Day 3 of The Picture Show began with Chapters 8-11 of The Purple Monster Strikes. Things are getting a little repetitive — sometimes literally, as the two directors (Spencer Bennett, Fred C. Brannon) and six writers (do you really care?) begin stretching things by recapping earlier plot points and cliffhanger thrills. Thus does Republic turn 12 chapters into 15. Bob Bloom’s program notes, quoting movie-serial blogger Jerry Blake, tell us that (1) Purple Monster boasts a plethora of fine cliffhangers, many of them supplied by those ingeniously resourceful special-effects artists, brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker; and (2) this was one of the last Republic serials to make extensive use of the brothers’ original effects; henceforth, for the ten years or so left to Republic serials, the studio would rely more on stock footage of their earlier work.

Then it was time for The Picture Show’s annual Saturday morning animation program, curated and annotated by the worthy Stewart McKissick. And here I’m forced to make a confession that I’ve been dreading. It seems that at last year’s animation program, the schedule included Frank Tashlin’s The Tangled Angler (Columbia, 1941), and the program book reflected that. However, the supplier sent the wrong print: Tangled Travels (also Columbia, 1944) arrived instead of The Tangled Angler. The substitution came too late to change the book, and the book was what I relied on in my post. (Those cartoons do tend to blur together if you’re not careful.) In writing my post last year, I refreshed my memory (which, as it happened, was faulty) with The Tangled Angler on YouTube. Fortunately, Tangled Travels is also on YouTube, so I’ve been able to update my post from last year (I had hoped to make the change quietly with nobody the wiser, but I included an image from Angler in my cartoon collage — there it is again below, third row center — and it couldn’t be removed). Anyhow, The Tangled Angler made its belated appearance this year, and I’ve transferred my remarks from last year’s post to this one.

As for this year’s cartoons (with links to YouTube where available):

Joint Wipers (1932) (top row, left) was an example of the other Tom and Jerry, the ones — humans, not cat and mouse — produced by Van Beuren Studios between 1931 and ’33. In this one the boys are plumbers, summoned to fix some leaky pipes and only making matters worse, with an amusing song-and-dance interlude in the midst of all the water damage. The YouTube link above has a rather blurry image; the image is better at this link, albeit with a rambling commentary by one Justin Leal.

Also from 1932, Hollywood Diet was a Terrytoon about “Dr. Fathead’s House of Painless Fat Removing” — in later terms, a weight-loss clinic. The fat jokes came thick and heavy (if you’ll pardon the expression), with clients — mainly lazy, spoiled and obese Hollywood housewives — carted around on hand-trucks by sweating attendants and shoveled into moving vans for transport. Fat-shaming was alive and well in 1932, and this one is not for the sensitive. So be warned before you hop over to YouTube. 

With Down Among the Sugar Cane (top row, right) we continued to linger in 1932, for a bouncing-ball singalong from Max and Dave Fleischer. After their customary surrealistic imagery, the singing was led by winsome Lillian Roth (whose troubles with alcohol, documented in the book and movie I’ll Cry Tomorrow, were not yet generally known). Like last year’s You Try Somebody Else, the song was an unfamiliar one, but the Picture Show audience gamely warbled along. (The Fleischers were always good about planting the tune firmly in the audience’s head before asking anyone to sing.)

We left 1932 behind with Ham and Eggs (1933) (second row, right), one of Walter Lantz’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for Universal. Oswald’s back story is more interesting that any of his cartoons. He had been poached from Walt Disney in 1927, forcing Disney to come up with some other tent-pole character (the result was Mickey Mouse, and no one ever wrestled a character away from Walt Disney again). Meanwhile, at Universal, Charles Mintz and George Winkler tried to make something of Oswald; eventually the character fell into Lantz’s hands. It wasn’t until the introduction of Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker that Walter Lantz struck cartoon gold; until then, Lantz, like Mintz and Winkler before him, was unable to make Oswald anything more that what he had been all along: a dry run for Mickey Mouse. Still, Lantz’s Oswald cartoons weren’t bad, and this one was enjoyable. In it, Oswald and his girl (who looks more like a dog than a rabbit to me) run a short-order diner, dealing with a succession of querulous customers with a smile and a song. Fred “Tex” Avery, early in his career, was among the animators.

The Masque Raid (1937)  was a Krazy Kat cartoon produced by the busy Charles Mintz for Columbia. This was an example of a sub-genre of cartoon that appeared regularly in the 1930s: After hours in some commercial establishment (bookstore, food market, toy shop, newsstand, etc.), the products on the shelves come to life and cavort until the dawn’s early light. Here it was a costume shop, and Krazy is the night watchman observing the doings of various exotic garments as they spring off the racks, all while a rainstorm rages outside. Spoiler alert: Krazy has dozed off on the job, and it’s all a dream.

She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (1937) (second row, left) was my favorite cartoon on the program — as, indeed, it’s been a favorite of mine ever since it cropped up on television in the 1950s. (Alas, Warner Bros. cartoons are thin on the ground at YouTube, and I’m unable to link to this one.) This was the first color cartoon of the day — but it was a bit of a tease, as it takes place in a movie theater and much of its running time is taken up (as in the illustration) with the black-and-white films on the screen. They were fun, though; the main feature was a spoof of The Petrified Forest (“The Petrified Florist“), featuring cameo appearances by animated caricatures of Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. No Bogart, however. Bogie’s stardom was still a few years off, and odds are that even the best caricature of him (there were a number of good ones to come in the ’40s) would have gone unrecognized by 1937 audiences, while everyone knew Bette and Leslie.

The Frog Pond (1938) was directed by Ub Iwerks for Columbia during his years away from Disney. The story wanders all over the place, but pleasantly. What begins with fairly straight anthropomorphic-frog antics around a lily pond segues into the story of a sort of frog gang-lord enlisting underlings to build him a castle on a particularly roomy lily pad, then throwing himself a party at a wetland nightclub, with elaborate Busby-Berkeley-style song and dance, and finally being sent (literally) down the river to land in Croak Croak Prison (“Croak Croak”/”Sing Sing”, get it?). It ends with the Frogfather smashing rocks to spell out “Crime Does Not Pay”.

Then, at last, we got the long-delayed screening of The Tangled Angler (1941), directed by Frank Tashlin for Columbia. Last year this was planned to be a sort of companion piece to Tashlin’s live-action comedy Marry Me Again (1953) with Robert Cummings and Marie Wilson, Tashlin being the only cartoon director to transition successfully to live-action while preserving his freewheeling cartoon style. Alas, there was no Tashlin picture to go with it this year, so Angler was forced to stand on its own — which it did very nicely, thank you. Made during his brief one-year sojourn at Columbia’s cartoon unit between stints at Warner Bros. (the Looney Tunes influence is clear), Angler tells of the battle between a fisherman pelican and the slippery (in every sense) fish he can’t manage to land. 

Dance of the Weed (1941) (bottom row, left) was produced at MGM by Rudolf Ising (during a hiatus in his partnership with Hugh Harman). Heavily influenced by Fantasia the year before, and foreshadowing Bambi to come in ’42, it was a lush pastoral ballet with dancing flora of various botanical phyla and featuring a flirtatious pas de deux between a gallumphing yellow-brown weed and a delicate green-and-orange poppy. It was gorgeously colorful, with individual images suitable for framing. Interesting sidelight: One of the cartoon’s uncredited writers was Gus Arriola, who later in 1941 left MGM’s cartoon unit to create the comic strip Gordo for United Features Syndicate; he would write and draw the strip until 1985.

SH-H-H-H-H-H (1955) (bottom row, right) was the great Tex Avery’s swan song as a writer/director of theatrical cartoons. Fired by MGM in 1953, he landed back where he started with Walter Lantz at Universal (Universal International, by then). SH-H-H-H-H-H shows him with his wit and talent undimmed. The story: A nightclub musician, his nerves jangled by the constant cacophony of the band he plays with, goes off to a resort in the Swiss Alps (“The Hush-Hush Lodge”) for rest, relaxation, and regeneration — only to be jangled anew by the guests in the room next door. Be prepared for a twist ending.

Nick Santa Maria — not only Benny Biffle of Michael Schlesinger’s 1930s-style Biffle and Shooster shorts, but also a devoted authority on Abbott and Costello — introduced the duo’s Keep ‘Em Flying from their busy year of 1941 (January: Buck Privates; May: In the Navy; August: Hold That Ghost; then this one in November — not to mention Ride ‘Em Cowboy, released in January ’42 but filmed in ’41). This completed Bud and Lou’s trilogy of service comedies begun with Buck Privates and In the Navy; they wouldn’t return to the genre until Buck Privates Come Home in 1947, which actually veered off on a non-military tangent. In the meantime, they played Blackie (Bud) and Heathcliff (Lou), sidekicks to carnival stunt pilot Jinx Roberts (Dick Foran) who become part of his ground crew when he enlists in the U.S. Army Air Corps. (By mid-1941 it was generally accepted that we’d be in that war of Hitler’s sooner or later — though nobody expected Pearl Harbor, exactly.)

Also in the cast was band singer Carol Bruce, whose movie career never really took off, but who was good enough to deserve better breaks. All through the screening I struggled to figure out why she looked so familiar, but it never came. It wasn’t until later, reading Dave Domagala’s program notes, that I got my answer: From 1978 to ’82 she had a recurring role on WKRP in Cincinnati as Lillian Carlson, the flinty station owner and mother of manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump). I would never have figured that out on my own, but now that I know, I can see it. The eyes, I think, are a bit of a giveaway.

Another female holding her own with Bud and Lou — not surprisingly — was Martha Raye, hilarious again as identical twins, one sweet, shy and demure, the other — well, more like Martha Raye. Her scenes, especially with Lou (one sister has a crush on him, the other doesn’t) and her rousing delivery of the hit song “Pig Foot Pete”, were highlights. Beyond that, Abbott and Costello are already falling into a bit of a routine formula — not surprising when you’re cranking pictures out as fast as this.

After the lunch break came Lights Out (1923). I’m sorry I didn’t see this one — took too long for lunch, then opted for the dealers’ room instead — because it sounds interesting. For one thing, it was presented in digital projection rather than the usual 16mm because it was believed lost until 2021, when a digital copy (labeled with the wrong title) was found to have been gifted to the Library of Congress by the Russian Gosfilmofond archive in 2010. The plot has to do with a couple of semi-reformed crooks who con a screenwriter into penning a movie recounting their last big heist — this as a ploy to lure their erstwhile confederate, who absconded to Brazil with all the loot, out of hiding. Joe Harvat’s program notes tell us Lights Out was a big hit, with “universally glowing” reviews — but the only review I found (Variety, Oct. 25, ’23) was a pretty merciless pan. Still, I’m sorry I missed it; I’d probably have to make an appointment with the Library of Congress to have another chance to see it. The story, based on a Broadway play that closed after two weeks in August 1922, was remade in 1938 as Crashing Hollywood with Lee Tracy.

I sure didn’t miss the next screening, and boy, am I glad, because this was another highlight of the whole weekend — for me at least, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone (witness the fact that a poster for it graced the cover of The Picture Show’s program book). The picture, introduced by author and historian James D’Arc, was Blaze of Noon (1947), a movie whose continuing obscurity is a mystery that will confound me to the end of my days. I mean, for starters, just take a gander at the names on this lobby card: Anne Baxter, William Holden, Sonny Tufts, William Bendix, Sterling Hayden, Howard da Silva, director John Farrow. Then there are the names you can’t see here. The cinematographer: William C. Mellor (A Place in the Sun, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant). The composer: Adolph Deutsch, one of Hollywood’s most underrated composers (he contributed hugely to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, among many others). The writers: Arthur Sheekman and Frank “Spig” Wead (the aviator-turned-screenwriter played by John Wayne in John Ford’s biopic The Wings of Eagles). Finally and especially, the author on whose book Wead and Sheekman’s script was based: Ernest K. Gann. Blaze of Noon was Gann’s second bestseller; his first, Island in the Sky, had made him a literary celebrity. His later books in the ’50s and ’60s (The High and the Mighty, Twilight for the Gods, Fate Is the Hunter) would make his name even bigger. 

Taken all in all, that’s one hell of a pedigree.

The story had to do with the four McDonald brothers — Roland (Tufts), Colin (Holden), Tad (Hayden) and Keith (Johnny Sands) — stunt fliers with a traveling carnival in the 1920s who all hang together when Colin decides to quit show business for a job in the burgeoning airmail industry, represented by a gruff but compassionate Howard da Silva. Anne Baxter played a nurse who marries William Holden and becomes the unwitting object of unrequited love from brother Sterling Hayden, while William Bendix was another aviator who has trouble forsaking his hell-raising barnstorming antics and knuckling down to business. Spoiler alert: the life of pioneering airmail pilots comes at a cost to the four brothers, with more than their share of heartache.

Not to mince words, Blaze of Noon is a terrific picture, one that can stand with better-known movies about early flight like Wings, I Wanted Wings, Dive Bomber and Men with Wings without hanging its head. I’m an ardent partisan of John Farrow’s pictures Night Has a Thousand Eyes (’48) and Alias Nick Beal (’49), while most movie buffs are partial to his noir classic The Big Clock (’48), but this one is fully their equal — and as a piece of sheer directorial brio may be the best of the bunch. Note, for example (if you ever get the chance to see it), the opening shot of the story proper (after a prologue singing the praises of airmail pilots): Farrow stages a long, complex tracking shot weaving through the busy carnival with its dancing girls, barkers male and female, rides, popcorn and balloon vendors, and multitude of country patrons ogling the sights and munching their hot dogs and cotton candy. The camera discovers the four brothers leaning against a game booth chitchatting, then follows them back to where the shot started, coming to rest on William Holden flirting with dancer Jean Wallace (that’s her flashing her gams on the lobby card above). It’s a real tour-de-force take that runs a full minute-and-42-seconds, establishing both the four brothers and the world they work in without calling attention to its own virtuosity — one of the highlights of Farrow’s whole career, and that of cinematographer William Mellor. And Blaze of Noon has more to come. It’s a pity that this pre-1950 Paramount languishes in the Universal vaults without a home-video release to give it the reputation it deserves. Indeed, a collector friend of mine recently tried to find a buyer for a 16mm print without success — not even other collectors had ever heard of it. (Part of the problem may be the title; it’s Ernest Gann’s own, but it gives no hint of what the movie is about. It makes it sound like a western.) If this near-classic ever does come out on video, remember: You heard about it here first.

After the dinner break it was the final Laurel and Hardy short of the weekend: Wrong Again (1929), technically a “sound” film but not a talkie; rather, it was a silent with no spoken dialogue, but with a soundtrack of music and sound effects, giving Picture Show accompanists Philip Carli and David Drazin a break for a couple of reels. (Like other studio heads, Hal Roach used this semi-sound approach to transition his studio into the era of talking pictures). In Wrong Again, The Boys played stable attendants tending to a horse named Blue Boy. When the famous Gainsborough painting of the same name is stolen and the millionaire owner offers a $5,000 reward, Stan and Ollie think he’s willing to pay that much for the horse. Imagine the possibilities.

Either Philip Carli or David Drazin — sorry, I forget which — was pressed back into service for So’s Your Old Man (1926), one of W.C. Fields’s surviving silent pictures. Like two of his others, Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and It’s the Old Army Game (’26), it was later remade as a talkie. Sally of the Sawdust became Poppy (’36), It’s the Old Army Game returned (more or less) as It’s a Gift (’34), and So’s Your Old Man was remade as You’re Telling Me! (also ’34). In both So’s Your Old Man and You’re Telling Me!, Fields plays Sam Bisbee, an eccentric small-town inventor whose social-climbing wife is ashamed of him because of the way he and his family are looked down on by the town’s “better” people. Bisbee doesn’t care what the snobs think of him, but he wants to make good for the sake of his daughter (the delightfully named Kittens Reichert), who is in love with Kenneth Murchison (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), son of the town’s snootiest grande dame. Bisbee travels to an auto manufacturers’ convention to sell his invention, a shatterproof windshield, but when someone switches his test vehicle for a regular car, his demonstration fails and he becomes a laughingstock. Returning home in disgrace, he befriends a young woman on the train (Alice Joyce) who, unbeknownst to him, is a royal princess on a goodwill tour of America, and she determines to do what she can to help him.

Fields’s silents suffer today because, unlike audiences of the 1920s, we know well his inimitable, oft-imitated voice and how much it contributed to his comedy, and we miss it in a way that viewers back then couldn’t. Still, So’s Your Old Man holds up nicely because You’re Telling Me! was later a virtual shot-for-shot remake (director Erle C. Kenton was smart enough to imitate original director Gregory La Cava slavishly) and it’s easy to hear Fields’s voice in our heads as we read the intertitles. (Practically the only difference is that in You’re Telling Me! Sam Bisbee’s invention is a puncture-proof tire rather than shatterproof glass.)

Eric Grayson’s program notes tell a fascinating, convoluted story about why So’s Your Old Man is out of circulation. Let’s see if I can make it simple. Paramount sold their 1930-50 library to Universal; that’s why things like the Marx Brothers’ pre-MGM titles, Fields’s talkies, and the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road pictures sport the Universal Globe before the Paramount Mountain takes the screen. Paramount still theoretically owns their 1923-29 silents, but except for special cases like Wings, they don’t particularly care. On top of that, So’s Your Old Man is based on a short story by Julian Street (1879-1947), and even though both picture and story are in the public domain, Paramount is contractually obligated to compensate the Street estate for any screenings or releases of the picture. Back in the ’70s, when Street’s survivors were easier to track down, Paramount made a deal to distribute You’re Telling Me!, but So’s Your Old Man was a silent, so — I say again — they didn’t care. Nowadays, there’s more of a market for silent cinema, but who and where Street’s surviving relatives are is anybody’s guess. Fortunately, some enterprising bootlegger copied Fields’s Paramount silents, including So’s Your Old Man, for the collectors’ market on their way to whatever vault or archive they were earmarked for. How one of those prints found itself in Columbus for The Picture Show is (again) anybody’s guess.

I suspect I’ve rather garbled the story in trying to simplify it — but I’ve spent enough time on it, I think. If you can get in touch with Eric Grayson, maybe he can explain it to you better than I have.

The Turning Point (1952) was a tight, economical crime thriller from Paramount, writers Warren Duff and Horace McCoy, and director William Dieterle, whose pictures — The Life of Emile Zola, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (’39) — were usually less gritty and street-wise. Edmund O’Brien played John Conroy, a crusading special prosecutor charged with breaking up a crime syndicate in a large, Midwestern Chicago-type city masterminded by “trucking executive” Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). As his chief investigator he appoints his father, veteran straight-arrow cop Matt Conroy (Tom Tully). Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), an equally crusading newspaper reporter and John Conroy’s lifelong friend, keeps a close eye on the investigation; he’s sympathetic, but he fears Conroy is too inexperienced to take on the criminal conspiracy he’s trying to tackle. McKibbon uncovers the fact that Conroy’s father Matt is in fact a “mole” on Eichelberger’s payroll — and, making things even more uncomfortable, McKibbon is falling in love with Conroy’s assistant and paramour Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith). The picture was really strong stuff, with some shocking violence — especially for 1952 — plus several very unsettling turns of the plot before the final fade-out.

Day 3 wrapped up with Mystery of the White Room (1939), an installment of the short-lived Crime Club series from Universal. (Short-lived in duration, that is; producer Irving Starr managed to knock out 11 B-mysteries during the two years the franchise lasted. The inspiration for the series, the Crime Club imprint of Doubleday Publishers, had a more prosperous run: It lasted from 1928 to 1991 and published nearly 2,500 titles. There was a short-lived radio series too.)

The “White Room” of the title was literally that — the operating room at a big-city hospital. During a tense operation the lights go out, and during the brief darkness the hospital’s head surgeon (Addison Richards) is murdered with a scalpel to the heart. Complicating the investigation is the fact that both assisting doctors (Bruce Cabot, Roland Drew) and both nurses (Helen Mack, Constance Worth) — everybody in the room, it seems, except for the patient — had reason to bear a grudge. Not only that, but they were all wearing rubber gloves, so there are no fingerprints to enter into evidence. Bruce Cabot and Helen Mack were top-billed as doctor-and-nurse sweethearts, so the rules of 1930s B-movies suggested they’d be innocent in the end — but they came in for their share of suspicion nevertheless. It was a clever little locked-room murder mystery that sets up and resolves its mystery in a no-frills 57 minutes — although some tiresome comic relief from orderly Tom Dugan and switchboard operator Mabel Todd (whose rasping, nasal, annoying voice makes Fran Drescher sound like Angela Lansbury) makes the picture feel several minutes longer.

And that was it for Saturday’s program. Three down and one to go.

To be concluded…

The serial for this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show was The Purple Monster Strikes from 1945, one of the last 15-chapter productions that Republic Pictures mounted before rising costs and ebbing revenues forced the studio to downsize their serials to 12 installments. The first three chapters occupied the first hour of the first day, with four more coming on each of the succeeding days of the Picture Show.

The premise of The Purple Monster Strikes is pretty much a howler. It seems the Emperor of Mars is planning to conquer the Earth and enslave all its inhabitants. But there’s a catch: The Martians have the technology to observe everything that goes on on Earth, and even to understand and speak all Earth languages (shades of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!), but they haven’t been able to develop a spacecraft capable of making the round trip from Mars to Earth and back. Fortunately for them, though, they’ve learned that Dr. Cyrus Layton (James Craven) is working on a “jet plane” that will be able to travel both ways (according to Bob Bloom’s program notes, Republic’s lawyers insisted on calling it a “jet plane” rather than a “rocket ship” for fear of legal action from Universal, whose Flash Gordon serials had rocket ships). So the Emperor sends a scout (Roy Barcroft as the Purple Monster — he actually introduces himself that way) on a one-way voyage to Earth with orders to steal Dr. Layton’s plans. The scout crash lands near Dr. Layton’s observatory, murders him with a capsule of Martian atmosphere (“carbo-oxide gas”) fatal to Earthlings, then commandeers his body, spending the rest of the serial going back and forth between Dr. Layton’s identity and his own, depending on his needs of the moment. While he’s at it, he enlists the aid of Garrett (Bud Geary), a local thug who’s been blackmailing the doctor.

Got all that? As interplanetary invasions go, this one is a pretty slapdash operation. Even so, all that stands between the Purple Monster and success is Dr. Layton’s niece Sheila (Linda Stirling, Republic’s reigning damsel in distress) and her boyfriend, two-fisted attorney Craig Foster (Dennis Moore). Preposterous as it all is, it makes a useful framework for the near-nonstop fisticuffs (I’d love to have had the breakaway furniture concession on the production), and the array of detailed miniatures (houses, trucks, cars, rockets, etc.) built by the resourceful Lydecker Brothers to crash, explode, burn, and go sailing off cliffs.

Chapter 1, “The Man in the Meteor”, has at least one memorable line, spoken by Craig Foster after the first of his many fistfights with the Purple Monster: “There was a man in here, a weird-looking person wearing tights and a helmet. He knocked me out and must have escaped across the terrace.” (Actually, he escaped into Dr. Layton, but Craig doesn’t know that, and won’t for several more chapters yet.)

Next came a tribute to the forgotten Hal Roach comedy star Max Davidson (1875-1950). Or rather, “long-forgotten” I should say, because Davidson has been undergoing a bit of a rediscovery in recent years. Baby Boomers of a Certain Age will remember him from the Our Gang short Moan and Groan, Inc. (1929), in which the gang goes treasure-hunting in the basement of a supposedly haunted house. Max plays a homeless lunatic squatting in the derelict house; he’s harmless, but nevertheless pretty spooky, and he leads the gang and Edgar Kennedy the cop on a merry chase. I especially remember a delicious shiver as Max invites poor Farina to join him in an invisible Thanksgiving feast (“You…like…toikey?“). In fact, Max amassed quite a résumé by the time he retired in 1945; his IMDb filmography lists 200 titles, mostly uncredited bits between 1930 and 1945. But before that, in the mid-to-late 1920s, he was a popular star for Hal Roach — before his brand of “ethnic” (read “Jewish”) comedy went out of style as old-fashioned and in questionable taste. (Davidson didn’t live long enough to profit from the revival of ethnic comedy — Benny Rubin, Myron Cohen, Jack Carter, Alan King, Shelley Berman et al. — in the 1950s and ’60s.)

Three of the four shorts in the Picture Show’s tribute were from this period (the fourth, 1914’s Bill Joins the W.W.W.’s, featured Max in support of stars Tammany Young and Fay Tincher at Universal). Two of the Hal Roach three, Don’t Tell Everything and Should Second Husbands Come First? (both 1927) were directed by future Oscar winner Leo McCarey. The best of the lot was Pass the Gravy (’28), in which Max’s dimwitted son (mega-freckle-faced Spec O’Donnell) accidentally kills the neighbor’s prize-winning rooster, and the family compounds the offense by unwittingly roasting the deceased bird and serving it to the neighbor for dinner — with its “First Prize” ribbon still attached to its drumstick. Eric Grayson’s program notes call Pass the Gravy Max’s masterpiece, and I believe it; it’s a riot, and the Library of Congress evidently agrees — it was added to their National Film Registry in 1998. Alas, most of Max Davidson’s silent output is lost now, but enough has survived that the Picture Show promises more such tributes in years to come.

The first feature of the day was The Blue Veil (1951), a real two-hanky weeper. Jane Wyman stars as a young wife and mother whose husband has died in World War I and whose baby lives only a day or two. At loose ends and grieving, she takes a job as nursemaid to an infant whose mother died in childbirth. What begins as just a temporary situation to help ease her bereavement turns into a lifelong calling, and the movie becomes an episodic drama, almost an anthology film, as she moves from family to family for over thirty years, often working for parents who are, shall we say, less than wholly involved in their children’s lives.

The Blue Veil was actually a remake of a French film of the same title (Le Voile Bleu in French), produced in 1942 under the German occupation, and hence not seen in the U.S. until 1947. It got only a spotty distribution then, but it caught the eye of producer Jerry Wald, who nailed down the remake rights. Wald’s first idea was to cast Bette Davis as the heroine, or even to coax Greta Garbo out of retirement, but his cooler head prevailed and he settled on Jane Wyman, whom he had ushered to an Oscar in 1948’s Johnny Belinda. And I say “settled on“, not “settled for“, because it was an inspired choice. This came right smack in the middle of Wyman’s apotheosis years, which spanned from The Yearling in 1946 to 1954, when she made All That Heaven Allows and got her fourth and final Oscar nomination for Magnificent Obsession. She was nominated for The Blue Veil too, and might well have won had she not been up against Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Also nominated for The Blue Veil was Joan Blondell as a fading Broadway musical star whose laser focus on reviving her career threatens to forfeit the affections of daughter Natalie Wood. Joan was as good as ever, of course, but why she landed her only nomination for this over any number of her other performances — A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (’45), Nightmare Alley (’47), The Cincinnati Kid (’65) — is a bit of a mystery. Ah well, let’s not quibble, she was overdue. Anyhow, she and Wyman were just first and second among equals in the closest thing to an all-star cast that RKO Radio could field at that stage of its decline-and-fall. Just look at the thumbnail portraits on this poster surrounding Jane Wyman like a rectangular halo (from bottom left): Richard Carlson, Joan, Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Don Taylor, Audrey Totter, Cyril Cusack, Natalie, Everett Sloane. Add to them Vivian Vance, Alan Napier, Warner Anderson, Les Tremayne, Dan O’Herlihy, Harry Morgan and others, and you’ve got quite an ensemble. Led by Wyman’s resolutely unsentimental performance, The Blue Veil earns its tears honestly.

Then came Come Next Spring (1956), a rural domestic drama from the waning years of Republic Pictures (just as The Blue Veil had been from the waning years of RKO Radio). The screening was introduced by Steven C. Smith, author of Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer. Mr. Smith had expressed an interest in making the introduction because he regards Come Next Spring as one of Steiner’s best pictures of the 1950s, and the setting for one of his best scores. Come Next Spring is a particular favorite of mine too, so I was most interested in hearing Mr. Smith’s intro (having been highly gratified by what he wrote about it in his biography of the composer). Unfortunately, I dawdled a bit too long in the dealers’ room, so I missed the first minute or two of his remarks. Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard him mention my name: “For more information, I refer you to Jim Lane…” I thought he was referring to the notes I wrote for the Picture Show program book, but actually (I learned when I met him later) he was talking about my Cinedrome post from 2014, which he discovered while researching his book on Steiner. Since he was kind enough to plug my post, I’m happy to return the compliment. Click the link above and hop on over to Amazon for your own copy of Music by Max Steiner. Steiner may not be the greatest of all film composers (though I believe he is), but without him Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Dimitri Tiomkin, Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, Alfred or Randy Newman, you name ’em — none of them would have had the careers they did. And besides, the book is a marvelous read.

Now here I insert my program notes for Come Next Spring. However, those notes are adapted from my 2014 post, which you can read here. I go into a good deal more detail, plus the picture was filmed in a small California town about 35 miles from my front door, so I include a number of then-and-now photographs of the picture’s locations. So if you like, you can click over to my 2014 post and skip the next 13 paragraphs.

By the the summer of 1955, Republic Pictures was on its last legs as a movie-producing entity. It had once been prolific, cranking out horse operas, serials and hillbilly comedies for small towns, with occasional “prestige” pictures like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). Now, taking one last shot at prestige, studio boss Herbert J. Yates dispatched a unit up north to the California Gold Country town of Ione (pronounced “eye-own”). There they made Come Next Spring, arguably — with the possible exception of Orson Welles’s 1948 Macbeth — the best movie ever to come out of Republic Pictures that didn’t involve John Ford or John Wayne. (And no, I’m not forgetting Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.)

Come Next Spring was directed by R.G. (“Bud”) Springsteen, the epitome of the reliable but unexceptional studio workhorse. Actually, “plowhorse” would be more like it; by the time of Come Next Spring he had already directed over 50 features in ten years — mostly Republic programmers running about an hour. He never wasted film, time or money — a triple virtue guaranteed to please the penny-pinching Yates. It would also earn Springsteen a secure niche in television until he retired in 1970.

The secret ingredient of Come Next Spring was its writer, Montgomery Pittman. Pittman might be described as “unjustly forgotten today” — except that the sorry truth is he died before even being noticed, succumbing to throat cancer at 42 in 1962. But in his brief 11-year career he was prolific, resourceful and original, leaving a varied body of movie and TV work — and a frustrating hint of what might have been if even another ten or 15 years had been granted to him.

Born in Oklahoma in 1920, Pittman, by his own colorful account, left home while still a teenager, working with a traveling carnival as (no joke!) a snake-oil salesman. After service in World War II he landed first in New York, then Los Angeles, hoping to become an actor. But he found more work and better money writing for TV, eventually moving into directing as well. Along the way, in 1952, he married Maurita Gilbert Jackson, a widow whose ten-year-old daughter Sherry was already working as a child actress. Pittman’s relationship with his new stepdaughter would bear fruit in Come Next Spring.

In the mid-’50s Pittman was a contract writer for Warner Bros. Television on the studio’s westerns Cheyenne, Sugarfoot and Maverick, and the private-eye series 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye, often directing his own scripts. In the early ’60s, just as his time on Earth was running out, Pittman wrote and directed three episodes of Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone on CBS, making him the only person during the show’s entire run who both wrote and directed an episode — and he did it three times. Those three are among the very best episodes that weren’t written by The Twilight Zone’s “Big Three” (Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson). The titles are worth mentioning: “Two”, a post-apocalyptic drama starring Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery; “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, featuring James Best, Edgar Buchanan and Sherry Jackson from Come Next Spring; and “The Grave” with Lee Marvin as an Old West bounty hunter, plus Elen Willard as a female character named Ione — an unmistakable hat-tip to the town where Come Next Spring was filmed.

Monty Pittman’s pitch-perfect script tells an unusual yet straightforward story: Matt Ballot, a reformed alcoholic (Steve Cochran), returns to his home in 1920s Arkansas hoping to make amends to his wife Bess (Ann Sheridan), his children (Sherry Jackson, Richard Eyer), and his rural community, all of whom he abandoned in a drunken haze years before. There are strong performances all around, underscored by the great Max Steiner (including a title song written with Lenny Adelson that was a popular hit for Tony Bennett, who sings it under the credits).

When she made Come Next Spring, Ann Sheridan was several years past her glamour days as Warner Bros.’ “Oomph Girl” (a nickname she detested). Even at the height of her career, her talent never got the respect it deserved — not surprising for a studio dominated by male stars that already had Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland — but she had remarkable depth and range. All through World War II she was well-liked by co-workers, popular with audiences, and underrated by critics. That combination held right up to her untimely death at 51 in 1967 (and the “underrated” part has stayed with her ever since).

Steve Cochran, unlike Sheridan, was never underrated…exactly. But ever since his sudden death from a lung infection at 48 in 1965, the question has haunted movie buffs: Why didn’t this guy ever become a bigger star? Partly, it may have been his tabloid lifestyle of womanizing, carousing and boozing, flouting his fragile health (a heart murmur kept him out of World War II). Anyhow, he never managed to break the mold of thugs and unsavories into which he had been cast, certainly not the way actors like Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews had been able to do. Still, he never gave a bad performance even in the weakest of his 39 pictures. Matt Ballot was the role of Cochran’s life, and he knew it. When his friend Pittman brought him the script, Cochran bought it for his own company, Robert Alexander Productions (named for his real first and middle names), then sold it to Republic on the condition that he and Sherry Jackson play the parts Pittman had written for them. If Cochran had given this performance for any studio but Republic it might have made all the difference in his career. But probably no other studio would have cast him as anything but a ne’er-do-well or a hoodlum. It may even be that no other studio would have touched Come Next Spring at all. That, sad to say, was just Steve Cochran’s luck.

Sonny Tufts played Leroy Hightower, an admirer of Bess Ballot’s who resents Matt’s sudden return. Bowen Charles Tufts III is one of Hollywood’s sad cases. He was not without talent, but not talented enough to overcome some poor life and career choices. Scion of a prominent Boston family (his great-uncle founded Tufts University), he shunned the family banking business to study opera at Yale. Classified 4-F during World War II due to a college football injury, he found stardom in Hollywood when handsome leading men were scarce. Alcohol was his undoing, and his off-screen behavior became notorious. He gave probably his best performance in Come Next Spring, and a few years later he reportedly sobered up in hopes of playing Jim Bowie in John Wayne’s The Alamo. True or not, by then his name was a Hollywood punchline, and the idea was probably a non-starter. He died of pneumonia in 1970, age 58.

As if Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran, Sonny Tufts and a first-rate supporting cast were not enough, there’s another reason to see Come Next Spring, one that all by itself would more than suffice: the extraordinary performance of 13-year-old Sherry Jackson as Annie, Bess and Matt’s mute daughter. Already a veteran (coming off her second season as Danny Thomas’s oldest daughter on Make Room for Daddy), she, like Cochran, gave the performance of her life in Come Next Spring. With her enormous, expressive eyes and every tiny movement of the corners of her mouth, she makes Annie’s thoughts as plain as if she spoke them out loud — and all without uttering a sound. It is, without question, one of the greatest child performances ever put on film.

Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran, Sonny Tufts, Sherry Jackson: All of them were never better than in Come Next Spring, maybe even never as good. Hmmm. Maybe this Bud Springsteen was a better director than he ever got credit for.

And one final thing. This is a promise: The very last shot of the picture, just before it fades to “The End”, is something you’ll remember as long as you live. Mark my words.

Before we move on, here’s a funny little factoid I stumbled across while looking for images of Come Next Spring. I found the Belgian poster for the picture, which gave the title twice, once in French (Celui Qu’on N’attendait Plus) and once in Dutch (De Man die Men Niet Meer Verwachtte). Both versions translate to roughly the same thing: The Man They No Longer Expected. Well, that fits well enough, if “come next spring” is too much a regional Americanism to translate, but I wonder why they didn’t use “next spring” (Le Printemps Prochain / Volgende Lente) or “when spring comes” (Quand Vient le Printemps / Als de Lente Komt). After all, the phrase “come next spring” pops up several times in the dialogue and they must have translated that somehow. Just one of those unimportant little questions we can never know the answer to.

The first silent feature of the weekend was The Heart of Texas Ryan (1917) an early Tom Mix picture. “Early” in this case must be qualified. By this time Mix had been in movies for eight years and had 170 titles on his filmography — mostly one- and two-reel shorts. But he hadn’t become “Tom Mix” yet, the straight-arrow hero in the white ten-gallon hat. His superstardom was just around the corner, though, probably as a result of his leaving Selig Polyscope to sign with Fox Film Corp., which happened after ten more pictures, in late 1917 (his first release of 1918, Cupid’s Roundup, was for Fox). In Texas Ryan, contrary to what you might expect, he doesn’t play the title role (and Variety’s review of 2/23/17 doesn’t even mention his name). So this poster, with his name above and larger than the title, is a bit misleading. It’s not from the picture’s original release, in February ’17 from K-E-S-E (Kleine-Edison-Selig-Essanay). The poster is from a 1923 reissue (by which time Mix was the one of the biggest stars in the world) from Exclusive Features Inc., whoever they were.

Texas Ryan (played by Bessie Eyton) is actually the daughter of the rancher (George Fawcett) for whom Tom works as a cowpuncher. His character is Jack “Single-Shot” Parker (“Single-Shot” Parker was the title of another of the picture’s reissues); Parker is a rootin’-tootin’ hell-raising troublemaker who spends his weekends brawling and shooting up the nearby town of Cactus Bend. Single-Shot gets on the bad side of the local marshal “Dice” McAllister (Frank Campeau), mainly by beating the snot out of him with McAllister’s own boot. Worse, the marshal is a “dirty cop”, working in cahoots with the bandit Jose Mandero (William Ryno).

As the movie opens, Texas Ryan is returning to the wide-open spaces after two years at an eastern college. Single-Shot and Mandero both catch sight of her and are smitten. Single-Shot resolves to mend his lawless ways and be worthy of the lady’s love; Mandero resolves to abduct the lady, for purposes that (this being 1917) are left discreetly unspecified. First Single-Shot rescues Texas, then later, when Mandero kidnaps Single-Shot for revenge and plans to kill him, Texas rescues him by paying a hefty ransom. Happy ending, iris-out. 

The Heart of Texas Ryan is a fast-paced, appealing actioner, its excitement undimmed after 106 years. It is enlivened, like nearly all of Tom Mix’s surviving pictures, by his already-evident penchant for perilous, positively insane stunts. (He scorned to use a double and was frequently injured, which must have had the Fox front office tearing their hair.) At one point in Texas Ryan, as Mandero’s gang leads him on horseback with his hands tied behind his back, he escapes by leaping from the saddle and tumbling ass-over-teakettle, hands still tied, down a hill so steep it’s practically a cliff. His horse here is almost as game as he is, a dark-maned gray willing to carry him anywhere. (It would be several years before Mix teamed up with “Tony the Wonder Horse”, an intelligent Tennessee Pacer that became almost as big a star as he was.)

We returned from the dinner break for Laurel and Hardy in Come Clean (1931). The Hardys are enjoying an evening at home when an unwelcome visit from the Laurels turns things upside down. Stan wants ice cream, so he and Oliver venture out to get some, leading to a frustrating episode with an ice cream sales clerk (Charlie Hall). On the way home, they rescue a woman (Mae Busch) who has jumped into the river to kill herself. Ungrateful at being rescued, the harridan demands that they now must take care of her, presumably forever. The rest of the short details The Boys’ efforts to keep Busch hidden from their suspicious wives (Gertrude Astor, Linda Loredo) until the ironic dénouement.

Then it was Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Charles Chaplin’s black-comedy fantasia on the career of serial killer Henri Landru, who murdered somewhere between seven and 83 people between 1915 and 1919, then went to the guillotine for 11 of them in 1922. Chaplin claimed that the premise for Verdoux arose out of a negotiation with Orson Welles (who got a story credit in the finished film), but the Picture Show program notes by Chaplin and Max Linder biographer Lisa Stein Haven say Chaplin had been percolating the idea since 1921. In any event, the picture was an echoing flop in 1947 (though the French liked it) but has grown in stature over the years since Chaplin allowed it back in circulation in the 1960s, to the point where it was one of the clear headliners at this year’s Picture Show.

But not every work by a master is a masterwork, and I’ve never much cared for Monsieur Verdoux (though I like it better than the absurdly overrated The Great Dictator). I find Verdoux‘s comedy flatfooted, forced and unfunny (except for Martha Raye, hilarious as the one intended victim whom Chaplin’s Verdoux, try as he might, just can’t manage to kill). And when Chaplin shifts gears into moralizing about individual murders vs. the organized mass killing of war, his channeling of George Bernard Shaw strikes me as glib, smug and condescending. The day may well come when I revisit Monsieur Verdoux, slap my forehead and cry, “What a fool I’ve been!” But that day is not yet here. I elected to spend the two hours browsing the dealers’ room, postponing my eating crow about Chaplin’s picture to some other time.

When I was a pre- and early-teen adolescent in the late 1950s and early ’60s, my friends and I were amateur connoisseurs of the horror movies of the day — The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill (1959); 13 Ghosts and The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (’60); The Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Curse of the Werewolf (’61), and many more. In the spring of 1961, there was one that — at least in my neck of the woods — was the movie to see; it seemed that all the guys were talking about it, but for some reason I never got around to seeing it. Not then, and not as its reputation grew over the ensuing decades; not until the end of the first day of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show. This was Black Sunday (1960), the Italian import from first-time director and future horror master Mario Bava.

Originally titled La Maschera del Demonio (The Mask of the Demon), the picture underwent a major makeover when American International Pictures (AIP) acquired the U.S. distribution rights. Some violent and erotic footage was scaled back or eliminated, dialogue was re-dubbed, and the picture’s musical score by Roberto Nicolosi was replaced by one from the American Les Baxter. All in all, AIP could claim some justification for the tagline, “From the producers of House of Usher“, because more than simply distributing the movie, they had actually produced a picture that differed perceptibly from the one that had only a middling success in Italy.

In the version that cleaned up at the American box office for AIP, British actress Barbara Steele plays Asa (“Ah-zah”) Vajda, a vampire in 17th century Moldavia who, along with her vampire lover Javutich, is condemned to death for witchcraft by her brother Griabi. As she sees the bronze-spiked mask that is to be hammered onto her face, Asa howls a curse on Griabi and his descendants — and then she appears to summon a sudden storm that prevents the villagers from burning her body at the stake.

Two hundred years later, a physician and his assistant are traveling through the country on their way to a medical conference when their carriage loses a wheel. Exploring a nearby crypt while their coachman makes repairs, they unwittingly revive Asa and Javutich’s corpses, and the two vampires begin wreaking their vengeance, especially on Griabi’s multi-great-granddaughter Katia (Barbara Steele again), whom Asa believes is the reincarnation of her own wicked soul.

My friends back in 1961 were right; Black Sunday absolutely lives up to its reputation. After sixty-plus years, even in heavy-shadowed black and white with little actual blood but an atmosphere of erotic dread, the picture packs a mighty punch. I can only (and barely) imagine the impact it had in 1961. No wonder all the guys were talking about it. Frankly, I’m just as glad I had to wait; I’m not sure I could have handled it back then. Director Bava weaves his Gothic tapestry with an undercurrent of breathless sex and violence that a 13-year-old male in 1961 would have felt but scarcely understood. 

And with that we called it a day.

To be continued…

Do you recognize this eye on the left? “Should I?” I hear you ask. Well, no, of course not; I’m just having a little fun with you. I doubt if I myself could put a whole face to this fragment, the way they say a paleontologist can reconstruct an entire dinosaur from one or two bones. No, I don’t think I could do it — and I know who the eye belongs to.

How about this smile on the right? Any guesses?

I won’t tease you much longer, I promise. This isn’t a mystery like that jigsaw puzzle of autographs I explored a few posts back. This time I know the whole back-story behind these fragments, and here it is.

When I was in college in the 1970s, my father had a friend, a drinking buddy, named Ted Sierka. When I knew him, Ted was…well, I guess you’d call him a barfly — a nice enough fellow, good-hearted, but a little sad and probably lonely. He lived in the back room of the Pocket Club, a rather ramshackle neighborhood bar located in the middle of what are now the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 through South Sacramento, Calif. Ted did a little bartending, a little janitoring, and a little night-watchman work in return for room and board and a few bucks a week for spending money. His only friend, besides the club’s owner (Don Somebody), my dad, and the other people he drank with, was a fat waddling beagle named Hey You.

Ted had a long résumé — or would have had, if he’d ever bothered to compile one — of jobs in what is now called the hospitality industry, mostly waiting tables in restaurants and bellhopping in hotels. (As a side note, there is one upscale eatery in Sacramento, quite famous locally for its plush ambiance and swanky menu, where Ted worked for a while; he said the place had the dirtiest kitchen he’d ever seen. Obviously I won’t name the establishment — besides, he may have merely been a disgruntled ex-employee.) Years earlier, as a fresh-faced lad of 23, Ted was a bellhop at the Sherry-Netherlands Hotel at 5th Avenue and Central Park South in New York City. One day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, these two people came through town:

End of tease, all is revealed: The eye belongs to Joan Crawford, the smile to her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

This was not only the Depression, it was also during the Noble Experiment of Prohibition — which only had a little over a year to run, although nobody knew that at the time. Ted was able to procure some liquor for the Sherry-Netherlands’ Hollywood guests, and his reward — part of it, anyhow — was these two photos. Autographed to him personally. They’re not too easy to read because first, Joan signed hers upside down in just about the only light spot on the photo (“To Ted Sierka, In appreciation. Joan Crawford”); and second, Doug (“To Ted Sierka — With grateful good wishes — Douglas Fairbanks Jr.”) signed with a sharp-nibbed fountain pen that dug some pretty serious divots into the surface of the picture. (The ball-point pen was the greatest boon to autograph seekers since the invention of ink.)

In reproducing these portraits here, I’ve resisted the temptation to retouch or digitally enhance them. They’re in extraordinarily good shape for a couple of 90-year-old photographs, but inevitably they’ve picked up a few marks and smudges over the decades. Still, I decided that at present it was best to scan and publish them exactly as they stood. The time may come, though, when I decide to have the scans spruced up and restored, either by myself or by someone expert and experienced at it. Fact is, they’re worth the effort, because they happen to be by two of the best and most esteemed photographers of the entire Hollywood Studio Era. Each photo is emboss-stamped with the photographer’s name in the lower right corner (if your monitor is big enough you can just about make them out), and the back of each is ink-stamped with a request to “please” and “kindly” give credit where it’s due. We’ll take them one at a time.

JOAN CRAWFORD  The photo measures 13¼ x 10 in. The photographer was Clarence Sinclair Bull, shown here in a 1945 session with Ava Gardner. Born in Montana in 1896, he studied art under the western painter Charles M. Russell (according to Wikipedia, if we can believe them), but he segued at an early age into photography. At the time he took Ted Sierka’s photo of Joan Crawford, he was the head of MGM’s Still Photography Dept., and had been since before the studio even existed. In 1919 Sam Goldwyn hired Bull for his own production company. Goldwyn soon departed the company that bore his name (though strictly speaking, it was the other way around; the former Samuel Goldfish had changed his name to match the company’s), but Bull stayed on, and he was there in 1924 when the Goldwyn Co. merged with Metro and Louis B. Mayer to form MGM. Bull remained at the studio, riding herd on a sizable staff of talented photographers, until his retirement in 1961 — thus his time with the studio was longer than both Goldwyn’s and Mayer’s put together. In his retirement years he befriended the historian and collector John Kobal (founder of the vast Kobal Collection archive of movie-related images). Kobal inherited Bull’s scrapbooks and albums when he died in 1979, with the result that we know more about Bull’s career, and have more specimens of his work, than almost any of his colleagues from the studio era. An original silver-gelatin print of Joan Crawford, autographed on the front by her and on the back, stamped and numbered (B1901) by Clarence Sinclair Bull — this may be something not even Kobal ever knew existed.

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR.  Measures 12 x 9½ inches, taken by Elmer Fryer, shown at right in an undated session with Mary Astor. Fryer was born in Missouri in 1898, and by 1929 he was head of the Stills Dept. at First National Pictures, staying on after First National was absorbed by Warner Bros. and remaining on the job until 1940. He died too early and too young (on March 3, 1944, age 46) to be discovered by the likes of John Kobal, so his name is less familiar than Clarence Bull, George Hurrell, and other Hollywood glamour photographers. Still, by 1934 he had taken some 16,000 pictures of Warners’ biggest stars; his portrait of Edward G. Robinson was even used as the model for a commemorative postage stamp in 2000. And, fortunately, Fryer still has his admirers today.

How that came about is a story in itself. Six months after he dropped dead at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles (reportedly of cirrhosis of the liver), up north in Oakland was born a son to Fryer’s daughter and her husband, a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps. That grandson grew up to be the Grammy-winning record producer and engineer Roger Nichols (best known for his early work with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker in the creation of Steely Dan). Nichols (who died in 2011) and other family members made it a matter of pride to keep the name of Elmer Fryer alive, and their dedication communicated itself to Nichols’s widow Conrad “Connie” Reeder, a singer/songwriter who (among other accomplishments) toured for 15 years with John Denver. Ms. Reeder has her own Web site, which includes a very informative page devoted to Grandpa Elmer. (NOTE: The picture here of Elmer Fryer at work is taken from that Web page. I reproduce it here under the Fair Use Doctrine, but it and other images on Ms. Reeder’s site are copyrighted by The Elmer Fryer Family Archive and all rights are reserved.) In addition to his work as a studio photographer, Elmer Fryer was a charter member of the American Society of Cinematographers in 1919. He was serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II, producing military documentaries and training films, at the time of his untimely death.

Theodore Robert Sierka died in Sacramento on May 17, 1978, four months shy of his 70th birthday. (This was a surprise to me; I would have guessed he was considerably older. Well, as the song says, “that’s what comes of too much pills and liquor.”) Some years before, Ted had given these pictures to my dad as keepsakes, and my dad in turn passed them on to me and my film-buff uncle — Doug for me, Joan for my uncle in Muncie, Ind.

Somewhere around 2005 or so, after my father himself had passed away, my uncle offered the photo of Joan for auction on eBay. He was in the process of divesting himself of his 16mm film collection and much of his memorabilia, and I think he had simply forgotten how he acquired the photo of Joan; in any case, he never mentioned the pending sale to me. Fortunately, I spotted the auction in my eBay browsing and was able to place the high bid, thereby keeping Joan in the family. These portraits have now been in my possession (and, for a while, my uncle’s) longer than they were in Ted’s.

So the question is now: Exactly when did Ted Sierka supply Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks Jr. with that liquor and get these photos in grateful appreciation? Actually, that’s not too difficult to nail down. Joan and Doug were married June 3, 1929 and Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933. But Crawford had filed for divorce in April of that year; in fact, the marriage had been rocky from the beginning, due to a combination of Crawford’s career obsession and Fairbanks’s youthful insecurity (he was only 19 when they were married; she was nearly five years older). Besides, both their careers were going great guns during the switchover to talking pictures: Doug made twenty movies between 1929 and ’32; Joan made sixteen. They didn’t even have time for a honeymoon until they’d been married for three years.

That came, according to Doug’s autobiography The Salad Days, in June 1932. Taking a long-deferred break from moviemaking, they planned to sail from New York for a European honeymoon. Salad Days suggests that Doug hoped the vacation might save their marriage, but that may have been hindsight from 1988, when he was writing. In any case, Doug assures us that Joan had a lousy time once they sailed. She put on a brave face and played the good sport, but all the time they were gone she couldn’t wait to get back into harness at MGM; she didn’t return to Europe for years, long after their marriage was over. So those few days’ sojourn in New York, before they sailed for Europe on the German liner S.S. Bremen, offers the most likely time for their paths to cross Ted Sierka’s.

Evidently, however, it wasn’t at the Sherry-Netherlands. In The Salad Days Doug clearly recalls that they stayed at the Hotel St. Moritz — their studios, MGM (Joan’s) and Warner Bros. (Doug’s), were footing the bill for their honeymoon, and that’s where they booked them. Personally, I trust Doug’s memory here more than Ted’s. Maybe Ted worked both hotels at different times and simply misremembered where he met the couple. On the other hand, it’s only a four-minute walk from the Sherry-Netherlands to the St. Moritz; maybe Doug and Joan’s bellhop said, “Let me call a friend over at the Sherry; maybe he can find something…” (if so, I wonder what that bellhop got out of the deal). Both Doug’s and Ted’s memories may have been correct.

There are questions I wish I could go back and ask Ted now. What did he supply to Doug and Joan, bathtub gin or the real stuff? The real stuff, probably scotch, I’d guess, but I don’t know. How much? One bottle? Two? A case? Not a case, I’d guess, probably just enough to tide them over till they sailed; after that, they could buy all they wanted, as long as they didn’t try to bring it back into the country. But I don’t know. When did Doug and Joan sign these photos? On the spot? Next day? I tend to doubt that they carried these oversize photos around ready to sign and hand out; my guess is they called MGM and Warners’ New York offices and had them sent over to the hotel. But I don’t know. And everybody’s beyond asking about it now.

I may have blown a chance to get some of these questions answered. Late in his life, around 1996 or so, Doug came to Sacramento for one of his An Evening with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. personal appearances. I toyed with the idea of sending Elmer Fryer’s portrait of him backstage with a note: “In 1932 you signed this picture for my friend Ted Sierka. Will you sign it again for me now?” But I didn’t; I didn’t even go. My reasons seemed to me good and sufficient at the time — but now, I can’t for the life of me imagine what they were.