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Picture Show 2022 — Day 4

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on July 8, 2022 by Jim LaneJuly 25, 2022

Heading into the home stretch of this first Columbus Moving Picture Show, we saw…I believe the customary term is “the thrilling conclusion” with Chapters 9-12 of Adventures of Red Ryder. Justice triumphed, bad guys got what was coming to them (banker Drake met a particularly grisly end), and surviving good guys lived happily until the next adventure — which came in the funny papers, on radio, and in B-western features; there were to be no more serials.

Then we saw former child star Jackie Cooper in the first of 73 adult roles in his 61-year career: Stork Bites Man (1947). This was the second picture for which I contributed notes to The Picture Show program, and here they are:

In 1945 Mary Pickford, still dabbling in movies from her boozy retirement at Pickfair, formed a production company, Comet Pictures, with husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Ralph Cohn. Cohn was the son of Jack and nephew of Harry, the battling brothers who were always at each other’s throats over the running of Columbia Pictures, where Ralph had been a B-picture producer, turning out installments in the Crime Doctor, Lone Wolf, Boston Blackie and Ellery Queen series, along with other low-budget efforts.

The model for Comet Pictures was Hal Roach’s “Streamliners”, mid-length pictures longer than short subjects but less than an hour long and aimed at the bottom slot on double features. Comet productions came in right around 65 minutes, as does our specimen, Stork Bites Man.

The germ of Stork Bites Man was a slim book by Louis Pollock, subtitled “What the Expectant Father May Expect”. Pollock’s comic treatise, dedicated to the proposition that no man is ever ready for fatherhood, never made the bestseller lists. But being published in 1945 during the waning months of World War II, it fortuitously caught the leading edge of the Baby Boom, when millions of returning servicemen were poised to go through what Pollock wrote about.

In adapting Stork Bites Man to the screen in 1947, there was a catch: Most of what Pollock wrote about was frowned upon by the Production Code, if not downright forbidden. This included such things as morning sickness, food cravings, mood swings, a high-strung wife losing (temporarily) her figure — even the words “pregnant” and “pregnancy” themselves. Writer/director Cyril (“Cy”) Endfield and adapter Fred Freiberger met the challenge by changing the story’s focus: Instead of Lou Pollock coping with his wife Cleta’s nine expectant months, their theme was America’s post-war housing shortage.

And so it was that Lou and Cleta Pollock were renamed Ernie Brown (Jackie Cooper) and his wife Peg (Gene Roberts, later to change her name to Meg Randall), resident managers of an apartment house. The landlord (Emory Parnell) doesn’t allow families with children, and housing being a seller’s market after American industry’s four years of single-minded focus on wartime production, he’s able to get away with it. The first half of the picture chronicles Ernie’s efforts to keep Peg’s condition secret from the boss. Inevitably, once the cat is out of the bag (if you’ll pardon the expression), Ernie is fired, he and Peg are evicted, and Ernie decides to organize a strike among workers and tenants to force a change of policy.

Variety found Stork Bites Man a “lightweight comedy that’ll serve for dualers,” reserving special praise for Jackie Cooper and co-star Gus Schilling as a baby-supplies salesman. Still, amusing as it was, its theme of the little guy organizing against the hard-hearted plutocracy was the kind of candy-coated leftism that would in time draw the baleful attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cy Endfield’s time came in 1951; blacklisted for his Young Communist League activism at Yale in the 1930s, he relocated to the U.K., where he worked for a while under various aliases, finally resuming his real name in 1957. Depending on your point of view, his directing career peaked either with the 1961 Jules Verne fantasy The Mysterious Island (with visual effects by the great Ray Harryhausen) or with 1964’s Zulu, about the battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (starring Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, and the up-and-coming Michael Caine). Endfield lost interest in filmmaking in 1971, but he remained an author, inventor, and amateur magician for the rest of his life; he died in England in 1995, age 80.

Comet Pictures, alas, fizzled after only four releases; Stork Bites Man was probably its best, and certainly its last. Cy Endfield (as noted) moved to England. Ralph Cohn returned to Columbia to head Screen Gems, the studio’s TV distribution wing. Fred Freiberger went on to produce The Six Million Dollar Man, Space: 1999 and the original Star Trek, among other TV programs. Buddy Rogers and Mary Pickford, of course, retreated to Pickfair, where Buddy became Mary’s devoted caretaker for the rest of her long life, and custodian of her legend for the rest of his.

 

Wild Beauty (1927) was a vehicle for the equine star Rex, who was introduced to audiences in The King of the Wild Horses (1924, screened at Cinevent 50 in 2018). Rex was “discovered” by Hal Roach, who used Rex to get his feet wet in feature production. Rex has the distinction of being the only horse in history to become a genuine movie star without (literally) supporting some human cowboy star. With Rex it was the other way around: In his pictures, the humans (figuratively) supported him. In the course of his career, which lasted until 1938, he was variously billed as “Rex the Wonder Horse” or (echoing the title of his film debut) “King of the Wild Horses”. By the time of Wild Beauty, Hal Roach had decided to postpone his move into features a few years, so he sold Rex to Carl Laemmle over at Universal. The plot of this first Universal Rex picture had human hero Hugh Allen rescuing a mare he names “Valerie” from the battlefields of the Great War; he brings her home, where wild stallion Rex tries to lure her away from the ranch. Soon Rex is vying for Valerie’s attention with another stallion named Starbright. Meanwhile, there’s a parallel human romance between rancher Hugh Allen and June Marlowe — later, with blonde hair, to be beloved by generations of children as Miss Crabtree in the Our Gang shorts. But June Marlowe’s glory years were still in the future, and does anybody know or remember who Hugh Allen was? (Actually, his birth name was Allan Hughes; the spelling of his professional surname varied between “Allan” and “Allen”. He lived to be 93 but his film career ended at 27 without making the slightest impression.)

The humans hardly matter, though; Rex is pretty much the whole show. Now he makes an impression. Elinor Glyn, the British erotic novelist, famously tagged Clara Bow as having “It“, that elusive, hard-to-pinpoint magnetic power that attracts both sexes. According to Mme. Glyn, Rex had it too: “Rex has ‘it’ and if I could only find a leading man with the same look in his eye, my quest would be finished. He is not just a horse. He has personality and he exudes something beyond all this, and that is the spirit of romance.” I don’t know if Mme. Glyn’s words sounded as vaguely alarming in the 1920s as they do now, but there’s no denying that Rex had something, nor that the camera found it a joy to behold. And it wasn’t just the tricks he learned from a trainer. The buzz is that, like a number of human stars, Rex was notoriously difficult to work with — in Rex’s case, owing to some pretty brutal abuse in his early years. The difference, in Rex’s case, was that “difficult” could translate to “murderous” when you weigh approximately 1,400 pounds. Dangerous and unpredictable — maybe that’s what comes through on screen, and what gave Rex “It“.

Love Thy Neighbor (1940) provided the final highlight of the weekend. Expertly directed by the nimble Mark Sandrich, it capitalized on the p.r. “feud” between radio comedians Jack Benny at NBC and Fred Allen over at CBS, much the way 1937’s Wake Up and Live (Cinevent 51, Day 2) exploited the equally spurious clash between Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. Allen and Benny were both professional funny men, so it was generally understood that their feud was all in fun; no one ever seems to have taken it seriously, as some did Bernie and Winchell’s.

The plot of Love Thy Neighbor offered new-minted Broadway star Mary Martin as Fred Allen’s (fictitious) niece Mary Allen. Mary goes to Benny’s office in an effort to negotiate a truce between the two men, then in a case of mistaken identity, she auditions for and gets cast as the leading lady of Benny’s new stage show, under the name of Virginia Astor. In Miami for rehearsals and the out-of-town opening, Benny winds up in a hotel suite next to Allen, who is also in Miami under doctor’s orders to work off the stress of the feud. While they’re all in Miami, with Mary walking the tightrope between her uncle and her boss, the real Virginia Astor (Virginia Dale) shows up, and…well, imagine the possibilities.

Love Thy Neighbor came midway in the three or four years during which Mary Martin tried and failed to transfer her stage stardom to the screen. Like her great rival Ethel Merman, there was something in her star persona that simply didn’t photograph well. In Merman’s case, she tended to come off as too big and brassy for the screen, even in the early years when she was still rather petite (and even a bit of a “dish”). With Martin, it wasn’t “too big”, but “too chilly”; somehow the camera didn’t warm to her, and neither did audiences. (Not until the 1950s, with TV productions of Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun did Martin approach her Broadway success, and those performances — preserved, thank God — remain the best record we have of her.) Martin isn’t quite able to provide the musical spice to Love Thy Neighbor that Alice Faye did to Wake Up and Live, but she at least is allowed to perform her first signature song, Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, slightly bowdlerized but within two years of introducing it.

What musical spice Love Thy Neighbor contains is rather fleeting, and from a surprising source. This is a nifty blend of Shakespeare and jitterbug entitled “Dearest, Darest I” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Eddie Anderson as Benny’s valet Rochester and Theresa Harris as his girlfriend Josephine. Anderson was so famous for his role that he was often billed with “Rochester” as his middle name, and sometimes by that name alone. His gravelly voice (the result of ruptured vocal cords as a newsboy in his youth) meant that Dick Powell and Nelson Eddy’s jobs were safe, but Anderson could put a song over with personality, and that voice (plus the generosity of Jack Benny, who saw to it that he always got all the best lines) made him a star. 

Now a few words about Theresa Harris (1906-85). This woman is long overdue for some kind of recognition. Hollywood blogger Steve Cubine, in a 2019 post about Harris, said, “Hollywood just didn’t know what to do with the talented Miss Harris,” but that’s a crock. Hollywood knew damn well what to do with Theresa Harris, they just wouldn’t let her do it. She was beautiful, intelligent and sexy; she could act, she could sing, she could dance. And oh yes, she was African-American. So naturally, she played maids. In a little over 100 films in a little under 30 years, you could find her picking up after, dressing the hair of, or laying out clothes for more than half the leading ladies in Hollywood — Lilyan Tashman, Thelma Todd, Lupe Velez, Ginger Rogers (twice), Margaret Lindsay, Barbara Stanwyck (twice), Mae Clarke, Constance Cummings, Billie Burke, Helen Morgan, Gloria Stuart, Claire Trevor, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Frances Dee, Betty Grable, Lillian Gish, June Haver, Maureen O’Hara, Gloria Grahame, Maureen O’Sullivan, Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Arlene Dahl, Jane Russell — you name her, chances are at some time or other you’ll see Theresa Harris standing behind her in a black dress and white lace cap, hands demurely folded in front of her. If she seldom got to show what she could really do, at least she was never used for coarse comic relief, and so could invest her roles with a dignity that plays well today — see her especially as Chico to Stanwyck’s Lily in Baby Face (1933) and as the wise house servant Alma in I Walked with a Zombie (’43). She was released from domestic service at least twice: Here in Love Thy Neighbor and in a previous turn as Rochester’s Josephine in another Jack Benny vehicle, Buck Benny Rides Again earlier in 1940. In that outing she and Anderson got to sing and dance “My My” by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh. (It’s probably not a coincidence that Buck Benny was also directed by Mark Sandrich. Good for him.) There’s plenty of good work from Theresa Harris if you know where to look, but in those days of artistic apartheid, she is yet another example of a Great Star Who Never Was.

I was much looking forward to seeing The Student of Prague in Columbus this year, but I was laboring under a misunderstanding: I thought we were getting the 1926 silent with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss. Instead, it was The Student of Prague (1913), the earlier version. And considering how much cinema all over the world evolved between 1913 and 1926, it must be said that what we saw was a much earlier version. The picture tells the story of Balduin (Paul Wegener), a college student less interested in academics than in drinking, gambling, dueling, and — it is discreetly hinted — whoring (“The more things change…”). As Balduin fritters away his limited funds, he is approached by a whimsical old man named Scapinelli (John Gottowt). He offers Balduin a vast fortune (“100,000 pieces of gold”, “600,000 florins”, or other amounts, depending on which translation you watch) in exchange for any single item the old boy is able to find in Balduin’s lodging. Knowing he owns practically nothing, Balduin readily signs Scapinelli’s contract, and forthwith he is showered with a mountain of coins. He leads Scapinelli to his barely-furnished room, where the old man claims an item Balduin wouldn’t have thought was part of the deal: His reflection in the mirror. 

Only momentarily dismayed at his failure to cast a reflection, Balduin sallies forth with his newfound funds, becoming the life of every party. But his reflection dogs his every move, becoming in effect his evil twin, and working mischief in the lives of Balduin and everyone around him — the barmaid who loves him (Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s wife at the time), the countess whom he loves (Grete Berger), the countess’s fiancé (Fritz Weidemann). Things do not end well for anyone but Scapinelli.

The Student of Prague is widely regarded as “the first German art film”. But it’s an art film in comparison to what came before it, not to what came after. It wouldn’t be till after the Great War — to be precise, with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — that Germany vaulted to the front rank of world film. But Student has its points. The locations (it was actually shot in and around Prague) are attractive, the special effects surprisingly sophisticated — and most of all, there’s Paul Wegener. Wegener had a spectacular screen presence — in The Golem (1920) he gives one of the great performances of the silent era — and it comes through even in the blurriest versions of Student to be found on YouTube. Just take a gander at the lobby card above; notice how even with Lyda Salmonova flaunting her bare legs, your eye is drawn irresistibly to Wegener. 

There are several copies of The Student of Prague available on YouTube. The best one I could find is this one — but some of the intertitles come and go quickly, so be prepared to pause as needed. The best reason to see it remains Paul Wegener. The 1926 remake is there too, with an excellent image but, alas, no translations for the German titles. If you read German, here it is, with Conrad Veidt as Balduin and Werner Krauss (the original Dr. Caligari) as Scapinelli. The remake is still on my bucket list, but Conrad Veidt has some mighty big shoes to fill.

Cigarette Girl (1947) brought The Picture Show to a close, not with a bang — but to be fair, not really with a whimper either. For the benefit of Cinedrome readers who are not of a Certain Age, a cigarette girl was an employee of a restaurant or night club who, like a cocktail waitress, roamed among the customers’ tables with a tray slung around her neck (as in this poster) offering tobacco products for sale: “Cigars…cigarettes…pipe tobacco…” This was a viable line of work in the days when (1) indoor smoking was not only legal, but everyone without exception smoked, and (2) a cigar or a pack of cigarettes could be had for small change — say, ten cents for a pack of Luckies or Camels, or a White Owl or Dutch Masters cigar. The girl usually had to buy her own stock, but she could get it wholesale, and the tips could be pretty good: If a guy wanted to impress a date, or to hit on the cigarette girl herself, he might slip her a buck for a dime pack of cigarettes and tell her to keep the change. At that rate, with luck, she could earn her month’s rent of, say, $45.00 in a couple or three nights. 

End of history lesson. The cigarette girl of the title was played by Columbia contract player Leslie Brooks, the sort who played supports and bits in A-pictures and leads in B’s like this. Likewise leading man Jimmy Lloyd, and as a romantic team the two of them were blandly personable. They meet on neutral ground and launch a courtship under harmlessly false pretenses: She’s a “lowly” cigarette girl, but tells him she’s a popular night club singer; meanwhile he tells her he’s an oil company president (if memory serves, he’s really a gas station attendant). But lo and behold, their Little White Lies come true — by the final fadeout he’s a tycoon, she’s a Broadway star, and all’s right with the world. Russ Morgan and his Orchestra performed class arrangements to the songs by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts — I sat there tapping my toes as the movie unspooled, though I couldn’t have hummed a single tune ten minutes after the lights came up. All in all, a pleasant palate-cleanser to close out the day, and the weekend.

Thus did The Columbus Moving Picture Show take up the Cinevent torch, banner, baton — fill in the metaphor of your choice — for 2022. Memorial Day 2023 will be here before any of us know it, so take my advice and make your plans now; start by getting on their mailing list and Liking them on Facebook. I hope to see you in Columbus next year. Don’t forget to say hi.

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 — Day 3

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on July 4, 2022 by Jim LaneJuly 22, 2023

Chapters 7-9 of Adventures of Red Ryder led off Day 3 of The Columbus Moving Picture Show. The evil machinations of banker Drake (Harry Worth) and his henchman Ace Hanlon (Noah Beery) grew ever more desperate and menacing as Red, Beth and Little Beaver drew closer to uncovering their conspiracy.

Then it was the welcome return of another longstanding Cinevent tradition: the Saturday Morning Animation Program, curated by the estimable Stewart McKissick. This year’s program (with YouTube links where available):

Bosko the Doughboy (1931). (Top row left) Bosko was the first Looney Tunes star, produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, the most perfectly named partnership in movie history (“Harman-Ising”). They started out creating the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies lines at Warner Bros., then when they got fed up with executive producer Leon Schlesinger they decamped to MGM and started the cartoon program there. Bosko the Doughboy came early in the Warner years, set in the trenches of the Great War. The Bosko cartoons hit TV in the mid-1950s when I was a kid, and frankly, I never liked them — partly because (as this picture shows) he was always eating, chomping with jaws gaping wide, the food bouncing around in his mouth. Even at age seven, I was disgusted. (I suspect that animators Rollin Hamilton and Max Maxwell simply couldn’t draw someone chewing with his mouth closed.) Now I’m able to watch these cartoons with more appreciation. Stewart McKissick says this one is often considered the best of the Boskos, and I believe it; there’s a startling strain of dark humor in the way it makes gags out of the bombs, machine guns and artillery shells of the Western Front — only 13 years after the war decimated a generation of European manhood. 

Radio Girl (1932) was a Terrytoon with a succession of standard Depression-era gags draped on the premise of a radio exercise program. Like the YouTube video at the link, The Picture Show’s print was a 1950s TV syndicated version with new opening titles, but the rest was pure 1932.

Also from 1932 was Max and Dave Fleischer’s You Try Somebody Else (top row right), about a (literal) cat burglar newly released from prison. In short order he breaks into a house and raids the icebox filled with talking food. Caught by the homeowner, none other than a shotgun-toting Betty Boop, he goes back to the slammer, where he picks up a newspaper with a photo of Ethel Merman — and that’s all the excuse Max and Dave need to segue to Ethel in live-action for a follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong. The number is the title tune, one of the lesser-known works of the legendary songwriting trio of De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (“Good News”, “Birth of the Blues”, “Button Up Your Overcoat”, “Sunny Side Up” etc.). There was more dark humor at the end of this one.

Two-Gun Mickey (1934) (second row left) was Mickey Mouse from late in his black-and-white period, when he still had the comic spunk that would soon depart, leaving Mickey to play straight-man to Donald Duck and Pluto. As Stewart observes in his notes, at this point the Disney animation is smoother and more textured, but Walt’s drive for realism hasn’t yet banished the playful rubber-hose style of the early shorts. Dynamic and great fun.

The Headless Horseman (1934) (second row right) was a real revelation, and as such, just about my favorite entry on the program. One of Ub Iwerks’s ComiColor cartoons (produced during the six years he was lured away from Walt Disney by the Machiavellian Pat Powers), it’s an adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that beat Disney’s to the screen by 15 years. It’s quite a good one too: compact, witty, musical, with a pretty design that nicely conceals the limitations of Cinecolor. Spoiler alert!: The cartoon also makes explicit something that I didn’t see as a kid watching Disney’s version, and which was subtle enough to go over my head even when I read Irving’s story as a teenager: that Ichabod Crane’s run-in with the Headless Horseman is a prank played by Brom Bones to scare the superstitious schoolteacher out of the county and clear Brom’s path to Katrina Van Tassel. (Duh!) Iwerks’s cartoon lets that completely out of the bag, though it also ends with a nifty touch of the last laugh. 

Bridge Ahoy (1936) (third row left) was one of the Fleischer brothers’ black-and-white Popeye cartoons. In this one Popeye and Olive Oyl are offended by the high-handed treatment they and Wimpy receive as they cross a river on Bluto’s ferryboat, so they decide to build their own bridge and put him out of business. One moment in this one that I’ve always loved: As the ferry pulls away from the riverbank, Wimpy says to Bluto, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a ferry ride today.” Bluto, furious, throws him overboard. As the indignant Popeye prepares to dive in and rescue him, we see Wimpy receding in the background, going down once, twice, three times, and each time he surfaces, he cries, “Assistance! Assistance!”

The Tangled Angler (1941) made a nice companion piece to Day 1’s Marry Me Again, since it was written and directed by Frank Tashlin before giving up cartoons for live action. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), it tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land. UPDATE 7/21/23: I’m embarrassed to admit it, but The Tangled Angler wasn’t on the program after all; the supplier sent the wrong print, and by the time it arrived the program book had already gone to press. It was the book I relied on in writing up my coverage, and by then I’d forgotten about the change (these cartoons do tend to blur together if you’re not careful). What screened this year in Columbus was Tangled Travels (1944), also from Columbia, directed by Dave Fleischer, on the rebound from being bounced, along with his brother Max, from their animation studio at Paramount. Tangled Travels was a comic travelogue of the kind made during the 1940s over at Warner Bros., a series of punny “blackout” gags on geographical names and features (“We crossed a babbling brook…and a group of weeping willows…”). The Tangled Angler would have to wait another year, until Picture Show 2023, to join the Saturday morning cartoon program.

Rabbit Every Monday (1951) (bottom left) pitted Bugs Bunny against Yosemite Sam for the eighth of his 31 confrontations with the pugnacious little outlaw. I’ve always rather preferred Bugs’s duels with Sam over the ones with Elmer Fudd; Sam puts up more of a fight and is a worthier opponent than the hapless Elmer, who never seems to have a chance from the start. Besides, Sam is such an obnoxious blowhard that whatever he gets from Bugs, he’s got it coming. This was one of their few teamings where Sam is actually rabbit-hunting, almost as if he’s stepped in at the last minute because Elmer broke an ankle during rehearsals.

Rock-A-Bye Bear (1952) (bottom right) was prime Tex Avery screwball from his MGM years, with a dog named Spike hired to mind the house of a hibernating bear — but Spike has a spiteful rival who tries to get him fired by constantly making noise to wake up the sound-sensitive bear, hoping to replace Spike in the job. The picture here, also prime Tex Avery, gives a good idea of how the gags go in this one.

Barnyard Actor (1955) was a cleverer-than-usual Terrytoon starring Gandy Goose. Gandy receives a mail-order acting course, and immediately he is able to do impersonations of Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, James Cagney, Gary Cooper, and Charles Boyer (which isn’t the same as “acting”, but never mind). One very funny line, referencing Cooper’s role in High Noon (’52): “I’m the sheriff in these parts and I’ve got my duty to perform. I’m not deserting my post; I’d rather desert my wife.” The plot kicks in when Gandy’s pal Rudy Rooster asks him to impersonate a fox so he (Rudy) can chase him off and win the local hens back from the new rooster in the barnyard. Gandy agrees — but then a real fox shows up…

The cartoons were followed by The Little Cafe (1919) starring Max Linder. Linder (born Gabriel Leuvielle in 1883) was an early French film comedian, one of the first to establish a consistent screen persona, and by some accounts the first international movie star. He was certainly a recognized influence on Charlie Chaplin (whose fame quite eclipsed his, though they became and remained good friends), Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and (yes) Charley Chase, among others. Alas, his heyday was not long. His career peaked around 1912-14, when the outbreak of World War I, and his experiences at the front as a dispatch driver and entertaining the troops, led to issues with his physical and mental health, including recurring bouts of depression. The Little Cafe was part of his efforts to regain his comic mojo after the war, and while a great success in Europe, it did not do well in the U.S. Based on a 1912 play by Tristan Bernard, and directed by the playwright’s son Raymond, it starred Linder as a waiter who suddenly inherits great wealth, but whose boss won’t let him out of his contract, hoping to extort a huge payment to let the fellow go. The screening was introduced by Linder biographer Lisa Stein Haven, author of The Rise and Fall of Max Linder: The First Cinema Celebrity. As for the “fall” of that title, I may write about it someday but I won’t spill the beans now, but rather refer you to Ms. Stein Haven’s book. Suffice it for now to say that in late October 1925 the 41-year-old Linder and his 19-year-old wife died together, and not of natural causes.

Before we move on, a parenthetical aside about Tristan Bernard and his son Raymond. The elder Bernard (1866-1947), a novelist, playwright, humorist and screenwriter, was the author of one of the most breathtaking insights in the history of art. “Audiences want to be surprised,” he once said, “but by something they expect.” His son Raymond (1891-1977) started out acting in his father’s plays with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt; in 1916 he embarked on a career that would, if anything, completely eclipse that of Bernard père and mark the son as one of the greatest of all French film directors. One film alone is enough to make him immortal; this is his 1934 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Of all the 40-plus movies made from Hugo’s book, Raymond Bernard’s three-part, 281-minute version is by far the best; there’s not even a close second. For once — if not indeed for the only time — a movie is as great as the great novel it’s based on. 

Okay, back to Columbus. Alan K. Rode, author of biographies of Michael Curtiz and Charles McGraw, gave a summary of the short history of Eagle-Lion Productions, an independent company set up by Britain’s J. Arthur Rank to distribute British movies in the States and produced low-budget American pictures for double bills. Then he introduced one of Eagle-Lion’s pictures, Canon City (1948), about a notorious prison break at the end of 1947 at the state prison in that Colorado town. (Incidentally, it’s “Cañon City”, pronounced “canyon”, not “cannon”. The movie gets the pronunciation right, but not the spelling.)

Like Glen or Glenda, Canon City was rushed into production to cash in on a hot news story, albeit to considerably better effect. The jailbreak took place on December 30, 1947; the picture was shooting by March ’48 on the prison grounds (with appropriate security, one hopes) and in post-production by April; its world premiere was held on July 2 in Canon City’s own Rex Theatre (which makes a cameo appearance in an early scene). Haste did not make waste, however; written and directed by Crane Wilbur, the picture is swift, efficient, and as tight as a snare drum, with a cast of solid character actors: Scott Brady, Jeff Corey, Whit Bissell, Stanley Clements, DeForest Kelly, Henry Brandon. The omniscient narration by Reed Hadley marks it as not film noir, but solidly in the semi-documentary tradition then being pioneered over at 20th Century Fox by producer Louis de Rochemont and director Henry Hathaway (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, etc.); Warden Roy Best even plays himself. Canon City is available complete here on YouTube. (Spoiler alert: Within a week of the break, all 12 escapees had been killed or recaptured — but audiences would all have known that in 1948.)

From hard-boiled prison drama to wholesome family fare, next came Two Thoroughbreds (1939). Here I interpolate the notes I wrote for The Picture Show’s program:

Everybody loves “a boy and his horse” movies, don’t they? Our offering here, an RKO B-picture called Two Thoroughbreds, is one that even the most dogged film buff has probably never heard of, but it’s a real charmer, and even a cursory glance at the cast list may lead you to wonder, “Why haven’t I known about this?”

Our story opens in the dead of night, as horse thieves hijack a valuable brood mare from a breeding ranch. As the thieves drive off, the mare’s recent foal gallops after them, whinnying plaintively, but is soon left in the dust. Exhausted and dispirited, the young animal wanders onto a nearby hardscrabble farm, where another orphan, a human one named David Carey (Jimmy Lydon), lives at the mercy of his abusive Uncle Thaddeus and Aunt Hildegarde (Arthur Hohl, Marjorie Main). David prevails upon Uncle Thad to let him keep the horse until they can find the owner; surely there’s a reward for such a handsome piece of horseflesh. But by the time David learns where the colt belongs, the two have bonded and David can’t bring himself to let go. Then Uncle Thad, tired of waiting for some pie-in-the-sky reward, decides he’ll either sell the colt or work it to death. What is poor David to do?

Two Thoroughbreds was filmed in the Lake Sherwood area of California’s Santa Monica Mountains, a location familiar to moviegoers from dozens, maybe hundreds of productions, from Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922), which gave the lake its name, through Tarzan and His Mate and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, right down to Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Bridesmaids (2011). Sixteen-year-old Jimmy Lydon plays his first real role here — 1939 was his debut year in pictures, and so far he’d appeared only in Back Door to Heaven, an indie-B released through Paramount; The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair, a promo film for the fair’s Westinghouse exhibit; and a Robert Benchley short, Home Early — and he carries the 65-minute Thoroughbreds with ease. Stardom for young Jimmy was just around the corner, of course: In 1941 he would take on the role of Henry Aldrich in Paramount’s highly successful answer to MGM’s Andy Hardy series, then he’d become an early TV pioneer as “Biff” Cardoza on Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954), before settling in to a long and worthy career as a reliable character actor.

Stardom was in the cards for the perky, 14-year-old Joan Brodel, too — though not until Warner Bros. changed her name to Joan Leslie. Playing Wendy, the daughter of the colt’s rightful owner, she looks almost shockingly young here; it’s astounding to think that within three years she’ll be playing on-screen wives to Gary Cooper (in Sergeant York) and James Cagney (in Yankee Doodle Dandy).

And then there’s Marjorie Main. Her screen persona was still taking shape in 1939, the year of her breakthrough comic role in The Women, and the nasty old crone she plays here is a far cry from the Marjorie Main we know in Meet Me in St. Louis and The Harvey Girls. I wonder: Seven years later, when director Jack Hively was second-unit director on The Egg and I, did he and Marjorie ever reminisce about the difference between The Egg‘s Ma Kettle and the farm wife she played for him back in 1939? (Hively would remain a reliable journeyman director in movies and TV, often specializing in kids and animals, including 71 episodes of the long-running Lassie TV series during its Jon Provost/June Lockhart years and after, plus several TV movies with the canine star alone.)

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice one more familiar element in Two Thoroughbreds, and I’ll point it out now so you don’t miss any of the story trying to figure out where you’ve seen it before. This is the interior of the ranch house where the girl Wendy lives — that set also served as Katharine Hepburn’s Connecticut country house in RKO’s Bringing Up Baby the year before.

 

There’s an unhappy postscript to these notes. Almost the very day I turned them in to the program book’s editor, on March 9, 2022, veteran actor James “Jimmy” Lydon passed away at his home in San Diego, Calif. The Monday after The Picture Show, May 30, would have been his 99th birthday. (His wife of 59 years, Betty Lou, preceded him in death on January 1. I wonder if that bereavement perhaps hastened his own end.) The Columbus screening of Two Thoroughbreds was dedicated to his memory.

 

 

Silent movie historian Tim Lussier presented a program of Silent Fragments that was at once entertaining, tantalizing and frustrating. Frustrating because with each of the three titles he presented, the footage seemed to run out just as things were getting interesting. What we saw constituted fragments of fragments, actually, sort of teasers for the incomplete footage that survives. They were, in the order they’re presented in The Picture Show program:

A Kiss in the Dark (1925)  This was (judging from what we could see) a surprisingly risqué romantic comedy about a serial seducer (Adolphe Menjou at his most dapper) who gets into hot water over a perfectly innocent misunderstanding with a married woman (Lillian Rich) — for once, a woman he was not trying to seduce. Supposedly based on Aren’t We All? by Frederick Lonsdale, the picture by all accounts had nothing whatever to do with the play except one character surname: in the play, Lord Grenham, an avuncular old nobleman, in the movie Walter Grenham, the young Lothario played by Menjou. Variety’s reviewer “Fred” ventured to wonder why Paramount bothered to buy Lonsdale’s play rather than just come up with this original and save the money. Maybe it was for the publicity value; Lonsdale’s name was highly admired in those days. Location shooting was done in Havana to take advantage of both the Cuban scenery and the fact that Prohibition didn’t extend down there.

The Wanderer (1925)  A dramatization of the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, filling in a lot of story details that Jesus neglected to mention when He told the tale to His disciples. Longtime Cinedrome readers will recall that I reported acquiring a souvenir program for this picture in “Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2” in 2013. I had never heard of The Wanderer, but it was clearly a major Paramount production, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Walter Collier Jr., Greta Nissen, Ernest Torrence, Wallace Beery and Tyrone Power Sr. Back in 2013 I reported that a print of the picture survived in the UCLA Film Archive. Not exactly; evidently what survives is a Kodascope six-reel condensation of the full nine-reel feature (see Day 1 notes on Flesh and Blood [1922] for more about Kodascope). We didn’t see all six reels in Columbus, of course, but there was enough to show that The Wanderer was a pretty lavish production, including scenes of the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style destruction of the sinful city where the Prodigal squanders his inheritance.

The Forbidden Woman (1927)  Set in French Colonial Algeria, Jetta Goudal played the half-caste daughter of an Arab mother and a French father. Charged by her sheik grandfather with spying on the conquering French, she first marries a French commander, then complicates things by falling in love with his brother (Joseph Schildkraut). Variety’s “Rush” predicted it would be a hit with “the femmes”, adding that “a little of this heavy Oriental romance goes a long way with men”. However, he did allow that “Miss Goudal…is outstanding in her clinging gowns and picturesque headdresses”, as the poster above attests. I found this the most frustrating of the excerpts Mr. Lussier presented, because it offered the fewest hints as to how the plot resolved itself. Unless I missed something.

The second and final Laurel and Hardy short of the weekend was Going Bye-Bye (1934), with killer Walter Long vowing vengeance against The Boys for testifying against him, swearing to…well, never mind what he swears to do; suffice it to say he does it.

After that it was another highlight of the weekend, also from 1934, the genre-blending musical mystery Murder at the Vanities. The lobby cards for the picture, especially this one, are enough to make you wish it had been shot in Technicolor. But that would have meant postponing production until after the Production Code crackdown, in which case all those Most Beautiful Girls in the World would have had a lot more clothes on, instead of being as close to stark naked as state and federal obscenity laws would allow. Besides, the movie’s second-most-famous song would never have been included, and probably not even written; this was the remarkable “Sweet Marahuana [sic]”, a melancholy ode to cannabis sung by Gertrude Michael that made the movie a camp favorite among 1960s hippies after the demise of the Production Code.

Camp isn’t the only thing this jewel of Pre-Code Hollywood has going for it. The mix of musical and murder mystery is perfectly balanced by Producer E. Lloyd Sheldon and director Mitchell Leisen. The solution to the backstage crimes during opening night of Earl Carroll’s Vanities on Broadway, while not entirely unexpected, is smartly plotted and worked out. Leading man Carl Brisson was a touch too smarmy to be the Next Maurice Chevalier (which was obviously what Paramount had in mind for him), but he does no harm; besides, the real leading men are Jack Oakie as the show’s house manager and Victor McLaglen as an investigating cop, and they could carry anybody over the finish line. Musically, the songs are okay (with one legendary highlight), the production numbers lavish (with Ann Sheridan, Lucille Ball and Alan Ladd visible among the chorus if you look fast enough), and Duke Ellington and his Band are on hand to give Franz Liszt a swingtime treatment with “Ebony Rhapsody”.

That “legendary highlight” is the movie’s first-most-famous song, “Cocktails for Two”, one of the best and most popular songs of the decade — arguably better and more lasting than any of the three nominees that year for the first Best Song Oscar (“The Carioca”, “Love in Bloom”, and the winner, “The Continental”). “Cocktails” is introduced by Carl Brisson in rehearsal, then reprised later in a big production number and at the show’s finale, plus turning up frequently in the background all along — showing that the boys at Paramount really knew what they had. By the end of the decade, countless couples had designated it “their song”, and it had become enshrined as The Lounge Lizards’ National Anthem. (Ten years later, Spike Jones’s hilarious send-up infuriated songwriters Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow, but it made them rich all over again.)

Day 3 wrapped up with Top Banana (1954), the screen translation of the 1951 Broadway musical comedy that won Phil Silvers the first of his two Tony Awards. I call it a “screen translation” because “adaptation” would be a misnomer. The show ran from November 1951 to October ’52 on Broadway, then Silvers toured with it for two years. It was while the tour was in Los Angeles that the sets were carted over to an empty sound stage and the show was transferred to film in a dizzying five days. No effort was made to “open it up” or conceal its stage origins; quite the contrary, the movie aspires to look exactly like a filmed stage production, complete with curtains, flimsy sets flown and rolled in, and stage lighting, including footlights. (It was also filmed in 3-D, but never released that way.)

There have certainly been better movies made of Broadway shows, but Top Banana has a value uniquely its own to the show’s posterity: it is the closest thing we have to a precise record of what a show looked like during the Golden Age of the Broadway Musical. It’s also a specimen of the star-driven musical on the cusp of oblivion, before it was swept away by the irresistible wave of the integrated (and later the “concept”) musical, and of burlesque comedy before it got shouldered aside by striptease and more vulgar entertainments.

And talk about star-driven, the star here is firmly in the driver’s seat, and one of those newfangled hydrogen bombs couldn’t blow him out of it. Tony Awards in 1952 were announced without preliminary nominees, and it’s hard to imagine who could have been nominated against Phil Silvers. His only possible competition was Yul Brynner in The King and I, and under Tony rules Brynner wasn’t an above-the-title star so they weren’t in the same category. (Brynner won that year for outstanding “featured” — i.e., “supporting” — actor.) Bosley Crowther in the New York Times noted that, as he had been on Broadway, Phil Silvers was “ninety-nine one-hundredths” of the movie, and Silvers is practically a force of nature. The supporting cast includes some other burlesque veterans — Joey Faye, Herbie Faye (no relation), and Jack Albertson, still years away from his own stardom — but they are little more than Crowther’s other one-hundredth; Phil Silvers is the whole show.

(Rose Marie co-starred with Silvers on Broadway, and the show was almost as big a triumph for her, with four strong Johnny Mercer songs to leaven Silvers’s nonstop clowning. The movie was another story. In both her autobiography Hold the Roses and in Wait for Your Laugh, Jason Wise’s documentary about her career, she tells a story of being propositioned by the picture’s producer in front of the whole cast, and of her rebuffing him just as publicly. Her husband told her that her four songs in the show would be cut out of the movie, and he was right. Rose Marie doesn’t name the producer, but it’s pretty clear she’s talking about Albert Zugsmith. The story is not hard to believe.)

One misstep in the movie, I think, was not filming it before a live audience, or at least dubbing in a laugh track. Director Alfred E. Green inserts shots of a theater audience from time to time, and there’s applause on the soundtrack every now and then. But there’s no reaction to any of the comedy, much of which follows the Muppet Show principle that a joke that’s not good enough to use once may be bad enough to use six times. That kind of comedy needs the contagion of laughter, otherwise the jokes — bellowed at the top of the actors’ lungs, like verbal artillery barrages — tend to fall flat. For all that, though, and despite Rose Marie having been reduced to little more than a walk on, Top Banana is a valuable relic; it’s like finding a videotape of Weber and Fields or Smith and Dale in their prime.

And finally, there was one terrific bonus in Columbus this year. The DVD of Top Banana available from the Warner Archive, and even the version that pops up now and then on Turner Classic Movies, is missing a full 18 minutes, with several glaring holes where actors, sets, and costumes suddenly change in the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word. The Picture Show screened a complete 100-minute print struck in 1954. I can only imagine where they found it, but we all counted our blessings.

To be concluded…

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 – Day 2

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on June 26, 2022 by Jim LaneJuly 7, 2022

Day 2 of The Columbus Moving Picture Show began — after Chapters 4-6 of Adventures of Red Ryder, of course — with another happy holdover from Cinevent, one which dates back at least to 2001: the Festival of Charley Chase Shorts.

Charley Chase: cheerful, dapper, handsome, doggedly normal, even ordinary, yet constantly put-upon and buffeted by events not of his making; for nearly 20 years it was a winning screen persona for the man born Charles Joseph Parrott in 1893. By now Charley needs no introduction to Cinevent/Picture Show regulars, but there may be Cinedrome readers who are still unfamiliar with him. Unlike every other great silent clown — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, even Roscoe Arbuckle before his murder trials scuttled his career — Charley Chase never moved up to features, other than the occasional supporting role for friends, as in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933). But he made hundreds of one- and two-reel shorts between 1914 and 1940, hitting his stride in the 1920s for Hal Roach. When Roach himself began concentrating on features and moving away from shorts, he dumped Chase in 1936, whereupon Charley moved over to Columbia, where he both acted in shorts and directed them, sometimes under his real name (more about that later today). Maybe Chase felt temperamentally unsuited to features, or maybe he was just behind the curve and would have made the leap eventually. We’ll never know because he drank himself to death in 1940 at 46, and his life and work, once quite popular, went down the memory hole.

Fortunately, interest in Charley Chase has been on the upswing since the 1990s (witness the Cinevent tributes appearing in 2001 and thereafter), and it’s much easier to find him than in the first decades after his death. There’s a Web site, The World of Charley Chase, with a lot of good information, although it appears not to have been updated since 2019. And anyone wishing to sample Charley’s work will find plenty to choose from on Amazon and YouTube. On Amazon I particularly recommend the series Charley Chase: At Hal Roach: The Talkies from The Sprocket Vault and Kit Parker Films — three volumes so far, with a fourth coming in October.

In recent years the Cinevent emphasis has been on Chase’s silent shorts, and so it was this year at The Picture Show. There were three in all:

Innocent Husbands (1925)  Faithful husband Charley flies into a panic when a drunk woman from a party next door passes out in his apartment — and jealous wifey (Katherine Grant) is due home any minute.

Dog Shy (1926)  Charley, who has a serious phobia about dogs, tries to help a female friend from college escape from an arranged marriage to a pompous duke. His efforts are frustrated by the presence of her family’s enormous dog — also, curiously, named Duke.

Limousine Love (1928)  Already late for his wedding, Charley is delayed even further when a naked lady takes refuge in the back seat of his limo (don’t ask). A passerby, hearing Charley’s predicament, offers to help — he doesn’t know, and neither does Charley, that Charley’s nude passenger is his wife.

The day’s first feature was Ramrod (1947), introduced by James D’Arc. James, in addition to being a film historian, is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and the author of When Hollywood Came to Utah, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve ever visited or driven through the Beehive State, you know the beauty of its scenery — there’s much more to it than just the Great Salt Desert. Hollywood has indeed come there to work. You might be surprised to learn how many movies have been shot there, many of them drawn to the terrible, majestic desolation of Monument Valley.

But not all. Ramrod was one that passed on Monument Valley in favor of Zion National Park and the ghost town of Grafton just south of the park. Wikipedia even claims that Ramrod‘s producer Harry Sherman actually purchased Grafton to use as a filming location, but I was able to find no confirmation of this in James D’Arc’s book, so…well, Wikipedia, you know. Still, no denying that Sherman, “a westerner at heart” in James’s words, was taken with Utah in general and Grafton in particular. 

Like Pursued (1947) at last year’s Cinevent, Ramrod is a western with overtones of film noir. If anything, in Ramrod the overtones are even more pronounced; among them being the inclusion of a femme fatale played by Veronica Lake, then-wife of director Andre de Toth (this was their first project together). Check out the slogan on this poster about men being so easy; other posters were even more provocative: “They called it God’s Country…until the Devil put this woman there!” Both catchphrases aptly summarize Connie Dickason, Lake’s character — although, seeing as how the movie takes place sometime in the 1880s, I don’t recall her ever showing as much leg or décolletage as she does on this poster. In fact, I don’t think we saw so much as an ankle.

But this femme was plenty fatale, make no mistake. Ruthless, duplicitous and manipulative, she plays all the men around her against each other to make a go of her cattle empire: her ranch foreman, or “ramrod” (Joel McCrea); her decent weakling of a father (Charlie Ruggles); a good-bad-man drifter (Don DeFore); a rival rancher and former suitor (Preston Foster); the local sheriff (Donald Crisp); and various bystanders who become collateral damage in her drive to prevail. Her conniving is so over the top that at the film’s dénouement (which I will not spoil here), more than a few satisfied chuckles rippled through The Picture Show screening room. This may well be Veronica Lake’s best performance. Her director husband de Toth deserves credit, too, for effectively disguising the fact that at 5 ft. 1 in., she’s at least a foot or more shorter than all the men she uses, bullies and domineers.

Moving on, to after the lunch break…

In 1936 Paramount released a picture entitled Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, in which Gladys George played a prostitute who reforms for the sake of two orphans and starts a successful laundry business, only to have heartache beset her and the orphans as the children grow to adulthood, with (to paraphrase Thelma Ritter in All About Eve) everything but the bloodhounds snapping at their rear ends. It was a shameless six-hanky tearjerker and a big hit; Gladys George was nominated for an Academy Award. That was then. Now, Valiant Is the Word for Carrie is as utterly forgotten as any major Hollywood A-picture of the sound era. Gladys George lost her Oscar bid to Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, and she’s mainly remembered now as Miles Archer’s cheating wife in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the woman who says, “He used to be a big shot” about James Cagney at the end of The Roaring ’20s (1939).

If you think I’m building up to telling you that Valiant Is the Word for Carrie was screened at this year’s Picture Show, I’m not. I’m setting up one of the most exquisitely hilarious jokes in movie history, one that everyone understood at the time, but which nobody gets anymore. It so happens that the following year, the Three Stooges came out with one of their best-remembered shorts. It’s still very popular, but its most brilliant joke, which goes over the head of every Stooges fan today, is its title: Violent Is the Word for Curly (1937).

And how’s this for a coincidence: This classic Stooges short was directed by none other than our good friend Charley Chase, returning to the Picture Show screening room with only lunch and Ramrod between his last appearance and this. The academic robes in this shot are because Moe, Larry and Curly play gas station attendants who — never mind why — find themselves mistaken for three distinguished professors newly hired at a women’s college. The company of so many beautiful young co-eds is all it takes for the three of them to decide to go along with the mistake, and their introduction to the student body (if you’ll pardon the expression) leads to one of the Stooges’ most famous bits, one they performed live at personal appearances for years afterwards. This is the song “Swingin’ the Alphabet”, interpolated here by Charley, who learned it from his family maid. Stewart McKissick’s program notes tell us that the song itself was the work of the 19th century songwriter Septimus Winner (“Listen to the Mockingbird”, “Ten Little Indians”). Maybe so, but as done by the Stooges it definitely has a 1930s swingtime rollick to it. The whole short can be seen on YouTube, and here’s just the song — rather nicely colorized.

The title of Is Everybody Happy? (1943) was the trademarked catchphrase of bandleader Ted Lewis, who was a household name second only to Paul Whiteman in the 1920s, well before the advent of what we know as the Big Band Era, and would remain so well into the ’60s. He was an indifferent musician (his instrument was the clarinet) and a vocalist with a range of approximately one note, but his schmaltzy personality struck a chord with ballroom and radio audiences and he was a popular front man, especially since the band he fronted was so very good (indifferent clarinetist or no, he knew talent when he hired it, and his band was an early stop for such future greats as Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Muggsy Spanier and Jack Teagarden). 

Lewis’s lilting, wistful refrain between songs of “Is EVVVV’rybody HAPPP…pyyyy…?” was so instantly recognizable and widely imitated that it had already served as the title for his first film musical in 1929. That had been a bit of a train wreck and was completely forgotten by the time Columbia used the title 14 years later for this B-picture, an early specimen of what would come to be known as the jukebox musical. That “18 terrific tunes!” on this poster was no exaggeration; the songs, all easily sing-along-able chestnuts for 1943 audiences, included “Am I Blue?”, “Cuddle Up a Little Closer”, “St. Louis Blues”, “When My Baby Smiles at Me”, and (as the saying goes) many more. With a running time of only 74 min., the music never stopped for long. A good thing, too.

The last feature before dinner was the earliest of the whole weekend: Happiness (1917). It was, as Variety pointed out in its review on May 4 of that year, essentially a “poor little rich girl” picture, with Enid Bennett as a super-wealthy and super-shy heiress who gets a reputation for snobbery thanks to a snarky profile in a newspaper magazine supplement. When she goes away to college, eager to make friends, she finds that her bogus “reputation” precedes her and everybody shuns her — except for one decent fellow (Charles Gunn) working his way through college by taking in laundry. It was a diverting little drama, but the most remarkable thing about it is its basic premise: A perfectly nice person who wouldn’t harm anybody finds her life (almost) ruined by some nasty reporter for no better reason than to sell newspapers. That this plot device could be employed without even raising an eyebrow more than a hundred years ago suggests that contempt and mistrust for a dishonest, yellow-journalism news media isn’t as recent a phenomenon as we might think. 

After the dinner break we leapt forward 98 years, from the earliest movie at The Picture Show to the most recent. This was Bride of Finklestein (2015) — not only the most recent film of the weekend, but “younger” than anything ever shows at Cinevent during it’s 52-year run. But while it may have come into being only seven years ago, in content, style and spirit it’s much older — say, somewhere between 1935 and 1940.

Let me explain. Bride of Finklestein is one of the extant comedy shorts of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster. Biffle and Shooster, in turn, are the creations of Nick Santa Maria (Biffle, left), Will Ryan (Shooster, right), and their producer-director Michael Schlesinger (not pictured, but a veteran contributor to past Cinevents). Together they made a number of Biffle and Shooster shorts between 2013 and 2015, faithfully duplicating the black-and-white style of such classic comedy teams as Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Wheeler and Woolsey, with titles like It’s a Frame-Up!, Imitation of Wife, and Schmo Boat (that last one a musical in a pretty faithful approximation of Cinecolor). On the strength of just Bride of Finklestein, I can testify that Biffle and Shooster can hold their own among those classic teams, and are much funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey (but then, root canals are funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey). There are two Biffle and Shooster collections available that I know of: The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster can be streamed on Amazon Prime. There is also a DVD, The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster; which has everything on the streaming Adventures, plus 28 minutes of other odds and ends; the DVD can be obtained from Amazon (curiously, the DVD is a Kino Lorber release, but the KL Web site offers only the shorter Adventures). Sadly, what we have now of Biffle and Shooster is all we’ll ever get: Will (“Sam Shooster”) Ryan passed away in November 2021; The Picture Show’s screening of Bride of Finklestein, introduced by Michael Schlesinger, was dedicated to his memory.

Bride of Finklestein also served as a kind of lead-in to the next feature, which was introduced by Nick (“Benny Biffle”) Santa Maria. This was Hold That Ghost (1941), Abbott and Costello’s third starring feature, and one of their best. It started out as a B-comedy, Oh, Charlie, produced before their previous vehicle, Buck Privates, was released. When Buck Privates became Universal’s biggest hit in years and Universal finally realized what they had in Bud and Lou, Oh, Charlie was held back while they rushed the team into another service comedy, In the Navy. Meanwhile, Oh, Charlie was pumped up to A-picture status by adding musical numbers with the Andrews Sisters (who supported Bud and Lou in both service pictures) and (once again!) Ted Lewis. Retitled Hold That Ghost, it was released on August 30, the third of their four pictures for 1941.

Personally, I still say the team’s masterpiece is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); after that, my own favorite is The Time of Their Lives (’46), with Lou and Marjorie Reynolds as ghosts from the American Revolution haunting modern-day Bud. Hold That Ghost, which has Bud and Lou treasure-hunting in a supposedly haunted old tavern they’ve inherited from a dead gangster, is right up there with them, funny enough to make the tacked-on musical numbers worth sitting through. Funniest scene: a levitating candle that scares the wits out of Lou but refuses to budge when Bud is looking. Pleasant surprise: Joan Davis as a radio actress who specializes in screams; she’s a scream herself, as funny as Lou. 

Next to the 1930s pastiche of Bride of Finklestein, the most recent picture at The Picture Show this year was Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), a lumpy, slipshod caper comedy that had Robert Wagner as the naïve nephew of a Boston scrap-metal dealer who tries to save a mothballed Liberty Ship from the scrap heap, only to see it, himself, and his long-suffering fiancée (Dolores Hart) fall into the hands of a gang with big plans and small I.Q.s. The gang plans to use the ship as their getaway vehicle after knocking over a Boston bank disguised as Pilgrims during a Thanksgiving festival. It was an inoffensive time-waster, interesting mainly as the last film of TV comedy genius Ernie Kovacs; it was released barely three weeks before he wrapped his Corvair station wagon around a lamppost on Santa Monica Blvd., dying instantly. His performance, indeed, was one of the picture’s assets, as was that of Frank Gorshin as the (relatively speaking) “brains” of the gang.

Not long after Sail a Crooked Ship, Dolores Hart gave up acting and became a nun. Coincidence? Maybe.

Day 2 wrapped up with Glen or Glenda (1953), the notorious first film by the notorious Edward D. Wood Jr. This poster notwithstanding, Glen or Glenda was not entirely about transgenderism — or, as it was more commonly known at the time, a “sex-change operation”. To be sure, that was what producer George Weiss had in mind when he hired Wood to write and direct a quickie picture exploiting the case of Christine Jorgensen (née George), whose series of gender-reassignment surgeries between 1951 and 1953 had focused public awareness on the issue; Weiss wanted to cash in.

Shooting in four days, Wood gave Weiss what he asked for — sort of. In fact, Glen or Glenda divides its time between two cases, both recounted by a doctor to a police detective (Lyle Talbot) investigating the suicide of a man who, repeatedly arrested for wearing women’s clothes, couldn’t face going through the ordeal again. As the doctor describes the two cases, one is Glen/Glenda, a “transvestite” — a heterosexual man who finds it pleasurable and comfortable to wear women’s clothes — while the other is Alan/Anne, a “transsexual” — a person who feels mentally and emotionally female but is trapped in a male body. Whether the movie’s approach to the issue would pass muster with 21st-century gender theory is beside the point; what matters is that it was surprisingly enlightened for 1953 (there were some pretty mean jokes going around about Christine Jorgensen at the time), and it offered an earnest plea for compassion and understanding. Note I said “earnest”, not “eloquent”. The fact is that, whatever its intentions, Glen or Glenda comes up against the invincible ineptitude of Edward D. Wood Jr.

What can we say about Ed Wood? The kindest thing is that you have to be in a certain frame of mind to sit through one of his movies. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood tried to portray him (in the person of Johnny Depp) as a wide-eyed naif with an irresistible urge to be part of the transformative art of the twentieth century, moving pictures. Burton’s movie got good reviews, and won an Oscar for Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi (whom Wood befriended and exploited in Lugosi’s last drug-riddled years), but it sank like a rock at the box office, earning less than a third of its modest $18 million cost. My own feeling was that if you wanted to make a movie celebrating some unsung artist of the motion picture industry, there were about 875 directors you might go through before you got down to Ed Wood.

Nevertheless, any Ed Wood movie is certainly something to have seen, and Glen or Glenda is less mind-bogglingly inept than his later movies like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space — probably because he wasn’t yet the incoherent, falling-down drunk he would later become. Even so, as a writer he could barely put one sentence after another; Glen or Glenda‘s narrative is interrupted at intervals by Bela Lugosi sitting in a laboratory among skeletons, skulls and test tubes, babbling about God knows what. As a director he lacked any sense of pace, composition or atmosphere. And as an actor — Wood, himself a heterosexual cross-dresser, plays Glen/Glenda, billed as “Daniel Davis” — as an actor he was…well, any junior high drama club in the country would have been glad to have him.

As I said, something to have seen, and you can see it here on YouTube. And with that, we called it a day in Columbus. More to come!

To be continued…

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 — Day 1

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on June 18, 2022 by Jim LaneJuly 7, 2022

A feature of the last few Cinevents that The Picture Show wisely chose to continue this year is the 12-chapter serial, screening three chapters at the beginning of each of the convention’s four days. As in prior years, this year’s serial was from Republic — naturally enough, since Republic was, well, if not the Tiffany’s, at least the Zale’s of chapter-play production. And after the relatively exotic serials of the last few years — with heroes taking on a Japanese spy ring during World War II (The Masked Marvel, Cinevent 50), lost-world savages on a volcanic island above the Arctic Circle (Hawk of the Wilderness, C-51), and Teutonic saboteurs before America’s entry into the war (King of the Texas Rangers, C-52) — this one, for a refreshing change of pace, was a standard, good old-fashioned cowboy shoot-’em-up, Adventures of Red Ryder (1940). As anybody who ever read a comic book or the funny-pages in a newspaper between 1938 and 1964 can tell you, Red Ryder was the tall, square-jawed, white-hatted, red-haired hero of the Painted Valley Ranch in the Blanco Basin of the San Juan Mountains, noted for never killing the bad guys but simply shooting the guns out of their hands. His gal was Beth Wilder, his youthful Native American sidekick was Little Beaver, and his archenemy was the dastardly Ace Hanlon. Red made his debut in newspapers in 1938, then expanded to comic books in 1939, this Republic serial in 1940, radio in 1942, B-movie features in 1944, and even a couple of unsold pilots for TV series in the 1950s and ’60s.

In addition to being the avatar of clean living and upright law and order, Red Ryder was also a pioneer of tie-in merchandising. Millions who weren’t even born when the Red Ryder strip ended in 1964 are nevertheless aware, thanks to 1983’s A Christmas Story, of the Daisy Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle With a Compass in the Stock and This Thing Which Tells Time, first marketed in 1940 and — believe it or not! — still available from the Daisy Manufacturing Company of Rogers, Arkansas (not that exact model, now discontinued, but plenty of others).

But back to that 1940 Republic serial. The story was the old western trope about the crooked banker in cahoots with outlaws to terrorize local ranchers into selling their property dirt cheap so the banker can make a handsome profit by selling to the railroad that only he knows is coming through. Red was the son of one such rancher, swinging into action when his father is murdered after getting too close to discovering the banker’s plot.

The serial was directed by William Witney and John English (the same team responsible for Hawk of the Wilderness and King of the Texas Rangers), and Red was played by Don “Red” Barry. Neither Witney nor English thought Barry was right for the part, and Barry himself later admitted he was miscast — at 5 ft. 4, he was a full foot shorter than the lanky Red Ryder of the comics. But Republic president Herbert Yates insisted (he compared Barry to James Cagney), and that was that. Evidently, Barry suffered from a short-man pugnacity complex, because both directors came to detest him, as did most of the cast and crew — leading lady Vivian Coe, as Red’s girl (renamed Beth Andrews), remembered, “I don’t like saying negative things about the departed, but he wasn’t a very nice fellow,” and Barry himself, years later, admitted he had been “a brash, smart ass young punk.” Still, it must be said that Barry does okay in the part, playing Red Ryder as a bantam rooster rather than the tall-in-the-saddle type — though it does take some suspension of disbelief when Red goes into fistfights with baddies who have several inches and 20-30 pounds on him (Noah Beery Sr., the serial’s Ace Hanlon, was 6 ft. 1 in.)

Little Beaver was played by nine-year-old Tommy Cook, who is not only still with us at 91 (the last survivor of this or any other Republic serial), but was an honored guest in Columbus; here he is shown with Picture Show Chair Samantha Glasser in the Dealers Room. (And by the way, do you see what’s hanging on the easel under the poster for the serial? Yep, it’s a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. They raffled one off during the weekend — albeit with no compass or sundial in the stock — and I admit I was tempted for a second or two. But [1] I’d never have gotten it on the plane; and [2] even if I had it shipped to my home, what could I do with it then? I’d probably just shoot my eye out.)

My only regret of the weekend is that I didn’t get a chance to meet and chat with Mr. Cook; for one thing, I’d have liked to hear what he had to say about working with Red Barry. Somehow I even managed to miss his interview with Caroline Breder-Watts on Saturday morning. But The Picture Show’s Facebook page has a video excerpt of that interview in which Mr. Cook tells an amusing anecdote about doing a whisky commercial with Orson Welles; he (Mr. Cook) could easily pass for 25 years younger than he is. Click here.

The first feature of the weekend, Behind the News, was also from Republic, and also from 1940. Lloyd Nolan played a once-great reporter for a major newspaper in “State City” (probably a pseudonym for San Diego, Calif., since the plot later reveals it to be within driving distance of Calexico). Now jaded and cynical, he gets an annoying kick in the conscience when his latest padded expense account enrages his harried managing editor (reliable old Robert Armstrong). To get back at the reporter, the editor saddles him with an idealistic gee-whiz cub reporter straight out of journalism school (the prolific Frank Albertson, best remembered now as Sam “Hee-haw!” Wainwright in It’s a Wonderful Life). When the youngster’s gung-ho admiration for his past work shows Nolan up for the bitter, burned-out failure he has become, he arranges a series of humiliations that ruin Albertson’s standing at the paper. Then Albertson uncovers a case of an innocent Mexican-American being railroaded on a trumped-up murder charge, but nobody will believe him, so Nolan’s long-suffering girlfriend (the earnest, likable Doris Davenport) prods him into taking the boy’s part. It was a solid little newspaper melodrama, well-plotted and snappily directed by Joseph Santley. 

Behind the News was also the swan song of Doris Davenport after six years and nine pictures, four of them with no screen credit. At the beginning and end of those six years she did seem to be going places. Her first picture was in 1934, playing Eddie Cantor’s girlfriend in Kid Millions. Other bits followed, interspersed with fashion modeling to make ends meet. In 1938, under the name Doris Jordan, she tested for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and, according to Dave Domagala’s program notes, “was actually one of the finalists.” (Well, actually, “one of the semi-finalists” is  more like it. On November 18, 1938, David Selznick listed his Scarlett front-runners as Paulette Goddard, Doris Jordan, Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, and Loretta Young, adding that “Jordan is a complete amateur”. By December 12, Selznick was writing, “it’s narrowed down to Paulette, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett, and Vivien Leigh” — with Leigh having the inside track.) Doris Jordan/Davenport’s test for Scarlett impressed producer Samuel Goldwyn enough to get her cast in The Westerner (1940) opposite Gary Cooper for director William Wyler. Wyler wasn’t impressed (he wanted her part for his wife, Margaret Tallichet), but Goldwyn thought she had real star potential. After that came Behind the News — then nothing. Some sources say she simply got no further offers, though it seems likely that if nothing else, Republic at least could have found something for her to do. One dramatic story, attributed to David Ragan’s Who’s Who in Hollywood but unconfirmed anywhere else, claims that an auto accident after shooting The Westerner crushed her legs and forced her to use a cane for the rest of her days. Grain of salt on that one, I think; if that’s true, then how did she make Beyond the News? Whatever the reason, Doris Davenport lived on until 1980 but never made another picture.

Next came three silent Our Gang shorts from Hal Roach, The Champeen (1923) featuring Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Jackson, Roach’s first African-American child star, then Barnum & Ringling, Inc. and The Spanking Age (both 1928).

The last feature before the dinner break was a highlight of the whole weekend, at least as far as I was concerned: Love Among the Millionaires (1930) starring Clara Bow. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, and I’ll repeat it as often as I feel it’s necessary: There was never a more charming and delightful movie star than Clara Bow. As charming and as delightful, granted, but more so? None. Ever. 

That said, I must concede that if somebody asked me what was the big deal about Clara Bow, Love Among the Millionaires isn’t necessarily the first movie I’d point them to. (Where would I point them, you ask? Well…to Mantrap [1926], Wings and It [both ’27] — pretty much in that order.)

With Millionaires, the story sets Clara up as a diner waitress being romanced by the son of a railroad tycoon, then playing the low-class hussy to drive him away and spare him being disowned by his father. It was too familiar by half, as old as La Dame aux Camélias and as recent as Mary Pickford in My Best Girl (1927). Worse, it didn’t play to Clara’s strengths, as critics at the time were quick to point out. As Richard Barrios suggests in his insightful history A Song in the Dark, it’s almost as if Paramount were trying to turn Clara into Janet Gaynor — a wasted effort, you’d think, considering that she was already Clara Bow. (Richard, by the way, also wrote Love Among the Millionaires’ notes for The Picture Show program.)

Today, with hindsight, we know that Clara’s career was deep into twilight; her off-screen emotional problems were catching up, and while her supposed mike-fright didn’t show as much as later legend has it, the fun was going out of the work for her, and public scandals were belying the Janet Gaynor act. There was an unspoken sense that her career wasn’t on the right track; fan magazines were speculating on who would be “the next Clara Bow” — the implication being that the present one wouldn’t be on top much longer.

Still, Love Among the Millionaires was a hit — the true measure of Clara’s stardom, as with all stars past, present and future, was that she was expected and able to carry material like this. To be fair, she didn’t bear the burden alone. She got good support from 9-year-old Mitzi Green (shown here) as her brassy sister, Charles Sellon as their father, and Stanley Smith as Clara’s boyish sweetheart. Comic relief was provided by Stuart Erwin and Skeets Gallagher as two would-be suitors for Clara’s hand — although frankly, they come off more as a bickering couple than as romantic rivals.

I’ve always enjoyed Love Among the Millionaires, and I was happy for the chance to see it again in Columbus. It was Clara’s only real musical — her ability to sell a song had surprised everyone, not least herself, in Paramount on Parade earlier in 1930 — and while her untrained voice was no threat to Jeanette MacDonald, she could carry a tune. The L. Wolfe Gilbert/Abel Baer songs may not be classics, but they’re catchy enough, and she puts them across — singing live on the set, mind you — with confidence and infectious gusto. As Richard Barrios says in his program notes, if musicals hadn’t fallen out of favor and her own demons hadn’t overwhelmed her, Clara might have reinvented herself for the sound era. But by the time musicals came back in style, she was out of the biz for good.

 

After dinner came the first of the weekend’s Laurel and Hardy shorts, Our Wife (1931). Stan and Ollie try to pull off an elopement, spiriting Oliver’s intended Dulcy (Babe London) out from under the disapproving nose of her daddy James Finlayson. Ollie entrusts Stan with the task of finding a getaway car, and the disasters pile up from there. When the wedding party finally arrives before the justice of the peace, he turns out to be Ben Turpin — who, thanks to his famously crossed eyes, marries Dulcy to the wrong guy.

Next it was Flesh and Blood (1922), with Lon Chaney as a man unjustly convicted and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. After 15 years in the joint, he makes an escape to see his wife and daughter, and to find the ex-law-partner who framed him (Ralph Lewis) and force a confession that will clear his name. He is aided in this by a friend in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Noah Beery again, welcome as ever but a little hard to swallow as a Chinese tong lord). Disguised as a wheelchair-bound invalid to elude police, he learns that his wife has died and his daughter, now a beautiful young woman (Edith Roberts), is working in a skid row mission. She believes her father is dead, so he doesn’t disabuse her, but he keeps a watchful eye on her as he plots his revenge. Things get complicated when he learns that his daughter is in love with and engaged to marry the son of his old nemesis (Jack Mulhall).

Lon Chaney is widely regarded today as a horror movie actor, mainly on the strength of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (’25). In fact, in most of his pictures, including those two, lugubrious melodrama was his actual stock in trade. (It took the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of Phantom to re-assert the fact that Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel is a romantic melodrama, not a horror story.) Flesh and Blood is a good specimen of that uniquely Lon Chaney brand; it echoed elements in his earlier movies even as it foreshadowed elements of pictures he had yet to make.

There’s some question as to whether the picture survives intact. IMDb gives the running time as 74 min.; in the Exhibitor’s Herald of August 26, 1922 it’s listed at five reels, about the same (in the silent days a picture’s length was expressed in reels, not minutes, due to variations in projector speeds; one reel was roughly 15 minutes). The Picture Show’s print ran 61 min., which was the length of the trimmed-down version offered for rent by Eastman House’s Kodascope Library in the 1920s and ’30s. Quite a few silent movies appear to have survived only in these Kodascope versions (Eastman House having been pioneers in film preservation), and this seems to be one of them. In any case, there are no gaping holes in the picture as it stands; the gang at Eastman Kodak were pretty careful in editing films down for home use, for which we can be grateful.

Flesh and Blood is also noteworthy as an early feature by actor-turned-producer-turned director Irving Cummings; on this one he served in the last two capacities. Cummings would go on to be a hard-working and reliable director, especially at 20th Century Fox. He specialized in musicals, turning out some of the best examples starring Shirley Temple (Curly Top, Poor Little Rich Girl, Little Miss Broadway), Alice Faye (Hollywood Cavalcade, Lillian Russell, That Night in Rio) and Betty Grable (Down Argentine Way, Springtime in the Rockies, The Dolly Sisters), as well as In Old Arizona (taking over for the injured Raoul Walsh) and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.

Marry Me Again (1953) was lightweight, a bit dated, but pretty dang funny for all that. It starred Robert Cummings and Marie Wilson, both movie veterans just then getting a taste of television success. Wilson had just transferred her hit radio show My Friend Irma to TV (after two movies, in 1949 and ’50) and was America’s favorite lovably ditzy blonde. Cummings was halfway through his first sitcom, the one-season My Hero; his biggest TV success, Love That Bob, was still two years away (which explains why Marie Wilson gets top billing on this poster).

In Marry Me Again the two play a couple whose wedding is interrupted just short of “I now pronounce you…” when Cummings gets word that he’s been called up for the Korean War. So the wedding goes on a back burner while he jets off to do his bit as a fighter pilot. He comes home a war hero, eager to pick up where he and Wilson left off at the altar. At his welcome-home party, he declares that he intends to be the breadwinner in the family, with his wife staying home where women belong (that sort of thing played better in 1953 than it does now). The problem is, unbeknownst to him, his bride-to-be has inherited a million bucks while he was away. She tries to keep it secret, but the beans get spilled before the wedding. She’s rich, he can’t find a job, so the wedding is off until things get back the way God intended.

Like I say, a bit dated. Still, it was very funny, once you tune in to the fact that the groom-to-be isn’t supposed to be an obnoxious patriarchal jerk. Wilson and Cummings’s comedy chops are considerable, and so are those of writer/director Frank Tashlin. Tashlin was a successful director of cartoon shorts at Warner Bros. who managed the unique feat of transitioning into equal success directing live-action comedies (Son of Paleface, Hollywood or Bust, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?). Tashlin never lost that Looney Tunes wackiness, and both his cartoons and his movies profited from it.

 

The first day wrapped up with a diverting low-camp thriller from Monogram, Invisible Ghost (1941). Bela Lugosi played an upstanding citizen living on his country estate with his daughter (Polly Ann Young) and various servants. His one peculiarity is an obsession with the wife who deserted him years ago; now every year on their anniversary he has dinner with her, requiring the butler (Clarence Muse) to serve her empty chair, and talking to her as if she is really there. What he doesn’t know is she is there, wandering the grounds of the estate, brain-damaged, for reasons too complicated to explain. He sees her every once in a while, and when he does he goes into a murderous trance and strangles the first person he sees. His killings have all gone unsolved, and even he doesn’t remember them, but when he murders his maid, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend of his daughter’s fiancé (John McGuire), the fiancé is convicted and executed for the crime. Then the fiancé’s twin (McGuire again) shows up from South America to investigate his brother’s death.

It’s all a crock, but somehow director Joseph H. Lewis manages to make something out of this sow’s ear of a script; he draws straight-faced performances from everyone; he (aided by cinematographers Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould) enhances the modest sets with atmospheric and expressive (even expressionist) lighting; and he delivers some surprisingly effective chills along the way. Invisible Ghost, all 63 min. of it, is available here on YouTube, if you’re curious. Nine years after giving this Monogram potboiler what conviction it has, Lewis would go on to direct the noir cult classic Gun Crazy (1950).

To be continued…

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 — Prelude

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on June 11, 2022 by Jim LaneJune 20, 2022

I’m back from Columbus, where Memorial Day Weekend was always Cinevent Weekend until 2019, when Cinevent Chair Michael Haynes announced that Cinevent 52 in 2020 would be the last — but that the tradition of a Memorial Day classic movie convention in Ohio’s capital would continue under a new name (to be determined) and new management (albeit with many familiar faces performing the same volunteer services as before).

Then, like so much else intended for 2020, Cinevent 52 didn’t happen — until Halloween Weekend 2021, 17 months late. By then, the TBD name for Cinevent’s successor had been chosen, The Columbus Moving Picture Show, and this above is their new logo. You’ll find it here on their Web site, and if you’re on Facebook (who isn’t?), on their FB page as well. You can also follow them on Twitter and Instagram if you’re of a mind.

Last October brought the final installment of Cinevent, presented in conjunction with the fledgling Columbus Moving Picture Show. Cinevent’s Michael Haynes passed the torch to Samantha Glasser (right), who stepped up from Dealers Coordinator to Chair, overseeing the activities of a cadre of dedicated Cinevent volunteers, who elected (unanimously, as far as I could tell) to continue under the new banner.

So for Memorial Day Weekend 2022, and moving forward, it’s The Columbus Moving Picture Show from now on. (Michael Haynes was there, however, as a dealer, seeking new homes for the extensive — nay, mind-boggling — collections of books, films and videos of his late father Steven, one of Cinevent’s original founders. I suspect Michael will be back next year too; he still has plenty of things to offer for sale.)

One thing more before I embark on my coverage of The Columbus Moving Picture Show 1; that is, to find a useful shorthand term to refer to the four-day event, whose full name, for all its stateliness and retro-nostalgic charm, can be a little cumbersome if used too frequently. In covering Cinevent 52 last October, I often referred to “CMPS”, but I found that to be a bit unsatisfactory; to me it sounded like the acronym of a non-governmental organization, or some disease requiring a rolling oxygen tank. Instead, in present and future posts, once the full name is established, I’ll just shorten it to “The Picture Show”; please take it as given that the location is Columbus and the Pictures are Moving.

Picture Show Eve at the Wexner

This year marked the return of a night-before tradition at Cinevent/The Picture Show: A double-feature screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University campus, in conjunction with the weekend’s events downtown. The theme for this year’s Wednesday evening was “Pre-Code at 20th Century Fox”.

Ahem. Did you catch the glaring blooper in that theme? That’s right: There’s no such thing as Pre-Code 20th Century Fox; 20th Century Fox didn’t exist during the Pre-Code Era, which ended a year before Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures merged with (read “gobbled up”) the moribund Fox Film Corporation. The theme should properly have been “Pre-Code at Fox”, and the folks at the Wexner Center should have known as much. (Then again, maybe they did. Maybe they were afraid they’d incur the wrath of angry leftists unable to grasp that the Fox Film Corp. — which ceased to exist in 1935 — has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel — which didn’t exist until 1996. That seems to be the motivation for the Disney Corporation, once they in turn gobbled up 20th Century Fox, changing the studio’s name back to 20th Century Pictures — which was a pity, because it banished the name of William Fox from the movie industry he did so much to create.)

Well, whether the Wexner Center admitted it or not, Pre-Code at Fox is what we got, starting with Me and My Gal (1932, not to be confused with For Me and My Gal, the Judy Garland/Gene Kelly MGM musical of ten years later). This one was an urban melo-dramedy directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett. The story wasn’t much. Tracy played Danny Dolan, a happy-go-lucky waterfront cop who takes a shine to Helen (Bennett), a waitress in a greasy spoon on his beat. Meanwhile, her sister Kate (Marion Burns), though married to an adoring nice-guy dork, can’t resist her gangster ex-boyfriend Duke (George Walsh), who has her wrapped around (phallic symbol alert!) his little finger. While hubby is away in the merchant marine, Duke breaks out of prison and Kate hides him in the attic of the apartment she shares with her father-in-law, who is mute and wheelchair-bound from a stroke.

Got that? Now you can forget it, because it’s all beside the point. Marion Burns was a bland presence whose career would be pretty much over in another three years, and no wonder; she can’t even carry a subplot. On the other hand, it is nice to see George Walsh (Raoul’s younger brother) in a substantial role; his career never recovered from getting canned from the silent Ben-Hur in 1924 before even walking onto the chaotic set (see here for details about George’s short-circuited career). Still, the real fun of Me and My Gal is the wise-crackling courtship between Tracy’s Danny and Bennett’s Helen. In a couple of decades, they would be the middle-aged, staid, almost stodgy Bankses in Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951), but what a difference 18 years makes: Here they are sassy, sexy, and full of piss and vinegar, sparring jauntily with slangy dialogue at a lively pace set by director Walsh. The image on the poster here is, for once, taken directly from the movie, as the two of them snuggle cozily on her living-room sofa. Danny tells Helen about a movie he saw last night, “Strange Inner Tube or something like that” — and suddenly the scene segues into a witty parody of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, the movie of which was just then in theaters. The scene is not only an amusing send-up, but also a clever moment of character exposition:

Helen: “I saw that. That’s the one where the actors say one thing, and then a minute later say out loud what they really think.”

Danny: “Yeah. Y’know, you remind me an awful lot of the leadin’ lady — good lookin’ and a swell figure.” (Voice-over: “That oughta hold you for a while, baby.”)

Helen: “Say, come to think of it, you remind me of the leading man — so big and strong.” (“Probably won’t be able to get into that derby now.”)

Danny: “Gee, what a squawk your old man’d put up if he come in and found us like this, huh?” (“If he does it’s every man for himself.”)

Helen: “Well, wouldn’t be anything to squawk about.” (“Not much! If he walked in here and saw me like this they’d have to put you under ether to extract his foot, that’s all.”)

. . .

Danny: “Y’know, I feel as though I’ve known you a long, long time.” (“I think I better slip this dame a little kiss before the old man gets here.”)

Helen: (“Oh! He kissed me. I’m so thrilled. But I’ll pretend I’m mad.”) “How dare you!”

That’s just a sample of the banter. The picture has other things going for it besides two stars in the peppery bloom of youth: reliable old J. Farrell MacDonald as Helen and Kate’s father; Henry B. Walthall, D.W. Griffith’s first leading man, as Kate’s disabled father-in-law, still conveying profound emotion without uttering a sound; Raoul Walsh’s feel for the unpretentiousness of working-class life. (On the other hand, there’s Bert Hanlon as a drunken fisherman hanging out in Helen’s diner, quickly wearing out his welcome with her — and even more quickly with us.)

Then — getting back to the movie’s assets — there’s this fellow here. He plays Al, Danny Dolan’s partner/sidekick, a good fellow but a little slow on the uptake, very much in Danny’s shadow. I spent the whole picture trying to figure out where I’d seen this guy before. Then, during the intermission before the next movie, it hit me. It wasn’t where I’d seen him before, but who he reminded me of: John Candy. He had the same look, the same voice, the same physical and vocal mannerisms. It was remarkable, even a little eerie.

Then again, delving further, I found out that I had seen him before, in a lot of famous movies, usually in small roles, often uncredited: ‘G’ Men (1935); The Petrified Forest (’36); Angels with Dirty Faces (’38); Union Pacific and Rose of Washington Square (both ’39); The Grapes of Wrath, Castle on the Hudson and Christmas in July (all ’40).

His name was Adrian Morris, scion of a distinguished showbiz family; his father was the William Morris (of the William Morris Agency), his older brother was the actor Chester Morris. In his 10-year career, he racked up 79 screen appearances — 15 in 1939 and 14 in 1940 alone. Here he is (at right, below) in one of his most instantly memorable bits, in Gone With the Wind as the sidewalk carpetbagger in postwar Atlanta, promising Freedmen 40 acres and a mule (“…because we’re your friends. And you’re gonna be voters. And you’re gonna vote the way your friends vote…”). He’s on screen for only 13 seconds of a four-hour movie, but everybody remembers him.

Still ahead for Adrian Morris were Penny Serenade, Blood and Sand, The Big Store and Belle Starr (all ’41). He might have continued in that vein for decades and hundreds more titles, but a cerebral hemorrhage carried him off in November 1941 at the obscenely young age of 34.

If you care to check out Me and My Gal — and I recommend it — it’s available to rent or buy on Amazon. Or you can watch it for free on YouTube (click on Settings to turn off the intrusive Portuguese subtitles). As The New Yorker’s blogger Richard Brody says, the point of Me and My Gal isn’t the drama; the point is the spice. 

The evening’s other feature, alas, isn’t so readily available. This was The Warrior’s Husband (1933), a title that sounded more of an oxymoron at the time than it does now. It’s too bad it’s not easy to get to see, because it is hands-down one of the great what-the-hell-is-this??? movies of the 1930s. The Wexner Center presented it in a sparkling brand-new 4K digital transfer, so there may be hope for a DVD or streaming option sometime in the future. If it does happen, you really want to take a gander at this thing.

The Warrior’s Husband began as a 1924 play by pharmaceutical executive and amateur playwright Julian F. Thompson. It opened and closed on May 6, 1924; even in those days of shorter Broadway runs, one performance counted as an unmistakable flop. A 1932 revival fared better, running a more respectable two months. This production showcased a newcomer named Katharine Hepburn as Antiope, sister to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The attention earned her a trip to Hollywood for her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement with John Barrymore.

Later that year, when Fox purchased the movie rights to the play, Hepburn was otherwise engaged, so her role went to Fox’s new contract discovery Elissa Landi. And no kidding, in the finished film Landi looks like nothing so much as — wait for it — Katharine Hepburn. This was understandable, since Hepburn was the current Big Thing, and Fox had plans to make Landi the next Big Thing. She had already made an impression on loan to Paramount and Cecil B. DeMille for The Sign of the Cross. Her timorous Christian damsel in that Roman spectacle pales beside her swaggering pagan Antiope; if The Warrior’s Husband were as widely available as The Sign of the Cross, this might be the picture she’s best remembered for today. Here are dueling Antiopes, Landi’s from the movie beside Hepburn’s from the stage; it’s not easy to tell them apart.

The conceit of Thompson’s play, and the screenplay that Sonya Levien, Ralph Spence and director Walter Lang made of it, was that in the land of the Amazons, women are the warriors and breadwinners while a man’s place is in the home, barefoot and — well, not pregnant, obviously, but confined to knitting, cooking, and running the house. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules in her capital city of Pontus by virtue of the power vested in the Sacred Girdle of Diana. There’s a subversive legend about a mythical race called “Greeks” where the gender roles are shockingly reversed, men in charge and women subservient, but this is widely dismissed as an old husbands’ tale to frighten girls. Then two actual Greeks show up at Hippolyta’s court, the handsome soldier Theseus (David Manners) and the poet Homer (Lionel Belmore), followed by Hercules (Stanley “Tiny” Sanford). Despite his terror of the mighty Amazons, Hercules is determined to fulfill the ninth of his twelve labors — to steal the Girdle of Diana from Hippolyta. (Quasi-historical note: In the ancient myth, Hercules kills Hippolyta to get it, but that detail is happily fudged here.) This not only removes the Amazons’ invincibility in battle, it makes them vulnerable to the masculine charms of the handsome Greek soldiers under Theseus’s command — and especially Antiope vis-à-vis Theseus himself.

It also gives Hippolyta’s spouse Sapiens (Ernest Truex) ideas above his station. Sapiens (or “Sap”) shares with Theseus the “warrior’s husband” designation of the title, and his newfound assertiveness makes him an ancient advocate of men’s liberation (I guess you’d call him an early “masculist”).

If you wanted to find an actor to make Marjorie Rambeau, Elissa Landi, and every other woman on the Fox lot look macho, you could hardly do better than Ernest Truex; his spit-curl hair and ringleted beard complete The Warrior’s Husband‘s plunge into deep “woo-woo” territory.

The picture has some pretty spectacular production values — massive sets, elaborate clashes of Amazons and Greeks that are half battle, half orgy, and a convincing simulation of a cast of thousands. This, mind you, at a time when Fox was reeling from years of financial losses and ripe for takeover (even as The Warrior’s Husband was hitting screens, there were rumors that Warner Bros. was about to buy the studio up; in time, of course, it would be 20th Century that did the deed). At the same time, there’s a subversive, transgressive approach to gender roles that’s pretty startling for a movie from the depths of the Great Depression. True, in the end the Amazons all yield to the invading Greek men and Theseus carries Antiope off to marriage with her enthusiastic consent, so things resolve themselves in a manner quite comfortable to mainstream audiences of 1933. But for much of its 75 minutes, The Warrior’s Husband pokes wicked fun at those gender-role conventions, as if to say, “How would you like it if…”

As the lights came up in the Wexner Center, a gentleman sitting near me turned to David Drazin (one of The Picture Show’s silent-movie accompanists) in the row behind us and said, “Well, that was just about the queerest movie I’ve ever seen.” This prompted a question in my mind, which I kept to myself: In what sense? Almost immediately, I had my answer: Take your pick. I kept that to myself too.

So much for The Picture Show’s night-before appetizer, appetizingly served by the Wexner Center. The main event would begin the next day.

To be continued…

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A “Christmas Wish” Returns

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on December 18, 2021 by Jim LaneDecember 18, 2021

 

It’s that time of year again, and I depart once more from my focus on Golden Age Hollywood to share my story “The Sensible Christmas Wish”, first published here in 2016 about this time. That first year’s introduction can be found by clicking here if you’re interested in knowing what I said then — or, if you’d rather, just click on the title and you’ll be taken directly to the story, which came to me from a wise and wonderful older person I once knew. As ever, I hope it brings you some of the magic and joy of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

Happy Holidays!

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The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 4

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on December 17, 2021 by Jim LaneFebruary 2, 2022

Day 4 of Cinevent 52 landed on October 31, Halloween itself. In keeping with the spirit of the day, the weekend’s Halloween theme made one final appearance in the form of a kinescope (film transcription of a live TV broadcast) excerpt from The Red Skelton Show of June 17, 1954. The 20-minute sketch — titled “Dial ‘B’ for Brush”, a reference to Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder, then in release — offered Red’s dimwit character Clem Kadiddlehopper as a door-to-door brush salesman with just the kind of empty brain the local mad scientist is looking for to complete his latest sinister experiment. Guests on the episode, shown here with Red/Clem, were (left to right) TV horror-movie host and “glamour ghoul” Vampira (née Maila Elizabeth Niemi), Lon Chaney Jr., and the one and only Bela Lugosi. It was primitive fun; as would often be the case with Skelton’s long-running program, the flubs, mishaps, accidents and ad-libs were funnier than the script.

 

 

Besides the nod to Halloween, the sketch also served as an intro to Public Pigeon No. 1 (1957), Skelton’s last starring movie (his TV show would last until 1970, getting cancelled while still in the top ten, and he would make TV and big-screen guest shots until 1981). Even this had a TV origin, being a feature-length, Technicolor expansion of a comic episode of the live drama series Climax!, which Red had done in 1955. In both, he played a likable dope who gets duped by some con-men on a phony uranium stock deal (uranium was a popular plot device in those early days of the Atomic Age). When he winds up taking the fall for their swindle and going to prison, some G-men, knowing he’s only the patsy, arrange for him to break prison so he can lead them to the real crooks. The picture was okay, and Red was as good as ever (his prime was a long one) — but Public Pigeon No. 1 was, unfortunately, a product of RKO Radio Pictures in its last agonizing stage of being driven off a cliff and into the ground by Howard Hughes. It has the usual signs of cutting corners that can be seen in so many RKO pictures of the mid-’50s: the flimsy sets slapped together with a single coat of cheap paint, the lack of extras in the background (New York appears to have a population of about 45), the bare-bones soundtrack. Red, director Norman Z. McLeod, and the supporting cast (Vivian Blaine, Janet Blair, Jay C. Flippen, Allyn Joslyn, etc.) soldier gamely on, but there’s an unmistakable aura of sadness to the movie, like the last struggling store in a shopping mall slated for demolition. (Is that merely hindsight? Maybe so; at the time few people suspected that by the end of 1957 the studio would be sold and renamed Desilu.) Anyhow, pleasant as it is, Public Pigeon No. 1 is a definite step down from Red’s high-flying days at MGM.

The Mark of Zorro (1920) is, like Frankenstein, another one of those needs-no-introduction movies. It was the first of Douglas Fairbanks’s costume swashbucklers; his movies made before then are best described as “athletic comedies”, a genre of which he was, and would remain, the chief practitioner (with honorable mention, perhaps, to Buster Keaton — and, long decades later, Jackie Chan). It was also the first of three signature masterpieces he turned out between 1920 and ’25. The next would be Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood in 1922 (he added his name to the title to keep some fly-by-night ripoff from siphoning off his audience), followed by The Thief of Bagdad in 1924. In 1930, if you had asked moviegoers to name a Fairbanks picture, odds are they would have mentioned one of those, or even all three, before getting around to The Three Musketeers (’21), The Black Pirate (’26) or The Iron Mask (’28). 

When Douglas Fairbanks died in 1939, his reputation as a star rested firmly on those three pictures: they seemed to be his lasting legacy, and they all hold up quite well today. By 1940 all three would be remade; as each remake loomed, the Hollywood buzz was that it was a fool’s errand to take on Doug’s classic, doomed to suffer by comparison. That’s what the proverbial “they” said about all three remakes — The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone; The Mark of Zorro (’40) with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rathbone again; and The Thief of Bagdad (also ’40) with Sabu, Conrad Veidt and June Duprez. And yet each time, the remake not only stood up to Doug’s original, it absolutely blew it out of the water; Doug’s version would forever be overshadowed and made to look like just a primitive, halfway-decent first cut. Few silent stars have suffered that kind of comedown.

Tracey Goessel’s biography The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks provides an excellent corrective to this undeserved eclipse, reminding us of how he bestrode popular culture at the height of his career. Zorro is a case in point. Johnston McCulley may have created the character, but it was Fairbanks’s movie that added the detail of carving a “Z” with his sword (hence the title change, The Mark of Zorro). And Fairbanks dressed him in black. True, this poster suggests his shirt was dark blue and the sash and bandana were red, but they photographed black, and black-clad Zorro would remain. Without Douglas Fairbanks, Zorro would be as forgotten today as any of the pulp heroes of his day whose names no one living recalls. (Have you ever read Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano? I tried years ago; it’s awful.) We’d never have had the Tyrone Power remake, or the definitive 1950s Zorro of Guy Williams, or Frank Langella’s 1974 TV movie, or George Hamilton’s spoof Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981). (We wouldn’t have had those CGI-infested reboots with Antonio Banderas either, but the less said about those turkeys the better.) The Fairbanks/McCulley Zorro (nurturing the seed planted by Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel) also inspired generations of crime-fighting heroes (both human and super) hiding behind ineffectual, even foppish alter egos. Directly inspired, in the case of Bob Kane, creator of Batman: In Kane’s original story, young Bruce Wayne and his parents are returning from seeing The Mark of Zorro the night Bruce’s parents are killed, and the adult Bruce adopts Zorro-esque attire when he becomes “the Bat-Man”.

One last thing we can thank The Mark of Zorro for: In 1925 Fairbanks made Don Q Son of Zorro, the no-kidding, first-ever movie sequel. But let’s not be too hard on Doug; he didn’t live to see what a monster he created with that little innovation.

After the lunch break we got Chapters 10-12 of King of the Texas Rangers, with clean living triumphant and all villains getting their just deserts. Then came Dynamite Dan (1924), one of several pictures in which a Poverty Row indie producer named Anthony J. Xydias tried in vain to make a star out of one Kenneth MacDonald. I regret to say that nothing in Eric Grayson’s program notes made Dynamite Dan sound appealing, not even the prospect of an early performance by Boris Karloff (as “Tony Garcia”!), so I spent its 61-minute running time browsing the Dealers Room. However — again, if you’re curious — Dynamite Dan can be seen here on YouTube. Let me know if I missed anything.

The last movie of the day — of the whole weekend, and of Cinevent’s 52-year history — was On the Spot (1940), a likeable little B-murder mystery/comedy from Monogram Pictures starring Frankie Darro and Mantan Moreland. Darro and Moreland made a number of these pictures, playing co-workers who are forced to become amateur detectives to solve a murder or two at their workplace. This time they’re working in a small-town drugstore — Darro as a soda jerk, Moreland as the janitor — when a notorious gangster, riddled with bullets, stumbles in, places a call in their phone booth, and falls over dead before he can say much. It turns out he was on the run after knocking over a bank for $300,000, and everybody — reporters, lawmen, and the gangster’s cronies — thinks he told Darro and Moreland where he stashed the loot. This one was out of circulation for years, probably considered lost if anybody ever gave it any thought, but resurfaced “a few years back” (per Dave Domagala’s program notes). It’s also available on YouTube, and worth spending an hour or so to watch; Darro and Moreland make a good team, and the story is actually pretty well-plotted.

And that was that. Cinevent 52 was history, and so was Cinevent. Gone but not forgotten — and, in a real sense, not even gone. The Columbus Moving Picture Show takes it from here, so if you’ve grown accustomed to Cinevent (like me), or always meant to check it out, the CMPS is for you. Here are links to their Web site, their podcast, and their Facebook page. The schedule for May 26-29, 2022 is already taking shape, so hop on over, get on their mailing list, and I’ll look forward to seeing you in Columbus in five months. Be sure to say hi.

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The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 3

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on December 11, 2021 by Jim LaneJune 15, 2022

Apologies for the delay in getting to Day 3. This year is a unique situation: For the first and only time, my coverage of Cinevent has conflicted with the Thanksgiving Holiday Season. What with taking down Halloween decorations, preparing for (and eating) the Big Feast, and beginning decking the halls with Yuletide trimmings, Cinevent just got elbowed aside. This will of course not be an issue when The Columbus Moving Picture Show (CMPS) takes over next Memorial Day. For now, where was I? Oh yeah…

Saturday morning at Cinevent, of course, is Cartoon Time. This year, animation curator Stewart McKissick took advantage of the scheduling anomaly to establish a Halloween theme for the program; most of the cartoons had at least a tenuous connection to something eerie, ghostly, creepy or monstrous; all that was missing was the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia. Some highlights (I include YouTube links where available):

One of my favorites this year was the first one, I Heard (1933), with Betty Boop (any Betty Boop is likely to be one of my favorites). The Halloween connection was a baseball game among ghosts at the bottom of a coal mine (the “Never Mine”) in the last minute. For the rest, it was Betty in her sex-kitten prime, with the patented Fleischer surrealist funk, set to a jazz score provided by the unjustly forgotten Don Redman and His Orchestra. I couldn’t make room for an I Heard image in this collage, so let’s move on now to the others.

Soda Squirt (1933) (top row left) had Ub Iwerks’s Flip the Frog welcoming a succession of movie stars to the Hollywood-premiere-style grand opening of his new soda fountain. These celebrity-caricature cartoons are a sub-genre in their own right (I’m always a sucker for them myself); maybe one of these years (assuming CMPS retains the Saturday animation program) Stewart will schedule a whole program just of these. He’d have plenty to choose from.

In Pluto’s Judgement Day (1935) (top row right), Mickey’s dog’s penchant for tormenting cats comes back to bite him (if you’ll pardon the expression) when he dreams himself into Kitty Hell, where he is put on trial for crimes against the feline species.

Like Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (see below), Rocket to Mars (1946) (second row left) was Halloween-by-way-of-science-fiction, with Olive Oyl accidentally launching Popeye and herself into outer space, where they have a close encounter with a Bluto-like alien tyrant bent on interplanetary conquest. Curiously enough, this one was directed by Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, who created the memorable images in the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence mentioned above.

Frankenstein’s Cat (1942) (second row right) began life as one of producer Paul Terry’s Super Mouse cartoon — but very early in the series’ life, Terry got wind of a Supermouse comic-book, so to prevent confusion (and to avoid free publicity for somebody else’s product) he changed the name to Mighty Mouse. Most extant prints (including the one Cinevent saw and the one at the YouTube link) are from TV prints where “Super” is overdubbed with “Mighty”. Having originated as a Super Mouse, this one is a straight narrative, rather than one of the mini-operas the Mighty Mouse cartoons would later become. Super/Mighty is differently proportioned, too, with a bigger chest and scrawnier limbs than the character we all remember singing, “He-e-e-e-e-e-re I come to save the da-a-a-a-a-a-ay!”

The program culminated in a triple-peak of great pictures from Chuck Jones and Warner Bros., one Looney Toon and two Merrie Melodies. First was Hair-Raising Hare (1946) (third row right), featuring the first appearance of that hulking orange monster who remained unnamed on screen but was later referred to as either Rudolph or Gossamer (“Gossamer”??? I guess that’s like calling a seven-foot basketball player “Stubby”).

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) (bottom row right), besides being Halloween-by-way-of-science-fiction like Rocket to Mars, is simply one of the all-time great cartoons; Stewart could screen it every year until the print disintegrated and I wouldn’t squawk. Like Hair-Raising Hare, there’s no YouTube link for this gem; you’ll just have to spring for Looney Toons Golden Collection (the first volume, hence no number) to get this and a ton of other greats. However, YouTube does have the cartoon with an amusing commentary by two gents (heretofore unknown to me) named Trevor Thompson and Sean McBee. You can access that here.

The only cartoon in this collage that gets two images (bottom left) was (1) the final one on the program and (2) one of my all-time favorites: Claws for Alarm (1954). Motoring through the Southwest, Porky and Sylvester stop for the night in a desert ghost town where Porky, not noticing the lack of inhabitants, blithely signs the cobwebby register at the hotel. The town is inhabited after all, but not by ghosts — instead, the locals are mice posing as ghosts to try to scare off the interlopers. It works on Sylvester, but Porky remains oblivious and refuses to leave. The images here show Sylvester shivering in the night (below), and (above) the departure next morning with Porky singing his hilarious broken-record rendition of “Home on the Range” (you’ll have to see it to get the joke). This one is available whole on YouTube, albeit with — I kid you not — Greek subtitles. But those are easy enough to disregard, so click on over and enjoy. (And by the way, if you’ve ever wondered what “Sylvester” looks like in Greek, it’s “ΣΙλβεστερ”. Never let it be said that Cinedrome neglects a classical education.)

After the animation program, the Saturday kiddie matinee vibe continued, as it has most years — this time with a trio of silent Our Gang shorts from Hal Roach: Dogs of War (1923), Big Business (1924; not to be confused with the 1928 Laurel and Hardy classic), and The Sun Down Limited (1924). All three were directed by the all-but-unsung Robert F. McGowan. If Hal Roach was the Our Gang series’ commanding general, McGowan was his executive officer; he directed or co-directed 102 of the shorts between 1922 and 1936 and played a major role in shaping their comic style while getting natural, unself-conscious performances from the kids. Film history owes Robert McGowan a lot. 

That said, I must confess I’m never entirely satisfied with the silent Our Gangs. Delightful as they are, I miss the voices, having first encountered and grown up with the talkie shorts on TV in their Little Rascals phase. Darla warbling “I’m in the Mood for Love”, Alfalfa screeching “The Barber of Seville”, Tommy Bond’s Butch muttering “C’mon, Woim”, the wise banter between Spanky McFarland and Scotty Beckett at their cutest — all that is a major component of the shorts’ charm for me. Still, the silent shorts are worth seeing, and not just as historical artifacts.

Then the Kiddie Matinee section of the day wound up with Chapters 7-9 of King of the Texas Rangers, and it was time for lunch.

Back from lunch break, we saw Stella (1950). The lobby card reproduced here is a trifle misleading, as can be seen by perusing my notes for the Cinevent program book:

You won’t find Claude Binyon’s name in any of the high-end film encyclopedias, and maybe that’s as it should be. Still, his career was nothing to sneeze at. Like so many screenwriters of the era, he started out as a newspaperman, working for the Chicago Examiner — then later, as city editor for Variety. Legend has it that in that capacity he concocted the immortal 1929 headline WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG — though it’s only right to mention that other legends credit Sime Silverman and Abel Green.

Whatever Binyon’s experience at the showbiz Bible, by 1932 he had segued from writing about movies to writing for them, with his first job being one of 16 writers on the omnibus comedy If I Had a Million (1932). That was one time when too many cooks didn’t spoil the soup, though it would be nice to know how much of which episode Binyon worked on.

As a contract writer at Paramount throughout the 1930s and into the ’40s, Binyon kept busy; he made uncredited contributions to such pictures as The Old Fashioned Way and It’s a Gift (both 1934), The Princess Comes Across (’37) and Dixie (’43), and he was the writer of record on a whopping 14 pictures for director Wesley Ruggles, including the Bing Crosby/Fred MacMurray/Donald O’Connor vehicle Sing, You Sinners (’38). Later, Binyon gave Der Bingle and Fred Astaire a 24-karat setting in Holiday Inn (’42) — with a major assist, of course, from Irving Berlin’s songs. Then again, Berlin also wrote the songs for the Crosby/Astaire follow-up vehicle Blue Skies (’46), with distinctly inferior results. True, director Mark Sandrich didn’t live to complete Blue Skies as he had Holiday Inn – but Binyon didn’t write Blue Skies either. Coincidence? Maybe.

Anyhow, let’s say it again: A career not to be sneezed at.

Binyon never abandoned writing for other directors, right up through Henry Hathaway’s hilarious North to Alaska (1960) and Leo McCarey’s last two pictures, 1958’s Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and Satan Never Sleeps in 1962. But he started directing his own scripts with The Saxon Charm in 1948, and continued the practice off and on through 1956, with generally happy results. Cinevent50 viewers got a delicious helping of Binyon the auteur with Dreamboat (’52), his delightful satire of Hollywood, academia and TV starring Clifton Webb and Ginger Rogers.

Dreamboat was probably the peak of Binyon’s career as writer-director, but he had come close to it two years earlier with Stella, based on Doris Miles Disney’s novel Family Skeleton. Ms. Disney’s book told the story of the Bevans family, a rather dimwitted clan whose cantankerous Uncle Joe dies accidentally during a family outing. Fearing that nobody will believe they didn’t kill the old reprobate on purpose, his surviving relatives decide to give him a hasty burial in an unmarked grave and pretend he’s just off on one of his benders. The only one not in on this birdbrained scheme is Stella, the family breadwinner and the only one with the sense God gave a goose. By the time she learns what’s happened, it seems there’s nothing to be done but ride the thing out. Then the plot thickens when it comes to light that Uncle Joe was insured for $20,000, and Stella’s layabout brothers-in-law begin conniving to cash in — and thicker still, Stella works as a secretary for Uncle Joe’s insurance agent.

The New York Times appraised Family Skeleton as “half humorous…not a mystery, hardly even a murder novel, and certainly not the light farce suggested by the publisher’s grinning skull symbol.” Which sounds odd now in light of the movie 20th Century Fox and Binyon made of the book, because a light farce is exactly what Binyon delivered, with a mix of black comedy and a New England setting that foreshadowed Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955).

The central role of Stella was reportedly first assigned to Fox contract star Susan Hayward. When she turned it down — wisely, since comedy was never Hayward’s strength — the role went to Ann Sheridan, whose droll delivery was certainly better suited to the material. Sheridan also exerted a lightening influence on co-star Victor Mature (who too seldom got to deploy his flair for comedy) as an insurance investigator who smells something fishy. But good as those two are, the movie gets stolen right out from under them by David Wayne and Frank Fontaine (still ten years from his most famous turn as Crazy Guggenheim on The Jackie Gleason Show) as the venal brothers-in-law, and by Evelyn Varden as the family’s whimpering matriarch.

In reviewing Stella for The New York Times, Thomas M. Pryor noted: “Out of an essentially macaber [sic] situation, Claude Binyon…has drawn some of the most unusual comedy of the season.” Variety’s “Brog” concurred that “a missing corpse takes on a comedic flavor with quick pacing and sharp dialog.”

As a side note, Stella marked the final (posthumous) appearance of the prolific character actor Hobart Cavanaugh as the local undertaker. This fact prompted columnist Jimmy Fidler — a week after Cavanaugh’s passing and three months before the movie’s release — to write: “Hobart Cavanaugh, who died the other day, had specialized for years in ‘Mr. Milquetoast’ roles, but I think the cast and crew of ‘Stella,’ his last picture, will always remember him as a man of extraordinary courage. Cavanaugh, who had already submitted to one operation for intestinal cancer, came to work on that picture in a dying condition, well aware of the fact that he didn’t have more than one chance in a million to live another month. He hadn’t been able to eat a bite of food for five days, and he was unable to eat during the several days it took him to complete his role. Twice he collapsed on the set, but he insisted on finishing the job. And when he had done so he said his goodbyes with a wisecrack thrown in for seasoning. ‘I play an undertaker in this picture but it’s poor casting,’ he laughed. ‘I look more like the corpse.’ It takes fortitude for a man to make remarks like that while facing another operation that is almost sure to be fatal.” This blurb has all the earmarks of an item planted by the Fox publicity department to wring some publicity out of Cavanaugh’s death. And if that sounds a little ghoulish…well, it’s not out of keeping with the spirit of the picture as a whole. 

After Stella came a conversation between ace historian/biographers Scott Eyman and Alan K. Rode. Scott was at the convention — well, he’s at Cinevent most years, but this year in particular he was there to promote (and sign copies of) his latest book, 20th Century Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio, published under the aegis of Turner Classic Movies. There have been other histories of that studio (notably Michael Troyan’s Twentieth Century Fox: A Century of Entertainment), but Scott’s has a unique advantage — besides, that is, Scott’s trenchant historical analysis and eye for the telling detail. His is the first history of 20th Century Fox to encompass the moment when the studio ceased to exist — that is, its 2018 acquisition by the Disney Company, like a once-mighty Mesoamerican empire being absorbed and obliterated by the encroaching jungle. When Disney changed the name of its new subsidiary to Twentieth Century Pictures — ironically, returning to the name Darryl Zanuck and Joseph Schenck came up with 85 years earlier — for the first time in over a hundred years the name of William Fox was missing from the motion picture business (Fox himself was ousted in 1930). Scott’s book is both a chronicle and an elegy.

I mentioned back on Day 2 Alan K. Rode’s Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, but another mention isn’t out of order. Back in the 1960s, when the Auteur Theory was reaching its maximum influence with people who indulged in such things, I remember a semi-serious joke that went around to the effect that Michael Curtiz was one director who “single-handedly disproves the Auteur Theory.” Well, to the contrary, Alan Rode’s biography makes a convincing case that Curtiz may have been more of an auteur than he usually gets credit for. In addition, Alan gives long-overdue credit to Curtiz’s wife, the writer Bess Meredyth, whose advice and script-doctoring efforts buttressed Curtiz’s career in much the same way Lady Alma Hitchcock did Sir Alfred’s. And if nothing else, we finish the book having been reminded how much Curtiz contributed to the Warner Bros. house style during the studio’s halcyon years — and continued to do so long after other creators of that style had decamped to greener pastures: Darryl Zanuck to create 20th Century Pictures and merge with Fox, Mervyn LeRoy to MGM, Hal Wallis to Paramount. If nothing else, Curtiz seems to have been able to work with Jack L. Warner longer than almost anyone. 

After Scott and Alan’s colloquy (moderated by Caroline Breder-Watts) Alan introduced another Michael Curtiz Pre-Code, The Cabin in the Cotton (1932). Richard Barthelmess played the son of a family of sharecroppers who is hungry for education to better himself, but is forced back to grueling farm work when his father suddenly dies. When his planter-landlord’s daughter (Bette Davis) goes to bat for him, he’s allowed to complete his education and winds up graduating from the fields to the office of the plantation. There he is torn in his loyalties between the boss and his roots among the hardscrabble workers, just as he is between his new rich girlfriend and his lifelong sweetheart (Dorothy Jordan). It was the kind of role Barthelmess had been playing since the late 1910s for D.W. Griffith, and truth to tell by 1932 he was getting too old really to pull it off. But audiences then looked at him and saw the youthful lad they remembered from Way Down East and Tol’able David, while we today look and see a middle-aged actor trying to pass for nineteen. Fortunately for Barthelmess’s legacy, we also see the dogged, unshowy conviction that kept his career alive through the Pre-Code era. The Cabin in the Cotton also still plays — better than it did in 1932, if Michael Haynes’s citing of contemporary critics is any indication — thanks to Curtiz’s unpretentious direction, the irresistibly fetching Dorothy Jordan, and (last but not least) Bette Davis near the beginning of her career, coyly drawling the first of her signature lines: “Ah’d like t’kiss ya, but Ah jus’ washed my hair [‘hay-ah’].” Late in life, Bette was quoted as saying that was her all-time favorite line. 

After the dinner break, it was Laurel and Hardy time again, this time Their First Mistake (1932). Ollie, nagged by his wife (“the ever-popular Mae Busch”) for spending too much time with Stanley, gets the bright idea to adopt a baby to occupy the Missus while he gallivants with Stan. Coming home with the baby, he learns that his wife has left him, so The Boys must parent the child themselves. You can imagine how that works out; by the time the short has run its 20-minute course, it’s a toss-up as to which of the three is the most helpless infant.

Then came The Haunted Castle (1921), an early — and minor — F.W. Murnau, made before even his breakthrough with Nosferatu (1922). Any Murnau is worth seeing at least once — after all, he is one of the masters, he only directed 22 pictures, and seven of those are lost — but this one was frankly pretty tough sledding. (The English subtitles on the German intertitles didn’t help.) Despite the English title, there was nothing “haunted” about it; it wasn’t a ghost or horror story, but a straightforward (and pretty rudimentary) murder mystery. In fact, the original German title was Schloss Vogelöd (“Vogelöd Castle”), a simple identification of the setting. The scenario was adapted by Carl Mayer (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Last Laugh, Sunrise) from a novel by one Rudolf Stratz. Besides Murnau and Mayer, there are no names connected with The Haunted Castle worth mentioning. The cast was a gaggle of second-string actors whose names were unknown outside Germany then and are utterly forgotten today.

Parole Fixer (1940) was a sprightly B-picture from Paramount about a conspiracy among gangsters and shyster lawyers to wangle undeserved paroles and fast-track criminals back to their nefarious ways. Supposedly based on J. Edgar Hoover’s book Persons in Hiding, the script was by the journeyman writer Horace McCoy (who did not live to see his 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? hailed as a 20th century classic), with crisp direction by Robert Florey. Top-billed William Henry, Virginia Dale, Robert Paige and Richard Denning were pretty lackluster, but the supporting cast included Lyle Talbot, Anthony Quinn, Marjory Gateson, Jack Carson and Louise Beavers.

The day finished up with…oh jeez, how shall I put this?…one of the most indelible screenings of the whole weekend. This was Sabaka (1954), a ghastly Technicolor train wreck that makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The plot concerned a young mahout (elephant wrangler) in India, Gunga Ram (Nino Marcel), seeking vengeance on the cult of Sabaka, the “fire goddess”, led by a charlatan priestess named Marku Ponjoy (prolific voice artist June Foray in a rare on-camera performance).

The provenance of Sabaka may not interest most readers, but it’s vastly more interesting than the movie itself, so here goes. The adventures of young Gunga Ram were a segment of a network-hopping kiddie show of early TV called Smilin’ Ed’s Gang, which Baby Boomers of a Certain Age may dimly remember. (Personally, I have no recollection of Gunga Ram, but I clearly remember the show, hosted by former kids’ radio personality Smilin’ Ed McConnell. I likewise remember his gang, including the puppets Midnight the Cat and Froggy the Gremlin, and his catchphrase “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”) Series producer/director Frank Ferrin expanded one of these Gunga Ram segments into feature length, dispatched a second unit to India for local color, and shot the main body of the picture in and around Los Angeles, hiring a smattering of reputable actors (Boris Karloff, Reginald Denny, Victor Jory, Jay Novello, Vito Scotti) for fly-by cameos that could be filmed in a day or two and spliced in as needed. As for that location footage — you’d think a color picture shot in India would at least have pretty scenery, but no. The credited cinematographers were Jack McCoskey and Alan Stensvold, and whichever one Ferrin sent to India had trouble even focusing the camera (which must have had the Cinevent projectionists tearing their hair). Sabaka is available complete on YouTube if you’re curious. I’ll be interested to know how long you’re able to stick it out. 

Just as Sabaka was going into release in 1954 — and in a possibly unrelated development — Smilin’ Ed McConnell dropped dead unexpectedly of a heart attack at 62. He was replaced by Andy Devine, and the show became Andy’s Gang until it finally ran its course at the end of 1960. Baby Boomers of a Slightly Younger Age may remember that incarnation of Froggy, Midnight, Gunga Ram and the rest of the gang.

And so it was, at slightly before 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning, that those of us who stayed with Sabaka to the end repaired at last to our hotel rooms, secure in the knowledge that the final day of the final Cinevent would have nothing worse in store for us.

To be concluded…

Posted in Blog Entries

The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 2

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on November 21, 2021 by Jim LaneJune 15, 2022

Cinevent Day 2 began with Chapters 4 – 6 of King of the Texas Rangers. Bob Bloom’s program notes tell us that this serial was filmed on location in the San Bernardino National Forest from June 17 to July 18, 1941 at a total cost of $139,701 (the production ran $1,165 over budget). Just for fun, let’s assume the standard six-day work week of the time, and let’s assume the company took no time off for the Fourth of July (though in fact they probably did). That means a shooting schedule of 28 days for a production running a total of 3 hours 35 minutes — in other words, on an average day directors Witney and English got about seven-and-a-half minutes of usable film in the can while spending $4,989.32. In Day 1’s notes I described Republic Pictures as an “economical” studio; giving credit where it’s due, it was also a pretty well-oiled operation, especially considering that it had been in existence for only six years.

The first feature of the day was the British film of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1939), in a beautiful IB Tech print showcasing that inimitable British Technicolor, so much more delicate than the American variety. And here I insert the notes I wrote for the Cinevent program book:

It wasn’t only Hollywood movies that had a good year in 1939. That was also a banner year for Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular comic opera. First — in September 1938, actually — came The Swing Mikado, produced by the Chicago branch of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project with an all-African-American cast, and with Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music given a jazzy jitterbug beat. After a five-month run in Chicago, it was transplanted to Broadway for another three months. Not to be outdone, Broadway showman Michael Todd mounted his own all-Black (and even jazzier) production, The Hot Mikado, featuring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the title role. After a Broadway run of 85 performances, the show was transplanted to the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, where it was a popular attraction during both seasons of the fair.

Coming close on the heels of both of these, even overlapping by a few days, was producer Geoffrey Toye and director Victor Schertzinger’s screen adaptation of The Mikado, a more traditional production, filmed in England but with American talent on both sides of the camera. The movie was the brainchild of first-time producer Toye. From 1919 to 1924, Toye had been musical director for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, custodians of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon while the works were still under copyright. In that capacity he had earned the trust and respect of Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of the company’s illustrious founder, even after the two had gone their separate professional ways.

And so it was, in the late 1930s, that Toye was able to obtain the film rights to all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works. His plan was to produce a series of film adaptations over the coming years, with his first production to be The Yeomen of the Guard.

Toye’s first move was to travel to Hollywood, as he said, “in search of technical experts.” It didn’t take him long to decide that The Mikado would be a more bankable title this first time out of the gate. At the same time, he decided his movie would have to be in Technicolor — a bold and prescient decision, since at that point only three British films had been made in Technicolor. Mikado would be the fourth.

It wasn’t only “technical experts” Toye was looking for over here. Once he decided on Mikado instead of Yeomen, the first item on his wish list was to get Deanna Durbin to play Yum-Yum. Alas for Toye and movie history, Universal wouldn’t allow it — yet another example, as if one were needed, of the short-sighted stupidity with which the studio mismanaged the career of its biggest star.  Ironically, Universal eventually wound up being The Mikado‘s U.S. distributor. I wonder: did the bright boys in the front office ever regret not letting Durbin appear in it?

So Toye was denied his first-choice star, but he didn’t go home empty-handed. By the time he sailed for England, he had secured the services of Victor Schertzinger to direct. It was another canny choice; Schertzinger was a trained musician and composer as well as director, and had been Oscar-nominated for directing Metropolitan Opera star Grace Moore in One Night of Love (1934). Also, to play Nanki-Poo, the incognito son of the emperor of Japan, Toye signed another American, radio and recording star Kenny Baker. It was a move to shore up the movie’s chances at the American box office, and despite some grumbling from G&S purists (British wags called him “Yankee-Poo”), Baker acquitted himself quite nicely.

For other roles, Toye turned to the D’Oyly Carte Company. Sydney Granville, a D’Oyly Carte star off and on since 1907, made his only film appearance as the officious Pooh-Bah, while Martyn Green, in his prime at 39 and midway through his 29-year tenure at D’Oyly Carte, played Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. Toye also enlisted the D’Oyly Carte chorus, filling out the larger ensemble for the film with alumni of the company. Non-company players Jean Colin (as Yum-Yum), Constance Willis (Katisha) and John Barclay (the Mikado) rounded out the cast.

During production, Schertzinger reportedly received as many as 3,000 letters a week threatening “dire consequences” if he tampered unduly with the show’s sacred text. The letter-writers need not have worried; while the show was somewhat rearranged and several songs were cut to get the running time down to 90 minutes, the result was quite faithful to Gilbert and Sullivan’s satiric spirit. (And by the way, it was understood then, as it had been in 1885, that the butt of The Mikado‘s satire was Great Britain, not Japan.) In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent called the movie “one of the most luscious productions of the operetta in history” (though he wondered if this purely theatrical piece was a good candidate for filming in the first place). Variety’s “Jolo” called it a “thoroughly ingratiating satire, carefully concocted.” The critics also praised the picture’s pastel Technicolor photography, which was justly nominated for an Academy Award (though of course this was 1939, and nothing was going to take that Oscar away from Gone With the Wind).

Geoffrey Toye’s plan to produce a series of Gilbert and Sullivan films, with the approval and participation of the D’Oyly Carte Company, was off to a good start, but there would be no further installments. The project was doomed first by the outbreak of World War II, then by Toye’s untimely death at 53 in 1942. It’s a pity we were denied a record of Sydney Granville and Martyn Green’s performances in, say, Yeomen of the Guard, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance – but let us count our blessings. After all, the Hot and Swing Mikados have survived only on scratchy phonograph records and in grainy silent home movies, while Victor Schertzinger and Geoffrey Toye’s rendition has come down to us exactly as audiences saw it in 1939.

After The Mikado came some comedy shorts from Hal Roach’s Lot of Fun bookending the lunch break. Before lunch it was We Faw Down (1928), a late silent with Laurel and Hardy — albeit one with a sound-on-disk Vitaphone musical score and sound effects. The long-lost disks were recently rediscovered, and Cinevent saw a print with the Vitaphone accompaniment restored on a conventional soundtrack. 

The short had quite a pedigree. It not only starred The Boys, but was directed by Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, Going My Way, An Affair to Remember) and photographed by future director George Stevens (Gunga Din, Shane, Giant).

And there was a special bonus for movie trivia buffs: Pictured here in the role of Mrs. Stanley Laurel was none other than the one and only Bess Flowers, surely the most prolific actor, male or female, in movie history. She sometimes had lines, but usually didn’t; was sometimes credited on screen, but usually wasn’t. Still, between 1923 and 1969 she ran up an unapproachable record of 966 movie and TV appearances. Bess had an extensive wardrobe and could dress for any occasion this side of a Stone Age cave-warming, so plugging her into a crowd scene was one less hassle for a casting director and costumer. Check out her filmography; you’ll see a lot of “Party Guest”, “Nightclub Patron”, “Ship’s Passenger”, “Audience Member”, “Secretary”, “Nurse”, “Maid”, and so on. Lines or no lines, seldom more than a few day’s work, but my lord, the lady kept busy: 28 movies in 1939, 35 in 1940, 48 in 1941. She was well-known and well-liked in the industry, obviously — you don’t amass nearly a thousand credits if you make people say, “Uh-oh, here comes trouble!” Bess Flowers retired after an episode of The Red Skelton Hour in 1969 and died in 1984 at the Motion Picture Country Home, age 85. 

In We Faw Down, Stan and Ollie tell their domineering wives (Stan and Ollie’s wives were always domineering) that they’re going to a vaudeville show with their boss, but they’re really going to a big poker game. Then on the way to the game they get sidetracked into a pied-à-terre with two good-time gals. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the wives learn that the vaudeville theater has burned down. Complications ensue. It all culminates in one of Laurel and Hardy’s all-time-greatest closing gags, involving the wives, a shotgun, and two adjacent apartment buildings. If you’ve seen We Faw Down, you don’t need more hint than that; if you haven’t, I won’t spoil the gag. 

After lunch the Hal Roach parade continued with three Charley Chase silent shorts: The Fraidy Cat (1924), A Ten-Minute Egg (also ’24), and A Treat for the Boys [a.k.a. The Sting of Stings] (’27). Charley was definitely in his prime in those days, still finalizing his persona in the first two and really hitting his stride in the third. Personally, I’ve always rather preferred his sound shorts of the 1930s, mainly for his tendency to break into song (he was a very appealing musical performer). There’s no denying, though, that in the silent ’20s Charley Chase was younger, more energetic, and further away from that early grave he would drink himself into at 46 in 1940.

Film musical historian and aficionado Richard Barrios hosted a “Vol. 2” session of Songs in the Dark and Dangerous Rhythms (continuing what he started at Cinevent 51 all those months ago), an assortment of musical numbers old and new(er). The title, of course, alludes to Richard’s books A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter (both of which belong in every movie buff’s library).

Next, Richard introduced Main Street to Broadway (1953), a broken-heart-for-every-light-on-Broadway drama distinguished by a roster of guest stars being trotted out for drive-by appearances. The stars were cajoled into appearing through a tie-in between independent producer Lester Cowan and the Council for the Living Theatre, a public relations group formed in 1947 by Pulitzer Prize playwright Robert E. Sherwood (who supplied Main Street to Broadway‘s story, such as it was) on the occasion of the bicentennial of the American (read “New York”) theater. In return for providing the big names, the Council stood to get a 25 percent share of the movie’s profits. Unfortunately, there weren’t any.

The picture’s central (stock) characters were played by two names in the fine print at the bottom of this list: Tom Morton as Angry Young Playwright With Chip on Shoulder and Mary Murphy as Small Town Girl Straight Out of High School Drama Club Taking Fling at Acting Career. Then as now, Main Street‘s chief interest was the parade of stars, most gamely playing themselves for a minute or two of screen time. (Exceptions: Tallulah Bankhead, in a major support, played a good-sport parody of herself; Agnes Moorehead camped it up as Morton’s drama-queen agent; and Gertrude Berg played her radio/TV sitcom character Molly Goldberg as if she existed in the real world.) Others not listed on this poster included director Joshua Logan, Henry Fonda, Vivian Blaine, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, Stuart Erwin, Jeffrey Lynn, society hostess Elsa Maxwell, and Broadway critics Brooks Atkinson, Ward Moorehouse and John Mason Brown.

Actually, there was one other point of interest beside this gaggle of celebs from the Golden Age of Broadway. As the movie’s nominal leads, Tom Morton and Mary Murphy played stereotypical opposites-who-attract: He disdains her bourgeois primness, she resents his snotty condescension, but (as the top picture on the poster suggests) they absolutely cannot keep their hands off each other. When Main Street to Broadway was released in October 1953, Morton, 27, was just beginning his six-year, seven-credit career, while Murphy, 22, was two months away from her best-remembered role as the police chief’s daughter playing with Marlon Brando’s fire in The Wild One. For most of Main Street, Morton and Murphy were blandly likeable, but when they went into the clinches (which was often), they hungrily devoured each other, fairly steaming up the camera lens and exuding a sexual chemistry far beyond anything Murphy would show with Brando. I couldn’t help wondering what was going on between these two when the cameras weren’t rolling. When I shared this thought with another audience member, she said, “From what I understand, there was quite a lot going on!” (Mind you, I don’t know who this person was, or what she knew or how she knew it. I pass her observation on as the rankest gossip, and meaning no offense to Ms. Murphy’s memory — she died in 2011 — or to Mr. Morton, who is evidently still with us at 95.)

When the lights came up after Main Street to Broadway, it was time for dinner. When we came back, it was to a presentation by biographer Alan K. Rode, author of Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film. In his excellent, well-researched book, Rode makes a persuasive case for Curtiz as one of the most prolific and versatile artists — yes, artists — ever to work in Hollywood. I rather suspect that he may have been preaching to the choir at Cinevent — at least I certainly hope that Cinevent-goers appreciate Curtiz’s body of work more than the average citizen. For that matter, I hope we appreciate him more than some film critics and theorists, who tend to look down on prolific filmmakers (Curtiz directed 178 movies) as somehow unserious. If nothing else, Alan Rode’s lecture was a timely reminder of what we already know — or should. (By the way, Rode’s biography tells us that Curtiz, who was born Manó Kaminer, pronounced his professional name “Cur-tezz“, not “Cur-teez“. And while we’re on the subject, Alan Rode’s own surname is pronounced “Roadie”.)

Then Mr. Rode introduced Private Detective 62 (1933), one of Curtiz’s lesser-known Warner Bros. Pre-Code pictures. William Powell played a U.S. diplomat stationed in Paris who, for reasons we needn’t go into, is forced to resign in disgrace. Back in the States and scrambling for work, he falls in with an unscrupulous detective agency running the old badger game, entrapping “marks” in compromising situations, then blackmailing them to keep things quiet. Powell’s life gets complicated when he finds himself falling for his latest victim (Margaret Lindsay). Paced by Curtiz at a breakneck 66 minutes, it was far-fetched but diverting. Powell and Lindsay were supported by Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Hohl, James Bell — and, as a gangland casino operator, the ill-fated Gordon Westcott. Westcott would go on to earn his own footnote in history in 1935 when, riding for MGM in a polo game against a team led by Walt Disney, his horse fell on him and crushed his skull. He lingered unconscious for three days in hospital, finally dying a week short of his thirty-second birthday. His death dampened Hollywood’s enthusiasm for polo; Lillian Disney put her foot down, and her husband had to find other diversions to occupy his spare time. Like model-railroading. And daydreaming about building an amusement park. All because of Gordon Westcott’s bad luck on the polo field.

Dr. Jack (1922) was Harold Lloyd’s second venture into feature-length comedy, and he was still getting the hang of it. Lloyd played a small-town doctor who takes on the case of a patient billed as “The Sick Little Well Girl” (Mildred Davis) when he suspects her family is being milked by a “specialist” who not only has no intention of “curing” her, but knows full well she’s not really sick in the first place. The picture feels like two or three of Lloyd’s shorts strung together, but it’s fun for all that, with some rewarding scenes (like a nifty poker game) that contribute more to the comedy than to the picture’s putative plot. The proceedings are added to by cameos from Mickey Daniels and Jackie Condon, two of the first round of producer Hal Roach’s Our Gang kids, plus an appealing canine who (Samantha Glasser speculates in her program notes) looks enough like Pete the Pup of the 1930s Our Gang to have been an ancestor.

As things turned out, Dr. Jack had two happy endings, one of them in real life. Just two months after the picture’s release, on February 3, 1923, Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis were married, and they stayed that way until death did them part in 1969. Generations of Lloyds rose up and called them blessed.

In keeping with Cinevent 52’s Halloween Weekend setting, Day 2 closed out with Frankenstein (1931). Do I really need to say much about this one? After ninety years, it’s still one of the most famous movies ever made. However, at the risk of being burned for heresy, I will venture to suggest that the picture shows its age rather badly, and has ever since I first saw it sixty years ago — admittedly, on TV, and in the expurgated form of its Post-Code reissues that held sway until the 1980s. Cinevent, of course, screened the uncut Pre-Code version.

What unarguably survives intact from 1931 is Boris Karloff’s performance, simultaneously menacing, repellent, heart-wrenching and pathetic, absolutely iconic in the purest sense of the word. His first appearance, with Arthur Edeson’s camera leaping ever closer to his undead face in wavering hand-held quick cuts, still has the power to take our breath away, and could raise gooseflesh on a marble statue.

But much of the movie, to me anyhow, feels slapdash and incomplete. I think its reputation owes much to its sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which was an exponential improvement — possibly the greatest ratio of improvement for a sequel to its original in movie history. If nothing else, Franz Waxman’s ominous musical score makes a huge difference; the lack of music in the original fairly screams its absence. There are other improvements: John Fulton’s photographic effects complement and enlarge the mechanical effects of Ken Strickfaden. The prissy epicureanism of Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius provides a foil for Colin Clive’s neurotic energy that he didn’t find in John Boles, Mae Clark, or that blustering old fart (Frederick Kerr) who played his father. There is simply no end to the ways The Bride is better than Frankenstein. Still, there’s no denying the obvious: Without the original, we wouldn’t have had the sequel. We can be thankful for that. And for Boris Karloff.

To be continued…

Posted in Blog Entries

The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 1

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on November 13, 2021 by Jim LaneJune 15, 2022

Cinevent, the venerable classic film convention that was a longtime fixture on Memorial Day Weekend in Columbus, Ohio, convened belatedly for the 52nd time October 28-31 this year. It was doubly belated, in fact — postponed from 2020 to 2021 by the COVID lockdown, then from May to October just to be on the safe side. Then this damned Delta Variant came along and seemed to threaten even that — but with vaccinations strongly encouraged and masks mandatory, the convention proceed as (re)scheduled. 

So where are the masks in this picture, you ask? Those are still in the future; the pic is from Cinevent 51 in 2019, when Cinevent chair Michael Haynes (left) and Dealers’ Room coordinator Samantha Glasser announced that Cinevent 52 (expected, naturally, to be in 2020) would be the last. Cinevent’s founders were all gone. John Baker, much the oldest of the three, was the first to go, after a long retirement in Florida; then John Stingley died in 2007 at 59; Michael’s father Steven, the last survivor, passed away in April 2015 as Cinevent 47 was gearing up. Now, in 2019, Michael and his mother Barbara decided it was time to step down from active participation, retire the Cinevent name, and pass the torch if anyone cared to carry it forward.

Fortunately, Samantha did, along with a significant cadre of Cinevent’s dedicated staff. In 2019 they were seeking suggestions for a new name; now they have one: The Columbus Moving Picture Show (CMPS). And so it is that The Classic Film Convention Formerly Known as Cinevent will go forward under that name, and will return to Memorial Day Weekend — only seven months away.

In the meantime, CMPS served as co-presenter of Cinevent 52, so let’s have a look at the program for this final year.

One feature of this and the two previous Cinevents that I hope CMPS will continue is the practice of scheduling a 12-chapter serial throughout the weekend, screening three chapters on each of the four mornings. This tradition-in-the-making began at Cinevent 50 with The Masked Marvel (1943), a spirited Republic actioner about fighting home-front saboteurs during World War II. In its day it was upstaged by “the Masked Marvel murder“, the bizarre unsolved killing of one of its leading players weeks before the first chapter hit theaters; today the murder is a forgotten footnote, while the serial remains good fun. In 2019 Cinevent presented Hawk of the Wilderness, a bizarre mash-up of Tarzan of the Apes, The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island and The Last Days of Pompeii that I’m told has a good rep among serial aficionados, but which I could never get behind.

This year brought King of the Texas Rangers (1941) (like its predecessors, from the…er, “economical” Republic Pictures factory). The star was pro football’s Sammy Baugh (dubbed “Slingin’ Sammy” by sportswriters and Republic publicists; Baugh himself preferred plain “Sam”) as “Smashin’ Tom” King, likewise a pro footballer (the kind who boldly goes for a first down on fourth-and-eight — and makes it). When Tom’s Texas Ranger father is killed while investigating sinister foreign sabotage in Texas, Tom puts his gridiron career on hold while he enlists in the Rangers and picks up where Dad left off. (America not yet being involved in World War II, the culprits are not specifically identified as they cruise around in their zeppelin plotting mischief, but their stiff-arm salutes and Teutonic accents leave no doubt about what nationality they’re supposed to be.)

Sammy Baugh’s own pro career didn’t have to wait; King of the Texas Rangers was filmed during his off-season (he played for the Washington Redskins from 1937 to ’52). As an actor, Baugh was no threat to Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, but he was up to the modest demands of a Republic serial hero right enough, and having been raised on a Texas farm, he was as good a horseman as any stuntman on the lot.

Besides, he was buoyed by a good supporting cast. Neil Hamilton, playing a quisling saboteur, had started in the 1920s as a leading man for D.W. Griffith; by 1941 his star had dimmed somewhat (he was best remembered as the luckless wimp who lost Maureen O’Sullivan to Johnny Weismuller in MGM’s first two Tarzan pictures), but he was still soldiering on in the trenches, as he would continue to do through the end of the 1960s; later generations would know him as Commissioner Gordon to Adam West’s Batman. Duncan Renaldo (still ten years from his signature gig as TV’s Cisco Kid) played a Mexican federale on assignment north of the border, serving as Baugh’s cheerful sidekick. And Pauline Moore, as a plucky Lois Lane-style newspaper reporter, contributed as much as mere “girls” were allowed to do in Republic serials. Toss in the usual contingent of two-fisted gun-toting henchmen from the studio’s stable of stuntmen, and breakneck direction from William Witney and John English, and the recipe was complete.

After the first three chapters of King, it was time to bring on the features. The Great Hotel Murder  (1935) was the sixth re-teaming of Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen as dueling frenemies, after their 1926 hit What Price Glory as Marine Corps Sgt. Quirt (Lowe) and Captain Flagg (McLaglen). Some of those re-teamings were straight Quirt/Flagg sequels, with the boys battling over some female or other; others, like this one, varied the formula a bit. Here Lowe played a famous mystery novelist horning in on house detective McLaglen’s investigation of a murder at a medical convention meeting in the hotel where McLaglen works and Lowe lives. This time it’s not a woman they’re fighting over, but bragging rights for solving the murder. It was a fun banter-fest and a pretty clever mystery, albeit with an abrupt and confusing climax (Dave Domagala’s program notes alluded to some maladroit pre-release editing that mucked things up).

The weekend’s first silent was 1928’s The Michigan Kid, from a novel by Rex Beach. Conrad Nagel played a gambling-house owner in the Alaska Gold Rush of the 1890s, with Renee Adoree as the childhood sweetheart he hopes to marry. Beautiful scenery and an impressive forest fire climax bolstered the film. Then it was Welcome Home (1935), a complicated sting operation (and who isn’t a sucker for those?) with con-artist James Dunn returning to his home town for a chamber of commerce reunion, then discovering that one of his partners in crime (Raymond Walburn) has swindled the town fathers in a stock scam. Getting the money back before the game is discovered, plus inducing a New York tycoon to invest in the local economy, made up the bulk of the picture’s 73 minutes. Arline Judge, Rosina Lawrence, William Frawley and Charles Sellon rounded out the cast. 

After the dinner break came the highlight of the day and one of the highlights of the whole weekend. This was Pursued (1947), a moody, genre-bending melodrama from Warner Bros., director Raoul Walsh and writer Niven Busch. On the surface Pursued is a western, but with enough elements of film noir to bolster those who maintain that noir is less a genre than a style. On top of the western/noir mix, there’s a soupçon of Wuthering Heights‘s Cathy/Heathcliff/Hindley triangle of sexual obsession and sibling rivalry, and even a few threads of Moby Dick in the obsessive, vendetta-driven character played by Dean Jagger.

The story opens in the New Mexico Territory in the 1880s. Eleven-year-old Jeb Rand survives the massacre of his family by cowering in the cellar of their cabin, seeing only confusing glimpses of the slaughter that will haunt his nightmares well into adulthood. He is discovered in the aftermath by the widow Callum (Judith Anderson), a neighboring rancher who takes him home and raises him as a foster son. Years later, he has grown into Robert Mitchum, in love with his foster sister Thor Callum (Teresa Wright), loathed and resented by her brother Adam (John Rodney), and still haunted by those nightmares. Lurking on the edges of his life is Widow Callum’s brother Grant (Dean Jagger), waiting impatiently for the day he can bring about Jeb’s death, either personally or by manipulating the resentments of others. In service to Grant’s malignant hatred a number of bystanders, even an innocent pony, are made to bite the dust.

The torrid, borderline-incestuous passion between Jeb and Thor is the fraught focus of Pursued. Writer Niven Busch was no stranger to sexual ferment, whether in a western (Duel in the Sun) or a film noir (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), and if Pursued doesn’t quite have the lurid, panting carnality of those challenges to the Production Code, it still has an adult-content edge that makes it something more than a family-feud shoot-’em-up. By the time just deserts got meted out, the Cinevent audience was keyed up enough to burst into applause well before the final credits.

After that, we all unwound with Helpmates (1932), one of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts, in which The Boys frantically try to straighten up Ollie’s house after a wild party and before the shrewish Mrs. Hardy (Blanche Payson) gets home from her visit to Mother. Then came The Clinging Vine (1926), a silent romantic comedy in which Leatrice Joy (with her gender-bending signature male haircut) plays a career-driven business executive who takes lessons in femininity from her prospective grandmother-in-law to help her win the boss’s son (Tom Moore) by making him think he’s the brainy one.

Then, just like that, it was back to melodrama for Black Tuesday (1954), with Edward G. Robinson leading a daring prison break — from Death Row, no less — along with girlfriend Jean Parker and fellow condemned killer Peter Graves; before they can make a clean getaway with Graves’s $200,000 in stashed loot, the exploit degenerates into a hostage situation on the top floor of a warehouse. The lobby card here promises “The most ruthless Robinson of all time!” — and by golly, that’s not far off the truth. His Vincent Canelli makes Little Caesar and Key Largo‘s Johnny Rocco look like Southern Baptist deacons. “Some people have youth, some have beauty,” Robinson once famously said, “I have menace.” In Black Tuesday Robinson is at his menacing-est. Sidney Boehm’s script is peppered with indictments of capital punishment, but Robinson’s Canelli undercuts them: Nothing but cyanide pellets, a bullet in the head, or 25,000 volts will do for this vicious beast. Screenings of Black Tuesday are evidently rare, due (it is said) to a complicated copyright arrangement that’s more trouble to work out than it’s worth. Too bad; it’s a tight, grueling 80 minutes (thanks to director Hugo Fregonese), with Robinson at his late-career best heading a cast that includes Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, James Bell, Russell Johnson and Frank Ferguson.

And that closed out the first day of the last Cinevent. More was to come.

To be continued…

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4

  • 40th Anniversary Tour: Jesus Christ Superstar

A

  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 1
  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 2: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
  • “A Genial Hack,” Part 3: Peter Ibbetson
  • A “Christmas Wish” Returns
  • A Cinedrome “Christmas Tradition” Returns
  • A Cinedrome Pop Quiz
  • A Hitch in the Get-Along: State Secret
  • A Holiday Treat (I Hope!) for Cinedrome Readers
  • A Jigsaw Mystery
  • A Mystery Photo
  • A Time-Travel Studio Tour
  • A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 1
  • A Treasure Trove of MGM Shorts, Part 2
  • A Visit with Jody Baxter, Chick Mallison, Trooper Jeff Yorke et al.
  • A Weekend With David O. Selznick
  • A-a-a-and We’re Back…!
  • Addio, Cinevent 42!
  • After a Brief Intermission…
  • America’s Canadian Sweetheart, 1921-2013
  • Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012
  • Auditioning for Immortality
  • Ave Atque Vale, Fairy Princess!
  • Ave Atque Vale, Jody Baxter

B

  • Bright Eyes, 1928-2014
  • Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 1
  • Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2

C

  • C.B. Gets His Due
  • Camera Beauty
  • Cary-ing On
  • Catching Some Rays
  • Catting Around
  • CHAPTER I
  • CHAPTER II
  • Cinedrome Does Its Part
  • Cinedrome Wins 2012 CMBA Award
  • Cinedrome’s Annual Holiday Treat Returns
  • Cinerama-Rama!
  • Cinevent 2016 (Continued)
  • Cinevent 2016, Concluded
  • Cinevent 2016, Part 3
  • Cinevent 2016, Part 4
  • Cinevent 2017 – No. 49 and Counting, Part 1
  • Cinevent 2017 – No. 49 and Counting, Part 4
  • Cinevent 2017 — No. 49 and Counting, Part 2
  • Cinevent 2017 — No. 49 and Counting, Part 3
  • Cinevent 42
  • Cinevent 45
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 1
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 2
  • Cinevent 50 – Day 3 (Part 2)
  • Cinevent 50 – Prelude
  • Cinevent 50 — Day 3 (Part 1)
  • Cinevent 50 — Day 4
  • Cinevent 51 – Day 1, Part 1
  • Cinevent 51 – Prelude
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 1, Part 2
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 2
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 3
  • Cinevent 51 — Day 4
  • Cinevent Turns 50
  • Cinevent, Day 2
  • Cinevent, Day 3
  • Cinevent, Day 4
  • CMBA Blogathon: Come Next Spring (1956)
  • CMBA Blogathon: Kitty (1945)
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 1
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 2
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 3
  • Crazy and Crazier, Part 4

D

  • “Don’t Stay Away Too Long…”

E

  • Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

F

  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Brigham Young (1940)
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Down to the Sea in Ships
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Fourteen Hours (1951)
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: Prince Valiant
  • Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills
  • First Comes the Phone Call
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood — Epilogue
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 1
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 2
  • Five-Minute Movie Star: Carman Barnes in Hollywood, Part 3
  • Flo Chart

G

  • “Glamour Boys” Begins…
  • “Glamour Boys” Continues…
  • Grand Opening!

H

  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 1
  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 2
  • “Here’s a Job for You, Marcel,” Part 3
  • Harlow in Hollywood

I

  • “Is Virginia Rappe Still Alive?”
  • Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown
  • Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown

J

  • Jigsaw Mystery — Solved?

L

  • Liebster Blog Award
  • Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal
  • Lost & Found: Night Has a Thousand Eyes
  • Lost and Found: Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948)
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 1
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 2
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 3
  • Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 4

M

  • “MOVIE” Souvenir Playing Cards
  • Merry Christmas from Cinedrome!
  • MERRY CHRISTMAS from Cinedrome!
  • Mickey and Judy — Together at Last
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 1
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 2
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 3
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 4
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 5
  • Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 6
  • Movie Playing Cards: 3 of Hearts – Geraldine Farrar
  • Movie Playing Cards: 5 of Spades – George Walsh
  • Movie Playing Cards: 9 of Diamonds – Mary Miles Minter
  • Moving Right Along…
  • Mr. Stewart Goes to War

N

  • Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

O

  • Our Mr. Webb

P

  • Picture Show 02 — Day 1
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 2
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 3
  • Picture Show 02 — Day 4
  • Picture Show 02, Day 00 — Prelude at the Wex
  • Picture Show 2022 – Day 2
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 1
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 3
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 4
  • Picture Show 2022 — Prelude
  • Picture Show No. 3 — Day 1, Part 1
  • Picture Show No. 3 — Prelude
  • Picture Show No. 3 — Tying Off a Loose End
  • Please Stay Tuned

R

  • R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013
  • Remembering the Night
  • Remembering the Night
  • Return of “Movie” Souvenir Playing Cards
  • Returning to Lost London
  • Returning to Lost London (Reprinted)
  • Rex the First
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange – EPILOGUE
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange, Part 1
  • Rhapsody in Green and Orange, Part 2
  • RIP Dean Stockwell, 1936-2021

S

  • Say, What Ever Happened to Carman Barnes?
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 1
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 10
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 11
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 12
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 13
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 14
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 2
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 3
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 4
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 5
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 6
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 7
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 8
  • Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 9
  • Silent Weekends
  • Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2
  • Sixty-Six Years’ Worth of Oscars
  • Songs in the Light, Part 1
  • Songs in the Light, Part 2
  • Songs in the Light, Part 3
  • Speak (Again) of the Devil
  • Speak of the Devil…

T

  • “The Best of Us,” Part 1
  • “The Best of Us,” Part 2
  • “The Best of Us”, Part 1
  • “The Best of Us”, Part 2
  • Ted Sierka’s Brush with Greatness
  • The 11-Oscar Mistake
  • The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”
  • The Bard of Burbank, Part 1
  • The Bard of Burbank, Part 2
  • The Could-Have-Been-Greater Moment
  • The Duke of Hollywood
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 1
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 1
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 2
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 2
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 3
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 3
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 4
  • The Fog of Lost London, Part 4
  • The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 1
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 2
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 3
  • The Last Cinevent, the First Picture Show — Day 4
  • The Man Who Saved Cinerama
  • The Mark of Kane
  • The Museum That Never Was, Part 1
  • The Museum That Never Was, Part 2
  • The Return of the King
  • The Rubaiyat of Eugene O’Neill
  • The Sensible Christmas Wish
  • The Shout Heard Round the World
  • The Stainless Steel Maiden, 1916-2020
  • The Stamm
  • Tony Curtis 1925-2010
  • Tragedy in Nevada, January 1942
  • Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ‘Star’

U

  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 1
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 2
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 3
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 4
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 5
  • Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 6

W

  • “Who Is the Tall Dark Stranger There…”
  • Wings, Again
  • Wyler and “Goldwynitis”
  • Wyler and “Goldwynitis” (reprinted)
  • Wyler Catches Fire: Hell’s Heroes
  • Wyler Catches Fire: Hell’s Heroes
  • Wyler’s Legacy
  • Wyler’s Legacy (reprinted)

Y

  • Yuletide 2018

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