Cinevent this year began with something new: A tour of Columbus’s Ohio Theatre. The tour cost extra, and ran late enough to conflict with the first show in the screening room — but it was worth it on both counts.

The theater is located on State Street, across the street from the south entrance to the Ohio State House, on the site of the original Columbus City Hall. Commissioned by Marcus Loew (who didn’t live to see it), it was designed by Thomas W. Lamb, one of America’s foremost theater architects of the 20th century. Some of Lamb’s other designs included: In New York, the Academy of Music (later the Palladium), the Capitol, and the Ziegfeld (the original one, at 6th Avenue and 54th Street); in San Francisco, the Fox; in Boston, the B.F. Keith Memorial (now the Boston Opera House) and the Orpheum. The Ohio opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1928 with the Greta Garbo silent The Divine Woman.

As a Loew’s Inc. theater seating 3,000 and lavishly appointed in Spanish Baroque style, the Ohio thrived as a first-run venue for MGM pictures, even after the U.S. v. Paramount consent decree divested the studios of their theater chains, until suburban sprawl and changing patterns in entertainment (read: television) spelled trouble for the big downtown picture palaces. The Ohio officially closed in February 1969 with the Michael Caine World War II picture Play Dirty. At that point the Ohio appeared doomed; a local developer planned to demolish it (and the adjacent Grand Theatre) in favor of a high-rise office building to be built on the site.

Fortunately, a groundswell of local Save-the-Ohio sentiment led to the creation of the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA). CAPA harnessed public sentiment and the support of business and government leaders to purchase the Ohio and set it on the path to restoration to its original appearance (done in stages throughout the 1970s), with shows and concerts all the while to keep the ball rolling. Next door, the Grand Theatre was eventually torn down; the site is now Galbreath Pavilion, an annex to the Ohio providing additional lobby space, offices, and rehearsal rooms.

CAPA’s success with the Ohio enabled it to expand its activities, even beyond Columbus. Locally, it now also operates the Palace (another Thomas Lamb creation three blocks away), the Lincoln, and Columbus’s oldest surviving theater (since 1896), the Southern. The Ohio Theatre remains CAPA’s flagship and base of operations, and rightly so — as these pictures attest, it’s a breathtaking sight to see (it’s the only theater I’ve ever seen with not just a second, but a third floor lobby). I’ll point to CAPA the next time America’s coastal elites decide to lord it over their cultural inferiors in flyover country. I would also point to such theaters as the Fox in San Francisco, Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, New York’s Roxy and Ziegfeld, and the Ambassador in Washington, DC — only I can’t, because they don’t exist anymore.

As I said before, the Ohio Theatre tour ran long enough that I missed the first event in the screening room, Chapters 1-3 of this year’s serial, Republic’s Hawk of the Wilderness (1938). This may have prevented me from tuning in to the serial’s wavelength — whatever that is. So perhaps I should reserve final judgment until I’ve had a chance to see the whole thing from the beginning. All I can say right now — having seen Chapters 4-6 on Day 2, then the final three on Day 4 — is that I’m not particularly eager to catch up with what I missed.

Based on a 1935 series written by William L. Chester (a sort of minor-league Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator) and published in the pulp magazine Blue Book, Hawk of the Wilderness opens with a scientific expedition in search of a lost-world-type island somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, yet warmed to a near-tropic clime by a volcano. When the ship founders in a storm, the expedition’s leader (whose wife and infant son are along for the ride) throws overboard a bottle with a desperate message for his colleague Dr. Munro. He and his wife go down with the ship, but his Native American assistant (Noble Johnson, the native chief of King Kong‘s Skull Island) makes it to the island with the scientist’s son.

Twenty-five years later the child has grown into Kioga, or “Hawk of the Wilderness” (Herman Brix, still a year away from changing his name to Bruce Bennett), so called by the island’s natives (whose ancestors remained there thousands of years ago while others continued on to the mainland, eventually to be known as “American Indians”). Kioga has been befriended by one of the locals, while others, led by a malcontent named (so help me) Yellow Weasel, want to kill him to appease their volcano god. Into all this comes a rescue expedition, led by Dr. Munro, the addressee of that long-ago message in a bottle, the message having been finally delivered by a seafaring criminal masquerading as a fisherman, who sniffs the possibility of treasure on the island and is just waiting for a chance to make his move.

As that summary suggests, Hawk of the Wilderness is an odd mash-up of Tarzan of the Apes, The Last of the Mohicans, and Treasure Island. It has a good reputation, if Bob Bloom’s program notes and some comments on the IMDb can be believed, but I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get into it myself. For such a plot-heavy story — Dr. Munro’s daughter Beth and Kioga fall in love, alliances are built and broken as characters hunt treasure, flee from or fight war parties, and contend with the erupting volcano — I found it oddly uneventful; certainly compared to last year’s The Masked Marvel, whose nonstop fistfights, chases, crashes and explosions made it a textbook example of “action-packed”. But to be fair, I only saw half of this year’s chapter-play — and just the second and fourth quarters at that. So I defer to Bob Bloom’s judgment: “Hawk of the Wilderness is a rarely-seen serial. It is available only through grey-market dealers on eBay. It’s fast-paced adventure with 12 chapters that will keep you coming back throughout Cinevent.” (I’ve ordered one of those grey-market eBay videos to fill the gaps in my viewing; if I have anything to add about it, I’ll post an update.)

After Hawk of the Wilderness came the first feature film of this year’s Cinevent: John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer (1938). Ford was on a roll in those days, although this particular picture came during what his biographer Scott Eyman called a “temporary malaise” — after Ford’s first Oscar for The Informer (’35) and the twin high points of Wee Willie Winkie and The Hurricane (both ’37), and just before the string of jewels and outright masterpieces that would run from Stagecoach (’39) through How Green Was My Valley (’41).

Four Men and a Prayer hardly deserves mention in the same breath with those, but it’s still pretty good; if nothing else, it has a certain curiosity value as Ford’s only murder mystery (at least, as far as I can recall). The four men of the title are Richard Greene, George Sanders, David Niven and William Henry as the sons of C. Aubrey Smith, a colonel of the British Army in India who has been found guilty of dereliction of duty in bringing on a massacre. Drummed out of the service in disgrace, he returns to England and calls a family council. He tells the boys he was the victim of a frame-up (of course they never doubted him) and he has the papers to prove it. But before he can tell them more, he is found dead — with his briefcase empty.

The coroner declares his death a guilty suicide, but the colonel’s sons know better, and they set out to clear his name — with the assistance of top-billed Loretta Young as a wealthy heiress with eyes for Greene. Their investigation sends the brothers (and Loretta) globe-trotting off in all directions, from India to Buenos Aires to Alexandria — all, of course, without leaving the safety of the 20th Century Fox backlot (which has an exotic appeal all its own). Along the way, Ford’s feel for pacing and eye for striking pictorial compositions keep raising the movie above the humdrum level of Richard Sherman, Sonya Levien and Walter Ferris’s script (from a novel by David Garth), especially in an episode during the ruthless quashing of a South American revolution. The resolution of the plot, if not exactly surprising, is at least satisfying — and, after one more “malaise” picture (Submarine Patrol later in ’38), Ford would move on to Stagecoach and his white-hot phase.

And Day 1 had just begun. I’ll continue with the Thursday lineup next time.

To be continued…

“G’bye, Mary Poppins,” says Dick Van Dyke’s Bert as the Practically Perfect Nanny sails away from No. 17 Cherry Tree Lane in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964). “Don’t stay away too long…”

Well, she did stay away too long. But at long last Mary Poppins Returns has finally arrived, a sequel 54 years after the movie it sequelizes — surely some sort of record. I won’t go into great detail about the movie here, for two reasons: (1) the focus of Cinedrome is Classic Hollywood, not the current movie scene; and (2) the pleasures of Mary Poppins Returns are best discovered without any preparation beyond what you can get from having seen Mary Poppins in the first place.

But I will say this: Mary Poppins Returns is manifestly the best and most enduring movie of 2018. Does that sound brash? So be it. In my defense, I call as my witness generations yet unborn, who will know and cherish this picture long after whatever wins the Oscar this coming Sunday — and any other movie released last year — is a Trivial Pursuit answer that nobody gets. That this exquisite specimen of the moviemaker’s craft scores 78 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and 66 on Metacritic only tells me that 22 percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and 34 percent on Metacritic, are fools who don’t know a great movie musical when it stares them in the face; I feel sorry for them. (Meanwhile, on RT, Bumblebee scores 93 percent fresh — which says all you need to know about the current state of film criticism.)

That’s all I have to say here about Mary Poppins Returns. I mention it mainly as a way to segue into a discussion of why it took 54 years for us to get a sequel to Mary Poppins at all. Because the fact is, we could have had Mary Poppins Returns, or something like it, fully half a century ago. It certainly would have starred Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, and might even have had the rest of the cast — Dick Van Dyke, David Tomlinson, Glynis Johns, Karen Dotrice, Matthew Garber, right down to Reginald Owen as Admiral Boom. That this alternate-universe sequel never happened was due to two reasons: (1) Walt Disney died too soon, and (2) P.L. Travers lived much too long.

Before I get to Mary Poppins, a few words about Walt Disney. In the community college Film History and Introduction to Film classes I teach, I have a standard lecture I deliver when the subject comes up, as it always will, of Disney’s place in the art and history of moving pictures. Generally, that lecture runs something like this:

Some years ago, the arts editor on the paper where I was a film critic asked me: Who did I consider the most influential artist of the 20th century? I’m sure she expected me to name Pablo Picasso, or Salvador Dali, or Jackson Pollock. Or, moving to other arts, possibly James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill or Ernest Hemingway. Or, sticking just to movies, maybe John Ford, Orson Welles, or even D.W. Griffith.

I didn’t even have to think about it. There’s not even a close second, I told her; the most influential artist of the 20th century is Walt Disney. All she could say to that was, “Well, if you consider Disney an artist…” “Well, if you don’t,” I told her, “you’re wrong.”

To me this is not a matter of opinion but a plain fact. Critics and artists may groan at the thought, but merely by inventing the theme park Walt Disney had an influence on American and world culture that Picasso or Hemingway could only dream of — and theme parks are far from all there was to Disney. If there’s one filmmaker from the 1920s — and ’30s, and ’40s, and ’50s, and ’60s — with whose movies you are reasonably familiar, it’s going to be Walt Disney.

Now I’m not talking about the Disney Company. I’m talking about Walt Disney the man — born 1901, died 1966. He died when your grandparents were the age you are now; I know because I’m old enough to be your grandfather and I was 18 when Walt Disney died. It was an occasion of not national, but world-wide mourning. Your grandparents grew up on Walt Disney’s movies. And so did your great-grandparents, and so did your parents — and so did you.

And, I’ll bet, so will your grandchildren. Someday you’ll be babysitting your grandkids, and you’ll turn on whatever people are using to watch movies when that day comes, and you’ll put on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Lady and the Tramp or Mary Poppins, and you’ll watch it with them, seeing it through a child’s eyes again just as you did when you first saw it at their age. And you’ll remember. That’s one of the things that makes Walt Disney one of the greatest artists America has ever produced.

And by the way, if anybody tells you otherwise, don’t listen to them, because there’s something wrong with their definition of art.

I transition now from my classroom lecture on Walt Disney back to a consideration of his final masterpiece. 

I saw Mary Poppins for the first time in early December 1964 at the Fox Senator Theatre, the first-run venue for all Disney pictures when they came to Sacramento. I remember it was the same night as the city’s Christmas Parade down K Street right in front of the theater; our showing turned out to be sold out, so my date and I killed a couple of hours watching the parade, window shopping, and helium-talking from a balloon we bought at a stand outside the entrance to F.W. Woolworth’s.

Finally, we got in to see the movie, and as we came out I had a thought that had never come to me after a movie before: “I’ve just seen a classic.”

Now I’d seen plenty of first-run classics up to that point: Cinderella, The War of the Worlds, The King and I, Mister Roberts, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. But I was four to ten years old when I saw those, and four-to-ten-year-olds just don’t think in terms of classic anything. This, at age 16, was the first time the conscious thought came to me immediately as I left the theater.

I was a bit surprised, a couple of months later, when the Oscar nominations came out, and “Chim Chim Cher-ee” was nominated for best song. The song I’d been humming as I left the theater that night wasn’t “Chim Chim Cher-ee” but “Jolly Holiday”, the one Bert (and half the animal kingdom) sings as he and Mary Poppins stroll through the sidewalk chalk picture. The song’s “Once in Love with Amy” lilt was simply irresistible — plus, of course, it goes on for nearly 15 minutes.

As all the world now knows, “Chim Chim Cher-ee” went on to win the Oscar, one of two that Robert and Richard Sherman won for writing Mary Poppins‘s music. By awards night I’d seen the picture a couple more times, and I better understood why “Chim Chim Cher-ee” won. It wasn’t until many years later, with decades of hindsight, that I came to believe as I do now: The nomination, and the award, should have gone to “Feed the Birds”. For my money, that’s the most beautiful song ever written for a Walt Disney picture, and that’s saying something. I’m not surprised that it was a particular favorite of Walt’s, or that he often asked the Shermans to play it to help him unwind at the end of a busy week. It’s probably no coincidence that it’s also the song most directly inspired by the original Mary Poppins stories — and the song that finally persuaded author P.L. Travers to go along with making Mary Poppins a musical.

And this brings me to Walt Disney’s secret weapon on Mary Poppins. Or weapons, I should say: Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman. Like writer Lawrence Edward Watkin on Darby O’Gill and the Little People, the Shermans were hired for a specific project, then assigned to others when that project had to go on a back burner. Watkin’s script for Darby O’Gill was delayed 12 years, during which he was put to work on Treasure Island, The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, The Great Locomotive Chase and others. The Sherman brothers didn’t have to wait quite that long to see Mary Poppins in production, but they were still sidetracked onto incidental songs for other projects — The Absent-Minded Professor, Big Red, The Sword in the Stone, The Miracle of the White Stallions, etc. — while Disney was courting P.L. Travers. 

“The Boys”, as they quickly became known around the studio, had been handed a copy of the first Mary Poppins book early on, and they were very much in synch with Disney’s thinking on Travers’ episodic, essentially plotless novel — when they compared notes, they saw that they and he had marked off the same six chapters for inclusion in a prospective movie — and story/song sessions with writer Don Da Gradi went well.

Bob and Dick Sherman were pleased with, and even proud of, what they’d written for Mary Poppins, and rightly so. Let’s not mince words; what they turned out is arguably the greatest score ever written for an original film musical. To my way of thinking, its only serious rivals are the ones for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz. (To be honest, The Wizard of Oz would probably get most people’s vote. But it wouldn’t get mine.)

By the time Travers and Disney finally closed the deal — with Travers to receive $100,000 against five percent of the gross earnings from any eventual film, plus complete script approval — DaGradi and the Shermans were pretty pleased with what they’d come up with. They were sure (as Dick Sherman put it years later) that Mrs. Travers would be “bowled over” when she heard what they had for her.

They reckoned without P.L. Travers. “Bowled over” wasn’t in her vocabulary — unless it was something she did to other people. And she was about to do it to Don DaGradi and Robert and Richard Sherman. We’ll get into that next time.

To be continued…

I know this is a departure from the subject of movies and the Golden Age of Hollywood, but as the Christmas Season rolls around once again, I don’t want it to go unobserved that 2018 marks the Bicentennial of the most familiar and beloved of all Christmas carols: “Silent Night”.

Or rather, strictly speaking, it’s the 200th anniversary of the carol’s original version, “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”. It wasn’t to become “Silent Night” until 1859, when it was translated into English by Fr. John Freeman Young, an Episcopal priest in New York City. But as “Stille Nacht”, it was first performed at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1818 by its lyricist, Fr. Joseph Mohr, and composer, Franz X. Gruber, accompanied by Herr Gruber on guitar. Rather like Christianity itself, “Silent Night” first came into the world in a humble, even obscure imperial backwater — in this case Oberndorf, Austria — then proceeded to be embraced around the world in a remarkably short time. The song’s sublime spiritual simplicity continues to speak for itself, as it has for fully two centuries.

And in another departure from writing on Classic Hollywood, I’m sharing once again a contribution of my own to the Yuletide Season. As most Cinedrome readers will probably know, writer Philip Van Doren Stern once wrote a little story he called “The Greatest Gift”. He worked on it from 1939 to 1943, then, when he felt it was ready, he found himself unable to interest anyone in publishing it.  So Stern had 200 copies printed in a little booklet and sent them out to family and friends as his Christmas card that year. In time, the story came to the attention of Hollywood, and eventually, after a few false starts here and there, director Frank Capra made it the basis for his 1946 picture It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart and Donna Reed.

Taking a leaf from Philip Van Doren Stern, and in keeping with the Spirit of the Season, I’m offering a little story of my own as a sort of Christmas card for my Cinedrome readers. Unlike “The Greatest Gift”, it has nothing to do with movies or Hollywood; it’s just a tale told to me by a wise and wonderful older person I once knew. It’s called “The Sensible Christmas Wish”, and you can read it by clicking here.

If you like the story, feel free to share it with friends and family. Please remember, though, that like everything else here at Cinedrome, it is under copyright, and all rights are reserved.

Happy Holidays!

Apologies for the delay, Cinedrome readers. I’ve been on vacation, but now I’m back and ready to resume my recap of this year’s Cinevent.

After The War of the Worlds on Saturday afternoon, Leonard Maltin introduced The Meanest Man in the World (1943) with Jack Benny. Sharing above-the-title billing with him was the ever-fetching Priscilla Lane, but as anyone who remembers Benny’s radio or TV shows will know, his real co-star was Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (here billed only by his nom de radio).

Benny played Richard Clarke, a tender-hearted small-town lawyer who moves to New York, leaving sweetheart Janie (Lane) back home while he makes his fortune — which his manservant Shufro (Anderson) persuades him he’ll never do until he stops being such a darn nice guy. So he decides to become a first-class heel — but, as this poster suggests, that only puts him in danger of losing his girlfriend.

The two men may have sported different names in the movie, but it was business as usual for Jack Benny and Rochester, with Rochester/Shufro getting most of the funny lines and staying always one step ahead of his boss. Directed by Sidney Lanfield (who always knew how to stay out of the way), the movie clocked in at only 57 minutes, which made it play more or less like an hour-long episode of The Jack Benny Program, and a pretty funny one at that. An unexpected surprise was Anne Revere as Benny’s secretary. I’ve been more accustomed to see her in dead-serious roles as somebody’s dogged no-nonsense mother (Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun), but here she was a wisecracking office assistant (she reminded me of Ann B. Davis’s Schultzy on the old Bob Cummings Show), and she was hilarious. I never knew she had it in her.

Just before the dinner break came the third and final tribute to one of Cinevent’s founders. This time it was for John Baker, and the program consisted of 15 jazz soundies of the type Mr. Baker once so diligently collected. “Soundies”, for those who don’t know, were two-to-three minute filmed musical performances — forerunners, if you will, of music videos — that were shot on 16mm and played in specially designed jukeboxes. Their heyday wasn’t long, but there were many of them made while the fad lasted. Mr. Baker himself accumulated thousands of them, eventually selling his collection to the University of Kansas and the American Jazz Museum (thus funding his retirement to Florida). I don’t know whether any of the soundies shown at Cinevent were actually from his former collection, but they were the sort of things he would certainly have had, and the artists ranged from the near-forgotten (Apos & Estrellita, Dewey Brown, The Delta Rhythm Boys) to the full-out-legendary (Cab Calloway, Noble Sissle, Nat “King” Cole, Fats Waller, Count Basie).

After dinner it was The Sea Spoilers (1936), one of the B-pictures John Wayne made at Universal in an effort to break out of the horse-opera ghetto he was mired in at Republic and for fly-by-night producer Paul Malvern. Two years ago Cinevent presented probably the best of these, California Straight Ahead, but all of them were pretty good. Sea Spoilers had the Duke as a U.S. Coast Guard officer on the trail of seal poachers led by Russell Hicks, with his sweetheart Nan Gray caught in the crossfire.

Then came Richard Talmadge in the silent The Speed King (1923), a variation on The Prisoner of Zenda that had him as an American motorcycle racer dragooned into impersonating a lookalike king in one of those tiny kingdoms where stories like this always take place. Talmadge (no relation to sisters Norma, Constance and Natalie — in fact, his given name was Sylvester Metz) was an appealing sort who had a brief run as an actor but a long one as stuntman, stunt coordinator, second unit director and other miscellaneous crew functions. Henry Hathaway employed him often, from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to How the West Was Won; he can be seen (if you know where to look) doubling for Lionel Barrymore in his more strenuous scenes in Hathaway’s masterpiece Down to the Sea in Ships. (And say, Cinevent folks, how about showing that one one of these years?)

Next was, for many of those in attendance, the highlight of the whole weekend: 1946’s Three Little Girls in Blue. (Personally, I’d put it neck-and-neck with The War of the Worlds, but that could just be me.) As I’ve mentioned before, this was 20th Century Fox’s second remake of their own Three Blind Mice from 1938 (the first remake, in 1941, was the Betty Grable vehicle Moon Over Miami), about three sisters living high on a modest inheritance, hoping to land rich husbands before the money runs out. It’s a movie of immense charm and constant pleasures that deserves to be better known.

The print shown this year was the same one Cinevent screened in 1998; genuine IB Technicolor — as such, guaranteed never to fade — and in the same impeccable physical condition as 20 years ago, with hardly a splice, line, or scratch from first frame to last.

This is important to note because the DVD available from the 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives collection is distinctly inferior. Fox turned out the best specimens of Technicolor in the 1940s, but you wouldn’t always know it from the quality of their DVD releases. They’ve been very uneven, and Three Little Girls, alas, is way at the low end of the scale. I mentioned a while back that this is probably the best Fox musical that didn’t involve Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Shirley Temple or Rodgers and Hammerstein, and it’s probably no coincidence that those names are on the best examples of Fox Tech on DVD (Moon Over Miami; Hello, Frisco, Hello; The Little Princess; State Fair). It’s a shame Three Little Girls in Blue didn’t get similar care, because the color really is lovely — and, in Vera-Ellen’s fantasy dance to “You Make Me Feel So Young”, pretty striking. And Celeste Holm’s red dress as she sings “Always a Lady” is enough to knock your eyes out. If you were lucky enough to see it this year (or 20 years ago) at Cinevent. Kudos and thanks to the unidentified source of that print. (And by the way, the lobby card reproduced here is a classic example of false advertising. You’d never guess, would you, that the picture takes place in 1902?)

Finally, it pains me to say this, but I had to miss the last screening of Day 3, 1935’s Murder by Television with Bela Lugosi and June Collyer. The spirit was willing, but the start time was 12:20 a.m. Sunday morning, and I had to call it a day. I’ll just have to catch up with that intriguing curiosity some other day.

*                         *                         *

Now I want to double back to that afternoon conversation between Scott Eyman and Leonard Maltin. I wasn’t able to record the whole hour’s talk (I trust somebody did), but I did catch a few interesting remarks from these articulate gentlemen. First, moderator Caroline Breder-Watts asked Leonard what first got him hooked on movies; “What was it that caused that spark for you, for film?”

L.M.: I think it was the fact that when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, television was a living museum of movies. And being a Baby Boomer, I became a TV addict, and at that time — I’m not telling you guys anything you don’t know; if there were younger people here I’d have to explain it a little more fully — but I watched Laurel and Hardy every day, every day of my life growing up. The Little Rascals, every day. Walt Disney every week. At one golden period, The Mickey Mouse Club every afternoon. All of these things left a deep, deep impression on me, and they’re still the things I care about most today. So I think it all began there.

C.B.-W.: Were those experiences you shared with your parents, with your family, or was that something that was more solitary for you?

L.M.: You know, I honestly don’t remember. We only had one TV I think at that time. Imagine the deprivation! So I guess we must have watched a lot of it. But a lot of it was early morning, late afternoon after school, you know, Saturday morning, all of that. So those were “kid time”.

C.B.-W.: I think there is something to be mourned in that we don’t have that communal experience at home anymore with all our devices and all our tablets and all of our things. I was in the same situation when I was a kid, I watched kind of what my parents watched — but that was a good thing, ’cause they watched really good things. And they watched old movies, and that’s where I got my spark from. And that’s not an experience we all have any more. There’s channels for children, there’s all kind of different distractions, that sort of thing.

L.M.: There’s fragmentation, and narrow-casting, too. When I was growing up you didn’t have to go to Turner Classic Movies, the sole channel on the dial — “dial”! — you didn’t have to go someplace to see old movies. You just had to switch the channel, because this channel would be showing a W.C. Fields movie, and this one might be showing a Bogart movie, and this one might be showing Charlie Chan, or something like that. They were everywhere. They were unavoidable, I guess is what I’m saying, it was unavoidable to see old movies at that time.

C.B.-W.: Scott, I know this convention, this festival in particular had a big part of your upbringing, didn’t it?

S.E.: Yeah, unlike Leonard — let’s see, you grew up in Teaneck [New Jersey], so you had WOR, and you had the Million Dollar Movie, and you had all these New York stations that were churning films all the time. I grew up in Cleveland — please, no hatred [laughter] — and the only thing we had was the Paramount package from the 1930s. So I saw W.C. Fields and a few other things, but there wasn’t a lot there. I didn’t get that immersion that you did. What did it for me was two movies, actually. Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy in 1962 or ’63; I think it was ’63 when I saw it, so I would have been 11. I’d seen some, like, “funny man” TV series and clips, Flicker Flashback, things like that on television, and this silent thing interested me. So I conned my grandmother into taking me to see Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy, which was in a theater which was in what is euphemistically referred to in that area as a “changing neighborhood”. She wouldn’t go in, because God only knows what would happen if she went in and had to sit in a dark theater in a changing neighborhood. So she dropped me off, and she stayed in the car for two hours while I was inside the theater, so in case I came out I wouldn’t be attacked and murdered in the 20 feet between the doors and the car. I went and saw Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy, and that intrigued me sociologically. That’s not a word I would have applied at the age of 11 or 12, but you know, the clothes, the cars, the buildings, it was so different than what I saw around me. Also, of course, the gags, the structure, how he worked comedically, as opposed to the people I was seeing on television like Jack Benny. It was a different vibe, it was visual as opposed to verbal.

And then the second one that got me — you’ll laugh — was The Sons of Katie Elder about a year later, about ’64, which I went in to see, it was on a double bill with The Family Jewels at the Center Mayfield Theatre. Do you guys remember the theater where you saw movies? I can remember exactly which theater I saw every movie I’ve ever seen at.

L.M.: Me too, and I wonder if today’s generation can possibly have that same feeling about having seen a movie in Multiplex 4.

S.E.: No, no. But I went in to see Sons of Katie Elder and it was crowded so I had to sit way down in front, like four or five rows from the front row. I usually sat in the middle, but here I was stuck in the front of the theater looking up like this, and I suddenly noticed the grain in the film. And the grain was alive, and the film was alive. On one hand I was watching the story and the acting — it’s a good movie — but I was also watching the film itself as it sped through the projector. And I had this interesting sensation of watching a living organism unfold; it was like microphotography in a National Geographic special. So it was a two-part thing. The Harold Lloyd thing gave me a sense of film as a window into the past, and at this point I wanted to be an archaeologist, and The Sons of Katie Elder gave me a sense of film as a living organism that is constructed, and architected, and planned. Those two things combined in this pincer movement for me.

*          *          *

[Later, Ms. Breder-Watts asked how the love of watching movies led them to transition into writing about them]:

L.M.: Actually, I started writing letters, that’s where it began. I wrote fan letters; I was big on that. I got some wonderful, wonderful answers. My first ambition had been to be a cartoonist, and I wrote to some of my heroes. I wanted to be a cartoonist and I sent some of my samples to Charles Schulz, who wrote back the kindest, most encouraging letter, very supportive. A personal letter, not a form letter, just a wonderful gesture on his part. And he included in the package an original signed daily Peanuts strip. Unsolicited. P.S., 30 years later I got hired by United Media, his syndicator, to interview him in his studio in Santa Rosa, Calif., for a video that was going to accompany a traveling museum tour. So as they’re getting the cameras set I told him that story. He jumped out of his seat, he says, “We gotta get you something newer!” He went over to one of his work tables and sifted through his Sunday pages, found a more recent original Sunday India ink page, and signed it this time for Alice [Mrs. Maltin] and me, and signed it “Sparky”, which was his nickname with his friends. So sometimes luck and timing and coincidence play a role in all of this.

C.B.-W.: And it’s probably a really good letter, right?

L.M.: I guess I wrote pretty good letters. I’ve seen a few and they embarrass me now. Like the time I wrote to [film historian] William K. Everson, having just recently met him, telling him I thought Metropolis was boring. I’m not reprinting that anywhere.

*          *          *

[Scott spoke about the principles that motivated him when he embarked on his own writing career…]:

S.E.: I knew what I didn’t want to do more than I did what I wanted to do. I wanted to start writing and interviewing people; I think Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By was a huge influence on me — a whole generation of historians, actually — and I knew what I didn’t want to do, because I was starting to read seriously, read books about writers, read books about artists, and all these other things. And then I’d read books about movie people and they were on such a superficial, trashy level. And I didn’t see any reason why a book about a movie director or an actor should be written on such a mediocre level when you wouldn’t think of writing a book about an author like that. So I was kind of coming around to the idea of writing serious books about people that usually weren’t treated seriously. The first person I interviewed outside of Cleveland — I mean, Andy McLaglen came through to push a movie, or Earl Holliman would come through to push a movie, so I would talk to them — but the first person I interviewed in Los Angeles was John Wayne, and it’s been downhill ever since. I mean, if that’s your first out of the box when you’re 21 years old, why should you be worried about talking to anybody else on the face of the earth, including the Pope?

[…and about approaching future projects as he ages]:

Who knows? At some point you pitch face-forward. Now, of course David McCullough’s 85 years old and he’s still working. That’s great, he’s lucky, he’s got good genes. But you’re not guaranteed that. When I was 35 or even 40, somebody would suggest something, I’d say, “That sounds like fun, I’ve never read that book. Sure, I’ll do it.” Now, I circle and circle and circle, is this worth those years of my life I have remaining, three or four years that I have remaining? Is this guy, is this woman worth the time? It’s an entirely different transaction now than it was.

L.M.: As a reader, I’m going to interject to say “Yes.” Because Scott’s book on John Wayne is the best book on John Wayne, just as his book on Cecil B. DeMille is the definitive book on Cecil B. DeMille. I’m compulsive, but I’ve been tempted to actually discard some of my other books because they’re taking up shelf space.

C.B.-W.: That’s a great compliment.

L.M.: Well, I mean it to be a great compliment, but it’s also the truth. I’m too anal, I can’t get rid of the other books, but if I could tame my instincts I would just say, “These are useless now ’cause Scott’s done the ultimate job.”

C.B.-W.: Scott, that’s funny that you mention David McCullough because I remember hearing an interview with him on NPR where he said the major reason he wrote the book on Harry Truman was because he had been writing a book, or planning to write a book, on Pablo Picasso, and he was such a dreadful human being he couldn’t imagine spending time writing about a dreadful human being. So he said, “I’m gonna write about somebody I like, somebody that’s a nice guy.” So that obviously figures into you as well.

L.M.: You know that old saying, “No man is a hero to his valet.” I’ve heard biographers say that, in a different context, that when they get to really know their subject well, they become disillusioned. I guess that’s just part of the game.

S.E.: Sometimes, sometimes not. People ask me, “What was the book you loved writing the most?” and I always tell them the Lubitsch book, my book on Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise]. Because he was such a fully actualized person, what a shrink would call actualized. He was exactly the person he wanted to be, and he made exactly the films he wanted to make. Nobody got in his way, and nothing got in his way, until his heart broke down. But he was very — he loved being him. And the most difficult book, conversely, was John Ford [Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford]. Because it was like being locked in a telephone booth with twelve Eugene O’Neill characters, and they’re all mean, and they’re all snarling at each other, and they’re all stinking drunk. I had to keep watching the movies to remind myself why I was writing the book. You get over any kind of romantic ideal that talent cares who it happens to. Talent doesn’t care who it happens to. Some people are great stewards of their talent and other people spend it like they’re drunken sailors. Ford was not a particularly pleasant human being, but he was a stupendous artist, a stupendous American artist, and I had to keep watching the movies to remind myself why I was doing the book.

So this is a long, involved way to answer your question. No, I don’t have to love my subject. But I have to respect them as artists. That’s mandatory. That’s mandatory. Now there are people that will spend fifteen years writing a two-volume biography of Josef Goebbels. I am not one of those people. I might read those books, but I have zero interest in spending time with a human beast. There has to be something there to validate that human being in my eyes. It can be their life, it can be their work — hopefully it’s both, but it has to be something.

*          *          *

That’s as much as I was able to record of this productive and stimulating conversation. I wish there was more, but I think that will give you an idea of what a good time was had by all that afternoon. I also remember that in a Q&A with the audience in the second half of the session, someone asked if there were any highly-regarded films that the two men consider overrated, and that Leonard Maltin cited A Place in the Sun (1951) as one that he doesn’t think has aged well. Sorry, I don’t recall which movie(s) Scott Eyman may have mentioned. If anyone reading this happens to have been there in the Cinevent screening room that day, I welcome your memories and reflections in the comments. In the meantime, I’ll move on to the fourth and last day of the weekend.

To be concluded…

Day 2 of Cinevent began bright and early with what was probably the most…the most…well, just about the oddest movie of the whole weekend: Night in Paradise (1946). Produced by Walter Wanger for Universal, it was based on George S. Hellman’s novel Peacock’s Feather, and Wanger had been trying to get it produced ever since snapping up the film rights shortly after the book was published in 1931. For a while, according to Richard Barrios’s program notes, he planned to star Ann Harding and Charles Boyer, and to make it the first feature in three-strip Technicolor. For one reason or another, he lost the services of Ann Harding, which — for the time being — sank the whole project (and instead, Becky Sharp became the first full-Technicolor feature in 1935; Wanger ventured into Tech the following year when he produced The Trail of the Lonesome Pine at Paramount).

Wanger got the project rolling again during a stint at Universal (Wanger was incredibly peripatetic, working at studios all over Hollywood, plus his own Walter Wanger Productions). He got the green light after scoring a box-office bullseye with Arabian Nights (1942), an installment in the studio’s Maria Montez/Jon Hall “King and Queen of Technicolor” series of campy adventures. And so it was that Wanger’s long-cherished film of Peacock’s Feather, now titled Night in Paradise, finally saw the light of a projector lamp in 1946.

In place of Montez and Hall, Wanger cast Merle Oberon (left above) and Montez’s frequent co-star Turhan Bey (below). Casting Oberon was definitely a step up from Maria Montez. Turhan Bey was more like a step across. Born Turhan Sahultavy in Vienna to a Turkish Muslim father and a Czechoslovakian Jewish mother, he and his divorced mom fled Austria when Hitler annexed the country, and they wound up in Los Angeles in 1940, when Turhan was 18. When so many of Hollywood’s leading men marched off to World War II, Bey was one of the stay-at-homes who benefited from the manpower shortage. He was a handsome young devil and really not a bad actor, but he somehow managed to be both exotic and bland at the same time. He had the kind of foreign accent that came of speaking English too precisely, and the blandness made him unthreatening; it was a combination that stood him in good stead for the duration of the war.

The Night in Paradise lobby card above may make it look like one of those Arabian Nights fantasias that flourished on the coattails of 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad, but the setting was Ancient Greece, not Arabia. It takes place at the court of the money-hungry King Croesus of Lydia (Thomas Gomez), who has jilted the sorceress Atossa (Gale Sondergaard) in order to marry wealthy Princess Delarai of Persia (Oberon). Turhan Bey plays Croesus’s counselor Aesop — yes, that Aesop, the guy with all the fables. Aesop is old, ugly, lame and hunchbacked, but one look at the newly arrived Delarai and he’s instantly smitten. So he decides to visit the princess by night. But here’s the catch: Aesop is in disguise. The ugliness and the hump on his back are a put-on, adopted by him on the theory that no king would look for wise counsel from a handsome young man. It’s the handsome young Aesop who comes to Delarai for the night in paradise that gives the movie its title. (Rumor has it that Turhan and Merle’s love scenes continued off the set, despite her being married and his being involved with Lana Turner. Well, just look at these two; can you blame either one of them?) Meanwhile, the jealous Atossa refuses to take being dumped lying down, and she uses her magic to drive the faithless Croesus even madder than he already is.

Needless to say, if you need to cram for a final exam in Ancient Greek history, you probably want to steer clear of Night in Paradise. You may want to steer clear of it anyway; as opulent and colorful as it is — with lavish sets, dazzling costumes and a supporting cast that includes Ray Collins, Ernest Truex, John Litel, Jerome Cowan and Douglass Dumbrille — the story never quite kicks into gear. At Friday’s screening I was still waiting for something to happen when “The End” appeared on the screen. The movie wasn’t exactly a waste of time — at the very least, it’s surely the best movie ever made about the love life of Aesop — but it seemed all wind-up and no pitch. I have a used copy of George Hellman’s novel on order, and the Web site I ordered it from hints at (ahem!) mature pleasures that may have been nixed by the Breen Office in 1946. (A reproduction of the book’s frontispiece shows the sorceress Atossa appearing to Aesop in full-frontal nudity.) As with Day 1’s Repeat Performance, I may have more to say about the novel and its transition to the screen at some later time. For now, moving right along…

Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937) was an installment in the prolific (51 pictures in eight years) Three Mesquiteers series at Republic Pictures. The trio of genial cowpokes (Robert Livingston, Ray “Crash” Corrigan and Max Terhune) take time off from their duties at the ranch to accompany an archaeological expedition to a lost Indian city and help the young woman leading it (Betty Marsh) learn the fate of her father, who disappeared leading a similar expedition to the same destination. In the process, they investigate a series of murders picking off members of the party one by one. The movie was enjoyable, but it was shot in eight days and it looks it; Republic (only two years old at the time) hadn’t yet found its footing as the most polished of the Poverty Row studios; there’s quite a difference between this specimen of the studio’s output and the Masked Marvel serial only five years later.

A more satisfying western was the 1920 William S. Hart silent The Toll Gate. Hart plays Black Deering, a semi-reformed outlaw on the run who takes refuge with an abandoned frontier wife (Anna Q. Nilsson) and her toddler son (“Master” Richard Headrick). He bonds with them so quickly that when a posse shows up on his trail (fortuitously not knowing what he looks like), she doesn’t hesitate to claim he’s her husband. Actually, it turns out that the husband who ran out on her is none other than the former member of Deering’s gang who ratted him out to the law. Director Lambert Hillyer’s scenario thus establishes the perfect set-up for a double dose of revenge before Deering settles down and makes his reformation complete, Nilsson’s Mary Brown having made an honest man of him. The picture had Hart’s trademark dusty realism, and his interplay with Nilsson and young Headrick had the unpretentious ring of truth. This Headrick kid especially, only three at the time, was a real charmer. He had a busy few years in Hollywood, but his screen career was over by the time he was nine. Still, he lived into the 21st century, dying at 84 in November 2001. “Nobody ever talked to him?” Scott Eyman wondered. Evidently not, and that’s a pity.

Richard Barrios did introductory honors again for The Phantom President (1932), one of the most historic musicals Hollywood ever turned out. It’s historic not because it’s one of the great film musicals (it’s pretty good but not great), but because it gives us a permanent record of George M. Cohan, the legendary force of showbiz nature who virtually single-handedly invented the American musical comedy. Personally, he was an arrogant megalomaniac who made Al Jolson look timorous; he made life hell for everybody on the set, especially those whose jobs he thought he could do better — director Norman Taurog, composer Richard Rodgers, lyricist Lorenz Hart — and he bad-mouthed the picture far and wide after it went into release. It was churlish of him; he never realized the inestimable service The Phantom President did to his legend, giving future generations something to go on besides yellowing press clippings and the dwindling memories of those who saw his performances in person.

Cohan plays Theodore K. Blair, prominent banker and front-runner of an unnamed political party for the presidential nomination. Problem is, he’s also a boring old poot who will lose votes every time he opens his mouth. Fortunately for the party, his handlers stumble across the lookalike Peter Varney (Cohan again), a medicine-show song-and-dance man with all the charm and pizzazz Blair lacks, and Varney is recruited to take the banker’s place on the campaign trail. Complications arise when he also takes Blair’s place at the side of one Felicia Hammond (Claudette Colbert), whom Blair harbors vain hopes of making his wife. She has already rejected him in no uncertain terms, but she takes a shine to Varney — thinking, of course, that he’s the same man.

Cohan’s glory days were well behind him by 1932, but he was still the genuine article. He was 54 but could pass for ten years younger, and his dual performance is nicely modulated (aided by some surprisingly sophisticated visual effects). Also, seeing him in action makes a striking counterpoint to James Cagney’s depiction of him ten years later in Yankee Doodle Dandy (which Cohan lived just long enough to see); we can see how one great performer was able to embody another without completely subsuming his own unique personality. Without The Phantom President, we’d still know that Cagney is brilliant in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but we might not know just how brilliant.

Phantom President does have its drawbacks, mostly thanks to Jimmy Durante as Varney’s sidekick. In those days the Great Schnozzola hadn’t yet mellowed into the loveable ham he would become; a little of him went a long way, and there’s a lot of him in The Phantom President (Cohan griped about that too). But the picture’s biting critique of politics as showbiz still has teeth in it (if anything, now more than ever). And Claudette Colbert looks like a million bucks.

The rest of Day 2 we can cover in a few paragraphs. C.B. DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) presented Gloria Swanson at her sleek-and-smartest as a neglected wife tempted away from her lumpen husband (Elliott Dexter) by a smooth-talking roué (Lew Cody), only to learn that the grass isn’t always greener.

Next, a real oddity: Double Whoopee (1929), one of Laurel and Hardy’s last silent shorts — but not silent. Let me explain. In the late 1960s Hal Roach experimented with a way to market his library of silent comedies. He commissioned this pilot from producer Al Kilgore, who removed the short’s intertitles and added a soundtrack with music, sound effects and voices — and hey presto!, a late silent became an early talkie. (Chuck McCann, who passed away just two months ago, voiced both Stan and Ollie, sounding absolutely authentic. Whoever did Jean Harlow as “Swanky Blonde”, however, didn’t even come close.) The result was actually quite good, but in the long run nothing came of the idea, and the reconstituted Double Whoopee became a one-off.

Finally there was Value for Money, a rather sour British comedy from 1955, about a tight-fisted Yorkshireman (John Gregson) who gets involved with a gold-digging London showgirl (Diana Dors), to the wounded dismay of local newspaper reporter Susan Stephen, who (unaccountably) loves him. The picture had excellent Technicolor photography by Geoffrey Unsworth (and Cinevent’s print did it full justice), and Diana Dors showed herself to be not just a luscious eyeful but a comic actress of wit  and charm. Still, the movie was a sour misfire, mainly because of John Gregson’s character — a clueless, mean-spirited boor who in the end gets much better than is coming to him. Somebody like Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers might have managed to make this unpleasant pill eccentrically endearing, but the worthy Gregson wasn’t that kind of actor. Value for Money has its moments of visual and verbal wit, but it’s weighed down by a flinty, unsympathetic center.

Thus ended Friday of Cinevent 50. The weekend had gotten off to a nice start, but Saturday would take things to a whole new level, an almost uninterrupted parade of highlights. I may have to cover the day in more than one post. We’ll see.

To be continued…