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A Jigsaw Mystery

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on September 14, 2022 by Jim LaneOctober 17, 2022

I have an acquaintance who is a collector/dealer of movie memorabilia and ephemera. I’ve known this fellow for 54 years — or rather, let me rephrase that: I knew him 54 years ago, when his younger brother and I were roommates at Sacramento State College (now CSU Sacramento). The collector/dealer’s path and mine have crossed once or twice since then, but the brother, my former roommate, and I have remained reasonably in touch over the years.

We met for lunch recently, and he shared this photo with me. As he told it to me over our sandwiches, these fragments were included in a bookcase-load of material that his older brother acquired last year from the estate of producer Jerry Wald. The bookcase’s contents mainly consisted of leather-bound copies of scripts to pictures Wald had produced (Peyton Place, Wild in the Country, Sons and Lovers, An Affair to Remember, etc.), but there were also these pieces of paper. They were from a single oversize sheet of parchment that had been cut up, cutting carefully around signatures, so that they could be put into a standard-size manila folder.

Unfortunately, as we can clearly see, the roster hasn’t survived intact. My friend tells me there are 100 signatures on what we have; I haven’t counted myself, but looking at it, that sounds about right. And they’re real signatures too, not reproductions, written in ink on parchment. No telling how many more there may have been; my own guess would be somewhere between 20 and 40.

Since that day at lunch, my friend has IM’d me with a correction. It turns out this incomplete jigsaw puzzle wasn’t among that recently-acquired Jerry Wald collection after all. On the contrary, the collector brother told him he’s had this for at least thirty years. So long, he says, that he’s no longer sure exactly where he got it — but he thinks it was among a large batch of film ephemera he bought from another dealer in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a batch that included scripts and business documents from the Hal Roach Studios. 

On that narrow thread, I ran the picture by historian Richard M. Roberts, who specializes in silent comedy and knows more about Hal Roach’s career than Roach himself ever did. Richard didn’t know of any possible connection to Roach; he speculated only that the occasion was some sort of event at Paramount, since many (if not most) of the names here were Paramount employees at the time; beyond that he couldn’t say, though he did allow as how it was “an interesting bunch of autographs.”

It is indeed. And by the way, what do we mean by “at the time”? Well, as it happens, we can date this paper pretty narrowly based on internal evidence. At the due east point on the paper is the signature of Gale Sondergaard. Her first picture, Warner Bros.’ Anthony Adverse, was released in August 1936; it’s a cinch she wouldn’t have found herself in such illustrious company before then, and probably not till some time after, when she’d had a chance to make a splash with her showcase performance (she went on to win an Oscar for it). At the other end of the time-window, the southeast quadrant has the signature of composer Hugo Riesenfeld; he died on September 10, 1939 after a severe and lengthy illness. I don’t know how severe or lengthy that illness was, but let’s say it lasted most of 1939; let’s also say Gale Sondergaard didn’t break into the A-List until at least January 1937. Allowing that, it’s reasonable to say this roster is from sometime during 1937 or ’38. 

But what was the occasion? At the center of the sheet there’s a wide gap, but we can glimpse the remnants of printed red letters that look like they may have formed the word “welcome”. Under the final “e” of “welcome” there’s another trace of red ink that suggests there were additional words, or perhaps a name, under that, and then there’s a third row consisting of white dots. This gap in the puzzle is what creates the mystery; if that weren’t missing, the purpose of this sheet of signatures might be crystal clear.

Even as it stands, there are interesting points to be gleaned from these signatures. Just under the w-e-l of “welcome” is a trio of noted German expatriate directors: Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, and none other than that era’s supreme genius of the stage, Max Reinhardt himself. Two names below Reinhardt is Rouben Mamoulian (who directed High, Wide and Handsome at Paramount in 1937), but between them is what looks like someone named Maria Solvez. Who in the world could that be? For that matter, who are Nick Carter, Guillermo Areos, Manny Wolfe, Ralph Wilk, and several others whose handwriting is — to me at least — illegible?

Walter James Westmore of the Westmore makeup dynasty may have been billed as “Wally” in his 463 screen credits, but he signed this sheet “Wallie” (east of center, next to the big gap in the middle). Similarly, Cecil B. DeMille may have billed himself with an uppercase “D”, but here (across that gap from Wallie Westmore) he spells his last name “deMille”, just like brother William, niece Agnes, and the rest of their family always did. And in the southeast quadrant, between casting director Fred Schuessler (Gone With the Wind, Christopher Strong, King Kong [’33]) and costume designer Ali Hubert (The Life of Emile Zola, The Merry Widow [’34]), actor Joseph Schildkraut (who won an Oscar the same year as Gale Sondergaard) spells his first name “Josef”, the way his parents did when they named their newborn son in Vienna in 1896. And the Oscar-winning cinematographer we know as Tony Gaudio signs here (southwest, fourth row from bottom) with his given name of Gaetano.

Adding to the mystery of it all is the fact that Hollywood people, then as now, didn’t as a rule go around collecting each other’s autographs, except on checks and contracts. So who collected all these, and why? The only clue I can offer is this — another collection of celebrity signatures on parchment, although here they’re lithographic reproductions, not the real McCoy. There’s no mystery to this parchment; it was an insert in the souvenir program for The House of Rothschild (1934) starring George Arliss, Loretta Young, Robert Young and Boris Karloff. As you can see, it’s a sort of birthday card, congratulating Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck on the first anniversary of 20th Century Pictures and the release of Rothschild. From the top row (Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Marie Dressler) to the bottom (Johnny Weissmuller, Adrienne Ames, Toby Wing, Randolph Scott, Jeanette MacDonald), it’s an impressive roster. (And about to become two less: When Rothschild premiered on April 7, 1934, Marie Dressler had only three-and-a-half months left; she would die of cancer on July 28. Later, in September, 26-year-old crooner Russ Columbo [fourth row from bottom] would be shot to death in a freak accident with an antique dueling pistol.)

Clearly, I think, the parchment above was something along the lines of this, wishing somebody or something welcome the way this wishes happy birthday and congratulations. But who, why, and when…? Barring some lucky miracle, I guess we’ll never know. Pretty much everybody who signed it had left us by the end of the 1980s; actor Fritz Feld (southwest quadrant) made it to 1993, but he died of dementia, so who knows how much he would have remembered that late? I don’t know when my friend’s collector brother acquired the chart (neither, evidently, does he for sure), but by the time he did, there was probably nobody left to ask about it.

As Hollywood mysteries go, this one is comparatively trivial — but that doesn’t make it any less of a mystery. So I offer it here for study and speculation. Comments, hypotheses, ruminations are welcome. Meanwhile, I look forward to the day that some unexpected revelation, some offhand comment in some history, memoir or oral-history interview sheds light on what happened at Paramount (or wherever) in 1937 (or whenever) to make all those people write their names on a sheet of parchment to prove they were there.

UPDATE 9/20/22:

My friend Blair Leatherwood, who has access to a number of newspaper archives as part of his genealogical research, has been able to fill in a few gaps in our knowledge of these signatories:

Maria Solveg (not “Solvez”) was, like the three names above her — Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, Max Reinhardt — a German expatriate. She and her husband Ernst Matray (Maria sometimes billed herself under her married name) first came to America with Reinhardt’s company in 1927, performing as a dance team and, in her case, actress. In 1933 the Matrays joined the exodus of German Jews who had the foresight and good fortune to flee Nazi Germany while the getting was good, first to France, then Great Britain, and finally the U.S. Significantly for our purposes, in August and September 1938 she was in Los Angeles working as Reinhardt’s assistant director on a production of Faust at the Pilgrimage Outdoor Theatre (today, the John Anson Ford Theatre) in the Hollywood Hills; that may narrow down even further the dating of this jigsaw puzzle. At some point, probably in 1940, Maria became a U.S. citizen and, in the words of Reinhardt’s son and biographer Gottfried, the Master’s “highly efficient assistant on Broadway”. Also a dancer and choreographer, she worked in some capacity (according to her Trivia page on the IMDb) on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Pride and Prejudice (’40), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (’41), White Cargo, Random Harvest (both ’42), Swing Fever (’43), Step Lively (’44), Murder in the Music Hall (’46) and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (’47), among others. Whatever she did, she was not credited on most of those, either on screen or on the IMDb. By the late 1950s she was back in West Germany, the country having been safely de-Nazified, and she reclaimed her German citizenship in 1960. By then she had segued into screenwriting, and she worked steadily at that until 1992. She died in Munich in 1993, age 86.

Ralph Wilk (southwest quadrant, above Torben Meyer and Gaetano Gaudio) was born in Minneapolis in 1894 and lived in Los Angeles from 1927 until his death on June 9, 1949, age 55. According to his obituary in the L.A. Times, he was “West Coast manager of Film Trade”, but that was the result of either sloppy obituary writing or faulty information supplied to the paper; in fact, Ralph Wilk was the L.A. representative for Film Daily, a daily trade paper that published from 1918 to 1970.

Manny Wolfe (top left corner) was, from July 1932 to May ’39, head of the Paramount story department. Before that, he had been story editor at First National Pictures. From September 1928, First National was a subsidiary of Warner Bros.; flush with profits from The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, the Bros. had purchased a 58 percent share of First National to gain access to FN’s theater chain and Burbank studio complex (which remains the Warner Bros. Studio to this day). Warners eventually acquired a total of 87.5 percent, and First National became a wholly-owned subsidiary, with pictures released under both FN and Warners banners until 1936, when First National was dissolved. This is all necessary background to the following: While Manny Wolfe was at First National, across the lot at Warner Bros. there was a press agent and aspiring playwright named Norman Krasna. Krasna’s first produced play was Louder, Please, about two Hollywood publicity men who fake the disappearance of a movie star, with characters reportedly based on easily recognized persons around the Warners-First National lot. The play opened on Broadway on November 12, 1931 and ran for 68 performances. The Louder, Please playbill bears the credit, “A.L. JONES (By arrangement with Manny Wolfe) PRESENTS…” My guess is that Wolfe and Krasna knew each other at the studio, Krasna showed Wolfe his script, and Wolfe hustled it around New York, acting as Krasna’s unofficial agent and wangling an associate-producer credit on the production (not to mention pocketing a tidy sum in that “arrangement” with A.L. Jones). The play made enough of a splash that Krasna landed a writing gig at Columbia in 1932; it may have gotten Wolfe the job at Paramount as well. Whatever the case, Wolfe stayed at Paramount until May 1939, when he left “to assume a producer’s post at another studio.” What that studio was is not known, but Wolfe never seems to have earned a producer credit — or a writer’s for that matter. For all we know, he did fine work as a story editor, but that’s the kind of administrative position that leaves little trace except in a studio’s corporate records. Krasna, on the other hand, went on to a long and distinguished career on Broadway and in Hollywood as both writer and director, earning an Oscar for writing Princess O’Rourke (1943) and three other nominations before his death in 1984. What ever became of Manny Wolfe after 1939, I haven’t been able to ascertain.

Guillermo Arcos (not “Areos”; due west, under Robert Florey and Melvyn Douglas) was born in Spain in 1880. He is, according to Blair, “listed on various documents (border crossing, WW II draft registration card, etc.) as an artist and as a jeweler. He also appears to have been a classical guitarist of some note.” At first I thought that, since Arcos would have been 60 in 1940, that draft card could not have been his (maybe a son, or even grandson) — but no, the card gives his birth date as July 8, 1880 (check!) and his “present” age as 62 (double check!). On IMDb, he has a handful of Spanish-language acting credits, plus uncredited (and probably non-dialogue) bits in A Message to Garcia and Ramona (both 1936). This photo is from his “Declaration of Intent”, a step in applying for U.S. citizenship, dated January 5, 1949. Also, an undated newspaper item from sometime in 1951-53 mentions him having given a guitar concert in Carnegie Hall “33 years ago” and credits him with having played incidental music for Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951). Coming at this from another angle, on FindAGrave.com I found a listing for Pilar Arcos, born in Havana, Cuba in 1893. She was an actress and operatic soprano, and according to the listing, in 1917, while studying at the Conservatory of Madrid, she “married a guitar teacher/actor Guillermo Arcos.” (In early 1917 Guillermo would have been 36, Pilar 23. There may have been some urgency to their nuptials: Their first child, a boy William, was born October 28, 1917 in Houston, Texas.) In 1935, Pilar traveled to Spain to continue her singing career, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War drove her back to North America. Were she and Guillermo still together by then? Perhaps, or perhaps they had already separated. In any case, they were divorced in December 1939; on May 6, 1941 Guillermo married his second wife, Concepción. Guillermo died at 78 in 1959. Pilar outlived him by over 30 years; she died in 1990, age 96. Both died in Los Angeles, but they are not buried together. Pilar rests in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, beside her and Guillermo’s daughter Helen (1919-73), whom she outlived by 16 years. Guillermo’s resting place I was unable to locate.

If any other information comes to light about the less-familiar names on the parchment, I’ll post another update — and another, and another, as needed. Watch this space!

 

Posted in Blog Entries

Return of “Movie” Souvenir Playing Cards

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jim LaneAugust 21, 2022

I’ve decided it’s time to revive a series I began in the first year of Cinedrome, and which somehow fell by the wayside after only a couple of months and four posts. That series was an examination of a deck of “Movie” Souvenir Playing Cards, surely the first of its kind, manufactured and sold by the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio, between 1916 (when they were copyrighted by one M.J. Moriarty) and sometime in the early 1920s. You can find the original posts above on the “Series” drop-down menu. Here, however, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen or may have forgotten what I wrote before, I’m republishing my introductory post (updating some information and replacing links that have gone dead), which segued into the first examination of one of the cards in the deck — in this case, the King of Hearts, H.B. Warner. At the end, I’ll add links to the three subsequent posts in the series. After that, I’ll pick up where I left off, shuffling the deck to see which card, with whose picture, pops up, and sharing what I’m able to learn about them. I don’t know who that’ll be yet; stay tuned…

*                         *                         *

 

Try to imagine a time when a deck of cards with movie star pictures was a novelty. It’s not easy, is it? We can hardly even imagine a time when a movie star was such a novelty that the word “movie” itself was in quotes. But here it is, courtesy of M.J. Moriarty and the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

When I got this deck of cards as an opening-night gift from the director of a show I was in, about 50 years ago, I thought it was something really rare — all 54 cards (including the Joker and the descriptor card shown at right) complete and unblemished, with even the gilded edges of the cards reasonably intact after who knew how many years. Yes, a singular rarity, I thought. I know better now. These Moriarty movie cards are collectible, to be sure, but they don’t seem to be particularly rare. A deck cost fifty cents in 1916 — $13.59 in 2022 dollars, or twice what a regular deck costs now. Collector-dealer Cliff Aliperti said in 2010 that a deck could sell for anywhere from $75 to $150, depending on condition; I don’t know what his estimate would be today, but as I write this in August 2022, I’ve just won an auction on eBay for a different version of the deck, this one costing me $127.34 (including tax and shipping). There’s also a deck offered at the Buy It Now price of $229.99. Then again, over the last twenty years or so, I’ve seen more than one deck in dealers’ rooms and at memorabilia fairs going for $40 or less.
 

The relative commonness of these decks at collector shows suggests to me that they were probably treated as collectibles from day one; people bought them to keep and look at the pictures, not to face the wear and tear of their Tuesday night whist clubs. (When was the last time you saw a 100-year-old deck of cards in perfect condition?)

 

That may be changing. It’s becoming common practice among dealers now to break up the decks and sell the cards one at a time. At this moment in 2022, there are 54 individual cards available on eBay at prices ranging from five to twelve dollars. At that rate, a deck that Cliff Aliperti once said was worth no more than $150 (and which I’ve seen much lower) can bring a dealer as much as $630 or more. (Some cards are worth more than others, like this Charlie Chaplin Joker; it brings a premium because it’s the one instance where the card and the personality are perfectly matched — and probably also because Chaplin is the one person in the deck whom pretty much everybody recognizes.) This deck-splitting makes good business sense, but it probably means that decks that survived the last hundred years in near-mint condition are going to have a tough time making it through the next ten.

These decks first appeared in 1916 — at least that’s the copyright date on the card backing. Stars came, went, and changed positions in the deck, and some people (here, for example, at Cliff Aliperti’s Immortal Ephemera) have made a study of comparing and contrasting the decks that can still be found. Certain evidence of the cards themselves suggests that that they stopped production in 1922 at the latest: Wallace Reid appears on the 4 of Spades, and Reid died in January 1923; that’s not conclusive, though, because two other actors (Nicholas Dunaew and Richard C. Travers) occupied that card at one time or another. More persuasive is the case of Mary Miles Minter, the only occupant (so far known) of the 9 of Diamonds. Minter’s career was wrecked in the backwash of the William Desmond Taylor murder in February 1922, when her indiscreet love letters to the late director (30 years her senior) shattered her virgin-pure screen image. But even if the cards were still in production in 1922 (probably unlikely), they stopped pretty early. Many of the stars most associated with the silent era — Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Colleen Moore, Harry Langdon, Ramon Novarro, Bebe Daniels, Bessie Love — hadn’t made their big splash yet and don’t appear in any version of the deck.

Others might be expected to show up but don’t. Conspicuous by their absence are the King and Queen of Hollywood (even before their marriage made it official), Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford — although their colleague in United Artists, Chaplin, is Clown Prince of the deck. Dorothy Gish (5 of Clubs) appears, but not her sister Lillian, much the bigger star. And we have Mabel Normand (10 of Clubs) but not her teammate Roscoe Arbuckle, with whom she made dozens of popular Mack Sennett comedies between 1912 and ’16. When these cards hit the market, Arbuckle’s legal troubles were still five years in the future, but he appears in no extant version of the deck, although “Fatty and Mabel” were as much a team as Laurel and Hardy would later be. 

Now a word about the card backing — “the famous painting, ‘The Chariot Race'”, as the descriptor card says. The cards show only a detail; here’s a more complete look at the painting. It was indeed pretty famous during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was the work of Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), a sort of Hungarian Norman Rockwell of the era. Von Wagner painted at least three versions of the painting, the first one in 1873 for the Vienna Exposition. A second version went on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, and another — or perhaps the same one — at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The painting sparked a national craze, with etchings and lithograph prints for sale everywhere. Contrary to what some have said, it does not reproduce a scene from Ben-Hur, which wasn’t published until 1880; indeed, the painting and its pop-culture clones may have inspired Gen. Lew Wallace to include such a scene in his novel. In point of fact, the full title of the work is “Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus, Rome, in the Presence of the Emperor Domitian”, which would have been several decades after Judah Ben-Hur and Messala had their fateful showdown in Antioch’s Circus Maximus. Only one of von Wagner’s versions of the painting is known to survive; it hangs today in the Manchester Art Gallery in England. 

But back to those 53 faces — “every one a favorite of yours”, according to the deck’s promo. So many of those favorites are forgotten today — victims of fickle audiences even in their own lifetimes, then victimized again by the passage of time and Hollywood’s too-little-much-too-late attitude toward film preservation. They’re not only forgotten, but in many cases we can’t even refresh our memories; the movies these “favorites” made, more often than not, are lost forever. Their careers have proven as ephemeral as if they never work anywhere but on the stage. They made dozens, even hundreds of movies, yet now they are merely faces on an antique deck of cards, curious faces with names that nobody living recognizes or remembers.

I thought it would be a good idea to try to fight back, on their behalf, against that oblivion — to take these cards one at a time and review what we can know now of the lives and careers behind those “beautiful halftone portraits.” Chaplin hardly needs it, of course, but what about House Peters, Mildred Harris, Wanda Hawley, George Larkin? Or Lillian Walker, Bessie Barriscale, June Caprice, Pauline Curley? I’ll be shuffling the deck from time to time, cutting the cards and seeing what comes up. Maybe we can uncover some sense of why these names and faces were popular enough to be included in a deck of cards — and why the cards were bought, and enjoyed, and even cherished and preserved so carefully for a hundred years and more.

*                         *                         *

King of Hearts – H.B. Warner

 

 

Here’s an easy one for starters. Every true film buff knows Henry Byron Charles Stewart Warner-Lickford, although they might have to look twice to recognize the H.B. Warner they remember in this dapper, Arrow-collared, surprisingly youthful gent-about-town. This portrait may date from Warner’s entry into movies, when he was 38; that would have made the picture a couple of years old when the deck was published, but that sort of thing is not unheard of among actors’ head shots.

So film buffs know the name, even if the face comes as a bit of a surprise — but what about those less devout moviegoers, who don’t make a practice of memorizing the name of every Thurston Hall or J. Edward Bromberg who marches across the screen? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I think it just may be that H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by more people alive today than anyone else in the M.J. Moriarty deck. Yes, maybe even more than Charlie Chaplin.

Note I said “seen by”, not “familiar to”. So take another look. Try to add, oh, maybe 30 years to that face. Look especially at the eyes. Ring any bells? Well…

 

 
 
How about this? That’s right, H.B. Warner was old Mr. Gower, the druggist who slaps young George Bailey around the back room of his store in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and who, in the world where George was never born, is the “rummy” who “spent twenty years in prison for poisonin’ a kid.” I’ll bet that anyone who ever saw Warner’s performance in It’s a Wonderful Life has never forgotten it, even if they never took the trouble to find out the actor’s name.
 
By 1946, the year of Wonderful Life, Warner had become a steady member of Capra’s informal stock company. This was the fifth of his six pictures for Capra, and those six are a major reason why I suggest H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by so many. He played the judge hearing Gary Cooper’s case in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) — “Not only are you not insane — you’re the sanest man who ever walked into this courtroom!” It’s a hallelujah moment, provided by writer Robert Riskin and delivered by H.B. Warner.
 
 

In 1937, Capra gave Warner the opportunity to deliver probably his best screen performance. The picture was Lost Horizon, from James Hilton’s utopian romance about a group of refugees from war-torn “civilization” who find themselves in the remote Himalayan paradise of  Shangri-La. Warner (here with Isabel Jewell, Edward Everett Horton, Ronald Colman and Thomas Mitchell) played Chang, their mysterious escort from the snowbound wreck of their plane to the Edenic Valley of the Blue Moon, and their host after they arrive. Endlessly cordial, welcoming and polite, he nevertheless is inscrutably vague about when and how they will ever be able to return to their homes. Warner got an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, but he didn’t win; he lost out to Joseph Schildkraut as Alfred Dreyfus in Warner Bros.’ The Life of Emile Zola. That’s a worthy performance, but I’m not at all sure the Academy made the right call. H.B. Warner’s other pictures for Capra were You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  (1939, as the Senate Majority Leader) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).

But you don’t get your picture on a deck of cards for supporting and character roles in your twilight years, however memorable. What about his career earlier, when he appeared on the King of Hearts sometime between 1916 and 1920? Well, unfortunately, that’s something we’re going to bump up against over and over as we discuss this antique deck of cards — and for that matter, anything else about the silent era. The survival rate of movies made between 1890 and and 1920 is only a cut or two above snowball-in-hell level; for much of Warner’s career we have to piece together what information we can from secondary sources.

We know that he made his Broadway debut on November 24, 1902 at the age of 27 (billed as “Harry Warner”), in Audrey by Harriet Ford and E.F. Boddington. In 1910 he appeared in Alias Jimmy Valentine, one of the smash hits of the early 20th century stage, adapted from the O. Henry story “A Retrieved Reformation.” He must have made quite an impression in that, because in 1914, when he filmed another one of his stage successes, The Ghost Breaker, the laudatory review in Variety mentioned him as “he of ‘Jimmy Valentine’ fame.” The Ghost Breaker was his third picture in 1914, and was co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille. They would work together again, and would in fact make their last picture together — but more of that anon.

Warner was a veteran stage star by the time his movie career really got underway in the mid ‘teens, and he established himself (if we can believe his Variety reviews) as an appealing romantic lead in titles like The Raiders, Shell 43 and The Vagabond Prince (all 1916), Danger Trail (’17) and The Pagan God (’19). He continued to appear on Broadway until Silence in the winter of 1924-25 (which he also filmed in 1926); after that he was a Hollywood actor for good.

At least one of H.B. Warner’s silent movies has survived intact, and it’s a biggie: Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacularly reverent The King of Kings (1927), in which Warner played the title role. The movie was a triumph of prestige and box office for DeMille; in reviewing it, Variety’s legendary editor Sime Silverman was quite tongue-tied with awe; in 24 column inches, Silverman (normally so terse and pithy) fairly stumbles over himself groping for superlatives. The movie is a bit too earnestly pious for modern tastes, but its appeal for 1927 audiences is still understandable, and DeMille’s showmanship is at its smoothest. Most memorably, Warner’s performance, in an age when accusations of sacrilege were a very real concern, is excellent. Here’s a strikingly dramatic shot of him at the Crucifixion, seen from the viewpoint of Jesus’s mother Mary mourning at the foot of the Cross.

 

 

 

And here, just to give a flavor of the lavishness of DeMille’s picture, is a frame from one of King of Kings‘s two Technicolor sequences, showing the resurrrected Christ comforting Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) at the opening to the tomb on Easter morning. (On a curious side note: in King of Kings Judas Iscariot was played by none other than the self-same Joseph Schildkraut who ten years later would ace Warner out of that Oscar.)

 
 
 
 
 
 
With the coming of sound, H.B. Warner was well into his fifties, so character parts became his lot as they do for nearly all actors as they age. And it proved to be a fertile field for him; after King of Kings there were well over a hundred film appearances in the 29 years that remained to him — Lost Horizon and It’s a Wonderful Life were only two of them. Here’s one that movie buffs particularly cherish: Warner playing himself in 1950’s Sunset Blvd. (though unidentified until the closing credits), as one of the has-been “waxworks” playing bridge with Gloria Swanson’s mad Norma Desmond. Staring him down is, of course, Buster Keaton. (And on a cautionary note, here’s an example of what a decade of sodden alcoholism can do to you: Warner and Keaton look about the same age; actually, Keaton was twenty years younger, almost to the day.)
 
 
 
 
 
H.B. Warner’s final screen appearance was a poignant one. He was approaching 80 and living at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills in 1955 when the call came from his old friend Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille was planning a massive spectacle expanding the Biblical section of his 1923 hit The Ten Commandments, and he had a part for H.B. if he felt up to it. The role was identified in the script as “Amminadab”, an aging Israelite setting out on the Exodus from Egypt, even though he knows he’ll never see the Promised Land — indeed, probably won’t live out the day. The actor carrying him in this shot, Donald Curtis, remembered that Warner weighed no more than a child, and carrying him wasn’t merely in the script, it was a necessity: “It was clear H.B. couldn’t walk — could barely breathe.” He had come to the set in an ambulance and lay on a stretcher, breathing through an oxygen mask, until the cameras were ready to roll. In the script, he had a rather complex speech adapted from Psalm 22, but he couldn’t manage it, so DeMille told him to say whatever he wanted, and Curtis and Nina Foch would work with it. H.B. Warner’s last words in his 137th movie, after 53 years as an actor, were: “I am poured out like water, my strength dried up into the dust of death.” 
 
Donald Curtis believed the old boy could only have weeks to live, but he was wrong. In fact, H.B. Warner lasted three more years; he died on December 21, 1958, 56 days after his 83rd birthday.
 

*                         *                         *

 
 
 
 
9 of Diamonds — Mary Miles Minter
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
5 of Spades — George Walsh
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3 of Hearts — Geraldine Farrar
 
Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 — Day 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 — Day 3

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on July 4, 2022 by Jim LaneJuly 6, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tangled Angler (1941) made a nice companion piece to Day 1’s Marry Me Again, since it was written and directed by Frank Tashlin before giving up cartoons for live action. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), it tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be concluded…

Posted in Blog Entries

Picture Show 2022 – Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on, to after the lunch break…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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4

  • 40th Anniversary Tour: Jesus Christ Superstar

A

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

B

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

C

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

D

  • “Don’t Stay Away Too Long…”

E

  • Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

F

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

G

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

H

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

I

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

J

  • Jigsaw Mystery — Solved?

L

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

M

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

N

  • Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

O

  • Our Mr. Webb

P

  • Picture Show 2022 – Day 2
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 1
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 3
  • Picture Show 2022 — Day 4
  • Picture Show 2022 — Prelude
  • Please Stay Tuned

R

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

S

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

T

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

U

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

W

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

Y

  • Yuletide 2018

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