I ordered the Warner Archive’s Vitaphone Varieties collection because the transition to sound is one of two periods in movie history that particularly fascinate me (the other is the early “outlaw” years circa 1888-1912 with its patent wars, jockeying for supremacy and feverish experimentation). I also hoped that this new batch of 60 shorts would provide the grist for a post or two, like the MGM shorts package I wrote about here and here.
I got half a loaf. I found the collection interesting, but I don’t know if anyone else would agree if they don’t already share my penchant for the period.
Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (perfect title!) chronicles the dizzy suddenness with which silents went out and talkies came in, even as many Hollywood insiders said it was only a passing fad. Only in hindsight do they look to us like dodos standing neck-deep in water shouting “There isn’t going to be any flood!” And only in hindsight does it look like it happened overnight; there were three long and confused years before silents finally bit the dust.
That’s the period covered by this collection, and it’s actually a little less than claimed at the WA site. There are no shorts from 1926, the earliest in the collection being the first, The Revelers (from April 1927, six months before The Jazz Singer). And truth be told, this batch of shorts is a little drab compared to an earlier 6-disc set, Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts. That one covered nearly a full decade, 1931-38, with more familiar names than you’ll find in this one. The new collection has a lot of seven-to-ten-minute turns by vaudevillians that I for one had never heard of, and whom I couldn’t find in any of my vaudeville references.
They’re not all strangers. An amazingly young-looking Jay C. Flippen shows up in The Ham What Am from 1928. Still years from his character-actor heyday in pictures like Brute Force, Winchester ’73 or They Live by Night, or singing that the farmer and the cowman should be friends in Oklahoma!, Flippen regales us — from the usual incongruous Vitaphone parlor set — with a couple of songs and a lot of jokes, all while flashing a toothy, Joker-size smile and brandishing a cigar the size of a horse’s leg.
Codee may be harder to place from this picture, but her accent and dignified look kept her busy as Madame This or That: Mme. Borodin, the owner of Margaret O’Brien’s ballet academy in The Unfinished Dance; Mme. Bouget in That Midnight Kiss, and so on. Any sci-fi fan will especially remember her, as I do…
There are a few more familiar names and faces — comedian Joe Frisco, character actors Montagu Love, Franklin Pangborn and Henry B. Walthall — but they’re not plentiful. For the most part, what the entertainers in this collection have in common more than anything else is their utter and absolute obscurity, then and now.
Who are these people? Some of them seem to have based their act on the premise that they have no talent whatsoever. Like Jack Born and Elmer Lawrence here, using floppy shoes, a Jew’s harp, and a sad-sack dead-pan delivery in a vain effort to make themselves (and their jokes) funnier than they are. Did they ever really connect with an audience? We can’t know because the audience is, by and large, as gone as they are. Nothing ages like comedy, which is why when we find someone who’s still funny — a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Groucho Marx, even a Moe or Curly Howard — it tells us something. All we know for sure about Born and Lawrence is that they’re not funny now. (Neither, for example, is one Charles “Slim” Timblin, dolled up as a blackface preacher in Revival Day [1930]. Here we have confirmation that at least some people at the time weren’t amused: Sitting in Rev. Timblin’s congregation are a number of bona fide African Americans, and they don’t think he’s funny; rather, they look sullen and disgusted at the thought of what they must put up with for — what, a measly five bucks a day?)
Parade” before a phalanx of tap-dancing
kids in satin uniforms — and for childhood
Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal
The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.
Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow, writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem — so close, in fact (the pictures were released less than five months apart), that I have to believe Beal was being prepared while Night was shooting, and being shot while Night was being readied for release. Without access to Paramount’s detailed records I can’t confirm that, but the two movies are simply too close a match, variations on a theme of frail little humans trapped in a web of which they can see only the dark and shadowy outline. The difference between them — the variation — is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of sinister and mysterious forces beyond our understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has a name — most of us were raised on childhood tales of it — but as adults, our belief in our own sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully refuse to see it until it’s too late.
Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won’t Believe Me (’47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock (’48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes — then, in ’49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men’s resumes — there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.
Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland’s one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason — that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-’60s TV. Latimer’s last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.
Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning — Hanson’s books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can’t take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here’s your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn’t speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrent tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.
Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he’s started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: “It’s not Beal, it’s me.”
Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.
Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, but I’m not sure he isn’t even better here — more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He’s the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.
The phrase “banality of evil” was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, its persistence. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won’t give up; he’ll be back, and he’s patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert’s testimony: “Glory be! I’ve wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I’ve pinned his shoulders to the mat…” Beal turns ironically to Foster. “I wonder if he knows it’s two falls out of three.”
Lost & Found: Night Has a Thousand Eyes
In using the heading “Lost & Found” for this post, I don’t mean to suggest a “lost” film in the sense that historians and archivists have come to mean it. I mean a movie that was once readily available — at least on TV, and in my neighborhood, in the days of local stations’ film libraries and syndication packages — but that now seems to have vanished entirely except for the occasional 16mm print or bootleg video.
John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes is one of those movies. It presumably still exists in the vaults at Universal Pictures (proprietors of Paramount’s pre-1950 library), waiting for the day Universal finds it worth their while to issue a white-market DVD. The day may yet come; the picture does have its following. I tried to bid on a 16mm print on eBay a couple of years ago, but the price quickly went out of my range — and this at a time when 16mm features were hardly moving on eBay at all.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes originated as a novel by Cornell Woolrich, one of the more unusual creeps in the history of Hollywood (where creeps have never exactly been an endangered species). Born Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich in 1903, his parents separated when he was little. He lived with his father in Mexico until he was 12, then moved to New York to live with his mother — which, except for one brief interval, he did for the rest of her life. He dropped out of Columbia when his first novel Cover Charge promised success as a writer. Another thing Woolrich did in Hollywood was get married, in 1930, to 20-year-old Gloria Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of silent movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was never consummated, and Gloria eventually had it annulled in 1933, after Woolrich had gone home to Mother. According to Corliss (who cites Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins), when Woolrich moved out on Gloria he left behind a diary for her to read. In it, for starters (says Corliss), he had written that “it might be a really good joke to marry this Gloria Blackton.” The diary also went into “sordid and dreadful detail” about his daily sexual adventures with anonymous men; as Corliss says, while he never consummated his marriage, he was hardly celibate.
I say it again, the man was a creep — not because he was gay, but because of the diary, and because he left it behind for Gloria to read. Then there’s the fact that he lived with his mother until he was 53, when she died. By itself that would just be kind of odd; taken with everything else it tends to red-line the creep factor. (It sounds like Sebastian and Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer.) When his mother died in 1957, Woolrich fell to pieces and wasted away. Literally. He neglected a minor foot infection, dulling the pain with booze, until it became gangrenous and they had to amputate his leg above the knee. When he died, alone and miserable in 1968, he weighed only 89 pounds.
The doom-laden fatalism and frustrated self-loathing that lurk under the thin skin of Woolrich’s life surfaced in his writing when he turned from Fitzgerald Jazz Age society to the dank, shadowed recesses of crime fiction. It may not have made him rich or famous, but it kept him eating, and as luck would have it he caught the leading edge of the wave — first of the pulp-fiction detective magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, then of the dark, morally ambiguous movement in 1940s Hollywood that would become known as film noir. There were no fewer than 15 movies made from his novels and stories in the 1940s alone, and dozens more (for theaters and TV) since then. Probably the best of the lot — certainly the most famous — is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), originally published as “It Had to Be Murder” in Dime Detective Magazine (Feb. ’42). But there were others: Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man (1943, from Black Alibi), Phantom Lady (’43), Deadline at Dawn (’46), The Window (’49, from “The Boy Cried Murder”). More recently, too: Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (’68) and Mississippi Mermaid (’69, from Waltz into Darkness), Mrs. Winterbourne (’96, from I Married a Dead Man), Original Sin (2001, Waltz into Darkness again).
Night Has a Thousand Eyes was published in 1945 under one of Woolrich’s pen names, George Hopley (his two middle names); later, in this ’50s-vintage paperback, under his other one, William Irish. But in 1948, when Paramount and director John Farrow filmed the novel, the screen credits named Cornell Woolrich as the novel’s author.Shawn senses some subtle, diabolical scam afoot and persuades his superiors to launch an investigation in the few days remaining. What is Tompkins up to? Is he up to anything at all? The novel then becomes a blend of police procedures, as detectives try to trace Tompkins’ “predictions” to their roots, and Shawn and Jean’s vigil at the Reid estate. As the two seek to raise Harlan Reid’s spirits and head off the perplexing prophecies, their forlorn efforts take on the futile aura of a death watch. It’s no spoiler to say that, along with a few unexpected turns, events work out precisely as Tompkins said they would. The novel ends on a note of trembling hope, but with the characters sensing that they are playthings in the hands of unbreakable fate, and that they’d have been far happier without that glimpse of the abyss.
Even Woolrich’s most admiring fans know that elegant plots were not among his strengths, and much of Night strains credulity; indeed, the supernatural element is often more credible than the ordinary goings-on (which may have been the whole idea). Nor was he much of a stylist; he often overwrites like a man who gets a penny a word and is determined to squeeze every cent he can out of his story. Sometimes his novel reads like the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane parody “The Girl Hunters Ballet” that Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote for the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon (1953), as funny unintentionally as Comden and Green were on purpose.
Rather than plot or style, what Woolrich’s novel has is mood — in spades, and maybe even to a fault — the chilling sense of being in the grip of some insensate force, powerless to resist. If Woolrich did happen to swing by New York’s Paramount Theatre when the movie opened there in October 1948, he might have noticed that that mood is preserved on the screen, even as his entire story and most of his characters are jettisoned.
Elements of the novel remain, recognizable but altered, as in a dream. The tormented oracle, of course. The opening scene of a young woman saved from suicide — only now her name is Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), and her rescuer isn’t a stranger but her fiance Elliott Carson (John Lund). The plane crash — only this time Jean’s father (Jerome Cowan) is on the plane and goes down with it. The police-procedural investigation by William Demarest as Lt. Shawn, the only surname to survive from the novel — only this time the aim is not to avert Jean’s father’s death, but her own. And as in the book, there are the cowardly servants deserting Jean, and treachery within the doomed tycoon’s circle of associates. Even the mysterious reference to a lion remains, and is similarly borne out.
The screenplay of Night Has a Thousand Eyes is by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, and for me there’s no getting around the fact that they made major improvements in Cornell Woolrich’s original. The story is simpler and more interesting — positioning Jean as the damsel in distress is a much smoother sell than asking us to worry about a broken old man giving up and sitting around waiting for death.
Lyndon and Latimer’s biggest and most satisfying change is in the character of the psychic, the reason the story exists in the first place. Woolrich, with a typically heavy hand, gives us Jeremiah Tompkins (“Jeremiah”, yet!), cursed and burdened his entire life with a “gift” he doesn’t understand or want and can’t control, crushed by it long before he meets Jean or her father. He’s given up. He’s a haunted zero.
In the movie Tompkins becomes John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), a vaudeville and nightclub mentalist with a phony mind-reading act. Or rather, that’s what he was some twenty-odd years ago, as he describes things to us in flashback. As he plies his act in theaters and saloons from town to town, he finds himself — and he’s not even sure exactly when it started — getting genuine flashes, glimpses into the future: the winner in a horse race, the son of an audience member who is playing with matches at home and about to set fire to the house, an investment opportunity that will pay off. Carson, Jean’s fiance, sees in Triton a carnival con-man running some kind of game to fleece a wealthy and vulnerable orphan, and he takes his concerns to the police. But Triton’s game, if there is a game, is a subtle one. He asks no money, does nothing illegal, and cooperates with the police one hundred percent. “He puts up a good show,” says a skeptical psychiatrist. What is this man up to?
There is simply no end to the ways in which Night Has a Thousand Eyes is better than the novel it’s based on. The book may be a work of art that expresses the author’s nightmarish vision of an overpowering and inexorable universe (though I have my doubts on that score), but the movie was made by craftsmen who had the story sense (Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer) and fluid style (John Farrow) that Cornell Woolrich lacked. In John Triton, the movie has a protagonist more complex, dramatic and interesting than the cringing troll Tompkins. Triton is a true Cassandra, a prophet fated to be disbelieved — not because people think he’s mad, but because they think he’s too sane, a slick and calculating huckster with a smooth line of patter. Which, once upon a time, he was.
In addition, and perhaps more important, the movie has Edward G. Robinson. Robinson once said of himself, “Some people have youth, some have beauty — I have menace.” In one of his other 1948 pictures, Key Largo, he menaced Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and anyone else who entered a room with him. Billy Wilder used that menace to great effect in Double Indemnity, where Robinson played, in fact, a good man who (without knowing it) menaced the picture’s protagonist and actual villain, perennial nice guy Fred MacMurray. 
Night Has a Thousand Eyes is a specimen of a rare subgenre: supernatural noir. There aren’t many examples of that; parapsychology, the “spirit world”, and such things are not to be easily grafted onto the gritty, cynical urban landscapes of movies like Laura and Double Indemnity. But John Farrow, Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem would do it again the following year in their next picture together, just a few months after finishing this. The result would be a neglected classic — forgotten now but, once seen, unforgettable. I’ll write about that one next time.Harlow in Hollywood
I ended my last post with the shadow of Jean Harlow’s name on the directory outside the star dressing rooms at the MGM studios. It was a ghostly image; the haunting is considerably more tangible in another new book, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Harlow’s birth (March 3, 1911). This sleekly sumptuous coffee-table volume does a great job of evoking both “H”s in the title. I can’t help comparing it to the late Ronald Haver’s David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, even at the risk of overpraising Harlow in Hollywood — at least in my own mind, since I consider Haver’s book just about the best single title ever published on Golden Age Hollywood. There never was such a visual and factual feast as that Selznick book, but Harlow in Hollywood is in the same league.
Rooney and Vieira’s text is essentially an artful paraphrase of David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which the authors acknowledge right up front as “the definitive biography” of the star. (By the way, now that I’ve checked out Bombshell‘s Amazon page and seen the prices it’s going for, I guess I’d better never let my 1993 first edition out of my sight!)
What really set the new book apart are its visuals — the cascade of pictures (there must be 400 or more) from the authors’ own collections and what they’ve garnered from other sources (duly thanked in the acknowledgments), all dazzlingly arranged by designer Hilary Lentini. The evocative beauty of Lentini’s design extends even to the whimsical endpapers, adapted from a 1937 Starland Map and dotted with “pins” marking locations that were significant in Harlow’s life and career. These endpapers go far to conjure up a cozy, sun-soaked little cluster of everybody-knows-everybody communities — Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon — that’s a far cry from the cramped, smoggy, seedy melange of urban sprawl, faded glory and retro kitsch that greets visitors to the L.A. Basin today. (Of course, the map probably had more than a touch of gaga fantasy even then.)
If Harlow in Hollywood doesn’t quite match the visual splash of David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, it’s probably because it doesn’t have the Haver book’s riot of eye-popping color. Which is only fitting: Selznick was an early champion of Technicolor and used it when others told him he was a fool to waste the money; but Selznick figured color would pay off in the long run by adding shelf life to his pictures (and he was right).
Not that there isn’t color in Harlow in Hollywood — like these striking Carbro color images taken by George Hurrell in late 1935 or early ’36. These pictures are from her “brownette” period late in her career (nobody knew how late), when MGM sought to placate the Breen Office by softening the erotic edge of her platinum blonde image. It’s not as if they had much choice. Harlow’s hair really had that white-blonde sheen in childhood and adolescence (and she was only 17 when she started in pictures), but every blonde’s hair color deepens and thickens with maturity, and Harlow was no exception. Stringent efforts to retain that platinum blonde look — peroxide, ammonia, Lux flakes — had ravaged her scalp and hair to the point where she was in real danger of going bald. I suspect part of the reason for the Hurrell portraits was to prepare Harlow’s fans for her new look.
A Time-Travel Studio Tour
Hollywood backlots are endlessly fascinating, aren’t they? When I moved to Long Beach in 1977 I drove up to Burbank one day to check out the Walt Disney Studios on Buena Vista Street. I parked on residential South Lincoln Street behind the studio. Peeking through a knothole in the studio fence, I could just catch a glimpse of what I’m sure were the old sets for the Zorro TV series. I was never able to prove it, though, and I guess I never will now: the Disney backlot is gone — and for all I know, the fence, that section of Lincoln St., and the houses that faced it — subsumed into the Walt Disney Feature Animation building that went up in the 1990s.
In 1986 I attended a screening of Wisdom (in which I had a bit role) at the 20th Century Fox studios, and afterwards took a stroll around the grounds (that’s when I learned that once you manage to get inside a studio’s gates, people let you go more or less where you please, on the assumption that you must belong there). I saw the picturesque little Swiss-looking bungalow that had been built for Shirley Temple (later the writers’ building), and walked the stunted remains of the Fox backlot, all that was left after they sold off the 180 acres that became Century City.
Also, the book could have used a more thorough job of copy editing. There are far more than the usual number of misspellings (“Donald O’Conner,” “legers [ledgers]”) typographical errors (“The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street,” elsewhere called “Wimple Street”), malapropisms (“initialized” for “initiated,” “cache” for “cachet,” “skewered” for “skewed”), grammatical missteps (“…the sets fell in to disrepair…”) and other hard-to-classify errors that could be one or more of the above (“…the seeds of destruction…were sewn…”). You can hardly go five pages without one gaffe or another. (And by the way, was there really a “Red Square” set in Yolanda and the Thief [1945]? I don’t remember one in that picture, which took place in a mythical South American country, but the authors say there was one, and that Lot 2’s New York Street played the role.)
All quibbles notwithstanding, this book is a swell read, a step-by-step tour that takes us through each lot one by one, ushering us in the front gate and taking in every building (on Lot 1) and outdoor set (on the others) in turn. There are plenty of maps, starting with this one showing all MGM’s holdings at its peak. (The two lots on the left are the ones you can see in the picture above.) If you live in the L.A. area and have a passing familiarity with Culver City, it’s easy to get the lay of MGM’s land.
Changing the subject slightly, I just got a DVD on eBay comprised of Kodachrome home movies taken at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Seeing the place in color is a much more immediate experience than all those old black-and-white newsreels and photos, and what comes through most clearly to me in these 70-year-old home movies is that everything — from the Trylon and Perisphere all the way down to the Amusement Zone rides — looks so absolutely and completely permanent.
It’s like that too in the movies shot on the MGM backlot. I mean, I’ve lived on streets that I don’t remember as vividly as Kensington Avenue from Meet Me in St. Louis or Andy Hardy’s street — which was also Maple St. in the “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, and the street Bobby Van hopped down in Small Town Girl.
That’s just from seeing them in the movies. How much more solid and permanent they must have looked to the people who actually worked on them. Not that they would have looked or felt real, of course. An actor always knows when he’s on a set, and Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone surely never had any illusions that the Hardys’ front door actually led anyplace — the company would have to adjourn to a set on one of Lot 1’s sound stages to continue that illusion.
But even so, there must have been a feeling that these sets would always be there, and it’s easy to imagine the wistful bewilderment people like Rooney and Debbie Reynolds and Ann Rutherford felt walking the backlot toward the end — after the carpenters and maintenance crews and greensmen had all been laid off, and there were weeds growing around the doorsteps and torn canvas walls flapping in the Santa Ana Winds. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it; we can see it in pictures like That’s Entertainment! and the documentary-cum-obituaries that date from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s there, too, in dozens of quotes in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, from stars and “backstage” workers alike, and always the subtext is the same: Jeez, what happened?? With the studio humming along on all cylinders, thousands of employees keeping everything fresh and ready to use on a moment’s notice, and packing the commissary every day at lunch, the MGM lots surely seemed as permanent as the pyramids.
Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011
It seems wrong not to say something about
the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, but what is
there that hasn’t already been said? There
are only a handful of performers who
managed to move from childhood stardom
to adult careers and make it stick — Dean
Stockwell, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper,
Roddy McDowall (there are also Jodie
Foster and Kurt Russell, but they were
only child actors, not stars). Even in
that small company, Taylor may be
unique: she rose to the top as a kid
and stayed there to the very end;
in fact, in a way, she even redefined
what “the top” actually was.
She didn’t make much of an impression
in her first picture, There’s One Born
Every Minute. But then, neither did
the picture itself, a piddling little Hugh
Herbert programmer for Universal
that not even Variety, who covered
just about everything, bothered to
review. Elizabeth (she hated being
called Liz, so I won’t) was no more
than ten, and vying for attention with
Hugh Herbert in three roles (the
mind boggles!). Who know, maybe
she was hoping no one would notice
her. In later life, she always had a
pretty sensitive b.s.-meter; and it
might well have been on line even
as early as that.
In any case, her second picture was another
kettle of fish — or rather, another bowl of kibble:
Lassie Come Home. I wasn’t there at the time,
but I have it on good authority that people
came out of theaters asking two questions:
Wasn’t that dog amazing? and Who on earth
is that little girl? (“A pretty moppet,” beamed
Variety.) By that time (LCH was released in
December ’43) Elizabeth was going on
twelve. So what was different?
Was it puberty?
I think it was Technicolor. Taylor’s creamy
complexion, raven hair and (most particularly)
violet eyes came across in color as they couldn’t
in black and white. Uncredited (and unnoticed)
bits in Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover
only go to reinforce the point. Then it was back
to Technicolor for…
…National Velvet. Pauline Kael once said that this was “the high point in Elizabeth Taylor’s acting career,” and I think she’s right. At any rate, beginning with this movie, Elizabeth would never go unnoticed again.
She grew up fast at MGM, and it wasn’t long before her beauty stood out even in black and white. She’s 16 in the Clarence Sinclair Bull portrait that leads off this post…
Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2
Just so we’re clear, I don’t mean to suggest that the picture was tinted like this hand-colored lobby card. I mean stock-tinting, coloring the film stock a shade to match the mood of a scene — blue for nighttime, amber for candlelight, etc. Tinting was virtually universal in the silent era, and it’s the one facet of silent movies that now seems all but lost beyond recall. Modern digital tinting on video releases isn’t always pleasing to the eye — and in any case, so few tinted prints have survived that we can’t always know how authentic such efforts are. Gaynor’s print presumably dates from 1927, so here was an opportunity to see the real McCoy. I don’t know how many in the audience appreciated the rarity of what they were seeing, but they certainly appreciated the picture itself; when Gaynor’s timid little Diane finally turned on her physically abusive sister, the auditorium echoed with applause and cheers. (I guess film tinting is one of those lost arts, like hand-tinted photos in the manner of the lobby card here. But there must have been aesthetic rules and guidelines, and artisans who specialized in the process and were admired accordingly, just like editors and cinematographers. Has there ever been a full-length history of the art of tinting? There’s certainly a book in it. There’s a chapter on tinting in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By that’s as excellent as the rest of the book, but other than that I don’t know.)
One more note about the title of 7th Heaven: I’ve always seen it referred to (and referred to it myself) as Seventh Heaven. But “7th” is what appears onscreen, so properly speaking, that should be the title.
Another special guest was Annette D’Agostino
Lloyd, who discovered the comedies of Harold
Lloyd when she was a teenager and has
grown up to write a number of books
on his work, as well as hosting
Hello, Harold Lloyd, her own Web site
devoted to him. (And by the way, she’s
no relation to the great comedian;
her married surname is just one
of those amazing karmic
coincidences.)
The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011
“”Silent movies are the only art form to be discovered, embraced and discarded by a single generation.”
I wish I could claim credit for that keen insight, or failing that, could remember where I read it. (Was it in Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound? I’ll have to check.) Part of the keenness is the perception that what we now call “silent movies” (at the time nobody called them silent; they were just movies) are in fact a distinct art form. They’re not merely movies before they figured how to do the sound part, because for at least five years before The Jazz Singer, they knew how to do the sound. It’s just that nobody, including audiences, figured it was really needed — until the personality of Al Jolson showed them something ordinary movies couldn’t do. (And by the way, it wasn’t The Jazz Singer that nailed the coffin shut on the silent era, it was Jolson’s next part-talkie The Singing Fool. But that’s another story.)
I know some people are turned off by silent movies. I can’t say I have much respect for that attitude — to me it’s like refusing to watch Citizen Kane or Casablanca because they’re in black and white, or because all the sound comes out of one speaker — but I understand where it’s coming from. Silent movies demand your undivided attention; you can’t take your eyes from the screen for a nanosecond or you’ll lose the thread of a story that’s being conveyed in purely visual terms. King Vidor used to say that you couldn’t buy popcorn, soft drinks or candy at movie theaters before the coming of sound for that very reason.
The folks at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka understand and appreciate this, and they celebrate it — so I’m here to celebrate them.
In a way, the rediscovery of silent movies is a byproduct of home video. Historians like Kevin Brownlow and William K. Everson had been carrying the torch for years, with good results. But with home video, it was finally possible for anyone to watch a silent movie with an orchestral accompaniment, and without seeing it sped up from 16-18 frames per second to 24, which could make even the best silent look a little comical if you weren’t able to make allowances (and even if you were, it only added to the effort of watching). At last we could see The Big Parade or Greed or Ben-Hur exactly as audiences saw them in 1925; all that was missing was the experience of a 20- or 30-foot screen and a large audience in a 1,000-seat auditorium. Festivals like the KSFF supply that.
I’m ruefully surprised that it took me 14 years to learn about the KSFF, but now that I’ve found it I plan to be back. It’s free to the public (donations gratefully accepted), and the public responds. Not only in Topeka, but all over the country: at the banquet before Saturday night’s screening of 7th Heaven there were people who hailed from California (yours truly), Colorado, New Hampshire, New York — and those were just the ones who spoke up. Most heartening was the number of young people in the audience at all the screenings. I don’t mean just “younger than dirt,” I mean college, high school and elementary school age.
Films of Henry Hathaway: Prince Valiant
Wagner said that mainly, it was the wig (in fact, that’s the title of the chapter in which he discusses it), and as you can see from the picture above, he has a point. Pauline Kael once said that no actor can triumph over a bad toupee; she was talking about Walter Matthau in The Laughing Policeman, but she might well have been thinking of Robert Wagner in Prince Valiant. Wagner claims that Dean Martin visited the set one day and spent ten minutes talking to him before he realized he wasn’t Jane Wyman. Wagner himself thought the wig made him look like Louise Brooks; to me he looks more like Archie’s girlfriend Veronica. In any case, the wig is a performance-killer, no error. I doubt if Richard Burton — another young actor under contract to 20th Century Fox at the time, and one who might have made a good Valiant himself — could have made it work.
But Wagner can’t hang it all on the wig. Whatever his tonsorial accoutrement, his callow performance is more fitting to a Malibu beach boy than a Viking prince. There’s no dialogue coach credited on Prince Valiant; maybe the picture didn’t have one. But somebody should have pointed out to young RJ that the first name of Uther Pendragon is not pronounced “Youther”; nor “betrothed”, “betrawthed”; nor “Gawain”, “Gwayne”. And somebody should have ironed the California twang out of line readings like “Aw, c’mon, don’t be shy.”
It must be said that in every case, that somebody should have been Henry Hathaway.
Wagner’s rise at 20th Century Fox hadn’t exactly been meteoric, but it had been pretty swift: eleven pictures in just over three years. He was earnest and hardworking, but not a natural for a role like this; he had neither the effortless panache of Errol Flynn nor the graceful aplomb of Tyrone Power. He was certainly nowhere near the seasoned performer he would become in time (and remains today). But you can’t say he wasn’t game; thrust by Darryl F. Zanuck into the title role of a comic strip he’d loved as a kid, he dove into it with all the relish his then-limited resources could command. It was a mercy (to him then, to us now) that he didn’t overhear the wisecracks of the crew until his work on the picture was done, so his enthusiasm at least remains high on screen and never flags. An actor, when he’s lucky, gets his in-over-his-head performances out of the way in high school, college or amateur theater, then leaves them behind. It’s Wagner’s bad luck that he had to stumble like this in full view of the world. In CinemaScope and Technicolor.
So let us stipulate that Prince Valiant is mushy at the center, and grant that it’s not easy to watch without wincing in sympathy for a young hero who seems to be floundering in Daddy’s oversize suit of chain mail. The picture still has its pleasures, especially for those who discover it in uncritical childhood — the age at which a couple of generations of kids discovered Harold Foster’s comic strip.
There is, for example, an honorable — and largely successful — effort to duplicate Foster’s richly detailed visual style. Compare this illustration of Foster’s from the first year (1937) of the strip, as Sir Gawain and Valiant approach King Arthur’s Camelot…
…and another of the knights’ colorful pavilions:
In Prince Valiant‘s last half-hour Hathaway — and even Wagner — rise to the occasion, and the picture becomes all a bloodthirsty young fan of the comic strip could wish for. First there’s a hell-for-leather battle between the forces of Valiant’s father King Aguar (Donald Crisp) and those of the usurper Sligon (Primo Carnera), with work by stunt coordinator Richard Talmadge that’s still remarkable to see:
Remember, this was in the days before computer-generated images, and if you wanted fire in your battle scene there was nothing for it but to light the flames…
…and Franz Waxman’s virile, heroic score (one of his best) coming in at exactly the right moment, as Prince Valiant’s magical Singing Sword takes up its song on the side of right and honor. It’s 2 minutes 52 seconds from the first stroke until the villain falls dead, and it’s one of the most exhilarating swordfights ever committed to film.
Reviews for Prince Valiant weren’t particularly generous, but the reviews and Robert Wagner’s wig notwithstanding, the picture did well at the box office. (Wagner, for his part, counted his blessings and resolved never to get stuck in a role like that again.) Of the movies I’ve covered so far in my retrospective posts on Henry Hathaway, this is admittedly the least of them. It’s not historically important like The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, nor a neglected masterpiece like Down to the Sea in Ships, but it’s unpretentious fun in a Boy’s Own Adventure way. Harold Foster’s strip was 16 years old when the picture went into production (it still runs every Sunday in about 300 papers, 74 years after Foster, who died in 1982, created it), so the first generation of Valiant’s fans had kids of their own to take to see the movie.
I’ll let Harold Foster himself have the last word on the picture, from an interview he gave in 1969. It had been 15 years since the movie’s release, and there was no reason for him not to be honest about it. His appraisal of the CinemaScope version of his brainchild was clear-eyed and evenhanded:
“It was a magnificent film — the scenery, the castles, everything was beautiful. They used all my research: Sir Gawain had the right emblem on his shield, everything was right. But somehow, the story was a little bit childish…it was Hollywood.
“I thought [Robert] Wagner was a little bit immature — his face was immature, he ran around with his mouth open. But all in all I got a kick out of it; it was quite an experience.”
The Could-Have-Been-Greater Moment
The facts are messier and less clear-cut. For one thing, Unfaithfully Yours (1948) may have flopped at the box office, but Sturges’ craft was as strong as ever, and the picture can stand now beside The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels without blushing. But that’s a subject for another post; more to our present point, let’s not read too much into The Great Moment‘s eventual release date — September 9, 1944, on the heels of the giddy peaks of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. That skews the chronology. In fact, Sturges began writing The Great Moment (under his own title, Triumph over Pain) in 1939, even before he became a director of his own scripts. And he shot it from April to June 1942, between The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. In other words, he started work on the picture while he was still on the rise, and shot and edited it (to his own satisfaction, if not Paramount’s) while he was at his absolute peak.
Actually, it gets even messier than that. I think I’d better back way up and start at the beginning.
The Great Moment is one of two Sturges scripts to deal with a historical personage (the other was Diamond Jim [1935]). The subject here is William Thomas Green Morton (1819-68), a Boston dentist who in 1846 stumbled upon the use of ether as an anesthetic for the extraction of teeth. At first he had great success with his painless dentistry, disguising his simple discovery with the patent name Letheon. When he offered the use of Letheon in more serious surgery, he was forced to disclose its ingredients — or rather, sole ingredient. Almost immediately he was besieged with accusations that he had pirated the work of others, specifically fellow dentist Horace Wells and physician Charles T. Jackson, both of whom were personally acquainted with Morton, and Dr. Crawford W. Long of Georgia, who was not. Morton embarked upon an ill-advised lawsuit against the U.S. military for infringement of his Letheon patent, which only resulted in bad publicity for him; his patent was ultimately ruled invalid, and by 1850 the use of ether in surgery was virtually universal.
What happened to Triumph over Pain once it passed through the Paramount gate is a little foggy, which could often be the case when a property bought on spec bounced around a studio full of producers and writers trying to wrestle it into a screen treatment and, eventually, a script. In his detailed introduction in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges, Brian Henderson (citing Sturges biographer James Curtis) says there was first an extended treatment (perhaps even a script) by Samuel Hoffenstein. Over at Turner Classic Movies, on the other hand, their notes on The Great Moment cite the Paramount Collection at the Motion Picture Academy Library in stating that the original 1939 script was written by Sturges, Irwin Shaw, W.L. “Les” River, Charles Brackett and Waldo Twitchell; the notes don’t say whether any of them worked in collaboration or simply took turns at the script as it moved from one writer to the next. Another Web site, giving no source for its information, further asserts that Ernst Laemmle (one of “Uncle” Carl Laemmle’s extended family, in fact his literal nephew) also had a hand in things somewhere. (UPDATE 1/7/24): That site, however, no longer exists; the text has gone the way of its unspecified sources.) In any case, all the sources agree that the original (possibly vague) idea was for Triumph over Pain to serve as a vehicle for Gary Cooper as Morton, to be directed by Henry Hathaway.For the next couple of years, Preston Sturges was one of the busiest men on the Paramount lot. He eventually won an Oscar for his McGinty script, by which time he’d finished two more pictures — Christmas in July and The Lady Eve, both top-to-bottom rewrites of scripts he had written years earlier. Next came Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, brand new projects that he wrote, shot, and had ready for release each within six months of day one. For his next project, Henderson speculates that Sturges hoped to avoid the stress and pressure of beginning a whole new script from scratch. If that was the case, then he had only one unproduced script left in his files: Triumph over Pain.
In the meantime, something else had happened: William LeBaron (shown here with Mae West) left Paramount in late 1941, to be replaced as head of production by Buddy De Sylva (at right). Sturges had a relationship of mutual trust and respect with LeBaron, but with De Sylva it proved to be another matter, and in time it poisoned the well for Sturges. The story is that DeSylva resented the autonomy Sturges enjoyed over his pictures. Any newspaper or magazine writer can tell you tales of editors who just have to tinker with even the best and cleanest copy, if only to justify their own existence and remind the writer who’s really in charge; De Sylva may have been one of those. The fact that Sturges’ movies made money would be an incentive rather than a deterrent: stick your oar in and when the picture hits you can grab a share of the credit; if it flops, you can blame the writer/director and claim you did your best to fix it. Besides, it was a power thing. 
“Formerly” because it had already run into trouble, even before Sturges left Paramount, and the title was only the beginning. Even in the middle of shooting, with Joel McCrea playing Morton, De Sylva had begun referring to the picture as Great Without Glory, pointedly signaling that Sturges’ (and Rene Fulop-Miller’s) title wasn’t going to fly with the higher-ups. Sturges declined to take the hint and went over De Sylva’s head — which Brian Henderson calls a “tactical error” — to Paramount vice president Y. Frank Freeman. Freeman took it to the board, who considered “all title suggestions” (Henderson doesn’t say what the suggestions included, but other sources mention Immortal Secret and Morton the Magnficent) and settled on Great Without Glory. De Sylva 1, Sturges 0.
The fact is, according to Henderson, Sturges seems not to have fully appreciated that Paramount, and Buddy De Sylva in particular, had been lukewarm at best about the picture from the very beginning; they indulged Sturges, even on his first script back in 1939, because they wanted to continue tapping his talent for comedy. (The ultimate fate of The Great Moment lends force to the idea that the studio regarded Sturges as a maker of comedies only, and couldn’t think outside that box.) Henderson suggests, and it makes sense to me, that Sturges squandered political capital in his fight to retain Triumph over Pain as his title, capital that might have been better deployed defending the picture itself. As if to confirm De Sylva and his minions in their belief that he was being hardheaded and obstinate, Sturges also picked another pointless hill to die on.
Sturges had written an acerbic introduction to Triumph over Pain, to be spoken in voice-over even before the opening credits. The passage stated — overstated — the picture’s central theme: that the greatest benefactors of mankind are often denounced and reviled in their own time. Fair enough, and W.T.G. Morton’s life, as recounted by Rene Fulop-Miller and Preston Sturges, was a fit text for preaching that sermon. But Sturges laid it on with a trowel:
One of the most charming characteristics of Homo Sapiens, the wise guy on your right, is the consistency with which he has stoned, crucified, burned at the stake, and otherwise rid himself of those who consecrated their lives to his further comfort and well-being so that all his strength and cunning might be preserved for the erection of ever larger monuments, memorial shafts, triumphal arches, pyramids and obelisks to the eternal glory of generals on horseback, tyrants, usurpers, dictators, politicians and other heroes who led him, usually from the rear, to dismemberment and death…
Well, subtlety never was part of Preston Sturges’ charm. But what the hell was he thinking? Never mind that, at the very moment he was committing these words to film, the United States was trudging through the bleakest days of World War II with no assurance of how it would turn out. Even aside from the morale-busting words — which would never have made it past the Office of War Information — there’s a sour tone to the intro that would put the most cheerful moviegoer into a foul and unreceptive mood. Sturges clung to this intro like a terrier to a rat; when De Sylva urged him to revise it, he doubled down: he changed “wise guy” to “talking gorilla.” By the time he finally agreed to this:
…it was too little, too late.
In fact, by that time, the picture had been whittled and rearranged into more or less the form that has come down to us. Previews on August 13 and 27, 1942 of the picture as Sturges made it (but with the title Great Without Glory) had gotten a mixed response, whereas Sturges’ previous pictures had garnered raves. De Sylva was more convinced than ever that major surgery was called for, and that’s what the picture got — probably between September and December ’42 while Sturges was busy shooting The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.
Of the three pictures Sturges left behind at Paramount, only The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was left as he made it; the other two got major overhauls from De Sylva and his editors. Miracle opened on January 19, 1944 and was an immediate smash hit. De Sylva’s cut of Hail the Conquering Hero was previewed the next month and was a disaster. Sturges offered to come back to Paramount without pay and re-edit and reshoot Hero and Great Without Glory “to everyone’s satisfaction.” He was allowed to doctor (and save) Hail the Conquering Hero — after all, that was a comedy, Sturges’ specialty. But on Great Without Glory (now The Great Moment) De Sylva put his foot down; that, he figured, was a waste of time and money.
Sturges tried the same tactical error that had failed before. He appealed to Y. Frank Freeman, saying there was still time “to save ‘The Great Moment’ from the mediocre and shameful career it is going to have in its present form and under its present title.” As it was, he said, the picture was “a guaranteed, gild-edged disaster”; a little time and money (“less than fifty thousand dollars”) could result in “a picture of dignity and merit.” But Paramount was indisposed to be accommodating; Freeman did not reply.
And so Preston Sturges’ Triumph over Pain remained The Great Moment as we know it today, shoved out into release in September ’44, nearly two-and-a-half years after shooting was complete. If it looks like the beginning of the end, a glaring “uh-oh”, to us now, it wasn’t quite that obvious to everyone at the time. Sturges still had his partisans, and some of them were better disposed to the picture than historians have been since. “[A]t least,” said Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “Mr. Sturges has triumphed over stiffness in screen biography.” Likewise The New Yorker’s John Lardner: “…shows clearly that film biographies need not wear stuffing in their shirts.” In Variety, “Sten” called the story “compelling” and predicted it “should prove to be a good grosser.” But Sten was wrong. Other critics were less kind, and financially The Great Moment turned out every bit the disaster Sturges had glumly predicted.
I first planned this post with the idea of doing a compare-and-contrast between Sturges’ published script and the finished film. But that way lies madness; Buddy De Sylva and his crew made such a total hash of things that trying to follow The Great Moment with script in hand is like being backstage prompter for an actor who never learned his lines and keeps hopping around from scene to scene at random.
In fashioning a screenplay from Triumph over Pain, Sturges’ original problem was simple, and not easily solved: Morton’s life consisted of an early brilliant success followed almost at once by scandal and twenty years of frustration, disappointment, increasing opprobrium and deepening poverty — a long and dispiriting anticlimax.
Buddy De Sylva’s ordered changes in The Great Moment — carried out by editor Stuart Gilmore with suggestions from Chas. P. West of the Paramount editing department — threw all of that right out the window. Sturges later complained, “The studio decided that the picture should be cut for comedy. As a result, the unpleasant part was cut to a minimum, the story was not told, and the balance of the picture was upset.” Comparing his script with the picture as released, it’s plain that Sturges was exactly right. In the rush to get to the funny stuff (“The amazing, amusing romance of the hero of the roaring 1840s! Hilarious as a whiff of laughing gas!” bellowed the preview trailer), Paramount sacrificed much of the movie’s drama and may have even made the funny stuff less funny, because there was no longer the sense of relief that would make it welcome.
Even as it stands, truncated and vandalized by a clueless studio that had given up on it even before the cameras rolled (and would soon give up on Preston Sturges himself), The Great Moment is worth seeing. There are elements — like the persuasive period detail in the sets and costumes, and even in the typeface of posters and newspapers — that no editor could cut out, and which attest to how seriously Sturges took his story. Above all, there’s the simple dignity of Joel McCrea’s performance, and those of Betty Field, William Demarest and Harry Carey as the surgeon who believes in Morton. At the very least, as Bosley Crowther and John Lardner noted, the picture offers an interesting contrast to the standard reverent “marble man” portrayal so common in Hollywood’s treatment of important figures in science and medicine.
Preston Sturges’ fall from grace may have been inevitable, and when it came it was probably his own doing as much as anybody else’s. But it didn’t begin with The Great Moment, and the picture can’t be blamed for it. Uneven it may be, but Sturges conceived, wrote and filmed it at the height of his powers. What happened to it after that wasn’t entirely his fault.
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