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Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 4

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Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney makes only one mention of Darby O’Gill and the Little People — and in a footnote, at that — but it gives something like credit where it’s due, calling it “a film rich in Irish atmosphere but shot entirely in California.” Surprising as it sounds, it’s true; every frame of Darby O’Gill was shot at the Disney Studios in Burbank or about 30 miles up Highway 101 in Triunfo and Canoga Park. Much of the atmosphere commended by Barrier is to the credit of Peter Ellenshaw and the great cinematographer Winton C. Hoch; between them they were able to transmute the golden glimmer of sunny Southern California into the cloudy and cool green glow of the Emerald Isle — literally, “Irish atmosphere”.

Then there’s the cast, all of them either unfamiliar or entirely unknown, thus bearing few overt traces of Hollywood — the way, frankly, Barry Fitzgerald would have done. (Even the future Sir Sean Connery was so young at the time — he turned 29 during shooting — that he doesn’t particularly stand out from the pack even today.) Most of the actors are authentically Irish. I’ve already mentioned Albert Sharpe, Jimmy O’Dea and Kieron Moore; there were also Denis O’Dea as Father Murphy, the village priest; J.G. Devlin, Farrell Pelly and Nora O’Mahoney as Darby’s drinking companions at the Rathcullen Arms; and Jack MacGowran as Phadrig Oge, King Brian’s trusted lieutenant. The rest were either Celtic — the Scottish Connery and Janet Munro — or English of Irish ancestry, like Walter Fitzgerald as Lord Fitzpatrick. (Fitzgerald and O’Dea were both veterans of Disney’s Treasure Island, as Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesy respectively.) 

But all of this would have gone for naught if that rich Irish atmosphere hadn’t been — it always comes down to this — in Lawrence Edward Watkin’s screenplay to begin with. As Leonard Maltin says in The Disney Films (again, giving credit where it’s due), Watkin’s script “is little short of brilliant…giving voice to breezy Irish wit but also leaving room for sentimentality.” Those consultations with Drs. Delargy and O’Sullivan at the Irish Folklore Commission, and the weeks and months spent soaking up local color in Ireland, served Watkin well. To say nothing of the 11 years the idea spent simmering on a back burner while he honed his skills turning out script after script — Watkin had worked on only one picture before signing with Disney, and he wasn’t even the chief writer on that one.

One tradition of Irish folklore that Watkin most likely picked up from that Dublin commission — because it’s not mentioned in Kavanagh — says that as long as music is playing, a leprechaun can’t stop dancing; this stands Darby O’Gill in good stead when King Brian puts the come-hither on him and traps him in his mountain lair. In the first of Herminie Kavanagh’s stories, the same thing happens — she calls the spell the “comeither” — but there, Darby is held in gentle captivity for six months, finally escaping with the help of his sister-in-law, who is likewise enchanted. For a number of reasons (six months!) this would never do for the movie, so Watkin shortened Darby’s sentence to a single night. Darby offers to fiddle the Little People a tune, which sets them dancing. He fiddles faster and faster until they leap to their horses (see the end of Part 2) and gallop off into the night through a magical fissure that King Brian opens in the side of the mountain; the fissure remains open just long enough for Darby to make good his escape.

 
 
Darby scurries home, knowing that once King Brian gathers his wits he’ll be hot on Darby’s heels. Sure enough, before a minute has passed, his majesty materializes, leaping through Darby’s bolted barn door and bullyragging Darby for having abused his hospitality, tricked him, and made him a laughingstock in front of his own people. But the trip home has hatched a plan in Darby’s head; he pleads innocence, saying he only came home to get his favorite pipe. Let’s be off back to Knocknasheega, he says; we won’t even stop for a sip from this excellent jug of poteen (Irish moonshine). Wait a minute, now, says King Brian; let’s not be hasty. Darby detains the king all night drinking and making up songs until…
 
 
 
 
 
 
…the cock crows next morning, when — borrowing another bit of folklore, this time from one of Kavanagh’s stories (“The Adventures of King Brian Connors”) — King Brian’s powers desert him with the coming of daylight and he’s helpless in Darby’s power.
 
Darby is now entitled to three wishes. He spends the first wish to bind King Brian as his prisoner until he wishes the other two. Then he carelessly wastes his second wish, which makes him all the more cautious with his third. While Darby dithers, King Brian’s kingdom begins to fall into chaos — “I’m the one that keeps my kingdom in order, and all the unblessed spirits of the night will run wild unless you wish your wish and let me go.” He warns Darby that his lieutenant Phadrig Oge will stop at nothing to get him back, including putting the come-hither on Katie to make Darby wish her free again.

 
 
As things fall out, it’s worse than that. Somehow, something — whether it’s Phadrig or one of those “unblessed spirits” — sends a pookah to possess the body of Darby’s horse Cleopatra. It’s the same spell by which King Brian first put the come-hither on Darby; this time the pookah lures Katie up to the ruins atop Knocknasheega. There it turns on her.
Like the business of leprechauns and music, the pookah is something Darby O’Gill doesn’t stop to explain, any more than the characters would need to explain it to each other. Fans of the play and movie Harvey (both of which are at some pains to explain it) might remember that a pookah is a mischievous spirit, like a goblin, taking the shape of a black horse, goat or rabbit, and capable of bringing good fortune or ill. (The word pookah may derive from the same Norse root as the English word Puck, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
 
 
 
In Katie’s case, the fortune brought by the pookah is decidedly ill; Darby finds her grievously injured in a fall from the summit to a ledge some yards below. As Darby kneels distraught by his daughter, he spies that most dreaded figure of Irish folklore (and, in the movie at least, the most terrible) the Banshee — wailing mournfully and running a golden comb through her long hair, just as she is described in Kavanagh’s story “The Banshee’s Comb”. Darby drives the Banshee away, but he knows it can’t be for long. In “The Banshee’s Comb”, where the ghostly harbinger of death appears not for Darby’s daughter but for his neighbor Eileen McCarthy, he knows that the Banshee appears twice at the window of the afflicted; her third appearance brings the touch of death.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And so it is for Katie. Darby and Michael McBride carry her home from the slopes of Knocknasheega, and as she lies in her bed near death, and Father Murphy prepares to administer the last rites, Darby again hears the wail of the Banshee in the yard outside his front door. This time the Banshee will not be dispersed, though Darby chases her about the yard, swinging frantically at her with a spade. Instead, she rises out of Darby’s reach and  hovers by a high window of the cottage. There she calmly raises her arm and crooks a bony, spectral finger, summoning to Earth…

…the Costa Bower, the Death Coach, with its forbidding headless driver, sent to carry departed souls to the hereafter.

“Costa Bower” is how Herminie Kavanagh spells it, and so does Watkin in his novelization. A more accurate spelling from the Gaelic is “Coiste Bodhar” — pronounced “Coash-ta Bower”, as it is in Darby O’Gill. In Kavanagh’s story, the Costa Bower carries Darby and King Brian to a rendezvous with the Banshee so Darby can return her golden comb, which he has inadvertently pilfered; on the way they have quite a pleasant conversation with the driver — or rather, with his head, which sits on the seat beside him. The coachman reminisces about his mortal life “three or four hundhred years ago”, and it comes to light that he languished and died — a suicide, perhaps, which would explain his present employment — for love of “purty” Margit Ellen O’Gill, an ancestor of Darby’s. Small world, eh?

In Watkin’s screenplay, the Costa Bower’s mission is more in line with folklore: it’s coming to convey a departed soul to its final reward. Knowing it comes for Katie, Darby tries to use his third wish to send it away, but such a thing is not within King Brian’s powers; once the Costa Bower sets out for Earth it can never return empty. Then let it take me instead, Darby cries; that’s my third wish. King Brian shakes his head ruefully; “More’s the pity. Granted.”

When the coach arrives, its headless driver (unlike in Kavanagh’s story) is not inclined to idle chat, and utters only four words: “Darby O’Gill? Get in.”

Darby O’Gill and the Little People is a veritable catalogue of Irish folklore, nearly all of it presented matter-of-factly and without explanation, as if the audience — like Darby’s listeners in the Rathcullen Arms — had been raised on these traditions and knew them in their bones. From its early scenes of good-natured competition between Darby and King Brian, the story descends into a literal life-and-death struggle with the dark forces Darby’s meddling has unleashed. At the same time, on a more earthly level, the underhanded scheming of Sheelah and Pony Sugrue bears fruit that makes Darby’s, Katie’s and Michael’s situation all the more dire. Leonard Maltin’s “little short of brilliant” appraisal of the script may be an understatement. His other appraisal is right on the money: “Darby O’Gill and the Little People is not only one of Disney’s best films, but is certainly one of the best fantasies every put on film.”

As I mentioned at the beginning of these posts, Darby O’Gill was a flop. Even as a flop it was overshadowed by Disney’s costlier and higher-profile box office disappointment of 1959, Sleeping Beauty. (Only the unexpected bonanza of The Shaggy Dog enabled the Disney Studios to turn a tidy profit that year.)

Disney may have had a point when he suggested that Darby‘s extreme Irishness was its undoing in 1959, but it made it all the more unique and remarkable. Disney’s Pinocchio, on its release in 1940, was criticized for the way it turned Carlo Collodi’s creation into a generically American boy (although anybody who tries to read that dreadful, preachy, grisly book knows that Disney did more for Collodi than Collodi ever did for him). Likewise with Mary Poppins; while I yield to no one in my admiration for Disney’s classic, admirers of P.L. Travers’ books (beginning with Travers herself) have long scorned the movie — and in any event, no one could ever mistake it for an accurate picture of Edwardian London.

Darby O’Gill seems to have been granted one stroke of Irish luck after another. It took a dozen years for Disney’s version of Herminie Kavanagh’s stories to make its way into theaters, and every delay worked to its advantage. In 1946, no doubt, Disney would have made the picture with animated leprechauns the way Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox were drawn into Song of the South (and, years later, the foxhunters and dancing penguins into Mary Poppins). Disney’s original plan to have Barry Fitzgerald play both Darby and King Brian would have meant, at the very least, process photography with its telltale seams and grain, which, however well done, would have made Disney’s boast of a cast full of real leprechauns look silly on its very face. And too, it would have given us a familiar and beloved face, a genuine star, as both characters. Most of all, the delay gave Lawrence Edward Watkin the time he needed to absorb the elusive spirit of the stories and to mold them into an economical and dramatically sound screenplay.
 
Unlike the more-or-less-Americanized Pinocchio and Mary Poppins, Darby O’Gill and the Little People is Irish to its very core — even more so than John Ford’s classic The Quiet Man with its complement of Ford regulars (John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen, Arthur Shields, Ward Bond, etc.) so familiar from other pictures with other settings. It seems to me that no movie ever made so completely captures the Ireland that exists in the imagination of the world — including that of the Irish themselves — as this sweet, gentle, whimsical yarn that Lawrence Edward Watkin wrote, Peter Ellenshaw and Don DaGradi designed, and Robert Stevenson, Winton Hoch and a band of unknown Irish, Scottish and English troupers shot for Walt Disney in the San Fernando Valley during the summer and fall of 1958.

 

“Who Is the Tall Dark Stranger There…”

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…Maverick is the name. Ten months ago I wrote about Warner Home Video finally releasing Maverick: The Complete First Season on DVD. I said then that everybody in America should buy it, if only to sell enough to persuade Warner to bring out the later seasons. Well, I don’t know how many Americans bought it, but it was enough to keep ’em coming; Season 2 is now out.

It’s hard at this remove to appreciate what a revolutionary breath of fresh air Maverick was when it debuted in the fall of 1957. Its main character, Bret Maverick (James Garner), was a professional gambler — as was Bret’s brother Bart (Jack Kelly), introduced halfway through the first season. Before Maverick, gamblers were seldom seen as western heroes; glib, slick and dressed like a dandy, they were more often shown as shady and untrustworthy — when they weren’t outright villains and cheats. Bret and Bart never cheated at cards, but they weren’t above running a con game when they figured somebody had it coming. They weren’t strangers to gunplay, but neither were they trigger-happy or quick on the draw, much preferring to talk (or bluff) their way out of trouble. (“In other words,” scoffs one damsel at Bart, “you’re a coward!” To which Bart wheedles: “Isn’t everybody?”) Viewed today, the brothers look like much more conventional heroes, but only because they skewed the mold — which also has allowed them to age more gracefully than other TV western heroes, the type of characters Stan Freberg once spoofed as “Bang Gunleigh, U.S. Marshal Fields”.

Splitting the star billing — Garner featured one week, Kelly the next, with occasional team episodes — was another, more practical innovation. It allowed two production units to shoot simultaneously, which — along with frequent trips to Warner Bros.’ bulging library of stock footage — meant more of the series’ modest budget would appear on the home screen. Other series would employ this method too: Warners’ own 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6; Universal’s The Name of the Game; Bonanza over at Paramount, and so on.

Season 2 supports Garner and Kelly with the customary mix of seasoned Hollywood veterans (Lyle Talbot, John Litel, Reginald Owen, Wayne Morris, Marcel Dalio, Neil Hamilton, Barbara Jo “Vera Vague” Allen, Jimmy Lydon, Sig Ruman); guest stars from other Warner Bros. series (Richard Long, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Robert Conrad, Connie Stevens); and up-and-coming future Oscar winners (Martin Landau, Clint Eastwood, Louise Fletcher). This season also contains three of the best episodes of the entire run — and hence three of the best hour-long TV episodes ever: “Shady Deal at Sunny Acres”, in which Bret vows to get back $15,000 stolen from him by a crooked banker (John Dehner); “Gun-Shy”, a hilarious deadpan spoof of Gunsmoke wherein Bret runs afoul of Marshal Mort Dooley; and “The Rivals”, a clever adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy of manners transferred to the American frontier. Those last two, like many of Maverick‘s best episodes, were written by Marion Hargrove, who rose to fame with his wartime bestseller See Here, Private Hargrove and went on to a long and fruitful career in Hollywood. He also wrote screenplays for The Music Man, Boys’ Night Out, Cash McCall and 40 Pounds of Trouble.

The Warner Bros. TV series of the 1950s and early ’60s, along with Universal’s later series in the ’60s and ’70s, were the last flowering of the Hollywood studio system before it unraveled entirely. Cleverly written, fast-paced, sharply edited, and acted by a parade of old and young pros, these episodes of Maverick stand as delightful testimony to why and how Warner Bros. dominated prime-time TV for the better part of a decade.

Check Maverick out. Meanwhile, here at Cinedrome, for my next post it’s back to Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
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Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 3

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Reading the stories that Herminie Templeton (later Kavanagh) published in 1903 as Darby O’Gill and the Good People, it’s easy to understand why Walt Disney wouldn’t give up on the idea of bringing them to the screen — but it’s also easy to see why it took Lawrence Edward Watkin eleven years to fashion them into a screenplay. With titles like “The Convarsion of Father Cassidy”, “How the Fairies Came to Ireland” and “The Banshee’s Comb”, the stories are short on incident — more anecdotes that stories, really. Also, as the word “Convarsion” suggests, they are written in a (literally) pronounced Irish dialect — it takes a while to realize that “craychur” means “creature”, “sthrame” is “stream”, “imaget” is “immediate”, and so on.

But once you adjust to these idiosyncracies (especially if you can assume the accent and read the stories aloud), there’s an unassuming poetry to the tales that can sometimes take your breath away. Describing one fine morning, the narrator (it’s hinted that he’s a Kilkenny cabbie and the son of a cousin of Darby’s) says, “‘Twas one of those warm-hearted, laughing autumn days which steals for a while the bonnet and shawl of the May.” What more do we need to hear to know exactly the sort of day it was?

Another time, Darby O’Gill’s wife Bridget boasts to other wives of the village that her husband is so brave that he doesn’t fear to leave the house on Halloween Night, when “all the worruld” knows that ghosts are afoot. To prove her point (and save face), even as a fierce storm rages that very night, Bridget resolves to cajole Darby into taking “a bit of tay” to poor young Eileen McCarthy, who lies near death. At first Darby resists — “We have two separate ways of being good. Your way is to scurry round an’ do good acts. My way is to keep from doing bad ones. An who knows which way is the betther one. It isn’t for us to judge.” But when he finally agrees to go out, a relieved Bridget encourages him in this lovely passage: 

 

“Oh, ain’t ye the foolish darlin’ to be afeard,” smiled Bridget back at him, but she was serious, too. “Don’t you know that when one goes on an errant of marcy a score of God’s white angels with swoords in their hands march before an’ beside an’ afther him, keeping his path free from danger?” With that she pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him as she used in the old courting days.
 

There’s nothing puts so much high courage and clear steadfast purpose in a man’s heart, if it be properly given, as a kiss from the woman he loves. So, with the warmth of that kiss to cheer him, Darby set his face against the storm.

There are countless rough-jeweled passages like that in Mrs. Kavanagh’s prose — I laughed out loud at “One could have scraped with a knife the surprise off Darby’s face” — but you get the idea. How to preserve the delicate humor of the stories, the palpable sense of a happy home and hearth, the simple yet ardent faith, the merry yet mischievous friendship between Darby and King Brian, was what Lawrence Edward Watkin wrestled with between assignments from the day Disney hired him.

Because Darby O’Gill is rarely considered one of Disney’s major pictures, there is scant published documentation of its development and production. Two major biographies, Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, have only two cursory mentions between them. Peter Ellenshaw’s coffee-table memoir Ellenshaw Under Glass goes into detail about his visual effects work (which I covered in Part 2), and he says that both Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi (who later shared an Oscar nomination for their Mary Poppins screenplay) worked on the script. (In the finished picture DaGradi is credited only for “Special Art Styling”, Walsh not at all. It may be that Walsh — like DaGradi, one of Disney’s most trusted lieutenants — worked uncredited on the script; it’s also possible that Ellenshaw, writing in 2003, conflated Darby O’Gill with his later work with Walsh and DaGradi on Mary Poppins.)

We do, at least, have testimony from Walt Disney himself, in the form of his introduction to the Darby O’Gill novelization. (The intro was ghost-written, no doubt, but it’s a cinch it wouldn’t have gone to the printer until Walt approved it.) He says that it was “in 1945, I believe” that Herminie Kavanagh’s stories first came to his attention, prompting a trip to Ireland to get a feel for the land.

Disney did indeed visit Ireland and Great Britain in November 1946, and again for a longer stay from June to August ’49. His leprechaun movie might have been on his mind both those times. In ’46 he had spoken to Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper about plans for Alice in Wonderland (to be done with a live-action Alice played by little Luana Patten of Song of the South, and set in an animated Wonderland) as well as for The Little People, to be set in Ireland.

But it’s unlikely that Herminie Kavanagh’s Darby O’Gill stories were foremost in his mind even then. The Disney Studio was drifting after the end of World War II — strapped for money, still recovering from the bitter trauma of a strike in the early ’40s (which Disney took very personally), and uncertain how to move forward. Of more immediate concern, no doubt, was how the cash-poor studio could make use of the millions of pounds sterling that had piled up from features and shorts playing in the U.K. during the war; money that Disney sorely needed but which, due to currency restrictions imposed by Parliament, couldn’t be taken out of the country.

DR. JAMES HAMILTON DELARGY
Is it possible that Disney considered shooting something like Darby O’Gill in Northern Ireland, where his British pounds would be at his disposal? Probably not; in any case, those pounds wound up being pumped into Disney’s first all-live-action feature, Treasure Island (’50). Other British-shot pictures would follow: The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (’52), The Sword and the Rose, and Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (both ’53). But nothing with leprechauns.
 
Between those two visits, in 1947, Disney hired Larry Watkin to adapt Kavanagh’s stories, making sure “that he too should take a leisurely sojourn through Ireland, talking with the old storytellers and absorbing the spirit of the place”. (Did Watkin make this trip while Disney was there during the summer of ’49? Maybe; the record is unclear.) Disney goes on to say that Watkin consulted with Drs. James Hamilton Delargy and Sean O’Sullivan, the director and chief archivist (respectively) of the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin. (Curiously enough, the good doctors were able to show Watkin their files on no fewer than 54 versions of the old folktale — Death trapped in an old man’s apple tree — that had inspired his novel On Borrowed Time.)
 
“In spite of the richness of the material,” Disney remembered, “or maybe because of its abundance, the story did not jell that year”. Other projects intervened. Watkin got sidetracked into scripting all four of Disney’s British-made features, plus several others back in the States. Disney, of course, became preoccupied with both Disneyland (the TV series) and Disneyland (the park in Anaheim). It was nearly a decade before the two men returned to what Disney called “the Irish story”. “This time,” he remembered, “it worked”.
 
Without venturing into the archives of the Disney Studios, I can’t know what stages Watkin went through to, as they say, “break the back” of Walt’s leprechaun picture. (I’m sure the information is somewhere in those files; the Disney people never threw anything away. Maybe I’ll get a chance to find out someday.) All I have to go on is a comparison of Mrs. Kavanagh’s original stories with the one that appears on the screen, and Larry Watkin, while retaining the names of Darby O’Gill and King Brian Connors, took a wealth of liberties.
 

 

The liberties began with the mountain location of King Brian’s underground castle. Herminie Kavanagh gave it as Slieve-na-mon (usually spelled without the hyphens), a 2,363-ft. peak in southern County Tipperary, near Clonmel. Watkin moved King Brian’s court about 22 miles southwest, to Knocknasheega in County Waterford — possibly for its less cumbersome and more poetic-sounding name. But the change didn’t stop there; here’s a view of 1,404-ft. Knocknasheega as it is in real life…

…and here’s how it appears in Darby O’Gill (courtesy of the imagination of Larry Watkin and the palette of Peter Ellenshaw), crowned with the scattered ruins of a castle so ancient nobody remembers who built it. The ruins serve a dramatic as well as picturesque purpose; they become the scene of enchantment when the leprechauns cast their come-hither spell on Darby and — later, for a different reason — his daughter Katie. As you can see, there are no such ruins on the real Knocknasheega. There are in fact two prehistoric stone cairns on the peak and slopes of Slievenamon, but there is no fairy magic imputed to them by Irish folklore and they do not figure in any of the Kavanagh stories.
 

Darby O’Gill’s village has no name in Kavanagh; in the movie it’s Rathcullen. After an exhaustive Internet search, I could find no village by that name, only a real estate listing for a single house on a half-acre of land “nestling between Aherla [pop. 450] & Cloughduv [pop. 300] Villages” in County Cork. (There’s also a Web site for a Rathcullen Lounge in Killarney, County Kerry, which for all I know may have taken its name from the movie.) So let’s take it as given that Rathcullen and the neighboring village of Glencove are both creations of Lawrence Edward Watkin.

So are most of the characters. In the stories, Darby’s age is never mentioned, but his wife Bridget is still alive, his children (at least four of them) are still small, and the narrator often calls Darby “the lad”. Watkin made him an elderly widower with only his grown daughter Katie. While Darby’s livelihood is hardly hinted at in Kavanagh, in the movie he’s caretaker on the country estate of Lord Fitzpatrick (Walter Fitzgerald) — “but he retired about five years ago,” says his lordship, “didn’t tell me about it.” That’s why Lord Fitzpatrick has hired Michael McBride (Sean Connery) to replace him, intending to retire Darby on half pay, with free use of a small cottage on the property for the rest of his days. Darby wheedles his lordship into letting him break the news to Katie himself, and when Lord Fitzpatrick leaves, Darby introduces Michael to Katie as a new hired hand. Darby’s scheming to keep the truth from Katie as long as possible, along with his later kidnapping of King Brian, are the twin threads that will come together at Darby O’Gill‘s ghostly climax.

 
Watkin also provided something Herminie Kavanagh’s stories lacked: a couple of villains. Maybe “villains” is too strong a term; these two aren’t really wicked. But both of them are up to no good. First comes old Sheelah Sugrue, the village gossip and busybody (Estelle Winwood). Watkin’s novelization says, “She was the sort of old woman who in olden days made witch-burning flourish. One look at her and you would want the custom revived.” English-born Estelle Winwood was 75 when she made Darby; she had been a professional actress since 1903 and had made her Broadway debut in 1916. This was her sixth feature film since 1933 (she preferred the stage but did a lot of TV in the ’40s and ’50s), and she would go on to become the oldest working actress — or actor, for that matter — in the world. She made her last appearance in an episode of Quincy M.E. when she was 97 and died in 1984 at the age of 101. In Darby, her meddlesome Sheelah Sugrue is the proud mother of…
 
 
Pony Sugrue (Kieron Moore), Rathcullen’s roisterer, bully-boy, and all-around ne’er-do-well. (The character would resurface a generation later, little changed, in the form of Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.) Pony’s mother regards him as the natural heir to Darby’s job (a job she doesn’t know Michael McBride already has), while Pony himself regards Katie O’Gill as his personal property, any other man who looks at her doing so at his own peril. Kieron Moore was another one of the authentic Irishmen in Darby‘s cast. He began his acting career as a teenager with Dublin’s Abbey Players; he was soon placed under contract by British producer Alexander Korda, who predicted great stardom for him. The stardom never quite materialized despite solid work in over 50 movies and TV series, and he retired from acting in 1974 to devote himself to social activism on behalf of the Third World. He died in 2007, age 82.
Darby O’Gill and the Little People‘s director was Robert Stevenson, who by 1959 was becoming pretty well established as the Disney Studio’s house director. Stevenson began directing in his native England in 1932, where his pictures included the 1937 British version of King Solomon’s Mines. He came to Hollywood in 1940 to direct Tom Brown’s School Days for the short-lived The Play’s the Thing unit at RKO, then worked for RKO again on Forever and a Day, the 1943 wartime morale-builder about multiple generations in an English family. After that it was over to 20th Century Fox for Jane Eyre with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, a movie that remains the yardstick for measuring subsequent adaptations of Charlotte Bronte’s novel (others may be judged better, but all are compared first to Stevenson’s).
 
Stevenson’s first picture for Disney was Johnny Tremain in 1957, followed later that year by Old Yeller — another yardstick movie, this time for boy-and-his-dog stories. Then three episodes of Disney’s Zorro TV series, then Darby O’Gill. Stevenson would go on to direct some of Disney’s most successful live-action pictures: Kidnapped (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (’61), Son of Flubber (’63), and Walt Disney’s (and Stevenson’s) most glittering achievement, Mary Poppins (’64). After Disney’s death Stevenson would remain at the studio for The Love Bug (’68), Bedknobs and Broomsticks  (’71), and Herbie Rides Again (’74), among others. Not all of Stevenson’s pictures were estimable achievements — The Misadventures of Merlin Jones  (’64), The Monkey’s Uncle (’65) — but nearly all of them came in on time, under budget, and profitable.
 
In Part 4 I’ll talk about some elements of Irish folklore that appear in both Herminie Kavanagh’s stories and, distilled and transformed by Lawrence Edward Watkin’s own imagination, in the finished picture; and I’ll wind up my case for why I think Darby O’Gill and the Little People deserves to stand proudly beside Snow White, Fantasia, Mary Poppins, and just about any other Walt Disney picture you care to name.
 

To be concluded…

 

Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 2

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With this title card at the opening of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Walt Disney doubled down on the premise behind the broadcast of his weekly television show on May 29, 1959. (The official name of the series had changed to Walt Disney Presents in the fall of ’58, but everybody I knew still called it Disneyland.) On that episode, titled “I Captured the King of the Leprechauns”, Disney recounted to his Irish-American friend, actor Pat O’Brien, the research and negotiation behind the production of Darby O’Gill. Research in the form of a visit to Ireland to confer with scholars of Irish folklore; negotiation in the form of an arranged meeting with King Brian himself to offer him and his minions roles in the picture Disney was planning.

From the “scholar of Irish folklore” he consults, Disney learns  the story of how the leprechauns came to Ireland. What the man tells him is a tale straight out of Herminie Kavanagh’s book — I’ve found it nowhere else in print, so it’s likely she created it herself — and it goes like this: King Brian and his followers are fallen angels, casualties of the revolt of Satan in Heaven before the beginning of time. Too small and timid to engage in the fighting, they hid under the Golden Steps until Satan and his minions were defeated and cast into Hell. Confronting King Brian after the battle, the Archangel Gabriel told him, “An angel who won’t stand up and fight for what he knows is right may not be deserving of Hell, but he’s not fit for Heaven.” So Brian and the rest were banished to live on the Earth, but were mercifully granted leave to settle in a place of their choice. They chose what came to be known as Ireland because it was the closest thing to Heaven that they could find on Earth.

This charming legend doesn’t appear in Darby O’Gill (although Watkin found room for it in his novelization), so it was canny of Disney to include it in “I Captured the King of the Leprechauns”; it certainly made an impression on me at the time and has stayed with me all these years. Disney then goes on to recount how that Dublin scholar referred him to a “shanachie”, or storyteller, in the village of Rathcullen named Darby O’Gill, and how Darby arranged for the producer to have an audience with King Brian. At that meeting, according to Disney, his nebulous idea of making a picture about leprechauns took more definite shape, and he proposed that Darby and Brian should both appear in the picture playing themselves and telling the story of their adventures together. King Brian first dismissed the idea, but when he and Darby got into an argument over which of them would make the better “fillum actor”, Disney knew he had them.
 
I borrow a phrase from Leslie S. Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, to describe this episode of Walt Disney Presents. In his tome, Klinger admits that he perpetuates “the gentle fiction that Holmes and Watson really lived”. And that’s just what “I Captured the King of the Leprechauns” is — a gentle fiction. Even as a kid I recognized the episode for what it was, but once I had seen it, oxen and wainropes couldn’t have kept me away from Darby O’Gill and the Little People.

But my own reaction is neither here nor there. More to the point, Walt Disney felt free to purvey this gentle fiction, to assert that he had enlisted the aid of real leprechauns — saying so not only in a TV promo, but right there on the screen as the picture was about to begin — because he knew that he had a picture with seamless and absolutely convincing special effects. 
 
 
The man Disney assigned to spearhead those effects was Peter Ellenshaw, who had worked with Disney since his first all-live-action feature Treasure Island in 1950, and whose career with the studio would far outlive Disney himself. Ellenshaw was a matte painter — but that’s a bit like saying Chopin was a piano player. A matte painter, in those days before computer graphics, painted scenes on sheets of glass set between the camera and the subject, both to fill in the image to be photographed and to mask out elements on the set that weren’t meant to be seen. 
 
For example, take another look at the frame-cap at the beginning of this post, an establishing image of Darby O’Gill’s village of Rathcullen. A little over half that picture is Peter Ellenshaw’s work. As the set was built on the Disney Studio lot in Burbank, the church on the left had no roof and no steeple, the pub on the right had only half a roof and no chimney. Essentially, everything in the frame above the word “Leprechauns” — the roofs, the trees, the sky, the clouds — was painted on glass by Peter Ellenshaw. Ellenshaw had a major hand in establishing the distinctive look of Disney’s live-action movies from Treasure Island through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, Johnny Tremain, Pollyanna and Mary Poppins (he snagged an Oscar for that one) all the way through The Black Hole (’79) and Dick Tracy (’90).

For Darby O’Gill, Ellenshaw and Eustace Lycett employed special effects techniques that were simple in concept but complex and demanding in execution. The basic idea was called “forced perspective” and it boiled down to this: since the leprechauns had to appear one-quarter the size of a normal human being, the actors playing them had to be four times farther away from the camera. This shot of Darby and King Brian peeking out the window as Katie arrives home from a Saturday night dance makes a good illustration. The illusion is flawless, with Darby seemingly standing on the floor and King Brian perched beside him on the window sill. In fact, however, Albert Sharpe was standing (let’s say) five feet from the camera, while Jimmy O’Dea (along with his side of the curtains) was 15 feet behind him.
 
This simple idea came with a number of nuts-and-bolts challenges, both physical and photographic. In this shot, for example, the pattern on King Brian’s curtain had to be four times the size of the pattern on Darby’s. The fabric had to be thicker and stiffer so that the pleats would match. Even the leprechaun costumes had to be made of stiffer material so they would look like doll-size garments cut from a bolt of normal cloth. The set had to be flooded with light, even in a night-lit shot like this, so the camera aperture could be stopped down enough to keep both actors in focus. (Sometimes, Ellenshaw said, the set would get so hot that production would have to be shut down for the day; the battery of lights on the studio’s soundstages even triggered power failures all over Burbank.) If  humans and leprechauns had to look at each other, the actors needed separate targets to focus on so that their eyelines would match on film (the shot above of King Brian, Darby and Disney illustrates this). Props had to be built in two sizes — one to be seen with Darby, the other with the leprechauns — and they had to match exactly. Some shots required more distance between Darby and the leprechauns than the size of the soundstage itself. In those cases, the crew used the Schufftan Process, developed in the 1920s by the German cinematographer Eugen Schufftan. A mirror was set up between Darby and the camera at a 45-degree angle, with the reflective surface scraped away so Darby could be seen through the glass, while the camera also caught the reflection of the leprechauns off to the side and far behind the camera.
 
Every shot involving the leprechauns was storyboarded in detail, its requirements carefully calculated with mathematical precision. (These calculations, Ellenshaw said in his 2003 book Ellenshaw Under Glass: Going to the Matte for Disney, were duck soup to Lycett and director Robert Stevenson, “who was a mathematician in his own right. They were very interested in mathematics, read books on it just for pleasure!”)
 
For all these challenges, the modus operandi chosen by Ellenshaw and Lycett had one unsurpassable reward: It enabled human and leprechaun to appear simultaneously on a single strip of film, with no differences in film grain, no change in visual texture, no telltale blue lines that would be noticeable, however subliminally, if shots had been combined in the lab. The eye (and brain) accepts the illusion without question, and Disney’s boast that he enlisted real leprechauns in the cast passes the test — we see the evidence with our own eyes.
 
Have I blown Darby O’Gill‘s cover by telling you this? Not at all. Even knowing how it’s done, the trick is still magic. In the next installment I’ll get into the magic of the story itself; for now I’ll leave you with this shot. Darby is in the mountain hall of Knocknasheega, in King Brian’s throne room. He fiddles the Little People a lively tune that sets them dancing madly until, carried away, they run off and gallop back on horseback, riding in a circle around him. At this precise moment, everyone — everyone — who sees Darby O’Gill and the Little People thinks exactly the same thing: “My God, where on Earth did they get all those little tiny horses??!!” They have already accepted, on an emotional level, that these are genuine leprechauns; the only question is where they found horses to ride.
 
I know of no other shot in the long history of visual effects that gets such a reaction.
 

To be continued…

 

Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 1

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Book-coverWIn 1962, if I had known that the actor playing James Bond was the same actor who played Michael McBride in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, I might have taken the trouble to see Dr. No sooner than I did. But in all the publicity surrounding the screen debut of Ian Fleming’s secret agent, and the handsome young discovery of producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, there was scant mention (if any) of the picture Sean Connery had made for Walt Disney three years earlier. Small wonder: Darby O’Gill was a flop.
 
At this remove in time, it’s easy to forget how many of the movies we call “Disney Classics” were considered nothing of the kind when they were new. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a smash right enough, the top-grossing movie of all time — for a couple of years, until Gone With the Wind left it in the dust. But Pinocchio (’40) was a disappointment, Bambi (’42) was a flop, and Fantasia (’40) was a catastrophe. Only Dumbo (’41), followed by contract work for the government during World War II, kept Disney from going under altogether, and spared him the embarrassment of defaulting on the spiffy new studio he’d built with the profits from Snow White. In time, and thanks to persistent reissues every seven years, Disney’s faith in his pictures would be borne out as each one eventually found its audience. (Remember this when you hear talk about what a “bomb” Disney/Pixar’s John Carter was.)
 
Darby O’Gill and the Little People found its audience too…eventually…sort of. It wasn’t until 1969, a full decade after its release — and with Walt Disney nearly three years in his cremation urn — that the picture got its first reissue. There was another in 1977, but the picture still made few ripples — and certainly no splash — at the box office. After that, the studio made the ultimate surrender: they abandoned theatrical hopes for Darby and relegated it to two-part broadcasts on television.

 

The picture was never a flop as far as I was concerned. I loved it in 1959 when I saw it at the Stamm Theatre in Antioch, Calif. I loved it in 1960 when I read this novelization by Lawrence Edward Watkin of his own screenplay. And when it was reissued in ’69 (on a double bill with Dick Van Dyke and Edward G. Robinson in Never a Dull Moment) I went to see it almost every night it played — wondering with bemusement exactly when Sean Connery got into this movie. I contented myself with one viewing when it was reissued in ’77, but I said then what I say to this day: Darby O’Gill and the Little People is one of Walt Disney’s unsung masterpieces.

Disney himself attributed the picture’s failure to the unusually thick Irish accents of his actors, plus the fact that he was unable to make the picture as he originally planned, with Barry Fitzgerald playing the double role of Darby O’Gill and King Brian of the leprechauns. Maybe so, but personally, I think that in the long run the movie dodged a bullet. Barry Fitzgerald and softer brogues might have made Darby a bit more of a hit, but they would have made it much less of a masterpiece. (I’ve read that for some releases the dialogue was redubbed with more America-friendly voices, but if so I never saw or heard any of those prints. Thank God.)

 
 
 
And as for Barry Fitzgerald…Well, all due respect to the dear man, but by 1958, as Darby went into production, he was a real star, more identified with Hollywood than with Ireland. Fitzgerald turned Disney down because he felt too old to play either Darby or King Brian — ironic, then that the role of Darby went to Disney’s second choice, Albert Sharpe, who was three years older. Disney had seen Sharpe on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow in 1947, about the time he (Disney) discovered H.T. Kavanagh’s book Darby O’Gill and the Good People. 
 
 
For King Brian, Disney settled on Jimmy O’Dea, a popular Dublin comedian who performed in both English and Gaelic. O’Dea had appeared in a handful of movies since 1926, and one Irish-American picture, John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon (1957), while Sharpe had played small roles in a smattering of Hollywood movies: Up in Central Park (’48) with Deanna Durbin, Royal Wedding (’51) with Fred Astaire, and Brigadoon (’53) with Gene Kelly, among others. When Disney came calling, Sharpe was retired from acting and living on a pension in working-class Belfast. Both he and O’Dea, despite long stage experience, were largely unfamiliar faces, and their performances give Darby O’Gill an aura of authenticity it could never have had with Barry Fitzgerald playing both roles.
 
Walt Disney’s two young discoveries for Darby O’Gill were Sean Connery as the young man come to take Darby’s place as caretaker on Lord Fitzpatrick’s country estate, and Janet Munro as Darby’s spirited daughter Katie. Of Connery — almost incredibly young and handsome here — hardly anything need be said. But it’s worth mentioning that when Albert Broccoli’s wife Dana saw Darby she told her husband he could stop looking: “Well, that is James Bond!” More than half a century on, after an Oscar, a knighthood, and five more actors playing Bond, Dana Broccoli’s judgment still stands, and all because she saw Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Walt Disney deserves more credit for setting Sean Connery on his road to world treasure-hood than he usually gets.
 
At the time, 24-year-old Janet Munro seemed like the safer bet for long-term stardom. “Miss Munro, a delight to behold,” said Variety’s reviewer, “may be at the threshold of a glamorous career.” The daughter of Scottish music hall artist Alex Munro (a stage name for both; the family name was Horsburgh), Janet had, like Connery, compiled a worthy resume in British television, and like him, was making her American screen debut. Disney signed her to a five-picture contract and she appeared in Third Man on the Mountain (’59), Swiss Family Robinson (’60) and The Horsemasters (’61; shown on Disney’s TV show in the States, released to theaters in Europe) before her contract was dropped (the reason is a little vague). The glamorous career forecast by Variety failed to materialize, though she worked steadily through the 1960s amid an onslaught of personal and health problems. She died of chronic heart disease (compounded, alas, by alcoholism) in 1972 at the age of 38.
 
Back in 1947, Disney had hired Lawrence Edward Watkin to adapt the Darby O’Gill stories into a screenplay. Watkin was the author of On Borrowed Time, a fantasy novel about an old man who traps Death in his backyard apple tree. The novel was adapted into a successful play by Paul Osborn and a 1939 movie starring Lionel Barrymore and Cedric Hardwicke. It would be 12 years before Watkin’s efforts on Kavanagh’s stories saw the light of a projector lamp; in the meantime, he did some of his best work on some of Disney’s best live-action pictures: Treasure Island (’50), The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (’52), The Sword and the Rose (’53), The Great Locomotive Chase (’56), The Light in the Forest (’58).
 
The H.T. Kavanagh mentioned in Darby O’Gill‘s credits was born Herminie McGibney in 1861. She first published her stories in McClure’s Magazine in 1901-02, then in book form in 1903, using her first married name, Herminie Templeton. Abandoned by her husband in 1893 and finally widowed by 1907, she married Judge Marcus Kavanagh of Chicago in 1908; subsequent editions of her books bore the name Herminie Templeton Kavanagh. The Darby O’Gill imagined by Mrs. Kavanagh differs greatly from the one played by Albert Sharpe. In the stories Darby is younger, with a wife still living and more than just Katie among his offspring (Kavanagh never says exactly, but it’s clear that Darby and Bridget O’Gill have at least four children). The story Watkin concocted for the movie was entirely his own invention, though it incorporated many of Kavanagh’s details of Irish folklore and matched the stories’ spirit exactly. The movie’s credits say “Written by Lawrence Edward Watkin, Suggested by H.T. Kavanagh’s ‘Darby O’Gill’ Stories”, and that’s the simple truth of it.
 
I’ll have more to say about Darby O’Gill and the Little People in Part 2. I wanted to get at least this first part up in time for St. Patrick’s Day.
 

To be continued…

 

CMBA Blogathon: Kitty (1945)

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This post is Cinedrome’s contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association‘s first blogathon of 2013, Fabulous Films of the 1940s. (Now there’s a topic; CMBA could probably do five such ‘thons, with all members taking a different title, and never exhaust the possibilities!) Go here for a complete list of entries; you’ll find my colleagues holding forth on a mouthwatering array of movies legendary and obscure, long-remembered and half-forgotten. 

Before I get into my own contribution to the blogathon, here’s a bonus: I can’t make it an official entry because I’ve already posted on this picture before. But if we’re talking about Fabulous Films of the 1940s, I can’t forgo mentioning one of my absolute favorites, Henry Hathaway’s Down to the Sea in Ships (1949). As I said in my post (which you can reach at the link), I simply don’t understand why this one isn’t one of the best-loved movies of all time; sooner or later (and if I have anything to say about it), I’m sure it will be. (UPDATE 2/18/13: Reader David Rayner of Stoke-on-Trent, England, whose admiration equals my own, has written to tell me that Down to the Sea has been released on Region 1 DVD in the US and is available here from Amazon. Don’t miss it!)

But now, getting back to the blogathon at hand — drumroll, please — here’s another one of my particular favorites from that embarrassment-of-riches decade…

*               *               *  

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

The story is nonsense, of course. Goddard never had Scarlett nailed down, certainly not enough to throw a party over it. David Selznick’s first sight of Leigh is well-documented, and it wasn’t at Paulette’s house. Just about everybody knows that story, so I needn’t go into it here; suffice it to say the near miss on Gone With the Wind haunted Paulette Goddard for the rest of her life — through her 1940s peak at Paramount (when she never quite made it into the top rank of Hollywood stars), and especially through the long years before her death at 79 in 1990, years during which GWTW‘s fame grew even as her own dwindled.

There’s another sort-of connection with Gone With the Wind in Goddard’s career. It’s a bit of a stretch, I admit, but here goes: As you probably know, during the second half of the 1930s, Scarlett O’Hara was the most coveted role in Hollywood, and the novel’s millions of fans waited breathlessly for the movie David Selznick would make of it. Warner Bros. decided to cash in on the moss-magnolias-and-the-old-plantation fever by dusting off a 1933 Broadway flop by playwright Owen Davis called Jezebel, which also happened to be about a flirtatious and headstrong southern belle. Warners worked it up as a vehicle for Bette Davis and triumphantly swept it to the screen a year ahead of Gone With the Wind.

Fast-forward a few years to 1944. Another novel has set the hearts of America’s female readers a-flutter and got every actress in Hollywood rubbing her hands. The book is Forever Amber by 24-year-old Kathleen Winsor, about an ambitious village girl’s sexual exploits during the Restoration of Charles II of England, up to and including a liaison with the king himself. (Like Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber sparked a vogue for naming newborn girls after its heroine that endures to this day.) When this racy, titillating book by an unknown housewife sold 100,000 copies the first week (on its way to 3 million), Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox wasted no time nailing down the movie rights. Undaunted, the boys at Paramount decided to steal a march on Zanuck the way Warners had on Selznick, and the beneficiary of their ploy was Paulette Goddard.

The book they chose was Kitty by Rosamond Marshall, which had been published the year before Amber, but without gaining anywhere near the same amount of sales or notoriety.
 
Born in 1902, Rosamond Marshall wrote some 16 novels altogether between her first, None But the Brave: A Story of Holland in 1942 and her last, The Bixby Girls, published in 1957, the year she died. Her books sold pretty well during her lifetime — especially in paperback reprints with semi-lurid covers and titles like Duchess Hotspur, Rogue Cavalier and The General’s Wench — but only two of them ever made it to the screen: The Bixby Girls (filmed in 1960 as All the Fine Young Cannibals with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner) and Kitty.
 

Actually, though, not quite all of Kitty did make it to the screen. Marshall’s novel was what we now call a bodice-ripper, the tale of a 14-year-old London prostitute blithely sleeping her way up the social ladder during the days of King George III. As the story opens, Kitty — she doesn’t have a last name, or at least doesn’t know it — lives with and works for Old Meg in the wretched slums of Houndsditch. Old Meg sold Kitty’s virginity when the girl was only nine, and now Kitty spends her days thieving and her nights whoring, turning her loot and her earnings over to Old Meg in return for squalid shelter and crumbs of food.

One day Kitty indulges a common ploy: stealing the shoes of a gentleman as he’s being carried piggyback on his footman across a muddy street. When she’s caught and brought back to the man’s doorstep, he finds her face interesting and invites her in. He’s the painter Thomas Gainsborough, and he wants Kitty to pose for him. Once he’s had her washed and decently clothed he’s surprised to see that she’s not a child but a rather attractive young woman; she in turn is overawed by his studio, especially one portrait, which she impulsively dubs “Blueboy”.

Kitty also catches the eye of a visitor to Gainsborough’s studio, Sir Hugh Marcy. Sir Hugh is an impecunious ne’er-do-well, impoverished but charming. In time, through the picture Gainsborough eventually paints of her — “Portrait of an Anonymous Lady” — Kitty becomes the talk of London society. During the same time, Sir Hugh and his gin-sodden aunt Lady Susan take her under their threadbare wings, passing her off as Miss Kitty Gordon, the orphaned child of a dear friend. Day after day, they subject her to a crash course in proper speech and manners — while at night, Sir Hugh schools her in the unsuspected pleasures of orgasmic sex.
 
As years pass, Kitty blooms under their tutelage and her prospects improve. She marries a wealthy shipping merchant, bringing a welcome dowry to Sir Hugh and Lady Susan — although Lady Susan soon succeeds in drinking herself to death. Not long after, Kitty’s husband dies and Hugh arranges a second marriage to the aged Duke of Malminster. Kitty thus becomes a duchess, and she soon gives the duke an heir. The old boy never suspects that “his” son is really Sir Hugh’s; Kitty’s affair with him has continued throughout both her marriages.
 
That’s as much of the novel’s plot as we need go into here, because that (aside from the endless rounds of sex with Sir Hugh) is what remains in the movie Paramount released on October 16, 1945. Between publication and premiere, however, Rosamond Marshall’s story had to undergo a major overhaul at the hands of writers Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware and director Mitchell Leisen. 
 
Darrell Ware had been a prolific journeyman since 1936, turning out an array of dramas (A Yank in the R.A.F.), comedies (Charlie McCarthy, Detective) and musicals (Down Argentine Way, Orchestra Wives, My Gal Sal), none of which were particularly praised for their writing. Karl Tunberg’s career lasted longer, and he at least has the distinction of receiving sole screenplay credit for the 1959 Ben-Hur; his script was heavily doctored by Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry and others, and was conspicuous for being the only Oscar nomination that Ben-Hur didn’t win. Still, in Kitty, both Tunberg and Ware rose to the occasion with what was easily the best screenplay of their otherwise rather undistinguished careers. (Both men received associate producer credit on the picture — although their producing duties may not have amounted to much, at least not in Ware’s case: he died at age 37 in May 1944, nearly a year-and-a-half before Kitty‘s premiere.)
 
Their task with the novel’s plot was daunting. To begin with, of course, the idea of a prostitute as a heroine, let alone a 14-year-old one, was obviously out of the question. So Kitty was advanced to somewhere beyond the age of consent — and relieved of the need to have anything to consent to.
More important, Tunberg and Ware (with perhaps the collaboration of director Leisen) realized what Rosamond Marshall evidently did not: that next to Kitty herself, by far the book’s most interesting characters are the rakish cad Sir Hugh Marcy and the alcoholically haughty Lady Susan. In the novel, Lady Susan is dead halfway through; Sir Hugh disappears from Kitty’s life with far too many pages left to read, while Kitty rather unconvincingly transfers her affections to the now-adult subject of Gainsborough’s “Blueboy”. In the screenplay, both Sir Hugh and Lady Susan are kept around, to far more satisfying effect.

By the way, there’s a curious side note to this business of the painting: In reality the subject of Gainsborough’s famous portrait is not known for certain, but is believed to be one Jonathan Buttall, son of a wealthy London hardware merchant. In Marshall’s novel, this is the name of Kitty’s hot-tempered first husband, while the Blue Boy (a more accurate rendering of the portrait’s title) is named Brett Harwood, a cousin of Buttall’s. In the movie, all this was changed. The importance of the painting in Kitty’s life is downplayed, and Brett Harwood becomes a rival to Sir Hugh for Kitty’s heart. Meanwhile, her first husband is renamed Jonathan Selby — no doubt to avoid offense to any living descendants of the real J. Buttall.

But I digress.

Ware and Tunberg’s solution to Kitty‘s story problems — and its glaring conflicts with the Production Code — was elegantly inspired: They expanded and emphasized the scenes of Sir Hugh and Lady Susan schooling Kitty in ladylike comportment, thus changing Kitty‘s plot from the meteoric rise of an adolescent whore into an 18th century adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Kitty (Paulette Goddard) as Eliza Doolittle, Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) as Henry Higgins, Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway) as Col. Pickering, and Brett Harwood (Patric Knowles) as the sweetly besotted Freddie Eynsford-Hill. Shaw’s Mrs. Higgins, of course, became Lady Susan, and the role was entrusted to that grand dowager dragon of the British and Broadway stages, Constance Collier.
 
Bernard Shaw’s reaction to all this is unrecorded. I like to think the old boy would have been amused, but he may never have even seen the picture — and he almost certainly never read Marshall’s novel.
 
In addition to the “associate producers” credit for Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg, Kitty is also billed as “A Mitchell Leisen Production”. In the mid-’40s Leisen was Paramount’s reigning arbiter of elegance, having begun his career as a set and costume designer for Cecil B. DeMille, the only Paramount director who outranked him in prestige. Leisen (it’s pronounced “Leeson”, by the way) has taken a beating from auteurists in recent decades. I suspect this is mainly because those two auteur darlings Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges both claimed to have turned director out of dissatisfaction with Leisen’s treatment of their scripts. But an unbiased look at the pictures Leisen made of Sturges’s screenplays for Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (’40), or Wilder’s (and Charles Brackett’s) for Midnight (’39) and Hold Back the Dawn (’41), makes them sound like a couple of whining prima donnas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad and grateful that Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges moved into directing their own stuff; but they had no grounds whatever to complain about Mitch Leisen.

 

David Chierichetti’s 1995 book Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director does much to correct this injustice to Leisen, but its information on Kitty is sketchy and unreliable. Chierichetti calls it the story of “a filthy cockney street waif of Restoration Era England”; in fact it takes place in Georgian England a full 125 years after the Restoration in 1660. Leisen himself, interviewed, says: “I spent two years researching Gainsborough and the way he painted. We determined that the picture took place in 1659, and there’s nothing in the picture that was painted by him after that year.” Au contraire, Gainsborough wasn’t even born until 1727, and this frame from the picture states explicitly the year the story opens. Clearly, Leisen (who died in 1972) had not seen the picture recently when he discussed it with Chierichetti, nor had Chierichetti when he wrote about it. Leisen’s claim of spending two years in research is also plainly implausible: Kitty was ready for release by the end of 1944 but was held up a full year by Paramount’s backlog of product; two years of research would have had Leisen beginning in 1942, a year before Rosamond Marshall’s novel was published. Altogether, these facts cast doubt on much of the information in the seven pages Chierichetti devotes to Kitty.
 
But there is one point on which Chierichetti is absolutely right: Kitty “was precisely the kind of picture Leisen could do better than anybody else, and its mixture of mannered comedy and gutsy drama suited him perfectly”. The picture is a sumptuous feast for the eye, evoking 18th century London’s riot of teeming streets and Rococo decor as sharply as a series of engravings by William Hogarth. It’s a pity the picture couldn’t have been made in Technicolor — thus evoking Gainsborough rather than Hogarth — but Paramount was notoriously frugal on that score; among the major studios, even cheapskate Universal was more generous in their use of color. But even as it stands, Kitty richly deserved its Oscar nomination for art direction — for Hans Dreier and Walter Tyler; the production design was by Raoul Pene Du Bois. (Kitty lost; the award went to Anna and the King of Siam.)
 
Over and above its gorgeous look and elegent style, and entirely in keeping with it, Kitty gave Paulette Goddard the opportunity to deliver the performance of her career, and she came through with a performance nearly as good as Wendy Hiller’s in 1938’s Pygmalion (and considerably better than Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady). Always a conscientious actress rather than an inspired one, Goddard worked hard on her cockney accent. According to Chierichetti, Leisen credited Phyllis Loughton and Connie Emerald (mother of Ida Lupino) for this, adding that for Goddard’s diction as the new-and-improved Kitty, “we moved Connie Emerald out and Constance Collier in”, and the old girl coached Goddard/Kitty as much off screen as Lady Susan did on. There’s not a false note in Goddard’s performance, nor in any of the rest of the cast, which was surely one of the largest and best either she or Leisen ever worked with: Milland (against-all-odds charming as Sir Hugh, a more unsympathetic rotter than Henry Higgins ever was), Collier, Knowles, Kellaway, Dennis Hoey (as Kitty’s first husband), Reginald Owen (as her second), Sara Allgood (Old Meg) and the ever-popular Eric Blore as Sir Hugh and Lady Susan’s querulous manservant Dobson. (Blore has one of the picture’s best lines, which I hereby spoil for you: On Kitty’s first night in Sir Hugh’s household, Dobson hands her a tea tray and orders her to take it up to Lady Susan. Kitty: “‘Ow will I find ‘er?” Dobson: “Drunk, as usual!”)
 

Kitty is another of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal. Like others I’ve written about before (MissMiss Tatlock’s Millions, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes), it was often available in TV syndication during the 1960s and ’70s. Unlike them, however, Kitty hasn’t entirely vanished into the Universal vault. It’s turned up recently on Turner Classic Movies thanks to TCM’s agreement with Universal, so it’s out there somewhere for you to find, and to savor Leisen, Goddard, Milland et al. all at their best. There’s no “official” DVD yet — only ones of varying quality available here from Amazon and here from Loving the Classics. A full-scale DVD transfer, doing justice to those Oscar-nominated sets and Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography, is long overdue. We can only wait, and hope, for Universal to come through.

UPDATE 2/14/18: Universal has come through. Kitty is now available in a very nice DVD transfer from the Universal Vault series (Universal’s answer to the Warner Archive). It’s bare-bones, of course, like all such issues from Warner, Universal and Fox, with no extras (if Universal is interested in adding a commentary, I’m happy to volunteer), but well worth having. You can get it here from Amazon. 

 

The Man Who Saved Cinerama

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Let us now praise John Harvey.

Somewhere in my scattered stacks of pre-digital photographs, I have a picture I took of John Harvey posing proudly beside one of his Cinerama projectors. I’ve been ransacking the house for over three months now, all the time I’ve been preparing and posting this series on Cinerama, and I absolutely cannot find the damned thing, or any of the other pictures I took on my visit to John’s home town of Dayton, Ohio in 1996. So I’ve given up and decided to make do with this image from the supplemental materials on the This Is Cinerama Blu-ray. I’ll keep looking, because it’s important: I knew from the start that this whole series was going to culminate in a grateful tribute to John. Besides, those pictures aren’t just important to me. They’re historic.
 
Not to mince words or beat around the bush, John Harvey is the man who — virtually single-handedly — preserved Cinerama for posterity. His service to movie history can scarcely be overstated.
 
This is not in any way to minimize or overlook the efforts of others who have often worked above-and-beyond to ensure the survival of Fred Waller’s marvel. Just a few examples: The International Cinerama Society was instrumental in seeing that Cinerama was installed at the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television) in Bradford, UK. John Sittig, who recently retired as Director of Projection and Sound for ArcLight Cinemas, performed a similar service for the installation of Cinerama at ArcLight’s Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (he also capped his career by putting together last month’s 60th Anniversary Cinerama Festival at the Dome). David Strohmaier’s 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure was — besides being one of the best movie-themed documentaries ever made — a major step in retrieving the forgotten process from the memory hole of the 1950s and ’60s (Strohmaier also wrote, directed and edited the 30-minute short In the Picture [2012], the first picture in Cinerama since How the West Was Won).
 
And Australian collector John Mitchell has done much at his end of the globe — it was his prints of Search for Paradise and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm that screened at the festival in Hollywood. But before any of them except John Mitchell Down Under — back when the ICS was still scouring the world for parts to put in that museum in Bradford, when David Strohmaier was just beginning to wonder what ever happened to Cinerama — John Harvey had been hosting screenings of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won for years. In his living room. 
 
Harvey’s interest in the movie projectionist’s craft began at an early age in Dayton. At the age of 10 he’d tag along when his older brother went to work at the local drive-in theater, and he began to wonder about the kind of machine it would take to project movies onto that massive outdoor screen. The projectionist noticed him peering in the windows night after night, invited him in to have a look around, and became his mentor, eventually sponsoring him into the projectionists’ union when John turned 17.
 
Meanwhile, when John was 16, his father (a loyal fan of Lowell Thomas) had taken the family to see This Is Cinerama when it opened at Cincinnati’s Capitol Theatre in 1954. For a boy with a budding interest in movie projection, here was movie projection on steroids; in time he would travel the 54 miles to Cincinnati to see all the Cinerama features at the Capitol. And when Dayton’s Dabel Theatre converted to Cinerama in 1963, John — now a union projectionist — worked backup to the Dabel’s crew, seeing How the West Was Won for 38 straight weeks and getting hands-on experience running a Cinerama setup.
 
When three-strip Cinerama was abandoned after HTWWW, Harvey missed it. He saw clearly the difference with the “new” Cinerama movies like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Greatest Story Ever Told (really only UltraPanavision — a big picture on a curved screen, but the viewer was no more “in” the picture than if he were standing in front of a billboard by the side of the road).
 
Harvey’s home cinema began as a a sort of laboratory where he experimented with ways of keeping a single wide-screen frame in focus on a deeply curved screen. He enlarged his living room three-fold by knocking out the walls of two unused bedrooms and raising the ceiling, installed a 35mm projector, and began tinkering with lenses, mirrors, beam-splitters and screen surfaces. Eventually — and I’m speculating here, but it may have been when he finally realized that classic Cinerama was never coming back — he decided to convert his home theater to Cinerama. “One day,” he remembered, “I finally took the initiative: ‘I’m gonna build my own projectors; I’m gonna run that film.’ Because it hadn’t been seen for years.”
 
And he did. It took him years of patient accumulation and painstaking work, but he eventually installed three full-size Cinerama projectors — sometimes having parts made from scratch when he couldn’t find them — and a Cinerama sound console the size of an armoire (the set-up even encroached on his kitchen). He tracked down snippets of film all over the world, splicing them together as they came into his hands (the sheer magnitude of that chore is mind-boggling). In time he had complete prints of This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday and How the West Was Won. That’s at the very least; I seem to remember reading somewhere that he acquired, bit by bit, all seven features, but I can’t document that now. At any rate, he also amassed an impressive array of Fred Waller’s original test footage from the 1940s, and even a print of a Renault car commercial made to play with How the West Was Won in France. In addition, he had a museum’s worth of Cinerama memorabilia: posters, programs, lobby cards, stills — he even served guests popcorn in baskets lined with Cinerama napkins. Throughout the 1980s, to put it bluntly, John Harvey’s suburban Ohio home was one of only two functioning Cinerama theaters in the world; the other was in Australian John Mitchell’s backyard, 9,400 miles away. (It was about this time that I read of John and his happy obsession; I daydreamed about meeting him and wangling an invitation for a screening or two. If I had only known: I probably had only to look him up in Dayton directory assistance and drop him a line. In the end it didn’t come to that — but I’m getting ahead of my story.)
 
In the early 1980s a mutual friend invited Larry Smith to a screening at John’s home and introduced the two men. Smith remembered seeing Cinerama at the Dabel at the age of six, and his experience that night was a reunion with one of his most vivid childhood memories. He told Harvey that if there was any way he (Larry) could help bring this to a wider audience, he wanted to do it. In 1986, Smith became the manager of the New Neon Movies, a cozy little 300-seat art cinema nestled in one corner of a huge parking garage in downtown Dayton, and began a ten-year campaign to persuade Harvey to install his Cinerama equipment at the New Neon. (This picture, by the way, is a rather misleading likeness of Larry. It’s from a 1997 interview taken while Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet was playing at the New Neon, and Larry had bleached his hair and grown the moustache and soul-patch to emphasize his slight resemblance to Branagh as the Melancholy Dane.)
 
In John’s search for film and equipment, he had made the acquaintance of Willem Bouwmeester of the Netherlands. Like Harvey, Bouwmeester discovered Cinerama as a teenager and never lost his enthusiasm for the process. He grew up to work for IMAX in Europe and become a founding member of the International Cinerama Society, and from the Continent he had helped Harvey in his search. In 1993, when the ICS installed Cinerama at the Bradford museum, they sought and received advice and assistance from John Harvey. So now John’s house was no longer the lone outpost in a Cinerama-bereft world. But the only true Cinerama theater was in England; Cinerama remained a prophet without honor in the country of its origin (where it had once proved to be an honor without profit).
 

As 1995 became 1996, the landlord of the New Neon Movies announced plans to split the already-modest theater down the middle and turn it into a two-screen venue. Larry Smith at last persuaded John it was now or never, and they hatched a plan that was brilliant simplicity itself: Before the remodel, the New Neon would install John Harvey’s screen, projectors and sound equipment. The theater would continue showing its standard art-house fare every evening, but on weekends there would be full-Cinerama matinees of This Is Cinerama (on Saturdays) and How the West Was Won (Sundays). The landlord was doubtful the scheme would pay for itself, but he agreed to let Smith solicit a letter-writing campaign; if he could get 1,000 writers to pledge to come to Dayton for Cinerama, then they could talk.

Ads went out in movie-buff publications all over the country, things like Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age, soliciting interest. By the deadline Smith had received 1,200 expressions of interest and pledges to attend; the next day another 200 arrived. “Can you say ‘no’ to fourteen hundred people at once?” Smith asked. And so the project got a green light — but only for an eight-week run. 
 
Smith, Harvey and the New Neon staff had thirty days and almost no budget to retrofit the theater for Cinerama — something that had often taken months and as much as 200,000 1950s dollars to do when Cinerama was new. They did it with long hours and volunteer workers (“We can’t pay you,” Smith said, “but we can give you all the popcorn you can eat.”), ripping out 80 of the 300 seats to make way for the screen and auxiliary projection booth spanning the full back of the auditorium. As opening night drew near the story of their project made the Associated Press wire, drawing interest from all over the continent: Texas, Florida, Canada, New Orleans, Washington DC. “It just didn’t stop,” Smith remembered. “We had so many interviews that first week, we wondered if we’d ever get around to showing the movies.”
 
This Is Cinerama premiered a second time in America — and for the first time in over 30 years — at the New Neon on Thursday, August 29, 1996. The date was chosen to take advantage of the long Labor Day Weekend, but Harvey and Smith were in store for an eerie surprise. The guest of honor that night was Marianna Munn Thomas, widow of Lowell, and they learned from her that they had, without knowing it, brought This Is Cinerama back to America on the fifteenth anniversary of Lowell Thomas’s death. 
 
Now that’s what I call some kinda Karma.
 
I’ll never forget how I learned about the project. That summer of ’96, when my girlfriend LuAnn and I returned from vacation in Illinois and Indiana, we were picked up at the Sacramento airport by my uncle, himself on vacation from his home in Muncie, Indiana — the same uncle who had taken my parents and grandparents to see This Is Cinerama in San Francisco in 1953. As I sat down in the car, he dropped an issue of Classic Images in my lap, open to an ad announcing the eight-week return of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won. I stared, gobsmacked, for a few seconds, and once I realized it wasn’t some kind of trick, I turned to my uncle and said, “Let’s go.”
 
In October ’96, midway through the (supposedly) limited run, that’s what we did. I flew to my uncle’s home in Muncie, and from there we drove the 84 miles to Dayton. That’s when I met John Harvey and Larry Smith, and when I took all those pictures that I can’t find now.* And that’s when I had an experience I never expected to have again: seeing This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won in honest-to-goodness Cinerama, the way Fred Waller and Lowell Thomas and Merian C. Cooper and Hazard Reeves and Henry Hathaway and everybody else intended them to be seen.
 
Improvements in projection technology — and John Harvey’s almost supernatural rapport with his own equipment — made it possible for him now to do alone what had once taken an entire team of projectionists, and both movies came off without a hitch. John’s print of How the West Was Won was simply flawless: richly brilliant colors without a scratch, splice or line from the first frame to the last. I saw HTWWW four times in Cinerama in 1963 and ’64, and I’ve seen it four more times since the revival of the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, but I never saw it looking better — or even as good — as it did that Sunday in Dayton. 
 
This Is Cinerama was more variable, having clearly been assembled from more disparate sources. There were a number of splices, a few scratches, and a second or two here and there (no more than 10 or 15 seconds overall) when a section of one of the three panels couldn’t be found and had to be filled in with black slugs. (There were even a few seconds, in the canals of Venice if memory serves, imprinted with Danish subtitles — this footage no doubt obtained through the efforts of Willem Bouwmeester.) Even so, it was the real article, no doubt about it; for 23 years I had carried the unhappy memory of the picture’s misbegotten 70mm reissue in 1973 — which should have been called This Isn’t Cinerama — and this erased it completely.
 
Chatting with Larry Smith in the lobby, it was clear that, no matter what the ads said about “for 8 weeks only”, he intended to keep Cinerama playing at the New Neon until the landlord dragged the projectors, the sound console and the screen out the front door and threw them into the street. And that’s pretty much what happened. 
 
People came — no exaggeration — from all over the world; the original eight weeks got extension after extension. After a year, the New Neon’s Cinerama matinees were still selling out seven and eight weeks in advance, and the shows continued. On at least one occasion Smith and Harvey screened John’s print of the second feature, Cinerama Holiday (rather badly faded Eastman color, but complete) and the guests of honor were the Marshes (now divorced) and the Trollers, the couples who had starred in it back in 1954. Ultimately, the New Neon’s Cinerama engagement lasted nearly four years of weekends and special occasions, finally drawing to a close in April 2000. 
 
 
 
Eventually, the landlord followed through on his original plan, and the New Neon is now a two-screen cinema incapable of showing Cinerama. Larry Smith has moved on; he now lives in Culpeper, Virginia, where he works in the film preservation unit of the Library of Congress, specializing in the salvage and preservation of nitrate film.
 

John Harvey suffered a series of health issues in the early 2000s, and was forced to sell off his Cinerama equipment, prints and memorabilia to pay his medical bills. He finally lost his battle with those issues on May 3, 2018, at the age of 81. But the seeds of his quest and crusade to preserve Cinerama have borne priceless fruit. His and Larry Smith’s phenomenal success in Dayton from 1996 to 2000 sparked renewed interest in Fred Waller’s lifework. Now, in addition to the National Media Museum in Bradford, there are the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and the Cinerama in Seattle; both had been slated for demolition before public enthusiasm for Cinerama saved them from the wrecking ball, and both were fitted for Cinerama with John’s advice and assistance. Those two theaters owe their new lease on life — and the one in Bradford owes its very existence — in no small measure to the dedication, enthusiasm and practical know-how of John Harvey.

 
 
___________________
 
*Those pictures may yet turn up; stranger things have happened. If they do, I’ll add them here.

 

*                         *                            *

UPDATE 8/4/13: As always seems to happen, the photographs I took on my trip to Dayton in October 1996 turned up when I least expected to run across them. Here are a couple of good examples.

 

 

First, a shot of my uncle standing in front of the New Neon Movies as we arrived for the Sunday matinee showing of How the West Was Won. He’s holding one of my souvenir programs for the picture.

Just so there’s no confusion about the marquee over the box office: The New Neon ran This Is Cinerama on Saturday and How the West Was Won on Sunday afternoons. The rest of the week, and Saturday and Sunday evening, was devoted to current art-house fare. The marquee shows that the (regular) feature is Big Night, the 1996 hit starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers operating a failing Italian restaurant. Opening on the coming Friday will be Robert Altman’s jazz-flavored Kansas City.

 And here, finally, is the picture I originally wanted to open this post. This was taken the day before, in the “auxiliary” projection booth set up at the rear of the New Neon’s auditorium. It’s after the showing of This Is Cinerama, and John is carefully monitoring the rewinding of the second half of the feature.

Returning to Lost London (Reprinted)

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Just for the fun of it, I think I’ll make this an annual Halloween
event here at Cinedrome: reposting
my series on the lost Lon Chaney picture London After Midnight
(1927), and on Marie Coolidge-Rask’s novelization of Tod Browning and
Waldemar Young’s scenario. I first posted these four parts in October 2010, then again last year. London After Midnight wasn’t really a Halloween movie — it actually opened closer to Christmas, on December 17, 1927 — but it’s ghostly and creepy enough (most of the way, anyhow) to qualify for the season. So, whether you read it last year or the year before and were thinking of looking it up again for a good chill, or are coming to it now for the first time, here is my series The Fog of Lost London. Be sure to read the
posts in order so you don’t get ahead of the plot.

Have a fun and safely spooky Halloween, everybody!

Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

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At This Is Cinerama‘s premiere on September 30, 1952, historian Greg Kimble tells us, Lowell Thomas and Merian Cooper were as nervous as expectant fathers. But not Fred Waller; he sat quietly confident, and as the cheers and bravos echoed at the end, he allowed himself only the slightest of smiles. “I knew 16 years ago,” he said, “it would be like this.”

Even so, Waller never considered that night’s showing to be Cinerama in its final form; this was, in a sense, only the “third generation” version. Just as he had refined Vitarama’s 11 cameras and projectors down to five, and those five down to Cinerama’s three, he fully expected that the process would continue to evolve, and that he would be there to see it was done.

Truth be told, there was room for improvement, and Waller knew it.

Some of Cinerama’s technical problems can be discerned in this frame (frames, actually) from Search for Paradise — although to be fair, by the time this picture was shot most of them had been considerably alleviated. Most often complained about were those dividing lines between the three panels. The panels overlapped by a degree or two, which meant that the overlap area would inevitably get the light from two projectors. To minimize this over-exposure, the sides of each projector’s film gate were supplied with little devices called (spellings vary) “gigolos”. These were serrated, comb-like assemblies mounted on cams that moved them up and down, once for each frame (i.e., 26 times per second) as the film passed through the gate. This was intended to cut down on the excess light hitting the overlap, and to blur the sharp division from one panel to the next. As a matter of fact, this worked reasonably well.
 
Actually, when people remarked on Cinerama’s join lines, they were reacting not so much to the lines themselves, but to other technical peculiarities that tended to draw attention to them. The resolution isn’t very high on this illustration of a shot from This Is Cinerama (photographed live in the theater), but it shows some of what I’m talking about. There were often variations in color and intensity from one panel to the next (particularly noticeable in the sky here). Several factors could contribute to this: minute differences in the emulsion on the three negatives, or in the processing and printing, or in the intensity of light from the carbon-arc projectors. The carbons burned away during operation, like fireworks sparklers but more slowly, requiring constant adjustment and frequent replacement (that’s a major factor in why carbon arc projectors and searchlights became obsolete). Cinerama’s carbons multiplied the problem by three, and all three had to be closely monitored during each show to keep the light output as uniform as possible. Also contributing to this was the three lenses of the Cinerama camera, each of which was “faster” (admitting more light) at the center than at the edges. Another occasional peculiarity that can’t be shown by a still illustration was a perceptible “jiggle” between the frames, caused again by minute variations — this time in the film perforations, the sprockets in the separate camera and projector movements, or a combination thereof.  

 

Most noticeable of all was the parallax effect caused by the fact that the Cinerama camera was really three cameras, each with its own vanishing point. (“parallax [pár-a-laks] n. 1 the apparent difference in the position or direction of an object caused when the observer’s position is changed.”) Imagine yourself looking out at a vista: First you look straight ahead; then you take a step to your right and turn your head left; then two steps left and turn your head right. You’re looking at the same view each time, but from three ever-so-slightly different places. That’s parallax. Take this frame on the right, from the last scene of How the West Was Won, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. The join lines and the difference in color textures from one panel to the next are glaringly obvious, but even more pronounced are the “elbows” in the bridge; everyone knows that the Golden Gate travels in a perfectly straght line between San Francisco on the left and Marin County on the right.

Here’s a similar frame, on the left, from the same scene as it appears in a later DVD issue. The digital clean-up crew has been busy: Join lines have been digitally erased,  the color has been made uniform, and the “elbows” have been smoothed out. But the digital wizards couldn’t do anything about how the three lenses saw the bridge. That’s how it was with the Cinerama camera. The parallax wasn’t always obvious — especially when you were careening up and down rollercoaster tracks or swooping over Niagara Falls or through Zion Canyon in Utah — but when it was, it was impossible to ignore.

These were the things, as Cinerama opened in September ’52, that Fred Waller expected eventually to fine-tune. Early in 1953, as 20th Century Fox was beginning to beat the drum for CinemaScope, Cinerama announced plans for a single-booth, single-projector system. But that may simply have been a blue-sky announcement intended to take some of the wind out of CinemaScope’s sails. In any event, nothing ever came of it, at least not until It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World ten years later — which, despite sporting the name, wasn’t Cinerama at all. 
 
Also, by spring ’53, the Stanley Warner deal was in the works, and was finalized in August. Stanley Warner’s penny-wise-and-pound-foolish attitude toward Cinerama in general extended into the area of technical research, and Cinerama Inc., the manufacturing wing of the operation, was forced to eke out what technical improvements it could under the circumstances. New camera and projector assemblies were developed for the second feature, Cinerama Holiday, which had much greater registration accuracy than the industry standard, thus reducing considerably the jumping and jiggling of the three images. These new cameras also had improved focal ratios on the three lenses — from f/4.5 to f/2.8 — making them more sensitive to light.
 

As for the problem of slight variations in color, that was dependent on printing standards, which in most laboratories, as Hazard Reeves admitted, “have never been tight. If necessary,” he went on, “we’ll do our own printing.” But once again he ran up against the cheapskates at Stanley Warner. Not until 1958 did they agree to allot $200,000 for research into improved printing standards, and it wasn’t enough; Cinerama’s special in-house printers never materialized.

 
On May 18, 1954 Fred Waller died, and Cinerama lost its creator and conceptual genius. For all practical purposes, Cinerama remained, for the next (and last) nine years of its existence, what it was when Waller left it; the continuing evolution he envisioned would never happen — because there were no more Fred Wallers to drive it.
 
Waller left behind one final concept, designed to address the parallax problem inherent in Cinerama’s three-lens camera. This was a radically modified camera using a single lens that would duplicate the entire 146-degree field of vision of the three-lens camera, but on a single strip of film running horizontally through the camera 16 sprocket-holes at a time — the rough equivalent of a 102mm frame. This would eliminate the three-lens parallax, producing an image with a single vanishing point. That 102mm image could be divided in printing into three strips for projection (still necessary to cover Cinerama’s deeply curved screen) — and, as a bonus, could also be printed single-frame in any other format for conventional projection. The lens had been developed and a prototype camera was under construction in 1960 when the order came to abandon any further development.
 
In 1962, under Nicolas Reisini, Cinerama Inc. acquired the Photo Instruments Division of Benson-Lehner Corp. in Los Angeles, renaming it the Cinerama Camera Corp. Reisini might (and maybe should) have dedicated the new corporation to resolving the technical problems in Cinerama, perhaps even reviving that 102mm camera. But he didn’t. Instead, Cinerama Camera Corp. attempted to move into consumer products: a still camera that took 360-degree panoramic pictures, a wide-angle home movie projector, even (and I’ll bet you never knew this) a home videotape recorder. All of these ideas lost money in research and development (the videotape recorder was 20 years ahead of its time), and by 1964 Reisini had been ousted from Cinerama. The untapped potential of that single-lens, 102mm, 146-degree camera — Fred Waller’s last brainchild — is one of the great what-ifs of motion picture technology.
 

Cinedrome Wins 2012 CMBA Award

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I interrupt my series of posts commemorating the 60th anniversary of Cinerama at this point because the 2012 CiMBA Awards from the Classic Movie Blog Association have been announced — and Cinedrome has been honored with “Best Classic Movie Article” for my six-part series on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.

I won’t bore everybody with an endless Oscar-style acceptance speech, but I do want, gratefully, to thank my fellow CMBA members for this recognition, and to acknowledge the work of the many Welles biographers and scholars, especially Simon Callow and Prof. Robert L. Carringer, whose previous work contributed so much to my own and made my research such a pleasure. My conclusions may have differed from theirs, but I couldn’t have done it without them.

Links to the six parts of my Ambersons article are below. Meanwhile, you can go here for a complete list of CiMBA winners and nominees. Warmest congratulations to them all — and again, a grateful “Thank you!” to my colleagues for this honor.

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons (January 13 – March 28, 2012):

.