Saturday’s Animation Program this year was composed entirely of titles that had never been seen at Cinevent before, some of them quite rare. There were ten altogether, as always lovingly curated and annotated by Stewart McKissick. All were choice, but I’ll single out just five of my own favorites, illustrated here (with some YouTube links so you can pop over and watch them if you’re of a mind to). Clockwise from top left:

Mask-A-Raid (1931), an early Betty Boop — in fact, one of the first where she’s an actual human being rather than a weirdly sexy dog. Betty is the queen of a masquerade ball, and the proceedings are marked by the wiggy surrealism that was always Max and Dave Fleischer’s stock in trade. (If you do check it out on YouTube, note Betty’s entrance accompanied by identical-twin Mickey Mouses, both of them cut down to size and forced to carry Betty’s train. Max, Dave, you devils!)

The Hot Choc-Late Soldiers (1934). This one wasn’t a theatrical short, but a sequence produced by Walt Disney (and animated by Fred Moore) for MGM to include as a Technicolor sequence in Hollywood Party, a studio revue hung on a flimsy plot about Jimmy Durante inviting his movie star pals (including Mickey Mouse) to a soiree. Set to a song by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, the cartoon portrays a war of confections, chocolate soldiers vs. gingerbread men. The pic here shows the cocoa army, battered but unbowed, marching home in triumph. The sequence is fun, with a look and style foreshadowing the next year’s The Cookie Carnival, one of my favorite Silly Symphonies. (Interesting side note: Eleven years later, when MGM wanted to borrow Mickey for a tap dance with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, Walt said no.)

Somewhere in Dreamland (1936). Two dirt-poor urchins dream themselves cavorting in the kind of country Disney’s chocolate soldiers come from — then wake up to find it’s all come true. This was the first Fleischer “Color Classic” to be made in three-strip Technicolor; before this Disney had exclusive use of the process and the Fleischers made do with Cinecolor or two-color Tech. Cinevent’s print wasn’t Technicolor, but it looked mighty nice; the YouTube post is almost as good.

Tulips Shall Grow (1942). In 22 years attending Cinevent, I’ve never seen one of producer George Pal’s 1940s Puppetoons presented there — understandably, since good prints of them are hard too find. What prints there are are usually unstable Eastmans struck for TV in the 1950s, now badly faded and beet-red travesties (hence no link for this one — that’s all YouTube has too). Tulips Shall Grow was one of the Hungarian-born Pal’s best and most heartfelt shorts. He had worked briefly in the Netherlands after fleeing the Third Reich; two years later, safely ensconced in Hollywood, he made this allegory of an idyllic Dutch countryside of windmills, tulips and young lovers in wooden shoes, ravaged by the “Screwball” (i.e., “Nazi”) Army. Again, Cinevent’s print wasn’t Technicolor, but it was gorgeous. (Another side note: This makes four straight years that George Pal has been a presence on Cinevent Saturday. In 2016 it was Houdini [’53]; in 2017, When Worlds Collide [’52]; and in 2018, The War of the Worlds [’53].)

Hullaba-Lulu (1944). Little Lulu (based on the popular single-panel cartoon by “Marge” that had been running in The Saturday Evening Post since 1935) was one of the series produced by Paramount after ousting the Fleischer brothers from their own animation studio. Like the Puppetoons, this series was all over TV in the 1950s but has all but vanished since then. In this one Lulu innocently creates havoc when the circus comes to town. I hadn’t seen this one in over 50 years, but I could still sing that unforgettable intro, the all-time-best-ever cartoon theme song.

After the cartoons — just like a Saturday Kiddie Matinee of my childhood — it was three more chapters of Hawk of the Wilderness. Then the Saturday Matinee mold was broken by a silent feature, 13 Washington Square (1928). Based on a popular 1915 Broadway play, it starred Alice Joyce as a snooty rich dame out to break up her son’s romance before he marries “beneath his station”. Going incognito while everybody thinks she’s sailing to Europe, she falls in with a smooth art thief (Jean Hersholt) who’s plotting to burglarize her Washington Square mansion while she’s supposedly out of the country. Everybody winds up running around the house just missing each other — the thief to rob the place, the mother to stop him, the son and his sweetheart (George J. Lewis, Helen Foster) to pack his clothes and elope. It sounds like a good old-fashioned door-slamming farce, and maybe that’s what it was on stage, but Melville Brown’s stodgy direction kept things from really taking off. Still, it was amusing (partly due to Zasu Pitts as Joyce’s maid), and love did triumph in the end.

After lunch it was the return of a longtime favorite feature at Cinevent, a program of Charley Chase comedy shorts. This year’s entries were You Said a Hatful (1934), The Count Takes a Count (’36), and Calling All Doctors (’37), all quite funny. Welcome back, Charley; we missed you last year.

Then came the event that tied in with the Wednesday night Wexler Center program of two Audrey Hepburn pictures — author Robert Matzen gave a presentation on his latest book, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II. Already a bestseller on Amazon in three different categories (World War II History, World War II Biography, and Entertainment Biography), the book recounts teenage Audrey’s experiences under the German occupation of the Netherlands. (Ironically, Audrey had been in school in England when the war broke out. She was called back for her own safety by her Dutch mother, who assumed that England would be invaded any day. Mom further assumed that Hitler would respect the Netherlands’ neutrality as Kaiser Whilhelm had done in World War I. It was the least of the delusions of which Mom was fated to be disabused.)

Robert Matzen introduced Dutch Girl as the third and final volume in what he termed his “Hollywood in World War II” trilogy, following Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 and Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe. His presentation was informative and tantalizing, as he occasionally hinted at juicy details that he wouldn’t disclose — “For that you’ll have to read the book.” I picked up my own copy of Dutch Girl at one of Robert’s book signings; I’m reading it now and may well have more to say in a later post. For now I can certainly recommend my readers hop on the bestseller bandwagon and get the book for themselves. (By the way, a noted filmmaker who shall here remain nameless, but who knew and worked with Audrey late in her too-short life, has expressed a keen interest in filming Dutch Girl. I hope that comes to pass; it would mark the completion of the filmmaker’s own World War II trilogy.) (Oops! Make that a “quintilogy”; Dutch Girl would be the filmmaker’s fifth picture about the war.)

Just before the dinner break came one of the surprise highlights of the whole weekend — a surprise to me, anyhow. Not because I didn’t expect it to be good, but because it was so much better than I expected. This was The Marshal of Mesa City (1939), with George O’Brien as a former lawman who takes up the badge again in a new town — this because he takes a shine to a local schoolteacher (Virginia Vale, O’Brien’s leading lady in six of these B-westerns he made for RKO), while he also takes an instant dislike to the corrupt county sheriff (Leon Ames) who’s been forcing his attentions on the school marm.

George O’Brien deserves to be remembered much better than he is. Starting out in Hollywood as a stuntman, he rose up the ladder to star in some of the biggest pictures of the silent era: John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (’27), Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (’29). The Iron Horse landed him a charter membership in Ford’s stock company, and he later played key roles in Fort Apache (’48), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (’49) and Cheyenne Autumn (’64). In between he was a top box-office draw in dozens of westerns, first at Fox, then RKO, and it’s easy to see why. He combined extreme good looks and physical prowess with likeability and an easygoing sense of humor. And oh yeah, he also served with distinction in the U.S. Navy during both World Wars.

In my limited experience of O’Brien’s westerns, The Marshal of Mesa City is easily the best, for a number of reasons — chief among them a movie-stealing performance by Henry Brandon as a gunslinger hired by Ames to kill O’Brien, but who switches sides when he decides he likes his intended victim better. Another plus was director David Howard (who helmed many of O’Brien’s pictures). He may have been a routine talent, but his climactic shot of O’Brien and Brandon striding into the thick smoke of the burning jail, guns blazing, for a showdown with Ames and his gang — that was worthy of John Ford or Henry Hathaway.

Richard Barrios introduced The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), a risqué Pre-Code comedy from producer Sam Goldwyn and director Lowell Sherman (who also co-starred as a lubricious concert pianist), based on Zoe Akins’s 1930 play. Ina Claire, Joan Blondell and Madge Evans were deliciously well-matched, romping through the story of gal-pals trolling for sugar daddies. The three-gold-diggers-on-the-prowl premise was already familiar, and it would become even more so by way of Warner Bros.’ Gold Diggers series and 20th Century Fox’s recycling its similar story from Three Blind Mice to Moon Over Miami to Three Little Girls in Blue to How to Marry a Millionaire, right down to 2011’s Monte Carlo with Selena Gomez (also from Fox, though the studio was much changed by then). That familiarity may account for why Goldwyn always counted The Greeks a disappointment and sold it off to some fly-by-nighters. Nevertheless, it holds up well today; the stars are sassy and the Goldwyn gloss is much in evidence.

Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1920) was an appealing romantic dramedy (though the word hadn’t been coined yet) directed by Cecil B. DeMille’s big brother William, based on a 1903 bestseller by British novelist Leonard Merrick. Thomas Meighan starred as a disillusioned, middle-aged British Army officer jaded by service in India and seeking to regain the pleasures of his younger self. He learns, of course (20 years before Thomas Wolfe said it), that he can’t go home again. Then, even further disheartened, he falls in with a down-on-their-luck theatrical troupe, eventually learning that happiness is found in looking forward, not back.

Moss Rose (1947) was a decent enough thriller that nevertheless left a sense that it should have been better. Based on a 1934 novel by the prolific Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long (writing as Joseph Shearing), the picture was evidently Darryl F. Zanick’s attempt to repeat the success of Fox’s earlier ventures into Victorian Gothic suspense, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). Indeed, the role of murder suspect Michael Drego was tailor-made for Lodger and Hangover Square star Laird Cregar — who might well have played it if he hadn’t crash-dieted himself to death in 1944. Instead, the role went to Victor Mature — a better actor than he often gets credit for, but, well, Victorian Gothic probably wasn’t part of his skill set.

Then again, if the director had been John Brahm, whose talent for what Andrew Sarris called “mood-drenched melodrama” had made winners out of The Lodger and Hangover Square, Mature might have been able to get with the program. But the director was Gregory Ratoff, who divided his career between the director’s chair and as a character actor playing querulous mittel-European parvenus — and as a director, Ratoff made an excellent mittel-European parvenu.

Peggy Cummins, still licking her wounds over geting canned from Forever Amber, played a music-hall chorus girl investigating the murder of a friend who apparently got too close to the family secrets of Mature’s Drego and his mother Lady Margaret (Ethel Barrymore). Everyone on screen, including Vincent Price as a Scotland Yard detective and Patricia Medina as Mature’s fiancée, gave it their best shot. But the picture failed to find an audience. In a 1950 memo, Darryl Zanuck said it “was a catastrophe, for which I blame myself. Our picture was not as good as the original script and the casting was atrocious. The property lost $1,300,000 net…” Zanuck was too harsh; nothing about Moss Rose was “atrocious”. It was an interesting effort — but it was a bit of a misfire, shooting at a target where the studio had hit the bullseye twice before.

The day ended not with a bang but a whimper: Holy Wednesday (aka Snakes) (1974), produced in San Bernardino, Calif. on a shoestring for the drive-in circuit, it starred ’50s sci-fi stalwart Les Tremayne as an aged hermit siccing his herd of deadly serpents on his enemies. I didn’t stay. I watched about five minutes, enough to persuade me that this was ideal fodder for the robots on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, then I called it a day.

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There was some important news announced on Saturday by Cinevent chair Michael Haynes (on the left in this picture, in case you need to be told) and Dealers’ Room coordinator Samantha Glasser (the one who isn’t Michael).

Cinevent will return for Memorial Day Weekend 2020, which will be Michael’s last turn in the driver’s seat. At that point he’ll pass the baton to Samantha, who will continue the tradition into 2021 and beyond with a new organization which she is putting together even as you read this — a group that will, no doubt, include a good percentage of the current Cinevent staff. Also at the end of the 2020 convention, the Cinevent name will be retired.

Why retire the name? Well, when Steven Haynes passed away in 2015, he was the last of Cinevent’s original founders, John Baker and John Stingley having gone on before him. Now that Michael Haynes and his mother Barbara are withdrawing from active participation, it’s their wish to take the name with them. I can certainly sympathize and agree with that — but it won’t be easy to come up with a name as clever, as evocative, as…well, as downright cool as that.

As for the new name, Samantha is soliciting suggestions. Submit yours to her at [email protected] by June 30, 2019. It’s worth free admission in 2021 if your idea is chosen.

To be concluded…

The first silent of the weekend was The Prairie Pirate (1925), a Harry Carey western, and far from his best. (You can always tell that a movie star has really arrived when they’re expected to carry a story like this. By 1925 Harry Carey had not only arrived, he’d definitely set up housekeeping.) Carey played Brian Delaney, a cattle rancher in Old California who comes home one day to find that his sister Ruth (Jean Dumas), besieged in their isolated home by marauding bandits, has committed suicide rather than submit to a fate worse than death. The only clues: a hasty note from Ruth telling Brian “they’ll never take me ali–” and some distinctive black cigarette butts. (Ruth actually knew the outlaw leader’s name, Aguilar, but somehow neglected to include it in her note.)

In the next scene — the reason why is unexplained — Brian has become an outlaw calling himself the Yellow Seal. His life of crime consists mainly of raiding saloons all around the area and confiscating the establishments’ cigarette butts (actual title card: “Now bring me every ash tray in the place — muy pronto!“). This heinous spree of wanton lawlessness has put a $5,000 price on his head, dead or alive — a pretty draconian bounty for cleaning out ash trays, I’d say.

At the same time, Brian (as the Yellow Seal) meets and romances the daughter (Trilby Clark) of a local ranchero (Robert Edeson). She in turn is being coerced into marrying a saloon owner (Lloyd Whitlock) who has won her father’s hacienda at his crooked gaming tables — and who is also in cahoots with the bandit Aguilar.

Harry Carey is always welcome, of course, but that’s about as much time as we need to spend on this nonsense. Carey gets to do some nifty riding and fighting, though both he and Trilby Clark are all-too-clearly doubled in the picture’s barreling-downstream-toward-the-waterfall climax (which comes to an awfully hasty resolution; did they run out of money in 1925, or is footage missing now?).

The next two movies on the program were considerably more rewarding. First came Sunbonnet Sue (1945), a modest but entirely winning little Gay Nineties musical from Monogram Pictures. An ebullient Gale Storm played the title character, setting out on a showbiz career by singing in a Bowery saloon run by her father (George Cleveland) — to the horror of her stuffy Fifth Avenue aunt (Edna Holland), who vows to torpedo this vulgar stain on the family honor before it exposes her own humble roots. Monogram’s entry in the spate of nostalgic turn-of-the-20th-century musicals epitomized by Meet Me in St. Louis over at MGM, Sunbonnet Sue had enough charm to make you wish that the studio had shaken off Poverty Row altogether and sprung for a color production — if not Technicolor, then maybe Cinecolor or one of the other bargain-basement processes. Oh well, baby steps — Monogram was hoping to move into A-pictures eventually, but it wouldn’t do to go too far too fast. Still, Sunbonnet Sue was a nice effort, leaning heavily on old songs that, if not yet in the public domain, were at least well-worn enough that the rights could be had for…well, for a song. The picture even managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Edward J. Kay’s musical scoring (it lost to MGM’s Anchors Aweigh).

Next, after the Thursday dinner break, came the genuinely unusual, little-seen To Mary — with Love (1936). Based on a two-part novella by Richard Sherman that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in late 1935, the picture told the story of a marriage, or at least the first ten years of it (which for a while look like they will be the last ten years of it). We first meet Jock and Mary Wallace (Warner Baxter and Myrna Loy) on the evening of their wedding day — which also happens to be Election Night 1925, so their own little after-wedding party at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel is swamped by a much bigger party celebrating the election of Jimmy Walker as mayor of New York. Helping them celebrate is Bill Hallam (Ian Hunter), Jock’s best man (and a silent torch-bearer for Mary) and a young woman the three have just met that night, Kitty Brant (Claire Trevor), who will become an intimate friend — at one point, perhaps a little too intimate.

From there the picture follows the ups and downs of the Wallace marriage for the next ten years, with major moments set against a background of significant events in America — the Dempsey/Tunney fight, Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, the 1929 stock market crash, etc. Through it all, Bill Hallam is Jock and Mary’s staunch friend, conscience and protector, helping them navigate the rough spots (and some of them are rough indeed), despite the fact that he’s in love with Mary and she knows it. Well-directed by John Cromwell, To Mary — with Love told its story straightforwardly and with a refreshing (not to say astonishing) lack of melodrama or soap opera. Baxter, Loy and Hunter each gave one of their personal-best performances. According to the program notes by Richard Barrios (who also introduced the screening), this unique picture has been kept out of circulation for decades, apparently because of issues concerning the rights to Richard Sherman’s original story, so this screening at Cinevent was a rare opportunity to catch up with it.

Another near-lost picture was the Laurel and Hardy short Duck Soup (1927) (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers feature). This one was believed lost for years, which was a pity, until a print surfaced in Belgium in 1974, which was a blessing, because it’s probably the earliest short in which The Boys played something like the characters they would soon become famous for.

After that it was yet another picture based on a Saturday Evening Post story (“The Spoils of War” by Hugh Wiley). This was Behind the Front (1926), a Paramount silent comedy starring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton as soldiers who become best friends in the trenches of World War I, never suspecting that Hatton is the pickpocket who stole Beery’s watch, and whom Beery was chasing until they both got sidetracked into enlisting. What I saw looked pretty good, but a little Wallace Beery goes a long way with me, so I watched a little, then bailed out to browse the dealers’ room until they closed.

Besides, I didn’t want to miss the last movie of the day, The Amazing Mr. Williams (1939); the thought of Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell in the same picture was just too good to pass up. This was one of Columbia’s entries in Hollywood’s many efforts to duplicate the combination of sophisticated banter and murder-mystery suspense of William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man movies. This time, Douglas played an ace police detective who can solve the toughest cases in nothing flat; Blondell was his fiancée, the mayor’s secretary, ever getting stood up when he’s called away on yet another important case. Both of them get embroiled in the case at hand — which defies easy synopsis, so I won’t even try. Anyhow, the mystery was complicated enough to hold the interest, the love-play amusing, and the supporting cast stalwart: Clarence Kolb as Douglas’s conniving boss, Ruth Donnelly as (what else?) the heroine’s wise-cracking best friend, Jonathan Hale as the mayor, Edward Brophy, Donald MacBride, Don Beddoe, John Wray. Nobody, no studio, was ever quite able to duplicate that Thin Man magic, but watching them try made for a lot of fun in the 1930s and ’40s, and this was a good example.  

So opening day of Cinevent drew to a close. On to Day 2, Friday, next time.

To be continued…

Once again, on the Wednesday night before the first day of Cinevent, some of us early arrivals in Columbus attended a screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State Campus. The theme this year was “Audrey Hepburn X 2”, and the program consisted of pictures at opposite ends of Audrey’s career, one of her last (Robin and Marian, 1976) followed by one of her first (Secret People, 1952). Personally, I would have preferred that the Wexner Center take the program in chronological order rather than the reverse.

On second thought, let me rephrase that. I would have preferred that they not screen Robin and Marian at all, for one simple reason: It’s lousy. It was lousy in 1976 and it was lousy last Wednesday in Columbus. Besides, if any Ohio State students really needed to see it, Turner Classic Movies has been showing and promoting it for months far beyond its merits.

Purporting to chronicle the last days of Sean Connery’s Robin Hood and Audrey’s Maid Marian, Robin and Marian is easily the worst movie either star ever made — mean-spirited, cheap and shoddy. The mean spirit permeated James Goldman’s sneering script. As for the cheapness, well, there was really no excuse for that. The picture’s budget was $5,000,000 — quite respectable for 1976 — yet it takes place in a twelfth-century England where the population is about 35, all of them dressed in cast-off blankets and tin-plate armor that would be hooted out of any meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

The shoddiness came thanks to the director, the less-than-mediocre Richard Lester, who could never stage the simplest action without zoom-lensing and quick-cutting it into incoherence; without overusing his telephoto lens until his movies looked literally flat; without ham-handed “comedy” that made his actors look like small-time boobs. In a career that ran from 1954 to 1991, Lester made exactly one decent movie — but for many people, that one covered a multitude of sins.

The picture, of course, was A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Lester got more credit for it than he deserved. When it came out in July ’64 the Beatles were widely regarded as just four lucky yobbos from Liverpool who had stumbled into a freakish fame. Most everyone who wasn’t a teenage girl assumed it would blow over in a year and all four would be moved to the Where Are They Now File. A Hard Day’s Night‘s stars were assumed to be nothing special; in time, of course, the over-21 world would know better, but for now Lester got credit for making the Fab Four so appealing. The picture also had an excellent screenplay by Alun Owen, so smooth it seemed to have been ad-libbed on the spot. Unfortunately for Owen, it suffered the fate of all such scripts: Lester got credit for that too.

But I digress; back to Robin and Marian. Having seen it in 1976, I didn’t care if I never saw it again, but I supposed once every 43 years wouldn’t kill me. Well, now I’m done; if anybody’s still screening this turkey in 2062, I’ll be busy.

After intermission the Wexner Center redeemed itself with a much worthier effort. Secret People may be remembered chiefly as one of Audrey Hepburn’s first substantial roles (and the one that led directly to her breakthrough in Roman Holiday the next year), but the picture really belongs to Valentina Cortese (or “Cortesa”, as the Brits and Americans preferred to bill her in those days). She and Audrey play Maria Brentano and her younger sister Elenora (Nora), refugees in 1930 from an oppressive dictatorship in their unnamed foreign country. (Their names suggest Mussolini’s Italy, but the dictator is the neutrally-named General Galbern.) Their father, a Gandhi-esque dissident, has smuggled the girls to a friend in London. Shortly after their arrival, they learn that their father has been executed by the Galbern regime.

Seven years later, the two are naturalized British subjects, their surname anglicized to Brent. Maria is unexpectedly reunited with her former boyfriend Louis (Serge Reggiani), who recruits her into a plot to assasinate General Galbern on a visit to London. When the plan goes awry and leads to innocent death, it begins to dawn on Maria that Louis and his cohorts are nothing more than terrorists, as ruthless and callous toward human life as the regime they’re plotting against. Maria’s ambition to be a writer, and Nora’s to be a dancer, mean nothing to them in their lust for blood.

Secret People was directed and co-written by Thorold Dickinson (1903-84), a British filmmaker whose reputation has undergone a bit of a renaissance in recent years. Never prolific (“It’s terribly difficult to direct a film you don’t want to make,” he once said, “that’s why I’ve made so few.”), Dickinson is probably best known over here for his excellent 1940 picture Gaslight, which MGM fortunately failed to destroy when they remade it in 1944. Secret People isn’t entirely successful as either a political thriller or a psychological drama, but it poses intriguing questions, the plot takes some unexpected turns, and Valentina Cortese makes up in screen presence for what the colorless Serge Reggiani lacks. Plus, of course, it offers a glimpse of Audrey Hepburn on the cusp of immortality, indulging her first love, ballet.

In fact, the Audrey Hepburn connection would bear fruit later, once Cinevent itself was under way. I’ll get to that in its own good time.

To be continued…

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I wish I could take credit for this post, but I can’t. For the first time since I began Cinedrome, I’m presenting a guest blogger. The writer was a student in my Fall 2018 Introduction to Film Studies class at the college where I’m an adjunct instructor in Film and Media Studies. As I tell my Intro to Film students, my philosophy is that the best way to introduce them to film is to introduce them to films; thus I prefer to show them complete movies rather than excerpts. It’s all well and good to study individual sequences from movies you’ve seen, but if you haven’t seen the movie, showing part of it is like handing you a quarter-cup of Hershey’s Cocoa and calling it fudge.

In an 80-minute class period, finding movies to screen can be a challenge. So a major component of the class is to spend time with the films of Val Lewton, the legendary producer who turned out a series of extraordinarily intelligent B horror movies at RKO Radio during the 1940s — all of which ran between 65 and 75 minutes. An essay assignment on the final exam asked students to analyze any two of the five Lewton pictures they saw in class.

One student answered that assignment with a remarkable piece of film criticism, one of the best commentaries on Lewton’s unique body of work that I’ve ever read. I present that essay here for the enjoyment (and enlightenment) of Cinedrome readers.

I think it’s best if I don’t identify the student by name, or even by gender. Still, a few anonymous details won’t be out of order. This was the student’s first semester of college. He/she took the class “to learn more about the way movies/music videos/TV shows are made” and named some favorite movies: Roman Holiday, 10 Things I Hate About You,  Lady Bird.  The student has seen King Kong (1933), Gone With the Wind, West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music and Schindler’s List, but not Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove or Pulp Fiction; has seen the first installment of The Lord of the Rings but not the second or third.

And with that, here is the essay prompt from the exam, followed by the student’s essay. I have corrected minor errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation, and added actors’ names in parentheses where appropriate; otherwise I’ve changed nothing.

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Producer Val Lewton was noted for his “psychological” horror movies, replacing the usual movie vampires, werewolves and other monsters with explorations of the darker reaches of the human psyche. We saw five of Lewton’s movies in class: Cat People (1942, d: Jacques Tourneur), I Walked with a Zombie (1943, d: Tourneur), The Curse of the Cat People (1944, d: Gunther von Fritsch, Robert Wise), The Body Snatcher (1945, d: Wise) and Isle of the Dead (1945, d: Mark Robson). Discuss the psychological aspects of any two of these films.

Val Lewton’s movies were known for having supernatural aspects, yet always ending with the common message that the evils of the world were not found in monstrous identities, but in humans themselves. In Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944), both movies are heavy with psychological themes and explore individuals on a deeper level.

In Cat People the story is of a young man, Oliver (Kent Smith), falling for a mysterious designer named Irena (Simone Simon). Irena is reserved, and tells her husband there are certain things he cannot do, like kiss her. She is fearful of her past, which she hides from him, and is terribly afraid that she will turn into a monstrous cat that will put everyone around her in danger. She asks her husband to listen to her and to believe her when she finally confesses, but he brushes this off and makes her go see a therapist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway). Irena wants to get better, but in the end, because her husband gives up on her and has an affair with his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph), she turns into a large creature, is stabbed by Dr. Judd, who only wanted to exploit her, and dies.

The entire premise of Cat People seems to be a metaphor for depression or bipolar disorder, some type of mental illness. Irena suffers from a disorder due to a past that has traumatized her, and when she finally believes she can trust and open up to someone, they completely shut her down and refuse to understand her or stay with her through her episodes of unstable behavior. Throughout the film, Irena struggles with her ability to turn into a cat, much like those who suffer from mental illness. She has breakdowns and tries desperately to become better for the good of herself and her husband, but her husband gives up on her, triggering the start of another episode she cannot escape.

Irena has spent her whole life trying to suppress her emotions and “dark” feelings because that is what she has learned to do, which is unhealthy; this becomes her downfall in a way. Instead of being nurtured, encouraged, or listened to, Irena is forced to live in a cage her entire life, feeling as though she cannot escape from the prison of her mind. When she dies, she is finally free from the evils that plague her.

In truth, Irena was not the villain of the film at all. Oliver and Dr. Judd played such a large part in her downfall. Her husband, for not choosing to stick with her through the worst of times, and her therapist for trying to exploit her circumstances for his own curiosity, not to actually help her — which reflects many issues surrounding mental health today. Those afflicted with illness such as depression, etc., are not always supported and treated properly or given the help they need. When Lewton produced Cat People he chose a very taboo subject at the time and disguised it with a “horror” aspect. But Cat People seems to be a reflection of and metaphor for how mental illness works and affects people negatively.

Furthermore, in The Curse of the Cat People, the sequel to Cat People, we see Irena’s husband Oliver is now married to his co-worker Alice, and has a daughter with her named Amy (Ann Carter). Amy is perceived as a strange, imaginative girl who daydreams about fantastical and magical things. The other children believe her to be weird because of her airy personality and short attention span. She later befriends an old lady, Mrs. Farren (Julia Dean), with a jealous daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell), and even creates an imaginary friend who takes the form of Irena, her father’s first wife. Again, instead of choosing to understand his daughter, Oliver firmly tells her she must go play with the other kids or she will be punished. He also condemns her for having an imaginary friend, and she is severly punished for that as well.

Amy’s imaginary version of Irena is everything her parents are not — she listens to Amy, encourages and nurtures her, and therefore perpetuates Amy’s innocent view of the world in which all life is beautiful.

Amy’s childish innocence and ability to spread her warmth saves her from being killed when she hugs Mrs. Farren’s bitter daughter Barbara — Amy can see the good in people and in everything due to her innocence. In the end, Amy’s parents believe in her and finally listen to her instead of forcing her to try to be “normal” like the other children.

This here is another example of Lewton using a supernatural aspect as a disguise for a subject that was not really brought up during this time. Amy is a child who seems to be on the autism spectrum; she appears to have Asperger syndrome due to her behavior. Instead of really assessing this fact in their daughter, Amy’s parents, especially Oliver, are intent on making her a “normal” child, even punishing her for silly issues such as having an imaginary friend. Both parents are fearful their child may be mentally ill, especially when Amy mentions Irena. But in the end they come to accept her and foster her growth rather than cage her up, which is a stark contrast to what they did with Irena. The supernatural aspect Lewton added was to keep up the theme of “horror” films the company was marketing his movies as, but Curse of the Cat People was truly about child-like innocence and how adults try to take it away at an early age, when really they should be enouraging it.

Both Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People deal with serious issues in the world, but each topic is thinly veiled behind a supernatural aspect. Val Lewton’s films, though not filled with scary entities to haunt your dreams, are still equally as terrifying as they reflect how humans work. The psychological aspects of his films are what truly make them memorable and frightening.

 *                         *                           *

This is Jim again — I’m back. I don’t mind saying that this essay left me gasping with admiration. I don’t think I could have answered the essay prompt as completely and concisely as this student did — and I made it up. And remember: the student wrote this, as it were, “under the gun”, in a two-hour exam period — and after writing an equally long and insightful essay comparing Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

The mention of Amy possibly having Asperger syndrome is particularly astute — especially since the student is probably too young to know that Asperger’s had barely been identified by 1944 (and then only in the Third Reich) and didn’t become general knowledge until the 1980s. (Of course, behavior like Amy’s was not unheard of back then, but it was usually described in less compassionate terms: “The kid’s weird / nuts / not right in the head…”) In other classes where I screened Curse of the Cat People, I discussed the idea of Amy’s being somewhere on the autism spectrum (itself barely recognized in ’44), but with this class I didn’t. As it happened, I didn’t have to — not for this student, anyhow.

The last day of Cinevent 50 began with Kitty (1945), starring Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland. Since I wrote the program notes for Kitty, I’m going to follow my practice of years past and reproduce those notes here. However, I should mention that my notes for Cinevent were adapted from my 2013 Cinedrome post on this, one of my favorite pictures. So you’ve got a choice: you can read on now, or if you want the full gamut of what I had to say back then, you can click here and skip the next thirteen paragraphs.

Paulette Goddard is one of the great also-rans of movie history. As she never tired of saying, she was the front-runner to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind – until some pert little nobody from England came along. Late in life, Goddard told how she was offered the role and threw a party to celebrate. Selznick came, she said, and so did the English actor Laurence Olivier, in town shooting Wuthering Heights for Sam Goldwyn. Olivier (again, according to Paulette) brought along his girlfriend Vivien Leigh, Selznick took one look at her, and that was that.

The story is nonsense, of course. David Selznick didn’t meet Leigh at Paulette’s house, and Paulette never had Scarlett nailed down enough to throw a party over it. But Paulette’s harmless little fable shows how that near-miss haunted her for the rest of her life — through her 1940s peak at Paramount (when she never quite made it into the top rank of Hollywood stars), and all the long years before her death at 79 in 1990, years during which GWTW’s fame grew even as her own dwindled.

There’s another oblique link to Gone With the Wind in Goddard’s career. As everybody knows, while the world waited breathlessly for the movie David Selznick would make of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Warner Bros. decided to cash in on this vogue for the Old South by dusting off a 1933 Broadway flop about another flirtatious and headstrong southern belle — and Jezebel swept to the screen a year ahead of GWTW.

Fast-forward to 1944, when another novel has readers breathless and every actress in Hollywood rubbing her hands. The book is Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber, about an ambitious village girl’s sexual exploits during the reign of Charles II of England. Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox had snatched up the movie rights to this racy, titillating bestseller — and the boys over at Paramount decided to steal a march on Zanuck the way Warners had on Selznick. The beneficiary of their ploy was Paulette Goddard.

The vehicle they chose was Rosamond Marshall’s novel Kitty, which had been published the year before Amber, but with nowhere near the same success. Born in 1902, Rosamond Marshall wrote some 16 novels altogether, but only two of them ever made it to the screen: The Bixby Girls (filmed in 1960 as All the Fine Young Cannibals with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner) and Kitty.

Actually, not all of Kitty made it to the screen. Marshall’s novel was a pretty steamy bodice-ripper by 1940s standards, the tale of a 14-year-old London prostitute blithely sleeping her way up the social ladder in the days of King George III. Kitty (she doesn’t have a last name) gets caught stealing the shoes of the painter Thomas Gainsborough — and he, liking the look of her, invites her into his studio to pose. There, Kitty catches the eye of a ne’er-do-well visitor, Sir Hugh Marcy, who takes her home with him and introduces her to the pleasures of orgasmic sex. Sir Hugh and his gin-sodden aunt Lady Susan take Kitty under their wings, passing her off as the orphaned child of a dear friend and subjecting her to a crash course in proper speech and manners. Kitty blooms under their tutelage and her lovers multiply.

So much for the novel. Needless to say, between publication and the release of Paramount’s film in 1945, Rosamond Marshall’s story underwent a major overhaul at the hands of writers Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware and director Mitchell Leisen. For starters, a prostitute as a heroine, let alone a 14-year-old one, was out of the question. So Kitty was advanced to somewhere beyond the age of consent — and relieved of the need to have anything to consent to.

More important, Tunberg and Ware (with perhaps the input of director Leisen) realized what Rosamond Marshall evidently did not: that next to Kitty herself, by far the book’s most interesting characters are the cad Sir Hugh and the drunkard Lady Susan. In the novel, Lady Susan is dead halfway through and Sir Hugh disappears with far too many pages left to read. In the screenplay, both are kept around, to far better effect.

Ware and Tunberg’s other solution to Kitty’s story problems — and its conflicts with the Production Code — was inspired: They expanded the scenes of Sir Hugh and Lady Susan schooling Kitty in ladylike deportment, thus changing Kitty’s plot from the rise of an adolescent hooker to an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Kitty (Paulette Goddard) as Eliza Doolittle, Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) as Henry Higgins, and Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway) as Col. Pickering. Shaw’s Mrs. Higgins became Lady Susan, and the role was entrusted to that grand dowager of the British and Broadway stages, Constance Collier. (Shaw’s reaction to all this is unrecorded. He may have been amused – or he may never have even seen the picture. He almost certainly never read Marshall’s novel.)

Kitty is billed as “A Mitchell Leisen Production.” In the mid-’40s Leisen (pronounced “Leeson”) was Paramount’s arbiter of elegance, having begun his career designing sets and costumes for Cecil B. DeMille, the only Paramount director who outranked him in prestige. Leisen has taken a beating from auteurists in recent decades, mainly because Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges both claimed to have turned director out of dissatisfaction with Leisen’s treatment of their scripts. But an unbiased look at the pictures Leisen made of Sturges’s screenplays for Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (’40), or Wilder’s (and Charles Brackett’s) for Midnight (’39) and Hold Back the Dawn (’41), makes them sound like a couple of whining prima donnas. We should all be grateful that Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges moved into directing their own stuff, but they had no grounds whatever to complain about Mitch Leisen.

David Chierichetti’s 1995 book Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director does much to correct this injustice to Leisen, but its information on Kitty is sketchy and unreliable — when it’s not downright false. Chierichetti says it’s set in “Restoration Era England” when it takes place 125 years later. Leisen himself, interviewed, says: “I spent two years researching Gainsborough and the way he painted. We determined that the picture took place in 1659, and there’s nothing in the picture that was painted by him after that year.” Wrong again. Gainsborough wasn’t even born until 1727, and an opening title card explicitly sets the story in 1783. Clearly, Leisen (who died in 1972) had not seen the picture recently when he discussed it with Chierichetti, nor had Chierichetti when he wrote about it. And Leisen never spent two years in research. Kitty was ready for release by the end of 1944 but was held up a full year by Paramount’s backlog of product; two years of research would have had Leisen beginning in 1942, a year before the novel was published.

But there is one point on which Chierichetti is absolutely right: Kitty “was precisely the kind of picture Leisen could do better than anybody else, and its mixture of mannered comedy and gutsy drama suited him perfectly.” The picture is a sumptuous feast, evoking 18th century London as sharply as an engraving by William Hogarth. It’s a pity the picture couldn’t have been made in Technicolor — thus evoking Gainsborough rather than Hogarth — but Paramount was notoriously cheap on that score. Even as it stands, Kitty richly deserved its Oscar nomination for art direction — for Hans Dreier and Walter Tyler; the production design was by Raoul Pene Du Bois. (Kitty lost to Fox’s Anna and the King of Siam.)

Over and above its gorgeous look and elegent style, Kitty gave Paulette Goddard the opportunity of a lifetime, and she came through with the performance of her career. Always a conscientious actress rather than an inspired one, Goddard worked hard on her Cockney accent, coached by Phyllis Loughton and Connie Emerald (mother of Ida Lupino), and, as the new-and-improved Kitty, by Constance Collier, who tutored Goddard/Kitty as much off screen as Lady Susan did on. There’s not a false note in Goddard’s performance, nor in any of the rest of the cast, which was surely one of the largest and best either she or Leisen ever worked with: Milland (against-all-odds charming as Sir Hugh, a more detestable rotter than Henry Higgins ever was), Collier, Kellaway, Patric Knowles (as Kitty’s version of Freddy Eynsford-Hill), Dennis Hoey (as Kitty’s first husband), Reginald Owen (as her second), and the ever-popular Eric Blore as Sir Hugh and Lady Susan’s querulous manservant Dobson. (Blore has one of the best lines in the picture – but I won’t spoil it.)

After lunch we got the last three chapters of The Masked Marvel, and we finally learned who the Masked Marvel really was (as if it mattered; I never could keep the candidates straight — I can’t even remember which one wound up dying in that L.A. beanfield).

Then came The King of Wild Horses (1924), which showcased one of those stars that almost every film buff has heard of, but (I’ll bet) very few have ever seen: Rex the Wonder Horse. Discovered God knows where by producer Hal Roach, he had a pretty good career for a while — for a horse, anyhow, especially a horse who wasn’t partnered with some human cowboy star. This particular picture, Rex’s debut, had him as the alpha male in a herd of wild horses, sought by a cowboy (Léon Bary) who wants to catch and tame him, while the cowpoke’s rancher boss (Sidney De Gray) tries to learn who keeps rustling his stock. The two plotlines eventually converge, naturally, and work themselves out pretty well. Rex was the main attraction, and there’s no denying he had star quality, clearly intelligent and seemingly game for almost anything; it’s easy to understand how he came to rival, in his day, the popularity of Rin Tin Tin. Another point of interest was the presence in the cast of Charley Chase in a straight dramatic role (and, to avoid misleading audiences, billed as Charles Parrott, his real name).

Beauty for Sale (1933) was an energetic pre-Code from MGM and director Richard Boleslawski, from a novel by paleo-romance novelist Faith Baldwin. Madge Evans played a working girl at an upscale beauty salon catering to wealthy women with nothing better to do than sit around yakking at each other with mud on their faces. Various sexual shenanigans ensue: Evans wanders into an affair with the husband (Otto Kruger) of one of her more empty-headed clients (Alice Brady); her co-worker and best friend (Una Merkel) drains a sugar daddy (Charley Grapewin) for every dime she can get; another co-worker (Florine McKenney) carries on a forbidden-fruit romance with the pampered son (Phillips Holmes) of the salon’s owner (Hedda Hopper) and winds up pregnant.

Beauty for Sale was nicely done, and the print was handsome, but it was overshadowed by the picture that followed it, which in its turn closed out the weekend with one last highlight. This was Dreamboat (1952), a marvelous spoof of Hollywood, television, and academia that probably represents the pinnacle of writer/director Claude Binyon’s career.

No doubt that name sounds vaguely familiar. Binyon (1905-78) was a journeyman writer whose career, if it never quite scaled the heights of a Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, was still nothing to sneeze at. Starting out as a journalist, he worked at Variety for several years in the late ’20s and early ’30s, where some say he was responsible for the famous headlines WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG and STIX NIX HICK PIX. True credit on those is understandably disputed; whatever the case, by 1932 he had transitioned from writing about movies to writing for them. Over the years his scripts included Sing, You Sinners (1938); Holiday Inn (’42); This Is the Army (’43); Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (’58); North to Alaska (’60) — and, it must be said, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick (’52) and the 1960 all-star roadshow megabomb Pepe. 

Binyon occasionally directed his own scripts, and with Dreamboat he was at the top of both games. Clifton Webb played Thornton Sayre, a stuffy, acerbic college professor whose students call him “Old Ironheart” behind his back. The advent of television has uncovered a secret long buried in his past: He used to be a silent-screen heartthrob known as Bruce Blair (imagine a combination of Douglas Fairbanks and John Gilbert), and now those obsolete relics of a bygone day are turning up on TV, hosted by his former co-star Gloria Marlowe (Ginger Rogers). The movies have created a sensation, upsetting the stuffy trustees of his college, so he strikes out for New York to get an injunction to stop this invasion of his privacy, taking along his daughter Carol (Anne Francis), who is well on her way to becoming the same kind of stick-in-the-mud killjoy that he is. While Gloria and her TV producer (Fred Clark) try to charm Prof. Sayre out of his dudgeon, Carol is squired around town by the producer’s assistant (Jeffrey Hunter). In the process, father learns that reversing the wheels of showbiz is easier said than done, while daughter learns there’s more to having a good time than working on a thesis to “challenge the existence of Homer as an individual.” Dreamboat was a witty delight every inch of the way, poking fun at show business and academia with both barrels and scoring a bullseye every time. It was also a testament to 20th Century Fox’s ongoing ingenuity in finding vehicles to showcase the unorthodox but inimitable talents of Clifton Webb. Those of use who stayed through to the end of the weekend were well-rewarded for our loyalty.

Now I’d like to say a few words about Anne Francis. As Dreamboat romps across the screen, her Carol Sayre transforms from a buzzkill bookworm who looks about five days past puberty into something like the Anne Francis we all remember. She had a long and worthy career, with 169 credits between 1947 and 2004; she was always a welcome presence, and I’d venture to guess everyone who ever saw her in a movie or on TV remembered her fondly. Yet she never quite became a real star; I doubt if she ever got her name above a title, and she got top billing only in her one-season TV series Honey West. I wonder why?

There’s a line in John Fowles’s novel The Magus that has always stayed with me. The title character, Maurice Conchis, a mysterious middle-aged semi-recluse living on the (fictitious) Greek island of Phraxos, is speaking to the narrator, burnt-out teacher Nicholas Urfe, about Lily, the young woman who lives with Conchis. “Lily is beautiful, is she not? In fact, she is dangerously close to being perfect, and perfectly beautiful women are always boring.” (In the disastrous 1968 movie, Lily was played by Candice Bergen. ‘Nuff said.)

Maybe that’s what held Anne Francis back. Not that she was ever boring — far from it — but she was awfully close to being perfectly beautiful. All of the screen’s greatest beauties, it seems, had some flaw: their eyes were too large, or too small, or too far apart, or they had only one good side, or they were nothing without a camera. Anne Francis had nothing like that. There was that little mole near the right corner of her mouth, but does that really count as a flaw? Personally, I think it only put her that much closer to perfection. No wonder her role in Funny Girl (1968) was slashed to practically nothing; Barbra Streisand didn’t need that kind of competition. And no wonder one of her best (and best remembered) performances was on The Twilight Zone, as a department store mannequin allowed to come to life for a month and walk among the mortals.

Well, that’s one of the things I like about Cinevent. Along with the reunions with longtime and like-minded friends, the dealers’ room, the screenings, there are reflections like that that spring to mind. And you never know what’s going to bring one on. On to Memorial Day 2019!