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Our Mr. Webb

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Clifton Webb is unique among movie stars. There are other (albeit lesser) tough guys than Humphrey Bogart; other blonde sex symbols than Marilyn Monroe; other western heroes than John Wayne; other Latin lovers than Rudolph Valentino. But there was nobody like Clifton Webb before his belated screen debut at 54 in Laura, and there has been nobody like him since.
 
Actually, strictly speaking, Laura wasn’t his debut. He appeared in a thin smattering of silents and a single 1930 talking short immortalizing a stage sketch he’d performed with Fred Allen. There was also an 18-month period in 1935-36 when he was under contract to MGM (Metro had vague ideas of making him their answer to Fred Astaire), but nothing ever came of that. For all intents and purposes, Laura was the beginning of Clifton Webb As We Know Him. For many movie buffs today, I suspect their knowledge of Webb begins and ends with that 1944 noir classic. Or it may extend to the other two pictures for which he got Academy Award nominations, The Razor’s Edge (’46) and Sitting Pretty (’48).
 
 
That last title, in fact, is the one my friend Dave Smith has chosen for his book on Clifton Webb: Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb. Amazingly, it’s the first full-length biography of Webb; even more amazing is the fact that it was written at least in part by Clifton Webb himself. He had started writing his autobiography and made it through six chapters before putting the project aside. (Webb’s proposed title was Mabelle and Me — Mabelle being his mother; like Cornell Woolrich, Webb lived with his mother for her entire life and didn’t survive her by much. The resemblance between the two men, however, most emphatically ends there.)
 
Dave Smith has retrieved Webb’s manuscript from (and with the kind permission of) the collectors who came into possession of Webb’s papers and memorabilia after his death in 1966. In addition to those six chapters, there were extensive — though often undated — notes for the remainder of the autobiography, and Dave makes use of them, and his own tireless research, in picking up Webb’s story where he left it at the Broadway opening of the musical Dancing Around in 1914.
 

Nineteen-fourteen!?! Yes, Clifton Webb’s autobiography cuts off a full 30 years before where most of us think his career even began. In fact, the movies from Laura to Satan Never Sleeps (’62) were his second career, the first having lasted on stage throughout the ‘teens, ’20s and ’30s. It was sometime during these years that he painted the self-portrait here (the date is unknown, but my guess is it’s from sometime in the mid-1920s). Webb was a super-elegant song-and-dance man, famous and sought-after for his ballroom skills and, later, his musical comedy abilities (among the songs he introduced on Broadway were “I’ve Got a Crush on You”, “At Long Last Love”, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans” and “Easter Parade”).

It’s almost startling to read Webb’s chapters on his early days in New York after his mother married (her second time) into the high society of the turn of the 20th century. Startling to realize that he spent his childhood and adolescence in the Manhattan of Edith Wharton and Diamond Jim Brady (“…completely settled only as far north as 72nd Street”), rose to his first fame on the Broadway of Jerome Kern and Charles Frohman, and went on to make his last stage appearance just off the gaudy Times Square of Damon Runyon (by which time, snob that he was, he found New York much diminished by the changing years).

For me, these early chapters are particularly fun reading because they are in Webb’s own voice, and we can hear him speaking them. Webb was a shameless name-dropper, and reading his roll call of the famous people he rubbed elbows with in the 1910s and ’20s is heady stuff. Better still, his writing gives a bracing whiff of what everyone who knew him says: that he was a wonderful conversationalist. (A favorite passage of mine is Webb talking about his mother’s pregnancy, almost as if he remembered it: “Mabelle has always sworn that the first sign of life I evidenced was a good hard kick when she was in the act of applauding the eminent Francis Wilson, and she floated home convinced that she was to be the mother of a great actor. Nobody to this day, I confide with a grave sense of responsibility, has disabused her of the notion.”)

That kicking baby was born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in Indianapolis in 1889. As a child actor young Webb used his stepfather’s name and was billed as Webb Raum. When Mabelle sent the elder Raum packing (not a minute too soon, by Webb’s lights), her son cast about for another stage name. He liked Webb well enough, and decided “Clifton” had the right ring of patrician dignity. Mother became Mabelle Webb and called her son “Webb” to the end of her life — naturally enough, since it was in fact his first name. He always called her Mabelle, and eventually they would be known as the happiest couple in Hollywood. Myrna Loy always said Mabelle “looked like Clifton in drag”, and this picture proves Myrna wasn’t exaggerating.
 
There’s a story — a legend, maybe — that when Otto Preminger (having taken over the direction of Laura from Rouben Mamoulian) wanted Webb for the vicious Waldo Lydecker, he was told, “You can’t cast Webb — he flies!” Meaning to say, he’s a flaming queen, too flagrantly swishy ever to pass for any kind of heterosexual. Whoever said that, if anybody really did, underestimated Webb. As he said himself, “I have destroyed the formula completely. I’m not young. I don’t get the girl in the end and I don’t swallow her tonsils, but I have become a national figure.”
 
Clearly, Clifton Webb didn’t believe in false modesty (or any other kind), but he had a point. By the time he said that, he had become a national figure. Webb’s big splash in Laura might have been only a fluke if it hadn’t been for one thing: Darryl Zanuck liked him and sensed a unique screen persona that, with proper care, could be developed into a valuable property for 20th Century Fox. Webb’s next picture was The Dark Corner for Henry Hathaway, playing a coldly calculating art dealer not far removed from Laura‘s Waldo. Then came The Razor’s Edge and another Oscar nomination as Somerset Maugham’s snobbish expatriate Elliott Templeton. 
 
Those first three pictures made Clifton Webb’s reputation as a character actor, but it was Sitting Pretty that made him a star (and got him his third Oscar nomination) playing Lynn Belvedere, a prissy intellectual novelist who takes a position as live-in babysitter for parents Robert Young and Maureen O’Hara. Critics and film noir historians have glommed onto the scene in Laura where Webb talks to detective Dana Andrews from a bathtub, but in Webb’s own lifetime this was probably the most famous scene in his career, where he dumps a bowl of oatmeal over the head of a misbehaving baby. (In real life the kid, 18-month-old Roddy McCaskill, was delighted at all the mess, and having a high old time; they had to dub the sound of crying in post-production.) 
 
My own favorite Clifton Webb moment comes just before this. First the set-up: The Kings (Young and O’Hara) think they’ve hired a college co-ed to sit their kids while they both take jobs to make ends meet — after all, “her” name is Lynn Belvedere. Instead, they get this humorless middle-aged bachelor with his nose in the air. This first morning at the breakfast table it begins to dawn on them that he’s liable to be as much a handful as their own brood. Webb has a long speech in which he explains to Mr. and Mrs. King the terms on which he will agree to work for them; I can’t remember exactly what-all he says but it goes on for quite a while, telling them what hours he will work, what evenings he demands off, when he expects breakfast, lunch and dinner, how long his eggs must be cooked, and so on and on. In the finished picture, precisely as Mr. Belvedere concludes his long-winded ultimatum, little Roddy McCaskill sneezes. Without batting an eye, Webb glances at the toddler and barks, “Gezundheit!” It’s obviously unscripted — there’s no way to get an 18-month-old to sneeze on cue — but perfectly in character all around, and Webb’s “gezundheit” deftly snatches our attention back from the adorable tot and turns that sneeze into an exclamation point to Webb’s own speech. It’s a hilarious moment and an example of Clifton Webb’s amazing presence of mind. (Kudos too to Robert Young and Maureen O’Hara for keeping straight faces and not spoiling the take.)
 
After Sitting Pretty — and two more Belvedere sequels — Clifton Webb was a major box-office star, and he remained so for much of the rest of his career. If movies like Cheaper by the Dozen and Stars and Stripes Forever (a largely fictitious biopic in which Webb was nevertheless ideally cast as John Philip Sousa) are less highly regarded today than Laura or The Razor’s Edge — well, that’s only natural, I suppose, and probably correct. But they don’t deserve to be forgotten altogether. Webb had a marvelous flair for comedy — and not just the bitch-wit of Waldo Lydecker or Elliott Templeton — and movies like these are worth seeing for it. So is the all-but-forgotten Dreamboat (’52), in which Webb plays a staid college professor mortified when the new medium of television unexpectedly resurrects his previous career as a silent movie heartthrob.
 
Sitting Pretty (that is, Dave Smith’s book) grows unavoidably cheerless in its closing pages as it recounts Webb’s utter failure to cope with the death of his mother (in 1961, at the age of 91). He was disconsolate and maudlin at what was after all the natural order of things — people are supposed to bury their parents — and his incessant grief, not only for Mabelle but for other friends and intimates already gone, sorely tested the patience of those who were still around (Noel Coward snapped, “It must be hard to be orphaned at seventy-one.”). Well, that’s part of the story too, if not the best part. For most of his life Clifton Webb was great fun to be around. His movies remind us of that, and so does Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb; it brings the man back in his own words, and we can once again bask in the pleasure of his company.

Auditioning for Immortality

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I ordered the Warner Archive’s Vitaphone Varieties collection because the transition to sound is one of two periods in movie history that particularly fascinate me (the other is the early “outlaw” years circa 1888-1912 with its patent wars, jockeying for supremacy and feverish experimentation). I also hoped that this new batch of 60 shorts would provide the grist for a post or two, like the MGM shorts package I wrote about here and here.

I got half a loaf. I found the collection interesting, but I don’t know if anyone else would agree if they don’t already share my penchant for the period.

Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (perfect title!) chronicles the dizzy suddenness with which silents went out and talkies came in, even as many Hollywood insiders said it was only a passing fad. Only in hindsight do they look to us like dodos standing neck-deep in water shouting “There isn’t going to be any flood!” And only in hindsight does it look like it happened overnight; there were three long and confused years before silents finally bit the dust.

That’s the period covered by this collection, and it’s actually a little less than claimed at the WA site. There are no shorts from 1926, the earliest in the collection being the first, The Revelers (from April 1927, six months before The Jazz Singer). And truth be told, this batch of shorts is a little drab compared to an earlier 6-disc set, Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts. That one covered nearly a full decade, 1931-38, with more familiar names than you’ll find in this one. The new collection has a lot of seven-to-ten-minute turns by vaudevillians that I for one had never heard of, and whom I couldn’t find in any of my vaudeville references.

They’re not all strangers. An amazingly young-looking Jay C. Flippen shows up in The Ham What Am from 1928. Still years from his character-actor heyday in pictures like Brute Force, Winchester ’73 or They Live by Night, or singing that the farmer and the cowman should be friends in Oklahoma!, Flippen regales us — from the usual incongruous Vitaphone parlor set — with a couple of songs and a lot of jokes, all while flashing a toothy, Joker-size smile and brandishing a cigar the size of a horse’s leg.

And here was a surprise: the husband-and-wife vaudeville team of (Frank) Orth and (Ann) Codee. According to Joe Laurie Jr.’s chatty history Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace, written when many of the people he chatted about were still alive and working, Orth and Codee played their act all over the world in five different languages (she was Belgian-born). Like George Burns and Gracie Allen, she started out as straight-man to him, but he wound up playing straight-man to her. When the vaude circuits dried up, they both stepped easily into character work in movies, often uncredited. Orth’s stock in trade was cab drivers, waiters, bartenders (or barflies), and newsmen. If the face is familiar but you can’t quite place it, try this: he was Duffy, Cary Grant’s beleaguered assistant in His Girl Friday. 
 

Codee may be harder to place from this picture, but her accent and dignified look kept her busy as Madame This or That: Mme. Borodin, the owner of Margaret O’Brien’s ballet academy in The Unfinished Dance; Mme. Bouget in That Midnight Kiss, and so on. Any sci-fi fan will especially remember her, as I do…

 
 
 
 
 
…as Dr. Duprey, one of Gene Barry’s
scientific colleagues in George Pal’s The
War of the Worlds (shown here with
Sandro Giglio as Dr. Bilderbeck,
seeking refuge in a church during
the destruction of L.A.). 
 
 

 

There are a few more familiar names and faces — comedian Joe Frisco, character actors Montagu Love, Franklin Pangborn and Henry B. Walthall — but they’re not plentiful. For the most part, what the entertainers in this collection have in common more than anything else is their utter and absolute obscurity, then and now.

Who are these people? Some of them seem to have based their act on the premise that they have no talent whatsoever. Like Jack Born and Elmer Lawrence here, using floppy shoes, a Jew’s harp, and a sad-sack dead-pan delivery in a vain effort to make themselves (and their jokes) funnier than they are. Did they ever really connect with an audience? We can’t know because the audience is, by and large, as gone as they are. Nothing ages like comedy, which is why when we find someone who’s still funny — a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Groucho Marx, even a Moe or Curly Howard — it tells us something. All we know for sure about Born and Lawrence is that they’re not funny now. (Neither, for example, is one Charles “Slim” Timblin, dolled up as a blackface preacher in Revival Day [1930]. Here we have confirmation that at least some people at the time weren’t amused: Sitting in Rev. Timblin’s congregation are a number of bona fide African Americans, and they don’t think he’s funny; rather, they look sullen and disgusted at the thought of what they must put up with for — what, a measly five bucks a day?)

For some reason, during this young lady’s nine-minute Cycle of Songs (’28) I had something of an epiphany. Her name is Florence Brady, and she’s just one of literally dozens of people in Vitaphone Varieties whom I, who have been studying vaudeville history for nearly 40 years, have never heard of. She’s nothing particularly special, but she’s not bad; she has pep and a nice voice, and she presents herself well to a camera that is not entirely hostile (she’s like a young Rosie O’Donnell who can sing, and without the overweening anger). But I wondered: Did she make this short (and one other earlier in the year) because she was a name in vaudeville, or because she hoped to become a name in vaudeville?
 
Thousands of vaudevillians were thrown out of work when the two-a-day went belly-up, done in by the one-two punch of talkies and commercial radio. Some of them — the smart, the quick and the lucky, the Frank Orths and Ann Codees, the William Demarests and Jack Bennys and George Burnses and Bob Hopes — rolled with it and found work where the new money was. But for every one of them, there must have been many who struggled to sell themselves in a drying-up market until it was too late, then wound up teaching school or clerking in a bank or selling candy at Woolworth’s — and counted themselves lucky to get that. Maybe Florence Brady was one of those, along with Slim Timblin and Born and Lawrence, and Oklahoma Bob Albright, Carlena Diamond, Harpist Supreme, and Frank Whitman That Surprising Fiddler.
 
Or maybe not. Maybe these shorts aren’t really acts but auditions — a gig in a novelty medium, the Vitaphone short, that they hoped would get them some attention and a season’s contract with Alexander Pantages or B.F. Keith. Even as late as 1930 only the farsighted could see that vaudeville was dying — it had been around for over half a century, after all — so it could have looked like a smart career move in a competitive biz. (They just didn’t know how competitive it was about to become.) Unless somebody out there remembers these people (and surely somebody might) and fills us in, I guess we’ll never know. 
 
A recent 16mm acquisition confirms that these kinds of auditions didn’t die with vaudeville — and, not incidentally, restores my faith in Warner Bros. shorts, so badly shaken by Vitaphone Varieties. It’s Toyland Casino from 1938, another Vitaphone short (although by this time, of course, “Vitaphone” was an in-name-only thing). The premise is short and simple — a bunch of pesky kids annoy a hotel manager with their playing around in the lobby, so they compromise by having the kids stage a night club revue to entertain the guests. The picture gets that out of the way in a quick 45 seconds or so; the rest of the 20 minutes is devoted to song, dance, or both from every kid Warner Bros. could find who wanted — or whose parents wanted them — to become the next Shirley Temple or Jackie Cooper. The kids give it their best respective shots, with varying degrees of success, but for most of them there would be this one short and then — at least according to the IMDb — nothing more.
 
 
 
 
 
But not all. Take five-year-old Francine
Lassman, for example. Born Abigail
Francine, she dropped the first name
for this appearance — where she looks
and sounds like Our Gang’s Darla Hood,
singing “Five and Ten Cent Soldiers on
Parade” before a phalanx of tap-dancing
kids in satin uniforms — and for childhood
appearances on radio. In time, though,
she would drop “Francine” and rework
“Abigail Lassman” to become…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Abbe Lane, the sultry songstress and
wife (1952-64) of bandleader Xavier 
Cugat. Lane once boasted that she was
considered “too sexy for Italy” — hard 
to imagine unless you’ve seen pictures 
like this.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Then there’s 13-year-old Bobby Hastings. He shows up in 19th century garb a la Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott singing “In the Gloaming” with a sweet old-fashioned lilt. Hastings would go on to a pretty amazing run. He shortened his name to “Bob” and in the late 1940s played teen comics hero Archie Andrews on radio. There followed a long career as a journeyman actor in which he appeared in an astonishing range of TV series in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s: The Phil Silvers Show, The Untouchables, The Donna Reed Show, Ben Casey, Dennis the Menace, The Twilight Zone, Emergency, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, All in the Family, General Hospital, Lou Grant, The Dukes of Hazzard — you name it. If you remember the original McHale’s Navy, you might recognize him…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…as Lt. Elroy Carpenter, perennial suck-up to Joe Flynn’s Capt. Binghamton. 
 
I’m pleased to report that both Abbe Lane and Bob Hastings are still with us, 78 and 86 respectively at this writing. Continued good health to them both.
 
Right about the two-thirds mark Toyland Casino pops a real surprise — the Moylan Sisters, Peggy Joan (6) and Marianne (8), ride out on carousel horses and sing a close-harmony version of “My Little Buckaroo” that ties the whole short up in a ribbon and sets it in our laps. They sing with the sort of joined-at-the-hip sibling harmony that would later distinguish the Everly Brothers (without the rock-n-roll, of course). There are quite a few talented kids in Toyland Casino, but the Moylans are stars — and they know it. The other kids are doing their best to sell themselves, but Peggy Joan and Marianne are already beyond that — they’re selling the song.
 
The Moylan Sisters made it to stardom for a while, but not in movies (they made only four shorts like this one). Starting in 1939 they had their own 15-minute radio show Sunday afternoons on the NBC Blue Network. They continued at it through World War II and dropped out of show-biz about 1951. You can learn more, and hear samples of their singing, here. I understand that Marianne passed away in the early 1990s, but as far as I’ve been able to learn, Peggy Joan is still with us. If so, and if she reads this, I’d be delighted to hear from her.
 
I’m going to close with a real treat. Of all the auditions for immortality in Vitaphone Varieties and Toyland Casino, I think the Moylan Sisters deserved the best shot at it, so here’s a YouTube clip of their rendition of “My Little Buckaroo”. The song was written by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl for Warner Bros.’ 1937 The Cherokee Strip, where it was introduced by Dick Foran. It was a huge hit on record for Bing Crosby, and was covered by just about every singing cowboy from San Antonio to Gower Gulch. But I don’t think the song ever got a better performance than it does here from these two little grade-schoolers from Sag Harbor, Long Island. (If M.K. Jerome’s grandson R.J. happens to read this post, I’d be interested to hear his take.)
 

Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal

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The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.

Alias Nick Beal is another “supernatural noir“, the subgenre I mentioned in my post on Night Has a Thousand Eyes. It may be the only other example. Of all the movies with supernatural plots, I can’t think of any but those two that dressed their stories so fully in the trappings of film noir. (If you know of any, please speak up; I’ll gladly kick myself for not having thought of them first.) 

 

 

Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow, writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem — so close, in fact (the pictures were released less than five months apart), that I have to believe Beal was being prepared while Night was shooting, and being shot while Night was being readied for release. Without access to Paramount’s detailed records I can’t confirm that, but the two movies are simply too close a match, variations on a theme of frail little humans trapped in a web of which they can see only the dark and shadowy outline. The difference between them — the variation — is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of sinister and mysterious forces beyond our understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has a name — most of us were raised on childhood tales of it — but as adults, our belief in our own sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully refuse to see it until it’s too late.

The screenplay for Alias Nick Beal was by Jonathan Latimer, from an original story by Mindret Lord. Lord’s name isn’t a familiar one even to movie-trivia buffs; he is sometimes misidentified as “Mildred”. In fact, he was born Mindred Loeb in Chicago in 1903. His early years haven’t left much trace in the permanent record, but by the late 1920s he was an aspiring writer and had embarked on a long affair with the opera singer Marguerite Namara, 15 years his senior.
 
In 1934 Lord met an old flame of Namara’s, tenor Hardesty Johnson, and his wife Isabel, daughter of Hamlin Garland, a popular early-20th century writer whose fame would pretty much die with him in 1940. Isabel had ambitions to be a writer like her father, so she and Lord had something in common; by this time he had begun selling stories to the pulps, detective fiction to magazines like Black Mask and tales of horror and the supernatural to Weird Tales and the like (“pot boiling” he called it), and he mentored Isabel on her own writing. They began an affair that eventually finished off his liaison with Marguerite and her marriage to Hardesty. Lord and Isabel were married on December 21, 1936.
 
Mindret and Isabel collaborated (as “Garland Lord”) on several mystery novels while he continued to boil pots for the pulps; he never really broke into the “slicks”, as they were called, though he did eventually get four short-short stories (fictional anecdotes, really) into The New Yorker in 1942 and ’43. By then he had contributed some sketches to New Faces of 1936 on Broadway, done some script doctoring for a wealthy Park Avenue wannabe-playwright, and picked up work writing for sundry radio series.
 
This got him a foothold in Hollywood (sort of), writing for independent producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy’s older, far less talented brother), who released his movies through Poverty Row’s Republic Pictures. Lord began drinking heavily, his marriage fell apart, he had an affair — though in what order, and which caused what, is anybody’s guess. In 1948 and ’49 he sold two stories to Paramount which became The Sainted Sisters and Nick Beal respectively. He wrote for a few second-string syndicated series in the early years of television, one last C-picture for Wilder, and finally, the script for The Virgin Queen (1955) with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and Richard Todd as Sir Walter Raleigh. Near the end of that year, Lord committed suicide at 52. It’s not hard to imagine why — his writing career had never really gone anywhere, and he died one day after what would have been his wedding anniversary — but if anybody knows the real reason, or even how he did it, they didn’t leave the information lying around where I could find it.
 
Jonathan Latimer, who turned Lord’s story for Beal into a screenplay, was also born in Chicago and wrote for the detective pulps in the ’30s, but he was another case entirely — a more successful career, a longer life, and death from natural causes at 76 in 1983. Latimer started out as a crime reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner — and later for the Tribune — where he became personally acquainted with Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and other Chicago underworld celebrities. In the mid-’30s he turned to fiction with a series of hardboiled, semi-comic mysteries featuring private eye Bill Crane.
 
Latimer branched out into non-crime fiction and non-series mysteries. One of the latter, Solomon’s Vineyard (1941) was so violent and sexy it came out only in England; it wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1950 (as The Fifth Grave), and then it was heavily expurgated (Latimer’s original text finally appeared in the States in 1982). It’s a good solid mystery that doesn’t waste a word, but it is violent, with at least a dozen killings (only about half of them offstage), and a surprising amount of hot and kinky sex, especially for 1941. It also has one of the greatest I-dare-you-to-stop-reading opening lines in the history of pulp fiction: “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be good in bed.”
 
At a time when The Thin Man had spearheaded a vogue for comedy/mysteries, Universal bought three of Latimer’s Bill Crane books for a short-lived series starring Preston Foster: The Westland Case (from Headed for a Hearse) in 1937 and two more the following year, The Lady in the Morgue and The Last Warning (from The Dead Don’t Care). Those scripts were written by others, but in 1940 Latimer tried his own hand at screenwriting, first contributing the story for Phantom Raiders (with Walter Pidgeon as detective Nick Carter), then in 1941 co-writing the script for Topper Returns.
 

Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won’t Believe Me (’47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock (’48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes — then, in ’49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men’s resumes — there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.

Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland’s one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason — that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-’60s TV. Latimer’s last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.

Alias Nick Beal is arguably the best thing Jonathan Latimer ever wrote, and it’s certainly the absolute pinnacle of Mindret Lord’s rather lackluster career. It takes place in an unnamed big city, one that closely resembles Lord and Latimer’s native Chicago: corrupt, crime-ridden, and ruled by oily political boss Frankie Faulkner (Fred Clark), so secure and arrogant that he doesn’t even bother to conceal his scheming or veil his threats.

However, Faulkner may have met his match in district attorney Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), a paragon of legal rectitude and civic virtue — in his spare time he helps his friend Rev. Garfield (George Macready) manage an after-school recreation program for boys at risk of delinquency — who is prosecuting Faulkner’s underling Hanson on corruption and racketeering charges, hoping to bring down Faulkner’s organization brick by brick. But Faulkner isn’t that easily dismantled; through crocodile tears he informs the prosecutor that Hanson’s books, which Foster had subpoenaed only that morning, were destroyed in a fire the night before. Foster is stymied, checkmated; he had been careful to make it appear that he wouldn’t seek the books, then had sprung his subpoena at the last moment, just to forestall something like this. But Faulkner was a step ahead of him. Foster’s got to nail Hanson if he wants to clean up the city, and there’s nothing he won’t do to get him.
 
That’s when Foster receives a cryptic summons to a dingy dive down by the waterfront: “If you want to nail Hanson, drop around the China Coast at eight tonight.” The man he meets that night (Ray Milland) is clean-shaven and dapper, impeccably groomed and dressed, cutting a figure entirely at odds with the sqalid little tavern where Foster finds him. His card reads simply: “Nicholas Beal, Agent”. “Agent for what?” asks Foster. Beal grins slightly. “That depends. Possibly for you.”

Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning — Hanson’s books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can’t take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here’s your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn’t speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrent tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.

Foster decides. He tucks the books under his arm, puts out the light, and makes his way out of the cannery by the beam of a flashlight Beal left behind. In the pitch dark of the outer room, his light startles a rat on a shelf. The rat sqeaks plaintively and stares at Foster, eye to eye. We can almost read the rat’s mind, as clearly as if he were speaking: Welcome to my world.
 
Foster gets his conviction and becomes a hero in the press. He’s still vaguely troubled about his hocus-pocus with the warrant, but shrugs it off. Still, Beal isn’t finished with him. No sooner do representatives of the state’s Independent Party arrive, asking if Foster will allow his name to be placed in nomination for governor, than Beal shows up in his study to collect for services already rendered. But what seems like a sly piece of blackmail takes an odd turn when Beal offers to contribute to his political campaign; he already knows about the overtures from the Independent Party (“I hear things.”).
 
 
 
That night, on the foggy boardwalk outside the China Coast, Beal takes the next step in whatever scheme he has afoot. A down-and-out slattern (Audrey Totter) gives him a come-on, but is taken aback when he knows her name, Donna Allen. He knows her history, too: a couple of years of college, ambitions to be an actress, then seduced and abandoned by an actor she called “Boysey” — who turned out to be married. They fought, he fell down a flight of stairs. “An accident, they said.” How do you know about Boysey, she asks; you a friend of his? “I met him once.”
 
 
 
 
 
Beal leads her to an expensive penthouse apartment, smart and stylish but somehow foreboding and unsettling, with Daliesque frescoes painted on the walls. It’s hers, he says, along with a wardrobe of silks and sables, diamonds and sapphires. She tries to bolt, but the delivery boy is at the door, and everything is just too tempting — and it all has her name on it. “What do I gotta do, murder?” “Just the opposite,” says Beal, “reform work. In a boys’ club.”
 
 
In the next scene Donna has made herself indispensible, organizing the boys’ club office and writing large checks for donations — and coyly flirting with Foster. It’s a scene she’s played often since her days with Boysey, but usually only for cheap drinks, and never with such lavish sets and costumes. Men are all alike, right? Boysey was married and here’s another one; this time she’s wised up, and if Beal wants her to tickle his vanity she’ll play along. Why should she care? 
 
As time goes on Donna will slowly realize that neither Foster nor Beal is the kind of man she thought he was. Neither she nor Foster can see what we see: that Beal is slowly, carefully drawing his net around them both. Every step, beginning with Foster’s compromise on the warrant and Donna’s following Beal from the waterfront to that apartment, calls for just a slight stretch of the conscience, a tiny little disregard of misgivings, moving them off true center by degrees they simply don’t notice.
 
We see other things the characters don’t. Beal’s plans involve conspiracy, duplicity, bribery, double-dealing, seduction and murder. Things come to a head as Beal prepares to spring his trap. He shows up at Donna’s apartment, telling her that Foster is on his way after a fight with his wife. Beal tells her how the conversation will go — what she’s to say, what Foster will answer, what she’s to say to that. She sneers at the melodrama; who would ever spout those cornball lines? Never mind, he says, just remember your part.
 
When Foster arrives their talk runs more or less as Beal said it would. Then, hearing her cue and hardly knowing what to expect, Donna segues into the words Beal gave her — and so does Foster. With growing horror, she tries to stop things, and her words take on a different, more frightening meaning — but they’re still Beal’s words! Try as she might, she can’t not say what Beal told her to. It’s a brilliantly written scene, and brilliantly played by Audrey Totter, the finest five minutes in her career.
 
Donna Allen becomes the first to sense the truth: Nicholas Beal isn’t just some slimy, amoral political operative. He is, in literal fact, the Devil Himself.
 
I’m not spoiling anything here; this isn’t a please-don’t-reveal-the-ending mystery. We’ve tipped to this long before Foster or Donna or Rev. Garfield. Beal knows things before they happen. He can’t stand to be touched. He refuses to read from the Bible, or even touch it. He cold-shoulders Rev. Garfield, who can’t quite place where he’s seen Beal’s face before. (“Did anyone ever paint your portrait?” “Yes, Rembrandt in 1655.”) The beauty of Alias Nick Beal isn’t that Beal’s character is revealed to us in a sudden, shocking whoa-didn’t-see-that-coming revelation. It’s that we can easily believe that the other characters can’t see him for what he is. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they see but they do not observe. We’re sitting watching a movie, but they’re living their lives; after all, this is the 20th century, and things like that just don’t happen, do they? But as Rev. Garfield finally says, “Maybe the Devil knows it’s the 20th century too, Joseph.”

 

Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he’s started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: “It’s not Beal, it’s me.”

Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.

Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, but I’m not sure he isn’t even better here — more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He’s the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.

 
Alias Nick Beal is superbly directed, too, by the underrated Farrow, whose name is more familiar now thanks to his daughter Mia’s career than to his own. He was Australian-born in 1904, naturalized American in 1947, twice Oscar-nominated (1942 for directing Wake Island; 1956 for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days, which he won). He was also something of a polymath — author of plays, novels, short stories, a Tahitian-English dictionary and biographies of Thomas More and Father Damien. Besides the Oscar, he was also awarded an honorary Commander of the British Empire (by Queen Elizabeth II) and a Knighthood of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre (by Pope Pius XI). In Nick Beal his hand is firm but not heavy, and he doesn’t overplay it. Scenes move sinuously from one to the next (the black fog of the waterfront becomes the back of Foster’s suit as he steps away from the camera in his study), and the story moves with the slithery grace of a serpent.
 
Notice too the performances of minor characters — Donna’s maid, a railroad depot bartender, the grizzled denizens of the China Coast. Farrow is a director who tends to the details. After all, isn’t that where the Devil is?
 

The phrase “banality of evil” was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, its persistence. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won’t give up; he’ll be back, and he’s patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert’s testimony: “Glory be! I’ve wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I’ve pinned his shoulders to the mat…” Beal turns ironically to Foster. “I wonder if he knows it’s two falls out of three.”

Lost & Found: Night Has a Thousand Eyes

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In using the heading “Lost & Found” for this post, I don’t mean to suggest a “lost” film in the sense that historians and archivists have come to mean it. I mean a movie that was once readily available — at least on TV, and in my neighborhood, in the days of local stations’ film libraries and syndication packages — but that now seems to have vanished entirely except for the occasional 16mm print or bootleg video.

John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes is one of those movies. It presumably still exists in the vaults at Universal Pictures (proprietors of Paramount’s pre-1950 library), waiting for the day Universal finds it worth their while to issue a white-market DVD. The day may yet come; the picture does have its following. I tried to bid on a 16mm print on eBay a couple of years ago, but the price quickly went out of my range — and this at a time when 16mm features were hardly moving on eBay at all.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes originated as a novel by Cornell Woolrich, one of the more unusual creeps in the history of Hollywood (where creeps have never exactly been an endangered species). Born Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich in 1903, his parents separated when he was little. He lived with his father in Mexico until he was 12, then moved to New York to live with his mother — which, except for one brief interval, he did for the rest of her life. He dropped out of Columbia when his first novel Cover Charge promised success as a writer. 
 
His first six books were sort of faux Scott Fitzgerald, and while that particular line didn’t pan out, when he turned to crime fiction it was another story. He began writing for the pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, cranking out short stories by the fistful — in time over 300 of them — and, later, novels for the same audience. He never got rich at the magazines’ penny-a-word rates, but he wrote fast enough to pay the bills. 
 
Before that, his Fitzgeraldesque books had earned him a job in Hollywood writing for First National Pictures — that’s the brief interval I mentioned. Whether anything he wrote made it to the screen is an open question. His IMDB page lists several titles, silent and early talkie, on which he was credited as William Irish; on the other hand, in an article for Time Magazine, Richard Corliss says that Irish was another writer at First National whose name Woolrich later appropriated as one of his noms de plume.
 

Another thing Woolrich did in Hollywood was get married, in 1930, to 20-year-old Gloria Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of silent movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was never consummated, and Gloria eventually had it annulled in 1933, after Woolrich had gone home to Mother. According to Corliss (who cites Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins), when Woolrich moved out on Gloria he left behind a diary for her to read. In it, for starters (says Corliss), he had written that “it might be a really good joke to marry this Gloria Blackton.” The diary also went into “sordid and dreadful detail” about his daily sexual adventures with anonymous men; as Corliss says, while he never consummated his marriage, he was hardly celibate.

I say it again, the man was a creep — not because he was gay, but because of the diary, and because he left it behind for Gloria to read. Then there’s the fact that he lived with his mother until he was 53, when she died. By itself that would just be kind of odd; taken with everything else it tends to red-line the creep factor. (It sounds like Sebastian and Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer.) When his mother died in 1957, Woolrich fell to pieces and wasted away. Literally. He neglected a minor foot infection, dulling the pain with booze, until it became gangrenous and they had to amputate his leg above the knee. When he died, alone and miserable in 1968, he weighed only 89 pounds.

The doom-laden fatalism and frustrated self-loathing that lurk under the thin skin of Woolrich’s life surfaced in his writing when he turned from Fitzgerald Jazz Age society to the dank, shadowed recesses of crime fiction. It may not have made him rich or famous, but it kept him eating, and as luck would have it he caught the leading edge of the wave — first of the pulp-fiction detective magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, then of the dark, morally ambiguous movement in 1940s Hollywood that would become known as film noir. There were no fewer than 15 movies made from his novels and stories in the 1940s alone, and dozens more (for theaters and TV) since then. Probably the best of the lot — certainly the most famous — is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), originally published as “It Had to Be Murder” in Dime Detective Magazine (Feb. ’42). But there were others: Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man (1943, from Black Alibi), Phantom Lady (’43), Deadline at Dawn (’46), The Window (’49, from “The Boy Cried Murder”). More recently, too: Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (’68) and Mississippi Mermaid (’69, from Waltz into Darkness), Mrs. Winterbourne (’96, from I Married a Dead Man), Original Sin (2001, Waltz into Darkness again).

Night Has a Thousand Eyes was published in 1945 under one of Woolrich’s pen names, George Hopley (his two middle names); later, in this ’50s-vintage paperback, under his other one, William Irish. But in 1948, when Paramount and director John Farrow filmed the novel, the screen credits named Cornell Woolrich as the novel’s author.
 
If Woolrich bothered to see the movie (and my guess is he simply took the money and ran — or rather, stayed home; he doesn’t seem to have gotten out much in those days), he might have had trouble recognizing it. The novel is told from the alternating viewpoints of its two central characters: New York police detective Fred Shawn and heiress Jean Reid, whom he saves from a suicidal jump off a bridge one night while walking home from work. Shattered and timorous, Jean recounts the events that have driven her to such a desperate pass.
 
Jean and her wealthy widowed father Harlan Reid were happy and secure until some weeks before, when he planned to fly west to San Francisco and back on a business trip. Overhearing the plans, a servant girl blurts out to Jean that her father mustn’t fly back; a “friend” has told her that the plane will crash. Jean tries to dismiss the idea, but her sense of dread grows by the hour, and she is devastated when the plane does indeed go down in Colorado. Seeking answers, the grieving Jean tries to meet her maid’s friend but he refuses, sending word that she should go home; she’ll see her father again. At home she finds a telegram: her father missed his flight and is unharmed; he’ll be coming home by train.
 
The Reids eventually meet the mysterious prophet: Jeremiah Tompkins, a shrunken, broken little man who disdains their gratitude, refuses money, and demands only to be left alone. Yet even as he rebuffs them, he speaks in riddles — and every cryptic remark is borne out by events that he could never have foreseen. Harlan Reid is hooked, returning to Tompkins time and again, seeking advice on business matters and always profiting by what he learns, and always offering payment which Tompkins always refuses. Finally Tompkins tells him that further advice is useless: Reid has only a few weeks to live. Unwilling to speak but unable to stop, Tompkins tells him the exact date and hour when he will meet his death “in the jaws of a lion.” The robust, confident Reid becomes a shocked, hollow shell of himself, waiting only to die. Jean, meanwhile, has glimpsed a hostile, uncaring universe without free will, in which she and her father are trapped like insects in amber. As a result, she has despaired and tried to kill herself, only to be rescued by Shawn.
 

Shawn senses some subtle, diabolical scam afoot and persuades his superiors to launch an investigation in the few days remaining. What is Tompkins up to? Is he up to anything at all? The novel then becomes a blend of police procedures, as detectives try to trace Tompkins’ “predictions” to their roots, and Shawn and Jean’s vigil at the Reid estate. As the two seek to raise Harlan Reid’s spirits and head off the perplexing prophecies, their forlorn efforts take on the futile aura of a death watch. It’s no spoiler to say that, along with a few unexpected turns, events work out precisely as Tompkins said they would. The novel ends on a note of trembling hope, but with the characters sensing that they are playthings in the hands of unbreakable fate, and that they’d have been far happier without that glimpse of the abyss.

Even Woolrich’s most admiring fans know that elegant plots were not among his strengths, and much of Night strains credulity; indeed, the supernatural element is often more credible than the ordinary goings-on (which may have been the whole idea). Nor was he much of a stylist; he often overwrites like a man who gets a penny a word and is determined to squeeze every cent he can out of his story. Sometimes his novel reads like the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane parody “The Girl Hunters Ballet” that Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote for the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon (1953), as funny unintentionally as Comden and Green were on purpose.

Rather than plot or style, what Woolrich’s novel has is mood — in spades, and maybe even to a fault — the chilling sense of being in the grip of some insensate force, powerless to resist. If Woolrich did happen to swing by New York’s Paramount Theatre when the movie opened there in October 1948, he might have noticed that that mood is preserved on the screen, even as his entire story and most of his characters are jettisoned.

Elements of the novel remain, recognizable but altered, as in a dream. The tormented oracle, of course. The opening scene of a young woman saved from suicide — only now her name is Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), and her rescuer isn’t a stranger but her fiance Elliott Carson (John Lund). The plane crash — only this time Jean’s father (Jerome Cowan) is on the plane and goes down with it. The police-procedural investigation by William Demarest as Lt. Shawn, the only surname to survive from the novel — only this time the aim is not to avert Jean’s father’s death, but her own. And as in the book, there are the cowardly servants deserting Jean, and treachery within the doomed tycoon’s circle of associates. Even the mysterious reference to a lion remains, and is similarly borne out.

The screenplay of Night Has a Thousand Eyes is by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, and for me there’s no getting around the fact that they made major improvements in Cornell Woolrich’s original. The story is simpler and more interesting — positioning Jean as the damsel in distress is a much smoother sell than asking us to worry about a broken old man giving up and sitting around waiting for death.

Lyndon and Latimer’s biggest and most satisfying change is in the character of the psychic, the reason the story exists in the first place. Woolrich, with a typically heavy hand, gives us Jeremiah Tompkins (“Jeremiah”, yet!), cursed and burdened his entire life with a “gift” he doesn’t understand or want and can’t control, crushed by it long before he meets Jean or her father. He’s given up. He’s a haunted zero. 

In the movie Tompkins becomes John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), a vaudeville and nightclub mentalist with a phony mind-reading act. Or rather, that’s what he was some twenty-odd years ago, as he describes things to us in flashback. As he plies his act in theaters and saloons from town to town, he finds himself — and he’s not even sure exactly when it started — getting genuine flashes, glimpses into the future: the winner in a horse race, the son of an audience member who is playing with matches at home and about to set fire to the house, an investment opportunity that will pay off. 
 
Triton has an additional connection with Jean Courtland supplied by Lyndon and Latimer: his partners in the act (Jerome Cowan and Virginia Bruce) are — will be — Jean’s parents, although the woman will die in childbirth and Jean will never know her. Triton sees this coming and thinks he can prevent it by running out on them, so he does (he still believes his visions are mutable and can be changed or forestalled). Courtland grows wealthy on the predictions he got from Triton before he disappeared, and for twenty years Jean has heard tales of Triton from her father, who believed the man was dead. Now Jean’s father himself is dead, and Triton knew it would happen. He knows as well that Jean too will meet…what?…death?…something…but he can’t…quite…make sense of his jumbled and fragmentary vision.
 

Carson, Jean’s fiance, sees in Triton a carnival con-man running some kind of game to fleece a wealthy and vulnerable orphan, and he takes his concerns to the police. But Triton’s game, if there is a game, is a subtle one. He asks no money, does nothing illegal, and cooperates with the police one hundred percent. “He puts up a good show,” says a skeptical psychiatrist. What is this man up to?

There is simply no end to the ways in which Night Has a Thousand Eyes is better than the novel it’s based on. The book may be a work of art that expresses the author’s nightmarish vision of an overpowering and inexorable universe (though I have my doubts on that score), but the movie was made by craftsmen who had the story sense (Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer) and fluid style (John Farrow) that Cornell Woolrich lacked. In John Triton, the movie has a protagonist more complex, dramatic and interesting than the cringing troll Tompkins. Triton is a true Cassandra, a prophet fated to be disbelieved — not because people think he’s mad, but because they think he’s too sane, a slick and calculating huckster with a smooth line of patter. Which, once upon a time, he was.

In addition, and perhaps more important, the movie has Edward G. Robinson. Robinson once said of himself, “Some people have youth, some have beauty — I have menace.” In one of his other 1948 pictures, Key Largo, he menaced Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and anyone else who entered a room with him. Billy Wilder used that menace to great effect in Double Indemnity, where Robinson played, in fact, a good man who (without knowing it) menaced the picture’s protagonist and actual villain, perennial nice guy Fred MacMurray. 
 
In Night Has a Thousand Eyes Robinson’s menace is turned in on itself, a serpent eating its tail for so long it’s hard to tell where the serpent ends and the tail begins, or what is eating whom. Triton can’t un-see his visions, and he knows that trying to change events will make them happen, but he can’t keep himself from trying anymore than he can keep them from happening. In the end we can’t decide whether Triton embraces his “gift” or surrenders to it. Neither, perhaps, can he.
 
We need a good professional DVD of Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The nocturnal motif of the title, the looming sense of prying, encroaching darkness, plays out in the relentless charcoal shadows strewn across the frame by Farrow and cinematographer John F. Seitz (I discussed this great cameraman in my essay on director Rex Ingram), and without a proper transfer, elements of their images can be (and no doubt have been) lost in the murk of careless reproduction. Still, even in the gray-market renditions currently available, this is a sinister and unsettling movie in the best sense of the phrase, one that seems to have a foot in two different worlds — one the world we live in, the other a world that just may have its foot in us. 
 
Night Has a Thousand Eyes is a specimen of a rare subgenre: supernatural noir. There aren’t many examples of that; parapsychology, the “spirit world”, and such things are not to be easily grafted onto the gritty, cynical urban landscapes of movies like Laura and Double Indemnity. But John Farrow, Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem would do it again the following year in their next picture together, just a few months after finishing this. The result would be a neglected classic — forgotten now but, once seen, unforgettable. I’ll write about that one next time.
 

Harlow in Hollywood

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I ended my last post with the shadow of Jean Harlow’s name on the directory outside the star dressing rooms at the MGM studios. It was a ghostly image; the haunting is considerably more tangible in another new book, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Harlow’s birth (March 3, 1911). This sleekly sumptuous coffee-table volume does a great job of evoking both “H”s in the title. I can’t help comparing it to the late Ronald Haver’s David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, even at the risk of overpraising Harlow in Hollywood — at least in my own mind, since I consider Haver’s book just about the best single title ever published on Golden Age Hollywood. There never was such a visual and factual feast as that Selznick book, but Harlow in Hollywood is in the same league.

Rooney and Vieira’s text is essentially an artful paraphrase of David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which the authors acknowledge right up front as “the definitive biography” of the star. (By the way, now that I’ve checked out Bombshell‘s Amazon page and seen the prices it’s going for, I guess I’d better never let my 1993 first edition out of my sight!)

What really set the new book apart are its visuals — the cascade of pictures (there must be 400 or more) from the authors’ own collections and what they’ve garnered from other sources (duly thanked in the acknowledgments), all dazzlingly arranged by designer Hilary Lentini. The evocative beauty of Lentini’s design extends even to the whimsical endpapers, adapted from a 1937 Starland Map and dotted with “pins” marking locations that were significant in Harlow’s life and career. These endpapers go far to conjure up a cozy, sun-soaked little cluster of everybody-knows-everybody communities — Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon — that’s a far cry from the cramped, smoggy, seedy melange of urban sprawl, faded glory and retro kitsch that greets visitors to the L.A. Basin today. (Of course, the map probably had more than a touch of gaga fantasy even then.)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

If Harlow in Hollywood doesn’t quite match the visual splash of David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, it’s probably because it doesn’t have the Haver book’s riot of eye-popping color. Which is only fitting: Selznick was an early champion of Technicolor and used it when others told him he was a fool to waste the money; but Selznick figured color would pay off in the long run by adding shelf life to his pictures (and he was right).

Not that there isn’t color in Harlow in Hollywood — like these striking Carbro color images taken by George Hurrell in late 1935 or early ’36. These pictures are from her “brownette” period late in her career (nobody knew how late), when MGM sought to placate the Breen Office by softening the erotic edge of her platinum blonde image. It’s not as if they had much choice. Harlow’s hair really had that white-blonde sheen in childhood and adolescence (and she was only 17 when she started in pictures), but every blonde’s hair color deepens and thickens with maturity, and Harlow was no exception. Stringent efforts to retain that platinum blonde look — peroxide, ammonia, Lux flakes — had ravaged her scalp and hair to the point where she was in real danger of going bald. I suspect part of the reason for the Hurrell portraits was to prepare Harlow’s fans for her new look.

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
But color portraits or no, Harlow was made for black and white. She was made by black and white, too, as this portrait on the set of Bombshell shows — she’s so much more alluring and accessible here, isn’t she? Harlow in Hollywood has picture after picture like this; the authors’ point is that Harlow was endlessly fascinating, and they prove it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are pictures like this one too, more candid shots, away from the controlled atmosphere of the studio with its careful grooming and flattering lighting, its makeup artists and glamour photographers. Here she is in 1936 at the Cocoanut Grove with William Powell…
…and again in court in 1935, seeking a divorce from
her third husband, cinematographer Hal Rosson. Harlow
is still Harlow, still glamourous and photogenic — but
her eyes look sunken and baggy, at least to me. Is it just
the sad wisdom of hindsight, or does Harlow really look
 
like a woman in failing health? Did anybody notice it at
the time? Or did they just put it down to her late hours
and heavy drinking? There was plenty of both. (Sitting
with her in this picture is her mother, the real Jean Harlow
— that is, the one born with the name that 17-year-old
Harlean Carpenter adopted when she registered with
Central Casting. Was that Harlean’s awkward tribute
to the mother who had wanted to be a movie star
more than she ever did? Whatever it was, Harlean
was stuck with her mother’s maiden name
from then on.)
 
 
What would have happened to Harlow if she had lived? Might she have, as some suggest, transferred her comic talent to TV as she slipped into middle age, the way Lucille Ball (five months younger than Harlow) did? Maybe; youth enhanced Harlow’s comic charm but didn’t define it. But the fact is, it wasn’t to be, not because she died young, but because she was probably dying — or at least doomed — before she ever set foot in California. An attack of scarlet fever at 15, probably followed by an undiagnosed kidney infection, had started her on a protracted and undetected course of kidney failure that finished her off 11 years later. There were no transplants or dialysis machines in those days; when your kidneys gave out that was it, you were a goner. The pressure of work and pleasing her mother, three failed marriages (one terminated by her husband’s grisly suicide), two abortions, an appendectomy, oral surgery and alcoholism may have sapped her constitution and will to live and brought the end that much sooner, but odds are Jean Harlow was never going to make it to the Age of Television no matter what.
 
Harlow in Hollywood covers all that — you can scarcely ignore it — but it’s no scandal-wallow. If the book wallows in anything, it’s in the glamour of Harlow’s Hollywood — the movies, the premieres, the mansions, the restaurants and night clubs. With things like that it’s not wallowing, it’s luxuriance. And this is a luxuriant book, richly printed on fine glossy paper in sparkling tones of silvery black and white. But I’ll close with another color image, this one a 2009 recreation of Farewell to Earth, the portrait that Harlow’s grieving mother commissioned after her death. On her right hand you can glimpse her 85-carat star sapphire ring, a 1936 Christmas present from William Powell, the love of Harlow’s life who wouldn’t marry her. 
 
The painting embodies Mother Jean’s maudlin grief. Shunned by the industry that never liked her very much even as they adored her daughter, she made her homes a succession of shrines to her “Baby” and died in obscurity in 1958. Nobody knows what ever happened to the painting (this image was digitally colorized from a photo), or to that star sapphire ring. 
 
But the portrait also captures something of Harlow’s beauty, grace, charm and intelligence, as does the whole book. At the list price of $50 it would be a bargain. At the $31.50 Amazon is asking, no movie buff can afford to be without it.
 

A Time-Travel Studio Tour

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Hollywood backlots are endlessly fascinating, aren’t they? When I moved to Long Beach in 1977 I drove up to Burbank one day to check out the Walt Disney Studios on Buena Vista Street. I parked on residential South Lincoln Street behind the studio. Peeking through a knothole in the studio fence, I could just catch a glimpse of what I’m sure were the old sets for the Zorro TV series. I was never able to prove it, though, and I guess I never will now: the Disney backlot is gone — and for all I know, the fence, that section of Lincoln St., and the houses that faced it — subsumed into the Walt Disney Feature Animation building that went up in the 1990s.

In 1986 I attended a screening of Wisdom (in which I had a bit role) at the 20th Century Fox studios, and afterwards took a stroll around the grounds (that’s when I learned that once you manage to get inside a studio’s gates, people let you go more or less where you please, on the assumption that you must belong there). I saw the picturesque little Swiss-looking bungalow that had been built for Shirley Temple (later the writers’ building), and walked the stunted remains of the Fox backlot, all that was left after they sold off the 180 acres that became Century City.

 
 
 
I never got even a glimpse of the colossal MGM backlot, but now I can, and so can you, thanks to MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot by Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester and Michael Troyan. This book manages to be both satisfying in its thorough documenting of the physical nuts and bolts of MGM, and tantalizing in its constant reminder that most of this is (if you’ll pardon the expression) gone with the wind. Much as we might wish to step into one of this book’s hundreds of pictures and look around, we will never walk the streets we know so well from Andy Hardy movies, Tarzan pictures, Gene Kelly musicals and The Twilight Zone — and neither, now, will anybody else. (This picture, by the way, shows only the 81 acres of MGM Lots 1 [the complex of buildings off in the distance] and 2 [closer up]. At the studio’s peak there were five other lots sprinkled around that part of Culver City on another hundred acres; they’re out of the picture off to the right.)

 
The book does have its nits, and I might as well pick them. The authors garble somewhat the prehistory of the three studios — Metro, Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures — before they merged to form MGM. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, director Rex Ingram worked for Metro, not Goldwyn, and his production of Mare Nostrum was not among the financial headaches MGM inherited with the merger. Neither was “Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur” shooting in Rome (also discussed here); that would be June Mathis and Charles Brabin’s Ben-Hur. Niblo was the director Mayer and Irving Thalberg picked later to clean up Brabin’s mess — back in Hollywood where they could keep an eye on things.

 

Also, the book could have used a more thorough job of copy editing. There are far more than the usual number of misspellings (“Donald O’Conner,” “legers [ledgers]”) typographical errors (“The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street,” elsewhere called “Wimple Street”), malapropisms (“initialized” for “initiated,” “cache” for “cachet,” “skewered” for “skewed”), grammatical missteps (“…the sets fell in to disrepair…”) and other hard-to-classify errors that could be one or more of the above (“…the seeds of destruction…were sewn…”). You can hardly go five pages without one gaffe or another. (And by the way, was there really a “Red Square” set in Yolanda and the Thief [1945]? I don’t remember one in that picture, which took place in a mythical South American country, but the authors say there was one, and that Lot 2’s New York Street played the role.)

 

 

 

All quibbles notwithstanding, this book is a swell read, a step-by-step tour that takes us through each lot one by one, ushering us in the front gate and taking in every building (on Lot 1) and outdoor set (on the others) in turn. There are plenty of maps, starting with this one showing all MGM’s holdings at its peak. (The two lots on the left are the ones you can see in the picture above.) If you live in the L.A. area and have a passing familiarity with Culver City, it’s easy to get the lay of MGM’s land.

 
Here’s another one of the book’s maps, this one of Lot 2 — home to Andy Hardy’s hometown of Carvel, Tarzan’s jungle, Romeo and Juliet‘s (1936) Verona Square, the Lord family mansion in The Philadelphia Story, the complex of New York Streets, etc. I don’t have room to reproduce it full-size, but if you Ctrl-click it to open it in a new tab, then “+” it up, you can see it more clearly. The numbers in the columns on the left correspond to shaded areas on the map, and each gets its own mini-chapter with accompanying pictures and a rundown of how each area was used over the years. You’ll spend a lot of time thumbing back and forth between text and maps, but by the time you’re through you’d be able to roam freely around all seven lots without getting lost. 

If they still existed — which, except for Lot 1 (now Sony Studios), they don’t. The last section of the book, “Backlot Babylon,” is the hardest to read, and it just gets more and more heartbreaking by the paragraph. 
This is where the authors take us through the long sorry story of the disintegration of Louis B. Mayer’s mighty empire. The authors quote a retired publicist, speaking in 1974, as saying that the studio’s last really great year was 1948. The irony in that, which the book makes clear, is that even in ’74 things hadn’t hit bottom, although “the writing was now clearly on the false walls.”
 
These pages are dominated by pictures like the two here: On the top, the decrepit hulk from 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty cowers beyond the rubble that was once Lot 3’s Dutch Street and Rawhide Street; on the bottom, a bulldozer polishes off the last of Lot 2’s complex of New York Streets in 1980.
 

Changing the subject slightly, I just got a DVD on eBay comprised of Kodachrome home movies taken at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Seeing the place in color is a much more immediate experience than all those old black-and-white newsreels and photos, and what comes through most clearly to me in these 70-year-old home movies is that everything — from the Trylon and Perisphere all the way down to the Amusement Zone rides — looks so absolutely and completely permanent.

It’s like that too in the movies shot on the MGM backlot. I mean, I’ve lived on streets that I don’t remember as vividly as Kensington Avenue from Meet Me in St. Louis or Andy Hardy’s street — which was also Maple St. in the “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, and the street Bobby Van hopped down in Small Town Girl.

That’s just from seeing them in the movies. How much more solid and permanent they must have looked to the people who actually worked on them. Not that they would have looked or felt real, of course. An actor always knows when he’s on a set, and Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone surely never had any illusions that the Hardys’ front door actually led anyplace — the company would have to adjourn to a set on one of Lot 1’s sound stages to continue that illusion.

But even so, there must have been a feeling that these sets would always be there, and it’s easy to imagine the wistful bewilderment people like Rooney and Debbie Reynolds and Ann Rutherford felt walking the backlot toward the end — after the carpenters and maintenance crews and greensmen had all been laid off, and there were weeds growing around the doorsteps and torn canvas walls flapping in the Santa Ana Winds. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it; we can see it in pictures like That’s Entertainment! and the documentary-cum-obituaries that date from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s there, too, in dozens of quotes in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, from stars and “backstage” workers alike, and always the subtext is the same: Jeez, what happened?? With the studio humming along on all cylinders, thousands of employees keeping everything fresh and ready to use on a moment’s notice, and packing the commissary every day at lunch, the MGM lots surely seemed as permanent as the pyramids.

 
In the end they weren’t, and in fact they never had been. For me, one of the saddest pictures in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot isn’t of great sets reduced to garbage or props and costumes auctioned off or used for landfill, it’s one of the simplest. And oddly enough, it’s not from the long miserable decline and fall; it’s from 1937, when the MGM lion was in full roar and the vigorous prime of life. And here it is, a sign on the outside wall of the star dressing room building — which, for the major stars, weren’t just rooms but full homes-away-from-home with bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and fireplaces. You can see here that Suite A is presently vacant, but that it once belonged to the recently deceased Jean Harlow. Her name has been removed, and her suite no doubt cleared out for its next occupant (in time it would go to Lana Turner),
but the letters of Jean’s name have left their shadow behind,
like the impression of a pen-press on the
second page of a note pad.
 
In the end, and for that matter all along, the entire
studio complex of mighty MGM turned out to be
no more permanent than that.

 

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

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It seems wrong not to say something about
the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, but what is
there that hasn’t already been said? There
are only a handful of performers who
managed to move from childhood stardom
to adult careers and make it stick — Dean
Stockwell, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper,
Roddy McDowall (there are also Jodie
Foster and Kurt Russell, but they were
only child actors, not stars). Even in
that small company, Taylor may be
unique: she rose to the top as a kid
and stayed there to the very end;
in fact, in a way, she even redefined
what “the top” actually was.

She didn’t make much of an impression
in her first picture, There’s One Born 
Every Minute. But then, neither did
the picture itself, a piddling little Hugh
Herbert programmer for Universal
that not even Variety, who covered
just about everything, bothered to
review. Elizabeth (she hated being
called Liz, so I won’t) was no more
than ten, and vying for attention with
Hugh Herbert in three roles (the
mind boggles!). Who know, maybe
she was hoping no one would notice
her. In later life, she always had a
pretty sensitive b.s.-meter; and it
might well have been on line even
as early as that.

In any case, her second picture was another
kettle of fish — or rather, another bowl of kibble:
Lassie Come Home. I wasn’t there at the time,
but I have it on good authority that people
came out of theaters asking two questions:
Wasn’t that dog amazing? and Who on earth
is that little girl? (“A pretty moppet,” beamed
Variety.) By that time (LCH was released in
 December ’43) Elizabeth was going on
twelve. So what was different?
Was it puberty?

I think it was Technicolor. Taylor’s creamy
complexion, raven hair and (most particularly)
violet eyes came across in color as they couldn’t
in black and white. Uncredited (and unnoticed)
bits in Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover
only go to reinforce the point. Then it was back
to Technicolor for…

…National Velvet. Pauline Kael once said that this was “the high point in Elizabeth Taylor’s acting career,” and I think she’s right. At any rate, beginning with this movie, Elizabeth would never go unnoticed again.

She grew up fast at MGM, and it wasn’t long before her beauty stood out even in black and white. She’s 16 in the Clarence Sinclair Bull portrait that leads off this post…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…15 here, touching up a water color (or pretending to)
in the Hollywood Hills. By 1949, at the ripe old age
of 17, she was playing the wife of 38-year-old
Robert Taylor in Conspirator.
 
None of these, of course, are what most people
think of when they hear Elizabeth Taylor’s name.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This is more like it, right? Suddenly, Last Summer may not be the hot seller on Amazon or in Netflix queues that it was in 1959 theaters, but this was one of the iconic movie images of the 1950s, right up there with Carroll Baker sucking her thumb in Baby Doll, or Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity. (The fact that Catherine Holly, Taylor’s character, told psychiatrist Montgomery Clift that the bathing suit made her look “almost nude” when it got wet no doubt stoked the fantasies of millions of red-blooded American men. Did any of them see the movie over and over, hoping that this time she would really go into the water?) Elizabeth is 27 here, on the way to the third of her five Oscar nominations (she won twice), and she’s been officially grown up since she and Clift (and director George Stevens’s camera) were more intimately involved in A Place in the Sun in 1951.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For most people who remember those days, Elizabeth Taylor’s life and career tend to boil down to (1) everything before Cleopatra and (2) everything after. It’s impossible for people today, jaded by a nonstop parade of showbiz media circuses — from Madonna to Britney to Lindsay to Charlie — even to imagine what a riveting can’t-look-away spectacle that trainwreck of a production was. You just had to be there — and by “there” I mean anywhere on planet Earth from 1959 to 1963. You couldn’t get away from it. Elizabeth’s brush with death-by-pneumonia in a London hospital was only the beginning, shutting down production until the English weather, never exactly balmy, turned so crummy that everybody had to start all over from day (and dollar) one in Rome. It wasn’t hype or hysteria: Elizabeth nearly checked out then and there; her tracheotomy scar is clearly visible in this picture of her in costume and makeup, looking weary and numb waiting for director Joe Mankiewicz to call action.
 
“Everything before and after Cleopatra” really means everything before and after Richard Burton, and I’ll bet that’s how Taylor tended to think of it herself. Burton accounted for two of her eight marriages (and she for two of his five), ten years the first time and ten months the second. If Burton had lived past 1984, they might have had a third go-round (ten weeks?), and a fourth (ten days?); they were clearly the loves of each other’s lives, even if they couldn’t hold it together and often seemed to bring out the worst in each other. To people in the 1960s it looked like the love affair of the century. To me it still does, and I don’t think I’m alone.
 
 
 
Here’s another iconic picture, this one from real life, though it could almost be a scene from their movie The V.I.P.s. Judging from the faces and clothes, that year (1963) is probably about right, give or take a couple. They seem to be trying to inch their way toward some anonymous airport VIP lounge, jostled by a combination of entourage and paparazzi, a breed of “journalist” that their affair and marriage virtually (albeit unwillingly) created. She looks resigned, he looks harried. (And who’s that guy in the center background, and why is he the only one smiling?)
 
With all Taylor’s heartaches, sorrows and physical ailments (the latter beginning with a fall from a horse during National Velvet), it’s remarkable in a way that she made it to 79. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t do it, or Judy Garland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived them, and nearly all her leading men, from Roddy McDowall and Robert Taylor through Montgomery Clift and Van Johnson to Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Did she thrive? I don’t know. But she survived, and prevailed.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I love this photo by Otto Dyar, and I want to close with it. It’s from the set of National Velvet, obviously. Elizabeth’s blissful love of horses permeates the picture, blesses and ennobles and exalts it. I believe that this 12-year-old child-woman looks more genuinely and serenely happy here than in any other picture I’ve ever seen of her, at any age. This is how I want to remember her.

Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2

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Since the Kansas Silent Film Festival 
in Topeka coincided with Academy 
Award weekend this year, the theme 
of the festival was the first year of the 
Oscars (1927-28, the only year that 
silent pictures dominated the awards), 
and the three-day program was 
peppered with winners and 
nominees.  In fact, Oscar
himself put in an 
appearance…
 
 
 
 
 
 …in the form of Benjamin Glazer’s
award for the screen adaptation
of 7th Heaven, which was proudly
displayed in the lobby of the White
Concert Hall on the Washburn 
University campus. If you’ve ever
wondered what an 81-year-old 
Academy Award looks like — and
they don’t come any older — here 
he is, ensconced in his glass case
like Snow White (only standing up).
You can click on the picture and 
“+” him up to see that, classic
though he may be, he does
carry his share of age marks.
(By the way, do I need to specify 
that the Academy Award statuette
and the nickname “Oscar” are 
registered trademarks of the 
Academy of Motion Picture 
Arts and Sciences? 
Let’s not forget that!)
 
 
 
Speaking of 7th Heaven, I have to say Saturday night’s screening of this touching romance between a boastful Paris sewer worker (Charles Farrell) and a mistreated street waif (Janet Gaynor) was the highlight of the weekend for me. I’d seen it before, but this time was something above and beyond: the festival screened the personal print of film preservationist David Shepard (a special guest at the event, he also delivered a lecture to accompany screened samples from his new DVD collection Chaplin at Keystone). Shepard’s print, in turn, was carefully and lovingly copied from Janet Gaynor’s own personal print, and the exquisite tinting of the film was a revelation. 
 

Just so we’re clear, I don’t mean to suggest that the picture was tinted like this hand-colored lobby card. I mean stock-tinting, coloring the film stock a shade to match the mood of a scene — blue for nighttime, amber for candlelight, etc. Tinting was virtually universal in the silent era, and it’s the one facet of silent movies that now seems all but lost beyond recall. Modern digital tinting on video releases isn’t always pleasing to the eye — and in any case, so few tinted prints have survived that we can’t always know how authentic such efforts are. Gaynor’s print presumably dates from 1927, so here was an opportunity to see the real McCoy. I don’t know how many in the audience appreciated the rarity of what they were seeing, but they certainly appreciated the picture itself; when Gaynor’s timid little Diane finally turned on her physically abusive sister, the auditorium echoed with applause and cheers. (I guess film tinting is one of those lost arts, like hand-tinted photos in the manner of the lobby card here. But there must have been aesthetic rules and guidelines, and artisans who specialized in the process and were admired accordingly, just like editors and cinematographers. Has there ever been a full-length history of the art of tinting? There’s certainly a book in it. There’s a chapter on tinting in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By that’s as excellent as the rest of the book, but other than that I don’t know.)

One more note about the title of 7th Heaven: I’ve always seen it referred to (and referred to it myself) as Seventh Heaven. But “7th” is what appears onscreen, so properly speaking, that should be the title.

 

Another special guest was Annette D’Agostino
Lloyd, who discovered the comedies of Harold
Lloyd when she was a teenager and has
grown up to write a number of books
on his work, as well as hosting
Hello, Harold Lloyd, her own Web site
devoted to him. (And by the way, she’s
no relation to the great comedian;
her married surname is just one
of those amazing karmic
coincidences.)

 
 
Ms. Lloyd addressed the audience Friday night to introduce Speedy (1928), Harold Lloyd’s last silent comedy and one of his most stylish, with Harold at his ingenious and sympathetic best. She warned us that the climax of the picture, with our hero driving a horse-drawn streetcar at a mad gallop through the streets of New York in a desperate race against time, was one of the greatest chase scenes of the silent era. And she was right. The sequence is nothing less than astonishing — it rivals the chariot race from either version of Ben-Hur, and it absolutely puts The French Connection to shame (43 years before the fact). And it’s funny to boot.
 
 
 
And one little detail that’s too
much fun not to share. Annette
Lloyd was also the after-dinner
speaker at the festival banquet
Saturday night, speaking (naturally)
on her favorite comedian. In keeping
with the subject of her talk, the 
KSFF chose an appropriate
design for the evening’s
dessert:
 
The festival culminated on Sunday afternoon with Wings, director William A. Wellman’s tribute to the airborne fighters of World War I (and the picture that put him on the map). To see Wings on the big screen is to understand at last why it won the Oscar for best picture; that’s one thing it has in common with both Lawrence of Arabia and Oliver! Clara Bow loves Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who loves Jobyna Ralston, who loves Richard Arlen — all while the Great War rages and Rogers and Arlen take to the sky in thrilling combat. The aerial action remains riveting, with no process photography and very little miniature work, and the action on the ground is handled well enough that you don’t grow impatient for the dogfights to resume. (There is, however, a basic flaw in the movie’s portrayal of Rogers’s character: any man who would pass up Clara Bow for that namby-pamby, two-timing Jobyna Ralston is obviously unfit for military service.)
 
Kudos all around for the class act that is the KSFF — to festival president Bill Shaffer, vice president Denise Morrison (who also provides chatty, informative intros to all of the screenings), and the festival’s board of directors. And a special nod to the festival’s musicians, keeping alive another not-quite-lost art: Marvin Faulwell (organ), Greg Foreman and Jeff Rapsis (piano), Bob Keckeisen (percussion), and special guests The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra of Boulder, CO. Like Cinevent in Columbus, OH, the Kansas Silent Film Festival now has a permanent place on my calendar. I’m already looking forward to next year.

The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011

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“”Silent movies are the only art form to be discovered, embraced and discarded by a single generation.”

I wish I could claim credit for that keen insight, or failing that, could remember where I read it. (Was it in Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound? I’ll have to check.) Part of the keenness is the perception that what we now call “silent movies” (at the time nobody called them silent; they were just movies) are in fact a distinct art form. They’re not merely movies before they figured how to do the sound part, because for at least five years before The Jazz Singer, they knew how to do the sound. It’s just that nobody, including audiences, figured it was really needed — until the personality of Al Jolson showed them something ordinary movies couldn’t do. (And by the way, it wasn’t The Jazz Singer that nailed the coffin shut on the silent era, it was Jolson’s next part-talkie The Singing Fool. But that’s another story.)

I know some people are turned off by silent movies. I can’t say I have much respect for that attitude — to me it’s like refusing to watch Citizen Kane or Casablanca because they’re in black and white, or because all the sound comes out of one speaker — but I understand where it’s coming from. Silent movies demand your undivided attention; you can’t take your eyes from the screen for a nanosecond or you’ll lose the thread of a story that’s being conveyed in purely visual terms. King Vidor used to say that you couldn’t buy popcorn, soft drinks or candy at movie theaters before the coming of sound for that very reason.

The folks at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka understand and appreciate this, and they celebrate it — so I’m here to celebrate them.

In a way, the rediscovery of silent movies is a byproduct of home video. Historians like Kevin Brownlow and William K. Everson had been carrying the torch for years, with good results. But with home video, it was finally possible for anyone to watch a silent movie with an orchestral accompaniment, and without seeing it sped up from 16-18 frames per second to 24, which could make even the best silent look a little comical if you weren’t able to make allowances (and even if you were, it only added to the effort of watching). At last we could see The Big Parade or Greed or Ben-Hur exactly as audiences saw them in 1925; all that was missing was the experience of a 20- or 30-foot screen and a large audience in a 1,000-seat auditorium. Festivals like the KSFF supply that.

I’m ruefully surprised that it took me 14 years to learn about the KSFF, but now that I’ve found it I plan to be back. It’s free to the public (donations gratefully accepted), and the public responds. Not only in Topeka, but all over the country: at the banquet before Saturday night’s screening of 7th Heaven there were people who hailed from California (yours truly), Colorado, New Hampshire, New York — and those were just the ones who spoke up. Most heartening was the number of young people in the audience at all the screenings. I don’t mean just “younger than dirt,” I mean college, high school and elementary school age.

The screenings are a mix of 16mm and digital projection, 
nearly all with live accompaniment. (The sole exception 
this year is Chaplin’s The Circus, which followed the Chaplin 
family’s preference for the “new” score Chaplin composed
for it in 1967). There’s variety in the accompaniments: 
sometimes a piano, sometimes a theater pipe organ (both 
with and without percussion), and sometimes (a special treat) 
the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I’ve always wanted 
to get to the famous silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy; 
until that day, the KSFF will keep me happy. Besides,
it’s free, and I can speak the language. 
 
I have more to say about this year’s festival, 
but it’s getting late and I have to get to bed. 
I want to be fresh for Wings 
tomorrow afternoon.

Films of Henry Hathaway: Prince Valiant

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In my last post on Henry Hathaway, I wrote about Down to the Sea in Ships (1949). For this one, I’m going pretty much from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is much that is ridiculous about Prince Valiant (1954), but it’s also ridiculously good fun — and not only for wiseacres out for a campy laugh.
 
Now here I have to sigh deeply, grit my teeth, and admit that we might as well get the most ridiculous element of Prince Valiant out of the way right off the bat. It’s easily identifiable and it has a name: Robert Wagner. In his 2008 autobiography Pieces of My Heart (written with Scott Eyman), Wagner admitted he was miscast as Hal Foster’s comic strip prince, and he spoke of the picture with chagrin: 
 
“I was happy to be working for director Henry Hathaway; I thought the picture was good, and I loved the romance of the subject matter. I was working with James Mason, another one of my favorite actors, and I thought I was sensational. I had no idea it would become for me what ‘Yonda lies the castle of my fadduh’ was for Tony Curtis.”
 

Wagner said that mainly, it was the wig (in fact, that’s the title of the chapter in which he discusses it), and as you can see from the picture above, he has a point. Pauline Kael once said that no actor can triumph over a bad toupee; she was talking about Walter Matthau in The Laughing Policeman, but she might well have been thinking of Robert Wagner in Prince Valiant. Wagner claims that Dean Martin visited the set one day and spent ten minutes talking to him before he realized he wasn’t Jane Wyman. Wagner himself thought the wig made him look like Louise Brooks; to me he looks more like Archie’s girlfriend Veronica. In any case, the wig is a performance-killer, no error. I doubt if Richard Burton — another young actor under contract to 20th Century Fox at the time, and one who might have made a good Valiant himself — could have made it work.

But Wagner can’t hang it all on the wig. Whatever his tonsorial accoutrement, his callow performance is more fitting to a Malibu beach boy than a Viking prince. There’s no dialogue coach credited on Prince Valiant; maybe the picture didn’t have one. But somebody should have pointed out to young RJ that the first name of Uther Pendragon is not pronounced “Youther”; nor “betrothed”, “betrawthed”; nor “Gawain”, “Gwayne”. And somebody should have ironed the California twang out of line readings like “Aw, c’mon, don’t be shy.”

It must be said that in every case, that somebody should have been Henry Hathaway.

Wagner’s rise at 20th Century Fox hadn’t exactly been meteoric, but it had been pretty swift: eleven pictures in just over three years. He was earnest and hardworking, but not a natural for a role like this; he had neither the effortless panache of Errol Flynn nor the graceful aplomb of Tyrone Power. He was certainly nowhere near the seasoned performer he would become in time (and remains today). But you can’t say he wasn’t game; thrust by Darryl F. Zanuck into the title role of a comic strip he’d loved as a kid, he dove into it with all the relish his then-limited resources could command. It was a mercy (to him then, to us now) that he didn’t overhear the wisecracks of the crew until his work on the picture was done, so his enthusiasm at least remains high on screen and never flags. An actor, when he’s lucky, gets his in-over-his-head performances out of the way in high school, college or amateur theater, then leaves them behind. It’s Wagner’s bad luck that he had to stumble like this in full view of the world. In CinemaScope and Technicolor.

 

 

So let us stipulate that Prince Valiant is mushy at the center, and grant that it’s not easy to watch without wincing in sympathy for a young hero who seems to be floundering in Daddy’s oversize suit of chain mail. The picture still has its pleasures, especially for those who discover it in uncritical childhood — the age at which a couple of generations of kids discovered Harold Foster’s comic strip.

There is, for example, an honorable — and largely successful — effort to duplicate Foster’s richly detailed visual style. Compare this illustration of Foster’s from the first year (1937) of the strip, as Sir Gawain and Valiant approach King Arthur’s Camelot…

 

 
 …with this view from the movie. That’s Sir Gawain and Val again in the foreground (though the plot differs from Foster’s), and the image is courtesy of Hathaway, cinematographers Lucien Ballard and Charles G. Clarke, art directors Lyle Wheeler and Mark-Lee Kirk, and special effects ace Ray Kellogg. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Here’s another Foster illustration from 1937, of a festive tournament day under the walls of Camelot…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…and once again, here’s a similar scene from the movie, with Foster’s picture divided into two shots, one of the field of play:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pavilions-movie

 

 

 

…and another of the knights’ colorful pavilions:

 

 
 
 
 
And here’s a comparison I particularly like. On the left the strip, on the right the movie. As with the examples above, the context of the shot  in Dudley Nichols’ script differs completely from what Foster wrote in the strip, yet it’s clear to see that Foster’s dramatic design and pictorial sense were carefully studied and, wherever possible, emulated in the movie.
 
 
 
 

 

 

In Prince Valiant‘s last half-hour Hathaway — and even Wagner — rise to the occasion, and the picture becomes all a bloodthirsty young fan of the comic strip could wish for. First there’s a hell-for-leather battle between the forces of Valiant’s father King Aguar (Donald Crisp) and those of the usurper Sligon (Primo Carnera), with work by stunt coordinator Richard Talmadge that’s still remarkable to see:

 

Remember, this was in the days before computer-generated images, and if you wanted fire in your battle scene there was nothing for it but to light the flames…

Battle04

 
 
 
 
…and let the stunt men (David Sharpe and Buddy Van Horn, among others) deal with them.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Finally, even if you’ve been jeering and groaning and rolling your eyes all through the picture, the last ten minutes will amply reward your put-upon patience. That’s when Valiant at last squares off against the traitorous knight Sir Brack (James Mason — and that’s no spoiler; if you can’t figure out within the first twenty minutes that Sir Brack is the mysterious Black Knight terrorizing the countryside, you’re not paying attention). The climactic duel to the death, superbly choreographed by Jean Heremans, is a real pip: 
 
 
 
 
 
For once there’s not the wiry swish and chitter of fencing foils or sabers, but the amazing whang! clang! bar-r-r-rang! of steel broadswords wielded in great, murderous arcing blows…

 

 
 
 
 
 
…with Wagner and Mason (if there was any doubling it isn’t obvious) ranging across the great hall of Camelot in a no-holds-barred free-for-all, over, around and through the Round Table itself…

 

 

 

…and Franz Waxman’s virile, heroic score (one of his best) coming in at exactly the right moment, as Prince Valiant’s magical Singing Sword takes up its song on the side of right and honor. It’s 2 minutes 52 seconds from the first stroke until the villain falls dead, and it’s one of the most exhilarating swordfights ever committed to film.

 

 

Reviews for Prince Valiant weren’t particularly generous, but the reviews and Robert Wagner’s wig notwithstanding, the picture did well at the box office. (Wagner, for his part, counted his blessings and resolved never to get stuck in a role like that again.) Of the movies I’ve covered so far in my retrospective posts on Henry Hathaway, this is admittedly the least of them. It’s not historically important like The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, nor a neglected masterpiece like Down to the Sea in Ships, but it’s unpretentious fun in a Boy’s Own Adventure way. Harold Foster’s strip was 16 years old when the picture went into production (it still runs every Sunday in about 300 papers, 74 years after Foster, who died in 1982, created it), so the first generation of Valiant’s fans had kids of their own to take to see the movie.

 
Dudley Nichols’ script jettisons the episodic plot of the strip (which most of its fans wouldn’t remember anyway, having few reprints to refer to) in favor of a simple story incorporating visual and dramatic elements that the fans would remember and respond to. At the midway point there’s a lavish recreation of a jousting tournament in the Age of Chivalry, with some fine equestrian stunt work. And capping it all off is a rousing final half-hour that redeems much of what has gone before.

 

I’ll let Harold Foster himself have the last word on the picture, from an interview he gave in 1969. It had been 15 years since the movie’s release, and there was no reason for him not to be honest about it. His appraisal of the CinemaScope version of his brainchild was clear-eyed and evenhanded:

“It was a magnificent film — the scenery, the castles, everything was beautiful. They used all my research: Sir Gawain had the right emblem on his shield, everything was right. But somehow, the story was a little bit childish…it was Hollywood.

“I thought [Robert] Wagner was a little bit immature — his face was immature, he ran around with his mouth open. But all in all I got a kick out of it; it was quite an experience.”