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.
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. 
In the meantime, CMPS served as co-presenter of Cinevent 52, so let’s have a look at the program for this final year.
After the dinner break came the highlight of the day and one of the highlights of the whole weekend. This was 
Then, just like that, it was back to melodrama for 
While preparing my post on the first day of this year’s Cinevent 52 in Columbus, Ohio, I learned of the passing of Dean Stockwell at his home in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico on November 7 at the age of 85. Stockwell, boy and man, was one of the finest actors who ever faced a movie camera, yet he never quite received 
The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.
That’s when Foster receives a cryptic summons to a dingy dive down by the waterfront: “If you want to nail Hanson, drop around the China Coast at eight tonight.” The man he meets that night (Ray Milland) is clean-shaven and dapper, impeccably groomed and dressed, cutting a figure entirely at odds with the squalid little tavern where Foster finds him. His card reads simply: “Nicholas Beal, Agent”. “Agent for what?” asks Foster. Beal grins slightly. “That depends. Possibly for you.”
Foster decides. He tucks the books under his arm, puts out the light, and makes his way out of the cannery by the beam of a flashlight Beal left behind. In the pitch dark of the outer room, his light startles a rat on a shelf. The rat squeaks plaintively and stares at Foster, eye to eye. We can almost read the rat’s mind, as clearly as if he were speaking: Welcome to my world.
Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s nothing short of superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.
At Cinevent 50 in Columbus, Ohio in 2018, there was a moderated Saturday-afternoon discussion between historians Leonard Maltin and Scott Eyman. At one point, Leonard said of Scott:
For Archie Leach, the Cary Grant persona was, in Scott’s apt phrase, a brilliant disguise — but it was also a precarious balancing act. Somehow, through some alchemical mix of talent, timing, ambition and luck, this music hall acrobat from Bristol crafted a personality unlike any other. The only child of a feckless alcoholic father and an emotionally unstable mother (young Archie’s father committed her to a mental hospital and told the boy she had died; he didn’t learn the truth for over 20 years), Archie Leach managed to remodel himself into the epitome of urbane sophistication and the greatest romantic comedian in the history of the acting profession. 
Well, that was then, this is now, and I’m breaking that rule again to discuss another contemporary movie and another long shadow. The movie is Mank, directed by David Fincher from a script by his father Jack, and the shadow belongs to Citizen Kane (1941). The younger Fincher appears to have undertaken Mank as a tribute to his father, who died in 2003 (the movie is dedicated to his memory). Besides that, it fits into the intermittent vogue for making movies about the making of movies — that is, about the making of specific movies. It’s a sub-genre that dates back at least as far as 1980’s TV movie The Scarlett O’Hara War, in which 55-year-old Tony Curtis played the 35-year-old David O. Selznick beating the bushes to find a leading lady for Gone With the Wind. The vogue has cropped up from time to time ever since; examples include the aforementioned Saving Mr. Banks and 2012’s Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho. Even Citizen Kane‘s production has been done before, in RKO 281 (1999), with Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles and James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst.
Marion Davies went to her grave insisting that she never saw Citizen Kane, and while I’m not sure I believe that, it was her story and she stuck to it to the end. In any case, the idea that she would have driven out to Victorville to sit on the porch critiquing the fine points of Mankiewicz’s script before shooting even started is just plain stupid.
There’s hardly a detail too minor for the movie to go out of its way to get wrong. Herman Mankiewicz had a mustache in 1940. Marion Davies was sweet and well-loved, but she drank too much and, having retired from the screen in 1937, she was puffy and tending to overweight by 1939; also, she stuttered. As for Rita Alexander, no Englishwoman then, or Englishman either, would have used the word “shitty” in mixed company, even if they did think aircraft carriers were “a shitty idea” (which nobody did). That word was a pure Americanism – and for that matter, even in America few women would have said it in those days. The road accident that broke Mankiewicz’s leg happened not because a letter fluttered out of his convertible with the top down, but because Tommy Phipps, who was driving, lost control of the car in the rain on Route 66. The Mankiewicz brothers never called each other “Hermie” and “Joey”, and nobody on Planet Earth was dumb enough to call William Randolph Hearst “Willie”, even behind his back in a soundproof room.
Late in the movie, I think at the climax (such as it was), there was a long scene in the “Refectory” at San Simeon (although in Messerschmidt’s hands it just looked like a rather well-furnished cave). The scene seemed to be terribly important; anyhow, it had Gary Oldman going tooth-and-nail for his second Oscar. But by that time the movie had completely lost me and I was no longer even pretending to pay attention; I just sat there rolling my eyes and making that wrist-rotating gesture that is the universal signal for let’s-wind-this-thing-up-already. (I couldn’t help remembering something Pauline Kael wrote in one of her reviews: “Sitting in the darkened theater, I kept listening for snorts, but every time I heard one I could feel the breath on my hands.”) Somewhere in this seemingly-terribly-important scene, Mankiewicz puked and made his famous wisecrack about the white wine coming up with the fish (which actually happened at the home of Arthur Hornblow Jr.), but that’s really all I remember. I was just marking time, waiting for this ridiculous, fraudulent movie to be over. And then…finally…it was.
A precocious student with an artistic bent, Olivia caught the acting bug as a teenager, making her debut at 16 playing Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the Saratoga Community Players. Her stepfather, a real petty tyrant, disapproved, and he tried putting his foot down after she was cast in a school production of Pride and Prejudice. None of this acting nonsense, he decreed, not if she wanted to live under his roof — only to learn the lesson others would learn when they tried pushing Olivia de Havilland around: She moved in with a family friend, and the show (and Olivia) went on.
Now before we go on, let’s pause to consider how Captain Blood might have turned out with Robert Donat and Marion Davies. Fortunately, we were spared that. Instead of Donat and Davies, we got Captain Blood with Errol and Olivia, and it made stars of them both. In eight pictures together, they shared a reserved grace that provided a good complement each for the other. Not to mention an erotic chemistry so strong that in those few pictures where their characters don’t end up together — like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Four’s a Crowd (1938) — something seems distinctly out of whack.
Over the years the sisters — protesting a bit too much, perhaps — would sometimes pose for photos to show that things were just fine between them. They were always burying the hatchet, and always remembering where they left it. The “final schism”, as Joan phrased it, seems to have come with their mother’s terminal illness in 1975. Joan, on tour in Cactus Flower, felt slighted at being excluded from end-of-life treatment decisions; worse, she felt Olivia was dilatory in letting her know when the end was near, so she was still on the road when Mummy breathed her last. At the memorial service, Joan refused to speak to her older sister. Three years later, in her autobiography, Joan, like a volcano that would not stop, spewed sixty years’ worth of pent-up hostility — prompted, perhaps, by still-tender wounds about their mother. In an interview promoting the book she said, “You can divorce your sister as well as your husbands. I don’t see her and I don’t intend to.” In public, Olivia maintained a lofty silence; privately she took to calling Joan the Dragon Lady. Joan titled her memoir No Bed of Roses. Olivia dubbed it No Shred of Truth. 
Olivia eventually got her own Oscar, of course. Two of them, in fact, and both at Paramount, the studio that had borrowed her for Hold Back the Dawn. First, in 1946, came To Each His Own. Olivia played an unwed mother who, when her lover is killed in World War I, is forced to give up her baby to be adopted by an old frenemy, then to watch from afar as the boy grows up, thinking of her only as a fussy and rather pathetic family friend. It was, in Oscar historian Robert Osborne’s apt phrase, “a Tiffany tear-jerker”. In the movie’s final scene, when the boy, now grown to manhood, finally gets it through his head why “Aunt Jody” has always been so nice to him, and says to her, “May I have this dance…Mother?” — the look on Olivia’s face is enough to reduce a bronze statue to helpless sobs.
Also at 100, she showed the world that there was litigation in the old girl yet. She sued FX Networks and producer Ryan Murphy over Feud: Bette and Joan, an eight-part miniseries that purported to dish the dirt on the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962 and the diva-rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Olivia had been a good friend of Bette’s, and she replaced Joan when she was fired from her and Bette’s follow-up teaming on Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), so Olivia was represented as a supporting character in the miniseries, and played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. As these two pictures suggest, neither Ms. Zeta-Jones, her costumer, nor her hairdresser gave much evidence of ever having seen or heard of Olivia. Neither did any of the writers, and that’s what she sued over, charging that her privacy had been invaded without her permission or input, that she had been slandered and misrepresented. True enough; Feud was sleazy stuff, despite all the A-list names, and it misrepresented pretty much everybody it mentioned. The only reason Olivia was the only plaintiff in the case is that she was the only one who was still alive.
This title card appears early in Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours — at the “climax” of the opening credits, you might say, just before the credit cards for producer Sol C. Siegel and director Hathaway. It’s the standard “entirely fictional and any similarity” disclaimer, the kind that usually appears in super-small type somewhere near the copyright notice, the MPAA “approved” certificate number, the Western Electric and IATSE credits, and other things that are legally required but nobody really cares if you see or not. For this picture, though, 20th Century Fox took the unusual step of making sure the disclaimer was very prominently placed where even the most inattentive could hardly miss it.
The picture opens quietly — in silence, in fact, without dialogue or even background music. (Indeed, except for Alfred Newman’s fervid theme under the opening credits, then a second theme swelling through the movie’s last 90 seconds, there’s no music in the entire picture.) We are introduced to what will prove to be the two central characters in the drama that follows. First we see Patrolman Charlie Dunnigan (Paul Douglas as the movie’s version of Charles Glasco) walking his beat in the early morning calm. He passes the Rodney Hotel, where a worker is polishing the brass plate at the entrance. Meanwhile, up in Room 1505…
Then the silence is rudely broken by the first human sound we hear — a secretary screaming in the window of a bank building across the street. Dunnigan dashes into the hotel to alert the staff, while the waiter calls down to the switchboard for the same reason. Dunnigan and Harris, the assistant manager (Willard Waterman), knowing now which room to go to, head up in the elevator. In the room, Harris blusters at Robert to come inside, sounding like an impotent scold. 
The colloquy between Charlie Dunnigan and Robert Cosick, a mixture of urgent pleading and forced-casual chitchat, provides the spine of Fourteen Hours, just as the real one between Charles Glasco and John Warde did for Joel Sayre’s New Yorker article. (Notice too how Joe MacDonald’s deep-focus photography emphasizes both men’s perilous perch 15 stories up. MacDonald was a master cinematographer who worked with Hathaway on nine pictures, including some of his best.) 
Over this bare factual skeleton Paxton’s script skillfully weaves a variety of fictional stories among the people drawn for one reason or another to the Rodney Hotel and the street outside. It amounts to a cross-section of the New York public circa 1950 — and for all the changes the city has seen in 69 years, it still rings true today.
Elsewhere in the crowd the reaction is more compassionate. Two young office workers, Ruth (Debra Paget, left) and Barbara (Joyce Van Patten, right), have gotten sidetracked on their way to work. The fretful Barbara wants only to get to work before they get in trouble with the boss. But Ruth is more worried about the stranger on the fifteenth floor: How old is he? What kind of trouble is he in? “Maybe someone was cruel to him, or maybe he’s just lonely…I wish I could help him.” Her tender words catch the ear of Danny behind her (Jeffrey Hunter), also pausing on his way to work. When Barbara gives up and leaves, Danny and Ruth strike up a sweetly tentative conversation. As the day wears on, neither of them will get to work. Feelings grow between them, and Danny reflects on how they might have gone their whole lives, missing each other by minutes, if it hadn’t been for this day. Hunter and the 17-year-old Paget were already launched on their successful careers as Fox contract players. Van Patten, making her film debut at 16, would in time become one of television’s busiest character actresses in a career that is still going strong today.
Needless to say, New York’s newshounds are also Johnny-on-the-spot. Newspapermen swarm over the scene like ants on a sugar cube. New York announcer George Putnam, playing himself, gives a play-by-play summary from a radio truck in the street. Another radio reporter barges into Room 1505 to jam a microphone out the window to eavesdrop on Dunnigan and Robert’s conversation — only to get the bum’s rush from the vigilant police. Station WNBC dispatches a television camera crew to the roof of a building across the street from the hotel. (Curiously enough, this wasn’t just an embellishment in Paxton’s script. NBC really did broadcast TV coverage of John Warde’s exploit back in 1938, even though there probably weren’t more than a few dozen sets in the whole city, and practically none in the rest of the country. It may well have been the very first example of television covering a breaking news story.)
While the crowd in the street mills about gawking, wringing their hands, or cracking callous jokes, up on the fifteenth floor things are in a muffled uproar. The NYPD’s rescue efforts are commanded by the officious but efficient Deputy Chief Moksar (Howard Da Silva, left), who coordinates activities while straight-arming a swarm of reporters and dealing with other interfering looky-loos (at one excruciatingly delicate moment, a crackpot preacher bursts into the room bellowing at Robert to kneel and pray). Police psychiatrist Dr. Strauss (Martin Gabel, center) offers on-the-fly advice to Moksar and Dunnigan on Robert’s mental state. Further complications come with the arrival of Robert’s divorced parents — his clutching, hysterical mother (Agnes Moorehead, second right) and feckless alcoholic father (Robert Keith, right), who graphically illustrate the Cosick family dysfunction. (“No wonder he’s cuckoo!” growls Moksar.)
Fourteen Hours was what was known as an A-minus picture — that is, a picture with an A budget but no major stars. The closest thing to one was Paul Douglas, the former sports announcer who had been one of Fox’s most popular and reliable supporting actors since his breakout work as Linda Darnell’s husband in A Letter to Three Wives (’49). In 1950 as Fourteen Hours went into production he was teetering between first and second leads, which he would continue to do for the rest of his life, until his untimely death from a heart attack in 1959 at 52. In Fourteen Hours, top-billed in a first-rate ensemble cast, he carries much of the film as his Charlie Dunnigan tries to lure Robert Cosick literally back from the brink, winging it from moment to moment with a seat-of-the-pants common sense.
At the end of Fourteen Hours Robert Cosick is finally brought in through the window to safety — you’ll have to see the movie to find out exactly how that comes about. Unfortunately, the day didn’t end as happily for John William Warde. At 10:30 p.m. that night, John said to Officer Glasco, “I’ve made up my mind.” Glasco took this as an optimistic sign that John had decided to come in; at least that’s how he chose to read it. “That’s the way to talk,” he said. About that time, a childhood friend of John’s arrived in room 1714, and he relieved Glasco at the window talking to John.
Sunday morning began with another George O’Brien B-picture directed by David Howard. 
Next came 
After the final three chapters of Hawk of the Wilderness came 
This brought us at last to the final picture of the weekend, a nifty little 65-minute murder mystery, 
I don’t want to leave my survey of this year’s Cinevent without mentioning my friend Phil Capasso. Last year, at the Golden Anniversary Celebration, Phil was honored as the only person who had been to every single Cinevent since the first one back in 1969. This dedicated attendance earned him the first slice of the 50th anniversary cake that evening, not to mention the privilege of introducing Cinevent 50’s guest of honor Leonard Maltin. Needless to say, Phil was in Seventh Heaven at that party, and as happy as I’d ever seen him. Then on August 28, 2018, barely three months after I took this picture of him in Columbus, Phil passed away at his home in Carmel, Indiana, at age 82. I’m sure he was planning for his annual trek to Los Angeles for Cinecon 54 on Labor Day Weekend. And I have no doubt he was already looking forward (in his customary phrase, “if God spares”) to joining us all again in Columbus for this year’s Cinevent 51.