Author Archives: Jim Lane

A-a-a-and We’re Back…!

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It’s been way too long — over a year-and-a-half — since I posted anything new here at Cinedrome. I want to apologize for that. I won’t overstate the concerns and conditions that led me to suspend blogging. Nor will I exaggerate the number of posts I began and never got around to finishing. But there have been some of both.

Be that as it may, I’ve had my necessary vacation and I feel rested, refreshed, and ready to soldier on. So with that, I file the following report on the 48th Annual Cinevent Classic Film Convention in Columbus, Ohio.

This was Cinevent’s second year in its new home, Columbus’s Renaissance Downtown Hotel. The convention’s previous, longtime venue, which had changed hands and names several times over the decades, closed suddenly — and permanently — in February 2015, only three months before that year’s Cinevent. Which, with an undertaking of this scale, qualifies as “at the last minute”. The Cinevent Committee had to scramble madly to find another venue, and by the grace of a merciful Providence the Renaissance was available. Better yet, the new place proved to be a step above the old one. Did I say a step? Actually, the new place is about three flights above the old one: superior accommodations, a better screening room with more comfortable chairs, a bigger dealers’ room, everything centrally located on one floor — and the hotel itself centrally located in a much better neighborhood, one block from the Ohio State House, with plenty of good restaurants nearby.

The Renaissance is now, as I said, Cinevent’s new home — but it wasn’t available for Memorial Day Weekend this year, so the get-together was delayed a week to June 2 – 5. Next year (the contract has already been signed) they’ll be going back to Memorial Day.

Cinevent 2016, Day 1

The first day featured a screening of King Vidor’s classic slice of life The Crowd (1928), one of the greatest pictures of the silent era — and probably one of the top 40 or 50 of all time. The Crowd is readily available on video and pops up regularly on Turner Classic Movies. Much harder to find — incredibly rare, as a matter of fact — was a program of all-but-lost comedy shorts from Fox Film Corp. For me, the highlights of the first day were Melody Cruise, a 1933 comedy starring Charlie Ruggles and Phil Harris (in his movie debut, 30-plus years before voicing Baloo the Bear in Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book); and The House of Rothschild (1934), from Darryl F. Zanuck’s fledgling 20th Century Pictures.

And by an astonishing coincidence, those happen to be the two pictures at this year’s Cinevent for which I supplied the program notes. And here they are:

 

Melody Cruise (1933)  With a title like Melody Cruise and a leading man like Phil Harris, you can be forgiven if you expect this picture to be one uninterrupted songfest. Well, it’s not exactly, so you’ll be wise to dial those expectations back a bit so you can join in the fun. It’s not really a musical — a “comedy with songs” would be a better term. But director Mark Sandrich — who was finally, after six years directing shorts for various studios, beginning to graduate once and for all to features — assembles the picture with an intuitive sense of musical rhythm that would come to full bloom in his partnership with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Melody Cruise concerns a trip by sea from New York through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles undertaken by two men, both well-to-do and each with an eye for the ladies: Pete Wells (Charlie Ruggles), a married man best described as a “male flirt”; and Alan Chandler (Phil Harris), a confirmed bachelor who loves to romance the fair sex but is (in the words of one of the movie’s semi-songs) “not the marrying kind.” In order to avoid any possibility of being waylaid into matrimony, Alan dispatches a letter to Pete’s wife in California “to be opened only in the event of my marriage” and detailing all of Pete’s marital indiscretions while husband and wife were on separate coasts; this, Alan figures, will give Pete a vested interest in scotching any shipboard romances that his bachelor pal may fall into.

Ah, but the best-laid plans…No sooner does the ship leave the pier than Alan meets winsome Laurie Marlowe (Helen Mack), and this bachelor suddenly finds himself feeling much less confirmed. Throw in an old flame of Alan’s who is also aboard (Greta Nissen), and a couple of randy party girls from Pete’s bon voyage celebration who linger in his stateroom after the vessel sails (June Brewster, Shirley Chambers), and the ingredients of an old-fashioned farce of misunderstandings and mistaken identity are in place, and the voyage promises to be a busy one for all concered.

The plot of this RKO pre-Code may be tissue-thin, but the execution gives it a gloss of frivolous fun. We can detect the influence of the previous year’s Love Me Tonight (from over at Paramount) right off the bat, as passengers in a shipping office negotiate for their respective cruises in a sort of recitative of rhyming dialogue, while the underlying music suggests a melody for their words that would become a song if anyone wanted to sing (the songs are credited to Val Burton and Will Jason). It happens again later as the ship sets sail, with the activities of the crew carefully choreographed to Max Steiner’s music, and later still as the ladies aboard (look sharp and you’ll catch a glimpse of 16-year-old Betty Grable) gossip about Alan Chandler in “He’s Not the Marrying Kind”. And in the picture’s one full-fledged song, sung by Phil Harris to Helen Mack as their ship waits its turn at the moonlit Panama Canal, both the title (“Isn’t It a Night for Love?”) and the staging are redolent of “Isn’t It Romantic?” from Love Me Tonight.

Making his screen debut here (if you don’t count an uncredited background bit as a nightclub drummer in 1929’s Why Be Good? with Colleen Moore), Phil Harris is younger, sleeker and smoother than the big loveable galoot we all remember from Jack Benny’s radio program and movies like The Wild Blue Yonder (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Later on in 1933, he and director Sandrich would collaborate on the short So This Is Harris!, which would go on to win an Oscar for best comedy short subject.

Melody Cruise got an indulgent recpetion from the critics. Variety’s “Rush” found it “just a well-rehearsed trifle, padded out unmercifully with incidentals, atmosphere and other embroideries”, but allowed that “photography and technical production are better than first class, becoming notable for excellence at many points” — an apparent nod to the many whimsical screen-wipes Sandrich and conematographer Bert Glennon use to transition from scene ot scene. Likewise Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times, who called it “an adroit mixture of nonsense and music which makes for an excellent Summer show…It is, however, not the singing or the clowning that makes this a smart piece of work, but the imaginative direction of Mark Sandrich, who is alert in seizing any opportunity for cinematic stunts. From the viewpoint of direction this production is quite an achievement, for there are moments when it has a foreign aspect and there is some extraordinarily clever photography.”

House of Rothschild LC02cThe House of Rothschild (1934)  At the beginning of 1933, Darryl F. Zanuck was head of production at Warner Bros., the man behind The Jazz Singer, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, 42nd Street, and other seminal pictures of Warners’ pre-Code era. On April 15, Zanuck abruptly resigned. As might be expected — especially with Warner Bros. — it was due to a dispute over money.  For once, though, it wasn’t Zanuck’s money that was being disputed. Zanuck had reluctantly agreed to be the bearer of the bad news when the brothers imposed temporary studio-wide pay cuts in the wake of FDR’s bank holiday in March ’33. When studio chief Jack Warner decided to extend the cuts beyond the agreed-upon end date, Zanuck felt that he (Warner) had broken his (Zanuck’s) word to the employees. Harsh words flew, and Zanuck took a walk.
 
Zanuck wasn’t idle long. Three days later he consulted Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists, for advice on some job offers he was considering. Schenck made an offer of his own: the two of them should go into business together. Schenck secured a loan from his brother Nicholas, president of Loew’s Inc., and 20th Century Pictures was born — with Schenck as president, William Goetz (son-in-law of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, who also put up some money) as vice president, and Zanuck as production chief.
 
The new concern hit the ground running. One of Zanuck’s first moves was to sign contracts with stars George Arliss and Loretta Young, whose contracts with Warner Bros. had just recently expired. That must have been a source of grim satisfaction to Zanuck.
 
It certainly rankled Harry Warner, who filed a protest with Will Hays of the MPPDA complaining that the creation of 20th Century was a deliberate, unethical slap in the face to Warner Bros, financed by loans from MGM’s Nick Schenck and L.B. Mayer and poaching Warners’ empoyees — particularly Arliss and Young. Joe Schenck got wind of Harry’s letter and filed his own rebuttal: neither Arliss nor Young, he wrote, had signed with 20th Century until after their Warners contracts expired. As for where Schenck got his financing, “it is absolutely none of [Harry Warner’s] business.”
 
Arliss and Young’s first project for 20th Century was The House of Rothschild. Arliss played the dual role of Mayer Rothschild, patriarch of the clan in 1780, and 32 years later, Mayer’s eldest son Nathan, who with his four brothers secured the family’s fabulous wealth by backing the right side in the Napoleonic Wars. Loretta played Nathan’s daughter Julie, who visits consternation on her devoutly Jewish father by falling in love with a Gentile officer in the Duke of Wellington’s army, a young captain played by Robert Young (no relation, of course).
 
George Arliss was, like his contemporary Marie Dressler, one of the most unusual movie stars of the 1920s and ’30s — neither handsome nor young, but charming and witty, with a twinkling eye that nicely complemented and softened his typically English stiff upper lip. Born Augustus George Andrews in 1868, Arliss cut his teeth as an actor on British provincial stages in the days of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. He made the transition from stage to screen with remarkable ease, and, thanks to his orotund elocutions, he moved just as easily from silents to talkies when sound came in. His signature stage role was as Queen Victoria’s favorite prime minister in Disraeli, which he filmed twice, as a silent in 1921 and a talkie eight years later (winning an Oscar the second time). Historical figures were a bit of a speciality — Disraeli and Alexander Hamilton before Nathan Rothschild, the Duke of Wellington and Cardinal Richelieu afterward — but, with appropriate changes in costume and hair style, they all semed to look and sound pretty much like George Arliss. That was good enough for audiences in the 1930s, and time hasn’t dimmed the old boy’s charm; it’s good enough for us today.
The House of Rothschild was directed by Alfred Werker, a reliable studio workhorse whose work was generally unobjectionable if undistinguished. According to the IMDb, some scenes were directed by the uncredited (and similarly reliable) Sidney Lanfield, though without combing the studio’s archives there’s no way of knowing which. Oddly enough — or perhaps it’s not so odd at that — both men would have their finest hours in 1939 directing Basil Rathbone’s first two outings as Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles (Lanfield) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Werker). The screen also credits, as “Associate Director”, Maude T. Howell, a member in good standing of Arliss’s informal support group on both stage and screen.
 
Written by Nunnally Johnson from a play by George Hembert Westley (real name George Hippisley, a humor writer and editor for the Boston Evening Transcript), House of Rothschild has the distinction of being one of the first movies (probably in fact the very first) to deal with the subject of anti-Semitism — this, mind you, just as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany. Nathan and his brothers deal with Jew-haters again and again, epitomized by Boris Karloff as the reptilian Count Ledrantz of Prussia and personified by the rioting mobs Ledrantz sets on the Jews in their ghettos all across Europe — until Napoleon’s escape from Elba puts Nathan once more in the financial driver’s seat. The picture was a powerful argument for tolerance in 1934, and it looks even more powerful today in light of what we now know was to come.
 
The House of Rothschild was a major hit and a succes d’estime for 20th Century, Oscar-nominated for best picture (it lost to It Happened One Night). Reviewers hailed it as one of the best pictures of George Arliss’s career, maybe even the very best — a judgment that holds up today. Variety’s “Land” called it “one of those occasional 100% smashes which Hollywood achieves.” In the New York Times, Mordaunt Hall enthused, “Mr. Arliss outshines any performance he has contributed to the screen, not excepting his expert and highly revealing interpretation of Disraeli.” In The New Yorker, even the perennially sniffy John Mosher concceded, “Mr. Arliss at last condescends to appear in a film of some maturity of purpose. His ‘House of Rothschild’ compares with his ‘Disraeli’ in quality as well as in the basic theme.” However, Mosher couldn’t forbear sniffing that the final scene was “soaked in abominable Technicolor for some mysterious reason.” The print we’re screening includes that scene in true IB Tech, so the Cinevent audience can judge for themselves the justice of Mr. Mosher’s complaint.
 
The first night was rounded out by Tomorrow at Ten, a British picture from 1962. Robert Shaw — already a veteran of British TV (The Buccaneers) and on the cusp of stardom that would come his way with From Russia With Love (’64) and A Man for All Seasons (’66) — plays Marlowe, a cold-eyed criminal who kidnaps a wealthy man’s little boy and stashes him in an isolated, anonymous rented house with a little “golliwog” doll to keep him company. Then he brazenly walks into the boy’s home and demands 50,000 pounds sterling and free passage to Brazil. Only then will he phone the father and reveal the boy’s location.
 
Inevitably, the police are called in, but Marlowe is unruffled. His trump card: that golliwog doll is a time bomb, and it’s set to go off the next morning at ten a.m. How all this plays out, especially after Marlowe dies without disclosing the boy’s whereabouts, makes for a nifty little thriller, a rare (for Americans) look at a British B-picture. (This one, unlike most British Bs, got a stateside release in 1965, after Shaw had made a name for himself with U.S. audiences in From Russia With Love, playing a role very similar to Marlowe.) It was a good way to close out the first day of Cinevent.
 
And the weekend was only beginning.
 
 

The Fog of Lost London, Part 4

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NOTE: As the Spooky Season reaches its climax, I repost the climax of my four-part tribute to the legendary lost Tod Browning-Lon Chaney collaboration London After Midnight. Here it is, with a few afterthoughts. If you haven’t read the first three parts yet, you’d better scroll down and catch up — you don’t want to get ahead of the story!

*                         *                         *

The concluding chapters of London After Midnight by Marie Coolidge-Rask:

Chapter 19 – The Man in the Beaver Hat

 

At Balfour House, the man in the beaver hat, lantern in hand, climbs the stairs to the secret room where the bat-woman hovers near the ceiling. Come down, he says, all is ready; she is on her way.

In the overgrown garden the bat-woman waits as Lucy approaches. As the two come together, a shriek like a woman’s voice rends the air. Lucy cowers, but the bat-woman soothes her: “It’s nothing. They’re awake — coming.” Lucy feels herself taken in two strong arms and carried bodily into the house. She sees that her bearer is the man in the beaver hat described by Smithson.

Lucy looks around; tears well in her eyes as she takes in the home she has not seen since her father’s death five years before. She begs the pair with her to tell her who they are.

The man in the beaver hat silences her with a gesture. Footsteps are heard outside. Suddenly there’s the crash of a shattering window and a man tumbles into the room at their feet.

Chapter 20 – Hibbs’ Madness

In Hamlin House, Hibbs dashes downstairs to where the servants cluster, roused from their sleep by the sudden hue and cry from Lucy’s room. They urgently entreat Hibbs to tell them what’s going on, but he is incoherent, raving — They’re coming! They’re all around! I go to destroy them!

The unfortunate Hibbs rummages around the kitchen, yard and outbuildings of the estate, raving about an axe and a hickory stake, the implements he must have to destroy the “vampyrs.” He finds an axe in a chopping block and sharpens two pieces of wood into stakes, muttering madly all the while. The servants watch in amazement, afraid to intervene in his maddened state. Soon he is off on his way to Balfour House on his desperate, fevered mission.

At Balfour House he lurks outside a window, his eyes wide, barely suppressing the wild beating of his heart. What he sees through the window drives him madder still: Lucy standing with the man in the beaver hat and the bat-woman. She doesn’t run, she doesn’t flee; she is in their wicked power! She must be saved before it’s too late!

Hibbs leaps through the window, falling at the feet of Lucy and the two fiends in a shower of glass. Before he can move or clear his fevered brain, creatures of unimaginable strength have pounced upon him, overwhelmed him, bound him, borne him off. Is this the end? Has he failed to save Lucy? Is he doomed to be a vampire himself?

Chapter 21 – Help from Scotland Yard

At Scotland Yard, the summons to Hamlin House has been received and a squad of constables is ready to set out. The assistant commissioner knows now that Inspector Burke’s preparations — carefully set in motion by the work of an undercover agent — are about to bear fruit.

The constables pile into a car and swiftly depart for their destination, an estate outside London. They are told that when the car is sighted there will be a signal — a siren; they are to reply with a howl, just like the other night.

As the car speeds along, they hear the siren — a long, piercing shriek like a woman’s scream. The car replies with its own special signal, a blaring electric horn like the howl of a dog. Peering into the darkness, the constables see the outline of Hamlin House straight ahead.

Chapter 22 – A Strange Conference

At Hamlin House, Colonel Yates hears the howl of a dog, just like the one the night of his and Sir James’s visit to the Balfour crypt. Looking out the window, he sees a car approaching. It must be Scotland Yard, he tells Sir James, and not a minute too soon.

As Yates and Sir James go downstairs, the butler is admitting the police, who have arrived in response to Sir James Hamlin’s request. Sir James introduces the policemen to Colonel Yates, saying he will explain the situation to them; Sir James himself is too distraught.

The colonel surveys the police detail with a military eye, apparently deciding that they will do. Quickly he summarizes the weird train of events that have led to their presence here. Now, he says, they have reason to believe that Miss Lucy Balfour is in dire peril in her former home. The police should proceed at once to Balfour House and be prepared for “instant action.”

Yates turns to Sir James; does he have his revolver ready? Sir James does. Let me see it, says the colonel. Examining the gun, he notes that it has not been fired in a long time and may not be reliable. Turning to one of the officers, he asks for a spare pistol that Sir James can carry in case the need for it arises.

Sir James, seated at his desk, tries to insist that his own revolver will do, but something in Colonel Yates’s eyes stops him. Sir James, in his highly nervous state, seems suddenly transfixed. Colonel Yates moves his hands before the man’s face but gets no response.

Satisfied, the colonel takes Sir James’s desk clock and sets the hands to eight o’clock. He places the clock before Sir James. At twenty-five minutes past eight, he tells Sir James, come to the verandah door at Balfour House.

Colonel Yates leaves with the police. Sir James, he says, will be joining them later.

Chapter 23 – From Out of the Past

Lucy is upset at what is happening to Hibbs — those men seizing him, binding him, carrying him away, saying he must be drunk. Jerry is never drunk! The bat-woman tries to calm her. Please, dear, she says, didn’t he tell you to remember your part and do it, no matter what? Yes, Lucy says, but he said he’d take care of Jerry, see that he comes to no harm. And so he will, the woman says, we all will. She turns to the man in the beaver hat. What was wrong with him? Too much excitement, the man says; he’ll be taken care of and kept out of harm’s way. But now we have to work fast.

Lucy pulls herself together. You’d better see the man in the next room, the bat-woman says to Lucy, prepare yourself. It might be a shock and you should get it over with.

Lucy parts a frayed curtain and looks into the next room at the man sitting at her father’s desk. It is a shock. The resemblance is uncanny, eerie. For a moment she feels like a little girl again, the little girl who came into this very room and found her father dead, sitting where that man is now. Lucy looks down at herself and sees that she is not that little girl at all anymore. This man can’t be her father — but he looks so like him.

Lucy prays for the strength to do what she must. She goes up to the man, who rises to greet her. They talk briefly. She answers his questions about the night she last saw her father alive. He tells her he can only imagine how difficult this is for her. He has three daughters of his own, and he hopes any one of them would feel just as Lucy does. But he also hopes that they would find the strength to do what must be done. It’s so important. “Play the role,” he says, “and make it a success.”

Chapter 24 – Metamorphosis

Lucy returns to the waiting bat-woman. The woman dresses her in a girlish white frock identical to one she had as a young girl. The woman tells her it is the same dress, that Smithson has retrieved it for Lucy to wear tonight. Again, as so often this night, Lucy is surprised; she thought she was being so clever in stealing away from Hamlin House, and Smithson knew all the time!
 
Colonel Yates strides into the hall with several men. One of them Lucy recognizes as one of the men who subdued Hibbs; in a flash she realizes that the other man who grappled with her sweetheart was the man who so resembles her father. Who are all these people? And who is Colonel Yates?
 
The man in the beaver hat removes his cloak and hands it to the colonel. Is everything ready? Yates asks. The man says yes, handing his hat to the colonel, then removing his wig and handing that over as well. In the hat, wig and cloak, stooped over and contorting his face, Colonel Yates looks exactly like the other man — except for the absence of those spiky teeth, which he conceals by raising the collar of the cloak. 
 
And now Smithson is there, telling Lucy how sweet she looks. I followed you to the edge of Hamlin grounds, she says, to make sure you were safe. 
 
Colonel Yates also compliments Lucy on her appearance — just what he wanted. As he takes her by the hand and leads her toward the other room, questions swim in Lucy’s head. What is this all about? Why isn’t Sir James here? Who are these people? Who is Smithson, really? And who is Colonel Yates? 

Chapter 25 – Sinister Preparations

 A steady stream of commands, directions and questions comes from Colonel Yates. Where is the notary? The stenographer? He questions Lucy about the arrangement of the furnishings in the room, making adjustments as she points them out. He orders everyone to their positions. He turns to Lucy and asks if she is ready. Yes, she says, but how can going through that night again bring a guilty person to justice? All will be clear in good time, he assures her. And he reminds her, after she has said good night, not to linger but to go directly to the room where the bat-woman waits for her. 
 
The colonel disappears behind a screen, but Lucy can just see his eyes watching through the slits between the panels. How she wishes this were all over and done. But now the house is silent, waiting. Someone is approaching along the verandah. 
 

Chapter 26 – Sir James Pays a Call

When the desk clock reads 8:25 Sir James rises and leaves the house, pausing briefly to tell Billings, the butler, that he is going to call at Balfour House. Billings says nothing, as he was directed by Colonel Yates, merely watches Sir James go. Billings reflects on the mystifying events of the last few days, most mystifying of all being the note left by Anna Smithson, thanking him for his many kindnesses and saying, regretfully, that it is necessary for her to leave Hamlin House immediately; a baggageman will call for her luggage in the morning. 
 
Sir James proceeds steadily to Balfour House, pausing to look around as he enters the grounds. What a fine estate he will have, he reflects, when these grounds are combined with his own. 
 
As Sir James enters the house, the butler, Mooney, announces him. His friend Roger rises to greet him. And there is dear Lucy, that lovely little girl of Roger’s. Sir James observes with envy the affection between father and daughter as she kisses Roger good night. Lucy smiles at Sir James and extends her hand, wishing him a good night. Aren’t you going to kiss me too? Sir James asks. 
 
Lucy’s smile vanishes. She tells Sir James she doesn’t like him when he talks like that. Then she is gone; Sir James and Roger Balfour are alone.
 

Chapter 27 – In Hypnosis

In Sir James’s mind, it is five years ago, the night he last saw Roger Balfour alive; the man with him is Roger Balfour; and they are alone. But the man he takes for Roger — whose real name is Drake — knows that none of those things are true. They are certainly not alone; every move they make is being watched, every word heard and taken down for the record. Now that Lucy is out of the room, there is only one person who knows how the conversation went between the two men that last night. Sir James is reliving his half of that scene; Drake must now play a very delicate game. He must deduce from Sir James’s behavior what he, as Roger Balfour, should do or say next. The slightest misstep can shatter Sir James’s hypnotic trance. 
Sir James, unable to quite conceal his annoyance, tells “Roger” that he has come here tonight in a spirit of friendship to help his friend with his financial difficulties. I know about your troubles, he says, more than you realize. 
 
Drake plays a hunch. He tells Sir James that he knows exactly the extent of his knowledge — he sees that his hunch has hit home, and continues — knows that Sir James has been stealing from him right and left, made him penniless. Now that you have me in your power, he says, what do you want?
 
I want Lucy, says Sir James. I have loved her since she was a baby, and I want her for my wife. You have always distrusted me, suspected me. You have called me a drug user and a sensualist, but you could never prove it. 
 
Now Drake, with the revulsion of a father with daughters of his own, knows what Roger Balfour must have said, the only thing that could have caused events to turn out as they did. I can prove it, he says, now.
 
Sir James’s eyes blaze with hate as he draws his revolver. He demands these “proofs.” The other man refuses, and Sir James fires. Drake crumples to the floor, a bloody wound in his temple. 
 
Sir James searches the desk. Those proofs, whatever Roger had, must be here, he is certain. He goes through every drawer quickly but carefully, finding nothing. The fool was bluffing. Well, now he’s dead, and good riddance. Sir James takes out his handkerchief, wipes his pistol clean, and lays it on the floor near the dead man’s lifeless fingers. Now he must escape before he is found here. He backs toward the door. 
 
As he reaches for the doorknob his arm is seized in a powerful grip, then his other arm. Sir James struggles in a desperate frenzy, unable to break free. He hears a voice: Don’t let him get away! He’s still under hypnosis! I’m coming!
 

Chapter 28 – A Dramatic Awakening

As Sir James struggles, the man in the beaver hat emerges from behind a screen. Under the man’s penetrating gaze, Sir James ceases to struggle. He looks around. Balfour House! How did he get here? He sees Roger Balfour dead on the floor, exactly where he left him. But that was five years ago! Or was it? Has it all been a dream, these five years, all his patient plotting and planning to possess Lucy? All a dream during the few seconds as he made his way to the door? 
 
It must have been! Roger had been too clever, had his men in hiding. But not clever enough; they’ve prevented my escape, but they’re too late to save his life. Sir James looks at the man in the beaver hat. Have I been asleep?
 
No, says the man, and neither have I. He reaches out and rips the sleeve from Sir James’s jacket. Sir James recoils from the searing pain. There! says the man. I knew I clipped you when I shot at you tonight. You thought you’d finish Hibbs with your poison needle, but I was there instead waiting for you. 
 

Chapter 29 – Surprising Revelations

 Drake rises from the floor, wiping the stage blood from his face, grateful that Sir James had been handed a doctored revolver back at Hamlin House. The man with Sir James removes his beaver hat, cloak and wig, revealing —
 
Yates! cries Sir James. I thought the years had changed you, but now I see you’re an impostor. You’ve set this trap to blackmail me! You’ll get nothing from me! Sir James shrieks with indignation.
 
“Colonel Yates” takes off his glasses, removes the subtle disguise from his face, rearranges his hair, and shows Sir James his badge: Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard. I have what I want from you, he says. I’ve spent the last three days carefully breaking down your defenses, creating a mental strain that would make you susceptible to hypnotic influence. My theory that a criminal in hypnosis, faced with the circumstances of his crime, will repeat that crime exactly — my theory has been proven correct.
 
Cornered, broken, trapped, Sir James crumbles and confesses all. He murdered Roger Balfour just as Burke and his crew have seen him reenact the crime tonight. He murdered Harry Balfour with a poison injection to the throat for fear that Harry would discover the proof of his wicked life that he could not find before — and worse, would take Lucy away from him. He tried to do the same to Hibbs to get him out of Lucy’s life, before Yates/Burke’s intervention sent him fleeing for his life. 
 
The stenographer has it all. Inspector Burke orders the statement typed up. He tells Sir James that the law will see to it that every last farthing he stole from Roger Balfour will be restored to Lucy as the last survivor of her murdered family. And finally, he orders his men to examine Roger Balfour’s desk closely for evidence of a secret drawer; those proofs must be in there somewhere.
 

Chapter 30 – Recapitulation

Burke tells Sir James that he suspected him from the start; if only he could have acted sooner, he might have saved Harry Balfour’s life. Burke’s investigation had uncovered evidence of Sir James’s embezzlement from Roger Balfour. A former policewoman, Anna Smithson, was planted in Sir James’s household, where she uncovered evidence of Sir James’s drug use and degenerate activities. She had also overheard conversations between Sir James and Harry — no one ever notices the servants — and knew that Harry intended to remove his sister from Sir James’s influence. She had even found the vial of poison with which Sir James murdered Harry (and intended to murder Hibbs) and replaced it with a harmless liquid. The real poison is now in police hands, to be used as evidence.
 

Chapter 31 – Professional Pride

Inspector Burke goes upstairs to where Lucy is sitting by the bedside of Hibbs, now all but recovered from his derangement. Burke tells Lucy and Hibbs his true identity, and that he has the murderer of Lucy’s father and brother in custody. He spares her any details for the moment. She must know all in time, of course, but later, when she’s stronger. 
 
Burke apologizes for keeping Hibbs in the dark, but it was necessary to the operation; Hibbs is not dissembler enough to have been able to play a role. Hibbs sheepishly admits that he now wishes he’d taken “Colonel Yates’s” advice and gone to bed. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble — especially himself. 
 
Smithson comes in to say goodbye; she will miss Miss Lucy and Mr. Jerry. She playfully scolds Burke for that “terrible tarradiddle” he made her tell about the green mist through the keyhole. 
 
Finally come the man in the beaver hat and the bat-woman; their part in Burke’s elaborate charade is done, and now it’s back to the music halls for them. Come see us, the woman says, Mooney and Luney — Jimmy Mooney and Lunette the bat: “I fly by night an’ I sleep by day, the looniest kind of a bat!”
 

Afterword

So there you have it, friends: London After Midnight — a Halloween treat with a trick. If you’ve seen 1935’s Mark of the Vampire, the twist came as no surprise to you; for that matter, even in 1927 the New York Times commented that whether the ending surprised anyone would be “a matter of opinion.”

There are major discrepancies between the Philip J. Riley and Turner Classic Movies reconstructions of London After Midnight and the story told by Marie Coolidge-Rask. In both reconstructions, Hibbs is identified as Arthur, not Jeremiah (Jerry), and he’s Sir James’s nephew, not his secretary. (Variety’s Mori says Hibbs is Roger Balfour’s nephew, but that doesn’t make sense and is probably a mistake on Mori’s part.) Riley’s version describes the search for and discovery of Harry Balfour’s body, but the TCM version doesn’t, nor do the reviews — they don’t even mention Harry’s existence. Anyhow, the illustration in the novel (see Chapter 2, “Another Mystery”) suggests Harry must have been in there somewhere. (Oddly enough, in the caption Jules Cowles, who played Gallagher the chauffeur, is identified by his own name rather than his character’s.)

Most important of all, the idea of Inspector Burke operating incognito as Colonel Yates seems to have been entirely Ms. Coolidge-Rask’s invention; in the reconstructions and reviews Burke is openly himself throughout. He is even shown investigating the “mysterious” death of Roger Balfour and deciding it was suicide, then coming back five years later to prove it was murder — the Times reviewer pinpointed the howling illogic of that (“…Burke of Scotland Yard, the genius who wills to solve a murder mystery five years after he has declared it to be a case of suicide.”).

All things considered — and with no true copy of London After Midnight, having only Variety’s detailed recounting, the New York Times’s musings, and the two reconstructions to go on — I have to say it’s pretty clear that Marie Coolidge-Rask, despite her cumbersome way with words, made a considerable improvement on Tod Browning’s story, which appears not to have been given much clear thought by Browning, his co-scenarist Waldemar Young, or anybody else at MGM. Once you accept the basic premise — an elaborate police sting to hypnotize a murderer into reenacting his crime — her story has its own logic and builds a good amount of suspense. There are many nicely creepy moments — not least the eye-opening whiff of pedophilia in Sir James’s character, which in the novel surely goes beyond what the Hays Office would have tolerated in 1927. Much of the plot as it reads must have been the novelist’s creation; there seems far too much to fit into a picture that Variety says ran only 65 minutes (TCM’s reconstruction runs 46). And the book has a good sense of pace, becoming quite breakneck as the climax approaches — just about the time Hibbs goes crazy we begin to feel as if we have, too; as Lucy’s world is turned topsy-turvy, so is ours.

I hope you’ve enjoyed Marie Coolidge-Rask’s spooky little Halloween campfire story. Have a safe and happily creepy Halloween, everyone!

The Fog of Lost London, Part 3

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on by
NOTE: The Spooky Season is upon us once again, so it’s time for my annual re-post of my four-part tribute to the legendary lost Tod Browning-Lon Chaney collaboration London After Midnight. Here’s Part 3. Whether you remember it from years past or are coming to it new, I hope it brings you a creepy moment or two. Be sure to read the four parts in order — you don’t want to get ahead of the story!
 

 *                         *                         *

Continuing with London After Midnight by Marie Coolidge-Rask: 

Chapter 10 – A Question of Vampires

The howling of the dog, coming from the direction of Balfour House, continues as Sir James and Yates make their way home from the crypt. They recount their experience to Hibbs, and the three discuss aspects of vampire lore as written in Colonel Yates’s book. Since murdered men and suicides are supposedly liable to become vampires, and since Roger Balfour’s coffin was still undisturbed at the time of Harry’s interment, it is cautiously suggested that the son’s unsolved murder may have had some supernatural effect on Roger Balfour’s restless soul. Sir James is clearly rattled by the night’s experience; Hibbs and Yates realize that there is some unknown factor at work over in Balfour House, and the mystery seems to deepen with every new event. It is near dawn when Sir James and Colonel Yates go to bed. Hibbs steals back downstairs to the library for further study of Colonel Yates’s book.

Chapter 11 – Harrowing Tales

All three men rise late the next day, leaving Lucy feeling quite lonely in the house, oppressed in the heat that has been intensified, rather than dispelled, by the early-morning electrical storm. At dinner that evening, conversation is kept trivial; by tacit agreement among the three men, Lucy is given no hint of what happened the night before.

Later that night, after Lucy has gone to her room, the three men resume their discussion of the night before. Suddenly they hear a piercing scream from upstairs, in the direction of Lucy’s room. Rushing upstairs, they find Lucy’s door locked. They try to break down the door, but before they have to, the door opens. In the room they find Smithson, the maid, trembling and sobbing, her eyes wide with fear, two small wounds at her throat, similar to the ones seen on the body of Harry Balfour. Sobbing, she tells the men that Lucy is locked in her dressing room, and they release the confused and frightened young lady from her confinement.

Finally, Smithson pulls herself together and tells the men what happened. As Miss Lucy was getting ready for bed, she says, she left her to fetch some towels from the linen closet. In the hallway she saw the man in the beaver hat, the one she saw on the steps of Balfour House as she was passing the night before. The man was stooped over and creeping toward her, his skeletal hand outstretched, his spiky teeth gleaming. Smithson was too frightened even to scream.

Thinking of Miss Lucy, Smithson says, she rushed back to the young lady’s room, shoved Lucy into the dressing room and locked her in. Then she locked the door to the outer room and thought they were safe. But before her horrified eyes, a green mist streamed through the keyhole and formed itself into the man in the beaver hat. The man came to her; she was unable to speak or scream, or even move. She felt him bending over her, felt his teeth on his throat. That must have been when she screamed, she says, but she doesn’t remember it. She knew nothing more until she heard Sir James, Colonel Yates and Hibbs pounding at the still-locked door.

Lucy, greatly excited, calls their attention to the window, where all of them see the man in the beaver hat skulking across the grounds in the direction of Balfour House. Colonel Yates tells Hibbs to remain with Lucy and see that she is not left alone; he and Sir James will investigate the matter further.

Chapter 12 – Panic

Left alone with Lucy and Hibbs, Smithson realizes that the two young people (whose feelings for each other have not escaped her notice) wish to be alone, so she tells them she is going down to the kitchen; after her experience she could use a nice cup of hot tea. Downstairs she finds the servants — butler, housekeeper, cook, maids and footmen — cowering in the kitchen, wondering about all the commotion earlier but afraid to go and see what it was. They mill around her, clamoring for news. Deciding she could use something a little stronger than tea, Smithson asks Billings, the butler, for “a little drop of spirits.” Thus fortified, she proceeds to regale the servants with another recounting of her experience in Lucy’s room, this one much embellished for dramatic effect as Smithson relishes the attentions of her rapt and horrified audience. At this inopportune moment, a cat knocks over a tin pan from the sink onto the floor; the sudden clatter sends the servants into an uproar. Upstairs, Lucy and Hibbs hear the melee downstairs and wonder what can possibly happen next.

Chapter 13 – The Woman on the Ceiling

Colonel Yates and Sir James make their way to Balfour House, proceeding slowly by a roundabout route, pausing frequently to watch and listen for prowlers or anything untoward. Once again Sir James’s heart is racing, and once again he depends entirely on the resoluteness of Colonel Yates to keep him going.

It is well after midnight when they approach Balfour House. The house is dark, but they can see a faint light glimmering from one of the upper windows — in fact from the “secret chamber” that has been unoccupied for centuries, the one in which a woman’s ghost is said to roam. Slowly forcing their way through the tangled grass and foliage of the overgrown grounds, they find a large tree from which they should be able to see into the lighted chamber. Taking the lead as usual, Yates climbs into the tree. At that moment they hear, low but clearly audible, the insistent sobbing of a woman in despair.

Through the high windows of the secret room they can see only the ceiling and the upper walls inside. There they behold a sight that confounds them. By the dim light inside, they see a mysterious shape in the secret room — now sharp and clear, now blurry and indistinct, now rising to the ceiling, now swooping below the level of the windows, now contracting, now expanding as if carried by huge bat-like wings. At one point the apparition turns its head to the light, and the two men clearly see the profile of a woman — a woman hovering and swooping high in the secret room on the wings of a bat!

From their perch in the tree they are able to step gingerly and noiselessly onto a narrow balcony by one of the windows, from which they have a wider view of the room. They see three men, all with a ghastly pallor to their faces, absorbed in watching the movements of the bat-woman over their heads. One of them is the man in the beaver hat. Another is unidentifiable, but the third man, as Sir James confirms in a trembling whisper, is Roger Balfour.
 
The bat-woman, where she hovers near the ceiling, turns her face toward the window, her eyes intent, as if to pierce the darkness beyond. Yates and Sir James take an involuntary step back into the shadows. The figure of Roger Balfour also turns to the window, his eyes keenly searching, his face ghostly pale, a small open wound crusted and discolored at his temple. Sir James shudders.
 
Colonel Yates whispers that they have seen enough for one night, and Sir James readily agrees. They stealthily return to the tree and cautiously climb back down to the ground. Sir James is highly agitated. In a distraught whisper he urges that they return at once to Hamlin House; God only knows what has happened to Lucy in their absence. In a sudden flash of insight, Colonel Yates realizes that Sir James’s feelings for Lucy are not merely those of a guardian for his ward. 
 
From a rise a little distance from Balfour House they look back. In the dim light of the upper window they see a shape standing at the window, and they hear a voice, low and plaintive, calling: “Lucy — Lucy — Lucy — “
 

Chapter 14 – By the Light of Day

Sir James spends a sleepless night, his mind going over and over the weird events of the night and the uncanny things he and Colonel Yates have seen. The next day at noon, Lucy, alarmed at his tired and ill appearance, asks him what happened while he and the colonel were out. Feeling it best to keep her unaware, he says that they were unsuccessful in their attempt to follow the man in the beaver hat; he had eluded them, and their long walk was for nothing. 
 
Sir James and Colonel Yates decide to return to Balfour House by daylight; they tell Hibbs that if they are not back in an hour he should send a party in search of them. Under the hot summer sun on a cloudless day, Balfour House looks impressive and looming, but empty and unthreatening. Sir James wonders, was what they saw the night before merely a figment of their imaginations? No, says Yates; they saw what they saw, but what it can mean is impossible to say. Sir James is not reassured.
 
They knock at the door, but there is no answer. Entering cautiously, they see no signs of occupancy, no disturbance in the dust on the tables, chairs and floor. The door to the secret room is still locked and bolted, the lock rusted and untouched. As they creep from room to room, searching, Sir James again has the unsettling feeling he had on the night they visited the Balfour crypt, that some unseen presence is following them, watchful. 
 
As they enter the library, the room in which Roger Balfour died five years ago, a strange sight greets them: High in a corner of the ceiling are a group of five bats, hanging in silent slumber. 
 

Chapter 15 – Two Suitors

Back at Hamlin House, Lucy waits for Colonel Yates in the rose garden; she has promised to give him a tour of the garden and a description of the blooms cultivated there. Hibbs scolds her for being alone, even in the daytime. She laughs, saying she wishes she had seen the man in the beaver hat herself; she’d have captured him! Hibbs, realizing she has been kept in the dark as to the extent of her danger, restrains himself from telling more than he should. 
 
Sir James and Colonel Yates come into the garden. As they discuss what to do about the previous night’s events, Yates notices the flash of suspicion on Sir James’s face at the apparent intimacy between Hibbs and Lucy. Yates urges Sir James to ask Scotland Yard to investigate Balfour House; involving the local police, he says, could lead to unwanted and harmful gossip, but the Yard is renowned for its discretion. Have Hibbs write Scotland Yard, he says, asking them to send several good, able-bodied men — “men who are not afraid of man, ghost or devil” — under cover of darkness. 
 
Sir James and Hibbs go into the house to draft the letter, leaving Yates and Lucy to their tour of the garden. As they chat, Lucy confides something she has never told anyone, not even her brother Harry: When she was a little girl, she was strangely afraid of Sir James, although she never knew exactly why; he was always so good to her. And since her father’s death, he has been kindness itself; she feels she could never repay him for all he has done for her and Harry. 
 
Colonel Yates assures her that he understands. He tells her that he wants to have “a serious talk” with her, on a matter that concerns her closely. 
 
From the house, Hibbs watches Lucy and the colonel in the garden. He sees Lucy throw her arms around Colonel Yates and kiss his cheek, then begin weeping on his shoulder. His jealousy flares, and it is with difficulty that Sir James recalls him to the task of writing Scotland Yard. 
 
Later, Hibbs confronts Lucy and demands an explanation. She cannot say anything, she says, and begs him not to ask. But she mollifies him by assuring him that she intends to break the news to Sir James of her and Hibbs’s feelings for one another. 
 
Lucy finds Sir James in the music room, as eager to speak with her as she is with him. Sir James wonders: Has Lucy been annoyed by the unwanted attentions of his secretary? No, not at all, she assures him. Before she can go on, he tells her he is glad to hear it. Hibbs could never support Lucy in a way to which she is entitled. On the other hand, he — Sir James himself — has long looked forward to making Lucy his wife. 
 
Surprised and alarmed, Lucy runs sobbing from the room. 
 

Chapter 16 – Exorcisms

 
Sir James and Colonel Yates find a passage in Yates’s book: “A wreath of tube roses at the window, a sword across the door, will make it impossible for the Vampyr to enter a sleeping room at night.” It may sound absurd, but after the past two nights nothing should be discounted; at least it can do no harm. 
 
Hibbs is tense and upset as they place a wreath of tube roses from the garden and a sword that had hung on the wall, according to the directions in the book; lack of sleep, concern for Lucy, and mistrust of Yates are taking their toll. Reading from the book, he speaks the prescribed incantation: “They shall not pass this threshold.”
 
As everyone retires for the night, Yates draws Hibbs into the upstairs study, saying he has something to tell him. Ignoring the smoldering anger in Hibbs’s eyes, Yates guides him to a chair and gently forces him to sit. He tells him that Lucy’s love for Hibbs speaks well of him, that Yates can see through her eyes what a fine fellow Hibbs is. 
 
All thought of Yates as a rival is suddenly gone from Hibbs’s mind. In the colonel’s steady gaze he sees the eyes of a friend and feels an urge to confide in him. Too bad about Lucy’s brother, Yates says; did he and Hibbs get along? Ruefully, Hibbs says no, Harry objected to Hibbs’s love for Lucy and was resolved to separate them for good. 
 
As they talk, Hibbs is overcome with drowsiness. He sleeps. 
 

Chapter 17 – An Assassin Foiled

Midnight. The house is still. A crouching, shadowy figure moves stealthily to the door of one of the sleeping rooms. Slowly, silently, the figure turns the knob, opens the door and slips inside. The figure approaches the sleeper in the bed, in its hand a long thin object, gleaming in the dim moonlight from the window. 
 
As the figure is poised to strike, the sleeper lunges bolt upright, startling the attacker to flight — out the door, down the hall, with the intended victim — none other than Colonel Yates — in pursuit. Yates fires his revolver at the fleeing figure, rousing the house. Lucy calls from inside her room, asking that someone remove the sword and let her out.
 
Sir James comes from his room, his hands shaking as he ties the belt of his robe. What was that? Nothing, says Yates; I must have had a nightmare. Sir James and Lucy are reassured, and the house settles down.
 
Alone again in the hall, Yates reflects that Hibbs did not appear after the gunshot. He kneels and searches the carpet. Finally he finds what he seeks: a spot of blood. His assailant did not escape untouched after all.
 
Yates makes sure that Lucy’s room is still secured with the sword and tube roses, then goes to Hibbs’s room. The door is open, the bedclothes rumpled, but the room is empty. Yates deftly makes up the bed, then goes into the study, where he finds Hibbs, still sound asleep in the chair where he dozed off while they talked. 
 

Chapter 18 – The Fallen Sword

Upon being awakened, Hibbs apologizes for his rudeness in dropping off. Don’t mention it, says Yates; on the contrary, I apologize for keeping you up so late. Yates leaves Hibbs in the study, telling him they both should be in bed.
 
Hibbs looks at his watch. Two-thirty! Have they really been talking so long? He hardly remembers a word they said. Before retiring, he decides to check on Lucy’s room. He is horrified to find the protecting sword missing. He pounds on the door, calling her name. 
 
Sir James appears, alarmed at Hibbs’s display — and outraged that he addresses Lucy by her first name. Colonel Yates joins them and they break in the door to Lucy’s room. It’s empty. She’s gone.
 
Finally the strain of the past few days has its way, and something in Hibbs snaps. He becomes hysterical, babbling that “vampyrs” have taken Lucy, that they must all be destroyed. Colonel Yates tries to calm him, to no avail. As Hibbs runs off, delirious, there comes from the direction of Balfour House the wild, piercing scream of a woman in distress. Could that have been Lucy?
 
No, says Gallagher, Sir James’s Irish chauffeur. That wasn’t Miss Lucy; ’twas the wail of “the banshee o’ Balfour House,” foretelling tragedy to come.
 

The Fog of Lost London, Part 2

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on by
NOTE: The Spooky Season is upon us once again, so it’s time for my annual re-post of my four-part tribute to the legendary lost Tod Browning-Lon Chaney collaboration London After Midnight. Whether you remember it from years past or are coming to it new, I hope it brings you a creepy moment or two. Be sure to read the four parts in order — you don’t want to get ahead of the story!

*                         *                         *

Here begins a chapter-by chapter synopsis of London After Midnight, a novel by Marie Collidge-Rask, based on the scenario of the Tod Browning production. Like the book, the synopsis will be

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY
A METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURE
STARRING LON CHANEY
 

Chapter 1 – Balfour House

Balfour House is an old ancestral home on the outskirts of London whose origins stretch back to before the time of Charles II. Successive generations of the Balfour family have added to it until it is a weird and mystifying architectural abnormality, a labyrinth of chambers, corridors, passageways and dark, massively furnished and heavily curtained rooms. One room, heavily bolted and padlocked, has not been opened in centuries. It is said that a beautiful young woman once met a horrible death in that room, and that her ghost walks restlessly moaning and sobbing whenever some tragedy is about to occur in the house. Those sobs are heard the night Roger Balfour is found dead in the house, a bullet in his head, driven to suicide by depression and money problems.

Roger’s son Harry, 15, and daughter Lucy, 13, become the wards of their father’s friend and neighbor Sir James Hamlin. Since there was no will, Sir James supervises the settling of Roger Balfour’s estate and takes the two children into his home. Balfour House and its grounds become shunned and neglected and, with no money left for their upkeep after settling Roger’s debts, fall into disrepair.

Five years pass. Harry Balfour, now 20 and more than a little resentful of his and Lucy’s dependence on Sir James’s generosity, returns from school and announces that he wants to reopen Balfour House. Sir James says this is impossible without major repairs, either by finding a wealthy tenant or a wealthy bride for Harry. Harry refuses to marry for money. Sir James offers to buy the Balfour estate outright, to give Harry a stake in life. Again, Harry indignantly refuses: “So long as I live the Balfour estate shall not revert to other hands.”

Soon after this, Harry has an unpleasant scene with Jeremiah (“Jerry”) Hibbs, Sir James’s secretary. An agitated Hibbs mutters to himself that Harry is “courting disaster” if he goes near Balfour House.

Chapter 2 – Another Mystery

Two days after his confrontations with Sir James and Hibbs, Harry fails to show up for a riding date with his sister Lucy. No one has seen him since dinner the night before, and his bed has not been slept in. At first Lucy pouts that Harry has ruined her day, but as the day wears on she begins to worry.

That night Hibbs sends one of the servants on a confidential errand. Overheard by the maid, Anna Smithson, Hibbs asks her to say nothing to anyone.

An hour later a group of Sir James’s servants, lashed by wind and rain, spooked and unnerved as they search through the overgrown grounds at Balfour House, find the body of Harry Balfour. As they lift the body to carry it to shelter, one of the servants swears he can hear, beneath the whistling of the wind, the wails of the ghost in the secret room of Balfour House.

 

 

 

Chapter 3 – Who Killed Harry Balfour?

Lucy Balfour is still worrying about Harry’s disappearance when her brother’s body is brought in. She is distraught at his death and horrified, as are the others, at the sight of two red wounds on his throat. The coroner’s inquest returns a verdict of death at the hands of “person or persons unknown.” In testimony at the inquest, neither Sir James nor Hibbs mentions their respective run-ins with Harry before his disappearance. The maid Smithson testifies that on the night of the murder, she was looking out a window into the storm and saw a man heading toward Balfour House. The man was definitely not Master Harry, she says. It is assumed that the person she saw was the murderer, but there is no clue as to his identity, his motive, or why he would make those wounds on Harry’s throat.

Chapter 4 – Hypnotic Hypotheses

Chief Detective Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard, dining with the assistant commissioner of his division, discusses the unsolved murder of Harry Balfour. Burke believes that the murder of Harry confirms his suspicion that Roger Balfour was murdered as well, even though all signs seemed to point to suicide at the time. He says that he has a number of leads but no firm evidence, and plans to test his theory that under hypnosis and the proper conditions, a criminal will reenact his crimes. Burke borrows a book from the assistant commissioner’s library, saying that he expects to be busy with his investigation for some time. When next they dine together, Burke says, he is sure he’ll have the proof he needs.

Chapter 5 – A Betrothal

Seven months have passed since Harry’s death, and Lucy is finally beginning to emerge from her grief. As May turns to June, Lucy finds herself turning more and more to Jerry Hibbs for companionship, and her feelings for him have grown more than sisterly. At last, in a sun-bathed arbor scented by the blooming roses of Hamlin House, Lucy and Hibbs profess their love for one another. They agree to say nothing to Sir James for the time being, for fear that he will disapprove and dispense with Hibbs’s services.

Chapter 6 – Uncanny Tenants

Night. Two men stand under a tree on the grounds of Balfour House, near where Harry Balfour’s body was discovered. They are representatives of the London realtor’s office that administers the Balfour property and are waiting while prospective tenants inspect the premises by lantern-light. The people came into the office near closing time and expressed an interest after seeing a picture of the house in a magazine (the realtors having long since given up advertising the property). If satisfactory, the tenants propose to move in at once. This has all happened so quickly that the agent hasn’t had time to notify Sir James, though he did get in touch with Hibbs. Hibbs told him to go ahead with the transaction if the tenants’ references are satisfactory. The agent is waiting outside for the tenants because, he said, nothing would induce him to enter the house.

Meanwhile, Anna Smithson and Thomas, another of the Hamlin House servants, are returning from the village station in a cart with the luggage of a guest Sir James is expecting. They see the light in Balfour House. They can see two shadowy figures moving about with the lantern; one of them is a woman, but they can make out no other details. Thomas believes the woman is the ghost of the house, but Anna scoffs. As they watch, the door of Balfour House opens and a man emerges, tall but stooped, shrouded in a heavy Inverness coat and wearing a high beaver hat. That’s all it takes for Thomas to crack his whip and hurry the horse on to Hamlin House.

 
The man in the beaver hat crosses slowly to where the realtor’s agents wait. The agents apologize for not accompanying him into the house, but he reassures them — in his spooky way: “Life is a mystery no man can solve. It extends beyond the grave.” They remind him that the owner will make no improvements, but he doesn’t mind; the house will suit his
purposes.
 
The agent hands the man the lease papers and he peruses them, only briefly looking up when a mournful wail rises from somewhere out in the darkness. By now the agents are thoroughly unnerved and eager to be off.
With a “horrible” smile, the man in the beaver hat slowly signs the lease. As he heads back into the house, the agents scurry off to apprise Sir James of the transaction.

 

Chapter 7 – Sir James Receives a Shock

At Hamlin House, preparations are under way for the coming of Colonel Yates, Sir James’s guest, when the realtor’s agents arrive. Sir James is astonished to learn that Balfour House has been let, and it is evident that the surprise is not an entirely pleasant one. Hibbs explains that he did not expect the tenants to take immediate possession; he thought they would merely inspect the property and then negotiate terms. The agents report that the tenant’s references were impeccable and he paid the entire term of the lease in cash, in advance.

Reassured, Sir James glances at the papers the agents have handed him. His calm demeanor vanishes and his face goes white when he sees the signature on the lease. It is signed “Roger Balfour.” And it is in Roger Balfour’s handwriting.

Chapter 8 – An Unexpected Guest

Why wasn’t this noticed at the office? Sir James asks. The agent replies that the matter was handled by a new employee who didn’t know the house’s history; the agent himself had simply presumed that this Roger Balfour was perhaps a distant relation wishing to see the ancestral home. Sir James says there are no other branches of the family and demands a description of the man in the beaver hat.

At this point, the butler announces Colonel Yates. Sir James’s consternation is almost complete, because in addition to this shock about Roger Balfour, he has been trying all day to remember who Colonel Yates is; he learned only today that this “old friend from India” was coming, and has been unable to place the name. As Yates is ushered in, however, Sir James remembers him at once and is reassured by Yates’s solid, dependable, no-nonsense presence. In fact, he welcomes his guest’s opinions on the matter of the new tenant at Balfour House, and briefly explains the situation to him.

It turns out Yates had known Roger Balfour years before, but had lost touch and did not know of his death; he says suicide seems unlike the Balfour he knew. When the agents describe the new tenant as “creepy” and “un-holy,” Yates scoffs. “You chaps must have been smoking something…” His laughter diffuses the tension in the room; even Sir James looks less upset.

Chapter 9 – Ghouls

As Yates and Sir James discuss the matter later, alone, Sir James shows Yates some documents signed by the late Roger Balfour, and Yates concedes that the handwriting on the lease is unmistakeably the same. Mulling this over, he cautions Sir James not to dismiss out of hand the idea of supernatural; years in India, he says, have taught him the folly of that. In fact, he has a book with him that he thinks might bear on the subject, and promises to give it to Sir James. Later, after dressing for dinner, Yates gives the book to Hibbs to place in the library, where it will be available to anyone interested. Hibbs (who for some reason has taken an instant, mild dislike to Colonel Yates) does so, and a glance at the book’s contents interests him enough to make him resolve to come back to it later.

All through dinner, and even afterward as Lucy plays for diversion, Sir James’s mind is elsewhere. He had insisted to Yates that he does not believe in ghosts, but he nevertheless has a superstitious nature and is troubled.

After Lucy finishes playing, Yates invites her to take a walk on the verandah. Hibbs, miffed and a little jealous, decides to take a closer look at Yates’s book in the library. He finds Sir James in the library, himself so absorbed in the book that he doesn’t hear Hibbs’s approach. Hibbs suggests that a study of the book might “throw light upon the mysteries of Balfour House.” Sir James says the mysteries be damned, he just wants to know who signed Roger Balfour’s name to that lease.

When Yates joins them in the library, Sir James shows him a passage in the book, printed in early English text, that has particularly alarmed him: “Men who have died by murder or suicide frequently become vampyrs.” The two agree that, unpleasant as the idea is, nothing will do but that they inspect the vault on the grounds of Balfour House where all the Balfours, including Roger, have been entombed. The sooner the better.

After midnight Yates and Sir James set out, armed with revolvers and carrying a lantern. Almost immediately Sir James’s courage begins to fail. He senses that someone, or something, is following them and trying to stop them on their errand, but every time he turns around, nothing is there. Only Yates, in his “military determination,” is unwavering, and Sir James forces himself to go on.

At one point something suddenly flaps at them out of the darkness. A bird? A bat? No way to tell. Slowly, carefully, onward they creep. At the door to the Balfour crypt Yates raises his lantern. The door is closed and locked, seemingly undisturbed since the day months earlier when Harry Balfour was interred there. Sir James’s hand shakes as he inserts the key into the locked door. The rusty lock resists, but eventually yields, and the door slowly swings inward.

The two men halt at a sudden sound — it sounded almost like a sigh. They wait, tensed, but now there is only silence. 
 
Standing in the yawning doorway, they peer into the darkness of the tomb. Yates raises the lantern and holds it forward in the gloom. By the dim yellow light, Sir James’s eyes search the shadows. His blood freezes as he sees that the lid of Roger Balfour’s coffin is open. The coffin is empty. 
 
There is a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, and somewhere in the night, the mournful, blood-curdling howl of a dog.  
 

To be continued…

The Fog of Lost London, Part 1

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NOTE: The Spooky Season is upon us once again, so it’s time for my annual re-post of my four-part tribute to the legendary lost Tod Browning-Lon Chaney collaboration London After Midnight. Whether you remember it from years past or are coming to it new, I hope it brings you a creepy moment or two. Be sure to read the four parts in order — you don’t want to get ahead of the story!

 

*                         *                         *

 

ChaneyWLondon After Midnight (MGM; 1927) is the Holy Grail of Lost Films. Oh sure, there’s the complete Greed. But we do have the incomplete Greed, and it’s a masterpiece as it stands. Besides, tell the truth: Isn’t there just the tiniest little fear, deep down in your heart, that if Stroheim’s 42-reel, ten-hour cut should miraculously turn up, it just might turn out to be a letdown, maybe even (Heresy! Heresy!) a bit of a bore? But be that as it may, we do have Greed; all we have of London After Midnight is an assortment of stills like this one of Lon Chaney in makeup and costume as the Man in the Beaver Hat.

There are enough of these remnants that Philip J. Riley was able to publish a reconstruction of Tod Browning’s movie in book form. If you didn’t have the opportunity or good sense to pay $29.95 for it in 1987, you may have to shell out as much as 115 bucks for it now, though there are used copies available for close to the original price. A few years ago Turner Classic Movies did a similar reconstruction, this time on film, and that one’s available on The Lon Chaney Collection.

In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art staged a “Lost Films” exhibit and published an accompanying book by the same title. At least three of the pictures in MoMA’s exhibit — Street Angel (1928) with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, Rex Ingram’s The Garden of Allah (1927), and Tod Browning’s own The Show with John Gilbert and Renee Adoree — have surfaced since then, so there’s always hope. But London After Midnight remains lost, and the pages devoted to it in the MoMA book are sparse. Author Gary Carey wrote: “It is almost impossible to synopsize a mystery film which one has not seen because critics, bound by professional ethics, divulge little of the plot let alone its solution.”

Mr. Carey should have read the review that appeared in Variety on December 14, 1927. Variety’s reviewer, “Mori,” didn’t much care for the movie (“Will add nothing to Chaney’s prestige as a trouper, nor increase the star’s box office value.”), nor did he shrink from discouraging potential viewers by recounting the entire plot, solution and all. Then, amazingly, in his last paragraph, he said: “The usual suspicions, planted while the situations are worked out, succeed in leaving an impression of mystery regarding the outcome.” (Not anymore, Mori!)

As a side note, let me add that Mori wasn’t the only Variety reviewer to do this sort of thing. It’s our good luck now that the Spoiler Police weren’t so powerful back then; the detailed descriptions in Variety’s reviews from 1907 to 1930 are virtually all we have to go on for movies now lost beyond recall. I’ve found them invaluable in researching the careers of the stars in the M.J. Moriarty deck of movie playing cards.

But back to London After Midnight. There’s always hope it may someday surface, like Street Angel, The Garden of Allah and The Show, but it hasn’t happened yet; the last known print was destroyed in a studio fire in the 1960s. Director Browning did a loose remake in 1935 — Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi and Lionel Barrymore taking over the equivalent roles that were both originally played by Lon Chaney — but that time Browning made major changes; for one thing, the new picture didn’t even take place in London. If we want any sense of the original, we still have to depend on the Riley and TCM reconstructions.

Or…there is this. I came across this book while perusing the shelves at the estate sale of a popular Sacramento TV personality. The novelization is the work of Marie Coolidge-Rask, who evidently made a decent living out

of this kind of piecework. She’s known to have also novelized Mary Pickford’s Sparrows (1926) and the King Vidor-Lillian Gish La Boheme that same year (now there’s a literary platypus for you: a novelization of a silent movie of an opera). 
 
Otherwise, Ms. Coolidge-Rask’s literary output seems not to have left much impression on the shifting sands of time. These movie tie-ins weren’t a terribly lucrative field for the writer-for-hire; usually there was just a flat fee — probably, in the 1920s, no more than a thousand dollars or so, if that — and that was that, no royalties. A shame, because London After Midnight may have sold pretty well; Mori’s opinion notwithstanding, the movie was the most successful Browning-Chaney collaboration. Whatever MGM and/or
Grosset & Dunlap paid her for her efforts, I hope for her sake she invested it wisely.
 
In any case, she doesn’t seem to have slavishly followed Browning and Waldemar Young’s script: Her novel features at least one character, a certain Colonel Yates, who doesn’t appear in the movie’s cast list on IMDB. And she isn’t bound by the limits of silent movies — her characters are certainly a talkative bunch. For that matter, so is Ms. Coolidge-Rask herself — she crams words in like a canner stuffing sardines in a tin. Here she is describing Sir James Hamlin (Henry B. Walthall):
 
“Sir James, despite the studied calmness of his demeanor when with Lucy Balfour or in the presence of those he deemed his inferiors, was of a nervous temperament, at times easily influenced, again firm to the point of stubbornness, according to his mental reaction to whatever force against which he found himself in opposition.”
 
Got all that? Here she is again, later on the same page: 
 
“In his presence, the baronet felt himself unusually helpless. Like a fly, pinned against the wall for scientific inspection with a microscope.” 
 
I don’t know what kind of scientist would pin a fly to the wall to see it through a microscope, but I suppose Ms. Coolidge-Rask might have known
some.
 
   
 
 
Anyhow, now, just in time for Halloween, I propose to spend the next few posts hacking through the purple undergrowth of Marie Coolidge-Rask’s prose (I do these things so you don’t have to), distilling it into a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of her novelization. In this way I hope to get some sense of what audiences at Browning’s vampire/murder mystery might have seen in 1927 — sort of like Tod Browning, Polly Moran and Lon Chaney here pretending to commune with the spirit world for the MGM publicity department. This will be (if you’ll pardon the expression) by the book, without reference to either Philip J. Riley’s or TCM’s reconstructions; if there are differences, maybe we can talk about those later.

 

So be warned: if you’re worried about spoiling the ending of London After Midnight (which you can’t see anyhow) or Mark of the Vampire (which you can), proceed at your own risk.

To be continued…

 

A Weekend With David O. Selznick

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Over the weekend of Sept. 27 – 28, I had an opportunity to revisit two of my favorite David O. Selznick pictures. On Sunday the 28th it was the Turner Classic Movies two-day-only theatrical reissue of Gone With the Wind. I’m sure many of my Cinedrome readers (among others) availed themselves of that one — at least, if the size of the audience I saw it with is any indication.

On Saturday the 27th, however, the reunion was more private: a family-and-friends home screening of 1938’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I’ll be spending most of this post talking about that one, because…well, of all the terms you might use to describe Gone With the Wind, “neglected classic” is certainly not one of them.

Some years ago, my friend John McElwee over at Greenbriar Picture Shows posted on Tom Sawyer here and here. “Does anyone else share my longstanding affection for this show?” John asked rhetorically. In the comments I replied, “Good heavens, doesn’t everyone share it?”

Well, apparently not; in David O. Selznick’s Hollywood Ron Haver dismissed it as “basically old fashioned and slightly dull”, and it has little of the latter-day respect accorded other Selznick pictures such as Nothing Sacred or the original A Star Is Born. Still, John and I aren’t entirely alone; Leonard Maltin gives Tom Sawyer three-and-a-half stars, and I have anecdotal evidence aplenty of the picture’s enduring ability to please any crowd.

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and assert that Selznick’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is just about the best movie ever made from any story by Mark Twain. (For the record, I’d give a close-second place to Warner Bros.’ 1937 The Prince and the Pauper, and an equally close third to 1960’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore.) 

But back to Tom Sawyer. Selznick originally hoped to shoot the picture in Technicolor, but there were no Tech cameras available. So instead, he began shooting in March 1937 in black and white, with H.C. Potter directing. Shooting proceeded in fits and starts until July, when Technicolor cameras unexpectedly became free; Selznick closed down production, had the location sets all repainted, replaced some cast members (Beulah Bondi was out as Aunt Polly, May Robson in), and brought Norman Taurog in to direct (Potter having walked off, exasperated with Selznick’s incessant kibitzing). The final negative cost, John McElwee tells us, was $1.2 million — some sources say as high as $1.5 million, but I trust John on things like this. Anyhow, whatever the cost, it was astronomical for the time, especially for a picture with no battle scenes, no production numbers, and no scenes using more than maybe 50 or 60 extras. (As a very broad rule of thumb, multiply any figures from this era by about 100 to get an idea of the cost in today’s dollars.) The bottom line: despite some glowing reviews and high hopes, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer broke nowhere near even, losing some $302,000 — probably more than the picture would have cost if it had been produced anywhere but at Selznick International.

The picture got a handful of reissues over the years, both before and after Selznick sold it off (along with the rest of his library) during his cash-strapped 1940s — the poster above is from one of those reissues — and that’s how I first saw it in 1958; my father, with fond memories of having seen it back in ’38, took the whole family to see it at the Vogue Theatre in Pittsburg, Calif. My brother was only four years old at the time, and I still remember his reaction: He sat down with a bag of M&Ms from the snack bar, took one out ready to pop it in his mouth, looked up at the screen, and was instantly hooked. As the movie ended and the lights came up, he was sitting there with that first M&M still between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand (and no, it hadn’t melted).

Today that four-year-old has 13 grandchildren of his own, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain’s original book) has been working its way through the family. My brother read it, and my sister-in-law, and their daughter has been reading it to her three kids. This prompted a groundswell of requests for a family screening of my 16mm print, which I last screened some six or eight years ago, before many of the kids were born. So I scheduled the screening for September 27, and got out my print to see what sort of shape it was in.

And here I have to discuss the color in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Selznick’s movie) — in general, and in my print in particular.

Selznick was an early proponent of Technicolor — any other producer in the world would have made Nothing Sacred, The Garden of Allah or A Star Is Born in black and white, and even his closest associates thought Technicolor for Gone With the Wind was a needless extravagance. But Selznick was convinced that Technicolor would increase the reissue value of his pictures. He was absolutely right, of course — but what he failed to anticipate was that he wouldn’t be the one reissuing them. When he sold his library off in the 1940s — he even let MGM buy his interest in Gone With the Wind (which is why Metro ever after presented GWTW as if they had produced it) — the rights didn’t always go to people willing to spring for striking new Technicolor prints. Nothing Sacred and A Star Is Born were issued in the ’40s in prints by the inferior Cinecolor process, with “In Technicolor” on the title frame either blacked out or overprinted with “In Color”.
 
I don’t know what was used for the 1958 reissue where I first saw Tom; the color looked okay to me at the time, but I was only a kid; what did I know? In any event, it would appear that no IB Technicolor 16mm prints of the picture were ever struck — anyhow, I’ve never seen or heard of one. My uncle used to have an Eastman print with decent color that turned and faded over time — but not before he had the chance to screen it for a couple of generations of his and my aunt’s elementary school students. (He even wrote to David O. Selznick once, letting him know how the picture continued to entertain children, and received a reply only a few months before Selznick’s death in 1965: “Dear Mr. Lane, Thank you for your letter…I was naturally very pleased.”)

The second (and, so far, last) time I saw The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a theater was at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, Calif. in the late 1980s. Now the Stanford is operated by the Stanford Theatre Foundation, which is headed by David W. Packard (son of the founder of Hewlett-Packard) and has contributed millions in cash and resources to the cause of film preservation. Consequently, the Stanford is on excellent terms with film archives all over the country. Any time a picture plays the Stanford, you can rest assured that you’ll be seeing the very best available print.

So it didn’t bode well that the print I saw that night in 1989 was a slightly red-shifted Eastman print. Oh dear, I thought. Could it be that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of those pictures that hasn’t survived in Technicolor at all? (No, as it turned out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

My own 16mm print, when I acquired it about ten years ago, was yet another Eastman print, and the color was distinctly faded. Also, over the years and reissues the running time had been whittled down from 93 to 77 minutes; my print ran 79. When I scheduled the family screening for last month, I hadn’t looked at it in years, so I cranked up the projector to see what condition it was in. Bad news — the color was pretty much shot, and in some scenes even the image was going fast. This print would do, but only in a terrible pinch — so I decided to shop around and see what else I could find.

To make a long story short — if it’s not already too late for that — I found two DVDs. One was a Region 2 British DVD, the other a transfer from South Korea (that one defaulted to Korean subtitles, but through the miracle of DVD I could turn those off). Why this quintessentially American story is available on DVD in Great Britain and South Korea, of all places, but not in the United States is one of those vagaries of video that defy explanation, but there it is. (In any case, it’s a powerful argument for owning a region-free player.)

Either one of these DVDs was a huge improvement over my 16mm print, but the difference between the discs themselves was like night and day.  The South Korean disc, in fact, might almost have been made from the print I saw in Palo Alto: it had the same red-shifted, high contrast image. The British DVD, on the other hand, must surely have been transferred from the restoration Disney made when they gained control of the picture in the early 1990s (see Part 2 of John McElwee’s post for details of that restoration). So to answer the question I asked myself that night in Palo Alto: No, the Technicolor Tom Sawyer is not lost; it still exists — if only on DVD. Here are some frame-caps comparing the two transfers, South Korea on the left and UK on the right:

beckttomleftW   tombeckyrightW
 

First, here’s Tom (Tommy Kelly) and Becky Thatcher’s (Ann Gillis) first after-school “date”. Notice the increased detail and texture, especially in the hill behind them and the creek under their feet, and the purer fleshtones. Notice, too, in all these frames that the Korean disc crops the image along all four edges.

Below, Tom and Joe Harper (Mickey Rentschler, left) play pirate on their island in the Mississippi, unaware that the folks back home believe they’ve been drowned. As in that frame above with Tom and Becky, the grass is a whole lot greener (and the sky less purple) in true Technicolor.

tomnJimleftW tomhuckrightW

Below, Becky and Tom on the way to the school outing where they’ll become lost in the cave (superbly designed by William Cameron Menzies and built on a soundstage at the Selznick studios). This shot is a particularly dramatic illustration of the difference between the two discs, both in the quality of the color and the size of the image, as is…

tomnbeckyleftW   tomnbeckyrightW
 
…this one of the crowd at the party celebrating Tom and Becky’s rescue.
SawyercrowdleftW   SawyercrowdrightW
 
Both discs, I believe, are complete — at least, they’re more complete than my 16mm print. But neither of them has the original 93-minute running time. Not only that, but while they appear to be identical, the South Korean disc runs 90 min. 46 sec., the British disc 86 min. 45 sec.

 

As you can no doubt gather from those frame comparisons, the British DVD was the way to go, so I put the 16mm projector back in the closet and got out my Epson Powerlite 6100. That old 16mm print of mine I junked; it had long outlived its usefulness. The night of the 27th my family and friends were treated to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer looking better than it has in years; for myself, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it looking as good as it does on that Region 2 DVD from the United Kingdom. If you’re in the market, accept no substitutes. There are a number of Hollywood classics that are available only in Region 2 DVDs, but for my money, this disc alone justifies the expense of buying a region-free player. (Alternatively, Region 2 DVDs will play on most computers.)

Tom Sawyer, like most of Selznick’s literary adaptations from Little Women to Gone With the Wind, is a perfect illustration of his dictum that it’s less important to film an entire novel than to give the impression that you’ve done so. Mark Twain’s book is loosely constructed and episodic, almost a collection of short stories rather than a unified novel. John V.A. Weaver’s script picks and chooses episodes both for how well they express the spirit of Twain and how they form a solid dramatic arc, building to Tom’s climactic showdown in the cave with Injun Joe (Victor Jory) and his struggle up the rocks to the light and safety (two moments that aren’t in Twain’s book, but which fit neatly into the movie).

The casting and performances are spot-on right down the line. Beulah Bondi was closer to the physical description of Aunt Polly in Twain, but it’s hard to imagine her improving on what May Robson does with the role. Robson perfectly captures the stern-yet-tender heart of Aunt Polly, a remarkable tightrope-walk for an actress to pull off. (By the way, here’s a Fun Fact: Do you know what distinction May Robson, who was nominated for best actress for 1933’s Lady for a Day, has among Academy Award nominees? She’s the only one who was born before the American Civil War, on April 19, 1858. Obviously, that record will stand forever.)

Right smack in the middle of all these perfectly cast veterans — Walter Brennan, Victor Jory, Donald Meek, Olin Howland, Victor Kilian, Frank McGlynn Sr. — there’s one of those little miracles that come along once in a great while: 12-year-old Tommy Kelly as Tom. The son of an unemployed Bronx firefighter, he had never acted before — and truth to tell, in time his acting skills would prove to be extremely limited. But that hardly matters here; he simply is Tom Sawyer — it’s as simple as that. Despite his inexperience, he is center-screen in almost every scene and carries the picture with natural ease. It’s one of those incredibly rare moments when exactly the right person for a role came along, seemingly out of nowhere, at exactly the right time in his life to play it. I’m pleased to report that at this writing, Tommy Kelly is still with us at 89, as are Ann Gillis (Becky Thatcher, now 87) and Cora Sue Collins (Amy Lawrence, also 87). (UPDATE 2/13/19: Tommy Kelly passed away on Jan. 26, 2016, age 90, and Ann Gillis, also 90, on Jan. 31, 2018. Cora Sue Collins will turn 92 on April 19; continued long life to her.)

So how did my screening go over? Like gangbusters, as I knew it would because it always has. None of the kids had ever seen it, and it was a revelation to all of them. I know that in years to come they’ll cherish the movie as a fond childhood memory — as their grandfather and I do, and as our father did before us, and all those grade-schoolers in my uncle and aunt’s classrooms over the years. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser that never seems to age, thanks to Technicolor (now brilliantly restored) and a quaint, old-fashioned style that meshes perfectly with the 19th century nostalgia that infused Mark Twain’s book in the first place.

*                    *                    *

 

Then on the next day, Sunday the 28th, it was Gone With the Wind, which I hadn’t seen in a theater since its 50th anniversary reissue in 1989.

The day may come when I have something to say about Gone With the Wind that hasn’t already been said far better by somebody else. But this is not that day. Instead, I’ll just take this opportunity to mention a new book on the subject, and here it is: The Making of Gone With the Wind by Steve Wilson.

Now I will confess that when I heard of this book, the first thing I thought was, “Oh great, just what we need, another book about the making of Gone With the Wind!” And I wasn’t particularly impressed with the book’s cover, with its monochrome image washed in thin blue and green of Vivien Leigh peeking out through the “O” in “GONE” while she grabs a quick cigarette between takes on the set — I mean, was there ever a book cover that conveyed less of a sense of the movie it’s supposed to be about?

So much for gripes and quibbles. I was wrong. No matter how many books on Gone With the Wind you’ve read or thumbed through, this one eclipses them all. It’s actually the companion volume to an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive, library and museum complex on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition is running now through January 4, 2015, and it draws from the Center’s massive David O. Selznick archive consisting of 5,000 boxes of documents and photographs and millions of feet of film. Steve Wilson, the book’s author, is curator of the Center’s film collection, and the book takes us step by step through the three-and-a-half years from the day Selznick bought the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel to the night the picture swept the 1939 Academy Awards. We see everything from the nationwide talent-search-cum-publicity-tour through shooting (presented chronologically as it was shot), editing, previews, everything. And all of it is illustrated with newspaper clippings, letters, telexes, telegrams, memos, call sheets, concept paintings, makeup and costume tests, notes, set photos, matte paintings, sheet music, maps — you name it, all of them reproduced in their original colors (or lack of them) on high-quality glossy paper.

I thought of scanning a sampling of some of the illustrations and posting them here, but that way lies madness — once I started I’d never be able to stop. Instead, just check out the link to the Harry Ransom Center above, or this link to the Center’s Web exhibit on the movie. That’ll show you more than I could ever post here. After that, just see if this isn’t a book you have to have. At the very least, it’s easier and less expensive than trying to squeeze in a trip to Austin between now and January 4.

A Mystery Photo

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I’m preparing a post now on my recent David O. Selznick weekend, but before I get to that, an intriguing mystery has come up.

Here is a photograph I picked up two days ago in an antique shop in Ashland, Oregon. The proprietor of the shop wasn’t able to tell me any more about it than I was able to deduce from looking at it — in fact, much of what he told me was at a variance from what I did deduce.

In the bottom left corner of the photo is a handwritten inscription:

To my dear friend
Sadie Thompson
John Barrymore
 
On the back the photo is stamped, in letters ranging from one-quarter inch to one inch high:
 
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
PRICE STUDIOS, INC.
SALMON TOWER BLDG.
11 WEST 42nd ST.
N.Y.C.
TELEPHONE — PENN. 1780
 
Above the stamp is handwritten in pencil: “Larchmont Yacht Club 1930”. Next to the date, also in pencil but sideways, is the number “13” in a circle.
 
The shop owner asserted that the signature reads “John Berryman”, but it clearly says “John Barrymore”. I got the distinct impression that the name John Barrymore meant absolutely nothing to him. 
 
I was able to find online several examples of John Barrymore’s autograph, and it must be admitted that most of them bear only a slight resemblance to the signature on the photo. However, most of them appear to have been scrawled in haste, no doubt as Barrymore was accosted on the street or in a restaurant and asked to sign someone’s autograph book; the photo, on the other hand, appears to have been inscribed at leisure and with some care. Personally, I’m satisfied that this is an authentic John Barrymore autograph — because I’m satisfied that the man in the photo is John Barrymore himself. Grotesquely made up, granted, but still easily recognizable.
 
The shop owner had the photo labeled “Vaudeville Photo 1920’s” and said it was of two vaudevillians in their stage costumes. I disagree. To me, there can be no doubt that the photo was taken at a costume party at the famous Larchmont Yacht Club in Westchester County, NY sometime during 1930 — Halloween, perhaps.
 
As for the inscription to “my dear friend Sadie Thompson” — well, that can only refer to the central character in Rain, the play by John Colton and Clemence Randolph based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson”; the idea that Barrymore, or anybody else for that matter, actually knew somebody by that name is patently far-fetched. It’s far more likely that this is a playful inscription to an actress who had played Sadie Thompson. By 1930 there were only two such actresses. The first was Jeanne Eagels, who created the role on Broadway in 1922, toured with the show for two years, then returned with it to Broadway for another run of a year and a half. But Jeanne Eagels died in October 1929; obviously the photo was not inscribed to her. That leaves Gloria Swanson, who starred in the 1928 silent picture Sadie Thompson. Was this photo a gift from Barrymore to his “dear friend” Gloria? Or did he have some other “dear friend” whom he identified with Maugham’s notorious good-time gal as a private joke?
 
And the final mystery: Who is the woman in the picture? It’s not Dolores Costello, to whom Barrymore was married in 1930. Nor is it Gloria Swanson, America’s only living Sadie Thompson.
 
Does anybody have any ideas? Comments and speculations are welcome.

 

Update 10/11/14, 11:05 pm:

Today I received this picture from historian Richard M. Roberts, who states conclusively — and I’m convinced — that my picture isn’t John Barrymore after all. Richard’s message:
 

Hello Jim,

I saw your Cinedrome blog today about your alleged Barrymore pic and I am really going to hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but it is not a picture of John Barrymore, nor of his autograph.

Attached is a copy of a carefully inscribed and autographed picture of John Barrymore, a good sample of the actor’s actual signature, and you will see that the signature and handwriting on your picture is nothing like it. Barrymore’s script was much more flamboyant, he was both an actor and an artist (as in sketching) don’t forget. The fellow in your picture also has a much longer and slimmer neck than Barrymore, nor are the eyes and eyebrows right.

The inscription is obviously meant to be ironic and sarcastic in a friendly way, meant to imply that the woman is being saucier than she actually is, and that the man is a more important actor than he is, but neither name is meant to be the actual names of the people involved. They most likely are two vaudevillians, probably husband and wife, but I have no idea who they actually are.

Hope you are well, I always enjoy your blog and look forward to seeing you at Cinevent next year.

Sincerely,

RICHARD

Many thanks for getting in touch, Richard; I had a hunch — no, I knew — you’d be able to shed light on the subject. Now that I compare the pictures directly, I can see that the ears are wrong too.

The picture remains a mystery, of course: Who are these people, and what — if anything — did they have to do with the Larchmont Yacht Club? Maybe New York socialites slumming as showbiz types for a party at the club?

Speculations remain welcome…
 

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 14

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And so we come to the endgame of the Shirley Temple Phenomenon. It’s the summer of 1939; Shirley is 11 years old — though she and the rest of the world still think she’s only ten — and she’s bumping up against a principle that won’t even be articulated until 1997: what critic Louis Menand called “The Iron Law of Stardom”. In a New Yorker article by that title published in March ’97, Menand posited his “Iron Law” as one of the immutable laws of the universe, like gravity or the speed of light. Put simply, the Iron Law is this: stardom never lasts more than three years. Menand was careful, however, to distinguish between “stardom” and “being a star”. Once a star, always a star, he said, but actual stardom is something else — “the period of inevitability, the time when everything works in a way that makes you think it will work that way forever…the intersection of personality with history, a perfect congruence of the way the world happens to be and the way the star is.” Thus, Menand explained, Elizabeth Taylor remained a star all her life by virtue of being the person who was Elizabeth Taylor from 1963 (Cleopatra) to 1966 (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and Al Pacino remains a star as the person who was Al Pacino from 1972 (The Godfather) to 1975 (Dog Day Afternoon).
 

By this reasoning, and with hindsight, we can see that Shirley in 1939 fits the pattern. She remains a star, but it’s by virtue of being the person who was Shirley Temple from 1934 (Little Miss Marker and Bright Eyes) to 1937 (Wee Willie Winkie and Heidi). Nineteen-forty will round out not only the decade, but her reign atop the box office and her career at 20th Century Fox as well.

 

The Blue Bird

(released January 19, 1940)

BB-mag ad01aAThe Blue Bird was Shirley’s second brush with a Nobel Prize winner, after Rudyard Kipling and Wee Willie Winkie. Belgian poet, essayist and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a leading proponent of the Symbolist movement in European art and literature of the late 19th century. His most influential and commercially successful play was probably Pelleas and Melisande (1893), a doomed-lovers tragedy that inspired numerous operas, all of which are performed these days far more often than the original play.

A close second to that, however, would have to be The Blue Bird, which was an immediate hit when it premiered at Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre in 1908. When Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in 1911 “in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works,” the citation explicitly mentioned “a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration”. This could only have been a reference to The Blue Bird, which was then sweeping the world and would have been prominent in the minds of the Swedish Academy (in those days, commercial success was not considered a disadvantage when Nobel Prize time rolled around).

The Blue Bird recounts the many adventures of the boy Tyltyl (“til-til”) and his little sister Mytyl (“mee-til”), the children of a poor woodcutter somewhere in Central Europe. One night the children are roused from sleep by a bent and withered old woman who, changing shape, is revealed as a beautiful fairy named Berylune. The fairy dispatches the two on a quest to find the Blue Bird of Happiness, in which they are to be accompanied by their dog and cat, both of whom are magically given human shape for the occasion. Also accompanying them, and also in human form, are the spirits of Bread, Water, Milk, Fire and Light. The children’s search takes them to many fanciful places — the palace of Berylune, which once belonged to the infamous Bluebeard; the Palace of Night, deep underground; the Graveyard of the Happy Dead, where they are briefly reunited with their late grandparents and seven brothers and sisters who all died in childhood; the Palace of Happiness, where luxuries and joys abound; and the Kingdom of the Future, where they meet children waiting to be born, all of whom have a knowledge of their destiny that they will lose once they begin their earthly lives (Tyltyl and Mytyl even meet their own future little brother, who already knows that he too will die in infancy). In the final scene Tyltyl and Mytyl awaken back in their own beds; their parents think they have only slept through the night, but the children know better — how could both have had the same dream? Whether dream or magic, their quest has failed, they never did find the elusive bird they sought. Then, to their surprise, they see that the Blue Bird is right there in their own house, and was there all along. At the very end the bird flies away, and Tyltyl turns to the audience and says, “If any of you  should find him, would you be so very kind as to give him back to us?…We need him for our happiness, later on….”

My memory of Maeterlinck’s play is unfortunately sketchy; it’s been more than 40 years since I read it, and I wouldn’t read it again if you held a gun to my brother’s head. I found it to be long, turgid and utterly pointless, and it calls for spectacular effects that might have been wonderful to look at but make awfully dry reading (given the state of stagecraft in 1908, Stanislavski’s set designers, carpenters and stage managers must have been tearing their hair as opening night drew near). The play was a great success in the first and second decades of the last century, no doubt because the fantastic effects it calls for made for quite a wondrous spectacle to behold. But after that first flush of success and the afterglow of the Nobel Prize, its charm quickly evaporated.

The reason isn’t hard to figure out. Despite its elaborate settings and special effects, and characters symbolic of everything under the sun, The Blue Bird simply has no story. Why do Tyltyl and Mytyl undertake this convoluted journey? Why don’t they just tell the old hag to get lost, then roll over and go back to sleep? The kids have nothing at stake in this quest; they’re just gallivanting around in Maeterlinck’s head. In The Wizard of Oz — to cite an example that will come up more than once in the course of this post — what Dorothy and her companions are after is crystal-clear, and there’s never any doubt what’s at stake. That’s why The Blue Bird hasn’t been staged in 90 years, and is never even read except under duress by hapless students in university drama classes — while L. Frank Baum’s tale still sells thousands of copies every year.

With all that said, 20th Century Fox’s 1940 version of The Blue Bird has been given a bum rap over the years. The main thrust of the rap is that The Blue Bird was Fox’s attempt to duplicate the success of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (this has also fed the myth that Shirley “lost” the role of Dorothy). It would be closer to the truth to say that both pictures were attempts to duplicate the success of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (In which, by the way, both failed. The Blue Bird, in Time Magazine’s inevitable snark line, “laid an egg”, but Oz didn’t do much better, either with the critics or at the box office; it was voted “Most Colossal Flop” of 1939 by the Harvard Lampoon, and it took 16 years and two reissues for the picture to turn a profit.)

Now let’s stipulate right up front that The Blue Bird is nowhere near the same league as The Wizard of Oz — but what movie is? Of all the many differences between them, the most basic one, and the one that most redounds to the advantage of The Wizard of Oz, is that MGM was adapting L. Frank Baum while 20th Century Fox was adapting Maurice Maeterlinck.

Or trying to. The Blue Bird‘s greatest faults are inherent in Maeterlinck’s play; this was one case where Fox might have been justified in jettisoning everything but the title. Instead, Ernest Pascal’s script made an honest effort (with moderate success) to streamline, simplify and motivate the wild excesses of Maeterlinck’s fantasy. First, merely as a practical matter, the birth order of the lead siblings was reversed, making Mytyl (Shirley) the older and Tyltyl (Johnny Russell) the younger. The size of their expedition was streamlined, with their only companions being the cat Tylette (Gale Sondergaard, right) and dog Tylo (Eddie Collins, next to her). Of Maeterlinck’s five spirits, only Light remained (played by Helen Ericson), and she served, logically enough, as the children’s guide on their quest. (The group is shown here as they set out, with Jessie Ralph as Berylune on the left.)
 
Pascal also attempted to motivate the quest by making Mytyl something of a brat, selfish, petulant and malcontented. She whines in an early scene about how unhappy she is — so it makes some sense for her to strike out, dragging her kid brother behind, looking for that Blue Bird. It also adds meaning to her return home — when, as the saying goes, she truly knows the place for the first time, and finds that the Blue Bird of Happiness has been there waiting for her all along, if only she would see it. This change (and it’s amazing, when you think about it, that Stanislavski didn’t suggest it to Maeterlinck in the first place) means that Mytyl and Tyltyl have been on a real journey from one psychological place to another, and not just running around all night getting into trouble.
 
Finally, Pascal simplified the children’s travels considerably. First they visit their late grandparents (Cecilia Loftus and Al Shean), who are awakened from their eternal slumber now that the children are thinking of them (all those dead brothers and sisters are mercifully dispensed with). This visit, bittersweet as it is, teaches Mytyl and Tyltyl that Happiness is not to be found in the Past, and they must regretfully move on, leaving Granny and Grandpa to resume their dreamless sleep.
 
Next, in a scene with no counterpart in Maetterlinck’s play, the children visit the home of Mr. and Mrs. Luxury (Nigel Bruce and Laura Hope Crews), two aging twits with far more money than brains, who unhesitatingly indulge their every shallow whim. At first the children are seduced by all the fancy clothes and fun to be had, but they come to realize that Happiness is not found in Things, and they escape (this despite the treachery of Tylette, who for feline reasons of her own tries to thwart them at every turn).
 
There follows another departure from Maeterlinck. After they escape from The Luxurys, the children must pass through a great forest. Tylette, hoping to rid herself of the children and thus gain her freedom, runs ahead of them and incites the trees (represented by Edwin Maxwell, Sterling Holloway and others) to avenge themselves on the children of the woodcutter who is always chopping them down. The trees take the bait, even calling on their old enemies lightning and fire — so eager are they to destroy the children that they willingly immolate themselves in a great forest fire. Tylette, however, has outsmarted herself; trying to lure the children to their doom, she is herself burned to death, and only the courageous efforts of the loyal Tylo enables the children to escape to safety. 
 
The fire is a highlight of The Blue Bird; even in this age of computer graphics when anything is possible and nothing is surprising, it is full of astonishing moments. This scene (the work, once again, of the great Fred Sersen) accounted for one of The Blue Bird‘s two Oscar nominations, for special effects. (The other was for Arthur Miller and Ray Rennahan’s Technicolor cinematography. In both categories The Blue Bird lost, and justifiably, to The Thief of Bagdad.) This forest fire would be the best scene in The Blue Bird if it weren’t for…
 
BB-Frame03aA-Kingdom of Future…the Kingdom of the Future, where (returning to Maeterlinck’s text) Mytyl and Tyltyl find countless children are waiting to be born. In this remarkable scene, which looks like something designed by Maxfield Parrish, Mytyl and Tyltyl wander among the eager throng, so amazed at what they see that they completely forget to look for the Blue Bird. They meet a little girl who joyfully greets them by name (Ann Todd, not to be confused with the British actress of the same name), telling them that she will be their little sister, “in a year perhaps.” Then she adds sadly, “I’ll only be with you a little while.” Mytyl and Tyltyl wander among children who are preparing for what will be their calling in life. One boy proudly displays the anesthetic he will discover; another tinkers with an electric light. Still another, solitary and melancholy, tells them his destiny is to fight against slavery, injustice and inequality — but people “won’t listen…they’ll destroy me.”
 
Then into the hall strides Father Time (Thurston Hall), coming to call those whose time it is to be born — including that melancholy fighter against injustice. (If this boy is who we think he is, it tells us that Mytyl and Tyltyl are visiting the Kingdom of the Future on February 11, 1809. A clincher, for those who notice such things, is composer Alfred Newman quoting a couple of bars from his score for John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln the year before.)
 
BB-Frame05aA-lovers
 
Father Time has to speak sharply to these young people (Dorothy Joyce and Tommy Baker). They knew this day would come, but they couldn’t help themselves — they’ve fallen in love. She begs to go with him (“Please, we love each other, and I shall be born too late.”) while he pleads to stay behind (“I will be gone before she comes down.”).
 
Time is implacable, and both lovers know they cannot choose. At last the boy tears himself away and the girl falls sobbing. Soulmates, they know they will never meet on earth, but will live their lives out in a cold, lonely world without ever understanding why.
 
The children whose time has come board a graceful alabaster ship with silver sails and the figurehead of a swan. As the boat pulls away from the quay into a golden sea and sky, the children left behind, still awaiting their turn, bid their friends a joyous bon voyage. The departing passengers fix their eyes on the far horizon, and they sing:
 

To the world so far away
Sail we now at break of day.
Mothers waiting there below.
Do they hear us? Do they know?

From the unseen distance another song can be heard — the song of the mothers coming out to meet them.

 
 
 
The last we see of the children — those on the ship as well as those left behind — is a glimpse of each of the two young lovers. First the boy — miserable, downcast, the only one not singing…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
…then the girl, the only one not waving a cheering farewell. She lies awash in her own tears, knowing in her broken heart that her life is over without ever having had a chance to begin. As the ship sails into the golden mists, it is a journey begun in lovers’ parting — lovers who are fated to be born, live, and die, never to meet again this side of Heaven.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Before we move on, I want to pause to acknowledge this little girl. Her name is Caryll Ann Ekelund, and in The Blue Bird she plays a child who tries to sneak aboard the boat transporting children to be born. Father Time catches her — this is the third time she’s tried to be born before her time — and he scolds her gently before sending her back to wait her turn. Caryll Ann was four years old in the summer of 1939 when she played this wordless cameo — and sadly, she did not live to see herself on the big screen. At a Halloween party later that year, a jack-o-lantern candle ignited her costume and she died three days later of her burns. She was buried in the pink tunic she wears here.

 

This lovely and poignant scene in the Kingdom of the Future — straight out of Maetterlinck, but massaged by Ernest Pascal to make it less cumbersome and archly precious than it reads in the original play — is the last stop on Mytyl and Tyltyl’s journey; having visited the Future, and still not finding the Blue Bird, there’s nothing left for them but to return home.

The next morning, Mytyl amazes her parents with her cheerful attitude (“Oh Mummy! Everything is so wonderful, isn’t it?”), so different from her petulant whining of the night before. And along with this newfound happiness in hearth and home, the children, to their surprise, even find the Blue Bird they have been searching for — but then, just as suddenly, they lose it again as the heedless bird flies away. Nevertheless, the new, improved Mytyl is undismayed. “Don’t worry,” she says, “we’ll find it again…I know we can, because now we know where to look for it.” Then, like the Tyltyl of the play, she addresses her last words directly to the audience: “Don’t we?”
 

The Blue Bird was the most expensive of all Shirley’s pictures — $1.5 million, she tells us — and it took a terrible bath at the box office, both in its original road-show engagements in New York, Detroit and San Francisco, and after going into general release at Easter. This was not, as legend would have it, because it suffered by comparison with The Wizard of Oz, but simply because The Blue Bird‘s time had long since passed. Even the 1918 silent version, lavishly produced within a decade of the play’s premiere, was a flop. (The curse repeated itself yet again in 1976, when a U.S./Soviet co-production directed by George Cukor sank like a rock. Some people never learn.)

The idea that The Blue Bird suffered by comparison with The Wizard of Oz in 1940 basically springs from the fact that it suffers by that same comparison today. Almost everyone who sees The Blue Bird nowadays can’t help seeing similarities to Oz, and of course Blue Bird can only be found wanting. There is, for starters, the black-and-white prologue, with the switch to Technicolor when the real adventure begins (although The Blue Bird never returns to black-and-white; in keeping with Mytyl’s improved outlook, the Technicolor stays to the end). Also, there’s the premise of the fantasy/dream and the look-for-happiness-in-your-own-back-yard moral. Which is ironic, considering that those elements are not found in L. Frank Baum but were swiped by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf from Maeterlinck’s play and grafted onto their script for Oz (where they did not belong). In a real sense, MGM’s Wizard of Oz was an imitation of The Blue Bird, and not the other way around.

If viewers today were as familiar with Maeterlinck’s dreadful play as they are with Oz, The Blue Bird‘s virtues would stand out more clearly. Ernest Pascal greatly improved on the original, tightening and focusing the diffuse and rambling story, and adding two elements lacking in the play: a villain (Tylette the cat) to scheme against the children, and a champion (Tylo the dog) to come to their aid in times of danger. For all his improvements, however, Pascal never solved the dramatic problem at the heart of this fatally flawed play: there is simply no reason for Mytyl and Tyltyl to undertake this dangerous quest, and no clear reward at journey’s end to justify it. It was a shaggy-dog fairy tale when Maeterlinck wrote it, and a shaggy-dog fairy tale it remained in 1940 — and remains to this day.

The play’s reputation had lost its luster by the time Darryl Zanuck and 20th Century Fox undertook to film it, and the movie’s reviews reflected the fact. In the Times, Frank S. Nugent confessed to having “long considered ‘The Blue Bird’ complete twaddle”, an opinion which the movie did nothing to dispel: “it has about the gayety [sic] and sparkle of the first half of ‘A Christmas Carol'”. Variety’s “Flin” wrote: “Whatever freshness and imaginative charm the Maurice Maeterlinck poem play possessed a generation ago seem to have tarnished through the years…Not even Shirley Temple, in a gallery of sparkling technicolor [sic] settings, and aided by all the wizardry of the finest technical workmanship, can make it seem new.” (To be fair, Shirley didn’t have much chance. Her performance is strong, but dominated by the story rather than dominating it; as written by both Maeterlinck and Pascal, Mytyl is as much a spectator to The Blue Bird‘s goings-on as we are.) Flin correctly cited the scene in the Kingdom of the Future as “the best and perhaps complete justification for the production…However trite some other passages of ‘The Blue Bird’ seem to be, this episode is touching and fine eerie storytelling.” And in The New Yorker, John Mosher said, “All in all, I should rank ‘The Blue Bird,’ with its pretty moments and its lapses, too, somewhere halfway between the Disneys and ‘The Wizard of Oz.'” (Notice that Oz, which an earlier New Yorker review had called “a stinkeroo”, is at the bottom of Mosher’s scale.)

The opinion of The Blue Bird that would be most interesting to hear, alas, I have been unable to find: that of Maurice Maeterlinck himself. Maeterlinck landed in the U.S. later in 1940, a refugee from the Nazis storming across France and his native Belgium, and he remained here until 1947, when he returned to his home in Nice (he died at 86 in 1949). He may well have seen The Blue Bird somewhere along the line, but what he thought remains unknown. In Child Star Shirley quotes Darryl Zanuck as saying only that the playwright was consulted on the script, and that he objected to the cutting of so many of his characters, but more than that I cannot say.

Whatever Maeterlinck might have thought, The Blue Bird was a sincere effort, exerted with all the resources at 20th Century Fox’s command, and it holds up today on the strength of its production values — and, it must be said, despite the deadly weaknesses of the source material. It holds up, that is, if — and it’s a big “if” — one can watch it without making invidious comparisons with The Wizard of Oz.

But whatever I or anyone else may think today, in 1940 The Blue Bird utterly failed to find its audience — as the silent version had done in 1918, and as another version would do 36 years later. Its failure was probably Maeterlinck’s fault more than Shirley’s, but hers was the more familiar name, and the stain of the flop stuck to her. The next time out, things would not get better.

 

Young People

(released August 23, 1940) 

As Fox had followed the lavish The Little Princess by placing Shirley in a B-western, so they followed the even more lavish The Blue Bird with an even-more-B musical. But more significantly, perhaps, by the time Young People opened in New York in August — in fact, even before Variety reviewed it in July — the picture was already a lame-duck movie. Fox chairman Joseph Schenck had announced on May 12, 1940 that the studio was “releasing” (i.e., “firing”) Shirley from the remaining 13 months of her seven-year contract. The effort of crafting vehicles for a growing child star — and of dealing with Gertrude and George Temple’s increasing objections to the unvarying parade of orphan and waif roles — had become more trouble than the diminishing box-office returns were worth. So Young People would be Shirley’s swan song at 20th Century Fox. The Blue Bird might at least have ended her career with a bang; Young People was a whimper.

Shirley’s co-stars were Jack Oakie and Charlotte Greenwood as Joe and Kit Ballantine, a husband-and-wife vaudeville team who informally adopt the infant daughter of their best friends, the O’Haras, when both parents succumb to untimely deaths.

The infant grows into Wendy (Shirley) and is incorporated into the act, now called The Three Ballantines. As Wendy approaches adolescence, Joe and Kit decide to retire from show business to a little farm they’ve bought in Connecticut, where Wendy can enjoy a “normal” life. But their brash showbiz manners scandalize the staid provincial citizens of their new home and the Ballantines become outcasts and objects of local ridicule, to the point where they are driven out of town in frustrated disgrace.

In the end, a fortuitous hurricane makes landfall near the town, Joe becomes a hero by rescuing a group of children caught out in the storm, and a tearful scolding by Wendy of the town’s leading citizens and the Ballantines’ chief tormentors (Kathleen Howard and Minor Watson) brings these bigoted small-town snobs to their senses, and the Ballantines are belatedly welcomed by their new neighbors with open arms.

In Child Star Shirley says Edwin Blum and Don Ettlinger’s script for Young People “made cheerless reading”, and it makes even more cheerless viewing. The new songs by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon (still three years from their Oscars for “You’ll Never Know” in Hello, Frisco, Hello) are lackluster, and the movie has a half-hearted romantic subplot for Arleen Whelan and George Montgomery that makes one long for the scintillating screen chemistry of June Lang and Michael Whalen in Wee Willie Winkie.

In early scenes, Young People illustrates Wendy’s start in Joe and Kit’s act by tipping in, clumsily, footage from Shirley’s “old” movies. First Jack Oakie and Charlotte Greenwood sing a chorus of Henry Kailikai’s “On the Beach at Waikiki”, followed by an extended shot of Shirley’s hula dance from Curly Top. Then, most egregiously, Oakie and Greenwood perpetrate a crass and stupid trashing of Brown and Gorney’s “Baby, Take a Bow” before the movie cuts to Shirley’s solo of the song from Stand Up and Cheer! “The film’s value,” Shirley accurately writes, “amounted to less than the sum of its parts.” Shirley deserved better, and so did Jack Oakie and Charlotte Greenwood. Hell, George Montgomery deserved better. Ironically, Young People was directed at his usual headlong pace by Allan Dwan, who years later would assert that Shirley was “over” before he undertook to direct her in Heidi. Shirley was by no means “over” in 1937, but by 1940 (and her third picture for Dwan), she certainly was.

Reviews were surprisingly indulgent — perhaps betraying a certain degree of relief that there would be no more Shirley Temple pictures for the foreseeable future. “Walt” in Variety wrote: “‘Young People’ establishes the definite spot for continuance of Shirley Temple in pictures through her adolescent and formative years. Not as a star, burdened with carrying a picture on her own, but in the groove of a featured player sharing billing and material with other top-notch artists…an above average programmer…” The Times’s Bosley Crowther added, “If this is really the end, it is not a bad exit at all for little Shirley, the superannuated sunbeam.” Even The New Yorker’s John Mosher, who rightly pegged Susannah of the Mounties as “very minor Temple”, said, “Miss Temple has obviously retired in the full tide of her powers…she shows no weariness, no slacking up, no arthritic pangs.”

If these valedictory tributes were intended even subliminally to soften the blow and let Shirley go out a winner, it didn’t work. Young People, even with its shoestrings-and-stock-footage budget, was a flop. Shirley was no longer tops at the box office — she had dropped to fifth in 1939, and by 1940 was out of the top ten — and Frank Nugent finally got the wish he expressed in his review of Wee Willie Winkie: Shirley would be a has-been at 15.

*                    *                    *

Shirley’s divorce from 20th Century Fox had been neither amicable nor particularly acrimonious. As late as April 1940 Darryl Zanuck had even resurrected the idea of starring her in Lady Jane, but she had outgrown the part by then — in Young People she was already developing hips and breasts (in Child Star Shirley recalls getting her first period at her “tenth” birthday party in 1939). Both Zanuck and the Temples were ready for a split, and on April 10 Gertrude Temple retained agent Frank Orsatti to negotiate Shirley’s release. Later that year, Orsatti landed Shirley a two-picture contract with MGM, but it would prove to be an uncomfortable fit. Metro turned out to be unhappy with Shirley’s hair, her face, her figure, her singing and her dancing, while neither Shirley nor her mother were happy with the studio’s makeover attempts. Mrs. Temple nixed the idea of Shirley co-starring with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway, fearing (probably correctly) that in their company her daughter would get short shrift.
 

On top of that, Shirley’s first meeting with producer Arthur Freed had not gone well. Shirley says (and frankly, I believe her) that Freed said, “I have something made just for you. You’ll be my new star!”, then stepped out from behind his desk and exposed himself to her. Shirley reacted like the 12-year-old she was, bursting into a nervous laugh that didn’t sit well with the notorious casting-couch jockey, and he angrily ordered her out of his office. At almost the same moment (again, I believe Shirley), L.B. Mayer was in his office coming on to an affronted Mother Gertrude — stopping short of exhibitionism but making his intentions plain. Perhaps coincidentally, Shirley’s contract was quickly redrafted: only one picture, with no approval or creative input from Shirley or her mother.

The sole result of Shirley’s sojourn at MGM was Kathleen (’41), a “tedious, thinly plotted fable” (Variety) where, according to the Times’s Theodore Strauss, “In those wistful, winsome close-ups Miss Temple seemed to be trying to say just one thing: ‘Get me out of here!'” In any event, that’s exactly what happened.

Next, Shirley went under contract to David O. Selznick, which worked out better for her, although her days of stardom were behind her. Throughout the 1940s she would give some effective performances — Since You Went Away (’44), Kiss and Tell (’45), The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (’47) — but Shirley was slow to learn that what had made her “sparkle” as a five-and-six-year-old could look infantile and affected in a young woman of 18 or 19. An ill-starred marriage at 17 to Army Air Corps Sgt. John Agar (who parlayed the connection into a long but inconsequential career in B movies) ended in 1950 — outlasting Shirley’s movie career by one year (her last picture was A Kiss for Corliss in 1949).

Shirley did, in time, get the hang of grown-up acting, as the host and occasional star of Shirley Temple’s Storybook and Shirley Temple Theatre (NBC, 1958-60), giving intelligent and measured performances in “The House of the Seven Gables”, “The Land of Oz”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and other episodes. (I remember as a child being unable to connect this adult Shirley to the curly-haired little girl in those old movies that were turning up on TV about the same time.) But by then acting was more a hobby than a calling, and when the show ran its course in two season she left it as she had left Hollywood in 1949, with never a backward glance. Ahead lay a third career — or fourth, if you count wife to Charles Black and mother to their two children, plus a daughter by John Agar — in politics and international diplomacy. And let us not forget her courageous battle with breast cancer in the 1970s, becoming one of the first celebrities to go public with her experience in that brush with death. All in all, the second half of the 20th century took her far from the tot who stood security for her movie-father’s bet on a fixed horse race and flew off on the wings of the Good Ship Lollipop. She had the grace and poise to take her long life as it came, and to make the most of it.

It’s been a while since I posted a YouTube clip of Shirley. I think it’s fitting to conclude with this one of her last public appearance on January 29, 2006, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. She is three months away from her 78th birthday (having long since learned her true age). [UPDATE 8/13/23: The YouTube link originally embedded in this post has been removed because “the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated”…
 
 

…However, the video still exists on YouTube. Since I am no longer able to embed YouTube videos in my posts — I still don’t know why, and I suppose I never will — I’m linking to it instead. You can see Shirley’s acceptance of the SAG award here. Skip forward to the 9:36 mark to see Jamie Lee Curtis’s introduction and Shirley’s thank-you speech.]

This was the woman who left us on February 10 of this year; long live her memory. She changed forever what it means to be a child star — mainly because, as critic Mark Steyn aptly put it, she wasn’t a “child star” at all. She was a star who just happened to be a child.

Epilogue

So there you have it, Shirley Temple’s entire career as a rising star and reigning princess during Hollywood’s Golden Age. As I said at the very beginning, while I had nothing but fond memories of Shirley, I had not seen any of these 24 pictures since I was about the age Shirley was when she made them. Several of them I had never seen at all. Seeing them — again or for the first time — was like a trip in a time machine with two stops: one at Shirley’s childhood, and another at my own.

Standouts? Well, the first one that comes to mind is…

Wee Willie Winkie  This may be the best picture — as a picture — of them all, and John Ford made the difference. It was, in effect, a sort of children’s introduction to the Cavalry Trilogy — for that matter, almost a trainer-wheel introduction for Ford himself, a dry run for the later, full flowering of his art, after his experience in the Navy during World War II had deepened and enriched his understanding of military camaraderie. The fact that 19-year-old Shirley would be on hand for the first chapter of the trilogy, 1948’s Fort Apache, only strengthens the connection. There is nothing in Shirley’s career quite so moving as Pvt. Winkie singing “Auld Lang Syne” at Sgt. MacDuff’s bedside, followed by her affectionate gaze at the friend who she doesn’t realize — or cannot admit — has just died.
 
Little Miss Marker  There’s a reason this picture made her a bona fide star; it has what just may be her most fully realized and least self-conscious performance. If Sgt. MacDuff’s deathbed in Wee Willie Winkie is Shirley’s best single scene, a close second is the first exchange of dialogue and eye-contact between Shirley’s Marky and Adolphe Menjou’s Sorrowful Jones.
 
Curly Top  I think Leslie Halliwell got this one right; Shirley’s full range of talents — acting, singing and dancing — are showcased here at their very peak, topped off by the almost startling tour de force of “When I Grow Up”.
 
Stowaway  This one stays in the mind — mine, at least — for the deep bench of Shirley’s supporting cast, and for her sly comic rapport with Robert Young. 
 
The Little Princess  Another strong supporting cast, beautiful Technicolor, Shirley’s acting chops at their most assured, and the most lavish production Shirley ever had to carry — which she did, easily.
 
Poor Little Rich Girl  A whimsically charming score and fine chemistry with Jack Haley and Alice Faye help this one triumph over the bizarre elements of the script. Plus another tour de force in that tap routine to “Military Man”.
 
Also, in various bits and pieces, anything — acting or dancing — with Bill Robinson (honorable mention: Buddy Ebsen). 
 
And finally, a special nod to The Blue Bird, just because it’s an honest and unstinting effort that has been so cruelly and unjustly maligned for nearly 75 years, forced to undergo a comparison that no movie ever made could possibly withstand.
 
So long, Shirley, and thanks for the memories — these and so many more.

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 13

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In Child Star Shirley says that after the release of Little Miss Broadway Darryl Zanuck announced that her next picture would be an adaptation of Lady Jane by Mrs. Cecilia Viets Jamison. Published around the turn of the 20th century (1903, as near as I can tell), the novel told the Dickensian tale of an orphan girl in New Orleans of the 1890s. Little Jane and her gravely ill mother, having fallen on hard times, are taken in by a Mme. Jozain, who, seeing the fine clothes in their luggage, calculates that she’ll be well compensated for nursing the mother back to health. But the mother dies, leaving the girl in Mme. Jozain’s hands to be exploited and abused, her only friend a blue heron.

All ends happily, of course, but we needn’t go into it any deeper than that. In trolling around the Internet looking for information on the book — it’s apparently out of print, but used copies are widely available — I found this. It’s a 1935 edition published by Grosset & Dunlap, a firm that often published movie novelizations and “motion picture editions” of classic books. As you can see, the dust jacket says, “This is the beautiful story from which the 20th Century Fox picture was made”. However, Grosset & Dunlap seem to have jumped the gun; Lady Jane was never filmed, with Shirley or anybody else. Could it be that Fox purchased the book as early as 1935, anticipating making a movie, even though Shirley doesn’t mention it coming up until three years later?

In any case, nothing ever came of Lady Jane. Other titles were tossed in the hopper, including one suggested casually by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau over lunch with Shirley and her mother: The Little Diplomat. On Zanuck’s orders, The Little Diplomat got as far as a treatment by studio writer Charles Beldon and a first draft by Eddie Moran, then withered on the vine. Another proposal, the 1936 children’s novel Susannah of the Mounties by Canadian Muriel Denison, went the distance, as we’ll see later. But for now, in the fall of 1938, Fox yet again turned to an old Mary Pickford vehicle. This time more than just the title would be used, and curiously enough, the story had some elements in common with Lady Jane. The result would be the glittering apotheosis of Shirley’s career at 20th Century Fox.

The Little Princess

(released March 10, 1939)

LP-poster03WUnlike Lady Jane, A Little Princess has never been out of print since it was first published in 1905. It was the work of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who was born in England in 1849 but lived much of her adult life in the U.S., where she became a citizen in 1905, and where she died and was buried in 1924. She began writing short fiction for magazines while still in her teens, later progressing to romantic novels for adults and sentimental books for children. Her books sold well all her life, enabling her to support a transatlantic lifestyle with homes at various times in America, in England and on the Continent. Her adult novels were all popular in their day, but it’s for her children’s books that she remains best remembered, specifically Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), The Secret Garden (1911) and A Little Princess.
 
A Little Princess first appeared in 1888 as a serial in St. Nicholas Magazine under the title Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s Boarding School. In 1902, Mrs. Burnett turned the story into a play, A Little Un-fairy Princess, the title later shortened to A Little Princess; in January 1903 the play opened in New York (with “The” replacing “A” in the title). About the same time, Mrs. Burnett set to expanding the original story into a complete novel, and the book (full title: A Little Princess; being the whole story of Sara Crewe now told for the first time) was published in 1905.
 
In the novel, Sara Crewe is the seven-year-old daughter of a well-to-do British Army captain serving in India. Pampered without being spoiled, Sara is brought by her father to be educated in England, away from the unhealthful Indian climate. He enrolls her in Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies, where the proprietress, Miss Maria Minchin, continues the practice of pampering Sara, albeit more for love of her father’s money than from any affection for Sara herself. In fact, Miss Minchin dislikes and resents Sara for her native intelligence, her scholastic aptitude, and her self-possession, which Miss Minchin regards as impertinence.
 
Sara spends four years at the school, fawned over (insincerely) as Miss Minchin’s star pupil. Then, just as Sara turns 11, her father suddenly dies, his health and spirit shattered by a series of financial reverses that have left him, and now his orphaned daughter, penniless with no friend or family to turn to. Miss Minchin’s resentment boils over at the thought of the luxuries she has lavished on Sara, expecting to be reimbursed by her father. She confiscates Sara’s fine clothes and evicts her from her well-appointed room. Henceforth, Sara will be expected to continue her studies while earning her keep as a scullery maid and all-around drudge, doing chores and running errands at all hours and in all weathers, wearing threadbare, ill-fitting clothes, sleeping in the attic with the rats and the discarded furniture, and taking what nourishment she can from the scraps of food thrown to her — that is, when her “meals” are not withheld for some imagined infraction or other.
 
Sara endures two years of this shabby abuse with stoic dignity, years in which both she and Miss Minchin show their true colors. In the end, Sara’s virtue is rewarded. While her father has indeed been lost, it turns out that her fortune has only been mislaid, and is now returned to her a hundredfold. She sweeps out of Miss Minchin’s clutches richer and more a “little princess” than she ever was, while Miss Minchin is left to gnash her teeth and contemplate what will become of her if word of how Sara was treated ever gets around.
 
A Little Princess was first filmed in 1917 with Mary Pickford as Sara. That version was reasonably faithful to the book — at least, as faithful as it could be in 62 minutes, especially when 16 of those minutes digressed into a long telling of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, which Sara recounts to her schoolmates. (This scene was supposedly included to dramatize Sara’s fertile imagination, but it chiefly served to relieve Pickford for a while from having to look and act like a ten-year-old.) 
 
For Shirley’s version — like the 1903 New York stage production, it was The Little Princess, not A Little Princess — 20th Century Fox mounted a lavish production. The budget, Shirley says, was $1.3 million, “six times the cost of my first film”. For this scene alone, a quick shot of Londoners cheering their soldiers off to war, the extras probably outnumbered the entire casts of Shirley’s last three pictures combined. (Shirley and Ian Hunter as Capt. Crewe can just barely be glimpsed in a hansom cab in the top right background.)
 
Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris’s script took major liberties with Mrs. Burnett’s story while retaining its basic structure. To spare Shirley having to age from seven to 13, they confined the action to a single year, 1899 to 1900. Capt. Crewe has been ordered from India to Africa to fight in the Boer War, and is reported killed at the siege of Mafeking. However, we soon learn that he was not killed but is only missing in action, and is being cared for in a hospital right there in London, a semi-comatose amnesiac whose identity is a mystery to those who are tending to him. Whether Capt. Crewe is dead or missing, the effect on Sara and on Miss Minchin (Mary Nash, still in villainess mode from Heidi) is the same. The difference is that Sara refuses to believe the reports, and she haunts the very same hospital whenever she can steal away from the school, always searching for her father but never finding him, asking after him but never asking anyone who knows about that mysterious unknown patient. In the end, with a gentle assist from Queen Victoria (Beryl Mercer, serving much as Frank McGlynn’s Abe Lincoln did in The Littlest Rebel), Sara is finally reunited with her father. The change is crucial: for this Sara Crewe, the happy ending is not regaining her fortune, but regaining her father.

Hill and Ferris also added a romantic subplot involving Rose (Anita Louise), a teacher at Miss Minchin’s, and Geoffrey Hamilton (Richard Greene), the school’s riding master (seen here with Sara before the downturn in her fortunes). Geoffrey is the semi-estranged grandson of Lord Wickham (Miles Mander), who lives next door to the school, attended by his Indian servant Ram Dass (Cesar Romero). Miss Minchin takes cruel delight in breaking up Rose and Geoffrey’s romance and discharging Rose, thinking it will curry favor with Lord Wickham. 
 
Meanwhile, Ram Dass, crossing the roofs from his attic room to Sara’s, has seen the wretched conditions under which she’s forced to live. Sara tells him of all the comforts she pretends her cold, dusty garret has. Later, with the approval and connivance of Lord Wickham, Ram Dass sneaks into the room while Sara sleeps and installs all the comforts she has only imagined — down quilts, soft cushions, cases of lovely books, food on the table and a warm fire in the grate. In this way the movie includes one of the charming touches in the book, changing the source of the mysterious largesse by establishing Lord Wickham as the curmudgeon with a heart of gold that has by now become a standard element of Shirley’s pictures.
 
LP-Frame04a-Temple,-TreacherW
 
The movie also provides Miss Minchin with a brother Bertie (Arthur Treacher) — “our professor of elocution and dramatics. “Bertie is also a former music hall entertainer, although Miss Minchin is too much of a snob to allow him to admit to it when Sara’s father remembers having seen him perform. And this is all the excuse the movie needs to put Sara and Bertie through a couple of quick song-and-dance choruses of the 1882 Albert Chevalier chestnut “The Old Kent Road” — first here in Miss Minchin’s parlor (when she’s not around, of course), then later at the hospital to entertain the convalescent soldiers.
 
In this way and others, The Little Princess tailors Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original story to Shirley’s strengths. “Studio moguls,” Shirley sighs in Child Star, “had given up the prospect of making me fit the story and had returned to making the story fit me.”
 
 
 Indeed they had, but more happily than in Heidi. The Little Princess demonstrates the difference between working to Shirley’s strengths and depending on her tricks — never more so than in this sequence, which comes at the picture’s two-thirds point. Sara is asleep in her garret; while she sleeps, Ram Dass steals in through the attic window and bedecks her room with comforts and finery — but we won’t know that until later because we are in Sara’s dream. She dreams she’s a princess holding court, with (like all dreams) people from her life taking their roles. Bertie is her court jester, Ram Dass her lord chamberlain (perhaps Sara, even asleep, is half-aware of his presence?), and Miss Minchin is there filing charges against Geoffrey for stealing a kiss from Rose. The scene is spoken in rhymed verse written by Walter Bullock, set to music by Samuel Pokrass (“There, you see, he broke the law! / What I say I saw, I saw!”). Geoffrey is acquitted because the kiss wasn’t stolen, it was given freely by Rose (“There, you see! I had a feeling / This was not a case of stealing.”), and the accuser is banished from Princess Sara’s realm.
 
 
 
 
 
 There follows a round of entertainment from the court dancers (to a genteel arrangement of “The Old Kent Road”), in which a new prima ballerina (who looks very much like Princess Sara herself) wins the approval of the court.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
As the dance ends, Sara awakens to find her room transformed — so completely transformed that at first she thinks she must be still asleep and dreaming.
 

The dream fantasy is a pure Hollywood touch, but it works for the picture rather than crippling it, as “In Our Little Wooden Shoes” had done to Heidi. In Heidi, there was no way we could believe that this little Swiss urchin would fantasize herself as a Dutch girl clomping around by the Zuider Zee in her wooden shoes, much less promenading through a stately minuet at the Palace of Versailles. But the fantasy here is entirely in keeping with the Sara Crewe we’ve come to know; for that matter, it’s consistent with the novel’s original Sara Crewe as well. Before Sara’s fall from grace, everyone at the school calls her a “little princess” (some, the mean and spiteful ones, sarcastically); after her fall, it becomes even more important to Sara to be “a princess inside” and take whatever mistreatment Miss Minchin can fling at her with the grace and dignity that implies. So in her dream we see Sara as she sees herself, dispensing justice to the good and wicked alike. The scene also illustrates Sara’s greatest asset in adversity: her vivid imagination. (The “Ali Baba” sequence in the Mary Pickford version tried to do the same, but it went on more than twice as long — in a movie that was half an hour shorter — and bore no connection to Sara’s waking life.)

 
The Little Princess, despite the liberties it takes with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, is one of Shirley’s strongest pictures — classic Hollywood star-vehicle moviemaking at its best. In it, for perhaps the first time — or maybe the second, after Wee Willie Winkie — 20th Century Fox gave the movie a production worthy of the studio’s biggest star, rather than expecting her to carry the show more (Dimples) or less (Stowaway) on her own. Reviews were indulgent. Variety’s anonymous reviewer wrote, “Shirley Temple appears in Technicolor for the first time but, more important, it’s her best picture in a long while.” At the Times, B.R. Crisler said, with tongue slightly in cheek: “With any other child star on Earth, it is amazing to reflect, ‘The Little Princess’ would stand out as one of the most glaring examples of pure hokum in screen history; with Mistress Temple, it may very well be, as Mr [Z]anuck unflinchingly proclaims, the greatest picture with which Mr. Zanuck has ever been associated. And that would be greatness indeed.” Even John Mosher at The New Yorker allowed, “This careful and even handsome screen version of the story Mother used to love when she was a girl is rich with all the sugar and all the poison of the past.”

For Shirley’s next outing, it was back to black-and-white, and a follow-through on one of the projects that had been back-burnered in favor of The Little Princess.

Susannah of the Mounties

(released June 23, 1939)

We needn’t spend much time on Susannah of the Mounties. Muriel Denison’s novel, published in 1936, was the first of four she would eventually turn out; the sequels were Susannah of the Yukon, Susannah at Boarding School and Susannah Rides Again. This first book told of a nine-year-old Canadian girl in 1896 sent to live with her uncle when her parents are assigned to a remote corner of the British Empire. The uncle, an officer at a Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost in the wilds of Saskatchewan, is at first surprised and unwelcoming, but Susannah soon wins his heart, along with those of everyone else on the post. My own copy of the book is still on order; when I’ve had a chance to look it over, if there’s anything more to be said about it, I’ll post an update here.

But I suspect there won’t be, because once again 20th Century Fox jettisoned everything except the title. The script was credited to Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (story by Fidel La Barba and Walter Ferris), but several other writers put their oars in without credit — never a good sign. Yet again, Shirley played an orphan: Susannah Sheldon, sole survivor of a wagon train massacred by renegade Blackfeet Indians in the 1880s. She is found by Mountie Randolph Scott out on patrol, and more or less adopted by him. From her place on the post she becomes embroiled in tensions between the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Blackfeet tribe, especially after she befriends the son of a Blackfeet chief sent to the post as a hostage against good behavior. Together Susannah and Little Chief (played by a 13-year-old Blackfeet youth named Martin Good Rider) intervene with his father Big Eagle (Maurice Moscovich) to thwart the warmongering of the villainous Wolf Pelt (Victor Jory) and “show White Man and Indian how to live as brothers.” Peace pipe smoked, fade out.

That’s about it. There’s a perfunctory romance between Susannah’s guardian Inspector Angus “Monty” Montague (Scott) and his commanding officer’s daughter (Margaret Lockwood) that falls somewhere between the similar subplot of Wee Willie Winkie and the one of The Little Princess; otherwise Susannah of the Mounties has the mediocre look and feel of a B-western (albeit spiced up with stock footage from earlier, more expensive Fox westerns). There’s also an attitude toward Canada’s native tribes that’s almost as uncomfortable today as the treatment of African Americans in The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel. “Ugh!” is a common line of dialogue given to Blackfeet characters; other lines include “Little Chief not sleep White Man house,” and, so help me, “Devil child have forked tongue!”

Reviews were dismissive, with an air of disappointment, as if the reviewers’ hopes had been raised by The Little Princess, only to be dashed. Variety called Susannah “weakest in the Temple series for some time”, adding, ominously: “Youngster is growing up fast, and is losing some of that sparkle displayed as a tot which carried her so far as a b.o. bet.” B.R. Crisler in the Times, noting the movie’s Mounties in their pillbox hats instead of the familiar peaked campaign hats, cracked: “The early Canadian Northwest Mounted Police certainly wore tricky uniforms, though. Except for the fact that they are on the screen, people at the Roxy might almost mistake them for ushers.” The New Yorker’s John Mosher put it succinctly, and correctly: “The whole offering must be considered as very minor Temple.”

Susannah of the Mounties was directed by Wiliam A. Seiter, one of Shirley’s favorites, who had already directed her in Stowaway and Dimples. Some scenes were directed without credit by Walter Lang (Seiter had performed the same fill-in duty on The Little Princess when director Lang left on “medical furlough”). Shirley’s next picture would reunite her with Lang. Once again, Shirley and Lang would be working in Technicolor, and the production would be, if anything, even more lavish than The Little Princess. Results, however, would differ sharply. For the first time, a Shirley Temple picture would lose money.

To be concluded…

 

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 12

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Despite the success of Wee Willie Winkie and Heidi, 20th Century Fox decided to table, for the time being at least, any literary pretensions in Shirley’s pictures. In Child Star Shirley says otherwise: “Ahead would be Fanchon the Cricket followed by Pollyanna…” — but nothing ever came of those, and she never mentions either title again, not even to explain why they didn’t happen. Both, not coincidentally, had been Mary Pickford vehicles in 1915 and 1920, respectively.

Fanchon, despite what Shirley says, was almost certainly never on the agenda. The 1849 George Sand novel on which it was based (La Petite Fadette) had no particular following in the U.S., and Pickford’s picture of it was long forgotten — presumed lost, in fact (a partial print didn’t surface until 1999). Besides, the character of a semi-feral peasant girl who wins the love of a respectable village boy in rural France was hardly a good fit for Shirley. Perhaps Mother Gertrude mentioned the title for (or to) Shirley, but Darryl Zanuck surely didn’t.

Pollyanna is another case entirely; why that one never happened is a mystery. The idea was a natural, more natural in fact than Heidi. For that matter, Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel was virtually an American carbon copy of Heidi — without goats and mountains, with an aunt instead of a grandfather, and with Heidi and Klara, the crippled friend who learns to walk again, combined into the one character of Pollyanna Whittier. The story could easily have accommodated as many songs for Shirley as Zanuck and his minions cared to throw at it, and could even have been updated to the 1930s without doing serious damage to the original. Fox’s failure to follow this lead has to count as a major missed opportunity, maybe even (depending on the results, of course) a crime against posterity. Could the problem have been that the Porter novel was still under copyright? I suppose we’ll never know.

Shirley wrote about Zanuck “grappling with that chronic demon” of “selecting my next screenplay.” The grappling produced results — Shirley made three pictures in 1938 — but the results were, alas, generally undistinguished. Shirley described one of those pictures as “unfailingly bland”, but she could have been talking about any of the three, and we can deal with each of them in a very few paragraphs.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

(released March 25, 1938)

RSF-Poster01aRebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was another of Shirley’s “no trace” pictures, like Poor Little Rich Girl and (allegedly) The Littlest Rebel. What there was no trace of this time was the 1903 novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin. The story had been filmed faithfully in 1917 with Mary Pickford and again in 1932 with Marian Nixon (produced by Fox Film Corp., so the post-merger studio still had the property lying around). For this incarnation, the studio adopted the same curious practice they had used with Poor Little Rich Girl: take a title widely identified with Mary Pickford, then make a picture with absolutely no connection to what Pickford and Co. did with it.

As if to ensure that Rebecca would be as familiar as possible, Zanuck and associate producer Raymond Griffith packed the supporting cast with returnees from Shirley’s earlier pictures: Gloria Stuart and Jack Haley from Poor Little Rich Girl; Helen Westley from Dimples, Stowaway and Heidi; Slim Summerville from Captain January; Bill Robinson from The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel; J. Edward Bromberg, the deus ex machina judge from Stowaway, serving the same function as a doctor this time; even Alan Dinehart, the sleazeball detective from way back in Baby Take a Bow, was brought back. Of the names on this poster, only Randolph Scott and Phyllis Brooks were new, and both would work with Shirley again before the year was out. The director, once again, was Heidi‘s reliably unimaginative Allan Dwan.

Even the story was a bit of a recycle; as in Poor Little Rich Girl, Shirley becomes a radio star unbeknownst to her ostensible guardian (duties divided this time between her grumpy aunt Helen Westley and shifty stepfather William Demarest) when, while living with her aunt on the farm of the title, she sneaks out for a remote broadcast from the farmhouse of her neighbor, radio producer Randolph Scott.

During that broadcast, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm drops all pretense to being anything more than Shirley Temple In Concert. The program’s emcee (Jack Haley) invites Shirley/Rebecca to “sing the songs that made a lot of people happy.” So she sings:

My dear radio audience, 
Now I shall do
Some of the songs I’ve had the pleasure of introducing to you…
 
This, mind you, on what is supposedly her very first broadcast. What follows is a medley of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” from Bright Eyes, “Animal Crackers in My Soup” from Curly Top, “When I’m With You” and “Oh, My Goodness” from Poor Little Rich Girl and “Good Night, My Love” (the lyric changed to “Good Night, My Friends”) from Stowaway. “Ah, but it’s great to reminisce,” Shirley/Rebecca sighs.

Like Captain January, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was one of Shirley’s first pictures to hit TV in the 1950s, so it has a special place in the childhood memories of many Baby Boomers. And giving credit where it’s due, Rebecca is a pleasant enough vehicle for Shirley. But it plows familiar ground while the original furrows are still fairly fresh. Those Baby Boomers (including myself) first saw Rebecca on its own, without the feeling of deja vu that comes from knowing about all the other movies it ransacks for actors, songs and plot elements. 

“Flin” in Variety wasn’t fooled. He gave Shirley full credit as “a great little artist”, but added:

The rest is synthetic and disappointing. Why they named it “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” is one of those mysteries. The only resemblance is a load of hay, a litter of pigs and Bill Robinson’s straw hat.

But Rebecca‘s familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. The picture ends, and I’ll end my comments on it, with Shirley singing “The Toy Trumpet” by Sidney Mitchell and Lew Pollack, then dancing the song with Bill Robinson. Granted, it’s really just a less-bravura retread of “Military Man” from Poor Little Rich Girl, but hey, it’s still Shirley and Bojangles (yet again, colorized):
 

 

Little Miss Broadway

(released July 22, 1938)

LMB-Poster02bLittle Miss Broadway was the one Shirley called “unfailingly bland”, and that about sums it up. Shirley is once again an orphan, this time moving from her orphanage to live with a friend of her late parents (Edward Ellis) who runs a hotel for entertainers. The curmudgeon this time is the rich old landlady next door (Edna May Oliver, her middle name misspelled as “Mae”), who not only plots to get rid of those unsavory show people by selling their hotel out from under them, but (channeling Sara Haden’s truant officer from Captain January) moves to have Shirley returned to her orphanage. Meanwhile, her playboy nephew (George Murphy) is charmed by Shirley and smitten with Ellis’s daughter (Phyllis Brooks of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) and tries to thwart the old girl. It all ends in the courtroom of judge Claude Gillingwater, with Shirley and her troupers proving that they’ve got a moneymaking show on their hands and can afford to keep the hotel open.
 
Little Miss Broadway was the first of two straight pictures Shirley made with associate producer David Hempstead. The other pictures Hempstead would make at Fox before decamping to RKO in 1940 were Happy Landing, Hold That Co-ed, Straight Place and Show and It Could Happen to You — not B pictures exactly, but definitely A-minus, and the same must be said for both of Shirley’s pictures for him. Even Mother Gertrude had noticed, with some alarm, the budget cutbacks in Shirley’s pictures, and there’s a chintzy, slapdash quality to Little Miss Broadway. It shows in odd ways, too — for example, the fact that Edna May Oliver, at the time one of the best-known and most popular character actresses in movies, couldn’t even get her name spelled correctly in the credits. (Also, the fact that as curmudgeon du jour, she doesn’t actually get won over by Shirley; like grumpy aunt Helen Westley in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she just stops being a curmudgeon and turns nice when the Harry Tugend-Jack Yellen screenplay decides it’s time.) And by the way, the thought of Shirley and Jimmy Durante in a movie together may sound promising, but it’s just a tease; he spends more time flirting with soubrette Patricia Wilder at the hotel’s switchboard than he does on screen with Shirley.
 
In Child Star Shirley spends less time talking about the picture itself than about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the set during production. ‘Nuff said. 
 
But at least Shirley had a couple of nice dance turns with George Murphy. One was the climactic title number (by Walter Bullock and Harold Spina), in which George and Shirley’s song-and-dance magically turns Judge Gillingwater’s courtroom into a glittering Busby Berkeley-style replica of Times Square. But I’m posting here their earlier number, “We Should Be Together” (also by Bullock and Spina); the colorized YouTube clip is better quality, and besides, the number itself is more fun:
 
 

In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent was rather sympathetic: “The devastating Mistress Temple is slightly less devastating than usual in ‘Little Miss Broadway,’…Although she performs with her customary gayety [sic] and dimpled charm, there is no mistaking the effort every dimple cost her.” Variety’s “Flin” added: “Shirley is better than her new vehicle, which in turn is better than her last one, ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'” Whether Little Miss Broadway was really better than Shirley’s last vehicle is open to debate. But it was certainly better than her next one.

Just Around the Corner

(released December 2, 1938)

 

JATC-Poster01WIf Little Miss Broadway was an A-minus picture, Just Around the Corner was no more than a B-plus. If that. Shirley plays Penny Hale, who is taken out of private school when her widowed architect father (Charles Farrell) loses his job, and consequently the penthouse he and Penny have been living in, as well as the money to pay for her school. He’s now forced to work as the electrician in the apartment building where they formerly occupied the penthouse, and he and Penny must now make do with a tiny apartment in the basement.

The penthouse now belongs to tycoon Samuel G. Henshaw (Claude Gillingwater again), the uncle of Penny’s new playmate Milton (Bennie Bartlett) and her father’s sweetheart Lola (Amanda Duff). This coincidence leads Penny to confuse the real man with the symbolic “Uncle Sam” — after all, he has the same white goatee — and to set about pulling him, her father and the country out of the economic doldrums by staging a benefit show at five cents admission.

Just Around the Corner, like Little Miss Broadway before it, was directed by Irving Cummings — the same man who had warned Mother Gertrude during Poor Little Rich Girl two years earlier that it was time for the studio to find better stories for Shirley, now that she had lost “that baby quality”. I doubt if this is what he had in mind. Shirley is ten now — or nine, depending on which version of her birth certificate people believed. In any case, she’s too old to be mistaking the “I Want You!” Uncle Sam for somebody’s real uncle who happens to go by that name. Conversely, she’s still too young to be spouting the lick-the-Depression pep talks that Warner Baxter once declaimed in Stand Up and Cheer!

Shirley remembered that her mother became alarmed at the trend of her recent pictures, not only the decreasing budgets, but the sameness of Shirley’s roles. As Shirley remembered it, her mother met with Zanuck and “expressed the opinion that recent scripts were forcing me into rigid, stereotyped roles inappropriate to my growth.” Zanuck countered that the public didn’t want their stars to change. “Now she’s lovable…The less she changes, the longer she lasts.”

Just Around the Corner wasn’t a dead loss. It’s worth seeing for, if nothing else, Shirley’s final teaming with Bill Robinson. Their last number together, “I Love to Walk in the Rain” (by Walter Bullock and Harold Spina), was a bit anticlimactic; more their style was an earlier number, “This Is a Happy Little Ditty”, in which they’re joined by Joan Davis and Bert Lahr. Their dance here looks more like Bojangles’s work and less like that of credited dance directors Nick Castle and Geneva Sawyer. Note especially Bojangles’s truckin’-on-down entrance into the number — that man could dance down a staircase like nobody’s business! (Note also, earlier in the number, when Shirley and Joan Davis get out of step with each other. Now there’s a typical B-movie touch for you: either nobody noticed, or they didn’t bother to retake it so Joan and Shirley could get it right.)
 
 

The unsigned review in Variety was surprisingly positive (“topflight for general all-around entertainment”), but conceded, “Youngster is unquestionably getting more mature, and in growing older, Shirley seems to be under stress of acting rather than being natural.” At the Times, Frank Nugent was biting:

Fee-fi-fo-fum, and a couple of ho-hums. Shirley Temple is at the Roxy in “Just Around the Corner” and that’s where we’re lurking with a cleaver in one hand and a lollypop [sic] in the other…Shirley is not responsible, of course. No child could conceive so diabolic a form of torture. There must be an adult mind in back of it all — way, way in back of it all.

And we’ll leave the picture with those two swings of the critical pendulum.

Next time out, Shirley would be restored to the undeniable ranks of Fox’s A-pictures. No expense would be spared — including, for the first time since the final seconds of The Little Colonel, the use of Technicolor.

To be continued…