; he’s seated in the second row from the top, seven in from the right, between Anjelica Huston and Jennifer Jones. As Claude says, except for that year’s winners, the arrangement is alphabetical; how many others can you identify?

Day 1 — Continued

So…Where was I? Oh Yes, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). As I said last time, Buster Keaton’s last masterpiece would be a highlight of any weekend of classic movies, and so it was in Columbus this year. This is the picture with one of the most famous stunts of the silent era — or any era since, for that matter — where the whole side of a house collapses on Buster during a cyclone, with only an open window saving him from being smashed flat.

I used to screen Steamboat Bill, Jr. for my Film Studies classes at a local community college here in Sacramento, not only because it’s a masterpiece, but for a local connection to which my students could relate: Keaton shot the picture on the outskirts of Sacramento, building his fictitious town of River Junction on the west bank of the Sacramento River (doubling for the Mississippi), just above its confluence with the American River. The opening shot, panning from the American to the Sacramento and the River Junction set, is instantly recognizable to local residents today — if they can imagine the wide swath of Interstate 5 bisecting the frame.

Also recognizable, though less immediately apparent, is the building just visible on the horizon in this frame cap, between Buster and his leading lady, the fetching Marion Byron. It’s almost unnoticeable watching the movie, and not easy to make out even here. So here, below the full frame, is an enlargement of a section of it. See it now? Author John Bengston, in his book Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, cites Paul Frobose of the Sacramento County Historical Society as identifying the building as the former California State Insurance Building at 10th and J Streets in Sacramento, three blocks from the State Capitol.

But I think a likelier candidate is this one on the left, Sacramento’s Elks Building, one block east at 11th and J. Recently completed in 1928, it was then the tallest building in Sacramento, the first one taller than the Capitol. Both the Elks and Insurance Buildings are still standing, but it’s too late to resolve the issue now; even if we could identify the exact spot where Keaton and director Charles Reisner placed their camera, too many newer, taller buildings have sprung up, on both sides of the river, in the 97 years since Buster and Marion stood there thinking wistfully of each other.

Among its many pleasures, Steamboat Bill, Jr. is also notable for giving character actor Ernest Torrence a rare opportunity to exercise his comic chops as Steamboat Bill Sr. At a towering six-foot-four, just seeing him standing next to the 5′ 5″ Keaton is already hilarious, but Torrence had a real flair for comedy that he too seldom got to deploy in a career where his size usually had him in more serious, even menacing roles — though he was also an extremely funny Captain Hook to Betty Bronson’s Peter Pan in 1924 (screened at Cinevent in 1999). He easily made the transition to sound, but an infection after gall bladder surgery in 1933 carried him off at 54; if he’d been granted even another ten or 15 years he might well have given Donald Crisp a run for his money.

My film studies students were usually unfamiliar with Steamboat Bill, Jr. — most of them were even unfamiliar with Keaton — but nearly all of them knew Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie. So they got that little light bulb of discovery when I pointed out that the title of Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon was a play on the title of Keaton’s picture. “If you ever wondered why he didn’t call it Steamboat Mickey…well, now you know.”

Next came the first sound version of Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon (1949), with Susan Stranks and Peter Rudolph James as children shipwrecked on a South Pacific island who grow up into Jean Simmons and Donald Houston, fall in love, and innocently found a family before being discovered by two other castaways (James Hayter, Cyril Cusack) of unsavory backgrounds and intentions. In Stacpoole’s novel, the two kids are first cousins, but this 1949 production bowed to the dictates of the Breen Office by removing any hint of incest and forgoing the nudity and overt eroticism that would later characterize the 1980 remake with Brooke Shields and Christoper Atkins. Photographed in beautiful Technicolor, director Frank Launder’s version hewed closely to Stacpoole’s idyllic Adam-and-Eve-in-the-Garden-of Eden theme. Audiences at the time, like later ones in 1980 (and presumably those of the lost 1923 silent picture), were left to wonder why the young man never grows a beard and the young woman’s legs and underarms remain primly shaved throughout their long desert-island sojourn. Perhaps beguiled by the beauty of Simmons and Houston in their winsome young-adult prime, nobody seemed to mind; they certainly didn’t in Columbus.

Day 1 rounded off with a late-night screening of a 1960 European horror film, as it had last year with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. This year the program book promised us the French shocker Eyes Without a Face (French title: Les yeux sans visage) from director Georges Franju, the tale of a mad scientist (Pierre Brasseur) who tries, repeatedly and without success, to repair his daughter’s (Édith Scob) disfigured face by transplanting those of luckless young women kidnapped by his assistant (Alida Valli). After each failure, the victim’s mangled remains are then dumped where the ghoulish pair hope they’ll never be found. Eventually, the doctor’s daughter goes mad herself and wreaks a terrible vengeance.

What we saw, in fact, wasn’t Franju’s French original, but the edited (by about two minutes) and English-dubbed version released in the U.S. in 1962 by Lopert Films under the insanely nonsensical title Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. Either way, it’s a stylish (if such an adjective can be applied to such grisly subject matter) and effective chiller, highlighted by a startling, can’t-look-away scene of the obsessed “Dr. Faustus” (actually “Dr. Génessier”) at work in his operating room, his scalpel peeling a young woman’s face away from her skull. This scene had audiences in the 1960s (my teenage self included) either staring aghast or averting their eyes in horror, and the scene — the whole film — has lost none of its punch. The French original is available here on YouTube, and it shows up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time.

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That’s as far as I got on this post, back in June, when its original title was “Picture Show No. 3 — Day 1, Part 2”. Then, as I warned at the end of “Day 1, Part 1”, my coverage of the 2024 Columbus Moving Picture Show (May 23-26, 2024) was interrupted by previously scheduled vacation travels. I promised to resume as soon as possible, but I reckoned without — how do I put this? — an unexpected medical issue that arose in the midst of those travels and was allowed to deepen and worsen while I flew hither and yon, leading eventually to emergency surgery, a week in hospital, home infusions of antibiotics four times a day for six weeks, and a longer, slower recovery than I could possibly have expected.

That’s all I’ll say about that — there’s nothing more boring than hearing about somebody else’s operation — but the upshot of it all is that last May’s Picture Show weekend has grown less fresh in my memory — and besides, it’s old news now anyway. (Memo to self: You really must start taking detailed notes while you’re on the spot in Columbus.) 

My usual detailed rundown of the Picture Show weekend is no longer feasible — and possibly no longer of interest — but just for the record, here are some highlights of Days 2, 3 and 4:

Day 2

Three silent pictures — two renowned classics and one a bit of a rediscovered surprise — highlighted the remaining days of the Picture Show. First was Hearts of the World (1918), D.W. Griffith’s melodrama of The Great War. Griffith’s story told of The Girl (Lillian Gish) and The Boy (Robert Harron) separated on the eve of their wedding by the outbreak of war. The Girl wanders deranged on the battlefield, then is nursed back to sanity by The Little Disturber (a showcase role for Lillian’s sister Dorothy). Griffith’s hand with battle action and a desperate-dash-to-the-rescue climax, like his penchant for cloying character names, was as strong as ever. But his timing was beginning to falter: Just as his pacifist message in Intolerance (1916) had fallen on blind eyes with America gearing up to enter the war, his hate-the-Hun militarism was inconvenient now that the war was all but over and the Allies were looking to patch things up at Versailles.

Day 3

Tumbleweeds (1925) was western icon William S. Hart’s last hurrah — indeed, except for a cameo in the King Vidor/Marion Davies Show People (1928) and a wistful spoken prologue to a 1939 reissue of Tumbleweeds, it was his last film appearance ever. The old boy certainly went out in style. Tumbleweeds is among his best, climaxed by a rousing recreation of the 1893 Oklahoma Land Rush and featuring some horsemanship by the 60-year-old Hart that still makes men half his age gape in wonder. With a face that virtually personified the Old West, he was an icon indeed; with the exception of Owen Wister in his 1902 novel The Virginian, Hart had more to do with the creation of the archetypal Westerner than anbody. His understated acting and unerring eye for realistic frontier detail give his pictures the ring of truth even now, when most of them are more than a century old — further in the past, in fact, than the genuine Old West was when they were made. Later stars from Gary Cooper and John Wayne, through Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, to Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, can all thank William S. Hart that they even had careers.

Day 4

A third silent on Day 4 is what stands out in my memory at this remove. This was The Enchanted Cottage (1924), the first screen version of Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1921 play. The play dealt with the fortuitous relationship that develops between a badly maimed veteran of The Great War (Richard Barthelmess) who banishes himself to a remote cottage to spare his family the sight of him, and a plain — even downright ugly — local girl (May McAvoy) who tends the cottage. In time, the spell of the cottage, and of the generations of newlyweds who have resided there, overcomes them and they see the sensitivity and inner beauty in themselves and each other, and the knowledge transforms them — if only in their own eyes — into the loving people they truly are.

I was familiar with the story only through the 1945 remake, updated to World War II and starring Dorothy Maguire and Robert Young. That version has always struck me as rather sickly-sentimental in a treacly Victorian way, and I found the lovers’ “ugly” sides — amounting to a couple of unfortunate scars on Robert Young and thick eyebrows and a shoddy dress on Dorothy Maguire — a bit of a tempest in a teapot, as if director John Cromwell and RKO Radio were unwilling to make their stars look really bad. Curiously enough, the 1924 silent (directed by John S. Robertson), by jumping into the Victorian sentimentality with both feet — and not least, by fearlessly making stars Barthelmess and McAvoy truly, well, unfortunate — gives the story a conviction that the remake lacks. The remake also lacks the play’s scenes in which the modern-day lovers are visited by the ghosts of honeymooners from centuries past; this silent version, made while the play was still treading the boards in regional theaters, includes those fantasy elements, and in so doing it better preserves and presents the enchantment promised by the title. The Enchanted Cottage (’24) is wholly superior to its better-known remake, and as one who has always found the remake completely resistible, I was pleasantly surprised.

There were other highlights of Picture Show Weekend that should not go unmentioned. A lovely Technicolor print of Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), a sort of second sequel to My Friend Flicka (1943) in the boy-and-his-horse genre. Though set in Wyoming, the green grass in this case was actually in Utah, and the Picture Show screening was introduced by historian James D’Arc, who was also there signing copies of the new Centennial Edition of his authoritative tome When Hollywood Came to Utah, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Beehive State’s career as a film and TV location. Then also, the customary samplings of comedy shorts from Max Davidson, Charley Chase and Laurel and Hardy. Angel’s Holiday (1937), with Jane Withers her usual impish self, a sort of live-action version of Little Lulu. And speaking of Little Lulu, one of Lulu’s cartoons, A Scout with the Gout, was a major part of Stewart McKissick’s annual Saturday morning Animation Program (like Stewart, I hope someday those Little Lulu cartoons, with their irresistible theme song, become available on home video). Slightly French (1949), a Columbia musical from director Douglas Sirk with Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour ringing amusing changes on the Pygmalion theme. Take a Chance (1933), a Paramount Pre-Code musical with James Dunn, June Knight, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and Lilian Roth doing a red-hot carnival dance previewed by Richard Barrios among his musical clips on Day 1. And, of course, the remaining chapters of the Spy Smasher serial, right up to the final triumph of the Good Guys in Chapter 12.

Sorry I can’t go into any further detail on the program as it played last May. You just had to be there. Now, for us here at Cinedrome, on to other things…

First, before I launch into my annual recap of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show, a heads-up and an apology. I’ve got quite a bit of vacation traveling to do in the next few weeks, and that will probably prolong the time it takes me to prepare and post my coverage. I ask Cinedrome readers to please bear with me; I’ll get as much posted as I can before I have to leave, and get the rest up as soon as possible after I get back.

Al rightie, then, that said, here we go:

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As has become traditional, the long weekend kicked off on the evening of Wednesday, May 22 with a screening, in conjunction with the Picture Show, at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of Ohio State University. This year the main attraction was a digital restoration of Bwana Devil, the 1952 surprise hit that launched the original 3D craze. Produced, written and directed by the eccentric Arch Oboler, Bwana Devil was loosely based on the man-eaters of Tsavo, a pair of rogue lions who went on a killing spree in 1898, slaughtering enough native African and Indian workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway to bring construction to a standstill for months (the story was filmed again, with slightly more fidelity to the facts, as The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996). Coming when it did, with Hollywood reeling from the onslaught of television and desperate to lure audiences back into theaters, Bwana Devil made 3D look like just what the faltering movie business needed.

For a while, anyhow. There was a flurry of 3D movies throughout 1953, and quite a few good ones: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space from Universal; House of Wax (Vincent Price’s first foray into horror), Hondo (starring John Wayne in one of his many signature roles) and The Charge at Feather River from Warner Bros.; the survival melodrama Inferno with Robert Ryan as a husband left for dead in the desert by his scheming wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan); Kiss Me Kate from MGM (with House of Wax, probably the best of the lot); Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth from Columbia, and so on.

Plagued by quality-control issues, though, 3D proved to be a flash in the pan that first time around. The technology was cumbersome; the two projectors in a theater’s projection booth, normally used for changeovers from one reel to the next every 12 or 13 minutes, had to both run simultaneously to project the left- and right-eye images — meaning that even with the largest reels available, theaters couldn’t show more than about 50 minutes at a time, requiring an intermission in even the shortest movies. If one of the two films broke, the other reel would have to mutilated to match it. If the projectors weren’t perfectly synchronized, the 3D illusion would be lost and might never be set right. The glasses, while not nearly the inconvenience that legend has it, depended on everything running perfectly, and if it didn’t, the glasses themselves could take the blame when things went wrong. By the end of 1953 and the beginning of ’54, the fad had petered out.  There would be the occasional one-off in subsequent decades, usually from fly-by-night outfits, but it would take another 50 years, and the advent of digital projection and computerized systems, for 3D to make a comeback with various superhero and adventure movies, plus such truly great movies as Hugo (2011) and Life of Pi (2012).

But those days were far in the future when Bwana Devil hit screens and caused such a sensation. So how about it? Well, unlike Hugo and Life of Pi, Bwana Devil isn’t a truly great movie. Unlike Kiss Me Kate and House of Wax, it isn’t excellent. Unlike Inferno and The Charge at Feather River, it isn’t even good. Indeed, Bwana Devil is arguably the worst historically important movie since Fred Ott’s Sneeze.

Nevertheless, it is historically important, and the new 2K restoration they screened at the Wexner Center gives us Bwana Devil looking better than it has since…well, probably ever. I’ve only seen the picture once before, in 2013 at a 60th Anniversary 3D Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. That was a film screening, and considering the picture’s age the print was in very good condition. But nothing like this. Kudos are due to the 3D Film Archive and its founder Bob Furmanek (who spoke at the screening) for spearheading the restoration.

Also on the program were two 3D cartoons from 1953: Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker, and Boo Moon featuring (who else?) Casper the Friendly Ghost. Both were good, with some effective stereoscopic moments, especially in Boo Moon. In addition, there was A Beany Story, a five-minute short that ran as a prologue to Bwana Devil, in which actor Lloyd Nolan, and an attractive starlet, Nancy Somebody, whose last name I didn’t catch, introduced us to the Natural Vision 3D process, aided by Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent of the Time for Beany TV show. This, by the way, was the original 1949-54 incarnation of Beany and Cecil, as hand puppets manipulated and voiced by Daws Butler (Beany) and Stan Freberg (Cecil). This short is even available on YouTube. You can access it here, and if you happen to have a pair of anaglyphic (i.e., red/blue lens) glasses lying around the house you can even see it in 3D. (The screening at the Wexner, however, was Polaroid, not anaglyphic).

 

Before we move on, I want to share this photo with you. Maybe you’ve already seen it; it’s pretty famous. It’s a shot of the audience at the world premiere of Bwana Devil at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, taken by J.R. Eyerman and published in the December 15, 1952 issue of Life Magazine. I reproduce it here because, in one of those odd little coincidences that the universe throws at us every once in a while, this photo is the wallpaper in the bathroom of every room in the Columbus Renaissance Downtown Hotel, where Cinevent and the Columbus Moving Picture Show have been held since 2015. When you step into the shower at the Renaissance Downtown, depending on which way your room is facing, these 1952 moviegoers are either gazing off to your left or staring right at you. That can be pretty unsettling, and in nine years I’ve never quite gotten used to it.

Anyhow, with Bwana Devil looking brand-spanking-new the night before, and with this first-nighter Hollywood audience dressed to the nines the morning after (for some reason I find my eye drawn to those teenagers in the third row near the bottom corner; a first date, I imagine), there was a sort of continuity over the decades.

And with that we were off to the first day of the Picture Show proper. But we’ll get into that next time.

To be continued…

 

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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…