Author Archives: Jim Lane

A Time-Travel Studio Tour

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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.

 
 
 
I never got even a glimpse of the colossal MGM backlot, but now I can, and so can you, thanks to MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot by Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester and Michael Troyan. This book manages to be both satisfying in its thorough documenting of the physical nuts and bolts of MGM, and tantalizing in its constant reminder that most of this is (if you’ll pardon the expression) gone with the wind. Much as we might wish to step into one of this book’s hundreds of pictures and look around, we will never walk the streets we know so well from Andy Hardy movies, Tarzan pictures, Gene Kelly musicals and The Twilight Zone — and neither, now, will anybody else. (This picture, by the way, shows only the 81 acres of MGM Lots 1 [the complex of buildings off in the distance] and 2 [closer up]. At the studio’s peak there were five other lots sprinkled around that part of Culver City on another hundred acres; they’re out of the picture off to the right.)

 
The book does have its nits, and I might as well pick them. The authors garble somewhat the prehistory of the three studios — Metro, Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures — before they merged to form MGM. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, director Rex Ingram worked for Metro, not Goldwyn, and his production of Mare Nostrum was not among the financial headaches MGM inherited with the merger. Neither was “Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur” shooting in Rome (also discussed here); that would be June Mathis and Charles Brabin’s Ben-Hur. Niblo was the director Mayer and Irving Thalberg picked later to clean up Brabin’s mess — back in Hollywood where they could keep an eye on things.

 

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.

 
Here’s another one of the book’s maps, this one of Lot 2 — home to Andy Hardy’s hometown of Carvel, Tarzan’s jungle, Romeo and Juliet‘s (1936) Verona Square, the Lord family mansion in The Philadelphia Story, the complex of New York Streets, etc. I don’t have room to reproduce it full-size, but if you Ctrl-click it to open it in a new tab, then “+” it up, you can see it more clearly. The numbers in the columns on the left correspond to shaded areas on the map, and each gets its own mini-chapter with accompanying pictures and a rundown of how each area was used over the years. You’ll spend a lot of time thumbing back and forth between text and maps, but by the time you’re through you’d be able to roam freely around all seven lots without getting lost. 

If they still existed — which, except for Lot 1 (now Sony Studios), they don’t. The last section of the book, “Backlot Babylon,” is the hardest to read, and it just gets more and more heartbreaking by the paragraph. 
This is where the authors take us through the long sorry story of the disintegration of Louis B. Mayer’s mighty empire. The authors quote a retired publicist, speaking in 1974, as saying that the studio’s last really great year was 1948. The irony in that, which the book makes clear, is that even in ’74 things hadn’t hit bottom, although “the writing was now clearly on the false walls.”
 
These pages are dominated by pictures like the two here: On the top, the decrepit hulk from 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty cowers beyond the rubble that was once Lot 3’s Dutch Street and Rawhide Street; on the bottom, a bulldozer polishes off the last of Lot 2’s complex of New York Streets in 1980.
 

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.

 
In the end they weren’t, and in fact they never had been. For me, one of the saddest pictures in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot isn’t of great sets reduced to garbage or props and costumes auctioned off or used for landfill, it’s one of the simplest. And oddly enough, it’s not from the long miserable decline and fall; it’s from 1937, when the MGM lion was in full roar and the vigorous prime of life. And here it is, a sign on the outside wall of the star dressing room building — which, for the major stars, weren’t just rooms but full homes-away-from-home with bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and fireplaces. You can see here that Suite A is presently vacant, but that it once belonged to the recently deceased Jean Harlow. Her name has been removed, and her suite no doubt cleared out for its next occupant (in time it would go to Lana Turner),
but the letters of Jean’s name have left their shadow behind,
like the impression of a pen-press on the
second page of a note pad.
 
In the end, and for that matter all along, the entire
studio complex of mighty MGM turned out to be
no more permanent than that.

 

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

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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…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…15 here, touching up a water color (or pretending to)
in the Hollywood Hills. By 1949, at the ripe old age
of 17, she was playing the wife of 38-year-old
Robert Taylor in Conspirator.
 
None of these, of course, are what most people
think of when they hear Elizabeth Taylor’s name.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This is more like it, right? Suddenly, Last Summer may not be the hot seller on Amazon or in Netflix queues that it was in 1959 theaters, but this was one of the iconic movie images of the 1950s, right up there with Carroll Baker sucking her thumb in Baby Doll, or Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity. (The fact that Catherine Holly, Taylor’s character, told psychiatrist Montgomery Clift that the bathing suit made her look “almost nude” when it got wet no doubt stoked the fantasies of millions of red-blooded American men. Did any of them see the movie over and over, hoping that this time she would really go into the water?) Elizabeth is 27 here, on the way to the third of her five Oscar nominations (she won twice), and she’s been officially grown up since she and Clift (and director George Stevens’s camera) were more intimately involved in A Place in the Sun in 1951.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For most people who remember those days, Elizabeth Taylor’s life and career tend to boil down to (1) everything before Cleopatra and (2) everything after. It’s impossible for people today, jaded by a nonstop parade of showbiz media circuses — from Madonna to Britney to Lindsay to Charlie — even to imagine what a riveting can’t-look-away spectacle that trainwreck of a production was. You just had to be there — and by “there” I mean anywhere on planet Earth from 1959 to 1963. You couldn’t get away from it. Elizabeth’s brush with death-by-pneumonia in a London hospital was only the beginning, shutting down production until the English weather, never exactly balmy, turned so crummy that everybody had to start all over from day (and dollar) one in Rome. It wasn’t hype or hysteria: Elizabeth nearly checked out then and there; her tracheotomy scar is clearly visible in this picture of her in costume and makeup, looking weary and numb waiting for director Joe Mankiewicz to call action.
 
“Everything before and after Cleopatra” really means everything before and after Richard Burton, and I’ll bet that’s how Taylor tended to think of it herself. Burton accounted for two of her eight marriages (and she for two of his five), ten years the first time and ten months the second. If Burton had lived past 1984, they might have had a third go-round (ten weeks?), and a fourth (ten days?); they were clearly the loves of each other’s lives, even if they couldn’t hold it together and often seemed to bring out the worst in each other. To people in the 1960s it looked like the love affair of the century. To me it still does, and I don’t think I’m alone.
 
 
 
Here’s another iconic picture, this one from real life, though it could almost be a scene from their movie The V.I.P.s. Judging from the faces and clothes, that year (1963) is probably about right, give or take a couple. They seem to be trying to inch their way toward some anonymous airport VIP lounge, jostled by a combination of entourage and paparazzi, a breed of “journalist” that their affair and marriage virtually (albeit unwillingly) created. She looks resigned, he looks harried. (And who’s that guy in the center background, and why is he the only one smiling?)
 
With all Taylor’s heartaches, sorrows and physical ailments (the latter beginning with a fall from a horse during National Velvet), it’s remarkable in a way that she made it to 79. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t do it, or Judy Garland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived them, and nearly all her leading men, from Roddy McDowall and Robert Taylor through Montgomery Clift and Van Johnson to Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Did she thrive? I don’t know. But she survived, and prevailed.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I love this photo by Otto Dyar, and I want to close with it. It’s from the set of National Velvet, obviously. Elizabeth’s blissful love of horses permeates the picture, blesses and ennobles and exalts it. I believe that this 12-year-old child-woman looks more genuinely and serenely happy here than in any other picture I’ve ever seen of her, at any age. This is how I want to remember her.

Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2

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Since the Kansas Silent Film Festival 
in Topeka coincided with Academy 
Award weekend this year, the theme 
of the festival was the first year of the 
Oscars (1927-28, the only year that 
silent pictures dominated the awards), 
and the three-day program was 
peppered with winners and 
nominees.  In fact, Oscar
himself put in an 
appearance…
 
 
 
 
 
 …in the form of Benjamin Glazer’s
award for the screen adaptation
of 7th Heaven, which was proudly
displayed in the lobby of the White
Concert Hall on the Washburn 
University campus. If you’ve ever
wondered what an 81-year-old 
Academy Award looks like — and
they don’t come any older — here 
he is, ensconced in his glass case
like Snow White (only standing up).
You can click on the picture and 
“+” him up to see that, classic
though he may be, he does
carry his share of age marks.
(By the way, do I need to specify 
that the Academy Award statuette
and the nickname “Oscar” are 
registered trademarks of the 
Academy of Motion Picture 
Arts and Sciences? 
Let’s not forget that!)
 
 
 
Speaking of 7th Heaven, I have to say Saturday night’s screening of this touching romance between a boastful Paris sewer worker (Charles Farrell) and a mistreated street waif (Janet Gaynor) was the highlight of the weekend for me. I’d seen it before, but this time was something above and beyond: the festival screened the personal print of film preservationist David Shepard (a special guest at the event, he also delivered a lecture to accompany screened samples from his new DVD collection Chaplin at Keystone). Shepard’s print, in turn, was carefully and lovingly copied from Janet Gaynor’s own personal print, and the exquisite tinting of the film was a revelation. 
 

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.)

 
 
Ms. Lloyd addressed the audience Friday night to introduce Speedy (1928), Harold Lloyd’s last silent comedy and one of his most stylish, with Harold at his ingenious and sympathetic best. She warned us that the climax of the picture, with our hero driving a horse-drawn streetcar at a mad gallop through the streets of New York in a desperate race against time, was one of the greatest chase scenes of the silent era. And she was right. The sequence is nothing less than astonishing — it rivals the chariot race from either version of Ben-Hur, and it absolutely puts The French Connection to shame (43 years before the fact). And it’s funny to boot.
 
 
 
And one little detail that’s too
much fun not to share. Annette
Lloyd was also the after-dinner
speaker at the festival banquet
Saturday night, speaking (naturally)
on her favorite comedian. In keeping
with the subject of her talk, the 
KSFF chose an appropriate
design for the evening’s
dessert:
 
The festival culminated on Sunday afternoon with Wings, director William A. Wellman’s tribute to the airborne fighters of World War I (and the picture that put him on the map). To see Wings on the big screen is to understand at last why it won the Oscar for best picture; that’s one thing it has in common with both Lawrence of Arabia and Oliver! Clara Bow loves Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who loves Jobyna Ralston, who loves Richard Arlen — all while the Great War rages and Rogers and Arlen take to the sky in thrilling combat. The aerial action remains riveting, with no process photography and very little miniature work, and the action on the ground is handled well enough that you don’t grow impatient for the dogfights to resume. (There is, however, a basic flaw in the movie’s portrayal of Rogers’s character: any man who would pass up Clara Bow for that namby-pamby, two-timing Jobyna Ralston is obviously unfit for military service.)
 
Kudos all around for the class act that is the KSFF — to festival president Bill Shaffer, vice president Denise Morrison (who also provides chatty, informative intros to all of the screenings), and the festival’s board of directors. And a special nod to the festival’s musicians, keeping alive another not-quite-lost art: Marvin Faulwell (organ), Greg Foreman and Jeff Rapsis (piano), Bob Keckeisen (percussion), and special guests The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra of Boulder, CO. Like Cinevent in Columbus, OH, the Kansas Silent Film Festival now has a permanent place on my calendar. I’m already looking forward to next year.

The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011

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“”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.

The screenings are a mix of 16mm and digital projection, 
nearly all with live accompaniment. (The sole exception 
this year is Chaplin’s The Circus, which followed the Chaplin 
family’s preference for the “new” score Chaplin composed
for it in 1967). There’s variety in the accompaniments: 
sometimes a piano, sometimes a theater pipe organ (both 
with and without percussion), and sometimes (a special treat) 
the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I’ve always wanted 
to get to the famous silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy; 
until that day, the KSFF will keep me happy. Besides,
it’s free, and I can speak the language. 
 
I have more to say about this year’s festival, 
but it’s getting late and I have to get to bed. 
I want to be fresh for Wings 
tomorrow afternoon.

Films of Henry Hathaway: Prince Valiant

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In my last post on Henry Hathaway, I wrote about Down to the Sea in Ships (1949). For this one, I’m going pretty much from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is much that is ridiculous about Prince Valiant (1954), but it’s also ridiculously good fun — and not only for wiseacres out for a campy laugh.
 
Now here I have to sigh deeply, grit my teeth, and admit that we might as well get the most ridiculous element of Prince Valiant out of the way right off the bat. It’s easily identifiable and it has a name: Robert Wagner. In his 2008 autobiography Pieces of My Heart (written with Scott Eyman), Wagner admitted he was miscast as Hal Foster’s comic strip prince, and he spoke of the picture with chagrin: 
 
“I was happy to be working for director Henry Hathaway; I thought the picture was good, and I loved the romance of the subject matter. I was working with James Mason, another one of my favorite actors, and I thought I was sensational. I had no idea it would become for me what ‘Yonda lies the castle of my fadduh’ was for Tony Curtis.”
 

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…

 

 
 …with this view from the movie. That’s Sir Gawain and Val again in the foreground (though the plot differs from Foster’s), and the image is courtesy of Hathaway, cinematographers Lucien Ballard and Charles G. Clarke, art directors Lyle Wheeler and Mark-Lee Kirk, and special effects ace Ray Kellogg. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Here’s another Foster illustration from 1937, of a festive tournament day under the walls of Camelot…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…and once again, here’s a similar scene from the movie, with Foster’s picture divided into two shots, one of the field of play:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pavilions-movie

 

 

 

…and another of the knights’ colorful pavilions:

 

 
 
 
 
And here’s a comparison I particularly like. On the left the strip, on the right the movie. As with the examples above, the context of the shot  in Dudley Nichols’ script differs completely from what Foster wrote in the strip, yet it’s clear to see that Foster’s dramatic design and pictorial sense were carefully studied and, wherever possible, emulated in the movie.
 
 
 
 

 

 

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…

Battle04

 
 
 
 
…and let the stunt men (David Sharpe and Buddy Van Horn, among others) deal with them.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Finally, even if you’ve been jeering and groaning and rolling your eyes all through the picture, the last ten minutes will amply reward your put-upon patience. That’s when Valiant at last squares off against the traitorous knight Sir Brack (James Mason — and that’s no spoiler; if you can’t figure out within the first twenty minutes that Sir Brack is the mysterious Black Knight terrorizing the countryside, you’re not paying attention). The climactic duel to the death, superbly choreographed by Jean Heremans, is a real pip: 
 
 
 
 
 
For once there’s not the wiry swish and chitter of fencing foils or sabers, but the amazing whang! clang! bar-r-r-rang! of steel broadswords wielded in great, murderous arcing blows…

 

 
 
 
 
 
…with Wagner and Mason (if there was any doubling it isn’t obvious) ranging across the great hall of Camelot in a no-holds-barred free-for-all, over, around and through the Round Table itself…

 

 

 

…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.

 
Dudley Nichols’ script jettisons the episodic plot of the strip (which most of its fans wouldn’t remember anyway, having few reprints to refer to) in favor of a simple story incorporating visual and dramatic elements that the fans would remember and respond to. At the midway point there’s a lavish recreation of a jousting tournament in the Age of Chivalry, with some fine equestrian stunt work. And capping it all off is a rousing final half-hour that redeems much of what has gone before.

 

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

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The Great Moment is the movie Preston Sturges’ admirers don’t like to talk about — the crackpot uncle at the family feast who makes everyone squirm in their seats, politely trying to ignore him and casting about for opportunities to change the subject (“Hey, how ’bout that Palm Beach Story?”).
 
I’ve always kind of liked The Great Moment myself. I think it comes of having seen it on TV at an early age — must be fifty years ago now, maybe more — before I even knew who Preston Sturges was, and I could get wrapped up in the story without comparing it to the rest of the man’s output. Harry Carey’s exultant “Gentlemen, this is no humbug!” really stayed with me; so did the final scene between Joel McCrea and the young girl on her way into surgery. It would be years, decades before I even refreshed my memory on the title of the picture, much less learned who made it, and when I did I was taken aback. The Great McGinty, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — that Preston Sturges???
 
It’s common for critics and historians to regard The Great Moment as the beginning of Sturges’ precipitous decline after his amazing track record at Paramount in the early 1940s, when it seemed he couldn’t put a foot wrong. In this view, The Great Moment is when the master begins to lose control of his craft — or at least when it begins to show. After this stumble it’s an unseemly plummet downhill, like a slapstick scene in one of his own movies: Sturges’ pictures become fewer, farther between, and weaker, until he ends his days in the Algonquin Hotel, unemployable, finally keeling over of a heart attack in the midst of writing his autobiography. It fits the legend of the meteoric genius flashing across the Hollywood firmament, then quickly and predictably burning out. It makes a comfortably dramatic story arc.

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.
 
Morton spent the rest of his life in a futile effort to gain some kind of financial reward for his discovery, interrupted by honorable Civil War service as a volunteer surgeon with the Army of the Potomac. His efforts were forever frustrated by the grandiose claims of Jackson (who had a penchant for such things; he also claimed to have invented the telegraph), and by the fact that Wells committed suicide in 1848 — there were rumors (false) that Morton had driven him to it. Finally, in 1868, on his way to Washington to pursue yet another claim, Morton collapsed and died in New York City, three weeks short of his forty-ninth birthday. How much credit Morton really deserves for the discovery of anesthesia, and whether he ever deserved any money for it, remains a matter of controversy to this day.
 
Morton’s life was the subject of a book by French author Rene Fulop-Miller, which appeared in translation in the U.S. under the title Triumph over Pain in 1938. Paramount Pictures bought the screen rights to Fulop-Miller’s book before publication; Warners’ The Story of Louis Pasteur was hot just then, and was the beginning of a vogue for scientist biopics that would stretch well into the ’40s.
 
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.
 
Making matters even more confusing, Hathaway himself had a distinctly different recollection in 1973, in an oral history interview with Polly Platt. According to him, Sturges had written Morton’s story as a comedy, whereas he (Hathaway) thought the story too important for that. So he convinced producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. to assign the property to Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who were then contract writers at Paramount, and they turned out a “marvelous” dramatic script. “We were ready to do it,” said Hathaway, “and the war broke out. They didn’t want anything to do with misery, with pain, with operations.” The project was tabled, Hathaway left Paramount, and Sturges later went back to his original script when the picture finally got underway. Hathaway’s story doesn’t really hold up. For one thing, the timeline is wrong: both he and Cooper had left Paramount well before America entered World War II; for another, he refers to the picture as The Great Moment, a title that didn’t come along until after it had been finished and taken out of Sturges’ hands. Before that, and certainly when Hathaway and Cooper would have been involved, the title had been Triumph over Pain. Hathaway’s memory no doubt played him false here, perhaps because Paramount’s original plans for Triumph as a Cooper-Hathaway picture never really got off the ground.
 
In fact, Triumph over Pain (Sturges’ title in 1939 and ever after) almost never got off the ground at all. Brian Henderson’s introduction to the published script concentrates on Sturges’ efforts to the exclusion of any other writers — whatever Hoffenstein, Shaw, Brackett, Wilder or anybody else may have done from the sidelines — and Henderson is pretty thorough about it. He says Sturges made his first notes on Triumph over Pain on March 15, 1939, just as he was finishing up the script for Remember the Night, and by the end of ’39 had cranked out three complete drafts. By that time, Sturges had finally badgered William LeBaron, Paramount’s head of production, into letting him direct, and was already shooting his first picture, The Great McGinty.

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. 
 
It may have been a power thing for Sturges, too; there are always two sides to every story, and maybe Sturges, being the artist in the equation, gets less blame in the history books than he should. In his unfinished autobiography Events Leading Up to My Death (published in 1990 as Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges), the writer-director spoke with almost wistful regret about his former bête noire: “I remember the dreadful hours with Buddy once the break, urged by his sycophants, had occurred; the reasonable and depressing talks we had later, both fond of each other, when it was too late to mend the break.”
 
Whatever the cause, by the end of 1943, Sturges and De Sylva found themselves unable to agree on the terms under which Sturges would remain working at Paramount, and he departed to enter a production agreement with (of all people) Howard Hughes. If anything, I’d say that was the undoing of Preston Sturges, and maybe someday I’ll post on those miserable two years. (Did anyone ever have dealings with Howard Hughes that didn’t dissolve into fiasco and bad feelings sooner or later? With Sturges it came sooner.) When Sturges walked out the gate at the end of his contract (December 10, 1943), he left three pictures behind him awaiting release: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero and the picture formerly known as Triumph over Pain.

“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.

Sturges’ solution was to build up to the triumph rather than begin with it. He opened Triumph over Pain with a prologue depicting a modern-day operation, as a frightened little boy is assured by his parents that his impending surgery won’t hurt at all. As the boy descends into anesthesia, Sturges dissolved to a reunion between Morton’s widow Elizabeth (Betty Field) and his friend Eben Frost (William Demarest) after Morton’s death. Then, in a series of flashbacks, Sturges worked more or less backward through Morton’s career, in scenes that became more lighthearted as Elizabeth’s reminiscences grew less and less bitter. In this way, Sturges constructed his script so that the comedy in the story came gradually to the fore and was a relief from what had gone before — that is, what for Morton and Elizabeth had come afterward. The idea was that the audience could share in Morton’s triumph knowing what he doesn’t: the disappointment that was to come.
 

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.

It’s not easy to say how much actual running time was sacrificed from Sturges’ cut of Triumph over Pain. A calculated guess suggests to me that the script as written would run about 100 min., and the DVD of The Great Moment runs precisely 80 min. 30 sec. Many of the comic antics in the movie seem odd and unduly raucous. (Sturges had a penchant for slapstick but no great knack for it; physical comedy was not where the pleasures of his movies lay.) How much the comedy could have been balanced and muted by the missing footage, we’ll never know. 

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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Moving Right Along…

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My apologies for the long silence here at Cinedrome. A number of circumstances have conspired to bring this about; among them was my decision that it was high time — or rather, past time — that I instituted an index. This proved to be more complicated and time-consuming, and the index itself more cumbersome, than I anticipated. As you can see above, I’ve decided on two indices: (1) Names, encompassing persons, corporations, institutions — anything that has a name; and (2) Titles — i.e., everything that has a title, movie or otherwise. I hope these will make navigating and cross-referencing my posts a little more reader-friendly.

Other improvements to Cinedrome are in the planning stages and will be rolled out as they mature. Meanwhile, stay tuned for a return to regular posting. Next up: Preston Sturges.

Remembering the Night

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This post is adapted and expanded from an article I wrote for the November 22, 2007 issue of the Sacramento News & Review.

 
 
 

I always dread this time of year, when the holiday movies are trotted out. You can’t turn around without hearing some jackass bitch about how much he hates It’s a Wonderful Life. He can’t get enough of “I am your father, Luke” or “I’m King o’ the World!”, but Zuzu’s petals once a year is just more than he can bear.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when I had It’s a Wonderful Life all to myself (and yes, there was such a time). Well, almost to myself, anyhow. Certainly everybody else who knew and loved Frank Capra’s picture had my own last name. Back about 1974 or so, in college, I had two friends who made a nightly ritual of staying up to watch car dealer Jay Brown’s all-night movies on Channel 36 out of San Jose. One day — and it was nowhere near Christmas — they rushed up to me bubbling with enthusiasm for this great Jimmy Stewart movie they’d seen the night before. They figured if anyone would know about it, I would, and they were right. That was — for me, anyhow — the beginning of the revival of It’s a Wonderful Life. And the beginning of the end for my family and me having the memory of It’s a Wonderful Life all to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad the picture finally came into its own, and I thank a merciful Providence that Capra, Stewart and Donna Reed all lived to see it. But then again, when people like that hypothetical (but all too credible) killjoy I mentioned above feel free to rag on it, sometimes I’m not so sure.

So I almost hesitate to mention Remember the Night. Maybe I wouldn’t, but the cat seems to be getting out of the bag. When I wrote about Remember the Night in 2007, it was available only on out-of-print used VHS or bootleg copies of an AMC broadcast from the 1990s. Things are different now; the movie’s available in an above-board (and beautiful) DVD from the TCM Web site, and I figure it’s only a matter of time before someone runs up to me bubbling with enthusiasm about this great Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck movie they saw the other night. I want to be able to say I’m way ahead of them.

Most of the reason for Remember the Night‘s resurgency — I mean in artistic terms, independent of the arcane ins and outs of who owns a film and who decides there’s a market for it — is its writer, Preston Sturges. This was the last script he ever wrote for somebody else to direct, the somebody in this case being Mitchell Leisen, then the alpha dog among Paramount directors (a position he would soon cede to — or at least share with — Sturges himself). Leisen’s star has slipped a bit since his heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, alleviated somewhat by an excellent biography, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director by David Chierichetti, originally published in 1973 (the year after Leisen died), then revised and expanded in 1995. I’ll have more to say about some of Leisen’s pictures later.

Right now I’m talking about Remember the Night. The version of Sturges’ script published in Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges is a facsimile of Sturges’ actual typescript, dated June 15, 1939 and bearing the title The Amazing Marriage. Written in by hand on the title page is “Remember the Night[,] Or”. Obviously, neither Sturges nor producer-director Leisen ever came up with a really good title. The Amazing Marriage at least has some slight connection to a line from the script, albeit one Leisen cut during shooting. The picture’s final title, though, is so generic as to be meaningless.

If the title is generic, however, it’s the only thing about Remember the Night that is. Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a hardboiled, tough cookie who gets busted in New York for lifting a diamond bracelet from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. MacMurray is assistant D.A. Jack Sargent, about to leave town to drive to his mother’s farm in Indiana for Christmas when his boss yanks him in to prosecute Lee. Disgruntled and eager to get on the road, he takes advantage of a legal technicality and gets the case continued until after New Year’s. Then he begins feeling guilty about leaving Lee in jail over the holidays and arranges to get her bailed out. To his surprise and discomfort, the bail bondsman remands Lee to his custody, and the surprise is compounded when, despite the fact that he was prosecuting her only that afternoon, the two find themselves taking a liking to one another. They even learn that they grew

up about fifty miles from each other in the same part of Indiana. So, still feeling responsible for Lee, Jack decides to take her home to spend Christmas with his mother (Beulah Bondi) and aunt (Elizabeth Patterson) and their hired hand (Sterling Holloway).
 
At the humble Sargent farm outside Wabash, Ind., Lee’s hard shell begins to soften and melt in the glow of a household suffused by warmth, affection and mutual support — the kind of nurturing family atmosphere that was completely missing from her own upbringing just a few towns away. At the same time, love — the other kind of love — begins to bloom between Lee and Jack, and they allow themselves to forget — almost — that she’s a repeat offender, and come January 3 he’s going to have to try to send her to jail for a long time. 
 
Remember the Night wasn’t marketed as a holiday movie — it was released January 19, 1940, and besides, such a thing was almost unheard of then — but it’s one of the best and least-known. It was a hit in 1940, with Stanwyck and MacMurray already showing the sexy chemistry that would play to more sinister effect four years later in Double Indemnity. And it was visible on TV through the 1960s and into the ’70s, but has been out of circulation for decades. Now that Turner Classic Movies and Universal (which owns the pre-1948 Paramount library) have partnered up to issue it on DVD, it surely won’t be long before it becomes as popular and beloved as It’s a Wonderful Life. Well, okay, maybe not entirely as much — Wonderful Life has a mighty powerful mystique — but I’m betting it won’t be far behind. 
 
I think I may have more to say on the subject, so there might be a Part 2 to this post. But that’s for another day; I wanted to be sure to get this much up in time for Christmas. So Merry Christmas everybody, and if you’re looking for a new movie to add to your list of holiday favorites, consider giving Remember the Night a try. 
 
Oh, and one more thing. Don’t come around in 2037 moaning about how you’re sick and tired of Remember the Night. I won’t want to hear it.

Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships

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In 1949 Henry Hathaway made one of the best movies of his long career. In it, his three stars, Richard Widmark, Lionel Barrymore and Dean Stockwell (and for that matter, most of the supporting cast) each gave one of his own best performances. Down to the Sea in Ships is in fact one of the finest movies ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system, and almost nobody has ever heard of it.

I know I run the risk of overselling the product here, but I simply don’t understand why Down to the Sea in Ships isn’t one of the best-loved movies of all time. When the talk turns to the great seafaring stories of the screen — Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, Captains Courageous, Moby Dick et al. — it’s a mystery to me why Down to the Sea in Ships never comes up. If there are such things as flawless movies, and there surely are, Henry Hathaway’s Down to the Sea in Ships is one of them.

I say “Henry Hathaway’s” to distinguish this picture from the other Down to the Sea in Ships, from 1922. That one made a star out of Clara Bow, and curiously enough, it’s available on home video — no doubt because it’s in the public domain, while Hathaway’s picture is still under copyright and quarantined in the 20th Century Fox vault. In the 1960s and ’70s it was the other way around: Down to the Sea in Ships (1922) was gone and long forgotten, but if your local TV station had a decent film library and you were willing to stay up till two or three in the morning, you could count on seeing Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) two or three times a year. 

Before we leave the subject of Clara Bow’s breakout vehicle for good, let’s get one point clear: Wikipedia says that the 1922 picture “was remade by Twentieth Century Fox in 1949,” but — well, that’s Wikipedia for you. (Whoever wrote the article didn’t even know that it’s “20th Century Fox,” not “Twentieth.”) In fact, there is no connection whatsoever between the two pictures — other than the fact that they both deal with whaling ships out of New Bedford, Mass., and they both take their title from Psalm 107:23 (“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters…”). These aren’t two versions of the same story, they’re two different movies with the same title; henceforth, when I use the title, I’ll be talking about only one of them.

Fox chief Darryl Zanuck first set out to produce Down to the Sea in Ships in 1939 — if not this picture precisely, at least one with this title and setting. Things got as far as sending a second unit crew into the waters of the Gulf of California to shoot background footage. But when World War II made it impossible to shoot on the open sea, or even in California’s harbors, the picture went on a back burner.
 
After the war, Zanuck reactivated the project and handed it over to producer Louis D. (“Buddy”) Lighton and director Hathaway. Both men were working for Fox now, but they had been paired before in the 1930s at Paramount: Lighton had produced the Shirley Temple vehicle Now and Forever, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and Peter Ibbetson, all of which Hathaway directed. The first draft of the script was by Sy Bartlett — that’s him at right — born Sacha Baraniev in Russia (now Ukraine) in 1900 but raised in America from the age of four. Originally a newspaper reporter, he became a screenwriter for various studios in the ’30s, but he was noted more for hobnobbing in Hollywood society, hosting Sunday barbecues, and the occasional gossip-column appearance. He served with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, then returned to Hollywood and a job at Fox. At the time that he took his first cut at Down to the Sea in Ships, Bartlett’s most memorable work was still ahead of him: he later turned his wartime experience into the novel and screenplay Twelve O’Clock High (1949) for director Henry King and star Gregory Peck.

Music historian Jon Burlingame (in his notes for the movie’s soundtrack CD) says Bartlett’s script underwent a rewrite by John Lee Mahin — shown here (on the left) in a rare acting stint in Hell Below (1933) with Robert Montgomery. Like Bartlett a reporter-turned-screenwriter, Mahin already had a number of major credits on his resume, many of them — including Red Dust, Treasure Island (1934), Test Pilot, Captains Courageous and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) — for Hathaway’s mentor Victor Fleming.
 

Without access to what records might be in the 20th Century Fox archives, it’s impossible for me to say exactly how credit for Down to the Sea‘s script should shake out — which is a pity, because the script is a truly masterful piece of work; if the picture ever gets the kind of attention it has deserved for over 60 years, maybe someone will shed some light on the subject. The writing credit on screen reads “Screen Play by John Lee Mahin and Sy Bartlett; From a Story by Sy Bartlett,” which matches the general drift of the two writers’ careers: story was Bartlett’s long suit, dialogue Mahin’s. Making an educated guess, I’d say Bartlett was responsible for Down to the Sea‘s distinctive blend of rousing adventure and psychological acuity, Mahin for the unerring cadence and vocabulary of the speech of 19th century New England whalermen. Or it may have been more complicated than that; Mahin gets top billing on screen, which suggests that his rewrite probably amounted to more than just touching up the dialogue.

Down to the Sea in Ships opens in New Bedford in the summer of 1887. The whaling ship Pride of New Bedford returns from a four-year voyage under the command of Capt. Bering Joy (Lionel Barrymore), the best whaler on the New England coast. He’s just about the oldest, too, though he shows no signs of being ready to retire from the sea. The reason for that is his 11-year-old grandson Jed (Dean Stockwell), the youngest in a line of the whaling Joy family that extends back “mighty nigh two hundred years.” Capt. Joy, though still on crutches from an injury that kept him bunk-ridden for much of the voyage, is unwilling to retire, at least until Jed is thoroughly brought up in the ways of the sea and can continue the family tradition. Jed himself is (if you’ll pardon the expression) entirely on board with this; he loves the seafaring life, the only life he’s ever known. He’s spent the last four years — nearly half his life — as his grandfather’s cabin boy, and is now eager to ship out again as an apprentice member of the fo’c’sle crew.
 

Unfortunately, the decision may be taken out of both their hands. The whaling firm’s insurance company refuses to cover Capt. Joy; moreover, Massachusetts law will not allow Jed to return to sea unless he can pass an exam covering the four years of schooling he missed while he was away. Fortunately, a sympathetic school superintendent (Gene Lockhart, in a warmhearted cameo) fudges Jed’s test results rather than disappoint the captain.

And a tentative compromise is reached on the insurance issue when Capt. Joy is persuaded to sign Dan Lunceford (Richard Widmark) as first mate. The firm’s president (Paul Harvey) says Lunceford is a promising young seaman who only needs some experience under a master mariner like Capt. Joy, but the captain isn’t fooled: he realizes that Lunceford, who has a master’s license, is being foisted on him at the insurance company’s behest, to be in a position to take command of the Pride of New Bedford if age or infirmity should overcome the old man.
 

For his part, Dan Lunceford doesn’t care much for the look of Capt. Joy, nor for his sneering at Lunceford’s “book-learnin'” and his college degree in marine biology; only a sweetening of his percentage of the voyage’s profits persuades the younger man to ship out with Capt. Joy after all.

Once the Pride of New Bedford is out to sea, Capt. Joy plays his trump card. He tells Lunceford that he sees “the hand of Providence” in Lunceford’s presence on board. Jed was allowed to ship out, he says, only on the condition that his studies be continued, and Capt. Joy is hereby assigning Lunceford, in addition to his regular duties as first mate, to be Jed’s tutor during his off-duty hours. In this way, the crafty old mariner intends to kill two birds with one stone: he’ll see to Jed’s education, and he’ll keep Lunceford too busy to undermine his authority.

Lunceford has no choice but to accept the assignment, but he does so with ill grace. Resentful at what he regards as essentially a babysitting chore, he is impatient, sarcastic and dismissive. Resentful in turn, Jed is obstreperous and uncooperative. Lunceford decides Jed is just as ornery and pigheaded as his grandfather, and he give up the lessons as a waste of his time.

Stung, Jed applies himself and in time surprises Lunceford with answers to all the questions that had stumped him before. Lunceford suddenly approaches his duties as tutor in earnest, tailoring lessons more carefully to Jed’s quick and lively but unsophisticated intelligence. As the friendship grows between Jed and Lunceford, Capt. Joy begins — rightly or wrongly — to fear that his grandson’s respect and affection are drifting away from himself and attaching themselves to Lunceford; he responds to the unexpected competition by looking more carefully at Lunceford’s ideas, which he had formerly dismissed as not worth his attention. All this happens even as the Pride of New Bedford roams the waters of the South Atlantic, stalking and taking whales.

That’s about as much of the plot as I care to go into here; better that you should discover the rest for yourself. Down to the Sea in Ships isn’t available on home video*, but it does surface (pun intended) from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel, and it’s worth seeking out to discover how the three-generation, three-way relationship of Capt. Joy, Jed and Dan Lunceford plays itself out against the background of a perilous voyage contending with the forces of nature and the leviathans of the deep. Each of the three discovers qualities of strength and character in the others that he either never suspected or did not properly value at first. Each brings out the best in the other two, and allows the other two to bring out the best in him.

 
All this, mind you, while the movie does not skimp on action and high adventure. There are scenes of whale chases and boats lost at sea, suspenseful and beautifully shot (Joe MacDonald) and edited (Dorothy Spencer), with excellent special effects (Fred Sersen and Ray Kellogg). Capping it all is a climactic sequence in which the Pride of New Bedford runs aground on an iceberg in the fog near the horn of South America…
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

…with the crew desperately struggling to free themselves and repair the damage before the sea pounds their ship to splinters against the unforgiving ice. Not to mince words, it’s an absolutely brilliant action/suspense set piece. Amazingly enough, it was shot entirely in a soundstage tank on the Fox lot, but it’s spectacularly convincing and harrowing for all that.

 

 
Down to the Sea in Ships was Lionel Barrymore’s last starring role, on loan from MGM. Once, when introducing Barrymore on a 1939 radio broadcast, Orson Welles referred to him as “the most beloved actor of our time.” It was probably an exaggeration, but not by much; Barrymore’s stock in trade was playing cantankerous old codgers with hearts of gold. Ironic, then, that the only role for which he’s widely remembered today is Old Man Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), one of the most thoroughly heartless characters in the history of movies. In his own day Barrymore was more closely identified with wise old Dr. Gillespie in MGM’s Dr. Kildare series, and with his annual holiday performances as Ebenezer Scrooge on radio. In fact, Barrymore had been slated to play Scrooge in MGM’s A Christmas Carol (1938) until he broke his hip in an auto accident. That injury landed him in a wheelchair, then advancing arthritis kept him there for the rest of his career — until Down to the Sea in Ships.
 
Henry Hathaway remembered, at first, a testy working relationship with Barrymore. As he told interviewer Polly Platt:
 
“He had everything wrong with him, most of it in his head…I said, “You’re not sick, you’re just destroying yourself…I have no sympathy for you. You’re a glutton, you drink too much…You want to destroy yourself, you’re really doing it.”
 

Is this callousness or tough love? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Hathaway had a reputation for being tough on actors. His side of it was simply that he refused to mollycoddle them; he expected actors to report to the set ready to work. He also remembered the day they finished shooting Barrymore’s scenes:

“We finish the picture, he walked off the set. No wheelchair. No crutches. And he came to me and said, “Mr. Hathaway, I want to tell you, you did more for me and for my life on this picture than ever happened to me before. From my father or my mother, or from anybody. I was just simply sitting there and waiting to die.”

Hathaway went on to say that they remained friends for the rest of Barrymore’s life. In any case, whatever the validity of Hathaway’s recollection, the evidence is there on screen: Barrymore responded — whether out of spite or chagrin — by giving one of his strongest performances in years. For once he’s not merely being wheeled around the set acting crusty (although in his more physically active shots he was often doubled by assistant director Richard Talmadge).

I don’t mean to minimize the genuine pain Barrymore surely suffered, but that wheelchair must have been a real convenience for a man who had never been all that crazy about being an actor to begin with. In youth, his real interests were in painting, writing, and composing music, but the pressure to enter the family trade (and the money to be made from it) kept him on stage, screen and radio for nearly sixty years. The role of Capt. Bering Joy was a recognizable “Lionel Barrymore type”, but it was also a complex and vigorous character betrayed by age and ill health, and Barrymore the self-described ham connected with it on a more profound level than almost any part he ever played. He deserves to be remembered for this performance as much as — indeed, more than — for the unalloyed wickedness of Henry Potter. 

Down to the Sea in Ships was Richard Widmark’s fifth movie, after his sensational debut as the giggling psycho killer Tommy Udo in Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947). In the intervening three pictures, Widmark played a woman-beating gang lord (The Street with No Name), a murderously jealous bar owner (Road House) and an underhanded western outlaw (Yellow Sky). The studio realized he was in danger of being typecast as a succession of nutjobs, sleazeballs and unsavories (because he played them so well), when what the studio really needed was another leading man. Casting him as Dan Lunceford was a conscious effort to help him segue into more sympathetic roles. It worked. Widmark went on to be one of Fox’s most stalwart leading men, playing good guys (Slattery’s Hurricane, Panic in the Streets), bad guys (No Way Out, O. Henry’s Full House) and guys in between (Pickup on South Street, Don’t Bother to Knock) — until, like many other stars, he went free-agent in the mid-1950s.

In Down to the Sea, Widmark is top-billed, although he doesn’t appear until half an hour in. His Dan Lunceford is the character who goes through the most self-surprising changes in the course of the picture. After all, Jed is an adolescent coming of age, and changes are to be expected, while Capt. Joy, though seemingly set in his ways and defiantly so, proves to be flexible, open to change, and willing to learn — when he thinks nobody is watching and he can do it without losing face.

Capt. Joy blusters, but it’s Dan Lunceford who is most nearly arrogant at the outset; part of the reason the captain scoffs at Lunceford’s education is that he senses Lunceford is more than a little puffed-up about it. For his part, Lunceford treats Capt. Joy with an exaggerated politeness that stops just short of insolent sarcasm. (Capt. Joy: “You may have noticed that most of my crew generally sign on again.” Lunceford [drily]: “Out of affection no doubt, sir.”) His sarcasm towards Jed’s lessons, on the other hand, is undisguised — at first. In time, he comes to realize he has misjudged them both, especially the captain. By the end he’s telling Jed that his grandfather is “more of a man than you or I could ever hope to be.” It’s an admission Lunceford could hardly have imagined making when the voyage began.

And then there’s Dean Stockwell. Stockwell’s first screen role came in 1945, when he was eight years old, and he’s still working today — which means that his career has now lasted longer than Lionel Barrymore’s or Richard Widmark’s. When I screened my print of Down to the Sea in Ships for some friends, one of them said, “Dean Stockwell was a revelation!” She was familiar with Stockwell as an adult actor, and knew he had started as a child star, but had no inkling he was ever as good as he is here. (“He was marvelous,” remembered Hathaway, “just a great actor. Intense little guy.”) My friend was right: Dean Stockwell’s performance here is a revelation, easily (at the age of twelve) the best of his career — and for an actor whose résumé includes Gentleman’s Agreement, The Boy with Green Hair, Compulsion, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Blue Velvet, and the TV series Quantum Leap, that’s saying something. Jed Joy is the fulcrum upon which the plot of Down to the Sea in Ships pivots, and in Stockwell’s performance we see him grow from an uncertain, sometimes petulant child into the makings of a fine, strong young man — he seems even to grow taller as the story progresses (and it’s all in his acting; the shooting schedule wasn’t that protracted).
 
Jon Burlingame says that Down to the Sea cost $2.5 million, one of Fox’s most expensive pictures of 1949, and that despite good reviews and high expectations (“…so engrossingly done that the box-office appeal should be sturdy,” said Variety, “…dotted with tremendously moving scenes that will stick in the memory.”), it failed to break even. Not an unfamiliar story in the history of Hollywood.
 
I’ve been dancing all around something here, and I might as well come right out and say it: Down to the Sea in Ships is a masterpiece. It’s not one of those “miracle pictures” I’ve talked about before, like Peter Ibbetson or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Making it was no departure for the Hollywood studio system; on the contrary, pictures like this were right up Hollywood’s alley. If there’s a miracle here, it isn’t that it was made in the first place, but that it turned out so well in the end.
 
Henry Hathaway never worked with a better script; for that matter, neither has anyone else. Whether the credit goes mainly to John Lee Mahin or to Sy Bartlett — or some magical, once-in-a-lifetime chemistry between the two — Down to the Sea‘s script is nothing less than a work of genius. It’s a rousing sea adventure, a sharp-eyed psychological study, a near-documentary reconstruction of the 19th century whaling trade, and a subtle examination of the customs and dynamics of a shipboard community in the age of sails. Nearly every line is memorable, every scene layered with nuances that reward repeated viewings. Even the name of the ship — Pride of New Bedford — is pregnant with symbolism: the many facets of pride, as both virtue and vice, is a major theme that runs through the story and all three of the central characters. This superb text inspired everyone who touched it — Hathaway, his actors, photographer Joe McDonald, editor Dorothy Spencer, composer Alfred Newman, everyone — to give it the best of their considerable abilities. The result of their efforts is (I say it again) a flawless movie. Not a work of art, perhaps — perhaps — but of such a high order of craftsmanship that it’s all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

If you ever get the chance to see Down to the Sea in Ships, don’t pass it up. I’ve never shown it to anyone who didn’t love it. I guarantee it: this is one of the greatest movies you never heard of.

_______________

*UPDATE 11/4/2021: Down to the Sea in Ships is now available on DVD from 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives; it’s available here from Amazon.

Camera Beauty

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on by
 
 
 

I once mentioned to my uncle (a movie buff like me)
that I thought Ava Gardner was the most beautiful
woman who ever stood in front of a movie camera.
Of course, that’s a subjective call if there ever was
one; plus, considering how much movie-camera
time has been devoted exclusively to photographing
beautiful women over the past ninety years or so,
the field of candidates is awfully crowded. You could
run the question by anybody — even limiting the
time period to, say, 1915-65 — and I’ll bet you’d
have to collect several hundred votes before you
got ten who picked the same woman.

Anyhow, meaning no disrespect to whoever’s name
popped into your head just now, that’s what I said
at the time: Ava Gardner topped my list. My uncle
considered the idea, and said two words: “Maureen O’Hara.”

Well, now, there was food for thought. So I
considered his idea, and I said, okay,
Ava Gardner for black and white …

 
 
… and Maureen O’Hara for Technicolor.
No doubt about it, when those old
three-strip cameras were cranking
and those blistering kilowatts of
light flooded the set, red hair and
green eyes — to say nothing of the
face that went with them — could be 
pretty powerful selling points.
 

Which raises the question: How much does the
camera matter?  A lot, obviously, but exactly
how much? Can it even be quantified?
I never met Ava Gardner or Maureen O’Hara,
but I’ve certainly seen plenty of their movies,
and publicity and paparazzi photos, in both
black and white and color — enough to
convince me that neither of them were
exactly dowdy scullery drudges
away from the set.

On the other hand, I have met Elle Macpherson; I interviewed her in 1994 when her supermodel career was at its peak. And you know what? She was more gorgeous in person than she is in any photograph I’ve ever seen of her, and even more than she was in the movie (Sirens) that I was interviewing her for. I know it sounds like a bizarre thing to say about a woman who appeared on a record five Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue covers, but I was there and I saw it with my own eyes: no camera has ever captured the full beauty of Elle Macpherson.
 
We’re used to thinking about all the things the camera adds — I mean besides the proverbial fifteen pounds. Garbo was famously ordinary off-camera, and she knew how much her mystique owed to cinematographer William H. Daniels; he shot 21 of her 25 Hollywood pictures, and the men who shot the others — Joseph Ruttenberg, Karl Freund and Oliver Marsh — were no slouches either. But the camera can take away, too. I saw it with Elle Macpherson, and it makes me wonder whether (incredible as it seems) Ava Gardner and Maureen O’Hara might have looked even more stunning in person than they do in that glamour shot above, or that frame from The Quiet Man.
 
Movie lovers are slaves to technology, every bit as much as the stars and directors. We’re dependent on the technology for our perceptions, and perceptions change as the technology improves or deteriorates. For example, the recent Blu-ray and DVD release of The Red Shoes has forced me to come up with a new choice — at the very least, a new candidate — for Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Stood in Front of a Movie Camera:
 

Moira Shearer as the doomed ballerina Victoria Page. The painstaking restoration of The Red Shoes undertaken by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the British Film Institute reportedly took two-and-a-half years, and it was worth every minute. I read somewhere once that The Red Shoes was the Technicolor Corp.’s own official choice for the most beautiful Technicolor movie ever made. I don’t know if that’s true, but I believe it; I’ve never seen a print of Red Shoes that was less than gorgeous. Even so, I’ve never seen — scarecely imagined — it looking like this. The movie itself, I think, is one of the unique works of art, though to be honest, it’s one I admire without entirely enjoying; for sheer pleasure I prefer other Powell-Pressburger pictures like I Know Where I’m Going, A Matter of Life and Death or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But as a sheer exercise in sumptuous pictorial splendor, The Red Shoes is without equal, and this new restoration leaves me wide-eyed and gasping at nearly every shot.

The chief beneficiary of the UCLA/BFI facelift, besides Jack Cardiff’s matchless cinematography (only the spiteful insularity of Hollywood can explain why he wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar), is Moira Shearer — the dancer who never really wanted to be a movie star. Whether she’s dressed to the nines for a formal reception, as above…

 

 
 
…strolling in the warm Monte Carlo sun…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…tousled after a strenuous rehearsal…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…togged out for a formal dinner date…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…larded over with seven pounds of ballet makeup…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  …or beaded with sweat during a performance, Shearer always looks like seven billion bucks. 
 
What I’m driving at is that all this is the result of improved technology. When my uncle and I had our discussion of Ava Gardner vis a vis Maureen O’Hara, and when we were considering all the legendary screen beauties (Garbo, Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Hedy Lamarr, Louise Brooks, insert favorite name here), I don’t think either of us gave a thought to Moira Shearer. Is Moira Shearer — the Moira Shearer of 1948 — suddenly more beautiful than she was the last time he or I saw The Red Shoes? 
 
Robert Gitt of the UCLA Film & Television Archive suggests that The Red Shoes may look better now — clearer, sharper, richer — than it did even when it was new, simply because of the digital techniques that allow for a precision in processing the Technicolor matrices that goes beyond anything possible in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, or for decades even beyond that. The process of shooting The Red Shoes is over and done with; we can’t change what happened on the set, or how Jack Cardiff lit the actors and focused and moved the camera. But what happens from there, between the time the negative comes out of the camera and the moment the finished image is splashed across a screen for discerning eyes — that process remains malleable, and probably always will (any collector who has watched the color shift and fade on a 16mm Eastman print can easily grasp the concept). Shooting a movie is a finite process, but making the movie can go on and on for years, decades — in the case of The Red Shoes, even after nearly everyone involved in getting the picture into theaters in the first place is dead and gone. That’s why movie buffs before the age of video would travel miles to see yet another print of a picture they already knew by heart, and why they might buy 16mm prints over and over — then, when video came in, the VHS, the laserdisc, the DVD, the Collector’s Edition, the Blu-ray. It’s like Shakespeare scholars taking in an infinity of Hamlets; the experience is different every time, and this one just might prove definitive.
 
So suddenly The Red Shoes looks more glorious than it ever did — which hardly seemed possible — and I have a new personal nominee for Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Stood in Front of a Movie Camera.
 
And yet, all this may change. If, say, Mogambo or The Quiet Man ever get the kind of laborious restoration that UCLA and the BFI have lavished The Red Shoes, there could be clearer, sharper, richer beauties revealed in Ava Gardner and Maureen O’Hara, and they may again challenge Moira Shearer for the title. Then again, just such a restoration is underway even now on another Powell-Pressburger picture, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and who knows…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…the 21-year-old Deborah Kerr just might come out of nowhere to knock them all out of the running.