Author Archives: Jim Lane

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 2

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“Anyone four years old,” Shirley Temple Black wrote, “absorbs experience like a blotter.” Anyhow, she certainly did, and her experience with the Baby Burlesks gave her plenty to soak up. She learned that making movies was business, and wasting time was wasting money — and if you wasted too much of either, you wouldn’t get any more of it. Se learned about hitting chalk marks on the floor to be properly lit. Even better than that, she found that her face was particularly sensitive to the warmth from the overhead lighting instruments, which made her good at what actors call “finding your light”; she could feel the difference between the light hitting her forehead, her cheek or her chin.

 

Something else that she found she could do didn’t surface until she made Stand Up and Cheer!: filming to playback. On the Baby Burlesks there hadn’t been time or money for fripperies like pre-recording; when Shirley sang “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” in Glad Rags to Riches or “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye” in Kid in Hollywood, she performed live on the set to a simple piano, with other instruments to be dubbed in later (even that was an extravagance for penny-pinching Educational). This idea of recording the song first, then mouthing the words later for the camera was entirely new to her. As even the most experienced actors have learned to their dismay, it’s not simply a matter of synchronizing lip movements; your posture, your breathing, the angle of your head, even your facial expressions can all influence the sound your voice makes when you’re singing. If you don’t replicate them precisely, audiences tend to notice the difference, even if they can’t quite put their finger on what’s wrong. Getting it right called for the application of another actorly phrase, “sense memory”. Shirley found that it came easily to her. “Mimicry is not an unusual talent in a child,” she wrote, “and I had no appreciation for what a nasty problem such synchronization presents for many actors.”
 
There were many such lessons that went into The Education of Shirley Temple. Henry Hathaway told a story of directing her in To the Last Man, a 1933 western from a Zane Grey novel about an age-old blood feud between two Kentucky clans that continues as both families relocate to the Nevada frontier. Shirley played an uncredited bit (one of her loan-outs from Jack Hays) as a third-generation child of one of the families. (She’s shown here with Muriel Kirkland, left, as her aunt and Gail Patrick as her mother.)
 
The script called for her to be conducting a play tea party in the yard outside her family’s ranch house when a member of the enemy clan shoots the head off her doll, hoping to prod her father, uncles and grandfather into a showdown.
 
As the camera rolled, she was to offer a cup of tea to a small pony standing by her table. But the pony became inordinately interested in the sugar bowl on the table and stuck his snout into it. Ad libbing with the moment, Shirley snapped “Get away! Get away!” and slapped the pony’s nose. The scene escalated into a shoving match, with Shirley pushing at the pony and kicking at his fetlocks. As Hathaway looked on in horror (“Oh Jeez, I was scared to death.”), the pony turned his back and kicked viciously at the girl with his hind legs, missing her head by inches. She stood her ground and glared at him: “You ever do that to me again, I’ll kick you!”
 
Hathaway had seen enough — too much, really. “Cut!” He went up to Shirley. “Didn’t that scare you?”
 
“Yes,” she said. 
 
“Well, you didn’t stop.” 
 
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare stop.” 
 

Even at the age of five, Shirley already knew two things: (1) animals can’t be counted on to follow the script, and you have to be ready to deal with what they actually do; and (2) no matter what happens, only the director gets to call “Cut!” (By the way, the pony’s kick did not remain in the picture; it would have detracted too much from the “murder” of the doll, the dramatic point of the scene.)

Shirley’s new contract with Fox was exclusive, but in the immediate aftermath of shooting “Baby, Take a Bow” for Stand Up and Cheer! all the studio found for her to do was a less-than-worthless bit in a Janet Gaynor/Charles Farrell romance called Change of Heart. Eight seconds on screen — with her back to the camera, yet! — and not a syllable of dialogue; it was worse than the bits Jack Hays used to send her on. Mother Gertrude set out to drum up some work — if some other studio wanted her daughter, surely a loan could be worked out — and she had just the picture in mind, over at Paramount. It was one for which Shirley had already auditioned and been dismissed out of hand. (“They took one look, watched me dance, and rejected me without a smile.”)


Little Miss Marker

(released June 1, 1934)

Little-Miss-Marker-LC01aWSomehow, this time Gertrude was able to wangle an interview with the movie’s director, Alexander Hall. In Child Star Shirley doesn’t know how Mother did it; I wouldn’t be surprised if word of  Shirley’s song-and-dance with James Dunn was already circulating on the Hollywood grapevine. In any event, Shirley auditioned for Hall personally.
 
The director showed Shirley to a chair and sat facing her. “Say, ‘Aw, nuts.'”
 
“Aw, nuts!”
 
“Scram!”
 
“Scram!”
 
Hall stood up. “Okay.”
 
“Okay!”
 

“No, kid! Stop! We’re finished.” It was as simple as that; Shirley had the part. Paramount offered Fox $1,000 a week for Shirley’s services (a huge profit over the $175 in her Fox contract), and on March 1, 1934 Shirley reported for her first costume fittings for Little Miss Marker.

William R. Lipman, Sam Hellman and Gladys Lehman’s script was adapted from a story by Damon Runyon about a sourpuss bookie named Sorrowful who grudgingly accepts a bettor’s small daughter as a sort of “hostage” for a two-dollar bet on a horse race. The father promises to get the money and be right back, but he never comes back. Sorrowful finds himself saddled with the little girl, whose sunny sweetness gradually thaws his heart, brightens his outlook and loosens his airtight purse strings. Everyone notices the change the tot makes in Sorrowful, and they warm to little “Marky” themselves.

Damon Runyon died in 1946, but his name has stayed current in American culture thanks to the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (its title taken from one of his story anthologies, its plot from two of his tales). But Guys and Dolls has also skewed the popular image of his stories and what it means to be “Runyonesque”. The musical is set in a rollicking fantasy land of cute underworld denizens — grifters, mugs, oafs and dames, colorful and essentially harmless. In Runyon’s stories there is humor, to be sure, but it’s not rollicking; it’s more often sardonic, even mordant, and the atmosphere of the stories, despite the picturesque speech, is hardly fantasy. The world of Runyon’s nameless narrator is gritty and down to earth, lit by bare bulbs in cheap hotel rooms and the gaudy glare of street neon; we can almost smell the cheap cigars and stale perfume. Things may work out — for the time being — for the characters, but it’s usually thanks to ironic accidents, not a benign universe. There’s often an undercurrent of menace beneath the whimsy, and bad things do happen.

And so it is in “Little Miss Marker”. One snowy night Marky wakes to find her nursemaid asleep and Sorrowful gone. Running outside barefoot in her nightgown, she tracks him to the Hot Box nightclub and runs into his arms just as a killer named Milk Ear Willie is about to settle an old grudge by plugging Sorrowful. Willie changes his mind, so Marky has saved Sorrowful’s life — but at the cost of her own. She contracts pneumonia and dies in hospital, despite the efforts of Sorrowful and his associates (even Milk Ear Willie chips in, kidnapping a famous child specialist to attend Marky’s bedside). Minutes after Marky’s death her father turns up, having suffered from amnesia since the day he left his little girl with the bookmaker. He has read about Marky in the newspapers and has finally come to take her home. “I suppose I owe you something?” he asks Sorrowful. Yes, says the bookie, you owe me two bucks. “I will trouble you to send it to me at once, so I can wipe you off my books.” He is once again the old Sorrowful, with the same “sad, mean-looking kisser” he had before — “and furthermore,” says the narrator, “it is never again anything else.”

The movie keeps Runyon’s hospital climax — Marky is there with life-threatening injuries from falling from a horse, not pneumonia — but softens the ending: Marky lives, and Sorrowful’s reformation is allowed to stick. (The writers also gave Sorrowful a surname, Jones, which is not in the story but has stayed with him through two remakes.) Otherwise, it’s faithful to the spirit of Runyon’s story — basically a drama with small comic flourishes — with a suitable mix of seediness and vulgar glamour. Surely, Runyon was pleased.

Little Miss Marker contains one of the  most unusual movie pairings of the 1930s: Shirley Temple and Adolphe Menjou. The usually dapper, immaculately tailored Menjou (he was voted Best Dressed Man in America nine times) was, at first glance, an odd choice not only to team with a child but to portray the rumpled, unkempt Sorrowful Jones. But it works; Shirley’s Marky brings out the debonair sport in Menjou’s Sorrowful, the one we knew was there all the time, by inspiring him to move to a more suitable apartment and upgrade his wardrobe.  (Curiously enough, Menjou would play a similarly disheveled grump, and have a similar rapport with kids, in his last picture, Disney’s Pollyanna in 1960 — this time with two child stars, Hayley Mills and Kevin Corcoran.)

Shirley says in Child Star that Menjou once offered to play hide-and-seek with her, but otherwise tended to keep his distance (“off-camera he treated me with the reticence adults commonly reserve for children”). But when the camera’s rolling the two have a remarkable chemistry. It’s there when Marky and Sorrowful first meet, as she stands beside her father on the divider railing in Sorrowful’s shabby office. Sorrowful orders Marky “down offa there”, but she teases him: “Look, Daddy, he’s running away! Is he afraid?…You’re afraid of my daddy! Or you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of something…” There follows a remarkable moment when Sorrowful picks Marky up, supposedly to get her off the railing, but holds her for a short while, her hands resting on his shoulders, while their eyes meet. Then he sets her down and growls to his henchman Regret (Lynn Overman), “Take his marker…A little doll like that’s worth twenty bucks. Any way you look at it.” (“Yeah,” Regret grumbles, “she oughta melt down for that much.”)

The chemistry is there, too, in a charming scene where Sorrowful and Marky talk about God, and he grudgingly agrees to teach her to say her prayers: “All right, get outta bed. I’ll show you how to pray. Sort of. But don’t you tell anybody, see?” The topper to the scene is the look on Sorrowful’s face when he hears why she wanted to learn: “And please, God, buy Sir Sorry a new suit of clothes.” In the very next scene, Sorrowful the sartorial butterfly has hatched out of his rumpled cocoon. (“Sir Sorry the Sad Knight” is the name Marky gives Sorrowful; she names all his cronies according to the stories she’s heard about King Arthur.)

 
Marky’s “Lady Guinevere” is Bangles Carson (Dorothy Dell), nightclub singer and kept doll of Big Steve Halloway (Charles Bickford). Bickford, of course, was in the early stages of a long and distinguished career. Dell might have been, too; she was only 19 when she made Little Miss Marker, her second picture, with a husky contralto voice and a wise way with a good line. She too had a strong rapport with Shirley, only this time it extended to off-camera, where she was as much a big sister to her as Bangles is to Marky. Dorothy Dell might have become Paramount’s answer to Alice Faye, Joan Blondell or Jean Harlow. Alas, when this scene of Bangles singing Marky to sleep was shot, Dell had only three months to live. Early in the morning of June 8, 1934, she was returning from a party in Altadena with a friend, Dr. Carl Wagner. On a deceptively sharp curve on Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena, Wagner lost control. The car hit a rock, then, flipping end over end, a light pole and a palm tree. Dorothy was killed instantly, crushed in the mangled wreck. Wagner was thrown clear but  died six hours later without regaining consciousness. Shirley was back at Paramount then, making another loan-out (Now and Forever); the studio staff kept the news from her as long as they could.
 
 
Some of Shirley and Dorothy’s chemistry is on display in this scene of the two singing one of Bangles’s songs, “Laugh, You Son of a Gun” (by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger). I post it here not only for Shirley, but for Dorothy; she deserves to be remembered. (UPDATE 9/1/14: Alas, the video clip from Little Miss Marker that was originally embedded here has now gone dead. Here’s a soundtrack-only clip of the song, as it was recorded live on the set during filming; hopefully a full clip will become available someday):

 

 

LMM-Frame05-TitleWLittle Miss Marker fleshed out and in many ways improved Runyon’s original story. The amnesiac-father angle was always a bit of a credulity stretch; in the movie he becomes a suicide — driven off the end of his rope when the bet he placed with Sorrowful turns out a loser. This heightens Sorrowful’s sense of obligation to Marky: the race was rigged and he knew it when he took the man’s bet. It also links Marky to that losing horse, the ironically named Dream Prince. When Big Steve, Dream Prince’s owner, is suspended over suspicions about that fixed race, Steve and Sorrowful set Marky up as Dream Prince’s dummy owner so the horse can continue to run. Marky’s affection for “the Charger” (another one of her fanciful King Arthur names) draws her, Sorrowful and Bangles closer together, and leads to a crisis when Big Steve gets wind of shenanigans behind his back.
 
Little Miss Marker was a smash hit. With it Shirley Temple truly arrived, and it remains one of her best pictures with one of her best performances. It proved that her show-stopper in Stand Up and Cheer! was no fluke, that she could handle the central role in a major feature and hold her own with a castful of seasoned professionals. Just look at her billing in the picture’s opening credits: her name alone, before the title and just as big — bigger in fact than Menjou, Bickford, Runyon, even director Alexander Hall. Runyon’s story would be filmed again over the years, going from good (Sorrowful Jones [1949] with Bob Hope) to bad (40 Pounds of Trouble [’62] with Tony Curtis) to awful (Little Miss Marker [’80] with Walter Matthau). In every single one, the little girl playing Marky made absolutely no impression whatever. Can you even name them? (If you said Mary Jane Saunders, Claire Wilcox and Sara Stimson, move to the head of the Trivia Seminar.) Marky is Shirley Temple’s role for as long as movies live.
 
And how the boys at Paramount must have crowed over that “Adolph Zukor Presents” line; take that, Fox! If you don’t know what to do with Shirley Temple, stand aside. (Paramount did in fact offer to buy Shirley’s contract for $50,000 outright. Fox declined.) Besides “announcing” Shirley and making her a real star, Little Miss Marker served notice to the geniuses over at Fox that they’d better get off their duffs and come up with something better than that miserable walk-on in Change of Heart. Luckily for Fox, they didn’t waste any more time; they put Shirley in a flurry of tailor-made pictures that are all but unique in the first year of any newborn star — a concentrated series of hits so impossible to ignore that it would spur the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, unsure what else to do, to invent a brand new award category just for her.

 
To be continued…
 

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 1

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Shirley Temple got her feet wet in the movie business — and came to the attention of Fox Film Corp. — in Jack Hays’s “Baby Burlesks”. These were a bizarre series of shorts that pretty much have to be seen to be disbelieved. The basic idea was to show toddlers in diapers either spoofing famous movies or engaging in various grown-up activities: war, politics, making movies (although the series called into question exactly how grown-up that particular activity was).  The first of these shorts — though the “Baby Burlesks” name hadn’t been adopted yet — was Runt Page, a send-up of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page. And this shot right here was America’s first look at three-year-old Shirley Jane Temple. She sits in her high chair listening as her screen parents and another couple chat about having seen The Front Page; then she flops over in sleep and dreams a ten-minute version of the story featuring her and her tiny playmates.

In her dream, Shirley is the fiancee of reporter Bilgy Yohnson, played by Georgie Smith, her “first leading man”; they are shown here with little Eugene Butler, who played Bilgy’s editor Walter Scalds (“Bilgy Yohnson” and  “Walter Scalds” for The Front Page‘s Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, get it? That’s about the level of producer Jack Hays’s writing). America may have seen her in Runt Page, but nobody heard her voice, or the voices of any of the other kids; they were all dubbed by adults. For that matter, it’s an open question exactly how many people even saw her; in Child Star she writes that the one-reel short was a “dismal failure in the marketplace [and] its sale was abandoned”. Besides, as this frame suggests, Shirley still had a few things to learn — for instance, not to look at the camera.
 
But she proved to be a quick study, especially at home with Mother Gertrude, who coached her in how to “sparkle” for the camera. “When she said ‘sparkle’,” Shirley wrote, “it meant energy, an intellectual intensity which would naturally translate itself into vivid and convincing gesture and expression.” (By the way, let me insert here that there can be no doubt that Shirley herself wrote Child Star; she writes like a diplomat. But not like a diplomat talking to her foreign counterparts — no, like a diplomat reporting to her colleagues back at the State Department.)

Runt Page was produced and distributed by Universal; evidently Shirley’s memory of it as a “dismal failure” was correct, because the studio bailed on making any other shorts with the “Baby Stars”. Jack Hays and his troupe of toddlers wound up at Educational Pictures, a Poverty Row establishment that trawled around the fringes of Hollywood snagging talent either on their way up (Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Edward Everett Horton worked there early in their careers) or on their way down (Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle all fell to earth there when their own stars went into eclipse).

Like the other kids in the Baby Burlesks, Shirley was under exclusive contract to producer Jack Hays. To finance his share of the shorts (Educational supplied 75 percent of the funding, Hays 25 percent), Hays farmed the kids out for modeling gigs, promotional gimmicks, bit parts or walk-ons, anything that required a child, pocketing most of the money and passing a pittance along to the parents (in Shirley’s case the few dollars supplemented her father George’s income as a branch manager for California Bank). All that shuttling around L.A. on Hays’s loan-outs, on top of her lessons at Mrs. Meglin’s Dance Studio, gave Shirley a tidy fund of experience for one so young.

After Runt Page the dubbing by adult voices was abandoned, and for the rest of the Baby Burlesks’ brief run the kids would all perform, for better or worse, with their own voices. In Shirley’s case it was for the better, as it turned out she could sing and dance. Here, in her seventh Baby Burlesk, Glad Rags to Riches, she sings for the first time on screen, playing Nell (aka night club chanteuse La Belle Diaperene). The song is “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”; Shirley is four years and nine months old.

In September 1933 Jack Hays declared personal bankruptcy, and George Temple used his banking contacts to negotiate with Hays’s court-appointed trustee to buy back Shirley’s contract for $25. (Hays, one of Hollywood’s true bottom-feeders, said nothing at the time. But later, after Shirley had hit it big, he tried suing for half a million dollars, claiming the sale had been illegal. His nuisance suit dragged on for years before he finally settled for $3,500.)

After two-and-a-half years, in which she made 15 shorts and appeared in five features, Shirley was unemployed. Then, as the saying goes, fate intervened. At the end of November 1933, at a sneak preview for What’s to Do?, one of the Educational shorts Shirley had made on loan from Hays, she and her mother met songwriter Jay Gorney, recently hired by Fox Film Corp. This landed her an audition with Gorney and his partner Lew Brown, who was also serving as associate producer under Fox production chief Winfield Sheehan. Brown and Gorney cast her in a small part in a picture that was already well into production. For all intents and purposes, whatever her previous experience, Shirley Temple’s screen career — and certainly the Shirley Temple Phenomenon — began with…

 
Stand Up and Cheer!

(released April 19, 1934)

Stand Up and Cheer! was an “all-star” revue masquerading as a standard book musical (the original working title was Fox Follies). The premise of Ralph Spence’s script, based on a “story idea suggested by” Will Rogers and Philip Klein, was that the U.S. President, in order to help people forget their troubles during the Depression, creates a new cabinet post, Secretary of Amusement, and appoints Broadway producer Lawrence Cromwell (Warner Baxter, essentially xeroxing his Julian Marsh from 42nd Street the year before) to oversee federally-funded public entertainment.

This provided the framework for a series of songs and specialty numbers by guest artists. Most of them were second- and third-string stars even at the time — vaudevillian Sylvia Froos, dreamboat tenor John Boles, blackface red-hot-mama entertainer Tess “Aunt Jemima” Gardella, hillbilly singer “Skins” Miller, knockabout comics Mitchell & Durant — and they’re all now generally (even utterly) forgotten. In fact, the one who’s best-remembered today is the one who wasn’t a star at all — yet: Shirley herself. In this poster she receives seventh billing, but on screen she’s billed third, right after romantic ingenue Madge Evans. Clearly, Fox had some inkling of what they had on their hands.

 

In Child Star Shirley remembers her mother taking her on December 7, 1933 to audition for Jay Gorney and Lew Brown. She sang “Lazybones” sitting on Brown’s piano, then slid down and stood by while the two songwriters discussed her as if she weren’t there (none of them suspecting, no doubt, that she’d be writing about it half a century hence). Brown was dubious; Winfield Sheehan, he said, was “high on the other kid.” Gorney demurred: “Unnatural, precocious. A revolting little monster.” Brown agreed, and they offered Shirley the part. After all, they wrote the songs for Stand Up and Cheer!, plus Brown was the picture’s associate producer. Shirley never knew how they brought Sheehan around, but Abel Green, in reviewing the picture for Variety, mentions approvingly that Brown had “held out…for that cute Shirley Temple.”

Shirley’s share of Stand Up and Cheer! consisted of two brief scenes, a curtain-call appearance in the movie’s finale, and a song-and-dance duet with James Dunn to “Baby, Take a Bow”. It may have helped them both that “Baby, Take a Bow” was the best song in the score. Or was it that it just seemed like the best because Dunn and Shirley performed it? That’s a chicken-or-the-egg question, but the bottom line was beyond debate: “Baby, Take a Bow” was the highlight of the weird, unruly hodgepodge that was Stand Up and Cheer!

The picture was deep into shooting when Shirley was cast, and the cash-strapped studio couldn’t afford to dawdle, so she had some serious catching up to do. To save rehearsal time, dance director Sammy Lee jettisoned the tap routine he’d taught to Dunn and had the actor learn the steps Shirley already knew from Mrs. Meglin’s. Then, late on her first morning, it was off to the sound studio to pre-record the song. Dunn flubbed several takes, then finally got it right. When her turn came, Shirley stood on a stool (her mother had taught her the words to the song just minutes before) and sang — then was mortified when, on the very last note, her voice slipped into an unintended falsetto (“Dad-dee, take a bow-oo!”). She thought she’d ruined the take and was terrified she’d be fired, but she needn’t have worried; that little half-yodel at the tail end of her vocal provided the perfect “button” to the song and firmly cemented her Cute Quotient.

My apologies to any black-and-white purists in the house, but the best clip of “Baby, Take a Bow” available on YouTube really is this colorized version, so try to make allowances (anyhow, the colorizing is better than usual, without those spray-on-tan orange skin tones). It’s worth posting here because it really is one of movie history’s genuine A Star Is Born Moments. Besides, it’s a fun number, well-stage by Lee in Busby-Berkeley-on-a-shoestring style. First comes Dunn singing the song to Patricia Lee, she silently beaming and sashaying in Toby Wing fashion. Then the customary parade of chorines, with Dunn endearingly hopping hither and yon to avoid stepping on their long trains. Shirley enters at about the two-thirds point — first she poses, then she sings, then she dances, each stage of the number presented as if to say, “But wait, there’s more!” As Shirley dances, swinging her arms in joyous abandon, it’s easy to imagine that she knows this is the chance of a lifetime, and is carpe-ing this diem for all it’s worth. That may be reading too much, though; after all, she’s only five. It may simply be that she’s having fun!
 

 

Stand Up and Cheer! ran 80 minutes, and Shirley was on screen for a mere 5 minutes, 5 seconds. (The picture survives only in a 69 min. version reissued after Fox had merged with Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures — but considering that by that time Shirley was the main selling point, it’s a cinch they didn’t cut a frame of hers.) Fleeting as they were, those five minutes were all she needed, and there was no doubt who stopped the show. Variety’s Green got right to the point. In his very first sentence, he wrote: “If nothing else, ‘Stand Up and Cheer’ should be very worthwhile for Fox because of that sure-fire, potential kidlet star in four-year-old Shirley Temple.” (Shirley was five — in fact, she turned six the day before Green’s review appeared — but never mind; Fox publicity had already shaved a year off her age.)

Meanwhile, over on the other coast, the New York Times’s Mordaunt Hall was borderline obtuse. He absurdly compared Stand Up and Cheer! to Gilbert and Sullivan and spent long inches recounting the picture’s plot — not its most prominent virtue — and praising an excruciating scene between Stepin Fetchit (so popular in the ’30s, so cringe-making today) and a penguin in a coat and hat claiming to be Jimmy Durante (the voice impersonated by Lew Brown). But even Hall paused to mention “a delightful child named Shirley Temple.”

Even before the public verdict was in, Winfield Sheehan knew what he had, and he wasted no time locking Shirley down. Two weeks after Shirley’s audition for Brown and Gorney, he tore up the old one-picture, two-week contract and offered a new one for a year, with an option to renew for seven. The money was a lot better, but Shirley and her parents were still dealing in a buyer’s market, and Fox got a sweet deal.

That was the easy part. Now the question was: How could Fox — bleeding cash, defaulting on loans and teetering on bankruptcy — exploit their most promising new star when she was only five — oops! make that [wink] four — years old? While they mulled that over, Fox decided to make a little mad money by loaning her out. And so it was that Shirley Temple’s first above-the-title credit, and the role that confirmed her as a bona fide star, came to her from another studio.  

 To be continued…
 

A Cinedrome Pop Quiz

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Here’s a challenge for Cinedrome’s readers, just for fun.

I recently won an auction on eBay for a 16mm print. The
picture is Up in Mabel’s Room (1944), directed by Allan
Dwan, based on the 1919 Broadway chestnut by Wilson
Collison and Otto Hauerbach. The movie’s cast includes
Marjorie Reynolds, Dennis O’Keefe, Gail Patrick, Mischa
Auer, Charlotte Greenwood and Binnie Barnes.

But none of that is important for our purposes here. What
is important is what came with the print. The seller included
a little note thanking me for my purchase and hoping I enjoy
it. Attached to the note was a unique bookmark, consisting
of four frames of 35mm Technicolor film (plus a diagonal
slice of an additional frame at each end). The four frames
are reproduced on the left.

Now here’s the challenge, in two parts: (1) Name the movie
these  frames are from; and (2) Identify the actors. The
Grand prize is unlimited bragging rights. Leave your guesses,
or any questions, in the comments. All right, ready? Go!

Next up here at Cinedrome: Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 1.

 

Tragedy in Nevada, January 1942

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Before I get into my Shirley Temple retrospective, I want to mention an important new book by my friend Robert Matzen. The second-best thing about Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 is that you don’t have to be a movie buff to find it a real page-turner; the best thing about it is that if you are a fan of classic Hollywood, and particularly of Carole Lombard, this is one of the indispensible books.

Robert Matzen is the author of two other books that are proudly ensconced on my bookshelf and deserve room on yours: (1) Errol Flynn Slept Here (with Michael Mazzone), a biography of Flynn’s Mulholland Farm estate high in the Hollywood Hills, from the time he built it in 1941 until it was torn down in 1988 (after Errol was forced to sell, it became home first to songwriter Stuart Hamblen, composer of “This Ole House” and “It Is No Secret What God Can Do”, then to rock-n-roll icon Rick Nelson); and (2) Errol & Olivia: Ego and Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood, about Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, their on-screen magic and complicated off-screen relationship.

The title Fireball has a three-pronged irony: it describes Carole Lombard’s feisty screen persona, her vivacious off-screen personality, and (grimly) the way she died on January 16, 1942, when the DC-3 taking her home from a World War II bond drive in her home state of Indiana flew smack into the side of a mountain outside Las Vegas, Nevada. It was less than six weeks after Pearl Harbor; Lombard had been the first Hollywood star to hit the campaign trail to sell war bonds and buck up homefront morale, and now she became the first star to die in America’s sudden new war.

With a vividness that would do credit to Walter Lord — and if you’ve read Lord’s recounting of the Titanic sinking (A Night to Remember), Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy) or the Alamo (A Time to Stand), you know what high praise that is — Robert Matzen shifts his narrative almost cinematically back and forth between witnesses on the ground in Nevada who heard TWA Flight 3 pass overhead, saw the terrible fire light up the desert sky and trekked up the sheer slopes of Potosi Mountain to look for possible survivors, and a biography of Lombard from her birth in Fort Wayne to the night she boarded that plane for her last flight. Then he takes us through the cruel business of climbing up to the smoldering wreckage in the dead of a desert winter, identifying bodies (some of them burned, mangled or lacerated beyond recognition) and bringing them down by pack-horses for proper burial — a nightmare assignment that haunted strong men for the rest of their lives, and is hardly less haunting to read about.

 
Fireball naturally focuses on Lombard, her husband Clark Gable, who never did get over her loss, and her mother Elizabeth Peters and publicist Otto Winkler, who both died with her. But the book doesn’t neglect the 19 others who perished on Flight 3: the 15 Army airmen, recent bride Lois Hamilton en route to Long Beach to join her Air Corps husband, and the three-person flight crew (including pilot Wayne Williams and stewardess Alice Getz, shown here). That’s what really makes Fireball such a compelling read. 
 
Robert Matzen sure did his homework, and he sketches these individuals for us through official records, letters, and the memories of friends and family. They may be forever fated to remain what they were in 1942, supporting players in the national tragedy of the loss of Carole Lombard, but Robert makes them live again for us, however briefly, and he poignantly shows what the loss of them meant to those they left behind (one airman’s young widow never remarried, and mourned her lost husband all the 66 years that remained to her).
 
Robert even went (literally!) above and beyond, climbing Potosi Mountain (8,500 ft. above sea level) to visit the crash site, in terrain so remote and forbidding that debris from the crash remains on the mountainside over 70 years after the fact. And he speculates credibly on what we can never know for sure: what happened in the cockpit of that DC-3 in those last minutes to send a perfectly functioning airplane, under the command of TWA’s most experienced pilot, straight into the side of a mountain on a clear, calm night.
 
 

Bright Eyes, 1928-2014

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It’s been over three weeks now since the news came that Shirley Temple Black had left us. I’ve spent the time perusing her 1988 autobiography Child Star — refreshingly frank and thorough, if a bit starchy and formal. I’ve also been reacquainting myself with her movies, which was more than a little overdue; I haven’t seen most of her pictures since I was about the age she was when she made them. Some I’ve never seen at all.
I’ll be posting on a few of those movies, because I think her career is worth reviewing in detail. But while I’m working up to that, I don’t want to let her passing go without some comment in the meantime. Shirley Temple was one of a kind.

It may sound strange, but the comparison that sprang to my mind when I heard she was gone was with the Beatles, and not just because she appears in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 

Both were unprecedented showbiz phenomena that broke the mold. There were child stars before Shirley Temple (Jackie Coogan, Baby Peggy, Jackie Cooper), just as there were pop music sensations before the Beatles (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley). But these two — that one and those four — reached a level of popularity that dwarfed anything that had come before. There was simply nothing to compare them to.

And they went beyond merely breaking the mold. They reset it — in their own image. Pop idols from ABBA and the Bay City Rollers to One Direction and Justin Bieber would all be called the biggest thing since the Beatles, but there never was a “next” Beatles. It’s been 80 years since Shirley Temple’s bit part in Stand Up and Cheer! made America sit up and take notice, and from Jane Withers through Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall, Margaret O’Brien, Bobby Driscoll, Patty McCormack, Hayley Mills, Tatum O’Neal, Drew Barrymore, Abigail Breslin — plus countless sitcom kiddies sprouting up along the way — there’s never been a “next” Shirley Temple either.

 
My father once told me, “There were two bright spots in the Great Depression. One was Will Rogers, and the other was Shirley Temple.” In Child Star Shirley tells us that Rogers said they were set to make a picture together “when I come back from Alaska”, but of course he never did. After August 1935 Shirley would have to brighten the Depression all by herself. And that’s just what she did, in picture after picture, beginning with her bit in Stand Up and Cheer!, singing and dancing “Baby, Take a Bow” with James Dunn. It may be hard at this remove — for some, impossible — to grasp how this little girl charmed and cheered America just when the country seemed to be falling apart. But she did, and for three years she was the top star in the nation, if not in the world.

Later, when — as it inevitably must — her box-office power began to wane, her personal popularity never did. Neither did the level-headed cheer that made up her on-and-off-screen personae. There was no descent into bitterness, drugs or alcohol, no pathetic scramble to cling to lost youth, no humiliating splash in the tabloids. A happy second marriage to well-to-do Charles Black helped, but even that might not have happened without the solid, no-nonsense upbringing she got from her mother.

Gertrude Temple was the kind of woman who could have given stage mothers a good name — if there hadn’t been so few like her. She saw to it that little Shirley had a firm sense of self independent of her phenomenal popularity — and in time, independent of her mother. That’s why, when her movie career ended in 1950, Shirley was able to move on without a backward glance. The grace, confidence and poise instilled by Mother Gertrude served her daughter well through those early dizzy years and, more important, long after. They took her smoothly through, first, a second career in early television; then, surprisingly, a third career in politics and international diplomacy, as U.S. ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia and White House chief of protocol; and finally, a long bask in the setting sun as a Dowager Queen of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

I’ll have more to say about those first heady years in posts to come. For now: So long, Shirley, and thanks for the memories. We shall not look upon your like again.
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40th Anniversary Tour: Jesus Christ Superstar

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Cinedrome celebrates the “Golden Age of Hollywood”, but like many ages, that one has no precise boundary date. As a general rule, I set the end of the Golden Age around 1964 — because that was the last year when the Oscar for best picture went to a movie (My Fair Lady) that was produced entirely within the walls of a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.). On the other hand, it’s a hard rule indeed that allows no exceptions, and I’m making an exception now. Here’s why:

Director Norman Jewison’s 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar is one of the great movie musicals — arguably the last great musical before the genre went into a 30-year hibernation brought on by the collapse of the studio system, rising costs, flagging interest, and the passing from the scene, through death or retirement, of many of its best creators — the Arthur Freeds and Roger Edenses, the Busby Berkeleys and Vincente Minnellis, the Harry Warrens, Irving Berlins and Cole Porters.
 
I first saw Jesus Christ Superstar on June 30, 1973, and I wasn’t expecting much. It had been two years since the original concept album by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had made such an enormous splash, and the ripples had largely subsided; for me, at least, much of its novelty had worn off. Then came the Broadway production, directed by Tom O’Horgan, who had shaken up the Street four years earlier with Hair. From what I saw of O’Horgan’s Superstar in magazines and read in reviews, it sounded pretentious, bloated, glam-campy and tasteless. (Lloyd Webber and Rice reportedly weren’t too pleased with it, and saw to it that things were done differently when the show was staged in London’s West End.) When the movie’s trailer began playing in theaters, with its tanks and jet fighters, I wasn’t impressed; I thought this picture was going to be a stinker, and I wasn’t shy about saying so.
 

Wrong. As the picture unrolled on the screen before me I was bowled over time and again. At the fadeout I sat there stunned. My friend Paul, who had talked me into seeing it with him, turned to me and said tentatively, almost apologetically, “I thought it was pretty good, Jim.” I said, “I thought it was terrific, Paul.” This being the Era of Continuous Showings, we stayed and sat through the picture again. The next day I returned with other friends and saw it two more times.

As Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overture begins, Jesus Christ Superstar opens with the camera prowling among the ruins of the ancient city of Avdat, in Israel’s Negev Desert 30 miles south of Beersheba. Two thousand years ago this was an important stop on the Incense Road between India and Ceylon in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west; today it’s a crumbling wreck. As the camera glides among the pitted walls and topless columns, the only trace of modernity is a temporary scaffold maybe 30 feet high — put there by some team of archaeologists, perhaps — and the only sign of life is a small lizard skittering across a wall in front of our eyes. Suddenly, in the distance, a cloud of dust — coming from what we see is a red, white and turquoise Israeli school bus barreling along the unpaved roads. The bus screeches to a halt at the foot of the hill where Avdat sits, and out springs a ragtag band of hippies, dozens of them. They swarm over the bus like bees in a hive, shaking the sand from the tarps that cover the baggage on the roof, opening the large wicker baskets underneath, tossing down a confusing array of props, costumes, headdresses — and, very carefully, one large wooden cross. These hippies, we see, are a troupe of itinerant street performers; we sense that not one of them has ever seen the inside of a real theater. (In real life, every one of them had. In fact, two of them — Robert LuPone and Baayork Lee — would go on to create the roles of Zach and Connie, respectively, in the original production of A Chorus Line, and Lee would restage Michael Bennett’s choreography for the 2006 revival.) There’s an air of high spirits and camaraderie among the players — they cheerfully help one another into their gear, kiss each other on the cheek, then move on to the next chore. Gradually their excitement settles down, a feeling of ritual and purposefulness begins to grow among them, their movements become deliberate and stylized. Each one slips into his or her character, steps into his or her place, and they assume the tableau you see at the beginning of this post. They are ready to enact their own version of The Greatest Story Ever Told.
 
This show-within-the-movie approach was the inspiration of Melvin Bragg, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Norman Jewison, after a false start by Tim Rice. “I was asked to do a screenplay,” Rice remembered years later. “I thought great, fantastic…I wrote a screenplay rather like Ben-Hur;  you know, Jesus addresses 20,000 people, or armies of Romans steam in from the left. I think they took one look at that and thought, ‘No,  that’s gonna be $50 million, forget it.’ My screenplay was instantly ditched, and Melvin Bragg — Lord Bragg — came in and wrote a screenplay.” 
 

Bragg, the celebrated broadcaster, author and polymath who was made Baron Bragg of Wigton, County Cumbria in 1998, saw at once what Rice did not: that the cast-of-thousands Ben-Hur approach was not only prohibitively expensive but incompatible with the pop vernacular of Rice’s libretto for Superstar. Instead, Bragg and Jewison established the framework of the traveling band of players reconstructing the last seven days of the earthly life of Jesus in a tell-us-now-in-your-own-words manner, as if this modern Passion Play had been developed in improvisational workshops before being brought out to be performed in the open air. It is, in effect, an intimate Biblical spectacle in modern dress. In 1973, you could have left the theater after seeing the movie and, before you’d gone two blocks, seen a dozen people dressed exactly like the performers in Superstar — even the Roman soldiers in their purple tank tops and camouflage pants.

 

In his 2004 commentary on the DVD, Jewison credits production designer Richard Macdonald with the decision to shoot the picture on existing locations, making only minor modifications in the form of set dressing. Most of these locations — Avdat, King Herod’s Palace, the amphitheater at Beit She’an near Nazareth, where Jesus (Ted Neeley) is tried and condemned by Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen) — were the ruined remains of Ancient Rome’s occupation of Palestine under the Caesars. Choosing to shoot in these places was a transformative decision, for it meant that Jesus Christ Superstar would show the early followers of Jesus, with the ecstatic joy of young people who have found something truly new and exciting, literally dancing among the bones of the Roman Empire. It’s a metaphor of breathtaking power, one that (naturally) no other production of JCS in any form has ever been able to attempt, let alone duplicate. It gives Jewison’s movie a level of meaning that JCS has never had before or since, one that complements and enhances Webber and Rice’s original text. (These dances, by the way, were performed in desert heat that rose as high as 115 degrees or more. The performers could dance for no more than 30 seconds before Jewison had to call cut and let everybody step to the sidelines to towel off and rehydrate. That the dances — this one is the Simon the Zealot number — play on screen as sustained, high-energy performances is a testament to all concerned: Jewison, choreographer Rob Iscove, editor Antony Gibbs, and most of all, the dancers themselves.)

Because Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera — or a “sung-through musical”, if you prefer — with no spoken dialogue, music is a constant on the soundtrack. Jewison makes it a constant in the image as well, fitting every camera movement, every cut, every dissolve, every zoom in or out to the rhythm of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. Both the performers and the camera are choreographed, using techniques he learned in early television, when he directed music-variety series like Your Hit Parade and the Andy Williams and Judy Garland shows. In Superstar he does things unavailable in live TV, too — slow motion, freeze-frames, etc. Always, everything to the music: a group of dancers will leap up and freeze midair, then we cut to another group similarly suspended, who come to life and complete the movement the first group began. Everything right on the driving beat; even something as simple as blowing out a candle matches the rhythm of the music.

All these techniques — moving and cutting to the music, playing with time and space — anticipated the music videos that would come along in the 1980s. As Ted Neeley put it in the DVD commentary, “This was the very first long-form music video ever done. MTV came as a result of this; after seeing these, MTV happened.” 

 
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, granted, but only a bit of one. The picture is a long-form video, with a visual freedom that spans decades of movie-musical syntax, past and (from 1973) future. Jewison’s vision ranges both forward to MTV and back to variety TV, even to the unfettered imagination of Busby Berkeley: this is supposedly an impromptu performance by a band of players piling out of a bus, but the movie draws us on until we’re seeing things this troupe could never have stuffed into those wicker baskets, and we move freely around, among and over the performers in a way no audience could ever do. Take, for example, this exultant rendition of the title song, where the shade of Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson, center) addresses Jesus with his own doubts and questions. This frame comes at the beginning of a soaring crane shot, the camera rising to heaven as the ensemble sings “Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ / Who are you? What have you sacrificed?” The dancers glitter like silver angels, while Anderson’s costume recalls that of Sly Stone in his performance at Woodstock — a reference that was inescapable to audiences in 1973, every one of whom had certainly seen the hit 1970 documentary.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
All this, in the hands of Jewison, designer Macdonald, editor Gibbs, and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, adds up to much more than gimmickry and camera tricks for their own sake. Everything is done in service to two things: (1) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music; and (2) the complex human story at the heart of Tim Rice’s libretto — the very thing that (by all accounts I heard and read at the time) was swamped on Broadway under the campy glitz of Tom O’Horgan’s elephantine production. Even those tanks and fighter jets, which had me snorting in derision when I saw them in the trailer, were organic to the movie and made their symbolic points: the tanks were the irresistible, overpowering force driving Judas to his act of betrayal; the jets, the winged furies of conscience plaguing him for what he had done.
 
 

 

 
In discarding Tim Rice’s Ben-Hur-style treatment and swapping the cast of thousands for a cast of dozens, Bragg and Jewison could sharpen the focus on the libretto’s four central characters. First, of course, was Jesus (Ted Neeley), a man overwhelmed by a sense of having been assigned a divine mission without fully understanding what is expected of him. Jesus’s finest moment, and Neeley’s, comes in the soliloquy/aria “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)”, in which he sings Rice’s version of Matthew 26:39 (“O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me…”): “Take this cup away from me / For I don’t want to taste its poison / Feel it burn me, I have changed I’m not as sure / As when we started…”
 

 

 

 

Then Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson), the character who drew Rice and Webber to write Jesus Christ Superstar in the first place, in an attempt to understand and explicate his motives. Jesus may be the title role, but in a very real sense Judas is the lead. After the overture — which in the movie serves to introduce the cast, the characters, and the setting — Judas opens the proceedings with the first song, “Heaven on Their Minds”. If Jesus is uncertain what God expects of him, Judas feels no such uncertainty; he believes he knows what Jesus’s mission is, and he very much fears Jesus has betrayed it, letting dangerous celebrity go to his head: “…And all the good you’ve done / Will soon get swept away / You’ve begun to matter more / Than the things you say…” At the opera’s climax, after his remorseful suicide, Judas returns, dropping from the sky dressed in white (a forgiven angel?) to ask what it was all about: “Don’t you get me wrong… / Only want to know…” As the movie’s Judas, Carl Anderson gave the performance of his life — a life, alas, that proved all too short; he died of leukemia in 2004, age 58.

 
Mary Magdalene was played by Yvonne Elliman, one of two members of the cast who played the same role in the original concept album, on Broadway for Tom O’Horgan, and for Norman Jewison on film. (Neeley was in the Broadway ensemble, understudied Jesus, and had played the role in concert.) Elliman’s Mary is devoted to Jesus without fully understanding why, paralleling Jesus’s own devotion to God. She expresses her love and confusion in the musical’s best-known and most enduring song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, which became an enormous hit and was recorded by dozens of artists — most prominently, Helen Reddy, whose version was released almost simultaneously with the concept album’s appearance in the U.S. If Reddy stole Elliman’s thunder with her hit single, Elliman took it back again — and kept it for good — in the movie. Her heart-wrenching rendition is first among equals in the movie’s many high points, lovingly staged by Jewison and beautifully photographed in the dead of night by Douglas Slocombe.
 
The other cast member to go the distance from concept album to Broadway to Norman Jewison’s film was Barry Dennen as Pontius Pilate. (Dennen had, in fact, been responsible for Norman Jewison’s interest in Superstar in the first place. He had just been cast as Pilate when he left for Yugoslavia, where he was to play a small role in Jewison’s movie of Fiddler on the Roof; he took some Superstar demo tapes with him to study, and he asked for Jewison’s advice on playing Pilate. One listen to Dennen’s samples and Jewison contacted Universal back in the States to nail down the screen rights for him — this, mind you, long before the Broadway production, and before the album had even been recorded.) Dennen’s Pilate is a decent man and a conscientious judge, but he’s not immune to Roman arrogance, nor to the exasperated condescension to Rome’s subjects that comes with it.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar took in $10.8 million at the box office, turning a more-than-respectable profit on Universal’s $3.6 million investment (both amounts were far more money in 1973 than they sound like now). It has by now acquired the aura — if not of a great movie musical, as I consider it — at least of a classic. In 1973, however, it weathered a torrent of critical scorn such as few movies have had to withstand. I remember particularly Paul D. Zimmerman’s screed in Newsweek: “…one of the true fiascos of modern cinema…Lord, forgive them. They knew not what they were doing.” There was a fiasco on display here, but it wasn’t the movie, it was Zimmerman’s dunderheaded review. I might have written it myself, if I had never bothered to, you know, actually see the movie. To be fair, Zimmerman was only echoing the near-unanimous sentiments of his critical fraternity. It was as if critics all over, embarrassed at the hyperbolic praise heaped on the album two years earlier, when it was compared to Bach and Handel, had decided in some secret meeting to take it out on Jewison’s movie. (Time Magazine no doubt regretted that they had already used the snark-line “I Was a Teenage Jesus” on 1961’s King of Kings.) Even when a review was positive — and Hollis Alpert’s in the Saturday Review was the only one I ever found — it carried a snide, patronizing air of I-can’t-believe-I’m-expected-to-take-this-thing-seriously. The critical reception was so savage that I sent a telegram to my uncle in Muncie, Indiana:

DISREGARD REPEAT DISREGARD ALL REVIEWS DON’T MISS JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

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All these musings on Jesus Christ Superstar are prompted by an experience I had last Sunday, August 25. Ted Neeley came to Sacramento on the third stop (after Los Angeles and San Francisco) in a cross-country tour commemorating the picture’s 40th anniversary. He brought with him a pristine archival print from the Universal vault, and the audience that day heard Superstar‘s soundtrack as it was meant to be heard for the first time in years, maybe decades. (The audio mix on all the video transfers — laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray — is incorrect, the vocals too “hot” and instrumentals too “cold”.) Mr. Neeley — actually, I feel comfortable calling him Ted — met with audience members in the lobby before the screening, addressed us from the stage and fielded questions as the show was about to begin, and held genial court once again in the lobby afterwards. He chatted warmly with my friend Don (that’s Don on the left) and me for a good ten or 15 minutes, especially when he learned we were both actors, and that Don himself had played Pontius Pilate in a local production of the show. Like the movie itself, Ted Neeley has aged gracefully and could easily pass for 20 years younger than he is. Our visit with him was friendly and comfortable, a perfect way to top off the day’s reunion with one of my favorite movies.

As we were introduced, my first words to him were: “I have to thank you. I spent the entire summer of 1973 watching this movie in one of our local theaters here; I saw it 16 times in two months. I developed a huge crush on one of the dancers, but I never knew who she was until you identified her in your commentary on the DVD; it was Vera Biloshisky.” “Ahhh yes,” he said in that mellow Texas drawl that disappears only when he sings, “dear Vera. I just saw her yesterday. You weren’t alone in that; every guy on the set had a crush on Vera.” This is Vera dancing in the Simon the Zealot number (she’s visible, too, on the left in the midair shot of the female dancers a few pictures up); if you’ve seen Jesus Christ Superstar more than once I’ll wager you’ve noticed her yourself; she has an energy and vivacity that make her stand out even in that energetic, vivacious ensemble. (Ted Neeley’s own crush, by the way, went in a different direction. Just visible in the background between Vera’s outstretched limbs is Leeyan Granger. She and Ted met on the set; after shooting was finished they began dating, and she became — and remains — his wife.)
 
Here’s Vera again, cavorting with Josh Mostel’s King Herod on the shores of the Dead Sea. She’s unrecognizable behind those shades and under that platinum-blonde fright wig — at least I never recognized her, as much as I’ve seen the movie, until Ted pointed her out in a photo on my copy of the soundtrack LP. Vera Biloshisky, here’s a belated thank-you. You’ll never know, unless you’re reading this now, how you brightened my July and August of 1973. It was (for reasons I won’t go into here) an awkward time for me, and being able to watch you dancing in Jesus Christ Superstar helped get me through it.
 
 
 
Jesus Christ Superstar ends with yet another metaphor of breathtaking power, only this time it was entirely unplanned and unexpected. After the Crucifixion, after Jesus has given up the Ghost, the scene dissolves to the band of performers climbing back into the bus at dusk for the trip back to town. We see them mount the steps one by one — Barry Dennen, Josh Mostel, Larry Marshall (who plays Simon the Zealot), Bob Bingham and Kurt Yaghjian (the priests Caiaphas and Annas), dancers Jeff Hyslop and Robert LuPone, Yvonne Elliman, and finally Carl Anderson. Everyone except Ted Neeley. Anderson stands on the bus’s steps gazing at something in the distance behind us as the bus lurches away and lumbers down the hill back to the road. The picture dissolves again to what you see here: an empty cross silhouetted against a blood-red sunset.
 At this precise moment, something happened that nobody planned or even noticed. “We were shooting through a telephoto lens,” Ted Neeley remembered, “from a couple of miles away, looking into the setting sun. We didn’t even see it until later, when we were watching the dailies.” From out of nowhere, a figure appeared — it’s barely visible here at the bottom of the image, about one-quarter in from the left. On screen, the figure moves like a ghostly apparition from left to right across the dark part of the screen under the cross. It’s a shepherd leading his flock; we can just make out their woolly fleeces bobbing along at the bottom of the frame. A shepherd, leading his flock past an empty cross. And nobody knew who he was or how he got there. “Somebody Else,” says Ted Neeley, “was directing that day.”
 

Cinedrome Does Its Part

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A couple of years back, in my first post on the Debbie Reynolds Collection, I mentioned that my tentative plans to attend the auction, and maybe even bid on something, were torpedoed by a purchase I’d just made on eBay. That purchase was a 16mm kinescope of the live TV drama The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

For the benefit of those who don’t remember them (which is most people now), a brief explanation of “kinescope” is probably in order. In the days before the invention of videotape, a kinescope was the only way to preserve a television broadcast. There were certain technical refinements to the process — synchronizing the cathode ray scanner with the camera shutter, for example — but essentially it boiled down to photographing the image and recording the sound off a TV monitor. Videotape was in development all through the early 1950s, but was impractical for broadcast purposes until late in 1956, the year of The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

The drama was broadcast on the evening of Saturday, February 11, 1956 (the eve of Lincoln’s birthday) as the sixth episode of CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee. Top billed were Raymond Massey (who else?) as Lincoln and Lillian Gish as his wife Mary. But the largest role in the teleplay, and its driving performance, was John Wilkes Booth. In this publicity shot (it’s not a shot from the program) the actor playing Booth may look familiar. He should: it’s a young up-and-comer named Jack Lemmon.

Lemmon had been kicking around movies and live TV for several years, and just seven months earlier, in July 1955, he had premiered in his breakthrough performance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts. A little over five weeks after the Lincoln broadcast, Lemmon would win his first Oscar, as best supporting actor in Roberts. In a symmetrical coincidence, Lincoln‘s director, Delbert Mann, would also win an Oscar that night for directing Marty, 1955’s best picture.

I saw that broadcast of The Day Lincoln Was Shot; I was even aware of Jim Bishop’s bestselling nonfiction book, on which it was based (though I wouldn’t read it for several years yet). The night of the broadcast, I had already seen Mister Roberts, but being only seven years old, I had no inkling that the men who played the happy-go-lucky Pulver and the brooding, obsessive, angry Booth were one and the same. Even if I’d seen both as an adult, I doubt if I’d have made the connection; the two performances couldn’t be more different.

Having seen The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and remembering it vividly all these years, I never dreamed that I’d ever see it again, let alone own it, but here it was. Watching it again after 55 years, I must say I was bowled over. The adaptation (by Jean Holloway and Denis and Terry Sanders) is that rarity, both good drama and good history, correct in nearly every detail. The studio reconstruction of Ford’s Theatre alone, which then still languished unused and unrestored after 90 years, was a marvel of accuracy. (The 1956 broadcast was in color, but it was kinescoped only in black and white — a frustrating omission, but probably a blessing in disguise. If they had done it in color, they’d probably have used Eastman Color, the cheapest process, and it might well have faded to nothing by now.) And Jack Lemmon was — there’s no other word for it — simply brilliant.

The cast of Lincoln certainly lived up to Ford Star Jubilee‘s name: besides Massey, Gish and the new-minted star Lemmon, the broadcast was narrated by Charles Laughton. Others in the cast included Herbert Anderson (later the harried father in TV’s Dennis the Menace), Raymond Bailey (banker Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and William Schallert (later of Dobie Gillis and The Patty Duke Show, among hundreds of other credits) as Secretary of State William Seward’s son Frederick. (Schallert, by the way, is happily still with us, turning 91 earlier this month; a belated happy birthday and continued long life to him.)

At Cinevent this year in Columbus, I mentioned my kinescope of Lincoln to my friend Larry Smith, a nitrate specialist in the Film Preservation Section of the Library of Congress. (You can read more about Larry here.) Larry’s interest was piqued, particularly at the thought of a TV performance by Lillian Gish; such performances were comparatively rare, and surviving examples of them are even rarer. He asked me to e-mail him a reminder about it when we both got home.

So I did, and Larry did a little research on the subject. He came back with news which, while it didn’t entirely surprise me, still gave my heart a not-so-little flutter: it seems that I have what just might be the only surviving copy of the kinescope of that landmark broadcast. At the very least, I can say this: if there’s another copy of The Day Lincoln Was Shot out there, the owner has never bothered to bring it to the attention of the Library of Congress. Larry told me that his higher-ups had agreed that, because of the broadcast’s clear historical importance, the LOC should borrow my print for digital scanning and preservation.

I placed my 16mm print in the hands of FedEx that very day, and it’s now safely ensconced in the LOC’s facility in Culpeper, Virginia. The queue at the scanner is long, so it’ll no doubt be a while before I get it back, but naturally I don’t mind. Upon reflection, I do wish I had held onto it one more day and screened it so I could have a few screen shots to accompany this post — the dearth of images on the Internet lends credence to my suspicion that this is the only copy. But I don’t mind about that either. We all know that the cause of film preservation won’t wait, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to make this small contribution to it.
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Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2

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John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot! and Richard Roberts’s Smileage Guaranteed were the two brand-new scoops to be had at Cinevent this year (Showmen is still awaiting its official release date), but they weren’t the only relatively new books on sale there. Two others I picked up from collector James A. Gresham are shown here: Children of the Night (2007) and They’re Here Already!. The subtitles of the two books tell the story: each is a 200-plus-page collection of posters, lobby cards and pressbook covers, all reproduced in full color on high-quality glossy paper, with text and commentary confined to the opening pages of each chapter.
 
The chapter arrangements differ. In Children of the Night posters are grouped by subject matter; thus Chapter 1, “The Dracula Series” covers from Dracula (1931) to House of Dracula (’45); while “The Frankenstein Series” ranges from the 1931 original to Abbott and Costello Meet… (’48). There are chapters on Boris Karloff’s other movies, and Bela Lugosi’s, and the pictures they made together; horror movies of the silent era and the 1940s; and so on.  The book essentially cuts off in the late ’40s, when space- and/or atomic-age science fiction took over the task of exploiting audiences’ sublimated fears.
 
And that’s where They’re Here Already! picks up. This one takes things not subject by subject but year by year, from ’50 to ’59, with all the posters, half-sheets, inserts and lobby cards (both domestic and foreign) you could ever want to see for everything from Destination Moon (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (’51), The War of the Worlds (’53) and Forbidden Planet (’56) all the way down to Robot Monster (’53), The Killer Shrews (’59) and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (’58). 
 
The books do have their odd little quirks. The British sci-fi epic Things to Come (1936) is shuffled in with horror films of the ’30s, while Hitchcock’s Psycho, for Jim Gresham’s purposes anyhow, qualifies as 1950s science fiction.  Well, what the hell, I won’t quibble; both books are fun to browse through, and if the subtitle A Comprehensive Guide sounds like a bit of an overstatement, it sure ain’t by much. Some of the materials reproduced here are from Gresham’s private collection, while others were borrowed from other collectors and archives. Personally, I bought both books as potential sources of illustrations to use here at Cinedrome; you may wind up seeing parts of them in posts to come.

So much for the new stuff. Moving backward in the history of publishing about 85 years, I’ve always been a sucker for movie tie-in books. Even those 1950s and ’60s Signet paperbacks with their eight-page photo inserts (“Now! A Major Motion Picture!”). But especially the really old ones from the silent era, when movie tie-ins were a frontier as unexplored as the Wild West. My 1927 novelization of London After Midnight, for example; that one turned out to be a fun read in spite of me. (I’ll be running the annual reprint of my four-part synopsis next Halloween Season, but if you’re impatient you can find it here, here, here and here.)

I picked up two such Grosset and Dunlap motion picture editions from one dealer at Cinevent this year, both — against long odds — with their dust jackets reasonably intact. First, this novelization of the original 1923 The Ten Commandments, “a novel by Henry MacMahon from Jeanie Macpherson’s Story Produced by Cecil B. DeMille as the Celebrated Motion Picture…” Curiously enough, the cover reproduces a scene from the modern half of the picture, rather than the first half, which recounts the more spectacular story from the Book of Exodus. (Theodore Roberts as Moses adorns the spine of the book and — along with Charles de Roche’s Pharaoh, a cast of thousands, and a couple of pyramids — the back cover.) This one has an inscription on the flyleaf: “With a Merry Merry Xmas. To Mamie Masek From Sister Rose. 1928.” Judging from the handwriting, I’d guess that the sisters weren’t exactly young even then; wherever they are now, I hope their hearts can rest secure in the knowledge that Sister Rose’s Xmas gift has found a good home.

Then there was this one: Bardelys the Magnificent by Rafael Sabatini, “the Alexandre Dumas of Modern Fiction”. As to that comparison, personally, I’ve never quite managed to get into The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, but I sail through Sabatini’s books like a knife through soft butter. You may never have read him, but chances are you’re more familiar with his work than you think: he was also the author of Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Black Swan and Scaramouche, all of which became high-profile movies, some more than once. Probably his most famous — or notorious — quote is the opening sentence of his 1921 novel Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” In 1932, these words somehow found themselves inscribed over one of the doors of the newly completed Sterling Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale. By the time the university’s administration learned that the quote came not from some classic poet but from a mere swashbuckling bestseller, it was too late to do anything about it. (Evidently, Sabatini’s Scaramouche wasn’t the only one born with a gift of laughter.) When Rafael Sabatini died at 74 in 1950, his widow had the grace to have that sentence inscribed on his tombstone.

Bardelys the Magnificent, the third of Sabatini’s 31 novels, published in 1905, was filmed by MGM in 1926, directed by King Vidor and starring John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman, and this edition was published in conjuction with that. Bardelys (the film) was considered lost for over 70 years, one of a number of MGM pictures deliberately suppressed by the studio. For once, however, it wasn’t MGM’s fault. When they bought the rights to Sabatini’s book in 1926, the terms of the sale specified that it was only for ten years; after that the studio had to buy the rights again or destroy the negative and all prints. By 1936, a silent picture with a fallen and deceased star was of no commercial value to MGM, and they had nobody under contract to put into a remake, so into the incinerator it went. And there the matter stood until 2006, when a single nitrate print surfaced in a large collection of films purchased by Lobster Films of Paris. It was missing one reel and in poor condition, but was preserved and digitally restored by Lobster, with the missing material — a little under five minutes — replaced with production stills. This restoration crops up now and again on Turner Classic Movies and is available in a gorgeous DVD from Flicker Alley; also here from Amazon. Even after all these years, Sabatini is a great read, and you could do a lot worse than to dive into one of his elegant, broad-shouldered adventure-romances. If you do, you’ll find that Warner Bros.’ 1935 Captain Blood was almost page-for-page faithful to the book, but be prepared for a surprise if you pick up The Sea Hawk; by the time Warners and Errol Flynn filmed it in 1940, nothing but the title remained.
 

Which brings me to this. Warner Bros.’ 1940 Sea Hawk was the second picture of that title. The first was a 1924 silent from First National Pictures, directed by Frank Lloyd with Milton Sills, Enid Bennett, Lloyd Hughes and Wallace Beery. Unlike the Errol Flynn version, this one was quite faithful to the novel, telling the story of a nobleman of Elizabethan England (Sills) betrayed by his treacherous half-brother and sold into slavery in a Spanish galleon. He escapes, converts to Islam and, in time, becomes a dreaded pirate of the Barbary Coast: Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk. When Warner Bros. absorbed First National later in the 1920s, it acquired the rights to Sabatini’s novel, and 15 years later — First National evidently having driven a harder bargain than MGM did over Bardelys the Magnificent — they made it into a vehicle for Errol Flynn, changing everything but the title and the time period. (Captain Blood, by the way, was also filmed as a silent in 1924. This was produced by Vitagraph, another company acquired in 1925 by the burgeoning Warner Bros. enterprise. Thus did the rights to this other Sabatini novel devolve onto Warners, where they sat for ten years before being dusted off and — after a false start with Robert Donat — making Errol Flynn a star. The 1924 Blood, unfortunately, survives only in a truncated digest form barely a quarter of its original length. It reposes now at the Library of Congress, waiting hopefully for more pieces to be discovered.)

But back to The Sea Hawk. What you see here is the cover to the souvenir program of the earlier, more faithful picture. I picked this up at Cinevent too — collecting souvenir programs is a favorite hobby of mine. This one is smaller than the usual program, only 6×9 inches, but it’s well designed and informative. The three-color illustration on the cover yields to two colors within, but I have to commend the designers for the number of pictures and the amount of information they managed to include — including a complete synopsis of the story (no doubt secure in the belief that nobody would read it until after they’d seen the picture).

This version of The Sea Hawk, unlike Captain Blood, survives intact, and it’s available here from the Warner Archive. It must take a back seat, of course, to the 1940 version; it doesn’t have Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, or director Michael Curtiz. Most of all, needless to say, it doesn’t have Errol Flynn. For all that, it’s a lavish and vigorous production, the DVD sparkles, and Milton Sills, while he’s no Errol (who was?), is a good swashbuckling hero.

One of my favorite dealers at Cinevent — and I daresay I’m one of his favorite customers too — is Larry Newman of Philadelphia, who specializes in souvenir programs, like the one above for The Sea Hawk. I probably buy more individual items from him than I do from anybody else, and it’s a rare year when his table doesn’t hold at least a few surprises for me. This year it had a whopper: a major Hollywood picture from 1925 that I had absolutely never heard of.  Here it is: The Wanderer, a Biblical spectacle based on the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel According to St. Luke. It was adapted from a 1917 play by Maurice V. Samuel, which was apparently one of those touring productions that popped up in those days hoping to ride the coattails of the stage version of Ben-Hur (the Les Miserables of the 1900s and ‘teens). Judging from the programs (Larry also had a copy of the stage program, and I picked up that one too), both play and picture expanded greatly on the New Testament. Where St. Luke merely tells that the young man “wasted his substance with riotous living”, the movie gives us (if you’ll pardon the expression) chapter and verse. The picture also includes something Jesus neglected to mention when telling the story to his disciples: a climactic scene of our antihero barely escaping with his life while a righteous prophet and a rain of lightning bolts from God destroy the sinful city a la Sodom and Gomorrah.
 
The picture was directed by auteurist icon and colorful character Raoul Walsh, and it starred William Collins Jr. as the prodigal Jether (Collins, 23 at the time, had a busy career between 1916 and 1935; in fact, he’s in the silent Sea Hawk too). Others in the cast included Ernest Torrence, Greta Nissen, Wallace Beery, and as the prodigal’s forgiving father, none other than Tyrone Power. No, not that Tyrone Power; his father, Tyrone Power Senior, age 56 in 1925. Plus, in a dance-on bit at a bacchanalian orgy, 19-year-old Myrna Loy (not mentioned in the program, of course).
 
I couldn’t believe this picture had escaped my notice all these years. “Does it even survive?” I asked Larry; he didn’t know. (Answer: Yes, there’s a print in the UCLA Film Archive.) At least I wasn’t the only one to overlook it. It wasn’t even reviewed by Variety, and they reviewed everything. (I imagine Jesse Lasky had some words with Sime Silverman about that oversight.) It didn’t escape the notice of the New York Times, though; Mordaunt Hall reviewed it in the issue of August 20, 1925, the day after it opened at Manhattan’s Criterion Theatre. Mr. Hall allowed as how “[p]ictorially is is unquestioningly beautiful, and the players acquit themselves with distinction…” but he went on to say, “The parable in St. Luke [chapt.] xv is told in fewer than 500 words, and after seeing this effusion one wishes that the producers had been less imaginative.”

I bought some other programs as well: Lilac Time (’28) with Colleen Moore giving the performance of her career as a French mademoiselle, and an incredibly young Gary Cooper as a dashing aviator stationed on her father’s farm during the Great War. Sally (’29), the early musical with Broadway’s Marilyn Miller, which was shot in two-strip Technicolor but, except for one rediscovered musical number, survives only in black and white. I even found one for The Birth of a Nation — which by itself isn’t as rare as you might think; there are four for sale on eBay as I type this. This one, however, still has its onionskin outer cover with the floral pattern, which on most such programs seems to have been the first thing to disappear once whoever bought it got home from the theater.

But I’ll close with this one. Not because it’s a particularly good program or from a particularly good movie — neither is the case — but because it represents one of the sorrier episodes in 1950s Hollywood, and one that has a certain significance for me because it bears on my native state of Indiana.
 

Raintree County was the first and last novel of Ross Lockridge Jr. of Bloomington, Indiana (which happens to be 41 miles northeast of the town where I was born). It was published on January 5, 1948 by Houghton Mifflin and was chosen a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club. Almost exactly two months later, just as the novel was hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list, the 33-year-old Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of his Bloomington home; it was March 6, 1948 (which happened to be five days before I was born).

Why did he do it? At the time, some speculated that after the long effort to bring his 1,066-page novel to fruition, Lockridge was exhausted and depressed at the thought of how he would ever follow it up. My uncle once expressed the opinion that Lockridge had deliberately set out to write the Great American Novel — in fact, believed that he had — and was fatally disappointed when reviews, while positive and even occasionally rapturous, failed to acknowledge it as such. I think my uncle might have hit the nail close to the head. Reading Shade of the Raintree by the novelist’s son and biographer Larry Lockridge, one thing seems clear: it was little short of a miracle that this brilliant, troubled, unstable young man lived long enough to complete his huge book.

The setting of Raintree County is a fictitious county in rural Indiana, and (like James Joyce’s Ulysses) it takes place on a single day — July 4, 1892 — following its main character, 53-year-old John Wickliff Shawnessy, and his family through the events of the day. Throughout, there are flashbacks to the past, as long ago as 1844 and as recently as earlier that same year, presented non-chronologically as they spring to the memories of Shawnessy and the other characters. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, yet carefully structured saga that seeks to summarize wholly the American experience: both everyday life and great events, as well as the aspirations, lofty or squalid, of ordinary people, and the legends and inchoate yearnings that underlie their psyches and shared culture. The book won the “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Annual Novel Award” — actually just a publicity-savvy way of buying movie rights before publication, but it brought Lockridge $150,000. A tidy sum now, a not-so-small fortune in 1948.*

By the end of 1948, Raintree County had drifted off the bestseller lists and been aced out of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction by James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor. Financial difficulties and internal power struggles at MGM put any plans to film the novel on a far-back burner.

Until 1956, when the movie that goes with this program went into production. In his biography of his father, Larry Lockridge remembered attending the world premiere in Louisville, Kentucky with his mother, brothers and sister in October 1957 (on their own dime, uninvited by MGM): “Critics agree that the movie we then watched is among the world’s worst.” This is overly harsh; the worst you can say about Raintree County — as a movie, considered by itself — is that it’s resolutely mediocre. That’s also the best you can say for it.

But that’s as a movie, considered by itself. As an adaptation of Ross Lockridge’s novel, however, there’s nothing bad enough to say about it. It’s as thorough a mangling as any novel ever got at the hands of Hollywood, and that’s saying something. Writer Millard Kaufman, a man of meager experience with little more than John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock and a couple of UPA cartoons under his belt, was completely flummoxed by a book that would have challenged more talented hands than his. His solution was to jettison the flashback structure, narrow the time frame to 1859-65, and turn it into a would-be Gone With the Wind, with Elizabeth Taylor as a Scarlett O’Hara manqué. Taylor, to her credit, did her best and snagged the first of four consecutive Oscar nominations. But as John Shawnessy, Montgomery Clift (who was probably miscast in the first place) was in a near-fatal auto accident that held up production for two months while his shattered face was reconstructed, and the visible on-screen difference between his pre- and post-accident performances is a grisly thing to see.

Be that as it may, Raintree County the novel was as mutilated on purpose as Montgomery Clift had been by accident. The director was Edward Dmytryk, a workhorse as relentlessly mediocre as the Raintree County movie itself. Dmytryk later admitted — nay, boasted — that he himself had never read the book (as if we needed him to tell us that). Like The Sea Beast (Cinevent, Day 2), Raintree County is the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. My nephew, a college literature major who read the book at my suggestion, called it “definitely the greatest novel I never heard of” — and shook his head in dismay at what MGM did to it.

Imagine if David Selznick had served Margaret Mitchell as poorly as producer David Lewis, Millard Kaufman, Edward Dmytryk et al. served the dead-and-buried Ross Lockridge Jr.; would anybody ever have bothered to get Gone With the Wind right? Of course not. Nobody will ever bother with Raintree County either. And that’s just too damn bad.

——————–

 *POSTSCRIPT: John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows informs me that only five MGM Novel Awards were ever given, and only two were ever filmed: Raintree County and the first winner, Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Street (awarded 1944, filmed 1947). The other winners: Before the Sun Goes Down by Elizabeth Metzger Howard in 1945; Return to Night by Mary Renault in 1946; and in 1947 a special award in addition to Raintree County‘s, to About Lyddy Thomas by Maritta M. Wolff. In May ’48 MGM discontinued the award as a belt-tightening measure. While it lasted, according to Variety, the award had constituted “the heaviest literary award in history.”
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After a Brief Intermission…

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I haven’t forgotten that I promised a Part 2 to my post “Browsing the Cinevent Library”. Unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with some computer issues lately that have put more than a little crimp in my never-lightning-swift pace, including losing my image-editing software of choice — which, careless as I often am in such things, I can’t remember the name of and hence can’t find again to reinstall. I’m working to resolve all this as fast as I can (real life does have a way of interfering, doesn’t it?), and will get back to the subject at hand as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, here are a few afterthoughts about another of the pictures screened at Cinevent this year: Cry of the Werewolf (1944), a Columbia B-picture that took the screen in Columbus, appropriately enough, at midnight on Saturday, Day 2. This was the first directorial effort of Henry Levin, who would go on to a career not without its pleasant touches here and there: Mr. Scoutmaster, Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, Where the Boys Are. Unfortunately, Cry of the Werewolf isn’t one of them. But it’s not a total washout either. In the title role, believe it or not, is 19-year-old Nina Foch as a gypsy princess struggling with an ancestral lycanthropic curse. It’s Nina Foch all right, but it wasn’t easy to recognize her; in this she’s softer, less hard-edged and (no pun intended) cougar-tough than she would appear later in movies like An American in Paris (can you believe she’s only 27 in that one?), Executive Suite and Spartacus.

Beyond that rather interesting surprise, though, Werewolf is a pretty flaccid affair.  It’s clear that the boys in Columbia’s B unit — producer Wallace MacDonald, writers Griffin Jay and Charles O’Neal, et al. — took a look at what Val Lewton was doing over at RKO with pictures like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and thought, “Hey, we can do that!” Well, no. That sort of atmospheric chiller, it turns out, is not as easy as Lewton and Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson and Robert Wise made it look. It’s not as simple as sending a German shepherd sauntering through a darkened set and telling the audience it’s a wolf. Still, at 63 minutes, Cry of the Werewolf wasn’t long enough to waste my time; on the contrary, it demonstrated by negative example just how efficient and effective Val Lewton’s movies really were. Since “this utterly suspenseless film” (NY Times, 8/12/44) will probably never come out on video, it’s thanks to festivals like Cinevent that we’re able to make that kind of compare-and-contrast.

Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 1

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The main reason my luggage is so heavy when I leave Columbus after Cinevent every year is the number of books I buy there. Lobby cards, stills, sheet music, even DVDs can weigh next to nothing, but books — that’s a whole other kettle of bound pages. There are books old and new on offer there, and two of the new ones I picked up this year should find a place on any well-stocked cinema bookshelf.

My friend John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!: Movies as Merchandise in Golden Era Hollywood all but beggars description. John is the proprietor and sole contributor to Greenbriar Picture Shows, the premier classic movie blog — this in a field simply chockablock with first-rate blogs. If you haven’t bookmarked John’s blog, you should, before you read another word of this one.
 
John has a particularly keen interest in the advertising and promotion end of things — that is, as it was practiced on a theater-by-theater basis back in the days before coordinated multimedia campaigns for movies opening simultaneously on 6,000 screens all over the nation. That’s the focus of Showmen, Sell It Hot!, many of its chapters drawn from — and expanding upon — posts he’s made on the subject over the seven years Greenbriar’s been going. It’s especially fascinating to see how small-town theater owners used to ballyhoo their coming attractions; urban exhibitors could wait perhaps a week for word of mouth to kick in, but it was a whole different game for houses where the bill changed every two or three days. At that level, promotion was very much a seat-of-the-pants operation.
 
Not that the book neglects the major urban and studio-driven campaigns. There are also chapters here on the selling of the sensational new pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio (at the time, it was a toss-up which word in the title was more exotic, “Rio” or “flying”); the incredibly long “legs” of 1939’s Jesse James with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott; the Marx Brothers’ second movie career at MGM, beginning with A Night at the Opera; the unexpected success of King Kong in its 1956 reissue; MGM’s conundrum over what to do with Saratoga (’37) when Jean Harlow died during production; likewise Warner Bros.’ scramble to sell James Dean’s posthumous pictures; the promotional campaigns for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Bonnie and Clyde; and more.
 
Written in John’s breezy vernacular style reminiscent of both Variety and Time Magazine in the 1930s, Showmen is a mine of amazing information. John makes the surprising — yet entirely logical — point that in the 1930s, installing air conditioning could do more for a theater’s bottom line than CinemaScope, 3-D or stereophonic sound 20 years later (“A lot of people went to the movies just to cool off, never mind what was playing.”). And he ferrets out eyebrow-raising information on individual pictures’ budgets and box office take. Did you know that the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup cost Paramount more than MGM spent on Grand Hotel, or RKO on King Kong? That the Brothers’ biggest box office hit was A Night in Casablanca (hardly their best)? I didn’t, but John’s got the figures here (heaven only knows where he finds them).
 

The publisher, GoodKnight Books, has given Showmen a production to make any author proud, and other authors envious. There are hundreds of illustrations — many (and probably all) from the Greenbriar site and John’s personal collection — all of them reproduced exactly as they are. If they’re black-and-white or sepia, one- two- or full-color, then that’s how they appear here — and thanks to editor and designer Mary Matzen and the super-rich production techniques at GoodKnight, they’re sharper and clearer than they ever were when John ran them at the Greenbriar site. Click here to learn how to get your copy of Showmen, Sell It Hot! with a pre-release discount. (On a side note, two other GoodKnight Books your shelf should make room for, if they’re not there already: Errol Flynn Slept Here: The Flynns, the Hamblens, Rick Nelson and the Most Notorious House in Hollywood and Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood.)

It’s always an exaggeration to say somebody knows “everything there is to know” about a subject, but when the somebody is Richard M. Roberts and the subject is Hollywood comedy, it’s really not all that exaggerated. For years now Richard has been one of the go-to guys for Cinevent’s program notes, especially when it comes to 1920s and ’30s comedy: the Laurel and Hardy shorts sprinkled here and there all weekend, the annual tradition of spotlighting three Charley Chase shorts, and so on.  He performs similar service for Slapsticon, the annual festival of silent-to-early-sound comedy that’s coming up on its 11th installment at the end of June (at a new venue on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington).

So if Richard does not know everything there is to know on the subject, it’s not for want of trying to find out. And he’ll probably never give up. Which is good news for us, because his new book — the first in a proposed trilogy — makes us the beneficiaries of his efforts (and those of co-researchers Robert Farr and Joe Moore). Here comes the title (brace yourself, it’s a long one): Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter: Musings on the Comedy Film Industry 1910-1945, Vol. One: Hal Roach.

As Scott Eyman points out in his “Big-Time Celebrity Intro” (Richard’s title, no doubt), it’s simply insane that Hal Roach managed to live a hundred years without anyone ever writing a comprehensive biography. After all, here was the man who gave us Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and Harold Lloyd; jump-started the careers of directors like Leo McCarey and George Stevens; and as Scott puts it, “more or less invented situation comedy as we know it”. Hal Roach has been gone 20 years now, and that biography still hasn’t turned up. Smileage Guaranteed may be as close as we’re likely to get. It’s not a biography, but it’s definitely comprehensive: a player-by-player, picture-by-picture, year-by-year survey and appraisal of the output of the Hal Roach Studios, the “Lot of Fun”.

Richard spends relatively little time on Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd or the Our Gang series; they’ve been amply covered elsewhere. Instead, the profusely illustrated Smileage Guaranteed concentrates on other performers on the Roach lot — Snub Pollard; Will Rogers; Max Davidson; the Parrott brothers, Paul and Charles (the latter of whom began as Roach’s ace director, then moved in front of the camera to gain stardom as Charley Chase); Harry Langdon at the beginning of his long career decline; Mabel Normand at the sad end of hers; and on and on. Not all of Roach’s brainstorms were as felicitous as Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang, and Richard covers the misfires as well — the Taxi Boys, for example, and the bizarre clown Toto (ne Armando Novello).

Fully 188 pages of the book’s 502 are devoted to an exhaustive filmography of every title Hal Roach produced (over 1,000 of them), followed by further filmographies for two of Roach’s major (albeit secondary) stars, Charles Parrott (aka Chase) and the Jewish comic Max Davidson.

All in all, Smileage Guaranteed could well warrant another subtitle to go with all those it already has: More Than You Ever Imagined There Was to Know About Hal Roach. Written in Richard’s wry conversational style, it is, like Roach’s studio, a lot of fun. And there are two more volumes to come.

These two tomes were my major acquisitions at Cinevent this year; between the two of them they took up three pounds and 234 cubic inches of my luggage. I’ll talk about some of the others next time.