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A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 2

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Discs 2 and 3 of Classic Musical Shorts from the Dream Factory are practically all Technicolor, except for one short, What Price Jazz with Ted Fio Rito and his orchestra, which credits Technicolor but evidently survives only in black and white. The Warner Archive emphasizes the color in these MGM shorts, and it’s a little misleading (like those video compilations from The Ed Sullivan Show that give you the impression the only guests Sullivan ever had were the Beatles, Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones). Still, while it’s true that Metro came late to the Technicolor party where features were concerned (their first was 1939’s Sweethearts; only Columbia and Universal waited longer to jump on the bandwagon), the studio dabbled extensively in Technicolor shorts throughout the ’30s.

There were, for one thing, the ubiquitous James A. FitzPatrick Traveltalks (“As our boat pulls away from the shore and the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid a reluctant farewell…”) — a fertile field for another Warner Archive collection. And the color shorts collected here — some, like Crazy House and The Devil’s Cabaret, composed of remnants of MGM’s aborted feature The March of Time (see Richard Barrios’s A Song in the Dark for a detailed retelling of that fiasco), while others were little mini-musicals created from scratch.

See, for example, the two-color Tech Over the Counter, in which a hustling young go-getter turns his father’s stodgy department store into a sort of daylight nightclub. (The picture here is of young Betty Grable, only 15 but already playing a married woman shopping for a baby. As you can see, it would take the coming of 3-strip Technicolor, and a little more maturity on her part, to do full justice to Betty’s looks.)

A few of the shorts stretch the meaning of “musical” in the title of the collection. The Spectacle Maker (1934), for one, is a fairy tale parable about a maker of magic lenses; one makes people see only beauty, which makes him famous and beloved, while another makes them see only the truth, which gets him condemned for witchcraft (don’t worry, all comes out well). Music is limited to some maypole dances and a simple ditty sung by little Cora Sue Collins as a princess. 


The Spectacle Maker is noteworthy for two things besides the pretty color: (1) It was the first directorial effort of Australian transplant John Villiers Farrow, who would go on to marry Maureen O’Sullivan, direct such movies as Five Came Back, Wake Island, The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal and Hondo, and father an actress daughter named Mia; and (2) the title role was played by Christian Rub, who would gain immortality as the voice and physical model for Gepetto in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (his appearance in this short may in fact have gotten him the job).


My favorite shorts in the whole collection are the color series produced by Louis Lewyn, invariably boasting “A Galaxy of Screen Stars” or words to that effect. My uncle (a film buff like me) says, “I always find these shorts interesting, though not necessarily good,” and that pretty much nails it. Lewyn’s modus operandi was to shoot these little 1930s showcases at the favorite playgrounds of the stars: the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and Lido Plunge spa (“Feminine Conditioning”) at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, or at Santa Barbara, Catalina Island, Palm Springs, etc. Then, I’m guessing, he would find stars who were between assignments and offer to put them up for a few days during shooting, in return for which they would do a little turn in front of the camera, or even just sit at a table and wave on cue. In this way, Lewyn would get a star-studded short in vivid (even garish) color, and his audience would get what seemed like a privileged glimpse of their screen idols at play.

In the first of these, 1934’s Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove, emcee Leo Carillo (for once blessedly free of his “Ohhhh, Ceesco” accent) recites Don Blanding’s poem “Hollywood”:

“Bunk, junk and genius, amazingly blended…
Shoddy and cheap — and astonishingly splendid.”

I love that line “Bunk, junk and genius;” in fact, I briefly considered making it the name of this blog, before deciding to go with something more descriptive and less obscure.

We have Lewyn’s come-and-put-in-an-appearance approach to thank for our only Technicolor look at the legendary Mary Pickford; gone but not forgotten by 1934, she steps to the mike, graciously addresses her public, and flirts with a youthful Bing Crosby before returning to her ringside table to beam at the Cocoanut Grove’s floor show.

Pickford wasn’t the only silent-era veteran who made an appearance for Lewyn. Chester Conklin, Ben Turpin, Hank Mann, Buster Keaton, William S. Hart and Rex Bell all show up in one locale or another; here’s a look at Turpin cavorting with a trio of comediennes at the Lido. Not all of these old-timers were as well-fixed and retired-by-choice as Mary Pickford. I think it speaks well of Lewyn that he was willing to give them a day or two of work and help them stay in the public eye, maybe pick up a few bucks to boot. (And while I’m thinking of it, isn’t it a pity that Rex Bell’s wife Clara Bow couldn’t have appeared with her husband, smiling and waving at the fans; wouldn’t it have been a treat to see her blazing red hair in 3-strip Technicolor?)

It wasn’t all idle stars and silent vets in a Lewyn short. He showcased the occasional new face as well. Here’s one from a Cocoanut Grove fashion parade of Travis Banton’s Egyptian-themed gowns; do you recognize her? I didn’t before she was pointed out to me, and her name isn’t mentioned as she sashays down the steps with the other models. But that’s 19-year-old Clara Lou Sheridan, before she permanently changed her first name to Ann.

Or how about this, from La Fiesta de Santa Barbara (’35, directed by Lewyn, produced by Pete Smith). Can you name that blonde cowgirl between Toby Wing and Chester Conklin? Believe it or not, underneath that thick layer of Technicolor makeup is Ida Lupino, still five years from They Drive by Night and a helluva long way from High Sierra and Road House.

Toby and Ida in their colorful western duds offer a hint to another surefire ingredient in Louis Lewyn’s short subjects: beautiful women and plenty of them. Whether they were lining up for volleyball on the Lido’s trucked-in sands…

…heralding a comic Andy Devine bullfight in Santa Barbara…

…clustering at the feet of comic Fuzzy Knight in Palm Springs…

 

 

 

 
 …yo-ho-ho-ing with the Halloween pirates on Catalina Island…

 

 

…or parading in faux Chinese feathers in an even faux-er Chinese tea garden….

 

…Lewyn made sure that they were never far from the camera for long. Lewyn (and his frequent director Roy Rowland) seem to have believed that those gorgeous Technicolor flesh tones looked better and better the more flesh you used to show them off.

And tell the truth — can you disagree?

Looking at these short peeks into Hollywood recreation, brightly painted for the Technicolor camera and carefully scrubbed into good clean fun for home consumption, I can’t help wondering what the stars were thinking as they sat and smiled and nodded and waved at their “host” (Leo Carillo, Reginald Denny, Elissa Landi, Chester Morris, Lee Tracy, whomever), whose joshing introductions were no doubt shot at an entirely different time, maybe even on a different day. And what did movie colony insiders think when they saw the finished product at some real Hollywood party?

Did this shot of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott on Catalina draw knowing glances from their peers and co-workers the way it does from the gleeful gossips of today? There doesn’t seem to be any such winking over a similar shot of Gary Cooper and Richard Cromwell at the Cocoanut Grove. And how much less over another shot of Sir Guy Standing sharing a table with a twinkling Toby Wing (what did they find to talk about?).

 

Surely this shot of Mr. and Mrs. Clark Gable on the lawn at the Lido must have startled at least some viewers in St. Louis or Des Moines — is that his aunt? Host Reg Denny is quick to point out that the lady is in fact his wife, making her (at least by marriage) the Queen of Hollywood. But in 1935, when this shot was taken, not even Gable could have known how uneasy sat his consort’s crown. It is for us, three-quarters-of-a-century on, to savor the poignant knowledge that this nice, motherly-looking lady is about to go toe-to-toe with Carole Lombard — and lose, big-time. Do we even remember her name? (Maria “Ria” Langham.)

After the gaudy splash of Discs 2 and 3, and Louis Lewyn’s relentlessly hearty civic-booster showmanship, Disc 4 in the collection can’t help looking a little anticlimactic, even drab. We’re back to black and white, even for Lewyn’s peppy Billy Rose’s Casa Manana Revue and Sunday Night at the Trocadero, and the collection rounds out with a sampling of Musical Merry-Go-Round shorts from 1948 with disc jockey Martin Block, creator of radio’s Make Believe Ballroom. As the picture here suggests, the shorts are essentially Block sitting at his microphone playing records and interviewing guests, with interpolated shots of the bands in question to save us from merely watching the turntable spin. (The pic also, I think, hints at the dissatisfaction with L.A. that would send Block scurrying back to New York as soon as his KFWB contract was up.)

From canned vaudeville to illustrated radio in twenty short years — that’s the arc of the theatrical movie short as presented in Classic Musical Shorts from the Dream Factory. The first Oscars for short subjects were awarded in 1931-32, and in retrospect we can see that their golden age wasn’t long. By ’48, even at lofty MGM, things had devolved to a deejay and his record collection; television and the antitrust breakup of the Hollywood monopoly were just around the bend to deliver the death blow to the short-spangled movie program. Warner Bros.’ Joe McDoakes would morph into TV’s George Jetson, and Pete Smith would wind up doing charcoal commercials.

The death spiral wasn’t quick; it was almost as long as the the golden age itself. Walt Disney would long depend on animated shorts and his groundbreaking True Life Adventure and People and Places documentaries to fill out programs with his animated and live-action features, and Looney Tunes would limp into the 1960s, growing cheaper and more lackluster almost by the day. Over at Columbia, Moe Howard and Larry Fine would soldier doggedly on like George Blanda kicking extra points or Harold Stassen running for president, even as Third Stooges kept dropping dead beside them; but in 1959 even they, like the Disney True Life Adventures, would segue into features for good.

 

Did audiences sense the end as they sat in theaters, their eyes wandering to the shadow patterns on the curtains behind Martin Block’s desk? I suppose not; right now always feels permanent at the time. But some far-seeing souls with long memories might have reflected that these shorts weren’t nearly as much fun as they used to be. Could they have imagined that fifty, sixty years down the line the Academy would still be doling out Oscars for short subjects — albeit to ones that almost nobody ever sees?
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A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 1

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The new collection from the Warner Archive, Classic Musical Shorts from the Dream Factory, offers quite a time-machine glimpse into the changing tastes of audiences between 1928 and 1948, at least as reflected in the output of the Metro short subjects unit. All of these shorts — well, most of them, anyhow — have been previously issued on laserdisc, either in the Cavalcade of MGM Shorts collections, as part of the Dawn of Sound series, or as supplements to various features. It’s that random-supplement business that has always frustrated me; I’ve long since given up trying to remember which disc included Pirate Party on Catalina Isle with its mildly eyebrow-raising shot of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott sharing an open-air table on the beach at Avalon. And besides, while I’ve retained all of my laserdisc collection, isn’t it remarkable how quickly those things have become clunky and cumbersome? Much better and more convenient to have all these shorts together in one collection like this.

The shorts are presented more or less in chronological order on the four discs. Disc 1 is from the late 1920s and shows a preponderance of vaudeville entertainers, the first resort of early sound. There are the unfortunately named Locust Sisters, a quartet of close-harmony singers with a fifth sister, Mathilda, accompanying them on the piano. The two songs they give us here appear to represent a sizable chunk of their fifteen minutes of fame, another chunk being their featured roles as missionaries in the 1927 Vincent Youmans Broadway musical Hit the Deck. The five-minute short in this collection, from 1928, is the first of their two appearances in a Metro Movietone Revue, and the parlor setting (these early sound shorts were often filmed on whatever standing sets were available) emphasizes the impression they give of being stagestruck amateurs rather than seasoned troupers. The sisters briefly recorded for Columbia Records, where their somewhat, er, matronly appearance was probably less of a handicap than on film.

Showing to rather better advantage is the diminutive Frances White (identified by some inattentive copywriter on the disc label and liner notes as “Fences White,” which makes her sound like a Damon Runyon character). A veteran of the Ziegfeld Follies, White was a temperamental and not entirely stable personality, but we can see here why she was, at least for a time, very popular with audiences. (In 1917 at the Bronx’s Royal Theatre, an overenthusiastic audience kept her and her partner William Rock on stage for 55 minutes.)

In this 1928 short, White appears in three costumes: as a bustled and corsetted belle of the 1890s; as a lisping schoolgirl spelling “Mississippi” in song (“M-i-s…s-i-s…s-i-p-p-i…”), the number that so enthralled that Bronx audience in 1917;

 

…and…

 …as a sultry vamp with an ostrich-plume fan, singing about her old home down south in Dixie. White was clearly versatile, and the Movietone camera, cooped up in its airtight, soundproof booth, certainly took a shine to her in a way it never did to the Locust Sisters. She might have had a real career in the sort of roles that went to the likes of Joan Blondell and Una Merkel, but it was not to be. As this short went into production, she was headlining at the Palace; two years later, she would end up in jail when she didn’t have the funds to pay a $3.50 taxi fare. She retired from show business in the late ’30s and died in obscurity in 1969. Now, 41 years later, she is back to entertain us again, only to be billed as “Fences White” by the Warner Archive.

 

Frances White — and Marion Harris, another appealing singer whose movie career quickly ended through bad timing and personal problems — may have just missed the breaks, but there are others in this collection for whom a Hollywood career was probably never in the cards, no matter what. Gus Edwards’ Kiddie Revue is a case in point. Originally produced in two-color Technicolor that has now faded to a dull sepia, the charms of its performers have tended to fade with the hues.

Gus Edwards was a personality who is difficult to explain to people today, but in his own time he was nearly as famous and influential as George Lucas or Steven Spielberg are now. A composer of popular songs (“By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” “School Days”), producer, impresario and entertainer, he also had an eye for young talent, and many of the kids he featured in vaudeville from 1905 to 1925 went on to major showbiz careers. Alas, no such happy fate awaited the mostly anonymous moppets in Kiddie Revue; on the whole, this 1930 short goes far to prove that the cute-kiddie schtick wasn’t as easy as Shirley Temple would later make it look.

It’s not that these kids have no talent; on the contrary. Take these three young beauties, for example, tapdancing in ballet toe-shoes up and down steps in perfect unison; they have a skill and stamina I’ve seldom seen anywhere else. And they are pretty and nubile enough that the camera records their routine with as much pleasure and enthusiasm as they perform it.

But where did they think such an act could take them? In vaudeville, it might have lasted them for years, even decades. In a movie, you do it once and within weeks it’s been seen by maybe millions of people; at that point you’d better come up with something new — the mid-twentieth century is strewn with the career wreckage of vaudevillians who never learned that lesson. Besides, seeing an act like this on stage is one thing; in closeup on a big screen, audiences in 1930 must have winced — “Jeez! That must really hurt!” — just as we do now. No wonder tip-toe-tapdancers like these don’t show up in a lot of movie musicals.

Other acts in the Kiddie Revue are odd to the point of being vaguely alarming. A fashion show finale, “Babies a la Mode,” testifies that the beauty pageant excesses we see in Little Miss Sunshine and the short, sad career of JonBenet Ramsey are not a recent development.

But oddest and most delightfully alarming of all is this young girl who performs a complete tap routine while bent over backwards with her hands flat on the stage floor. Such virtuosic agility deserves more than the anonymity of faded Technicolor, but unfortunately her name has not come down to us. Does she by any chance have a child or grandchild out there who is reading this now? Or can it be — it’s barely possible — that she herself is still among us? I’d be delighted to hear from you.

But we can’t let it go with just a single frame enlargement. Here’s a YouTube clip that includes her performance. Our girl turns up 2 min. 48 sec. into the clip; before that, you’ll see the mop-top little emcee, child actor Douglas Scott, introduce one “Madame Azusa” with a preternaturally clever send-up of stuffy coloratura sopranos (“A little bit of opera goes a long, long way…”). Then it’s our girl front and center, and it’s simply the damnedest thing you ever saw.

 

To Be Continued…

“A Genial Hack,” Part 3: Peter Ibbetson

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Ibbetson12aBaEvery now and then in the 1930s (and more often than you might think) the Hollywood factory would turn out a picture that just didn’t fit the mold, one that seems in retrospect out of step with the reigning star system, the house style of its studio, the temper of the times — or a combination of all three. Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn was like that, and Warner Bros.’ Victorian-ornate A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and 1934’s Death Takes a Holiday. (For that matter, so was King Kong.) “Miracle pictures,” I call them; the fact that they’re as good as they are — that they were made at all — seems almost to violate the laws of Hollywood physics.

In 1935, fresh off the roaring success of his first A-picture, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Henry Hathaway turned out one of these miracle pictures for Paramount. Peter Ibbetson is unlike any other movie Hathaway ever made. It’s unlike any other movie its star, Gary Cooper, ever made. Until the 1940s, when the trauma of World War II spawned a sub-genre of movies concerned with immortality and the afterlife (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, A Guy Named Joe, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, etc.), it was almost unique. It’s impossible to dismiss Peter Ibbetson once you’ve seen it. This post has been delayed because I want to be very careful what I write about it, to get what I want to say exactly right. And also because, revisiting Hathaway’s haunting, lyrical movie, I can’t restrain myself from wanting to watch it over and over — sometimes straight through, sometimes hopping from one favorite moment to another.

If Peter Ibbetson seemed strange to audiences in 1935, it probably wasn’t because it was so spiritual or ethereal, but because it was so old-fashioned. It must have looked like something D.W. Griffith would have done in his heyday (in fact, looking back now, it seems odd that Griffith never did). The story originated in an 1891 novel by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne du Maurier. The strain of gothic romance that runs through Dame Daphne’s novels (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn) can be traced to her grandfather, even though he’d been dead over a decade when she was born. Peter Ibbetson, riding the wave of spiritualism and occultism that was cresting in the late Victorian Era, was a modest success, and du Maurier followed it in 1894 with the hugely successful Trilby (in which he contributed the term “Svengali” to the English language).

 

In the late 1910s playwright John Nathaniel Raphael and actress-director Constance Collier adapted Ibbetson into a play. It was a hit on the London stage, and in 1917 Collier co-starred with the young John Barrymore on Broadway, as du Maurier’s star-crossed lovers who meet every night in their dreams. It was this version of du Maurier’s rambling and undisciplined tale that provided the framework for Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young’s script for Hathaway and his stars Gary Cooper and Ann Harding.

Hathaway wasn’t originally assigned to direct Peter Ibbetson; the job was supposed to go to Richard Wallace. Wallace (born, like Hathaway, in Sacramento) had just finished The Little Minister with Katharine Hepburn, and Ibbetson seemed like a good fit. But Gary Cooper, antsy over the script’s offbeat quality, insisted on Hathaway instead. (Hathaway was one of Cooper’s best friends and his favorite director, and eventually directed more of Cooper’s movies than anyone.) Shuffled off onto Annapolis Farewell, which had been Hathaway’s next slated assignment, Wallace flew off for the film’s Maryland location and was badly injured (though not killed) when his plane went down in Macon, Georgia; Annapolis Farewell was eventually directed by Alexander Hall.

Henry Hathaway didn’t often work with child actors, but when he did, he got good results (Spanky McFarland in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Dean Stockwell in Down to the Sea in Ships). And so it was with Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler in Ibbetson. They play Cooper and Harding as kids, “Gogo” and “Mimsey”, when their souls become mated for life. The first of the movie’s poetic moments comes when the two are about to be separated, as Gogo’s gruff uncle is taking him from his Paris home after his mother’s death, to be raised in England; a closeup shows Weidler timidly taking Moore by the hand.

When they meet years later, Gogo is now Peter, a promising young architect, and Mimsey is Mary, the Duchess of Towers, whose husband the duke (John Halliday) has hired Peter to redesign the stables on his estate. At first they don’t recognize one another, but the realization comes one morning during Peter’s stay at the estate, when the two find they have shared the same dream the night before, of being caught in a sudden storm during a carriage ride.

It is in its last third that Peter Ibbetson becomes something rare and unforgettable, when the lovers are parted once again as Peter is sent to prison. The most sensible and satisfying change that Raphael and Collier made in their play was to alter the crime for which Peter goes away. In du Maurier’s novel, he cold-bloodedly murders the “uncle” who raised him when he learns that the man is really his biological father, a notorious rake who seduced and abandoned his mother, leaving her to die brokenhearted in Paris.

In the play and movie, the “crime” occurs in a confrontation with the drunken Duke of Towers. The duke brandishes a pistol, and Peter, accidentally and in self-defense, bashes his brains out with a chair. Tormented by the separation and tortured in prison, his back broken by a sadistic guard, Peter surrenders to despair, hoping only for death. 

But Mary appears to him and proves that this is no delirium; they are really together in a dream, though separated by distance, stone and iron.

Ibbetson11“You needn’t be afraid, Peter,” she says. “The strangest things are true, and the truest things are strange.”

 

Peter gains courage to live for the nighttime, when they can be together. In du Maurier’s book, they spend years gallivanting through time and space, unfettered by a world that has grown unreal to them. (It gets more than a little tedious, truth be told.) In the movie, this is distilled into a transcendent 16-minute sequence, luminously photographed by Charles Lang (on some of the same locations Hathaway would soon showcase in Lonesome Pine), that takes Peter and Mary to a world of their own, brilliant with sunshine that contrasts sharply with his dank prison cell and her stately, forbidding manor house.  It’s the climactic movement of a lush visual symphony.

Peter Ibbetson is an almost ineffably sublime experience. Never mind that Gary Cooper, playing an Englishman, never even tries to hide that Montana accent that persuaded some people all through his career (and still does) that he couldn’t act at all. His faith in Hathaway is well-justified, for this is an extraordinarily well-directed movie, and one of his most touching performances. Ann Harding, despite her golden beauty, was a cold fish on screen (“an absolute bitch,” according to Hathaway). It’s no coincidence that her only Oscar nomination came for playing the snooty older sister in Holiday (1930). She bridled at working with Cooper, feeling he gave her nothing in his acting, but she was wrong. In Ibbetson she glows in the reflected warmth of Cooper’s performance; we love her because he does.

Ibbetson08The look of the movie is as sublime as Cooper’s acting. If Lives of a Bengal Lancer shows what Hathaway learned from Victor Fleming, Ibbetson shows the effect of having worked with Josef von Sternberg. Hathaway and Lang modeled their lighting on Rembrandt (“He taught you not to be afraid of the dark.”), and the compositions reinforce the romantic yearnings of the story. See how often the two lovers are separated by iron bars, walls — even, as children, the rails of the cast-iron fence between their homes. When, in dreams, they walk through the bars to be together, it’s a simple trick that any amateur shutterbug could explain to you, but it’s so perfectly right that it takes your breath away.

Some seven years later, Hathaway directed Constance Collier, now a grand dowager of the theater, in The Dark Corner. One day, during a break on the set, she suddenly said, “Henry Hathaway. My God, you’re not the Henry Hathaway who made that dreadful picture out of my play Peter Ibbetson with that horrible man — that Gary Cooper. My God, you’re not that Hathaway!” He said, “I sure am,” and Collier dropped the subject. Hathaway was proud of his movie; he couldn’t understand why Collier was so offended. Neither can I.

Nor could a lot of people. Ernst Lubitsch said it was one of the best-directed movies he’d ever seen. To Luis Bunuel, it was “one of the world’s ten best films;” to Andre Breton, “a triumph of surrealist thought.” Even Pauline Kael, who called it “an essentially sickly gothic,” conceded Hathaway “brings off some of the ethereal moments, and the film tends to stay in the memory.”

It’ll stay in yours, too.

 

POSTSCRIPT: This concludes the opening salvo in my tribute to Henry Hathaway. I’ll post on some of his other movies from time to time, movies you may well have seen without knowing who directed them — some acknowledged classics, some neglected gems, some perhaps less successful ventures that still have things worth seeing. If Hathaway is fated to remain neglected and ignored for his tremendous body of work, I hope it won’t be because I never spoke up to defend him.

“A Genial Hack,” Part 2: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

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The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a movie many people think they’ve heard of, even when they haven’t. “Oh yeah, isn’t that a Laurel and Hardy movie?” No, you’re thinking of Way Out West, where The Boys sang a song by that name (“In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia…”). The 1913 song, like Henry Hathaway’s 1936 movie, was inspired by a novel by John Fox Jr. published in 1908.
 

Lonesome Pine bookA

 

The book was a phenomenal success. Records being what they were in those days, it’s hard to know exactly how many copies it sold. Surely in the hundreds of thousands, probably more; one source I found said 1.3 million, at a time when a million-selling book was something to write home about. In any case, here’s what Fox’s novel looks like. It may look familiar; if you’ve spent any time at all in a used bookstore, you’ve probably seen several copies. They’re not uncommon, even after 102 years, and they’re not expensive; no telling how many times used copies like this one have been sold, resold, and resold again since 1908.

The novel has gone in and out of print (it’s currently in), but its popularity has never really gone away. In the wake of the 1936 movie, there was a stage adaptation that is still performed every summer (“official outdoor drama of the Commonwealth of Virginia”) in Big Stone Gap, Va., where Fox died in 1919. Fox managed somehow to come up with one of those perfect titles. Even if you’ve never heard of him or his books (and these days, most people outside Virginia and Kentucky haven’t), you feel as if you know what the story’s about the minute you hear it. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine — all by themselves, the words conjure up a time, a place, and a heart-on-the-sleeve sentimental romanticism.

 

 

 

Lonesome Pine03aC

 

 

 

 

The movie Hathaway and writer Grover Jones made for producer Walter Wanger in the late summer and early autumn of 1935 was the last, but not the first from Fox’s book; there had been three silent ones, in 1914, 1916 and 1923. There hasn’t been a movie from Fox’s novel since then. The reason could mainly be changes in public taste — romantic backwoods melodramas aren’t the surefire thing they were at the turn of the 20th century. But it could also be simply that the amazing success of Hathaway’s version — reinforced by numerous reissues over the next 20-plus years — made it an indelible act to follow.

 

 

The movie was a smash. It was only the second feature in Herbert Kalmus’s newly perfected three-strip Technicolor, and the first shot outdoors, in scenery made for Technicolor — Big Bear, in California’s San Bernardino Mountains. My mother saw The Trail of the Lonesome Pine as an 11-year-old girl, and she said her most vivid memory of it was Sylvia Sidney’s blue eyes. I know what she meant; I saw Lonesome Pine on a theatrical reissue when I was eight, and I remember Sylvia Sidney’s eyes just as clearly as my mother did. This frame from the Universal Home Video DVD release shows (to those of us who remember it in theaters) that it doesn’t do full justice to the IB Tech. But even to those who don’t remember it that way, it gives a powerful hint, and it’s a beautiful shot in its own right. It’s easy to believe that audiences in 1936 weren’t accustomed to seeing things like this on their movie screens.

Or this. Here’s the first sight that greeted audiences after the opening credits, and it suggests a canny calculation in the movie’s color scheme. Blue was one color that the old two-color system simply couldn’t handle; the closest it could come was a sort of turquoise. Even oceans and skies came out a sort of yellowish green. And the credit sequence to Lonesome Pine — names carved into tree trunks in a thick forest — seems almost deliberately weighted toward the red range that had been the old Tech’s long suit. It’s as if the credits are designed to invoke Your Father’s Technicolor, to remind you of what Technicolor couldn’t do just before showing you what it can do now. The effect, even now, is spectacular.

The first full-Technicolor feature, Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp, also made experiments with color, but it was setbound and stagy where Lonesome Pine was sun-splashed and outdoor-crisp. More to the point, Becky Sharp was a financial disappointment, if not a flop. People began to wonder if Technicolor could justify the extra expense. By the end of Lonesome Pine‘s second week in New York, the jury was back on that question. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine belongs in the history books for having gone far to prove the viability of color in commercial moviemaking.

 

And Lonesome Pine outdoes Becky artistically, too. The plain truth is, the subtleties and nuances of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair resist compression to the length of a single feature (in Becky Sharp‘s case, only 83 minutes), while a broad-stroke melodramatist like John Fox is tailor-made for it. Hathaway’s movie may not have the reach of Mamoulian’s, but it has a surer grasp. And audiences still respond to it emotionally, just as they did in 1936 (and ’49, and ’56). For that reason, though it’s 16 minutes longer than Becky Sharp, it feels half an hour shorter.

 

 

The raw emotionality of the story, set against the mountain feud between the Tolliver and Falin clans, makes the movie powerful. Even if it looked like outmoded hokum to the sophisticated critics of the day, audiences ate it up, and they still do. The emotion is close to the surface, whether full-bore in Sylvia Sidney’s screaming for blood or in the quiet moment here (Hathaway’s favorite shot in the entire picture). I won’t explain what’s happening, you’ll have to discover that for yourself. But if it doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, as they say, check your pulse. John Ford and Jean Renoir at their best could never have bettered the poetry of this heartbreaking shot.

Addio, Cinevent 42!

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It’s 1:15 in Columbus as I type this, and the 2010 edition of Cinevent has gone to bed. Monday’s program wrapped it all up with Dancing on a Dime, a pleasant 1940 B-musical from Paramount; 1924’s Lighthouse by the Sea, from the silent heyday of the original Rin Tin Tin; and Sarong Girl, one of striptease star Ann Corio’s Poverty Row efforts to follow her colleague Gypsy Rose Lee into a Hollywood career.

Saturday is usually the biggest and busiest day at Cinevent, when it’s hardest to find a seat in the screening room and the dealers’ rooms are most crowded. You snake your way through the aisles between the tables, catching odds and ends of conversations, gasps of surprise or pleasure, reminiscences, polite dickering and the occasional faintly vinegary whiff of acetate film. On Sunday the dealers and their customers have already begun to trickle out for the trip home. By Monday morning it’s down to a cadre of dedicated Cineventers unwilling to let the weekend come to a close without seeing the very last of it. There’s a valedictory air in the screening room and hallway on Monday, and everyone is already beginning to look forward to next year. Everyone, that is, except the organizers of Cinevent themselves, who no doubt won’t even give a thought to Cinevent 2011 until they’ve had a few months to unwind and decompress from this one.

So off we all go; have a safe trip home, everybody, and we’ll see you next year…

Cinevent, Day 4

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Sunday’s highlights:

(1) Chad Hanna (1940) Stable boy Henry Fonda runs away with a moth-eaten circus in 1841, in gorgeous Fox Technicolor* and with spot-on atmosphere courtesy of director Henry King. There’s also a pretty amazing scene of 16-year-old Linda Darnell training to be a bareback rider; it’s one long take of her horse cantering round and round the tiny circus ring, with Darnell bouncing in her training harness scrambling to hold on and her trainer barking instructions. The shot goes on for what seems like five minutes without a cut, and you can’t take your eyes off the screen; the plot goes nowhere during that time, but we learn a lot about 19th century circus life and the grit and determination of Darnell’s character. (And incidentally, we learn something about Darnell’s own grit — she was allergic to horses.)

(2) Roadhouse Nights (1930) Here’s another one of those synchronicity moments: this is one of the movies Richard Barrios talks about in A Song in the Dark, with Helen Morgan as a saloon singer embroiled in her gangster boyfriend’s crimes. Not a musical exactly, but with plenty of music — including several songs from Morgan (in her prime, before the booze really laid her low) and movie newcomer Jimmy Durante (it’s also Durante’s only movie appearance with his vaudeville partners Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson).

Plus an honorable mention for Woman on the Run (1950), a tight little noirish thriller set in San Francisco with Ann Sheridan as the estranged wife of a man on the run from the killer whose crime he witnessed. This one joins a select list of movies (Vertigo, The Lineup, Experiment in Terror) that give us a visual record of what San Francisco looked like before becoming crusted over with skyscrapers. (The amusement park climax isn’t San Francisco, however; it’s Carmel.)

*And speaking of Technicolor, here’s a good rule of thumb: If you want to see Golden Age Technicolor at its best, for the 1930s look to Selznick International (A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, Gone With the Wind); for the ’40s, 20th Century Fox (Hello, Frisco, Hello; Wilson; The Black Swan); and for the ’50s, Paramount (Shane, The War of the Worlds, White Christmas).

Cinevent, Day 3

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Saturday’s highlights in Columbus:

(1) Straight Shooting (1917) This was 23-year-old John Ford’s first directorial effort (“Jack Ford,” as he was billed at the time), and it’s a remarkable document as well as a good, solid archetypal western film. Here in a compact 60 minutes is the John Ford western fully formed, with some images and frame compositions as striking as anything Ford would do later on. Harry Carey, Ford’s favorite leading man, demonstrates the mold into which Ford would later pour young John Wayne, and which would remain Wayne’s forever after that (see the last shot of the Duke in The Searchers for his and Ford’s conscious tribute to Carey).

(2) The Fleet’s In (1942) This wartime musical combined Dorothy Lamour, new-minted leading man William Holden, and an excellent score by director Victor Schertzinger (music) and Johnny Mercer (words) that included the perennials “Tangerine” and “I Remember You.” There’s a touching story connected with the latter song, recounted in the Cinevent program notes. Schertzinger, a popular and respected man on the Paramount lot, died unexpectedly midway through production on the movie, and shooting was closed down for a time. When they resumed work, the first day’s shooting was devoted to Lamour’s rendition of “I Remember You.” The practice, of course, was for the performers to lip-synch to a playback of the soundtrack, recorded weeks earlier. As they reached the end of the first take and the sound man allowed the playback to continue past the end of the song, Schertzinger’s voice unexpectedly came over the loudspeakers, complimenting Lamour during the original recording session (as both director and composer) on her excellent performance of the song. The sound of his voice (combined, no doubt, with the sentiment of the song) was too much for Lamour, and she simply fell to pieces on the set.

Cinevent, Day 2

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Highlights of the first day at Cinevent here in Columbus were:

 

(1) Hired Wife (1940) Rosalind Russell plays a secretary in love with boss Brian Aherne, who doesn’t have the presence of mind to fully appreciate her. When he runs into tax trouble, she agrees to help out by marrying him — strictly on paper, you understand, just for business purposes. The inevitable comic complications ensue before the inevitable clinch at the fadeout. Writers Richard Connell and Gladys Lehman frost this cake with plenty of tasty dialogue, Brian Aherne never looked so lively and animated, and the actress was never born who could beat Rosalind Russell with a mouthful of good dialogue. And Roz, just coming off the breakthrough one-two punch of The Women and His Girl Friday, was sitting on top of the world, and you can see she knew it; and

(2) Chicago (1927) This was the first (and silent) film treatment of the Maurine Watkins play that would serve as the source for 1940’s Roxie Hart with Ginger Rogers, and (of course) the Tony-and-Oscar-sweeping musical. Long feared lost, this version surfaced some years ago, and it’s a lively two hours. Phyllis Haver makes a Roxie Hart who can stand beside Ginger Rogers, Gwen Verdon and Renee Zellweger without hanging her peroxided head. (And I couldn’t help reflecting what a nice meal Marion Davies could have made of the role — but of course, Hearst wouldn’t have let her anywhere near it. Not in a thousand years.)

Now it’s back to the program, so if you’ll excuse me…

Cinevent 42

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 I’m interrupting my posts on Henry Hathaway to post from Columbus, Ohio, where the 42nd Cinevent is about to begin. If you don’t know about Cinevent, you certainly should, especially if you live within convenient travel distance of Columbus (and after all, I come in all the way from Sacramento). It’s a “classic film convention” held every Memorial Day Weekend in Columbus; from Friday through Monday there are movies all day and deep into the night. The years of vintage range roughly from 1914 to 1950, with the program breaking down to about two-thirds talking pictures and one-third silents with live piano accompaniment, by either Dr. Philip Carli or David Drazin, two of the foremost silent film accompanists in America today. In addition to the movies, there are the dealers’ rooms, where any manner of memorabilia are available to collectors; you’ve already seen some of it here.

I’d been hearing about Cinevent for decades because my uncle — who lives in Muncie, Indiana, not too far from Columbus — has been coming here since the 1960s. Whenever he spoke of it, I’d think, “One of these years…” Well, one of those years finally came in 1998, and I haven’t missed a Cinevent since then; I have a standing commitment for Memorial Day from now on.

This year, there are some unusual — almost eerie — touches of synchronicity with this blog. One of the first features this afternoon is the 1924 silent Open All Night, on which none other than Henry Hathaway himself served as assistant under director Paul Bern (the great Howard Hawks also served as production manager). And Cinevent’s annual Saturday Morning Animation Festival will include a 1917 short by Willis O’Brien, the special effects pioneer who hired Marcel Delgado to build the models for The Lost World and King Kong. The title is certainly intriguing: Prehistoric Poultry.

For now, however, I have to free up the hotel’s computer. Stay tuned, and I’ll try to post more as the weekend progresses. No promises, though; the days are full and pass quickly here.

“A Genial Hack,” Part 1

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Henry Hathaway once said there was a time when he would have welcomed being called an “accomplished technician” or “studio workhorse.” “But the more I think about it, the more I realize it makes me seem to be a genial hack.” Hathaway was indeed an accomplished director, and he worked long and well in the studio system, first at Paramount, then for twenty years at 20th Century Fox. But he was nobody’s hack.

I guess I’ve always been a little over-protective of Henry Hathaway. Several years ago I bought one of those big encyclopedias that claim to tell you “everything you need to know” about American movies (actually, that should’ve tipped me off — the really good ones don’t do that). This one — well, let’s just say it was published under the aegis of a very prestigious group of people. The first thing I did was to turn to the biographical section on directors to see what they said about Hathaway. He wasn’t listed. I scanned back and forth across the pages, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing what I thought I didn’t see. Then I closed the book and never opened it again; when the donation truck came around, into the bin it went.

 

Whoever compiled that book, I didn’t expect them to admire Hathaway as much as I do — I don’t suppose anyone does that. But I wasn’t going to let them act as if he never existed. Not if they wanted to take up space on my bookshelf.

I first became aware of Hathaway the night I saw How the West Was Won at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. I was just beginning to notice movie directors; I wasn’t one of those film-buff prodigies who could discourse on the Auteur Theory at an age when other kids were reading Fun with Dick and Jane. I knew about Cecil B. DeMille, and Alfred Hitchcock, but everybody knew who they were. And I knew about John Ford, one of the other credited directors on How the West Was Won. George Marshall, the third director, not so much (though I knew about Destry Rides Again, one of his pictures). But Hathaway’s name caught my eye for the simple reason that the program said he was born in Sacramento, where I lived.

 

 

Now that I knew his name, I began to notice that Henry Hathaway directed some movies that I’d always loved. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), which I saw on a reissue at the age of eight. North to Alaska (1960). And others that I’d seen on TV in the 1950s and early ’60s: Call Northside 777 (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), Fourteen Hours and The Desert Fox (both 1951). Others would later make the list: The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Nevada Smith (1966), True Grit (1969). And, of course, How the West Was Won itself.

Hathaway was born in Sacramento (March 13, 1898), but it wasn’t exactly his home town; it was just where his actress mother happened to be on the point in her tour when his time came. (Traveling theater companies didn’t offer maternity leave in 1898.)

Henry Hathaway may well be the only hereditary Belgian nobleman who ever made it as a Hollywood movie director. His name at birth was Marquis Henri Leopold de Fiennes, a title he inherited through his father. Hathaway said his father’s name was Henry Rhody, but he appears to have been a bit of a theatrical jack of all trades — advance man, stage manager, actor — under the name Rhody Hathaway. Hathaway said his mother’s maiden name was Jean Weil, though other sources say she was born Marquise Lillie de Fiennes in Budapest in 1876. I’m inclined to take her son’s word on this point, but whatever the case, Mom acted under the name Jean Hathaway, and before long little Henri Leopold had taken it too. (Also, Henry’s paternal grandfather was supposed to secure the Hawaiian Islands for Belgium in the 1860s, and settled in San Francisco when the deal fell through. Considering how Belgium later administered its colonial holdings in Africa’s Congo, native Hawaiians might have cause to be grateful that Hathaway’s grandfather failed.)

Final - Jean H02

 

 

 

Jean Hathaway seems to have been no ordinary woman. Only 22 when her son was born, by the time they both entered movies in 1911 or ’12, she had moved into “character parts” — somebody’s mother or aunt or older sister, or a villainess if one was called for. I don’t know how old she is in this picture, but it seems to me she’s more or less the same age as Henry in the picture below, taken on the set of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, when he was 37.

 

 

That’s Henry standing on the left, next to Nigel Bruce. (At the table are Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda and Fred Stone.) You can see that Henry certainly took after his mother.

In more ways than one. Rhody Hathaway seems not to have had the theater bug as severely as his wife — it’s never been the most stable career path, and it was downright perilous then. Henry’s father eventually left the biz and got into electronics — a more obviously burgeoning field in the 1910s and ’20s — working on an early x-ray machine. Jean continued to tour, occasionally getting stranded, in those pre-Equity days, when a company would go bankrupt on the road.

When this happened to her in 1911 in San Diego, leaving her broke with no way to get home, she cast about for some kind of job to earn train fare, and landed with the American Film Company in nearby La Mesa. Moviemaking was a footloose operation in those days, grinding out quickie one-reelers for the nickelodeons, but here was steady work in one place, so when she saw that it was going to pan out, she sent for Henry and his sister, who had been living with relatives in San Francisco.

Henry started out as a child actor — usually, he said, playing the kid in the opening scene who grows up to be the leading man. As he grew into his teens, he went to work at Universal, first as a laborer, then a prop man. (His last acting credit was in 1917, just before a short army stint stateside during World War I.) After mustering out of the army, he went back to movies as a prop man at Goldwyn Studios, then Paramount, where he worked as an assistant director throughout the 1920s, learning the craft under men like Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming. He graduated into directing in 1933, remaking silent Paramount westerns for sound — only on a lower budget, re-using footage from the silent versions wherever possible. (“I had to have the new leads costumed the same as the silent players.”)

Few directors had a career to compare with Henry Hathaway’s. He literally got in on the ground floor, before there was even a Hollywood as we know it today. He made his first movie in 1911, his last in 1974. He started out digging ditches and lugging equipment, and rose to directing huge projects with the biggest stars in the business. Along the way he pioneered sound, color and narrative Cinerama, the wonder of the age throughout the 1950s.

 

 

The performances he got from his actors are nothing to sneeze at either. He made a star of Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947) and landed an Oscar for John Wayne in True Grit. And Dorothy Lamour, that sweet, ever-befuddled foil for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, never gave a good dramatic performance for any other director, but she did it for Hathaway twice, in Spawn of the North (1938) and Johnny Apollo (1940).

I’ll have more to say about some of Henry Hathaway’s movies later on. For now, take this as an introduction to the man, something to plug the hole in that encyclopedia I mentioned earlier — just in case you happened to buy it from the thrift store I donated it to.