Category Archives: Blog Entries

Bright Eyes, 1928-2014

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It’s been over three weeks now since the news came that Shirley Temple Black had left us. I’ve spent the time perusing her 1988 autobiography Child Star — refreshingly frank and thorough, if a bit starchy and formal. I’ve also been reacquainting myself with her movies, which was more than a little overdue; I haven’t seen most of her pictures since I was about the age she was when she made them. Some I’ve never seen at all.
I’ll be posting on a few of those movies, because I think her career is worth reviewing in detail. But while I’m working up to that, I don’t want to let her passing go without some comment in the meantime. Shirley Temple was one of a kind.

It may sound strange, but the comparison that sprang to my mind when I heard she was gone was with the Beatles, and not just because she appears in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 

Both were unprecedented showbiz phenomena that broke the mold. There were child stars before Shirley Temple (Jackie Coogan, Baby Peggy, Jackie Cooper), just as there were pop music sensations before the Beatles (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley). But these two — that one and those four — reached a level of popularity that dwarfed anything that had come before. There was simply nothing to compare them to.

And they went beyond merely breaking the mold. They reset it — in their own image. Pop idols from ABBA and the Bay City Rollers to One Direction and Justin Bieber would all be called the biggest thing since the Beatles, but there never was a “next” Beatles. It’s been 80 years since Shirley Temple’s bit part in Stand Up and Cheer! made America sit up and take notice, and from Jane Withers through Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall, Margaret O’Brien, Bobby Driscoll, Patty McCormack, Hayley Mills, Tatum O’Neal, Drew Barrymore, Abigail Breslin — plus countless sitcom kiddies sprouting up along the way — there’s never been a “next” Shirley Temple either.

 
My father once told me, “There were two bright spots in the Great Depression. One was Will Rogers, and the other was Shirley Temple.” In Child Star Shirley tells us that Rogers said they were set to make a picture together “when I come back from Alaska”, but of course he never did. After August 1935 Shirley would have to brighten the Depression all by herself. And that’s just what she did, in picture after picture, beginning with her bit in Stand Up and Cheer!, singing and dancing “Baby, Take a Bow” with James Dunn. It may be hard at this remove — for some, impossible — to grasp how this little girl charmed and cheered America just when the country seemed to be falling apart. But she did, and for three years she was the top star in the nation, if not in the world.

Later, when — as it inevitably must — her box-office power began to wane, her personal popularity never did. Neither did the level-headed cheer that made up her on-and-off-screen personae. There was no descent into bitterness, drugs or alcohol, no pathetic scramble to cling to lost youth, no humiliating splash in the tabloids. A happy second marriage to well-to-do Charles Black helped, but even that might not have happened without the solid, no-nonsense upbringing she got from her mother.

Gertrude Temple was the kind of woman who could have given stage mothers a good name — if there hadn’t been so few like her. She saw to it that little Shirley had a firm sense of self independent of her phenomenal popularity — and in time, independent of her mother. That’s why, when her movie career ended in 1950, Shirley was able to move on without a backward glance. The grace, confidence and poise instilled by Mother Gertrude served her daughter well through those early dizzy years and, more important, long after. They took her smoothly through, first, a second career in early television; then, surprisingly, a third career in politics and international diplomacy, as U.S. ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia and White House chief of protocol; and finally, a long bask in the setting sun as a Dowager Queen of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

I’ll have more to say about those first heady years in posts to come. For now: So long, Shirley, and thanks for the memories. We shall not look upon your like again.
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40th Anniversary Tour: Jesus Christ Superstar

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Cinedrome celebrates the “Golden Age of Hollywood”, but like many ages, that one has no precise boundary date. As a general rule, I set the end of the Golden Age around 1964 — because that was the last year when the Oscar for best picture went to a movie (My Fair Lady) that was produced entirely within the walls of a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.). On the other hand, it’s a hard rule indeed that allows no exceptions, and I’m making an exception now. Here’s why:

Director Norman Jewison’s 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar is one of the great movie musicals — arguably the last great musical before the genre went into a 30-year hibernation brought on by the collapse of the studio system, rising costs, flagging interest, and the passing from the scene, through death or retirement, of many of its best creators — the Arthur Freeds and Roger Edenses, the Busby Berkeleys and Vincente Minnellis, the Harry Warrens, Irving Berlins and Cole Porters.
 
I first saw Jesus Christ Superstar on June 30, 1973, and I wasn’t expecting much. It had been two years since the original concept album by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had made such an enormous splash, and the ripples had largely subsided; for me, at least, much of its novelty had worn off. Then came the Broadway production, directed by Tom O’Horgan, who had shaken up the Street four years earlier with Hair. From what I saw of O’Horgan’s Superstar in magazines and read in reviews, it sounded pretentious, bloated, glam-campy and tasteless. (Lloyd Webber and Rice reportedly weren’t too pleased with it, and saw to it that things were done differently when the show was staged in London’s West End.) When the movie’s trailer began playing in theaters, with its tanks and jet fighters, I wasn’t impressed; I thought this picture was going to be a stinker, and I wasn’t shy about saying so.
 

Wrong. As the picture unrolled on the screen before me I was bowled over time and again. At the fadeout I sat there stunned. My friend Paul, who had talked me into seeing it with him, turned to me and said tentatively, almost apologetically, “I thought it was pretty good, Jim.” I said, “I thought it was terrific, Paul.” This being the Era of Continuous Showings, we stayed and sat through the picture again. The next day I returned with other friends and saw it two more times.

As Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overture begins, Jesus Christ Superstar opens with the camera prowling among the ruins of the ancient city of Avdat, in Israel’s Negev Desert 30 miles south of Beersheba. Two thousand years ago this was an important stop on the Incense Road between India and Ceylon in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west; today it’s a crumbling wreck. As the camera glides among the pitted walls and topless columns, the only trace of modernity is a temporary scaffold maybe 30 feet high — put there by some team of archaeologists, perhaps — and the only sign of life is a small lizard skittering across a wall in front of our eyes. Suddenly, in the distance, a cloud of dust — coming from what we see is a red, white and turquoise Israeli school bus barreling along the unpaved roads. The bus screeches to a halt at the foot of the hill where Avdat sits, and out springs a ragtag band of hippies, dozens of them. They swarm over the bus like bees in a hive, shaking the sand from the tarps that cover the baggage on the roof, opening the large wicker baskets underneath, tossing down a confusing array of props, costumes, headdresses — and, very carefully, one large wooden cross. These hippies, we see, are a troupe of itinerant street performers; we sense that not one of them has ever seen the inside of a real theater. (In real life, every one of them had. In fact, two of them — Robert LuPone and Baayork Lee — would go on to create the roles of Zach and Connie, respectively, in the original production of A Chorus Line, and Lee would restage Michael Bennett’s choreography for the 2006 revival.) There’s an air of high spirits and camaraderie among the players — they cheerfully help one another into their gear, kiss each other on the cheek, then move on to the next chore. Gradually their excitement settles down, a feeling of ritual and purposefulness begins to grow among them, their movements become deliberate and stylized. Each one slips into his or her character, steps into his or her place, and they assume the tableau you see at the beginning of this post. They are ready to enact their own version of The Greatest Story Ever Told.
 
This show-within-the-movie approach was the inspiration of Melvin Bragg, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Norman Jewison, after a false start by Tim Rice. “I was asked to do a screenplay,” Rice remembered years later. “I thought great, fantastic…I wrote a screenplay rather like Ben-Hur;  you know, Jesus addresses 20,000 people, or armies of Romans steam in from the left. I think they took one look at that and thought, ‘No,  that’s gonna be $50 million, forget it.’ My screenplay was instantly ditched, and Melvin Bragg — Lord Bragg — came in and wrote a screenplay.” 
 

Bragg, the celebrated broadcaster, author and polymath who was made Baron Bragg of Wigton, County Cumbria in 1998, saw at once what Rice did not: that the cast-of-thousands Ben-Hur approach was not only prohibitively expensive but incompatible with the pop vernacular of Rice’s libretto for Superstar. Instead, Bragg and Jewison established the framework of the traveling band of players reconstructing the last seven days of the earthly life of Jesus in a tell-us-now-in-your-own-words manner, as if this modern Passion Play had been developed in improvisational workshops before being brought out to be performed in the open air. It is, in effect, an intimate Biblical spectacle in modern dress. In 1973, you could have left the theater after seeing the movie and, before you’d gone two blocks, seen a dozen people dressed exactly like the performers in Superstar — even the Roman soldiers in their purple tank tops and camouflage pants.

 

In his 2004 commentary on the DVD, Jewison credits production designer Richard Macdonald with the decision to shoot the picture on existing locations, making only minor modifications in the form of set dressing. Most of these locations — Avdat, King Herod’s Palace, the amphitheater at Beit She’an near Nazareth, where Jesus (Ted Neeley) is tried and condemned by Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen) — were the ruined remains of Ancient Rome’s occupation of Palestine under the Caesars. Choosing to shoot in these places was a transformative decision, for it meant that Jesus Christ Superstar would show the early followers of Jesus, with the ecstatic joy of young people who have found something truly new and exciting, literally dancing among the bones of the Roman Empire. It’s a metaphor of breathtaking power, one that (naturally) no other production of JCS in any form has ever been able to attempt, let alone duplicate. It gives Jewison’s movie a level of meaning that JCS has never had before or since, one that complements and enhances Webber and Rice’s original text. (These dances, by the way, were performed in desert heat that rose as high as 115 degrees or more. The performers could dance for no more than 30 seconds before Jewison had to call cut and let everybody step to the sidelines to towel off and rehydrate. That the dances — this one is the Simon the Zealot number — play on screen as sustained, high-energy performances is a testament to all concerned: Jewison, choreographer Rob Iscove, editor Antony Gibbs, and most of all, the dancers themselves.)

Because Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera — or a “sung-through musical”, if you prefer — with no spoken dialogue, music is a constant on the soundtrack. Jewison makes it a constant in the image as well, fitting every camera movement, every cut, every dissolve, every zoom in or out to the rhythm of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. Both the performers and the camera are choreographed, using techniques he learned in early television, when he directed music-variety series like Your Hit Parade and the Andy Williams and Judy Garland shows. In Superstar he does things unavailable in live TV, too — slow motion, freeze-frames, etc. Always, everything to the music: a group of dancers will leap up and freeze midair, then we cut to another group similarly suspended, who come to life and complete the movement the first group began. Everything right on the driving beat; even something as simple as blowing out a candle matches the rhythm of the music.

All these techniques — moving and cutting to the music, playing with time and space — anticipated the music videos that would come along in the 1980s. As Ted Neeley put it in the DVD commentary, “This was the very first long-form music video ever done. MTV came as a result of this; after seeing these, MTV happened.” 

 
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, granted, but only a bit of one. The picture is a long-form video, with a visual freedom that spans decades of movie-musical syntax, past and (from 1973) future. Jewison’s vision ranges both forward to MTV and back to variety TV, even to the unfettered imagination of Busby Berkeley: this is supposedly an impromptu performance by a band of players piling out of a bus, but the movie draws us on until we’re seeing things this troupe could never have stuffed into those wicker baskets, and we move freely around, among and over the performers in a way no audience could ever do. Take, for example, this exultant rendition of the title song, where the shade of Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson, center) addresses Jesus with his own doubts and questions. This frame comes at the beginning of a soaring crane shot, the camera rising to heaven as the ensemble sings “Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ / Who are you? What have you sacrificed?” The dancers glitter like silver angels, while Anderson’s costume recalls that of Sly Stone in his performance at Woodstock — a reference that was inescapable to audiences in 1973, every one of whom had certainly seen the hit 1970 documentary.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
All this, in the hands of Jewison, designer Macdonald, editor Gibbs, and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, adds up to much more than gimmickry and camera tricks for their own sake. Everything is done in service to two things: (1) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music; and (2) the complex human story at the heart of Tim Rice’s libretto — the very thing that (by all accounts I heard and read at the time) was swamped on Broadway under the campy glitz of Tom O’Horgan’s elephantine production. Even those tanks and fighter jets, which had me snorting in derision when I saw them in the trailer, were organic to the movie and made their symbolic points: the tanks were the irresistible, overpowering force driving Judas to his act of betrayal; the jets, the winged furies of conscience plaguing him for what he had done.
 
 

 

 
In discarding Tim Rice’s Ben-Hur-style treatment and swapping the cast of thousands for a cast of dozens, Bragg and Jewison could sharpen the focus on the libretto’s four central characters. First, of course, was Jesus (Ted Neeley), a man overwhelmed by a sense of having been assigned a divine mission without fully understanding what is expected of him. Jesus’s finest moment, and Neeley’s, comes in the soliloquy/aria “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)”, in which he sings Rice’s version of Matthew 26:39 (“O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me…”): “Take this cup away from me / For I don’t want to taste its poison / Feel it burn me, I have changed I’m not as sure / As when we started…”
 

 

 

 

Then Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson), the character who drew Rice and Webber to write Jesus Christ Superstar in the first place, in an attempt to understand and explicate his motives. Jesus may be the title role, but in a very real sense Judas is the lead. After the overture — which in the movie serves to introduce the cast, the characters, and the setting — Judas opens the proceedings with the first song, “Heaven on Their Minds”. If Jesus is uncertain what God expects of him, Judas feels no such uncertainty; he believes he knows what Jesus’s mission is, and he very much fears Jesus has betrayed it, letting dangerous celebrity go to his head: “…And all the good you’ve done / Will soon get swept away / You’ve begun to matter more / Than the things you say…” At the opera’s climax, after his remorseful suicide, Judas returns, dropping from the sky dressed in white (a forgiven angel?) to ask what it was all about: “Don’t you get me wrong… / Only want to know…” As the movie’s Judas, Carl Anderson gave the performance of his life — a life, alas, that proved all too short; he died of leukemia in 2004, age 58.

 
Mary Magdalene was played by Yvonne Elliman, one of two members of the cast who played the same role in the original concept album, on Broadway for Tom O’Horgan, and for Norman Jewison on film. (Neeley was in the Broadway ensemble, understudied Jesus, and had played the role in concert.) Elliman’s Mary is devoted to Jesus without fully understanding why, paralleling Jesus’s own devotion to God. She expresses her love and confusion in the musical’s best-known and most enduring song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, which became an enormous hit and was recorded by dozens of artists — most prominently, Helen Reddy, whose version was released almost simultaneously with the concept album’s appearance in the U.S. If Reddy stole Elliman’s thunder with her hit single, Elliman took it back again — and kept it for good — in the movie. Her heart-wrenching rendition is first among equals in the movie’s many high points, lovingly staged by Jewison and beautifully photographed in the dead of night by Douglas Slocombe.
 
The other cast member to go the distance from concept album to Broadway to Norman Jewison’s film was Barry Dennen as Pontius Pilate. (Dennen had, in fact, been responsible for Norman Jewison’s interest in Superstar in the first place. He had just been cast as Pilate when he left for Yugoslavia, where he was to play a small role in Jewison’s movie of Fiddler on the Roof; he took some Superstar demo tapes with him to study, and he asked for Jewison’s advice on playing Pilate. One listen to Dennen’s samples and Jewison contacted Universal back in the States to nail down the screen rights for him — this, mind you, long before the Broadway production, and before the album had even been recorded.) Dennen’s Pilate is a decent man and a conscientious judge, but he’s not immune to Roman arrogance, nor to the exasperated condescension to Rome’s subjects that comes with it.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar took in $10.8 million at the box office, turning a more-than-respectable profit on Universal’s $3.6 million investment (both amounts were far more money in 1973 than they sound like now). It has by now acquired the aura — if not of a great movie musical, as I consider it — at least of a classic. In 1973, however, it weathered a torrent of critical scorn such as few movies have had to withstand. I remember particularly Paul D. Zimmerman’s screed in Newsweek: “…one of the true fiascos of modern cinema…Lord, forgive them. They knew not what they were doing.” There was a fiasco on display here, but it wasn’t the movie, it was Zimmerman’s dunderheaded review. I might have written it myself, if I had never bothered to, you know, actually see the movie. To be fair, Zimmerman was only echoing the near-unanimous sentiments of his critical fraternity. It was as if critics all over, embarrassed at the hyperbolic praise heaped on the album two years earlier, when it was compared to Bach and Handel, had decided in some secret meeting to take it out on Jewison’s movie. (Time Magazine no doubt regretted that they had already used the snark-line “I Was a Teenage Jesus” on 1961’s King of Kings.) Even when a review was positive — and Hollis Alpert’s in the Saturday Review was the only one I ever found — it carried a snide, patronizing air of I-can’t-believe-I’m-expected-to-take-this-thing-seriously. The critical reception was so savage that I sent a telegram to my uncle in Muncie, Indiana:

DISREGARD REPEAT DISREGARD ALL REVIEWS DON’T MISS JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

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All these musings on Jesus Christ Superstar are prompted by an experience I had last Sunday, August 25. Ted Neeley came to Sacramento on the third stop (after Los Angeles and San Francisco) in a cross-country tour commemorating the picture’s 40th anniversary. He brought with him a pristine archival print from the Universal vault, and the audience that day heard Superstar‘s soundtrack as it was meant to be heard for the first time in years, maybe decades. (The audio mix on all the video transfers — laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray — is incorrect, the vocals too “hot” and instrumentals too “cold”.) Mr. Neeley — actually, I feel comfortable calling him Ted — met with audience members in the lobby before the screening, addressed us from the stage and fielded questions as the show was about to begin, and held genial court once again in the lobby afterwards. He chatted warmly with my friend Don (that’s Don on the left) and me for a good ten or 15 minutes, especially when he learned we were both actors, and that Don himself had played Pontius Pilate in a local production of the show. Like the movie itself, Ted Neeley has aged gracefully and could easily pass for 20 years younger than he is. Our visit with him was friendly and comfortable, a perfect way to top off the day’s reunion with one of my favorite movies.

As we were introduced, my first words to him were: “I have to thank you. I spent the entire summer of 1973 watching this movie in one of our local theaters here; I saw it 16 times in two months. I developed a huge crush on one of the dancers, but I never knew who she was until you identified her in your commentary on the DVD; it was Vera Biloshisky.” “Ahhh yes,” he said in that mellow Texas drawl that disappears only when he sings, “dear Vera. I just saw her yesterday. You weren’t alone in that; every guy on the set had a crush on Vera.” This is Vera dancing in the Simon the Zealot number (she’s visible, too, on the left in the midair shot of the female dancers a few pictures up); if you’ve seen Jesus Christ Superstar more than once I’ll wager you’ve noticed her yourself; she has an energy and vivacity that make her stand out even in that energetic, vivacious ensemble. (Ted Neeley’s own crush, by the way, went in a different direction. Just visible in the background between Vera’s outstretched limbs is Leeyan Granger. She and Ted met on the set; after shooting was finished they began dating, and she became — and remains — his wife.)
 
Here’s Vera again, cavorting with Josh Mostel’s King Herod on the shores of the Dead Sea. She’s unrecognizable behind those shades and under that platinum-blonde fright wig — at least I never recognized her, as much as I’ve seen the movie, until Ted pointed her out in a photo on my copy of the soundtrack LP. Vera Biloshisky, here’s a belated thank-you. You’ll never know, unless you’re reading this now, how you brightened my July and August of 1973. It was (for reasons I won’t go into here) an awkward time for me, and being able to watch you dancing in Jesus Christ Superstar helped get me through it.
 
 
 
Jesus Christ Superstar ends with yet another metaphor of breathtaking power, only this time it was entirely unplanned and unexpected. After the Crucifixion, after Jesus has given up the Ghost, the scene dissolves to the band of performers climbing back into the bus at dusk for the trip back to town. We see them mount the steps one by one — Barry Dennen, Josh Mostel, Larry Marshall (who plays Simon the Zealot), Bob Bingham and Kurt Yaghjian (the priests Caiaphas and Annas), dancers Jeff Hyslop and Robert LuPone, Yvonne Elliman, and finally Carl Anderson. Everyone except Ted Neeley. Anderson stands on the bus’s steps gazing at something in the distance behind us as the bus lurches away and lumbers down the hill back to the road. The picture dissolves again to what you see here: an empty cross silhouetted against a blood-red sunset.
 At this precise moment, something happened that nobody planned or even noticed. “We were shooting through a telephoto lens,” Ted Neeley remembered, “from a couple of miles away, looking into the setting sun. We didn’t even see it until later, when we were watching the dailies.” From out of nowhere, a figure appeared — it’s barely visible here at the bottom of the image, about one-quarter in from the left. On screen, the figure moves like a ghostly apparition from left to right across the dark part of the screen under the cross. It’s a shepherd leading his flock; we can just make out their woolly fleeces bobbing along at the bottom of the frame. A shepherd, leading his flock past an empty cross. And nobody knew who he was or how he got there. “Somebody Else,” says Ted Neeley, “was directing that day.”
 

Cinedrome Does Its Part

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A couple of years back, in my first post on the Debbie Reynolds Collection, I mentioned that my tentative plans to attend the auction, and maybe even bid on something, were torpedoed by a purchase I’d just made on eBay. That purchase was a 16mm kinescope of the live TV drama The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

For the benefit of those who don’t remember them (which is most people now), a brief explanation of “kinescope” is probably in order. In the days before the invention of videotape, a kinescope was the only way to preserve a television broadcast. There were certain technical refinements to the process — synchronizing the cathode ray scanner with the camera shutter, for example — but essentially it boiled down to photographing the image and recording the sound off a TV monitor. Videotape was in development all through the early 1950s, but was impractical for broadcast purposes until late in 1956, the year of The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

The drama was broadcast on the evening of Saturday, February 11, 1956 (the eve of Lincoln’s birthday) as the sixth episode of CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee. Top billed were Raymond Massey (who else?) as Lincoln and Lillian Gish as his wife Mary. But the largest role in the teleplay, and its driving performance, was John Wilkes Booth. In this publicity shot (it’s not a shot from the program) the actor playing Booth may look familiar. He should: it’s a young up-and-comer named Jack Lemmon.

Lemmon had been kicking around movies and live TV for several years, and just seven months earlier, in July 1955, he had premiered in his breakthrough performance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts. A little over five weeks after the Lincoln broadcast, Lemmon would win his first Oscar, as best supporting actor in Roberts. In a symmetrical coincidence, Lincoln‘s director, Delbert Mann, would also win an Oscar that night for directing Marty, 1955’s best picture.

I saw that broadcast of The Day Lincoln Was Shot; I was even aware of Jim Bishop’s bestselling nonfiction book, on which it was based (though I wouldn’t read it for several years yet). The night of the broadcast, I had already seen Mister Roberts, but being only seven years old, I had no inkling that the men who played the happy-go-lucky Pulver and the brooding, obsessive, angry Booth were one and the same. Even if I’d seen both as an adult, I doubt if I’d have made the connection; the two performances couldn’t be more different.

Having seen The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and remembering it vividly all these years, I never dreamed that I’d ever see it again, let alone own it, but here it was. Watching it again after 55 years, I must say I was bowled over. The adaptation (by Jean Holloway and Denis and Terry Sanders) is that rarity, both good drama and good history, correct in nearly every detail. The studio reconstruction of Ford’s Theatre alone, which then still languished unused and unrestored after 90 years, was a marvel of accuracy. (The 1956 broadcast was in color, but it was kinescoped only in black and white — a frustrating omission, but probably a blessing in disguise. If they had done it in color, they’d probably have used Eastman Color, the cheapest process, and it might well have faded to nothing by now.) And Jack Lemmon was — there’s no other word for it — simply brilliant.

The cast of Lincoln certainly lived up to Ford Star Jubilee‘s name: besides Massey, Gish and the new-minted star Lemmon, the broadcast was narrated by Charles Laughton. Others in the cast included Herbert Anderson (later the harried father in TV’s Dennis the Menace), Raymond Bailey (banker Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and William Schallert (later of Dobie Gillis and The Patty Duke Show, among hundreds of other credits) as Secretary of State William Seward’s son Frederick. (Schallert, by the way, is happily still with us, turning 91 earlier this month; a belated happy birthday and continued long life to him.)

At Cinevent this year in Columbus, I mentioned my kinescope of Lincoln to my friend Larry Smith, a nitrate specialist in the Film Preservation Section of the Library of Congress. (You can read more about Larry here.) Larry’s interest was piqued, particularly at the thought of a TV performance by Lillian Gish; such performances were comparatively rare, and surviving examples of them are even rarer. He asked me to e-mail him a reminder about it when we both got home.

So I did, and Larry did a little research on the subject. He came back with news which, while it didn’t entirely surprise me, still gave my heart a not-so-little flutter: it seems that I have what just might be the only surviving copy of the kinescope of that landmark broadcast. At the very least, I can say this: if there’s another copy of The Day Lincoln Was Shot out there, the owner has never bothered to bring it to the attention of the Library of Congress. Larry told me that his higher-ups had agreed that, because of the broadcast’s clear historical importance, the LOC should borrow my print for digital scanning and preservation.

I placed my 16mm print in the hands of FedEx that very day, and it’s now safely ensconced in the LOC’s facility in Culpeper, Virginia. The queue at the scanner is long, so it’ll no doubt be a while before I get it back, but naturally I don’t mind. Upon reflection, I do wish I had held onto it one more day and screened it so I could have a few screen shots to accompany this post — the dearth of images on the Internet lends credence to my suspicion that this is the only copy. But I don’t mind about that either. We all know that the cause of film preservation won’t wait, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to make this small contribution to it.
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Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2

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John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot! and Richard Roberts’s Smileage Guaranteed were the two brand-new scoops to be had at Cinevent this year (Showmen is still awaiting its official release date), but they weren’t the only relatively new books on sale there. Two others I picked up from collector James A. Gresham are shown here: Children of the Night (2007) and They’re Here Already!. The subtitles of the two books tell the story: each is a 200-plus-page collection of posters, lobby cards and pressbook covers, all reproduced in full color on high-quality glossy paper, with text and commentary confined to the opening pages of each chapter.
 
The chapter arrangements differ. In Children of the Night posters are grouped by subject matter; thus Chapter 1, “The Dracula Series” covers from Dracula (1931) to House of Dracula (’45); while “The Frankenstein Series” ranges from the 1931 original to Abbott and Costello Meet… (’48). There are chapters on Boris Karloff’s other movies, and Bela Lugosi’s, and the pictures they made together; horror movies of the silent era and the 1940s; and so on.  The book essentially cuts off in the late ’40s, when space- and/or atomic-age science fiction took over the task of exploiting audiences’ sublimated fears.
 
And that’s where They’re Here Already! picks up. This one takes things not subject by subject but year by year, from ’50 to ’59, with all the posters, half-sheets, inserts and lobby cards (both domestic and foreign) you could ever want to see for everything from Destination Moon (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (’51), The War of the Worlds (’53) and Forbidden Planet (’56) all the way down to Robot Monster (’53), The Killer Shrews (’59) and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (’58). 
 
The books do have their odd little quirks. The British sci-fi epic Things to Come (1936) is shuffled in with horror films of the ’30s, while Hitchcock’s Psycho, for Jim Gresham’s purposes anyhow, qualifies as 1950s science fiction.  Well, what the hell, I won’t quibble; both books are fun to browse through, and if the subtitle A Comprehensive Guide sounds like a bit of an overstatement, it sure ain’t by much. Some of the materials reproduced here are from Gresham’s private collection, while others were borrowed from other collectors and archives. Personally, I bought both books as potential sources of illustrations to use here at Cinedrome; you may wind up seeing parts of them in posts to come.

So much for the new stuff. Moving backward in the history of publishing about 85 years, I’ve always been a sucker for movie tie-in books. Even those 1950s and ’60s Signet paperbacks with their eight-page photo inserts (“Now! A Major Motion Picture!”). But especially the really old ones from the silent era, when movie tie-ins were a frontier as unexplored as the Wild West. My 1927 novelization of London After Midnight, for example; that one turned out to be a fun read in spite of me. (I’ll be running the annual reprint of my four-part synopsis next Halloween Season, but if you’re impatient you can find it here, here, here and here.)

I picked up two such Grosset and Dunlap motion picture editions from one dealer at Cinevent this year, both — against long odds — with their dust jackets reasonably intact. First, this novelization of the original 1923 The Ten Commandments, “a novel by Henry MacMahon from Jeanie Macpherson’s Story Produced by Cecil B. DeMille as the Celebrated Motion Picture…” Curiously enough, the cover reproduces a scene from the modern half of the picture, rather than the first half, which recounts the more spectacular story from the Book of Exodus. (Theodore Roberts as Moses adorns the spine of the book and — along with Charles de Roche’s Pharaoh, a cast of thousands, and a couple of pyramids — the back cover.) This one has an inscription on the flyleaf: “With a Merry Merry Xmas. To Mamie Masek From Sister Rose. 1928.” Judging from the handwriting, I’d guess that the sisters weren’t exactly young even then; wherever they are now, I hope their hearts can rest secure in the knowledge that Sister Rose’s Xmas gift has found a good home.

Then there was this one: Bardelys the Magnificent by Rafael Sabatini, “the Alexandre Dumas of Modern Fiction”. As to that comparison, personally, I’ve never quite managed to get into The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, but I sail through Sabatini’s books like a knife through soft butter. You may never have read him, but chances are you’re more familiar with his work than you think: he was also the author of Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Black Swan and Scaramouche, all of which became high-profile movies, some more than once. Probably his most famous — or notorious — quote is the opening sentence of his 1921 novel Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” In 1932, these words somehow found themselves inscribed over one of the doors of the newly completed Sterling Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale. By the time the university’s administration learned that the quote came not from some classic poet but from a mere swashbuckling bestseller, it was too late to do anything about it. (Evidently, Sabatini’s Scaramouche wasn’t the only one born with a gift of laughter.) When Rafael Sabatini died at 74 in 1950, his widow had the grace to have that sentence inscribed on his tombstone.

Bardelys the Magnificent, the third of Sabatini’s 31 novels, published in 1905, was filmed by MGM in 1926, directed by King Vidor and starring John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman, and this edition was published in conjuction with that. Bardelys (the film) was considered lost for over 70 years, one of a number of MGM pictures deliberately suppressed by the studio. For once, however, it wasn’t MGM’s fault. When they bought the rights to Sabatini’s book in 1926, the terms of the sale specified that it was only for ten years; after that the studio had to buy the rights again or destroy the negative and all prints. By 1936, a silent picture with a fallen and deceased star was of no commercial value to MGM, and they had nobody under contract to put into a remake, so into the incinerator it went. And there the matter stood until 2006, when a single nitrate print surfaced in a large collection of films purchased by Lobster Films of Paris. It was missing one reel and in poor condition, but was preserved and digitally restored by Lobster, with the missing material — a little under five minutes — replaced with production stills. This restoration crops up now and again on Turner Classic Movies and is available in a gorgeous DVD from Flicker Alley; also here from Amazon. Even after all these years, Sabatini is a great read, and you could do a lot worse than to dive into one of his elegant, broad-shouldered adventure-romances. If you do, you’ll find that Warner Bros.’ 1935 Captain Blood was almost page-for-page faithful to the book, but be prepared for a surprise if you pick up The Sea Hawk; by the time Warners and Errol Flynn filmed it in 1940, nothing but the title remained.
 

Which brings me to this. Warner Bros.’ 1940 Sea Hawk was the second picture of that title. The first was a 1924 silent from First National Pictures, directed by Frank Lloyd with Milton Sills, Enid Bennett, Lloyd Hughes and Wallace Beery. Unlike the Errol Flynn version, this one was quite faithful to the novel, telling the story of a nobleman of Elizabethan England (Sills) betrayed by his treacherous half-brother and sold into slavery in a Spanish galleon. He escapes, converts to Islam and, in time, becomes a dreaded pirate of the Barbary Coast: Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk. When Warner Bros. absorbed First National later in the 1920s, it acquired the rights to Sabatini’s novel, and 15 years later — First National evidently having driven a harder bargain than MGM did over Bardelys the Magnificent — they made it into a vehicle for Errol Flynn, changing everything but the title and the time period. (Captain Blood, by the way, was also filmed as a silent in 1924. This was produced by Vitagraph, another company acquired in 1925 by the burgeoning Warner Bros. enterprise. Thus did the rights to this other Sabatini novel devolve onto Warners, where they sat for ten years before being dusted off and — after a false start with Robert Donat — making Errol Flynn a star. The 1924 Blood, unfortunately, survives only in a truncated digest form barely a quarter of its original length. It reposes now at the Library of Congress, waiting hopefully for more pieces to be discovered.)

But back to The Sea Hawk. What you see here is the cover to the souvenir program of the earlier, more faithful picture. I picked this up at Cinevent too — collecting souvenir programs is a favorite hobby of mine. This one is smaller than the usual program, only 6×9 inches, but it’s well designed and informative. The three-color illustration on the cover yields to two colors within, but I have to commend the designers for the number of pictures and the amount of information they managed to include — including a complete synopsis of the story (no doubt secure in the belief that nobody would read it until after they’d seen the picture).

This version of The Sea Hawk, unlike Captain Blood, survives intact, and it’s available here from the Warner Archive. It must take a back seat, of course, to the 1940 version; it doesn’t have Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, or director Michael Curtiz. Most of all, needless to say, it doesn’t have Errol Flynn. For all that, it’s a lavish and vigorous production, the DVD sparkles, and Milton Sills, while he’s no Errol (who was?), is a good swashbuckling hero.

One of my favorite dealers at Cinevent — and I daresay I’m one of his favorite customers too — is Larry Newman of Philadelphia, who specializes in souvenir programs, like the one above for The Sea Hawk. I probably buy more individual items from him than I do from anybody else, and it’s a rare year when his table doesn’t hold at least a few surprises for me. This year it had a whopper: a major Hollywood picture from 1925 that I had absolutely never heard of.  Here it is: The Wanderer, a Biblical spectacle based on the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel According to St. Luke. It was adapted from a 1917 play by Maurice V. Samuel, which was apparently one of those touring productions that popped up in those days hoping to ride the coattails of the stage version of Ben-Hur (the Les Miserables of the 1900s and ‘teens). Judging from the programs (Larry also had a copy of the stage program, and I picked up that one too), both play and picture expanded greatly on the New Testament. Where St. Luke merely tells that the young man “wasted his substance with riotous living”, the movie gives us (if you’ll pardon the expression) chapter and verse. The picture also includes something Jesus neglected to mention when telling the story to his disciples: a climactic scene of our antihero barely escaping with his life while a righteous prophet and a rain of lightning bolts from God destroy the sinful city a la Sodom and Gomorrah.
 
The picture was directed by auteurist icon and colorful character Raoul Walsh, and it starred William Collins Jr. as the prodigal Jether (Collins, 23 at the time, had a busy career between 1916 and 1935; in fact, he’s in the silent Sea Hawk too). Others in the cast included Ernest Torrence, Greta Nissen, Wallace Beery, and as the prodigal’s forgiving father, none other than Tyrone Power. No, not that Tyrone Power; his father, Tyrone Power Senior, age 56 in 1925. Plus, in a dance-on bit at a bacchanalian orgy, 19-year-old Myrna Loy (not mentioned in the program, of course).
 
I couldn’t believe this picture had escaped my notice all these years. “Does it even survive?” I asked Larry; he didn’t know. (Answer: Yes, there’s a print in the UCLA Film Archive.) At least I wasn’t the only one to overlook it. It wasn’t even reviewed by Variety, and they reviewed everything. (I imagine Jesse Lasky had some words with Sime Silverman about that oversight.) It didn’t escape the notice of the New York Times, though; Mordaunt Hall reviewed it in the issue of August 20, 1925, the day after it opened at Manhattan’s Criterion Theatre. Mr. Hall allowed as how “[p]ictorially is is unquestioningly beautiful, and the players acquit themselves with distinction…” but he went on to say, “The parable in St. Luke [chapt.] xv is told in fewer than 500 words, and after seeing this effusion one wishes that the producers had been less imaginative.”

I bought some other programs as well: Lilac Time (’28) with Colleen Moore giving the performance of her career as a French mademoiselle, and an incredibly young Gary Cooper as a dashing aviator stationed on her father’s farm during the Great War. Sally (’29), the early musical with Broadway’s Marilyn Miller, which was shot in two-strip Technicolor but, except for one rediscovered musical number, survives only in black and white. I even found one for The Birth of a Nation — which by itself isn’t as rare as you might think; there are four for sale on eBay as I type this. This one, however, still has its onionskin outer cover with the floral pattern, which on most such programs seems to have been the first thing to disappear once whoever bought it got home from the theater.

But I’ll close with this one. Not because it’s a particularly good program or from a particularly good movie — neither is the case — but because it represents one of the sorrier episodes in 1950s Hollywood, and one that has a certain significance for me because it bears on my native state of Indiana.
 

Raintree County was the first and last novel of Ross Lockridge Jr. of Bloomington, Indiana (which happens to be 41 miles northeast of the town where I was born). It was published on January 5, 1948 by Houghton Mifflin and was chosen a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club. Almost exactly two months later, just as the novel was hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list, the 33-year-old Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of his Bloomington home; it was March 6, 1948 (which happened to be five days before I was born).

Why did he do it? At the time, some speculated that after the long effort to bring his 1,066-page novel to fruition, Lockridge was exhausted and depressed at the thought of how he would ever follow it up. My uncle once expressed the opinion that Lockridge had deliberately set out to write the Great American Novel — in fact, believed that he had — and was fatally disappointed when reviews, while positive and even occasionally rapturous, failed to acknowledge it as such. I think my uncle might have hit the nail close to the head. Reading Shade of the Raintree by the novelist’s son and biographer Larry Lockridge, one thing seems clear: it was little short of a miracle that this brilliant, troubled, unstable young man lived long enough to complete his huge book.

The setting of Raintree County is a fictitious county in rural Indiana, and (like James Joyce’s Ulysses) it takes place on a single day — July 4, 1892 — following its main character, 53-year-old John Wickliff Shawnessy, and his family through the events of the day. Throughout, there are flashbacks to the past, as long ago as 1844 and as recently as earlier that same year, presented non-chronologically as they spring to the memories of Shawnessy and the other characters. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, yet carefully structured saga that seeks to summarize wholly the American experience: both everyday life and great events, as well as the aspirations, lofty or squalid, of ordinary people, and the legends and inchoate yearnings that underlie their psyches and shared culture. The book won the “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Annual Novel Award” — actually just a publicity-savvy way of buying movie rights before publication, but it brought Lockridge $150,000. A tidy sum now, a not-so-small fortune in 1948.*

By the end of 1948, Raintree County had drifted off the bestseller lists and been aced out of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction by James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor. Financial difficulties and internal power struggles at MGM put any plans to film the novel on a far-back burner.

Until 1956, when the movie that goes with this program went into production. In his biography of his father, Larry Lockridge remembered attending the world premiere in Louisville, Kentucky with his mother, brothers and sister in October 1957 (on their own dime, uninvited by MGM): “Critics agree that the movie we then watched is among the world’s worst.” This is overly harsh; the worst you can say about Raintree County — as a movie, considered by itself — is that it’s resolutely mediocre. That’s also the best you can say for it.

But that’s as a movie, considered by itself. As an adaptation of Ross Lockridge’s novel, however, there’s nothing bad enough to say about it. It’s as thorough a mangling as any novel ever got at the hands of Hollywood, and that’s saying something. Writer Millard Kaufman, a man of meager experience with little more than John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock and a couple of UPA cartoons under his belt, was completely flummoxed by a book that would have challenged more talented hands than his. His solution was to jettison the flashback structure, narrow the time frame to 1859-65, and turn it into a would-be Gone With the Wind, with Elizabeth Taylor as a Scarlett O’Hara manqué. Taylor, to her credit, did her best and snagged the first of four consecutive Oscar nominations. But as John Shawnessy, Montgomery Clift (who was probably miscast in the first place) was in a near-fatal auto accident that held up production for two months while his shattered face was reconstructed, and the visible on-screen difference between his pre- and post-accident performances is a grisly thing to see.

Be that as it may, Raintree County the novel was as mutilated on purpose as Montgomery Clift had been by accident. The director was Edward Dmytryk, a workhorse as relentlessly mediocre as the Raintree County movie itself. Dmytryk later admitted — nay, boasted — that he himself had never read the book (as if we needed him to tell us that). Like The Sea Beast (Cinevent, Day 2), Raintree County is the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. My nephew, a college literature major who read the book at my suggestion, called it “definitely the greatest novel I never heard of” — and shook his head in dismay at what MGM did to it.

Imagine if David Selznick had served Margaret Mitchell as poorly as producer David Lewis, Millard Kaufman, Edward Dmytryk et al. served the dead-and-buried Ross Lockridge Jr.; would anybody ever have bothered to get Gone With the Wind right? Of course not. Nobody will ever bother with Raintree County either. And that’s just too damn bad.

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 *POSTSCRIPT: John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows informs me that only five MGM Novel Awards were ever given, and only two were ever filmed: Raintree County and the first winner, Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Street (awarded 1944, filmed 1947). The other winners: Before the Sun Goes Down by Elizabeth Metzger Howard in 1945; Return to Night by Mary Renault in 1946; and in 1947 a special award in addition to Raintree County‘s, to About Lyddy Thomas by Maritta M. Wolff. In May ’48 MGM discontinued the award as a belt-tightening measure. While it lasted, according to Variety, the award had constituted “the heaviest literary award in history.”
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After a Brief Intermission…

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I haven’t forgotten that I promised a Part 2 to my post “Browsing the Cinevent Library”. Unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with some computer issues lately that have put more than a little crimp in my never-lightning-swift pace, including losing my image-editing software of choice — which, careless as I often am in such things, I can’t remember the name of and hence can’t find again to reinstall. I’m working to resolve all this as fast as I can (real life does have a way of interfering, doesn’t it?), and will get back to the subject at hand as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, here are a few afterthoughts about another of the pictures screened at Cinevent this year: Cry of the Werewolf (1944), a Columbia B-picture that took the screen in Columbus, appropriately enough, at midnight on Saturday, Day 2. This was the first directorial effort of Henry Levin, who would go on to a career not without its pleasant touches here and there: Mr. Scoutmaster, Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, Where the Boys Are. Unfortunately, Cry of the Werewolf isn’t one of them. But it’s not a total washout either. In the title role, believe it or not, is 19-year-old Nina Foch as a gypsy princess struggling with an ancestral lycanthropic curse. It’s Nina Foch all right, but it wasn’t easy to recognize her; in this she’s softer, less hard-edged and (no pun intended) cougar-tough than she would appear later in movies like An American in Paris (can you believe she’s only 27 in that one?), Executive Suite and Spartacus.

Beyond that rather interesting surprise, though, Werewolf is a pretty flaccid affair.  It’s clear that the boys in Columbia’s B unit — producer Wallace MacDonald, writers Griffin Jay and Charles O’Neal, et al. — took a look at what Val Lewton was doing over at RKO with pictures like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and thought, “Hey, we can do that!” Well, no. That sort of atmospheric chiller, it turns out, is not as easy as Lewton and Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson and Robert Wise made it look. It’s not as simple as sending a German shepherd sauntering through a darkened set and telling the audience it’s a wolf. Still, at 63 minutes, Cry of the Werewolf wasn’t long enough to waste my time; on the contrary, it demonstrated by negative example just how efficient and effective Val Lewton’s movies really were. Since “this utterly suspenseless film” (NY Times, 8/12/44) will probably never come out on video, it’s thanks to festivals like Cinevent that we’re able to make that kind of compare-and-contrast.

Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 1

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The main reason my luggage is so heavy when I leave Columbus after Cinevent every year is the number of books I buy there. Lobby cards, stills, sheet music, even DVDs can weigh next to nothing, but books — that’s a whole other kettle of bound pages. There are books old and new on offer there, and two of the new ones I picked up this year should find a place on any well-stocked cinema bookshelf.

My friend John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!: Movies as Merchandise in Golden Era Hollywood all but beggars description. John is the proprietor and sole contributor to Greenbriar Picture Shows, the premier classic movie blog — this in a field simply chockablock with first-rate blogs. If you haven’t bookmarked John’s blog, you should, before you read another word of this one.
 
John has a particularly keen interest in the advertising and promotion end of things — that is, as it was practiced on a theater-by-theater basis back in the days before coordinated multimedia campaigns for movies opening simultaneously on 6,000 screens all over the nation. That’s the focus of Showmen, Sell It Hot!, many of its chapters drawn from — and expanding upon — posts he’s made on the subject over the seven years Greenbriar’s been going. It’s especially fascinating to see how small-town theater owners used to ballyhoo their coming attractions; urban exhibitors could wait perhaps a week for word of mouth to kick in, but it was a whole different game for houses where the bill changed every two or three days. At that level, promotion was very much a seat-of-the-pants operation.
 
Not that the book neglects the major urban and studio-driven campaigns. There are also chapters here on the selling of the sensational new pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio (at the time, it was a toss-up which word in the title was more exotic, “Rio” or “flying”); the incredibly long “legs” of 1939’s Jesse James with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott; the Marx Brothers’ second movie career at MGM, beginning with A Night at the Opera; the unexpected success of King Kong in its 1956 reissue; MGM’s conundrum over what to do with Saratoga (’37) when Jean Harlow died during production; likewise Warner Bros.’ scramble to sell James Dean’s posthumous pictures; the promotional campaigns for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Bonnie and Clyde; and more.
 
Written in John’s breezy vernacular style reminiscent of both Variety and Time Magazine in the 1930s, Showmen is a mine of amazing information. John makes the surprising — yet entirely logical — point that in the 1930s, installing air conditioning could do more for a theater’s bottom line than CinemaScope, 3-D or stereophonic sound 20 years later (“A lot of people went to the movies just to cool off, never mind what was playing.”). And he ferrets out eyebrow-raising information on individual pictures’ budgets and box office take. Did you know that the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup cost Paramount more than MGM spent on Grand Hotel, or RKO on King Kong? That the Brothers’ biggest box office hit was A Night in Casablanca (hardly their best)? I didn’t, but John’s got the figures here (heaven only knows where he finds them).
 

The publisher, GoodKnight Books, has given Showmen a production to make any author proud, and other authors envious. There are hundreds of illustrations — many (and probably all) from the Greenbriar site and John’s personal collection — all of them reproduced exactly as they are. If they’re black-and-white or sepia, one- two- or full-color, then that’s how they appear here — and thanks to editor and designer Mary Matzen and the super-rich production techniques at GoodKnight, they’re sharper and clearer than they ever were when John ran them at the Greenbriar site. Click here to learn how to get your copy of Showmen, Sell It Hot! with a pre-release discount. (On a side note, two other GoodKnight Books your shelf should make room for, if they’re not there already: Errol Flynn Slept Here: The Flynns, the Hamblens, Rick Nelson and the Most Notorious House in Hollywood and Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood.)

It’s always an exaggeration to say somebody knows “everything there is to know” about a subject, but when the somebody is Richard M. Roberts and the subject is Hollywood comedy, it’s really not all that exaggerated. For years now Richard has been one of the go-to guys for Cinevent’s program notes, especially when it comes to 1920s and ’30s comedy: the Laurel and Hardy shorts sprinkled here and there all weekend, the annual tradition of spotlighting three Charley Chase shorts, and so on.  He performs similar service for Slapsticon, the annual festival of silent-to-early-sound comedy that’s coming up on its 11th installment at the end of June (at a new venue on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington).

So if Richard does not know everything there is to know on the subject, it’s not for want of trying to find out. And he’ll probably never give up. Which is good news for us, because his new book — the first in a proposed trilogy — makes us the beneficiaries of his efforts (and those of co-researchers Robert Farr and Joe Moore). Here comes the title (brace yourself, it’s a long one): Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter: Musings on the Comedy Film Industry 1910-1945, Vol. One: Hal Roach.

As Scott Eyman points out in his “Big-Time Celebrity Intro” (Richard’s title, no doubt), it’s simply insane that Hal Roach managed to live a hundred years without anyone ever writing a comprehensive biography. After all, here was the man who gave us Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and Harold Lloyd; jump-started the careers of directors like Leo McCarey and George Stevens; and as Scott puts it, “more or less invented situation comedy as we know it”. Hal Roach has been gone 20 years now, and that biography still hasn’t turned up. Smileage Guaranteed may be as close as we’re likely to get. It’s not a biography, but it’s definitely comprehensive: a player-by-player, picture-by-picture, year-by-year survey and appraisal of the output of the Hal Roach Studios, the “Lot of Fun”.

Richard spends relatively little time on Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd or the Our Gang series; they’ve been amply covered elsewhere. Instead, the profusely illustrated Smileage Guaranteed concentrates on other performers on the Roach lot — Snub Pollard; Will Rogers; Max Davidson; the Parrott brothers, Paul and Charles (the latter of whom began as Roach’s ace director, then moved in front of the camera to gain stardom as Charley Chase); Harry Langdon at the beginning of his long career decline; Mabel Normand at the sad end of hers; and on and on. Not all of Roach’s brainstorms were as felicitous as Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang, and Richard covers the misfires as well — the Taxi Boys, for example, and the bizarre clown Toto (ne Armando Novello).

Fully 188 pages of the book’s 502 are devoted to an exhaustive filmography of every title Hal Roach produced (over 1,000 of them), followed by further filmographies for two of Roach’s major (albeit secondary) stars, Charles Parrott (aka Chase) and the Jewish comic Max Davidson.

All in all, Smileage Guaranteed could well warrant another subtitle to go with all those it already has: More Than You Ever Imagined There Was to Know About Hal Roach. Written in Richard’s wry conversational style, it is, like Roach’s studio, a lot of fun. And there are two more volumes to come.

These two tomes were my major acquisitions at Cinevent this year; between the two of them they took up three pounds and 234 cubic inches of my luggage. I’ll talk about some of the others next time.

Cinevent 45

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I’m home from Columbus, Ohio and more or less decompressed from spending four days at Cinevent, so I think I’m ready to give a quick rundown of the highlights I saw there. The Midwest’s venerable Classic Film Convention is always an embarrassment of riches, some of them quite obscure. It’s hard not to feel movie after movie passing in a sort of blur. Still, some stand out.

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Day 1 – Friday

Any day that includes a screening of Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen is bound to be dominated by that delirious Orientalist melodrama. The picture was chosen to open the Radio City Music Hall in 1933, but it performed so poorly that Music Hall management yanked it halfway through its contracted two-week run. The fervid theme of interracial sexual attraction packs a punch even today, even with the “Chinese” warlord played by Scandinavian Nils Asther, and it made ’em positively squirm 80 years ago — those who showed up at all. Barbara Stanwyck played the naive American missionary in the thrall of Asther’s General Yen (that picture on the poster doesn’t look much like her, does it?), but it’s the all-but-forgotten Asther who dominates the picture, in a performance of grace, intelligence and dignity that (like Luise Rainer’s O-Lan in The Good Earth four years later) wins over all but the most rigidly PC viewers today.

Other highlights of the day (for me, at least):  

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (’53), the Dr. Seuss fantasy that, in its way, was just as delirious as General Yen — and just as big a flop. (As film historian and biographer Scott Eyman said as we discussed the picture over breakfast that morning, “Yeah, [producer] Stanley Kramer lost a lot of money for Columbia.”) Still, Dr. T has found its audience over the last 60 years (though too late to do Columbia any good), and I’ve always had a soft spot for it. I still laugh out loud when, after the “whammy duel” between Peter Lind Hayes and Hans Conried, the two men collapse exhausted into each other’s arms: Conried: “Where did you study??” Hayes: “I just picked it up.”

The 1932 Fox western The Golden West, with an epic Zane Grey story that strained at the picture’s modest 74-minute running time, told the saga of two generations of star-crossed lovers, with George O’Brien playing the male half in both generations (and with an ultimately happy ending). This one featured an unusual supporting character: an Irish-Jewish peddler named Dennis Epstein (played by Bert Hanlon). There was also a buffalo stampede that was a real pip — thanks to the generous insertion of stock footage from The Iron Horse, The Big Trail and other Fox westerns.

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Day 2 – Saturday

 
Saturday’s headliner looked at first to be the 1926 silent The Sea Beast, even though it’s exactly the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. The Sea Beast was ostensibly an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which by the 1920s was finally coming into its own as a pinnacle of American literature. But no pinnacle is so high that somebody can’t be knocked off of it, and that’s what writers Bess Meredyth and Rupert Hughes proceeded to do, supplying Melville with all the things he neglected to write back in 1851. Capt. Ahab’s last name for example: they decided it was Ceeley. And what’s a man without a woman, right? So they gave their Ahab (John Barrymore) a sweetheart named Esther, who by a remarkable coincidence was played by Barrymore’s real-life squeeze (and future ex-wife) Dolores Costello. Then, to add the dramatic conflict that was missing in all that business about the White Whale, they invented Derek Ceeley (George O’Hara), Ahab’s brother and rival for Esther’s affections. The result was, as Richard M. Roberts succinctly put it in his Cinevent program notes, “a REALLY Stupid movie.” Having seen the later (1930) talkie remake Moby Dick (also starring Barrymore, and where the title was the only shred of Melville to be restored), I thought I’d give this one a look for the sake of completeness. Alas, I wasn’t man enough. I got only as far as Ahab’s first run-in with Moby Dick and the line (in an intertitle, of course) “My leg! My leg! He tore it off!” — and decided I simply didn’t need to see any more. The Sea Beast and its 1930 remake may well represent the rock-bottom worst of Hollywood in general, and of Warner Bros. in particular: They got two chances to have John Barrymore, the greatest actor of his age, play Melville’s titanic Capt. Ahab — and they blew it both times. (To be fair, The Sea Beast was a box-office hit, whereas when Warners and director John Huston tried to do right by Melville 30 years later, that version of Moby Dick flopped. So you have to blame the audience as much as Hollywood or Warner Bros.) 
 

Upstaging The Sea Beast, and just about everything else shown at Cinevent this year, was a real discovery, an absolute bolt out of nowhere, a picture almost nobody had ever heard of. It was The Canadian (1926), directed by none other than William Beaudine. Yes, the notorious “One-Shot” Beaudine, who cranked out some 368 features, shorts and TV episodes over his 53-year career — including the sexploitation “documentary” Mom and Dad (’45) and, towards the end of his run, the camp titles Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (both ’66). But back in the ’20s, Beaudine was a director to reckon with, and The Canadian shows why. It’s a simple story: Young Englishwoman Nora Marsh (Mona Palma) is left penniless at the death of the aunt she’s been living with, and has no choice but to emigrate to Canada, where her brother is a struggling farmer on the frontier of western Ontario. Pampered, stuck-up and generally useless, Nora clashes with her brother’s no-nonsense wife, until at length the wife lays down an either-she-goes-or-I-go ultimatum. Nora impulsively marries Frank Taylor, a neighboring farmer (Thomas Meighan), and the rest of the picture tells how this prissy little snob learns to carry her weight in her new household, where she and her stranger/husband slowly grow to love each other.

Based on Somerset Maugham’s play The Land of Promise, The Canadian was actually a remake; it was first filmed in 1917 under Maugham’s original title, with Thomas Meighan playing the same role (opposite Billie Burke). By 1926, Meighan was a well-established and popular star, billed above the title (and with the title changed to give him the title role), and he’s certainly good in The Canadian. 
 
But the picture belongs entirely to Mona Palma as Nora (shown here with Meighan’s Frank early in their hasty marriage). She gives one of the most remarkable performances of the entire silent era — subtle, sensitive and finely tuned; her face is as immobile as Buster Keaton’s, and yet (as with Keaton) you always know exactly what she’s thinking. Frankly, for much of the first half of the picture, those thoughts aren’t pleasant, and Nora Marsh isn’t very sympathetic; as she gradually grows up and shoulders the responsibilities of her new hardscrabble life — as Nora Marsh becomes Nora Taylor — she wins our sympathy just as she wins over the other characters in the picture. It’s simply an amazing performance. Alas, it’s virtually all we have of Mona Palma. She made only seven pictures in her four-year career (three under her real name, Mimi Palmieri). The Canadian was her big break and first lead, but she made only one more picture (Cabaret, 1927) before retiring from the screen at age 29. She lived to the ripe old age of 91 but never made another movie.

 

The Canadian survives almost by accident, according to Richard Roberts’s program notes. Paramount’s nitrate print was donated in 1969 to the fledgling UCLA Film Archive, who refused it because it was a silent; it went instead to the American Film Institute, who preserved it. The AFI screened it at the L.A. County Museum of Art in February 1970 as part of its “Rediscovering American Cinema” program. The guest of honor was director Beaudine, seeing the picture for the first time ever. At the thunderous standing ovation afterward, Roberts tells us, the old man wiped away a tear. “I’m very surprised. I was quite a good director once.” A month later, William Beaudine was dead. (I wonder if anybody thought to drive up to Oxnard, Calif. and invite 72-year-old Mrs. Mimi P. Cooper, the former Mona Palma, to the screening as well. Evidently not.)
 

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Day 3 – Sunday

 
 

By Sunday, things are generally beginning to wind down at Cinevent; this year, certainly, The Canadian cast a shadow that the rest of the film program was hard-pressed to live up to. There were a couple of high-profile silents on view this day. 

First was The Nut (1921), Douglas Fairbanks’s last modern-dress comedy before devoting himself entirely to the costume swashbucklers that began with The Mark of Zorro (’20), and for which he’s best remembered today. The Nut was…well, if somebody asked me what was the big deal about Doug Fairbanks, this isn’t the picture I’d refer them to to find out. The Obnoxious Schmuck would be a better title, I think, as Doug plays an overbearing inventor whose every effort to win the heart of his beloved backfires in spectacular and embarrassing fashion. The program notes called the picture “episodic”; I’d call it “monotonous”, with the irrepressible Doug’s character decidedly off-putting.
 
Then there was Stella Maris (1918), one of Mary Pickford’s biggest successes. She plays a dual role: as the title character, a cheerfully sheltered and pampered heiress confined to a wheelchair by some mysterious unnamed disability; and as Unity Blake, a pitifully mistreated orphan whose harsh life contrasts sharply with that of the silver-spooned Stella. It’s a very well-made picture and Pickford is excellent in it, plus there are some first-rate effects when both her characters appear on screen together. But the story itself, from a 1913 novel by William J. Locke, is a specimen of the kind of sickly Victorian melodrama that was going out of fashion even then, and that only a star of Pickford’s caliber could pull off. 
 
Probably the highlight of the day — and certainly the most fun — was Hold That Co-ed, a 1938 musical with John Barrymore as a Huey Long-ish governor running for the U.S. Senate while simultaneously (and corruptly) trying to wangle a national championship for his pet college football team. Barrymore is a full-throated hoot, the songs are pleasant, and the supporting cast (George Murphy, Marjorie Weaver, Joan Davis, Jack Haley, George Barbier) delightful.
 
Other memorable Sunday titles: Nazi Agent (’42), with Conrad Veidt (Casablanca‘s Major Strasser) as a naturalized German-American taking the place of his Nazi spy identical twin brother; The Man Who Lost Himself (’41), another lookalikes-switch-identities drama, this time with Brian Aherne replacing his double, the tycoon husband of Kay Francis; and The Disciple (’15), one of William S. Hart’s early westerns, more a strong domestic drama than shoot-’em-up, with Hart a frontier parson determined to clean up a sinful town, even as his wife succumbs to local temptations.
 

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Day 4 – Monday

 
And so we come to the last day — or half-day, really. As usual, most of the dealers have packed up and left, as has a large percentage of the attendees. Still, there are pleasures to be had for those (like me) who choose to stay to the bittersweet end. I think my favorite was The House of Fear (1939) — not to be confused with the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes picture with the same title. This one is a niftly little mystery with police detective William Gargan posing as a theater producer to crack a year-old cold case in which an actor was murdered onstage during his opening night performance. Other titles on Monday were The Social Secretary (’16), a silent romantic comedy with Norma Talmadge at her most charming; and Henry Aldrich, Editor (’42), in which our Andy Hardy/Archie clone hero (Jimmy Lydon) tries to run his school newspaper, only to get in hot water over an arson investigation. These Aldrich comedies have been running for a couple of years now at Cinevent, and they’re always pleasant, well-made comedies. This one, according to the program notes, is widely considered the best of the series, and I’m not surprised.
 
The movies are only part of the fun at Cinevent, of course. There are also the dealers’ rooms, where you can find a vast array of items for sale — film, video, books, stills, posters, lobby cards, magazines, sheet music, souvenir programs and other memorabilia. As always, I stocked up on much of this — and, as always, I didn’t realize how much I’d bought until I had to pack it all up to come home. I get quite a bit of exercise dragging my luggage through airport security and heaving it up into overhead compartments.
 
Then there are the people themselves, who have become good friends, a cozy community united by their shared love of classic Hollywood. Two such are John McElwee (left) of Greenbriar Picture Shows and Richard M. Roberts. Both are major contributors to Cinevent’s program notes, and both were there this year selling their recently published books: John’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!: Movies as Merchandise in Golden Era Hollywood; and Richard’s Past Humor, Present Laughter: Musings on the Comedy Film Industry 1910-1945, Vol. One: Hal Roach. I’ll have more to say about both books next time.
 

Films of Henry Hathaway: Brigham Young (1940)

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I now return to my too-long-dormant series commemorating the movies of Henry Hathaway, my personal nominee for the most neglected and underrated director of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
 
But this post is more than that. It’s also Cinedrome’s contribution to The Mary Astor Blogathon, co-hosted by my Classic Movie Blog Association colleagues Dorian of Tales of the Easily Distracted and Ruth of Silver Screenings. Click on the first link in this paragraph for a list of other entries in the blogathon, and on the other two links for a more general entry into Dorian and Ruth’s excellent blogs — a lot of great stuff there! (This blogathon, by the way, celebrates the 107th anniversary of Ms. Astor’s birth, born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke on May 3, 1906.)

 

Mary Astor was an actress of remarkable versatility, which she demonstrated time and again in the course of her 43-year screen career. That point is amply illustrated by this image for the blogathon, since nothing could be more different from the Mary Astor you see here than the one you’ll see in the movie I’ve chosen for the subject of this post…

 

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“Darryl,” Henry Hathaway said when Darryl F. Zanuck borrowed him from Paramount to direct Brigham Young, “the two dullest things in the whole world are a wagon train and religion. Now you take them and put them together.”

“This man Brigham Young,” Zanuck replied, “is more important than the story.”

Zanuck first became interested in filming the story of the “Mormon Moses” in 1938, at the suggestion of 20th Century Fox staff writer Eleanor Harris and with the encouragement of novelist Louis Bromfield, whom Zanuck hired to write a screen story for another Fox staffer, Lamar Trotti, to turn into a script.

(A side note on Louis Bromfield: In 1940 he was one of the most famous writers in America, considered the peer of Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald; notice that he receives authorial pride of place on the title card for Brigham Young, in type even larger than that for Zanuck himself. Nearly all of his 30-plus books were bestsellers, and he won a 1927 Pulitzer Prize for his third novel, Early Autumn. In his day he was a prime example of the Literary Man as Celebrity: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married at his Ohio farm in 1945. Alas, when he died in 1956 it was almost as if every one of his readers had died with him, and he is largely — and unfairly — forgotten today. A number of his books were made into memorable movies, and I may be posting on some of them in time to come.)

Although the title of the picture was Brigham Young, top billing went to Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell as two fictitious characters created by Bromfield and Trotti. Power was cast as Jonathan Kent, a young non-Mormon “outsider” who ends up scouting for Brigham Young and his followers on their trek west, while Darnell was to play Zina Webb, a Mormon girl with whom he falls in love.

Originally slated to direct Brigham Young was Fox contract director Henry King, the studio’s specialist in historical pictures and atmospheric Americana. King had already directed such Fox pictures as State Fair (1933), Ramona and Lloyds of London (both ’36), In Old Chicago (’37), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (’38), and Jesse James and Stanley and Livingstone (both ’39). (Several of those had starred Tyrone Power, although Power had yet to be cast in Brigham Young.) It seemed a natural fit, but for some reason the deal with King fell through. James D’Arc, in his commentary on the Brigham Young DVD, says that he could find no documentation in the Fox archives explaining this. I think it’s just possible — and I hasten to emphasize that this is the purest speculation on my part — that King, a Catholic, was uncomfortable with the Mormon story. I have absolutely no evidence for this, but it strikes me as the sort of thing that wouldn’t necessarily be committed to paper.

In any case, whatever the reason, in January 1940 Zanuck arranged to borrow Henry Hathaway from Paramount to direct the picture. That was when Hathaway made the remark that opens this post; it was also when Hathaway suggested changing the religious orientation of the two star characters: make Jonathan Kent the Mormon and Zina Webb the outsider. Zanuck agreed, and Hathaway (at his own expense) brought in Grover Jones, who had worked with him on Lives of a Bengal Lancer (’35) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (’36), among others, to write the change into the script. (Lamar Trotti, Hathaway later said, was incensed, and didn’t speak to the director for the rest of his life.)

For the all-important role of Brigham Young himself, Zanuck waffled. He considered Spencer Tracy, Don Ameche, Walter Huston, Albert Dekker, even Clark Gable (assuming he could be borrowed from MGM). But all, it seemed to Zanuck, had too-well-established screen personae. Zanuck even halted pre-production while he wrestled with the question. In the end, he went out on a limb, casting Dean Jagger, who had been rattling around Hollywood as a freelance actor since 1929 without making much of an impression. As this dual portrait shows (that’s the real Brigham, circa 1850, on the left), Jagger’s resemblance to Young was striking. Serving as technical advisor on the picture was 79-year-old George Pyper, a Salt Lake City theater buff and manager of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As a young man, Pyper had known Brigham Young personally (just think about that for a moment), and he had this to say in 1940: “Besides resembling him in appearance, there’s also a striking similarity to voice. I was only 17 when Brigham Young died, but I had known him well. Mr. Jagger even has some of Brigham’s mannerisms and his walk.”
 
 
 
 
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was played by Vincent Price, then in the third year of his movie career (Brigham Young was only the eighth of his 199 film and TV credits). The role was merely a supporting one — almost a cameo, considering the major star Price would become — since it was Smith’s murder by a lynch mob on June 27, 1844 that propelled Brigham Young to leadership of the Mormon Church. Hathaway later remembered that he insisted on Price for the role: “He seemed just right — so ethereal.” In a 1972 letter to James D’Arc, Price wrote: “I think one interesting sidelight was the wonderful direction of Henry Hathaway — how he avoided any ‘religious’ feeling and made it a believable story of strong men and women fighting for their faith. He was particularly vehement on this score with the part of Joseph. There was to be no hint of the standard Christ image — rather he felt Joseph was the interpreter of God’s word and as such should not wear a halo.”
 
A fictitious character was Angus Duncan, played by Brian Donlevy (shown here on the right with Frank Thomas as Hubert Crum, also fictitious; Donlevy was even considered — ever so briefly, and probably not seriously — for the part of Brigham). In Trotti’s script, Duncan rivals Brigham Young for leadership in the wake of Joseph Smith’s murder. In fact, Young had no serious rival in the eyes of most of Smith’s followers, although a few men siphoned off some believers into splinter sects of their own. Angus Duncan is the voice of dissent within the Mormon ranks, at first — while Smith is still alive — advocating for craven surrender in the face of the Mormon Church’s frontier persecutors. When Duncan stands in council and whimpers “Just give them whatever they want so we can have peace!”, audiences of 1940 were clearly expected to remember Neville Chamberlain on the London tarmac after surrendering to Adolf Hitler at Munich. Later, as Brigham Young leads the Latter-day Saints on their westward exodus, Duncan becomes a 19th century American version of the Old Testament figure of Dathan, who rebelled against Moses (the Edward G. Robinson role in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments). Even the names are similar: Duncan; Dathan. Duncan is forever second-guessing and carping at Brigham (“I told you what would happen if we settled in this valley, but you wouldn’t listen to me! You ran off with a false prophet!”). At one point on the trail, he even hears talk from an eastbound traveler about gold in California (an anachronism; gold wasn’t discovered till more than a year after it happens in the movie), Duncan then passes the gossip off as a revelation from God, hoping to lead the Mormons astray — in a real sense, offering them a Golden Calf (an analogy the script makes explicit).
 
Mary Astor played Mary Ann Young, Brigham’s senior wife. It was a tricky assignment, because of course Mary Ann wasn’t the only one. (In fact, on the right in this picture is Jean Rogers as Clara, Wife No. 2.) Long before 1940, the Mormons had renounced polygamy, but it was still one of the main things people associated with the early church, and Brigham Young handled the subject gingerly. An anti-Mormon yahoo makes a crude joke about “50 wives”. When, on their westward migration, the Mormons stop at Fort Bridger, Brigham has a conversation with the famous scout Jim Bridger, who asks, “Say, how many…” Brigham cuts him off: “Twelve.” And the conversation quickly switches to other things. Later, in a fireside chat with Mary Ann, Brigham praises her: “Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without you. Always the same, never complaining, never jealous of the others…” Others? An inattentive viewer (which I certainly was when I first saw Brigham Young as a child) would think Mary Ann was Brigham’s only wife. Jean Rogers gets screen credit but speaks hardly a line of dialogue, and there are occasional shots of other young women riding in or walking alongside the Young wagon, but in terms of the dramatic action of the movie, Mary Ann speaks and acts for them all. Here’s James D’Arc in his DVD commentary:
 
“As Mary Ann, [Astor] is pivotal in bolstering Brigham in his doubts, in the midst of his almost unbearable responsibility. Hers is a strong presence, decisive, practical and unsentimental. She prays that God will talk to him, even as she encourages Brigham with her love and support.”
 

The only other mention of polygamy — and in fact the only sustained one — comes in two later scenes (90 min. into the 112 min. picture). First, Jonathan Kent proposes marriage to Zina Webb, and she scornfully wonders how many more he’s going to ask, and how he plans to go about it: “Just imagine, 30 wives combing your beard!” This scene was obviously written by Grover Jones, since in Trotti’s original script it was Zina and not Jonathan who was the Mormon (how the proposal would have been treated if Hathaway hadn’t suggested the change is anybody’s guess).
 
Immediately after, there’s a scene between Jonathan and Porter Rockwell (a historical figure played by John Carradine) where the two humorously discuss the possible population boom under plural marriage, Rockwell saying, “I’m aimin’ to do my share.” And with that, the subject is closed for the remainder of the movie.
 
Other events in early Mormon history were treated more fully and dramatically. The picture begins with a nightrider raid on the Kent homestead during a party. Jonathan’s father is beaten to death, and even Zina’s father is shot dead — even though he’s not a Mormon himself, just somebody being friendly with the wrong people at the wrong time. This and later scenes of the persecution of Mormons had clear parallels — which Trotti’s script underscored — in Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. The Holocaust was still in the future, but pogroms like Kristallnacht were already on record; Zanuck even referred to raids like this in 1840s Ohio, Missouri and Illinois as “pogroms”.
 

In the movie, Joseph Smith is tried and convicted of treason. The trial is fictional; actually, Smith was awaiting trial when he was murdered. But it dramatizes the rabid anti-Mormon sentiment of the time in the raving denunciations of the prosecutor (Marc Lawrence) and the unhesitating “guilty” verdict of the jury. It also allows Brigham Young to address the court, describing his first meeting with Joseph Smith (shown in flashback) and delivering a ringing endorsement of freedom of religion: “You can’t convict Joseph Smith just because he happens to believe something you don’t believe. You can’t go against everything your ancestors fought and died for. And if you do, your names, not Joseph Smith’s, will go down in history as traitors. They’ll stink in the records, and be a shameful thing on the tongues of your children.” (In fact, during the events that led up to Smith’s killing, Young was in Massachusetts spreading the word and recruiting converts.) After the trial, a resigned Smith implicitly transfers care of his flock to Young — “I want you to stay and take care of my people.” — before being led off with his brother Hyrum (Stanley Andrews, the “Old Ranger” of TV’s Death Valley Days). Later, the mob murder of Hyrum and Joseph is shown pretty much as it happened that night in Carthage, Ill.

 
The next great dramatic set piece in Brigham Young is the exodus from Nauvoo, Ill. in the face of mounting hostility. It also occasions the first open conflict between Brigham and Angus Duncan. Like Moses in the Book of Exodus, Brigham prevails, and the Mormons light out on their trek by crossing the ice of the frozen Mississippi. Again, dramatic license is taken. The Mormons set out over a period of weeks in February 1846, not in a single night, and the Mississippi, though filled with ice, wasn’t quite frozen enough to bear the wagon train like this. But with the Mormons escaping from a band of vigilantes hot on their heels, it makes a dramatic parallel to the Israelites fleeing from Pharaoh’s army through the parted Red Sea.
 
This spectacular shot, by the way, was the work of special effects genius Fred Sersen. Director Hathaway had nowhere near that number of wagons at his disposal; the building and maintaining of Conestoga wagons was an all-but-lost art by 1940, to say nothing of finding and feeding the horses and oxen to pull them. Most studios had no more than a handful of wagons in their rolling stock, which had to be cleverly filmed and edited to swell their numbers. Many scenes of the westward trek in Brigham Young were enhanced by the use of stock footage from Raoul Walsh’s early sound epic The Big Trail, one of the last pictures to amass Conestoga wagons in anything like the numbers suggested here. (The Big Trail, a legendary box-office dud in 1930, holds up quite well today, and rates a post of its own.)
 

The climax of Brigham Young comes, not surprisingly, in the spring of 1848. After a grueling and disastrous winter of 1847-48, when the Mormon settlement in the Great Salt Lake Valley faced starvation that threatened to decimate their numbers — if not annihilate them entirely — things are beginning to look up with the spring planting. Then, a new disaster. A sudden infestation of crickets arrives to wipe out their crops. This scene was shot in Elko, Nev., where just such an invasion (at the time, anyhow) occurred like clockwork every few years. Hathaway and the company flew to Elko and waited. Just as they were getting impatient — “Don’t they know they’re holding up the schedule?” — the crickets arrived, and it was a nightmare as much for the company as it had been for the Mormons in 1848. Mary Astor left vivid descriptions in both her volumes of memoirs: the ugly bugs, countless millions of them, the size of her thumb, the piles of them as much as a foot high, the stench as they died and rotted in the 110-degree heat. The scene was scheduled to be shot over four days, but after one horrible day the cast and crew were in revolt; the hell with the money, they were going home. Hathaway and Grover Jones put their heads together, combining, shifting, telescoping. Finally Hathaway assembled the company, promising to wrap things by noon the next day if everybody would knuckle down and go to it. They didn’t make noon, but by four p.m., with heroic efforts, they were done.

In the movie, just as the Mormon despair matches that of their 1940 portrayers, comes…

…the famous Miracle of the Seagulls, a sky-blotting flight of birds that, in the words of one Mormon of the 1840s, came “sweep[ing] the crickets as they go”, devouring the insects and saving the settlers’ crops.

Again, some dramatic license here. Where in history the cricket invasion had descended on the settlement for several days, to be followed by two weeks of the saving intervention of the seagulls, the movie has the whole thing, crickets and seagulls both, occurring on the same frantic day, set to the stirring strains of Alfred Newman’s epic score. (In a nicely subliminal touch, the theme Newman used to score the arrival of the crickets was a variation on the music he used to accompany the nightrider raid on the Kent homestead at the opening of the picture.)

The scene of the seagulls, like this shot here, is another example of Fred Sersen’s work, combining images of the company on location at Lone Pine, Cal., with footage of seagulls shot months earlier at Utah Lake near Provo.

And finally, it must be said that in point of historical fact, Brigham Young wasn’t there for the Miracle of the Seagulls; he was off to the east arranging for the safe passage of later Mormon settlers, and he only heard of his followers’ miraculous deliverance by letter from his deputies on the scene. For a movie, of course, this would never do; Dean Jagger’s Brigham — along with Mary Ann, and Jonathan and Zina, and even the ankle-biting Angus Duncan — had to be on hand, right there in what would one day be Salt Lake City, Utah, reveling in the divine vindication of Brigham Young’s leadership, which had brought him and his followers across a thousand miles of hostile prairie to their Promised Land.

 
 
 
 After its premiere in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young underwent a title change for its general release, becoming Brigham Young — Frontiersman. This is how it appeared in reviews and publicity, and on posters and lobby cards, as a way of emphasizing the pioneer rather than religious aspect of the story. But it never appeared that way on screen, as the title card that begins this post attests. Now, the “Frontiersman” is gone for good, having presumably served its purpose, and Brigham Young again bears, in all labeling and packaging, the title under which it premiered in Salt Lake City on August 23, 1940.

R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

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It has just come to my attention that Ray Harryhausen died Tuesday
at his home in London. In this day and age when nearly all movie
special effects are created by people sitting at computer consoles,
the process of stop-motion animation that he mastered — filming
three-dimensional models one frame at a time, making infinitesimal
movements in between by hand — has become too expensive, slow
and time-consuming to survive. Still, all those graphics programmers
sitting at all those consoles most likely grew up on Harryhausen
pictures like Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
and Jason and the Argonauts — and grew up wanting to make
movies just like them. In his modest, unassuming, never-getting-
into-the-history-books way, Ray Harryhausen may have been
one of the most influential moviemakers of the last half century.

I did my own tribute to Harryhausen nearly two years ago,
singling out two of my favorite Harryhausen pictures for a
blogathon on 1950s monster movies hosted by Forgotten
Classics of Yesteryear. It was called “Catching Some Rays”
and you can read it here. For now I have nothing more to
add to it except to say Thank you, Ray Harryhausen, and
flights of creatures sing thee to thy rest.
.

America’s Canadian Sweetheart, 1921-2013

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Mrs. Edna Mae David passed away at her home in France sometime last week, and the 21st century lost another one of its last few links to the Golden Age of Hollywood. I knew I had just the picture to run with this post on Edna Mae, so I pulled it out of my files. When my six-year-old great-niece, who has never seen or heard of Edna Mae, saw this portrait, she said, “She looks like Jessica Rabbit.” I’d never thought about it before but y’know, it’s true; in this publicity shot she does look like Jessica Rabbit. And that’s just about the last thing you’d ever expect anyone to say about Deanna Durbin.
 
Deanna Durbin — her nom de screen was a creative rearrangement of the letters of her first name  — was born in Winnepeg on December 4, 1921, the daughter of a blacksmith for the Canadian Pacific Railway who had immigrated with his wife and Deanna’s older siblings from his native Lancashire. When (as she later put it) “the cold Canadian winters ate up all the summer savings”, the family decamped to California, where Papa Durbin supported the family through the worst of the Great Depression as a welder and in “a variety of manual jobs”. It was there that some Hollywood talent scouts discovered what soon all the world would know: this little girl could sing like an angel.
 
She might not have cared for that “angel” business. In her last interview, with historian David Shipman in 1983, she recalled a photo shoot with Life Magazine’s Philippe Halsman during the 1940s: Halsman said he was going to photograph her “looking like an angel”, and she said that that was the one way she did not want to be photographed. “…I wanted to look glamourous. I couldn’t wait to wear low-cut dresses and look sultry.” She’d probably have loved being compared to Jessica Rabbit.
 
Still, “like an angel” is the only way to describe her voice, a clear warm soprano that could raise gooseflesh on an iron lawn jockey. Walt Disney heard it when she auditioned for the voice of Snow White, but he didn’t hire her because she sounded too grown up (she was 14). The boys at MGM heard it, too, and they signed her to a short-term contract. She made only one picture there, in early 1936, an 11-minute short called Every Sunday, in which she was teamed with another of Metro’s prodigies, Judy Garland, as two pals whose singing saves Deanna’s grandfather’s weekly band concerts. 
 
There’s a persistent legend that when Louis B. Mayer saw the finished product he ordered underlings to “dump the fat one”; problem was (or so the story goes), both girls were still a little baby-fat plump, and the boys weren’t sure which one he meant — and they guessed wrong. The story may be true (Deanna certainly believed it), but I’m dubious. MGM staff arranger Roger Edens had already pegged Judy as potential dynamite, and I suspect he’d have done anything short of murder to keep her on the payroll. In any case, Deanna was out — but not for long. Universal Pictures, scrabbling desperately to avoid bankruptcy, gratefully snapped her up. There were weekly appearances on Eddie Cantor’s radio show, and at the end of ’36 Universal “introduced” her in Three Smart Girls. She had just turned 15. (Trivia answer: the Other Two Smart Girls were Nan Gray and Barbara Read.)

 

 
This is how she appeared in the very first scene of Three Smart Girls, when she hit the ground — er, water — singing. And this is why I’m skeptical about that Louis B. Mayer anecdote. This scene, with California’s Lake Arrowhead standing in for Switzerland, was shot barely six months after Every Sunday. Does Deanna look like “the fat one” to you?

 

The other persistent legend about Deanna Durbin’s career is that she single-handedly saved Universal from going belly-up, and this one’s probably true; at the very least, she kept the studio afloat until Abbott and Costello and W.C. Fields came along. She was a sensation in Three Smart Girls, and Universal scurried to cast her in picture after picture playing, as she later disdainfully put it “Little Miss Fixit who bursts into song.”

The sorry truth is, when all is said and done, she did more for Universal than they ever did for her. After one of her best pictures, It Started with Eve (1941), they let the team of producer Joe Pasternak and director Henry Koster, who had nurtured her in hit after hit, be lured away to MGM while holding fast to Deanna herself. They never bought any Broadway musicals for her; they never hired Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin or George or Ira Gershwin to write songs for her.

To be fair, Universal did commission Jerome Kern and E.Y. Harburg to write the score for 1944’s Can’t Help Singing. This was a sort of Oklahoma! meets It Happened One Night, with Deanna as a senator’s rebellious daughter running away to Gold Rush California to marry her sweetheart (wispy David Bruce) but falling for another man (bland Robert Paige) en route.

 
The result was another box-office hit, though it lacks…well, sparkle, I guess. Not that Deanna doesn’t hold up her end — here she is enjoying a reprise of the title song during an open-air bubble bath before hitting the dusty trail for California. Maybe the problem was the director, a graceless hack named Frank Ryan (he directed one other Durbin picture, Hers to Hold [’43], the second sequel to Three Smart Girls). Or the script, which frittered away precious minutes on labored comic relief from Akim Tamiroff and Leonid Kinskey. Robert Paige was part of the problem, for sure. Anyhow, there was more than a grain of truth in James Agee’s assessment: “It seems to me this could have been a beautiful and gay picture; unfortunately it is made without much feeling for either beauty or gaiety.” That was the problem with many of her pictures, especially after she lost the guidance of Pasternak and Koster: too often, the only one on the set with any feeling for beauty and gaiety was Deanna herself. She always delivered — but it could get pretty lonely at her branch of the post office. She didn’t even get help from Technicolor but this once. Universal lavished Technicolor on a string of backlot campfests with Jon Hall and Maria Montez, even used it for a 1943 remake of The Phantom of the Opera, but before and after Can’t Help Singing their biggest star had to make do with black and white.
 
It was probably only careless, shortsighted stupidity on Universal’s part, but at times it almost looked as if they were trying to sabotage her. Christmas Holiday (’44) is a perfect example. It’s a gritty, downbeat noirish thriller directed by Robert Siodmak and written by Herman J. Mankiewicz from a Somerset Maugham novel. Deanna plays a nightclub entertainer (removed just far enough from a prostitute to clear the Hays Office) married to a murderous, mother-obsessed louse (Gene Kelly). Yes, Deanna sings — giving an aching rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Always”, and introducing the Frank Loesser standard “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” — but it’s a drama, not a musical, and Deanna’s very good in it. But, come on, a picture with Deanna and Gene Kelly (early in his career, at that point known chiefly for For Me and My Gal, Dubarry Was a Lady and Cover Girl) that turns out to be a melodramatic downer? Called Christmas Holiday??
 
This was the same year that Dick Powell created a whole new screen persona for himself playing Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet over at RKO. That studio played their hand well, changing Raymond Chandler’s title from Farewell, My Lovely so audiences wouldn’t think they’d be seeing a tearful romance. Likewise, at 20th Century Fox, the title of Betty Grable’s first dramatic picture was changed from Hot Spot to I Wake Up Screaming, and Betty had another hit. Deanna might have done the same if Universal had changed Maugham’s title so audiences wouldn’t feel bait-and-switched at the box office. What was the studio thinking?
 
They were thinking (I think) that they didn’t want her to grow up. Too late; she already had. Pasternak and Koster might have finessed the transition for her career — they had already made a good start with It Started with Eve — but the boneheads they left behind couldn’t manage it. By 1947 Deanna was the highest-paid woman in America (which probably means the highest-paid in the world, barring royalty), but she still had no say in the scripts, directors, or co-stars she worked with. (Pipe down, little girl, and do as you’re told.) When her first marriage (to second-unit director Vaughn Paul) fell apart in 1943, Universal even tried to talk her out of getting a divorce. Bad for her image. “How could anyone really think I was going to spend the rest of my life
with a man I didn’t love,” she asked David Shipman, “just for the sake of an ‘image’?!”
 
By the way, don’t believe those who say Deanna just didn’t have the chops to handle anything more substantial than those perky Little Miss Fix-It roles. I don’t know why they say that, denying the evidence of their eyes and ears. Oh wait, I think I do know why: Judy Garland. They set up some imaginary rivalry that Judy and Deanna themselves never felt. I think there may be a little jealousy there too: At the height of her stardom, or after any of her comebacks, Judy was never as big a star as Deanna. But it’s not necessary to tear down Deanna Durbin to build up Judy Garland; Judy was as good as it got. 
 
And so was Deanna. She had every bit the talent — the pipes, the looks, the poise, the charm, the spirit — that Judy had. What she didn’t have — at least not after she lost Joe Pasternak and Henry Koster — was Arthur Freed and Roger Edens and Charles Walters and Vincente Minnelli. And Mickey Rooney. And (yes) Busby Berkeley. And Georgie Stoll and the MGM Orchestra. Universal figured they had a 20-carat diamond; why waste gold on the setting?
 
Another thing Deanna didn’t have was the eager, even desperate drive to perform. Deanna loved performing, but she didn’t feel incomplete without it. “Right from the start Judy had an immense talent,” Deanna remembered. “She was a professional
and had been on the stage since she was two. Her later story is tragic,
but I’m certain she could never have given up. She needed an audience as
she needed to breathe. I understood Judy, though. I did some vaudeville with Eddie Cantor when I
was beginning in pictures and between our weekly radio shows. Eight
shows a day! It was very exciting. Contact with a live audience is heady
stuff…”
 
One last thought before we leave the subject of Deanna “vs.” Judy: Here’s a publicity still taken of them on the set of Every Sunday. Which one is supposed to be “the fat one” again?
 
Deanna loved performing, but she didn’t need it. When she got tired of Universal forcing her to haul the studio’s junk around — and, frankly, when she didn’t need the money anymore — she quit. Like Judy, she married one of her directors (Charles David, the French-born director of Lady on a Train in ’45) and settled down with him on their estate outside Paris. Unlike Judy and Vincente Minnelli, this one went the distance, ending only with David’s death in 1999. 
 
There were offers and trial balloons over the years. Whenever Joe Pasternak was in Paris, he’d call. “Are you still happy?” When she said yes, he’d sigh: “Damn. All right, I’ll try again next time.” There were more concrete offers too: MGM tried to lure her back to film Kiss Me, Kate (what a triumphant return that would have been!), but the only time she was seriously tempted was when Lerner and Loewe auditioned some of the early songs they had written for what would become My Fair Lady. “I loved them,” she told David Shipman, “but I had my ticket to Paris in my pocket…” Robert Wise wanted her to play the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music, too, but she knew she’d only be upstaging Julie Andrews in all the press releases. So she stayed where she was, living out the last 65 years of her life away from what she called the “goldfish bowl” of stardom, outliving all of her co-workers — and, indeed, most of her original fans. 
 
Two things before I close. First, the Blogosphere has been buzzing the last couple of days with tributes and retrospectives (at least one, I won’t say which, struck me as rather snide and churlish: “Was Deanna Durbin still alive?”). A good starting place to link to some of the best ones is this page at Java’s Journeys.
 
And second, how can I not post some of Deanna’s singing? First, from Mad About Music (’38), a sample of what most people picture when they remember Deanna Durbin, the sort of thing Universal tried to keep going long after the star (if not her fans) had tired of it.
 
 
But here’s my own favorite Deanna moment. It’s from Lady on a Train, which I understand was her favorite among her own pictures — perhaps because it’s a nifty little murder mystery, perhaps because it’s where she met Charles David. Deanna is older, sexier, at once cooler and hotter, giving a hint of what might have been if Universal had given her the support system she deserved. The song is that 1926 chestnut “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya Huh?”:
 
 
So long, Edna Mae, and thanks for the memories. The Heavenly Choir, I expect, is sounding a lot better these days.
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